Digitalprimate

That’s enough internet for today.

This person petroleums.

Yeah, no. Crude and coal are still 95% USD denominated, and that’s more than half Russia’s exports.

I think you’re confusing the poor FBI guy reading our conversation ;)

Generics are required to be as efficacious as name brand in the US.

Let me introduce you to the way the FDA actually works.

Lots of stuff is easy to DIY if you have some work space. Furniture, fish tanks, thermonuclear warheads. Learning to sew is valuable, not because you should make your own clothes -fuck that- but because you can mend the stitching on your current clothes.

One of those things is not like the other…

Quality knives do not have to be super expensive. The trick is to maintain them. Honing of course, and unless you are a super enthusiastic home cook, a proper sharpening by a pro on Japanese wet stone twice a year is all it takes. That’s like at most USD 20 in most places, probably less. Even mid range knives are fine, so long as you keep them sharp.

And you don’t need a lot. In theory a good chefs knife and a good paring knife will do. In practice, you also want a bread knife and filleting knife, but you can start small.

arc’teryx for life.

“If you saw someone stealing food, no you didn’t.”

Broadcasting “no contact Israel” or similar is novel. Broadcasting “armed guards aboard” has been going on for at least a decade.

Totally agree about Obama’s well intentioned but ultimately disastrous attempt to reach across the aisle. He had two miraculous years to change it all, and blew it on trying to reconcile two utterly incompatible views of what America should be. Noble, but in the end foolish.

If you are right, it won’t really matter who takes the blame. Part of me thinks you are right, but the better part of me is still fighting.

Long story short, I don’t know that I consider Biden a pragmatic alternative at this point.

I get you, and you’re not wrong with the rest of what you wrote. The R’s have had a coherent game plan since Nixon and executed on it well enough (and had enough lucky accidents) to engineer exactly this kind of election.

The choice is whether or not the US continues as a representative democracy. This time it’s no hyperbole; it’s a truly binary decision for the future. And I’m afraid unless the D’s grow a real backbone, every election for the foreseeable future is going to be a response to an existential threat.

But the R’s cannot win. On this we can all agree.

I forgave his sins and allowed myself to miss him. The magpies in my back garden agreed with this.

Me either but as a CIS Het dude, I may be unlikely to notice it. Can anyone tell me more? Serious question, want to be part of the solution here.

This is the way. Would add Whiskeytown/Ryan Adams. Maybe a tiny bit of Wilco?

Weirdly enough I dreamt someone did this right in front of me last night. My subconscious is odd.

Gave you and upvote to get you back off zero and agree with your general sentiment.

But - the elections since Trump took the ROC convention have all been different - we must get rid of all the R’s we can no matter what at the local, state and national level as soon as possible now that the have proven to be an existential threat to democracy itself.

Just a minor but important point: being neurodivergent is not a “mental health disorder.”

I do agree it plays a role in boys becoming incels, but it’s not in the same category as depression or anxiety disorders.

Edit for the replies I got: I strongly believe our society needs to stop looking at neurodivergent people as somehow “wrong” or “messed up.” Your brain is your brain just like your skin color is your skin color, and no should be discriminated against for either. In this case, it really is society that needs change, not the individual. It’s uncomfortable or even traumatic for the individual because of how other people react to them, not because of who they fundamentally are. Having to Face all the time, being forced into far too stimulating situations, having very few people understand your needs while at the same time foisting their expectations on you is exhausting. And it shouldn’t have to be this way.

Have an upvote, but I don’t really agree with you. Here in the Netherlands about the time my two boys entered elementary school the government took a look at the stats and realized that boys over the last decade had poorer outcomes post secondary education than girls. So, they (to decidedly mixed success) added some more and more frequent physical activity including something that translates to rock and water, which is kinda hard to explain, but is a way to use physical exercise to teach boundaries. You can see similar stats regarding differences in outcomes for men and women in university graduation rates in America and the UK.

The point I’m trying to make is that something in our systems changed, and to some it appears to be a kind of zero sum game (which I do not believe it is or has to be). I mean sure there is a chance that producing better outcomes for girls, which is great, has had some negative effect on boys; the problem is we cannot tell if the two are related, outside of some inherent gross physical differences in size, strength etc. Thus, the incels immediately jumped to the conclusion that its “teh Femmminizzzz.”

And I do agree with the OP of this sub-thread that it is a very difficult process to realize your privilege, to see beyond it and then through someone else’s eyes. Unless you are lucky and either hit just the right place to start researching or have friends who can help, if you didn’t internalize your privilege at an early age, it’s a long ass road. Took me a good decade, and most weeks I come across something I still hadn’t learned.

I’ve brought both my boys up to understand exactly how privileged they are to have been born white, with a dick, straight, and in a wealthy W European country. I see many fathers and mothers here in NL have done the same. The kids these days really are all right. So I have real hope the Zoomers by and large and the incel subculture notwithstanding will simply never internalize the hateful points of view we Xers had to brute force our way out of.

Thank you for this good perspective.