@alexthechick's Threads
Since we are playing stupid maximalist position games, let me give a stupid maximalist prize. What I am about to type will insult many of you. I am aware of that. I am going to type it anyway. Because, again, if you make me care, you won't like the form that caring takes.
As the single, childless woman in the office who had to do the work of the women with children and the women out on maternity leave, what I hear when Women Reality Check is a bunch of women saying "Pay me for the work that you did". Because, ultimately, that is the reality of it
The work needs to be done. It needs to be done if your child is sick. It needs to be done when you are out on maternity leave. It needs to be done during your child's school event. The work does not care. It must be done. And someone has to do it. That is also reality.
(Before I start, this isn't directed at GP, I'm just riffing off this notion) And today is the day those who want President Trump impeached will find the correct words to convince those of us who do not believe that Trump is so horrible and evil and unfit that he must go!
Let me name names here: What, exactly and precisely, do David French and Patterico think they are accomplishing with all of their tweeting and columns and ranting and railing about how terrible the people who support Trump are? I'm being serious here. What is their goal?
There is a fundamental difference in kind between arguing Trump's actions are improper and worthy of sanction as opposed to if you support Trump you are a bad Christian who is violating their faith and you have fallen for a cult of personality and are drinking the Flavor Aid.
I am so sick of the Eternal Now idiocy. Who is in charge of American foreign policy, the President or the bureaucrats at State and in the intelligence community has been a fight for longer than I have been alive.
REE REE REE TRUMP IS INSANE BECAUSE HE WANTS TO DO SOMETHING WITH WHICH THE MANDARINS AT STATE DISAGREE REE REE REE is the same all the hand wringing about Ronnie Raygun is going to blow us all up. None of this is new. None of it. Not a single syllable.
A reminder, I start with Reagan due only to my age and thus that being what is truly in my memory as opposed to what my reading of history shows. But none of this is new. None of it. And I'm just sick of this notion that this fight is new and different and a dessert topping!
If you have as pitch black a sense of humor as I do, that the NYT will likely have nigh to utter impunity for publishing lies about Justice Kavanaugh, one of the nine most powerful people in America, due to SCOTUS's prior rulings, is darkly, grimly hilarious.
What is most fascinating to me about the NYT leaving out the bit in the book that the woman to whom the incident supposedly occurred with the friends shoving Kavanaugh's penis into her hand has no memory of this will be irrelevant to those who want Kavanaugh impeached.
Those who believe Blasey Ford do not care in the slightest that she cannot identify the year in which it happened. They don't care, in the slightest, that Leyland Keyser says no such party occurred and that she didn't know Kavanaugh. They don't care, at all, there is no proof.
Whilst attempting to not fall on my face while putting on pants today, I was pondering how to fight the scourge of Sources Say reporting. Now, Sources Say has always been a problem but it does seem to have ramped up in the last decade or so. How to stop this? I have thoughts.
First, read the article not the headline. This is an ancillary issue where headlines do not match the content of the piece. But read the article. Trump announces plans to eat pizza with a fork! Sanders announces plans to eliminate the heartbreak of grocery store rewards cards!
Blaring headline. Then you read it and Sources Say. Not a single named person. Just Sources who are close to the situation or are aware of it or are former members of WHAM. Not a single named source. So, in other words, prayer requests, I mean gossip. It's gossip.
Gather round it's story time and, yes, there is a point to this other than my liking the sound of my own typing. Right before I started high school, my family moved from where I'd grown up. Obviously, this necessitated my starting high school in a brand new school.
I attended a very small Christian school and by small I mean less than 100 kids combined in 7th-12th grades. There were 13 people in my graduating class. My freshman year of high school, my brother and I were the only new kids in the entire school.
Basically everyone else had grown up together. It was a challenging social situation for anyone, let alone me, someone who finds human beings nigh to incomprehensible. Let's just say that it didn't go very well, to put it mildly.
