Wait, you're conceding that the intent is malicious, but arguing the entire premise of the joke is not dehumanizing because the intent may be misconstrued? How others may see the outcome of this joke does not change the intent of the joke or make it less loathsome.

Correct me if I am wrong but all this does is provide additional clothing to the homeless as a means to use a human being as a living insult thereby degrading the dignity of the homeless at a time when they are at the most risk to freeze to death.

*disseminates over the Internet* This. is. treating. people. as. things. not. people.

It's an interesting theory, but for a novel theory to be accepted it must have superior explanatory powers than the already existing theory - in this case the theory posited by none other an Asimov, namely that he was a flaming liberal when he was married to Leslyn MacDonald, but when he married Ginny Gerstenfeld his…

The thing is, words exist as a means of communication that depends on an agreed usage. If someone reads an unintended meaning into a communication due to selecting an unintended usage that says more about the reader than me and I object to being asked to change because of a objection to a meaning that was injected…

As I understand that particular usage comes from manus - Latin for hand.

Different fields and even locations follow different conventions on this one. I and most of the PhD's I work with (in the physics and engineering field) leave off the Dr. unless we're trying to impress someone. Not that we never use it, we just save it for when we talk to grant reviewers, become the director of…

Oh, that's excellent to know, as we're flying through Amsterdam tomorrow.

Heh. My Grandfather was James Michael - his first son is James Michael Jr. and his third child is Jamie Marie. I know of what you speak.

What I really need to know is how to make a long plane ride suck less when traveling with a baby.

And the car has rotary threshers instead of hubcaps.

I'm legitimately curious about this position, and as you seem knowledgeable - I'll ask you.

I wondered about that too. More likely and pernicious than a conspiracy (which indicates intent, active planning, and execution) is thousands of small biases of people in power adding up to produce a headwind against anyone who doesn't fit into the biases, but can't be proved, and even the individuals with the biases…

If anything, liberals should be gloating more. The gloating I experienced after Walker won his recall election was loads more than I've seen here. Liberals seem to be feeling guilty for faintly smiling at all too common conservative hiss-fits, whereas conservatives in Madison actively sought out liberals to rub salt…

I'd really like to other agencies bootstrap off of infrastructure we build, but keep the silo's separate so to speak. With the ISS and ITER we're finding these large projects become unstoppable with international collaboration, but they also become unwieldy with bureaucracy and lack of clearly defined authority. But…

I'm sure a better person than I could produce a respectful and constructive response to this. Alas.

Considering 1 in 5 women in the US have been raped according to a CDC, it must be comforting to believe that all those women could have made better choices and associated with better people and avoided being violated. However, pretending 1 million women a year are too stupid to discern good people from bad doesn't…

It's also the home of Russ Feingold and Dave Obey. We're a more than a little bipolar in our voting habits.

To your second point - Organ donation is not mandatory, and making it so is the stuff of dystopian fantasy. So, if forcing a person to give up their kidney (lets say temporarily, because they'll give it back once a permanent donor is found) is abhorrent, why is it fine to tell a woman she must give up her uterus for…

Yeah, I looked askance at the assertion abortion is or should be about personhood as well. Were we to take the breathtaking step of confering personhood on a zygote, there's still the fundamental question of, why don't we make organ donation mandatory if we're all about protecting life? Why don't we force living…