Lewis2
19hr ago
An acquaintance of mine was bilked out of a five-figure some by a shady contractor a few years ago. After fighting with him in court for two years, she finally agreed to settle. He returned a tenth of what he stole, and in exchange, he demanded that she change her one-star Google review to a five-star. I mentioned this story to a friend of mine who works in a related field, and he said he’s seen that same scenario play out several times before. There’s unfortunately just not much anyone can do to prevent such behavior.
Lewis2
1d ago
“Peaked in high school” is definitely a real thing, though as others have mentioned, it’s probably more common in small towns and in sports-focused subcultures. A related type that doesn’t get quite as much focus is the “unpopular in high school and trying desperately to make up for it as an adult.” You’ll find a disproportionate number working as high school teachers, coaches (though they’re usually more the “peaked in high school” type), summer camp directors, youth directors, these people, etc.
Lewis2
5d ago
The bribes wouldn’t—couldn’t—be high enough. Too many Americans would expect $1,000,000 checks from each billionaire. They’d all be slaughtered due to the population’s innumeracy.
Lewis2
15d ago
If you’re interested in Pratchett, you should read something older. Monstrous Regiment was written only a few years before his Alzheimer’s diagnosis and several years after his writing started to show signs of his mental decline (e.g., reduced vocabulary). Also, I haven’t read all of his books, but of those I have read, Monstrous Regiment was my least favorite.
Lewis2
23d ago
The easy answer there is that the maxxing-type men want sex not as an end in itself, but as a means to gain approval from other men.
It seems to me that the easy answer is that men want to be in a relationship with someone whom they love and who loves them in return, someone who makes them both feel like a better person and want to be a better person. Yeah, sex is great and fun outside of that, but if given the choice between a woman who actively wants to be with you and a prostitute who will only stick around as long as you pay her, most men will prefer the former. Basically, the easy answer is that men are generally romantic.
Lewis2
24d ago
I think they’re considered old-fashioned these days, but I still like McIntoshes.
Lewis2
27d ago
In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.
Lewis2
27d ago
And when you see your friends who do have kids young just disappear and drop out of their social life, it makes the whole prospect seem terrible
This goes both ways, though. If you’re in a high-fertility (sub-) culture, the young families start having their own separate social lives centered around the children, while the few single adults just sort of disappear and drift away.
Lewis2
29d ago
That already happens in some (usually crass) all-male circles when ugly women are mentioned.
Lewis2
1mo ago
If you genuinely think your preferred policies are bad, maybe you should start supporting policies you think are good, rather than spouting off like a melodramatic teenage Goth or Robert Oppenheimer.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I would put the desire by the right to not take off mask as: 50% legitimate fear of leftist target 50% yes we are the bad guys and don’t want to our faces.
Highly improbable, even at first glance. Essentially no one sees himself as the bad guy, let alone a full 25% of the population.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Many of them certainly expelled the bankers and seized the loans. I think that counts as a cheat.
Lewis2
1mo ago
You clearly haven’t seen his sexy photoshoot from 1983.
(The photos weren’t published in Teen Beat as the article claims, but they are genuine.)
Lewis2
1mo ago
He had a gun, so why was he bringing a gun if he was only filming the protest?
Because it was his legal right to do so. “Why was he carrying a gun?” was a bad-faith question when leftists asked it about Rittenhouse, and it’s a bad faith question when conservatives now ask it about Pretti. It’s especially galling to see conservatives, who under normal circumstances are all about the Second Amendment, suddenly do an about face when someone they don’t like has a gun.
Lewis2
1mo ago
As AIs improve, I suspect we’ll end up in a situation where no one will be able to tell whether something was written by a human or an AI. The thing that makes AI writing uncanny now is that it’s much better than average (seriously, most people suck at writing), while at the same time curiously devoid of real content.
Lewis2
1mo ago
And before that, it was associated with old, conservative women. And Mrs Slocombe.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Self-driving trains seem like an easier problem to solve than self-driving cars, especially for a metro system like D.C.’s. They more or less just need to know when to stop and go, plus maybe have a sensor to make sure they don’t run over a pedestrian who fell on the tracks but didn’t get immediately electrocuted.
