FriendOfDeSoto

I was a child and had enough time to devote to learning this.

For me it’s my middle finger hitting the cushion below the thumb that makes the noise.

With kids there is no one size fits all approach. And you won’t do everything right as a parent either. Ever. You’re on a tightrope walk of keeping the ills of the world away from them and them fantasizing about the ills of the world from the bits and pieces they pick up along the way.

They have to feel safe. With you/at home/etc. As long as you get that mostly right, the other pieces fall into place. One of those pieces will be the MO you’re looking for here.

If you’re overly worried about the idea of having kids: even the dumbest, most ignorant humans have brought up the overwhelming majority of their children successfully. It’s not as hard as one thinks before. Because you worry about something like this way ahead of time, I am fairly sure you’ll do better than them.

It takes much longer to fall out of love than the other way around.

The good news is that the magas cherry pick what lies they want to believe. And they’ll wholeheartedly believe when he says it wasn’t his dumb economic policy but [insert scapegoat here] that increased the price of eggs twentyfold.

A gifted politician will find a way to give these people an out that doesn’t require them to admit they ran behind the wrong fasces, but somehow reinstalls stability in DC. If you can’t cut a path like that all they can do is double down because sure as hellfire they won’t admit he was, or indeed they were, the problem.

Don’t shoot me, for I’m only a messenger As a rule in life, if you can blame everything on everyone around you it’s time to look inwards for change. I’m just saying, maybe it’s not all of us, maybe it’s you? My first reaction to reading your post was to suggest a therapist. And I’m saying that as somebody who isn’t great at social interactions either.

We lionize medical professionals as these infallible gods in lab coats. They’re only human too, although they would not admit that. It’s good to keep that in mind; alter your perception to work with them on you rather than you being fully serviced by them.

I don’t think that’s the case in France. Technically, there was consent from the parents. The age of consent is 15. What they did was morally questionable but not illegal.

Eh

Then you haven’t been to China. It’s a shorthand gesture there. The character for ten is 十 so I’m not sure if the gesture informed the character or the other way around. What is noteworthy is just that both cultures ended up with a cross to denote ten.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of choosing our families. We can just try to do the best with the hand we’re dealt. I’m sorry for your loss.

Maybe delete the picture, put the phone down, and try to think of 20 great things about your grandmother.

Nobody here can really give you specific advice based on the few facts. You’re part of this family, you know them better than all of us. If you feel off about it, there’s a reason for it. You’ve come here to ask the question. So I think you’re well within your rights to reduce contact with that side of the family. I would only suggest you quietly ghost rather than making a big stink.

I think for answering that question we would need a baseline to compare with.

Lacking that, with kindness and empathy in conversations. And with resoluteness in the face of injustice.

I think ads on Gmail are also a thing of the past, aren’t they? The answer to your question is: no income. But you’re having a constant time share lunch with Google to actually buy a share in a beachfront condo. By which I mean subscribe to their cloud and AI plan. Or YouTube. Or their business suite. Etc. And then they have converted you to a paying customer. The free service is an investment to get you hooked and then paying.

And in the meantime they can collect some data from you so when you’re faced with ads they might be more effective.

In a time of handwriting, you could make clearer that This Was a Title without having to say it was a title or putting it in quotation marks.

Are social media the root of all problems? No. Do they have a significant influence? Yes.

You mentioned spineless billionaires who eff around. There are instances of real harm. There is bullying (everywhere), there are schemes to make groups depressed (teenage girls on Insta), there is a lack of moderators that lead to genocide (Myanmar). These things deserve to be looked at by legislators when the sycophants don’t do it by themselves.

Social media addiction is a thing as well. Addictions in young people are bad. Parents should be on the front line of this. But that does not absolve social media companies from taking measures to curb certain excesses. Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertize to toddlers either.

So saying they’re just a tool, like, say, a hammer is insincere. You can use a hammer to cause real harm. You can deploy social media to cause real harm.

One of the greatest issues of social media is scale. People on the fringes of society who would be largely outcast in their communities can group and organize with much more ease. In the past, this was limited to the pub in three sheets to the wind discussions. Now you get sh!t like Q Anon, flatearthers, vax nuts, etc. - stuff that common sense in smaller communities would have moderated or stamped out now gets mass appeal. They seem much bigger as an online presence than they often are. But they get dedicated believers to start shooting.

The introduction of the internet has been compared to the introduction of the printing press in Europe. Both events caused a quantum leap in the dissemination of information with profound influences on society. After the printing press we got a century and a half of conflicts and wars. We’ll be well off if all we get here is a century of people typing in caps lock at each other.

We limit things in society. The availability of nicotine products, alcohol, the ability to drive, the availability of weaponry, antitrust laws, environmental protections, etc. I think we will not get past regulating social media somehow. By which I mean I don’t know how either.

One thing that is certain will benefit society is investing in education, teaching media savvy-ness to young children and all adults if possible, giving them the tools to sort the relevant from the distorted. We are largely unprepared for this and I include myself here having grown up with papers and landlines. But education is the saddest item in any budget, as the costs are high and the results take a generation to bear fruit.