This this this. The rage over H1B visas is well placed. Hey it's only for jobs that cannot be filled by Americans! *thousands of Americans apply* But but but they won't accept $9 an hour! They are greedy! And we can't hold their visas hostage and work them like dogs!
Things like this make me understand the draw of Sanders and that branch of politics. Oh I do not agree and the solutions are not solutions. But I get, emotionally, the appeal. It is a slap in the face to sneer obtain new skills and then turn around and favor H1B over Americans
There are far too many people out there saying the same thing about being forced to train replacements and being forced to redo the outsourced work (which is a slightly different matter) for it all to be anecdata.
Thoughts on GoT from someone who didn't watch - I mention that because it's relevant to how I formed my views on this, not because oh I didn't watch I'm so much better. Dude, no. If you enjoy a show, then watch it. It just didn't grab me even though it should have. Anyway.
From what I saw of people's reactions over this season and from talking with a friend who did watch the whole series and was fine with the finale, despite being critical of other eps this season, most complaints boil down to this season having the characters act as plot points.
A common refrain was why is this all so rushed? Why are you having characters act in OOC ways at the end when one or two eps more would have allowed you to develop these story arcs? Why is it all so crammed into this short time frame when you could have as many eps as you want?
I violated my own Effort Is Bad mantra and decided to go look up what the success rate of vasectomy reversal is. I am defining successful to mean resulting in getting someone pregnant. That rate? 30-70%. Source: uihc.org/health-topics/…
Here's another from the NHS spelling it out more explicitly: nhs.uk/conditions/con…
Again, success being defined as getting someone pregnant after the reversal:
75% w/i 3 years
55% w/i 3-8 years
40-45% w/i 9-14 years
30% w/i 15-19 years
less than 10% w/i 20 years.
Again, success being defined as getting someone pregnant after the reversal:
75% w/i 3 years
55% w/i 3-8 years
40-45% w/i 9-14 years
30% w/i 15-19 years
less than 10% w/i 20 years.
The proposal being presented is that to prevent abortion, teenage boys should have vasectomies and then when they want kids have them reversed. Let's say that's done when the boy is 15 (age picked as mid-teens). Let's say the guy wants to have a kid at 25 (age picked as mid 20s)
I chose not to have kids. Get your hands out of my damn pockets to pay for the kids I did not have. I do, in fact, resent deeply being told I have some moral responsibility to care for someone else's kids. You had them. Not me. I owe you and them NOTHING.
I struggle with not tipping over into outright loathing of parents and children because I don't care if other people have kids and, in fact, yay kids! Children are a good thing so long as I do not have to interact with them ever. If you want kids, have 12, go you!
But when this we all have a responsibility to provide basic support for children idiocy, and it is idiocy, starts up? Well my immediate response is sod off breeders and it gets more profane from there. They are not my kids. I owe them NOTHING. Nothing. Sit down and shut up.
....Could one friend copy and repost? I am trying to demonstrate that someone is always listening. #SuicideAwareness
Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255
About 20 years ago I had to knock my father down with a forearm to throat and pull a bottle of poison out of his mouth. Thank God he lived and is doing well now. But to this day my mother admits she is scared of me because when I had to tackle my father I did without hesitation.
Suicide devastates the people left behind. Suicide attempts leave scars that run bone deep, both physical and emotional. Please, I beg you, call someone. There is help. You have worth. You will be missed. Please. Please. Call. Please.
Stop being cunts who mock people for enjoying things. All preening about how much better you are than those who react to something important to them that you think is stupid are proving only that you are nasty people. I am noting who does this. Including those I consider friends
Joy in this world is hard to come by. Tearing people down? That is easy as pie and some of you seem to take sexual pleasure in doing so. Oh? That is nasty and rude of me? I'm sorry, I am merely following your lead.
There have been times in my life when reality is dead set on bringing me to my knees where, yes, my sports ball team winning a game made me cry. Or a trailer to a movie I wanted to see. Or a video game clip. Because it was simple joy in a simple matter and it brought me peace
I am not a fan of Mr. French, no, 'tis true!, but this is a fair article. I say this as someone who has been happily single for get off my lawn years and is happily childless (I do attend church regularly). I am an outlier in being happy like that and I know it.
