domain:questioner.substack.com
TitaniumButterfly
7m ago
I was at a public park not long ago when one of my children, who had only just begun to toddle, wandered about fifteen feet away from me. Not a big problem, I thought, and of course I was keeping an eye on him. On the far side of the park, at least a minute's walk away, a young woman showed up with a big dog and let it off the leash. It slammed across the park faster than I could believe, a missile headed right at my child. I know dogs, I've raised dogs, I've hunted with dogs, and I've worked with professional dog trainers. This dog was trying to kill my baby, and it was so fast I almost couldn't react in time. Only my experience saved my child. My wife just watched with a glazed expression as all this played out. She does not know dogs. Anyway I was able to get close enough in time and yell and managed to get the dog to swerve at the last minute and back off while I scooped up my kid. Then I prepared to fight it to the death as it gave every indication of being about to try to jump up and snatch my kid out of my arms, which I've seen pit bulls do in videos, so I was ready. I kept yelling and there was a bit of a standoff until finally the owner showed up and leashed the dog. She seemed flustered and mostly wanted to avoid acknowledging what had just happened, and quickly left.
It was a terrifying experience. Dogs are not casual objects of entertainment or companionship. Modern people are so divorced from the realities of animal husbandry that I'm amazed we don't have more horrific catastrophes as a result.
I still take my kids to that park, but now I'm a helicopter parent in a way I never expected to be. At least for the smallest ones.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
8m ago
because the coffeehouses became a place where men would make and discuss policy decisions in a way that excluded women
It's a common argument, and it's utter BS, because the reverse is how Prohibition came about.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
8m ago
Practicality, I suppose. Can't leave the dog unattended, so it must come along. Few people will refrain from getting a dog for practical reasons like those.
Getting a dog seems like getting a tattoo or piercing. Some dumb lifestyle choice unjustified by reason, but felt to be entirely necessary and tolerable to inflict upon onlookers.
DradisPing
13m ago
The current culture in cities is to just push and see what you get away with. Right now stores have trained their employees not to push back on the general public in most cases.
So if a dog owner needs to go for a quick walk to grab something from a store then bringing the dog is convenient for them. Tying up the dog outside is seen ask risky. So they will try to bring the dog in the store.
The store doesn't see much value in using their employees to get their customers to follow norms and by laws.
The city will be on their side if it's something like smoking. A lot of blue cities will not be on their side if it's something like shoplifting. Where do dogs fall? Why should the stores risk it?
haroldbkny
15m ago
What I do not doubt though is that were there men’s online groups doing the same to women’s personal information, I’m 100% sure they would swiftly invite a huge media scandal, widespread condemnation, legal action and the attention of the authorities.
I very much agree with you on all of this, and this sort of feminist hypocrisy makes my blood boil. But I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second on one point, based on arguments my wife has had with me over these sort of issues.
As an example, my wife and I have argued about whether male-only spaces are okay. Feminists are clearly very in favor of female-only "safe" spaces, but have historically rallied against every possible male only space you can imagine, from trying to make colleges and frats co-ed, to historical wars against British coffeehouses. I personally believe that having male-only spaces is not only fair, if we are going to laud female spaces, but also very positive for men as a form of therapy, commraderie, social safety net, and many other good things.
However my wife (who loves to argue with me about this stuff, or is at least strongly compelled to because she's so damn stubborn) has talked about how the coffeehouses were harmful to women in a way that comparable female only spaces could never be, because the coffeehouses became a place where men would make and discuss policy decisions in a way that excluded women. She would say that the men held more powerful positions, and the coffeehouses and other such male spaces would never just stay as neutral academic or social spaces, the power from their positions would spill over into the once benign spaces. I myself am not so convinced of either the powerlessness of women, or even if that's true, the lack of value in male spaces even if what she says is true. But I wanted to present that viewpoint here.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
16m ago
What made you fed up with Ubuntu?
I don't know what exactly they did, but it started feeling bloated. Took forever to boot up, or start / close programs.
TitaniumButterfly
18m ago
Plutarch:
On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
There, now it's political.
