congratulations you are in the top 0.1% of parents/dads

This right here is what this whole question is directed at.

No, doing the basics does not put them in the “top 0.1% of dads,” like it’s some sort of anomaly (they might be, but it’s not because they changed diapers). Almost every dad I know is heavily involved in their kids lives, including when they are babies. I’m never the only dad at the park or the birthday party, and everything else. I have had many discussions with other guys about taking care of our babies, and it is very clear that it is a shared responsibility.

Do more men bail on their kids or dump responsibility on their spouse than women? Sure. Is that currently the common thing, or what 99.9% of men do? Absolutely not.

Stop perpetuating this stereotype, especially in a post about negative stereotypes.

I think that it is unfortunate that he got shanked, as he was convicted and appropriately sentenced for the murder he committed. That is as it should be.

Shank the ones that get away with it, not the ones in jail for it.

I didn’t watch it specifically because of Leto. I was absolutely stoked each time I saw an ad for it (forgetting that Leto was in it) right up until his stupid face popped up in the trailer.

If they had somebody else, even a complete no-name actor, I would have watched it. It is impressive how effectively they pushed away their audience.

I have made the argument to the “think of the economy” Republicans I have known for years, and come at it from a relatively heartless angle:

With automation (and now AI), it takes less and less humans to do the work. Not everybody can “start their own business,” obviously, and when self-driving vehicles that don’t require a human driver become effective and accepted, about 70 million jobs will disappear in a blink. And those won’t be shifted to another industry, because it doesn’t take 70 million people to code and maintain self-driving vehicles. And that is just the people who drive for a living. So either a significant chunk of the population is unemployed and can’t buy things or live anymore without significant help from the government anyway, or everybody works less hours (and still paid a living wage) to spread out the available work hours.

If there is a UBI that effectively covers shelter and food, then people would need to work less to pay for other necessities and what luxuries they can afford. If everybody gets it, it is completely fair.

And you do this by taxing the shit out any automation (enough that the business still gets a benefit, but so does the society they are taking jobs from), and taxing billionaires.

This isn’t about taking care of the sick or poor, or providing handouts, it’s about maintaining society with the rise of automation, and it not being possible without it.

Those I spoke to were remarkably receptive to that argument.

I’ll do a lot, but I’ll often start with Wagon Wheel, because it gets people singing along, and once they’re singing, they’re signing up to sing.

Sometimes people need encouragement.

That sounds excellent… i might pitch that to my wife for next year.

I gotta say…

This was a triumph.

I think, and this may be a wild concept that bothers both sides of the discussion, that individual sports governing bodies (specific leagues, NCAA, etc) should be making the decisions and absolutely nobody in government should be involved.

People should be allowed to compete in sports, but it should be up to the individual sports governing body to decide how they slot people. And if there is an absolute ban in the league against use of hormones (aimed at preventing performance enhancing effects), then so be it. Those bans were in place prior to the trans people in sports discussion, I wouldn’t say they are inherently biased. Take up the language of the rule with your local league to allow for medically necessary hormones for specific issues (including gender dysmorphia), but it is ultimately their prerogative on rules for their league. A senator doesn’t need to weigh in.

But any poltician who so much as brings up trans people in sports should be immediately told to stay in their fucking lane.

I had someone straight-faced say that Jeff Bezos should be able to buy a nuke (you can imagine the trajectory of the conversation that led to this, it wasn’t a non-sequitor).

Only if there are no Marine astronauts, otherwise they’ll assume it’s rations.

Linkin Park.

Look, I like them, so I’m not exactly knocking them, but a long time ago I was working an overnight inventory shift, and my manager at the time put on a Linkin Park album, and I predict how every song was going to go because they all seemed like the same song.

I appreciate the write-up, thank you! I feel like a lot of this is semantic differences. I’ve always thought of socialism as any public funds used specifically to help citizens (e.g. social security, medicare, unemployment, UBI, etc) and Communism to be the public owning and running the means of production, and distributing goods thereof, and the stateless, classless, moneyless society to be the ideal utopia it aspired to (similar to Star Trek). From your comment, I see that what I call Communism, you call Socialism (which explains a lot of confusion from discussions in the past with self-described Communists I’ve known), and the nameless Star Trek post-scarcity system you would call Communism.

