I didn't say he "seems like an okay guy," and ultimately I think it's kind of meaningless to make any kind of moral judgments about dead people, even say Hitler or Stalin or Bin Laden—I'd say the practical value of moral judgment is to try to shift someone's behavior (or to shift the views of anyone who may follow…

Well, for one thing I like his fiction and find a lot that's interesting and sympathetic about his letters, so I want to understand how those good qualities coexist with the bad. But in general I always think it's good to try to understand the origin of bad beliefs and behaviors in a detached way that's more focused…

Robert E. Howard was quite racist in his letters too, see this page. And for another example of an otherwise forward-thinking writer who was pretty virulent in racist beliefs that were fairly typical for his time, look at H.L. Mencken.

I think it's also worth pointing out that Lovecraft did show a certain willingness to reevaluate some of his views (there are a bunch of samples of his letters on his wikiquote page that illustrate some of this evolution)—he went from being a full-on Aryan supremacist in his youth to a later view in which he didn't…

Last I checked using all the aid money to build the wall was not actually Trump's position, rather as reported in this article he just wants Mexico to foot the bill:

You are trying to make the point that Trump is racist in order to say that the measures he's talking about taking are racist.

Your name is Hypnoself, no?

"You're not making any point whatsoever. This might be why you think there's a disconnect here."

"Your arguments are ridiculous. They must sound great in your head, otherwise you wouldn't write them, would you?"

I already explained why I think it's hard to read his statement as anything other than saying criminals/rapists are "typical" among illegal immigrants, or at least significantly more common among them compare to the population at large (or among legal immigrants). My argument was that when he said "When Mexico sends…

Nice try on changing the subject, but no one I know of is actually saying Trump is a racist for wanting illegal immigrants deported (though many point out that actually trying to deport them all would be insanely impractical, even if it might be morally justified), they are saying Trump is a racist for claiming that…

Yeah, the wikipedia article on Al Gore and information technology makes clear that the "Gore Bill" did play a big role in the early 1990s development of the internet—among other things it "allocated $600 million for high performance computing and for the creation of the National Research and Education Network [13–14].…

He doesn't say "all" (Dunk was obviously using a little hyperbole), but he did say "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs.…

Well, in my comment I did make the distinction between the fact that the US made 9/11 into a big deal in historical terms by its response to it, and the idea that there was nothing inherent in the fact of the attack itself that we should have made it into such a big deal. I think it's quite possible that at least some…

"Did you ever have a play date when you were a kid?"

Hope I'm wrong, but from a few years substitute teaching I've met a lot of teen students who don't think the internet is a part of the "real world"

What does "collectivism" mean? Are social-democratic countries collectivist, or does the term refer only to communism? (hopefully the latter, since it would hardly be fair to blame social democrats for the 'deaths of tens of millions' in communist dictatorships) Social democracy seems to work pretty effectively in…

"It didn't play that way in the movie, but whatever. It's at best ambiguous. "

Sure, my point was just to disagree with Patchfacethefool's original comment suggesting people shouldn't complain about the lack of an official release of the original trilogy since "I could find the despecialized versions on any torrent website if I bothered to look".

Thanks, I'll check that out. But looking at this video Harmy did about the making-of, starting around 4 minutes in he talks about how he had to replace shots (and parts of shots) that were changed for the special editions with the corresponding shots from the 2006 DVD release of "George's Original Unaltered Trilogy"…