Many years ago, I was an online acquaintance with a young woman who was having huge difficulties reconciling her self-proclaimed feminism with her deep desire to get married and have kids. I asked her if she believed that feminism meant going after what she wanted. She said yes.
So then I asked her why that didn't apply to wanting to be a wife and mother. It was important to her. Why was that not a valid path to pursue? No one had ever told her that before and that made me so angry. Her supposed mentors and friends were actively denigrating her goals
What an utterly ludicrous article. These aren't dangerous criminals they are families! So all those coyotes raping all those women and girls don't exist, right? And they just want asylum and it's visa overstays and ORANGE MAN WRONG BAD! What pathetic drivel.
Note the assumption that these are families and not people bringing children who may or may not be theirs with them. Note the complete lack of discussion as to how asylum is to be sought at the first country not three or four later. Note the hurr durr Trump thinks it's a movie.
This is not a serious piece and it is not a serious attempt to grapple with the issues and I apologize for treating it with more respect than it deserves. I am sick of these pieces that pretend to be rational takes written by those who make me look sane in how I view Bill Clinton
Begun the rant is: I have a right to defend myself. In fact, I have a duty to defend myself because if I do not defend myself, who will? If I do not deem my own life worth defense, why should anyone else? This should not be a controversial position. My life has worth.
Note that I said my life. Was your assumption that I meant physical safety? Probably. But I did not say that. I said my life. My life involves both physical safety and reputational safety. After all, my reputation and my standing before others is as important as physical safety.
So I have a right, and, I would argue, a duty to defend myself from reputational attacks with as much vigor as I do my physical safety. After all, physical attacks are generally short lived and the damage is immediate and apparent to all. Reputational attacks? Those are different
I am not a Ben Shapiro fan so this is a case where I have no interest other than the principle of the thing. I firmly believe that calling Shapiro and Peterson gateway drugs to Neo Nazism is actionable defamation. Also it is YouTube who makes the recommendation algorithm not them
It is galling to have the YouTube CEO act all innocent lamb about how Shapiro and Peterson are three clicks from NeoNazis. You run the algorithm. You tell me how that gets linked. Humans write code. Some human who works for Google decided those things are related.
I watch the ISS camera feed as background noise. You know what is about two clicks away in the recommendations? Flat Earth stuff. Does that mean ISS is a gateway drug to Flat Earth and the moon landing was faked? Only if you are mouth breathing stupid.
In which I sorta kinda if you squint defend AOC which, trust, me I do not want to do. For the record, I agree that going into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath was the correct decision as was finally calling Iraq into account for the serial violations of the ceasefire.
This is where the but begins. AOC was 11 just about to turn 12 years old on 9/11/01. She is now 29 years old. We have been in Afghanistan for going on 18 years which is well more than half of her life. There appears to be no end to our involvement there.
Not only does there appears to be no end to our involvement there, there is no true, coherent, publicly stated rationale of what our goals are, how we will achieve those goals, and, more importantly, when those goals will be reached and we will leave. Same with Iraq.
Here's what bugs me about The Bulwark and CPAC thing - it's another example of a trend that sets my teeth on edge: having someone review a matter that they can't stand. I'm not talking disagree with, I'm talking I detest that thing.
This happens in gaming and books and movies and the like. "I really do not like this genre of game/books/movies and here I'm going to review it." That's not going to be an honest review. It's someone going in with negative presuppositions looking to reinforce them.
Now there can be great value in having a person who is generally not a fan review a matter to see if it has broad appeal. That's fine and interesting because enthusiast reviews can suffer the opposite problem. I like this thing because it's a thing I like is also not helpful.
