Awesome. Joined. Thank you.

This is an excellent explanation. Thank you for taking the time to write it.

Holy shit. I hadn’t seen that one. Thanks for the link.

You’ve gotten some really good advice in this thread, especially from the comment to which you are responding here: a bit blunt, but if you can accept it, excellent advice.

The only two things I would add is that

1. Self-medication, by any means, EXTENDS any grief process, whether it’s your lady, your job, your grandmother, or your dog that you lost. The grief (what I am calling what you are now experiencing, even if it doesn’t look like sadness anymore) is the natural process of breaking of those emotional bonds. As many and as deeply as you created them, grief is now the process of breaking them, separating you from the person/object you lost so you can live freely again. There is no rushing this, but you CAN slow it down, and self-medicating is one of those ways of dragging it out into infinity. The only way to get past grief is go through it, literally to feel those breaking emotions and in feeling them, to drain them of their power. That’s just how it works. Self-medication does not decrease those emotions, which for you are already intense because you had so much of your own identity as a person invested in who you were WITH her. Medicating simply postpones them and spreads them out over time. I’m not judging you for your choices, but you might well be moving through this much faster if you were not overall numbing your emotions daily with substance use.

2. When you give in to the darker desires to inform yourself of her current situations without her knowledge, consent, or participation, you are literally recreating/reinforcing the very same emotional bonds you’re trying so hard and so painfully to break. That’s why doing it feels good: it feels like righting a wrong, like regaining a lost balance, like taking some power back. But in reality it’s none of those things, and far worse for your inner situation than you might think. So stop. Every time you think about tracking her down, checking her social media, finding out what she’s up to, ask yourself how many more minutes, hours, weeks, or months you want to suffer what you’re already going through, because in doing this you are actively retying bonds your own grief is trying to free you from. Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong or creepy or not, stalking feeds the beast. Remember this when you go to do it again.

No problem. Thanks for the link!

This could almost be called imeldific.

Were you intending to post a link, or . . . ?

LOL

For those who don’t get it, James Buchanan was the outgoing president in 1861, and

He was an advocate for states’ rights, particularly regarding slavery, and minimized the role of the federal government preceding the Civil War. Historians and scholars rank Buchanan as among the worst presidents in American history.

James Buchanan on Wikipedia

Nah, you’re golden. I’m not the other guy you were talking to, but IMO, there is no error (even if there technically is) because the more people you get reading and talking about this, the better. Thank you for taking the time to post it.

I’ve been thinking for quite some time now that there are far more criminals behind the bench than there are in front of it, and this newly revised number of police-ordered informal gravesites only serves to prove the point even further. (I’m using “the bench” as a symbol for the entire US justice system and not just corrupt judges, but you probably get my point.)

Netanyahu said in a press conference he had told Washington that he objected to any Palestinian statehood that did not guarantee Israel’s security.

Bibi’s only insisting upon that point because there is literally no such thing in reality: there is NO arrangement between warring neighbors that can guarantee “security” apart from the willingness of the participants themselves to stand down. And even if there were, he’d never agree to it anyway. (Nor would Hamas, off in their Qatari penthouses watching from afar.)

Plus, of all the participants who would have to agree to stand down, Israel seems to be the biggest force and the side waging the most active battle of the war. That’s problematic, because why would any of the weaker participants stop fighting when the biggest force has no intention of doing so? Israel would have to stand down first before any of the rest, for the détente to be taken seriously by anyone else involved.

Thus, by demanding the impossible and refusing to settle for anything less, Bibi maintains the status quo (and his own power, as well as that of Hamas). Corrupt authoritarian asshole.

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I’m so bored of hearing about their self inflicted problems, the same ones over and over again.

But looking at your post history, when it comes to news, you ONLY comment on US news.

Talk about self-inflicted problems. If you’re so bored with US news, move on and read news you’re actually interested in.

Yeah. When you already know there’s nothing better coming, no point in waiting.

Look at their post history, lol

Right now, Ukraine is doing all the heavy lifting for the West. Every bit of the cash spent in that direction is very wisely invested, and a fraction of the cost to everyone else if (god forbid) Ukraine fails.

If we (the West) don’t spend now to help Ukraine, what will we eventually spend to help Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and all the other lands Putin longs to annex and rob?

Right now, Ukraine is pretty much all that’s standing in the way of Putin’s visions of Russkiy Mir, and deserves everything the rest of us can dedicate to the cause: in the face of an expansionist dictator, the cause of Ukraine IS the cause of the world.

If even a small fraction of Russia’s nuclear arsenal is functional then they are still incredibly dangerous

Agreed, but it’s 50/50 as to whom. They can’t even afford to turn the keys at this point, lest that unmaintained shit blow up before it leaves Russian airspace – or, more likely, doesn’t even get off its Russian launchpad.

If he could have, he would have, but Putin knows if he even tries he unleashes full MAD.

I’m not saying he won’t or never would, just saying that for all the threats and saber-rattling, he’ll only do it when he himself is already damned.

LOL

Jesus, that almost sounds like sanity.

Media is all about elevating opinion to the level of proven fact these days.

As an aside, the one thing that shocked me the most throughout the runup to the referendum is that everyone involved knew that it would gut the Good Friday Agreement by putting a hard border back into Ireland, but NO ONE talked about it. NO ONE.

Whenever Ireland was brought up during Brexit discussions (rarely) it was dismissed, as rapidly as possible, as one of those things that would be resolved after the passing of the referendum – along with every other reasonable concern that got shoved aside in the run up – and of course never was, along with the rest of the shit they swore they had a plan for and of course did not.

Because they had no answer, not even a hint of a clue. The Troubles simmered for several hundred years, the Good Friday Agreement ended them – and the pro-Brexit crowd literally could not have cared less what Pandora’s box they would be opening in Ireland by putting a hard border back in.

It is ONLY because of the Irish people on both sides of that border, and NOT Westminster, that The Troubles have not begun again. The Irish themselves have kept the post-Brexit peace in spite of Brexit, with zero shits given by the pro-Brexit crowd at any point before or after.

edited to add: I know there is a lot more nuance to the GFA than simply a hard border, I am speaking only in terms of how Brexit could easily have brought back hostilities, etc.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; out of curiosity I just now tried it on Windows myself (Google Chrome 120.0.6099.130 Official Build 64-bit) by typing mozilla.org, clicking “Firefox downloads” at the top, and selecting the one for Windows. It sailed through almost instantly.

BUT - just because it worked for me personally on a completely different machine, OS, and installer doesn’t mean OP is misrepresenting what happened to him; competitive app blocking has certainly happened with Edge. For all we know it’s some Google A/B trial bullshit, no telling at this point.