“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good goat trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

-John Lewis

It looks like Jesus is targeted by a sniper.

Oh, I didn’t mean it like that. Seriously. It’s an old joke, but it’s funny. I upvoted it, I was just playing off of it. Threaded humor is like jazz. We just have to play off of each other.

I’m afraid I can only give half marks for this one because that’s technically a molecular biology joke, not a chemistry joke. As a biologist, I’m very sympathetic. It’s just that DNA helicase isn’t going to be covered in the coursework of chemistry, much less in a freshman chemistry book.

On the other hand, a tasteful pun about bondage would have received full marks.

TiVo has entered the chat.

It’s a genre called magical realism.

I never read the books, but this sounds like what they mean.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind response.

You have changed my mind on the subject. As a queer person it’s easy to see us as one big community, and I know that things like humor can read totally differently than how they sound over brunch. And as I said, I have always meant that kind of parodying in an explicitly trans supporting kind of way.

But your comment made me understand that those are not my jokes to make. We are all team rainbow, but the experiences of the trans community, especially now, belong to the trans community. While it was not my intention to trigger an emotional reaction, the fact that I did so and your very gentle and kind correction has made me resolve to not make that mistake again.

So you changed a mind today and educated a person. Thank you, and all love to you ❤️

That’s the combination I use for my luggage.

The joke is that it is emphatically not deadnaming. It’s disregarding a preferred nickname, but calling into the discussion the topic of deadnaming because he and his culture are massively transphobic.

I know we’re just two strangers passing in the night, but I want to be extremely clear that I would never deadname someone, regardless of their political beliefs or their stance relative to the trans community. I completely and totally respect the rights of all trans persons and for all people to define who they are.

I will also continue to call X Twitter and refer to it as deadnaming for the same reason, but if tomorrow Elon were to come out as trans I would respect their chosen names and pronouns.

I’m a cis gendered mostly gay man who has been active in the LGBT political and civil rights community since the days of ACT UP, I know the semiotics of genderism well enough to put together a course on it, and I’ve seen every episode of Pose.

I know your comment was very well meant, and I am in no way criticizing you for it. It’s coming from the best of places. I just want to be very clear where I’m coming from as well.

I think he meant “SECDEE!”

It’s just political posturing.

1. They don’t have a military. The National Guard units would come under the command of the President of the US, and any units in rebellion would know they’re facing courts martial for crimes that would be career limiting in that the penalties could include anything from life in prison to execution. It’s literally treason by the legal definition.
2. Even if any significant number of troops were to choose to violate the law, modern war isn’t about riflemen. There’s a massive infrastructure required to keep tanks and planes running, not to mention things like carrier battle groups. Northrop and Raytheon aren’t going to be forfeiting USG contracts to sell missile systems to Ohio.
3. Only the president has the nuclear codes, so nuclear blackmail can’t work either.

There isn’t going to be another civil war. Too much has changed between then and now in terms of military and economic organization. This is just Texas whacking off yet again, as they did under Obama and Bill Clinton.

The very real risks we’re facing are the election of Donald Trump - this is the biggest threat - and far right domestic terrorism. The former is an existential threat to the United States and should be treated as such. The latter is a law enforcement issue and should be treated as such. I suspect the Proud Boys are infiltrated all to hell as are the other major organizations, but there’s the potential for a significant amount of harm being done on a larger than 9/11 scale, although it’d be drawn out.

Not only is this just about the only deadnaming I support, I think we should all use the Spanish rolled “R.”

Also it’s the only time I’d be comfortable saying “No, where are you really from?”

People also like to argue it’s an acronym, but do you pronounce NASA the same as you pronounce the first letter of each word of National Aeronautics and Space Administration?

Um, yes?

I’m assuming we’re talking about the two A letters here, since nothing comes to mind about a different pronunciation of N or S in American English.

In American English - at least in my experience - the first sound in aeronautics is exactly the same as in “air,” which is also the same as in “administration.” We don’t generally say it as in “ear-onautocs.”

Also, I’m curious - has anyone ever published a study describing whether or not the difference in pronunciation differs between sectors in the computer science community? Particularly, is there a difference between normal developers and those who write in a Lisp?

Wings evolve from legs though, generally speaking. This means that a four legged dragon with wings would have conceivably evolved from a six legged creature. You can get hand-wings or arm-wings, and we’re not entirely sure but think insect wings may have also evolved from legs or some other kind of similar structure.

But pretty much you can either have wings or legs/arms. You have to trade them in. That’s why the whole angel/demon thing doesn’t work either. The traditional harpies work but they’d be furry and not feathered. I haven’t worked out the wingspan for them but you could probably come up with a reasonable guess. They’d be more bat-people than bird-people, and I suspect that their chest areas would be less generously proportioned than is typically seen in the artwork. I’m not going more into the physics of that one though.

BFD.

The whole YOLO thing never made any sense to me. If you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, then you have every excuse to risk your life doing whatever you want. There’s usually some kinds of moralistic restrictions, but except in the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies, I suspect wingsuiting on weekends is fair game. If you’re going to live forever no matter what you do, why not?

On the other hand, if you only live once - if you’re one and done - that seems like a demotivation to risk your life before you’re actually done with it.

There’s an old borscht belt joke about insurance - “What if something terrible happens, and you don’t die?”

The answer to which came first would be the male proto-chicken.

The problem with this question is that its assumption is so wrong that it is rebdered meaningless. Chomsky once wrote the sentence “Colorless greed ideas sleep furiously” as an example of a sentence that has syntactic correctness but no semantic meaning. Also, why a chicken, in particular? Why this animal who has been so successfully domesticated and differentially bred over centuries that calling it out is like Roy Confort calling out the similarly domesticated banana as evidence of god and creation?

In any case, eggs came first. The egg, if you will, is basically a big cell. It has a lot going on, but it got figured out long before modern birds, much less the domesticated chicken.

But of course, that’s not what they really mean. What they really mean is - how do you get from not-chicken to chicken without the biological equivalent of a big bang (and I’m not even touching on how cosmogenesis gets misunderstood)?

And the real answer is that, whether we’re talking about natural or human driven evolution, there’s no line between chicken and not-chicken. Its fairly easy for us to say that a cat is not a chicken and that a jellyfish is not a chicken, but as you get into the later dinosaurs and early birds, you start to move into grey areas.

Which brings us back around to semantics. As humans, for some reason, we like hard categories around things. That’s often not how the real world works. There’s really a lot of just continuous blessings, and ideas like species are a convenient label for us to understand gross differences but whose utility starts to fall apart once too closely examined. The definitions written in textbooks for high school students are unhelpful, as they represent the ideas as if they were handed down from on high, rather than “this is a convenient way of organizing things for some of our purposes.”

Isn’t that the same woman who has a currently circulating stock photo with a very badly gripped .45?