Various gaming thoughts: Let's start with the The Division 2 beta. Playing it reminded me of how much I loved The Division. Gun play is great, interesting systems, oh hey running straight into gunfire gets you killed WHO KNEW! Even PUG groups can make it through stuff.
I still do not like the Dark Zone but that is 100% due to my not liking PvP because of my awful PvP skills. Watching the Base of Operations and settlements upgrade is very rewarding. I wasn't sure about getting it since I have a backlog it but after playing the beta I am.
Next up: Anthem. I'm through the main story which is really in the vein of extended tutorial as is common in looter type games now. I enjoyed the story, I like the characters, I'm playing a Storm build because I like throwing lightning and fire at things. I'm having fun.
Story time! When I was in college, the Dean of Students got up at an assembly and went on a rant about how the women used over twice as much toilet paper as the men and this was ridiculous and had to stop and on and on. I went to small college of about 600 split about 50/50
Everyone was staring at him because boy howdy. I happened to be taking an independent study class with him and thus was besieged after the assembly to explain to him please how dumb that was.
Of note is that he was one of six boys and he had four boys so he was not familiar with being around more than one woman for personal hygiene reasons.
I was thinking about the Tyranny of the Least Able Brother (being told to avoid things that someone not secure in his faith may find wrong) in connection with being young and told I couldn't watch my cartoon because a friend was over whose parents thought television was sinful.
I don't remember what cartoon it was but I do remember being upset because the only time I wasn't allowed to watch it was as a punishment when I did something wrong. Poor Mommy tried to explain to me that I wasn't being punished and I kept saying but I am, I can't watch it.
It suddenly hit me like a bolt out of the blue that Kids These Days would have no concept why this was a problem. DVR it, stream it, On Demand, so you don't watch it while they're there, what's the problem? The problem, you on my lawn children, is that NONE OF THAT EXISTED.
Honest version of this story: the media makes money when people click on articles and to get people to click we need OUTRAGEOUS click bait and waiting for facts does not give you clicks. Note that media consumers are the ones doing the clicking.
Here is the cycle: politicians want press, press wants clicks because members of the press are having their metrics watched and the key metric is clicks. So the incentive structure is to say something snappy to get the clicks. Media consumers are the ones who click through
So to get the click you need the media consumer's attention. There is a reason why bright and flashy has worked for centuries to get attention. Clickbait the headline, get the click. Self perpetuating cycle. Everyone involved is at fault.
Questions on the 1,169 page spending bill:
1. How many hours did it take to physically type up the bill?
2. Who typed it and in whose office did that person work?
3. If multiple people typed different sections, how many people, who were they and for whom did they work?
1. How many hours did it take to physically type up the bill?
2. Who typed it and in whose office did that person work?
3. If multiple people typed different sections, how many people, who were they and for whom did they work?
4. Who determined which person(s) and which office(s) would type which parts?
5. How was the text disseminated to those doing the typing (ie dictation, hand written notes, email, text message)?
6. Who proofread the final text and in whose office does that person work?
5. How was the text disseminated to those doing the typing (ie dictation, hand written notes, email, text message)?
6. Who proofread the final text and in whose office does that person work?
7. If multiple people proofread different sections, who coordinated the compilation of the sections into one final document?
8. Who signed off on the final draft version as being acceptable for submission to the sponsors of the bill?
8. Who signed off on the final draft version as being acceptable for submission to the sponsors of the bill?
In which I read what is likely meant to be a sympathetic story and have rather not the emotional response likely intend: A thread on just how awful I can be.
1: Why was the school superintendent going to a kid's house to check up on him after he missed one day of school?
1: Why was the school superintendent going to a kid's house to check up on him after he missed one day of school?
It seems rather odd that the superintendent of schools would leave campus to go to a kid's house to check up on him when he was missing for one day without there being some kind of history or pattern of absences. That struck me as odd.
2. Why is there not a single syllable in here about the kid's parents? He was nine years old and it is impossible to tell from this if he was sick at home alone or not. There's not even a mom could not take off work throw away line. It's as if his parents do not exist.
