Not really related, there were lots of people using other preservatives already, and long before it was established that Wakefield was commiting deliberate fraud, it was well-established that if something in vaccines was causing autism, it wasn't thimerosal.

I think that's because you're fucking with a well-researched medical procedure based on absolutely no information whatsoever that would show that you have a reason to do so.

Yeah. Rift does a very good job. I know at least one person who was raiding without ever having spent any money on the game, and also without having bought credits (the store currency) with in-game money. The game is built around the same tuning that was generally regarded as acceptable when it was subscription-based, and the majority of the purchases go towards convenience things, cosmetics, and gambling. If you really want to be powerful, the best stuff still requires you to actually play the game.

Except... It's not actually true that these are all "games that are designed to exploit people for money on a continuous basis". At least some of the games that have adopted F2P models have worked very, very, hard to avoid exploiting players.

That's a nice attempt at a dodge, but unrelated to the actual point, which is that you can find clear evidence of previously-existing hostility. It's not that people act to hurt whatever group of people they're bigoted against, and get backlash, and then start being hostile. They're hostile first.

I've never actually seen him say something worthwhile, and often what he says is painfully stupid. I don't know what the gimmick is, but it's been sort of a long-running sore point for ages. He's the one thing Slashdot has that's more annoying than the obvious insertions from the DICE people.

Pretty much this, yeah.

You know, if any other part of your body hurt or stopped working as-expected, you'd probably go to a doctor pretty early on. But we have this cultural ideal that "willpower" is a virtue, so people want to "be strong". But you know, if stamina were a "virtue", would that mean that you should just laugh it off if you suddenly couldn't do normal things without being out of breath? No, it would not.

This is wrong in so many ways. We have always recognized at least some marriages which we knew perfectly well would never produce children, because children are only part of the point of marriage. The purpose of marriage is to create family relationships. That's useful for kids, but it's also beneficial to lots of other people. Furthermore, there have been plenty of places recognizing marriages between same-sex couples for years, and even if there weren't, so what? We are allowed to do new things if we think they're useful.

Mostly, it comes down to: No one is going to believe your feeble excuses, because we all know perfectly well that the people who don't think gays should be able to get married always just sort of happen to have a very noticeable personal hostility thing happening, even if they hide it somewhat, and that the arguments for that position are long-dead. The point at which several of the major former proponents of the position walked away because they realized that it was stupid and indefensible and motivated mostly by hatred was the point at which it stopped being a credible position to take.

Mostly, though, I think your analysis sucks because you're not considering the many non-child-related functions of having an institution for the creation of family ties.

We have pretty solid case law that marriage is indeed a civil right.

You keep using words like "lynch" and "crucify", and those are really powerful emotional words... that are totally out of proportion to anything happening here.

If you were to claim that James Byrd had been lynched, that would be credible and reasonably consistent with the facts. Claiming that someone powerful and wealthy was "lynched" because people said they disapproved strongly of him spending large amounts of money trying to harm other people is really pretty much not the same thing at all.

I don't see any persecution here. This is how free speech works; you get to say whatever you want, other people get to react to it.

I think the key here is:

The vast majority of people who have spent any time as an adult woman in our society would never dream of claiming it "doesn't matter". That you benefit from most of the ways it matters, and take them for granted, is the problem, not the solution.

I think most people would agree that, if we could eliminate the disparities, there would be no real reason to pay attention to the issue any more, but that won't happen until we go through a period of being aware of them enough to do something about them.

Sometimes, context is a thing. In terms of raw abilities, there is very little (apart from a few very specific biological functions) that cannot be done by both men and women. There might be some statistical variance, but in practice you are much better off evaluating individual competence only.

However, there are specific experiences that only some people will have had, and those can lead to perspectives differing between people.

Friend of mine once happened to go to lunch with some coworkers, and by coincidence ended up in a car in which she was the only white person. And so when the topic of conversation naturally turned to "places where the police pull you over and claim it was random", she was supriseed to find out that she had never experienced this, but that everyone else in the car had an actively-maintained mental map of the locations of "random" police stops. Because they had to assume that if they drove through a few of those, they would get pulled over at least once, and it would add a few minutes to how long it would take to get somewhere.

This isn't a reflection of some kind of innate quality people get from their skin color that affects their ability to remember where the cops do or don't "randomly" pull people over, but it is a case where different people will have very different experiences.

Men and women are both capable of being comparably-skilled programmers. But skill at programming is not the only useful thing in software development; awareness of the experiences users will be bringing to the table can be relevant.

All I'm getting is "blah blah blah I don't believe in science". When you can demonstrate the ability to completely and perfectly control your emotions in a controlled experiment, I will totally fake caring about what you say. Until then I'm not gonna even bother pretending.

That is really excellent advice for members of a species which isn't ours. Humans, however, really do have emotions, and they can't just shut them off. Furthermore, your proposed policy for what things should be like is basically the all-time champion of the Law of Unintended Consequences: If we adopt this policy, then the winning strategy is to constantly be an asshole to everyone, because if you can push them over the edge they lose.