Trump wants to dismantle the DOE…

The pyramids at Giza used to be smooth on the outside so people took pieces of them and built something else. I think they’re in a category with places like Angkor Wat. The sites’ importance decreased (religions changed, trade shifted, natural disasters, etc.) and it was easy for nature to cover them in sand or jungle and, poof, out of sight, out of mind.

It is very likely that they weren’t in fact totally forgotten. There probably was local knowledge about them that led white men with too much time and money, thinking themselves superior and as preservers of culture, to “discover” them. Tourism was for the elites and there wasn’t any money yet in preserving these old sites.

Even blue states vote on a working day and can have ridiculously long lines due to the booklet voters are asked to fill in. That’s already bad from my POV. All the other shenanigans are extra, on top of that.

I have stated elsewhere in this thread that I have limited sympathy for the US non-voters. So refer to that if you’re curious. I am trying my best not to condemn everybody equally. A free election, in most democracies, means you’re free not to go. Perhaps we’d all be fine with non-voters if Mrs. Harris had won. Putting blame at their feet is also shutting the barn door when the horse has already bolted. We should motivate the ones willing to stand up and resist. You don’t want to injure their pride and get them to jump on the MAGA bandwagon out of spite.

There are protests taking place. I just saw Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were in the news leading rallies and protests. American and Canadian protesters gathered on either side of one of the lakes, forgot which one. There are people who are saying something. Even GOP voters are shouting down their elected leaders in town hall meetings because Elon chainsawed a benefit that affected them and theirs. It’s easy to draw parallels to 1930s Germany but this Trump 2.0 administration will plot its own despicable course.

One of the reasons why you don’t see so many mass gatherings like you saw in Serbia recently or Slovakia is also US infrastructure. It’s real hard to get thousands of Americans into one place anywhere when there isn’t sufficient public transport and it would statistically be 1.2 people per car - you’d need a Rhode Island just for parking.

I agree. I didn’t mean to imply all of the remainder would be pro just one of the candidates. My guess is that it’s still enough to make up a silent majority. Which sounds great but no one can prove anyways.

I’m inclined to give American voters a limited raincheck on not bothering to show up. Voting is often a booklet of ballots on various issues and elections for office. It takes forever to fill it in. That explains the long, slow-moving lines outside pulling stations, much rarer occurrences in other democracies. And that’s only the people who are able to come on a workday (and didn’t have the foresight or were unable to get mail-ins). That’s after a registration process that can have Kafkaesque features in many states. So I would forgive the single mother who didn’t have time to do this between working her two low paid jobs. It’s part of a subtle but deliberate disenfranchisement. We’ll add that one to the list of grievances as well.

#4 still applies even if you already looked like a “fucking ass clown” before. Fuckingassclownery is limitless!

I would only add that depending on size it may not be possible to keep an operation secret. D-Day or Gulf War 1.0 come to mind when the world knew it was about to happen, maybe not the exact hour but we still knew. And then it’s a game of obfuscation, i.e. deliberately leading enemies down garden paths so you can surprise them with your real plan. But you wouldn’t want to leak your disinformation campaign in your text group either.

I would say “stupid” is a judgement you should keep between your ears. I think Americans are undereducated before they get released into a mad for-profit higher education system that gives them debts for life (but hitherto also great sciencing at a high level). The strong cultural undercurrent of exceptionalism hardly ever lets them look elsewhere for comparison. And the political system, which is based on who can spend more money, not so much on ideas, is proving to be a system that’s rarely bringing out the best people for top jobs. But it’s a dog and pony show and that favors characters over good policies. The fragmentation of people all watching the same news show at night 3 decades ago, to watching partisan 24h news channels 2 decades ago, to splintering even further on the socials now adds to the problem. There is no largely unified audience with the same facts at their disposal.

It’s also nice that Trump is now dismantling the democratic state because voting in the US always gets filtered through electoral colleges and gerimandered districts, skewing results to favor the two main parties, often only one of them. It was pretend-democratic until now.

Something that gets overlooked easily is the long history of fascist rules that was in place in the south after the civil war. Jim Crow laws masqueraded as democracy for a long time and every time courts tried to put a stop to it, the white people in charge found other ways to be a-holes. That’s part of American culture already.

America has always had a penchant for whacky leaders. Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. None of them fit my idea of a virtuous leader. But at least the ones this century adhered to a decorum, an unwritten standard of how to behave as president. Nixon didn’t want to get caught. Trump doesn’t give a sh!t. So the leadership culture has shifted, not for the better.

All this mixes a large chunk, an uncurious population that still sees itself pretty much as a role model for the world, falling for simple populist messages. It should also be said that tarring all Americans with the same brush is unfair. I think it was the votes of less than a third of eligible voters that made Trump 2.0 a reality, roughly another third just behind it, with the remainder not bothering to vote at all. I would say the often fantasized silent majority is actually not pro Trump.

So calling all Americans stupid is not right. There are a lot of people hurting right now as they watch their country develop in a bad way. We need those people to stand up and fight and calling them names doesn’t help.

(Other countries have gone down similar routes, have had whacky leaders, have done questionable things. The US is not alone on this path.)

Did you try this though? I’m guessing the suggestions are at least partially based on past searches and this might nuke them.