I did not define the word magic. Society did that. My choice is to communicate effectively, which means largely respecting the established consensus on which words mean what. If you'd rather render yourself ineffectual by using your own personal alternate definitions for established words, that is your choice, but it's not a choice that aligns with my or most other people's priorities.

Besides, "magic" only has whimsy associated with it because we restrict it to fake things. If we'd been calling electricity "magic" all along, "magic" would be mundane and you'd be over here complaining that we don't use a more whimsical term like "etherics" or "thaumaturgy" or "electricity."

As for wonder... what the flippity floppity fuck are you even talking about? The scientific world is full of wonder. Wonder is what drives science in the first place, and it has nothing at all to do with terminology. If you look up at the night sky and are too distracted by vocabulary to feel wonder at the pretty lights shining across unfathomable temporal and spatial distances, well, that seems more like a deficiency in you than any sort of flaw in which arbitrary sounds and squiggles we've picked out to describe things with.

TLDR, during a 1983 survey of 728 officers and 479 police spouses, "Approximately, 40 percent [of the officers] said that in the last six months prior to the survey they had behaved violently towards their spouse or children." Also, "Ten percent of the spouses reported being physically abused by their mates at least once; the same percentage claim that their children were physically abused."

I heard both growing up. To me they were just synonyms for the same game. Well, almost the same. Duck Duck Gray Duck is a little more fun because you assign colors to all of the ducks, so you have to pay a little more attention. But when not actually playing the game, the two versions live in the same pigeon hole within my brain.

No. Thinking about the panda is involuntary in that scenario. Typing up and submitting an explicitly unwanted response is not involuntary. It's a thing a person chooses to do expressly against the wishes of the person making the request.

Don't ease into it at all. Wait for a moment where it would be funny, then go whole hog with it. Treat it like a joke... but then just keep going. Never go back. Don't even acknowledge there is a back. Pretend this is how you've always talked and they're insane if they think otherwise.

The article's title presents this in a misleading way. The bill in question wouldn't prevent people from using their preferred names and pronouns. What it would do is prohibit the government from spending federal funds to implement or enforce any rules or recommendations encouraging its employees and contractors to respect those names and pronouns.

So in other words this is an attempt at protecting hate-speech, not at restricting free-speech. Shitty, but probably not unconstitutional.

Twas a tubular time.

Plus it's not just about total time between "I want food" and "Nom nom". There's also the matter of how usable that time is. On a good day it might only take me a few minutes longer to get fast food, but all of that time is spent behind the wheel and most of it is spent driving. Making a sandwich at home, on the other hand, only about a minute is spent actively handling food. The other seventeen minutes while the patty cooks are free; I can it spend doing anything I please. So instead of comparing twenty minutes for fast food vs. eighteen minutes for DIY, it's really more like twenty minutes vs. one minute.

It's a fun show. The ending didn't quite land right, but whatever; it's not the kind of series where that matters. Also, I didn't have any problem with the CGI and don't understand why so many people are complaining about it; probably they're just the CGI equivalent of audiophiles and should be ignored by any who don't share that particular affliction.

I don't know if this is the case for other people, but I have to be careful about using slurs in any context because the more I see or use a word the more likely it is to slip out in other situations. I'd never purposefully use a slur on somebody, but my word-choices are largely running on automatic when I'm angry. I just push intent at my mouth and then my subconscious picks out words matching that intent and feeds them into my tongue. If I push the intent "strong targeted insult" into that system, a slur could match those parameters and make it out my mouth before my conscious mind can catch and filter it. Entirely avoiding using slurs, and ideally avoiding even thinking slurs helps to avoid this happening (both by avoiding them entering my vocabulary-supply in the first place, and by building the mental reflex to immediately drop them like they're hot if they do pop into my brain).

A more society-level reason to discourage people from publicly using slurs even in discussions about them is to make it harder for bigots to stage "discussions" as excuses to loudly use slurs while in earshot of the people they'd like to use those slurs at.

People also get paranoid about automated (or braindead) moderation, or trolls who shame people based purely on the fact that a quick and context-free search of their post history turns up N uses of a slur. It's often easier to just dodge these kinds of problems than to fight them.

It doesn't say "a female behind." That would be fine. It says "a female's behind," using the noun form of female to refer to a woman. Normal people don't refer to a woman as "a female" outside of technical contexts like medicine or science. In casual speech it comes across as dehumanizing to call a person "a female," and this is a speech pattern that is primarily used by misogynists, especially the incel variety.

The preferred phrasing would have been "a woman's behind."

That said, giving the person a permaban over this seems pretty excessive unless there's additional context.

I’m one of the few here who seem to understand how people actually communicate in the real world

Nah. People in the real world don't use the noun phrase "a female" when referring respectfully to women. They say woman, lady, girl, gal, or something along those lines. The only times a woman is called "a female" are in technical contexts or when the speaker is a misogynist.