WhiningCoil
18m ago
I wish I knew. I'm still fence sitting myself. Unless a compelling argument presents itself, I'm likely to default to Ubuntu.
AvocadoPanic
21m ago
I've decided to ditch Windows at home rather than move to Win11. What's your preferred OS?
2rafa
21m ago
Low effort: le based Elon turned out not to be very based™️ after all, who could have predicted this.
More seriously: In the west today, immigration is the ONLY conservative issue. A communist who is anti-immigration is more conservative than the most otherwise reactionary individual who is even somewhat liberal in the immigration debate. If you want to prevent radical, deleterious, likely irreversible changes to western societies, it is the only thing that matters. Musk has shown what side he is on.
I sit here now having listened to near-continuous barking since waking up. Owners do nothing about it. Landlords do nothing about it. Noise complaint line does nothing about it.
Common sense rules already exist: dog-free housing, leash laws, noise ordinances, restrictions on pets in places that serve food, pick-up-feces laws, etc. A certain subset of dog owners simply takes it upon themselves to consistently ignore these rules. They pull up “Emotional Support” certificates or just indignantly grandstand any time someone calls them out. There are effectively no dog-free spaces left. You'd think it'd be easy to find at least one apartment building that categorically denies them but it simply doesn't exist in my city. From what I've read, it doesn't really exist in any city in the US.
On some level it makes sense. An animal that was selectively bred for unquestioning loyalty is obviously appealing to the kind of person that any thinking human would find selfish and detestable — someone so insufferable it took thousands of years of genetic engineering to create something that responds not with the disgust they deserve but instead some facsimile of love and adoration. Of course the kind of person to believe rules are beneath them would have significant overlap with dog-lovers.
But at the end of the day, dog-ownership, even by good owners, has to be one of the highest negative-externality hobbies in developed society. I can’t walk on the grass in my city because it’s invariably soaked in urine and feces. Every sidewalk smells of urine constantly. My head has to be angled down when walking anywhere to watch out for the feces piles and skid marks. There is rarely an hour that goes by in my home without a cacophony of barking nearby. Both of the nearest parks reek of wet dog. Dog-walkers take up the entire sidewalk and make no effort to keep their pet from slobbering over you. They bring their dogs into grocery stores and feign ignorance while they lick boxes.
I’m utterly sick of it. If I woke up to find a Thanos glove I’d snap dogs out of existence permanently. I have minimal doubts the world would be better for it.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
Because it doesn’t sell food.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
I’m going to echo what I posted on the fertility thread- lots of women are just fine, or at least not missing anything in an acute way, by not having a romantic relationship. In the past social pressures and general expectations and in a lot of cases actual institutions would push them into relationships anyways, but those are gone. Yes, in the long run women are happier married to Mr good enough. But that’s not apparent to single women.
And AFAICT the actual standards women have are mostly pretty reasonable even if they’re phrased badly- six feet and six figures really just means ‘makes enough to support us and taller than me’. I think, yes, women are saying that because they miss having someone else vet for them, but crucially, that vetting in the past was not an after the fact thing- as recently as the fifties it was seen as important to make sure young women were in contact with high-quality men. This is because women are perfectly fine for a while living with their parents, part time job/in school, social life with no men in it. Until they’re not.
Your intuition may differ, but SS was making the same point that I was: to me, it seems obviously unacceptable for one party to make significant unilateral changes to shared living conditions without getting clear buy-in from everyone else involved.
That doesn’t mean you have a license to block all changes just for the fun of it but ‘I don’t want to share my house with strangers’ is an entirely valid reason. It just seems totally obvious to me that you don’t get to install strangers in somebody else’s house just because it’s your house too. Personally I think this is a common assumption, which is why politicians constantly lie to give the impression they respect it.
Once that’s assumed, SS is arguing (correctly in my opinion) that he and other anti-immigration advocates possess the inalienable right of veto. He doesn’t need to convince his countrymen, they actively need to convince him to permit immigration. “I’ve known Bob for ages, he’s a great guy, he does DIY and I’ll tell him to move out if he’s a nuisance, please give him a chance.”
