That’s exactly it, yep. I’m well over apologizing at this point.

And yeah, I also moved back home for a while after college, and it was a bad time. Plenty of good, but plenty I’m glad to leave behind. Let us all strive to be better people than our parents were, I say.

I’m glad you’re out, and I hope you’re doing well. Stay safe out there!

Yeah, I’m conflicted about my family enough as it is. But push comes to shove, I’m fine on my own at this point.

Ah, that’s the thing. He never demanded an apology. He sulked, and it was others in the family who learned about it (through either me or him) that told me I was wrong and to apologize.

I’ve never been one to back down from a conflict I thought was worthwhile. It wasn’t until I was literally a married adult when an in-law (whom we love dearly) told my SO about how my family “sweeps things under the rug”. When my SO told me later, I was like “nah… but wait do we though?” That led to a lot of revisiting old memories and realizing how conflict avoidant we really were (except for me, lol).

Yeah, if either of my parents demanded an apology from me for anything right now… they have some choice words coming.

My dad was smart when I was growing up. He is smart now.

But he’s so entrenched in the worst right wing political lunacy, and always has been, that I’ve rarely viewed him as someone to imitate morally.

I blew up at him as a teen over the Iraq War. He never once justified his position in anything remotely resembling a reasoned argument, but I hurt his feelings, so I had to apologize to him about it. That family dynamic has never really changed, so I just don’t talk to him anymore.

Man, I still really struggle to understand​ how we can reliably age-gate anything on the Internet without sacrificing privacy for everyone.

IRL you can just show your govt issued ID, but there’s virtually zero privacy risk doing so. Bouncers don’t register ID scans, typically, and they’re just one person. The govt doesn’t know you went to that club or drank at that one bar, unless they’re actively surveilling you.

But if I needed to identify myself as an adult online, simply by virtue of how digital systems work, that probably requires checking against a govt database, and that database will keep logs, and now Trump knows I went to Pornhub, and likely also exactly what I watched or searched for.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I really don’t know any way around this sort of thing.

I remember reading a Haidt article for an ethics class in grad school. The analysis felt… underwhelming? It’s been too long to remember the article, but I think it was something about the “morality” of conservatives being not worse but different than liberals (limited to the US, iirc). I just remember reading it and going… yeah conservative morality functions differently. It’s also just demonstrably worse, though, even based on what the article was focusing on?

That class was weird though. Mostly just a bunch of folks going,“yeah well this is what I care about” and disagreeing with each other with seemingly no intention whatsoever to try and evaluate or engage with one another.

Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?

Ooooooh. Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

Yeah I guess I just meant like… logistically?

Ports of entry don’t move, and shipping containers are huge. I’m probably just not thinking flexible enough.

is that even possible?

Does India particularly differ? I think nods still mean yes and shakes still mean no there. They just also have the “noncommittal head bobble” that tends to confuse people outside India (and, presumably, Pakistan).

I sympathize with Gen Z. It’s pretty natural to see your parents’ generation having done way better than you are doing at the same age and feel like you’ve had something stolen from you. It’s a pretty profound sense of loss, esp. when you do look at history and think, “Jesus Christ, do we have to suffer like the Great Depression to turn this shit around?”

So I don’t know if the WPA itself would be considered socialism. I imagine it depends on your working definition of socialism.

What I can say with a little more confidence is that the WPA and a bunch of other New Deal programs were a direct result of pressure from American Socialists and Communists at the time.

I can’t recall if this is apocryphal or not, but the story goes that FDR told a private gathering of America’s biggest capitalists about his plans for the New Deal and told them they were going to pay for it through taxes. When they protested for a compromise, FDR said “this is the compromise. The alternative is guillotines.” But I can’t find that quote anywhere, so I may have made it up.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

Jesus fuck me

I like this idea, but I don’t know how you build a site to facilitate that without also being super appealing to children and pedos at the same time.

Oh yeah I first saw that on a miniminuteman YouTube short. At first I thought, no way, then he played the clip in context. And uh. Yeah. Woof. That’s a Nazi salute alright.

You misunderstand. This IS Trump’s chosen stooge. FTC Chairman Carr.

He’s complaining about tech companies “censoring” conservatives for “speaking their minds”, aka being hateful bigots and spreading misinformation during a public health crisis.

I’m unfamiliar with the context for most of these. Plenty don’t look like Nazi salutes. To me, anyway.

But literally every word that has slithered out of that moldy potato’s mouth for the last two decades is all you need to know he’s a white supremacist.

Wait there are no babysitters in Japan? I was only there for a year as a very much childless young adult, but for some reason I assumed there would be babysitters. Thinking back, I don’t think I ever knew someone who babysat unless it was an older sibling looking after younger siblings. Heck, I don’t even know the Japanese word for it. Wow, for some reason I really thought that was only a modern American problem.