I think we've seen that this word is so triggering for some people that they react irrationally. I wonder if some of the people who get triggered don't see it coming, either. There are few other words that have that kind of power, so I don't mind respecting that possibility. We can't force millions of people into therapy to deal with their feelings about it, so for me I'd rather err on the side of being considerate. I don't belong to a group that has been abused in as many horrible ways, so I wouldn't presume to speak for them or tell them how to feel.

When I read Huckleberry Finn I started to hear that word in my head despite never having used it in my life or being around people who used it. That really bothered me, especially since the context in the novel is never what it would have been in Jim Crow's 20th Century. So words do change over time. The word will probably lose its power in the next 30-50 years, depending on how fast assholes die off and how fast society improves. (And whether we will stop falling for the fallacy of misleading vividness / anecdotal evidence / selection bias)

I am willing to accede to other people's sensitivities. I can't know how other people should feel. Would I crack jokes about the Holocaust or 9-11? Probably not. Would I use derogatory words for other ethic groups? Nope. It's not usually necessary to use them, except in quoting them. I don't think I would quote Laura Schlessinger because she's an asshole. I might quote Richard Pryor, whose 3rd album was "That Nigger's Crazy," because he was hilarious and brilliant, but I wouldn't say the same phrase in normal conversation. So far in life, I haven't found a reason to use the word even in quotation (until just now!) So I don't worry too much about it.

Some bloggers will post very short posts, or posts that link to something else. If you have a goal of "find something interesting to share every day" that might be better than time. Lately, I've been writing a lot of posts that I haven't hit "publish" on. My older posts were inspired by anger, and my newer unpublished posts have been inspired by worry. It's a lot harder to put something worrying into words.

Or... I could just document the horrible things Pence has been doing.

What people did used to be newsworthy. Now it's what people say on twitter. This whole year has reminded me of 7th grade.

Wouldn't public recognition run the risk of potential authors contacting potential reviewers? There are some nuts out there. Gang Lu would be the most extreme example but other risks would be bribes, harassment, internet smear campaigns, etc.

Being silently paid or having one's department chair informed would be safer.

I wish she hadn't said that. I hope she was loopy from cough medicine or something.

People are complicated and I have known some horrible white racists who are also capable of empathy (toward their in-group) or even charity toward black people. The problem with Trump isn't that he appeals to 'those people' but to 'those tendencies.' By essentializing them she basically calls them incurable, and I would like to hope that they can be turned around... she could promise to show them how erroneous bigotry is when she's elected... or something. Insulting people when you really mean to insult an idea is a category error, and not befitting someone with diplomatic experience.

I agree completely. I did not choose to be an atheist. I chose to stop pretending to be a theist. Some of the skeptical literature I read at the time pushed me over the line (Thank you, James Randi!) but I did not read it with the intention of quashing my belief in a deity.

Perhaps the theists who think it's a choice are secretly atheist and are choosing to tell themselves that they believe, much like the "gay is a choice" extremists usually turn out to be gay themselves.

Mass killing of innocent people are (imho) due to those innocent people being viewed as stand-ins for the person or people the bad guy blames for his own troubles. Blaming a minority for your troubles is bigotry and hence hate crime because there are groups who promote the scapegoating. But the person's psychological state seems the same to me either way. The Columbine shooters blamed the social insiders of their school for ostracizing them. The Newtown shooter blamed children for some reason (resentment that his mother spent time with them? Resentment toward the kids who picked on him in elementary school?) The South Carolina Shooter was yet another ineffectual male who needed someone to blame (black people).

I guess something is a "hate crime" when someone who seems to have everything going for him (it's almost always a "he") becomes convinced that he's been disenfranchised somehow by people who actually have no power. And it's "terrorism" when the real target is the community looking on.
There will always be people who don't accept responsibility for their own troubles (or their own self-improvement when they do have a mental illness). They usually target people close to them and they only get onto the local news. If they don't have weapons of mass murder it stays at that level. This is why I'm for a ban on assault weapons and large magazines. The "law-abiding" person (so far) who has an incipient paranoia or an anger issue can't shoot over 100 people in a few minutes if those things aren't on the market.

Same with Kucinich. I like Kucinich but he didn't have a chance.

Native Americans are shot by cops at a higher rate than blacks. Why don't those lives matter?

The Animal Planet has started programming shows that have nothing to do with animals. Their "surprisingly human" tagline doesn't do it for me. I don't care about treehouses or reruns of "Dirty Jobs." Even if I did, I wouldn't watch those shows just to keep them from having a tick in their ratings from me. I haven't watched Discovery in years, which is a shame. And the "learning" channel lost me with the glut of too-many-babies shows. I want to see something about the impact of human overpopulation on the planet, not fundamentalist families whistling in the dark