Do you think it is possible to slow-roll the transition peacefully, though? If, for example, instead of the government bailing out industries, they bought out industries on the cheap, slowly growing and monopolizing like Google or Amazon have? Or do you think the rich would simply block that from happening?

So I will admit that I am ignorant of a method of attaining Communism that isn’t at the end of a rifle, and thus authoritarian by nature (and fully accept that, to a degree, Capitalism is also at the end of a gun, but typically less overt, or often directed without instead of within). The only nations I’ve seen flying the red flag have appeared highly authoritarian (and I’m not going to get drawn into a “USSR and PRC aren’t/weren’t authoritarian, and DPRK is actually a utopia!” discussion, so if that’s the direction this is going, let me know and I’ll politely see my way out).

I’ve seen in the lower comments that Socialism would be used as a gateway to Communism, but I am unclear about the transition from “everybody’s basic needs are met via taxation and distribution” to “personal property is abolished” (as I understand Communism to mean, please correct me if I’m wrong). Plenty of European countries have had (for the west), strong seemingly socialist systems, but they don’t seem to be deliberately angling toward Communism, for example.

So I’m curious what this peaceful Capitalist to Communist timeline would look like.

Boat.

Saving up for one now, but 20k should get me there.

My biggest gripe about it is that it should mean sacrificing a tenth (or a small portion) in order to preserve the whole.

So many words that mean completely destroy, and we have to make the one meaning specifically not that to also mean completely destroy. The language is weaker for it.

I thought they accidentally got rid of Black Friday with their anti-DEI measures?

The wars in the Middle East are tricky, though, because to have a “victory” you would need a clear metric for it, a clear goal. It’s not like the US was looking to conquer and annex those countries

If the goal was to completely fuck up a country with little to no (physical, not financial) damage to our home country, mission accomplished, one helluva victory.

If the goal was to stop Terrorism… that’s like the War on Drugs, there’s no winning that.

If the goal was merely to occupy them in order to (temporarily) prevent them from being a staging ground and financial support for Terrorism… I guess that worked? For awhile?

Vietnam and Korea were about stopping Communists from taking over the country. Huge failure on Vietnam, and apparently a draw in Korea (considering the North/South divide). But it was a clear enough goal. The Middle East? Who knows what the specific goal was (other than trillions of dollars to the Military Industrial Complex).

Honest answer, as someone in the military:

A LOT of military people lament how “soft” the military has become, and someone coming down on beards, fat, etc, as well as being up front with what the military is for (e.g. Department of War), scratches a whiny itch they’ve always had. Because every old salty sailor and sandy equivalent feels like they came from the Old Guard.

I came from the Old Guard that my peers are nostalgic about. It was terrible and unnecessarily cruel. It was inefficient and left new people floundering instead of supported. The whole thing feels like a cycle of abuse.

But back to the point, they don’t care if he’s underqualified, makes bad and inexperienced military decisions, or has a host of DUIs (“who doesn’t?”). They only care that he’s calling generals fat to their faces and getting rid of beard ememptions.

Wow, people are really pulling the last bit out of context and assuming the worst implications. His “stand by you” and “knocking on doors” thing is him acknowledging his white male privilege to feel safe doing things like going door to door in most neighborhoods, and being happy to extend that safety to others by standing beside them while they do it.

I get the concern about having a Nazi tattoo for over a decade, and concern that everything he is doing is performative based on his past. But what he said was pretty unequivically that he will support LGBTQ+ people, including in action. Whether anyone believes him or not is up to them. But what he said was not mealy-mouthed, it was direct.

I talked so much shit about Heath Ledger playing the Joker before that movie came out. The pretty boy from “10 Things I Hate About You?” Ridiculous. Just getting a big name, you know? And then he was beyond incredible, and a perfect example of what the Joker should be.

That made me hold my tongue when so many questionable choices for actors came out in the future, like both Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson for Batman.

Turns out Ledger was just an anomaly, though. So I’m still not going to be watching Tron: Ares.