As others have noted, the disclaimer detracts from your message. Just because people often say “This will be controversial, but...” does not mean that it adds t

As others have noted, the disclaimer detracts from your message. Just because people often say “This will be controversial, but...” does not mean that it adds to your message. It does not lower the reader’s defences against controversial ideas. What it actually does is appeal to people who are already predisposed to heterodoxy. For example, if I begin a comment with the statement: “This is going to bring the Men’s Rights Activist sea lions out of the woodwork, but...” What I am doing is appealing to people who are already predisposed to dislike the MRA movement and its adherents. I am absolutely not trying to appeal to people leaning that way to consider my message carefully and possibly soften their stance. Thus, statements like this tend to be divisive and polarizing, which runs 100% counter to a culture of open minded discussion. Far better, IMO, to sneak up on people who think that JavaScript objects are pretty-much the same thing as Smalltalk objects, and show the differences one-by-one, building to a grand reveal that--whoa--there is a big conceptual difference between a dictionary that happens to have methods and a fully encapsulated actor that responds to messages. TFA links to a post discussion this: http://raganwald.com/2015/05/11/javascript-classes.html http://raganwald.com/2015/05/11/javascript-classes.html JM2C, YMMV, &c.