Lewis2
1mo ago
Certainly a vile sentiment, but also not threatening violence, merely condoning.
That’s exactly the issue. I don’t think anyone expects Jones to go on a shooting spree at the closest Republican daycare, but I think it’s fair to say that he wouldn’t mind if someone else were to. That’s completely poisonous for an AG. He has given every indication that he will slow walk or prevent the prosecution of his ideological allies, even (or especially) if they commit violence against his ideological opponents.
That isn’t a theoretical fear. The members of the Weather Underground committed campaigns of terror, bombings, murder, robberies, etc., but they were given slaps on the wrist, pardoned, and ended up with cushy jobs in academia. At least one mentored a future US president. Similarly, the south had a long history of government officials overlooking, tacitly encouraging, and refusing to prosecute violence against blacks. I think it’s reasonable for the Republicans of Virginia to have the same disquiet at Jones’s election as the black residents of Virginia would have at the election of a Klansman as AG. The Klansman AG wouldn’t go out lynching people himself, but it seems like a pretty good bet that he’d try to prevent any other lynchers from facing prosecution and punishment. So also Jones.
You’re ignoring his follow-up phone call, the one where he said he wanted Gilbert’s children to be shot and die in their mother’s arms, so that he and his wife would change their minds on gun control. He then followed it up by texting
(Conyer) You were talking about hopping jennifer Gilbert’s children would die
(Jones) Yes, I’ve told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy
He then went even further, saying
I mean do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil? And that they’re breeding little fascists? Yes
He also previously told her that it would be a good thing if more police officers were shot, because then they’d be more reluctant to shoot others.
None of those follow standard joke templates, at least not where I’m from. The lady he was talking to also didn’t see any humor in those heated calls and texts, and she cut him off shortly thereafter.
It’s also good because the Minnesota AG recently gave an interview in which he lied about the provisions of the FACE Act in order to claim that the protestors couldn’t have violated it:
And the FACE Act, by the way, is designed to protect the rights of people seeking their reproductive rights, to be protected so that people for a religious reason cannot just use religion to break into women's reproductive health centers, so how they are stretching either of these laws to apply to people who protested in a church over the behavior or the perceived behavior of a religious leader is beyond me…. So I think that the FACE Act and the KKK Act are on their face inapplicable.
Interestingly, though Ellison doesn’t see a problem with protesting, harassing, and filming congregants at a church, back in 2020 his office was proud to assist in the prosecution of a woman “who has videotaped congregants at Dar al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington without their consent, causing those congregants and their children to feel intimidated and afraid.”
(Edited to include a link to the video and expand the quote.)
Lewis2
1mo ago
If you are claiming that 53% of voters are willingly voting for a candidate who wants to murder you, you are imitating the professional victims who claim the same about Trump voters. "I am Hispanic/LGBTQ*!@#, and it is common knowledge that Trump wants to kill me for that. So all the people who voted for him are fine with me getting killed." It is pathetic when they do it, and it is just as pathetic when you do it.
Have you read Jay Jones’s texts? I don’t think complaining, “This guy actually said he wanted to see me and mine murdered, we have the receipts, he doesn’t deny it, and yet people elected him to office anyway,” is the same as complaining, “MSNBC called this guy a fascist, the Nazis were fascists, the Nazis murdered people, ergo this guy wants to murder people, and yet people elected him to office anyway.” In the one case, we are relying on what the guy actually said. In the other, we have to make several massive leaps to arrive at that objection.
Lewis2
1mo ago
I was with you on aggressively paying down the mortgage (I’m at 6.25%), but looking at the increases in the stock market, foreign markets, and precious metals over the past year, I’m beginning to rethink my strategy.
My understanding is that the sum he returned pretty much paid her legal fees, and that was it. Her family was pissed that she settled for basically nothing, but she felt she “just had to move on.”
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