Forgotpassword
47m ago
I think this is assuming a lot more development on the part of the 'average male' in history than existed. 3 and 5 both absurd when for a lot of human history the idea of a single male living space/doing meaningful household beautification chores was very rare, same going for stuff like childrearing. I've got a baby and my wife's Southeast Asian older family members are absolutely amazed that I participate in stuff like doing nappies/feeding the baby/proactively doing infant tasks, and even current generations have a greater expectation of it being women/nannywork.
4 I'd agree with, but I think digital communication changes the vibe with being 'overly persevering' since every attempt at communication gets rendered onto the permanent record, and if you've originally met through a dating app you're probably not getting the incidental contact to allow for old-fashioned prolonged pursuit. Online dating makes things way more cut-and-dry. I'd also assume 'Understand planning social events' probably code for woes in getting actual dates out of Online Dating that aren't 'meet me at 3AM', but that's its own tangled metagame of both sides being so unimaginably flaky that trying to perform great romantic gestures gets squeezed out of you pretty quick. Also the literal matchmaking of these things means that the most attractive guys (and therefore the ones that get the most mindshare) are happy to throw out the most casual non-date invitations since they've got economics on their side.
I think the main dynamic shifts are that women's liberation/financial equalization has made it less of a matter of just rolling with the above manchild since it was the only path to leaving the family home and having some independence in life, and that the mainstreaming of Online Dating has absolutely torched a bunch of key social feedback loops.
zeke5123a
55m ago
But why is Home Depot okay? It’s a place of business. Where is the dividing line?
Rosencrantz2
57m ago
You might be assuming everyone around you also thinks that bringing dogs to cafes etc is weird. Maybe a larger proportion likes seeing dogs around the place. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case just from how much attention a cute dog gets from strangers when out in public.
hydroacetylene
57m ago
I like dogs, but I’ve lately been shocked by the lax discipline of most dog owners. No problem with people bringing dogs to Home Depot(food places are different, obv) in general, but there’s behavior minima for dogs in public and most dog owners seem unwilling to even try to enforce them.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
58m ago
In the first half of the 20th century the so-called Technocracy movement wanted to unite the countries in North America into a single "Technate" that would be ruled by an unelected coalition of preeminent scientists and engineers.
One Canadian-American supporter of this idea that was ultimately chased out of Canada for that was named Joshua Norman Haldeman. He had a daughter, Maye, who has the most punchable face you can find on the cover of a self-improvement book. She has a son, who is now the richest man on Earth and the future leader of DOGE and Mars.
Is it a coincidence that Trump, after becoming best friends with Elon, is now talking about annexing Greenland, Canada and Panama and replacing fat and lazy Amerimutts with the best people from every country? I think not, and if you try to convince me otherwise you're a technocratic sleeper agent!
Forgotpassword
1hr ago
I grew up with dogs and they're super normal to me, and yet it still confuses and dismays me how randomly entitled dog culture is now. Especially coupled with general laxness in obedience training and people having some sort of weird 'my dog is a good dog and can never potentially act out' mindset.
zeke5123a
1hr ago
Yeah — it seems that some believe the only sin is saying “no.” The question is why.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
Apple ecosystem stuff - MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, iPhone [whatever version], old iMac. Apple things just work better than whatever else you can get and I am not very price sensitive. Everything I buy from Apple lasts forever and just works the way that a normal person would expect it to.
I've bought one apple product in my life. An iPad 3. It got an unprecedented refresh in 6 mo versus the typical year, making me feel like quite the chump. At this point nearly everything has stopped working on it. Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Video, it's all shut down. Most websites load funny because of outdated SSL stuff I assume. More than half the storage has been eaten up with remnant files of OS updates that I can't get back no matter what I do. Apps don't get released for it anymore because apple dropped 32-bit support. Some of the old apps I have for it are just broken now for reasons I don't entirely understand. But storage is so gimped it's a constant chore to remove the 2 or 3 games that still fit on it to make room for others. About all I can do on it anymore is copy ebooks over from my PC.
And the floors are concrete. And they don’t have rules against dogs!
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