Avoid questions that seem like there is one right answer. In some cases, it works well to ask not for their own opinions, per se, but a sharing of what opinions they have heard about that topic; such an approach allows you to get the “lay of the land” without anyone feeling too exposed from the start.

sk students to complete an assignment in advance that helps them understand and articulate their own views, as well as others they have heard. Such pre-discussion homework can help them reflect on those views, understand potential reasons behind them, and connect them to disciplinary content in the course. Such activities let them do some more logical thinking in advance, before any emotional barriers get thrown up during a heated discussion.

In situations where you know you will be addressing a controversial topic, you can prepare for the discussion in ways that set the stage for success.

The Conversation’s senior editor had pulled the piece at the last minute, claiming it was “too polemical”. Unfortunately, the senior editor didn’t elaborate on their judgement (or contact me directly), so I can only guess that they were uncomfortable with my direct language and reference to the “generally supine media” – concerns all too easily hidden behind the façade of “too polemical”.

he Chinese government's efforts to repatriate looted objects and the refiguring of the Summer Palace as a people's park and memorial to imperialism

displayed in museums, or kept by the conquering armies.

discussions about SMS-2FA get heated very quickly. I've found that SMS-2FA deployment or advocacy has been a major professional project for some people, and they take questioning it's efficacy personally

I think I had expected that existing rails developers would discover this problem in existing code through the deprecation warning to avoid a nasty surprise. I'm worried about my future kids learning Rails and writing perfectly looking Ruby code just to learn the hard way that return is sometimes a nono! Jokes aside, I think that no one expected that the deprecation will turn into silent rollbacks. This is a very controversial change, pretty much everyone taking part in the discussion on the deprecation PR raised some concerns about the potential consequences of this change. The only thing that was making it easier to swallow was the promise of making it clear to the user by throwing an exception after the rollback.

Someone reported it for being off-topic, but a mod declined it with a comment "I see no reason why this is off-topic. Not a programming question? You must surely be joking!", so it seems that this is controversial for the mods as well.

I have never seen the @Stale bot or any directly equivalent to it achieve a net positive outcome. Never. It results in disgruntled people, extra expenditure of effort (for reporters and maintainers), real stuff getting lost when people get fed up with poking the bot (I have no intention of poking it further), and more extensive filing of duplicates. You say a simple comment dismisses it, but it doesn’t—it only does this time. Next time, it continues to annoy. This is an issue tracker. Use labels, projects, milestones and the likes for prioritising stuff. Not sweeping stuff under the carpet.

“The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.”

When dealing with the verb, the issue of how to treat the past participle is a contentious one, with much blood being shed on both sides. Some people feel that the past participle of input should be input, not inputted, based on the reasoning that the word comes from put, and we don’t say “he putted the papers on the shelf.” A similar line of reasoning has caused many people to aver that words such as broadcast should never be written as broadcasted, since the cast portion of the word remains unchanged with tense.

John Company offers players a new understanding of British history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century that reflects contemporary scholarship on the subject and extensive research into primary documents. John Company attempts to put the critical events of that time in their proper context and show how the imperial experience transformed the domestic culture of Britain. The East India Company lurked behind every building of a textile mill and every bit of wealth in a Jane Austen novel.  John Company is an uncompromising portrait of the people who made the Company and the British Empire what it was. It is as frank as it is cutting in its satire.  Accordingly, the game wrestles with many of the key themes of imperialism and globalization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how those developments were felt domestically. As such, this game might not be suitable for all players. Please make sure everyone in your group consents to this exploration before playing. 

I respectfully disagree with your assessment. You are referencing the quote "It's not appropriate to use the aside element just for parentheticals, since those are part of the main flow of the document." However the OP specifically said that they are looking for a semantic element for "a note that may be useful to read at a given point of a tutorial, but is not part of the main tutorial flow". That is what "aside" is for. It's not part of the main content flow.

markdown-it is the result of the decision of the authors who contributed to 99% of the Remarkable code to move to a project with the same authorship but new leadership (Vitaly and Alex). It's not a fork.

The term encapsulation is often used interchangeably with information hiding. Not all agree on the distinctions between the two though; one may think of information hiding as being the principle and encapsulation being the technique. A software module hides information by encapsulating the information into a module or other construct which presents an interface.

The systemd controversy seems to be a never ending saga among Linux users.

The Mint developers are resistant, though, saying Snap comes with too much Canonical baggage, and in particular seems tied to the official Snap store.

Thanks to that I have chance and time to properly initialise all the properties without reactive calls and I do not have to ignore these "initialising" events before proper initialisation.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over when to use buttons and when to use links. Much like tabs versus spaces or pullover hoodies versus zip-ups, this debate might rage without end.

If you were to have 2 buttons placed side by side, on which side should the primary button sit?

Option A shows the primary button on the left. The argument here is that it is probably what the user wants to see first, so show it first.

Longstanding controversy surrounds the meaning of the term "hacker". In this controversy, computer programmers reclaim the term hacker, arguing that it refers simply to someone with an advanced understanding of computers and computer networks[5] and that cracker is the more appropriate term for those who break into computers, whether computer criminals (black hats) or computer security experts (white hats).

Why not Template Literals?

Don't think so; template strings solve the problem JSX tries to tackle without forking the language.

The merge request must not contain more than 10 commit messages. This rule is maybe the most controversial.

The most controversial issue in RAND licensing is whether the "reasonable" license price should include the value contributed by the standard-setting organization's decision to adopt the standard. A technology is often more valuable after it has been widely adopted than when it is one alternative among many; there is a good argument that a license price that captures that additional value is not "reasonable" because it does not reflect the intrinsic value of the technology being licensed. On the other hand, the adoption of the standard may signal that the adopted technology is valuable, and the patent holder should be rewarded accordingly. That is particularly relevant when the value of the patent is not clearly known before the adoption of the standard.