Man, you’re a ferocious and mouthy bunch. You gave me links to a lot of excellent comments, and I pared them down to these eight (next time, I might cut them down more). The next step: vote by leaving a comment with the number of the nomination you like best. These are just short excerpts, you’ll have to click on them to read the whole thing.

1. Anyway, respectful transgender people and transsexual people alike wanted to organize around the common ground that does exist (which is plenty). So they/we needed a word that we could agree *did* represent everyone.

2. This is fucking serious: A man just made a joke about raping a woman who he’s never met, who never did him any harm, who he doesn’t know at all, and he did this without considering how the fuck it might impact her or people like her.

3. I’ve done a bit more reading and thinking, and feel more than ever that the 2nd amendment was intended to facilitate well-trained militias, and had diddly to do with personal gun ownership.

4. Why are you so damned insistent on finding that one special circumstance when it’s morally OK for you to do something horrific to me? Why is it so unacceptable to you that I have bodily autonomy in all circumstances?

5. That hard truth being: torture is, as many, many competent professionals are telling you, close to useless for getting timely and precise intel. Rather: its only particularly reliable value as a tool of statecraft is as a method of terror and suppression.

6. The demands religion makes on human sexuality are unreasonable. There has literally never been a human society on the face of the planet, no matter how thoroughly crushed under the thumb of theistic tyranny, where people actually consistently restricted themselves to monogamous marital sex.

7. BTW, keep your Oogedy Boogedy death cult religion away from my kids and pets.

8. Playing devil’s advocate does not require lying about your own position. Indeed, that term is generally used only if a person agrees with others in the discussion, but wishes to present the position of someone who disagrees.

You may recall that when I imposed the new rules on the site I also announced that there would also be changes to how the Molly awards were given: instead of giving them to commenters, we’d award them to specific comments. I suggested at that time that you might all start making note of exceptional comments — now it’s time to refer back to those notes.

Here’s the way it works: People should repost a link and quote from their favorite comments here; you can also just chime in and voice your approval for people’s choices. I’ll let you guys chime in here for a few days, and develop a preliminary list. I’ll then pick out the top three and post them in their entirety in a top-level post on Wednesday, and you’ll all vote (Yes! An online poll!) for the best.

So go to it. Think back over the last month or so and tell me what comment you found most enlightening, entertaining, provocative, or otherwise stimulating.