When someone is telling him how great and wonderful and smart and clever and chosen-by-god and handsome and wise and legitimate and righteous and not criminally liable and wealthy they think he is?

I don’t. I’m saying it’s really hard to tell why people aren’t doing something without putting in a lot of effort.

If someone says no to an offered glass of red wine at dinner, it can be very hard to tell why. They could be an oenophile, and it’s not good enough. They could be a former alcoholic not wanting to fall off the wagon. They could be pregnant. They could just prefer white. They could be practicing moderation and not taking a second glass. They could be a designated driver. They could recognise the vintner as one who supports a cause with which they disagree. It could be for some other reason not mentioned here. It could even be true they really want it but don’t want to be seen wanting it, or don’t want to take one glass because what they really want is the bottle and it just feels better to say no to the whole thing rather than get less than what they want, or they don’t want to ruin their ability to enjoy really shitty wine by tasting better wine, and so on, and so on, so they say they don’t want it even when that’s not strictly true.

You wouldn’t know without digging in and expending a lot of time and effort. The same applies to those ‘milestones.’ We can see people without them, but it’s not obvious in what ratios the big group of ‘people over age XX who aren’t homeowners’ can be divided as to ‘why.’ I’d like to know, but I don’t have several million dollars to send out swarms of researchers.

It can be very hard to disentangle the cause and effect of ‘not wanted so it doesn’t count as a failure to not get it,’ vs ‘can’t do it, so won’t say I want it,’ vs ‘might want to do it but everyone and everything is getting fucked so hard these days and I don’t want to watch my kid get fucked, so not going to bother having one.’

Now I wonder what it would be like to go inside of a mirrored sphere wearing a glow in the dark jumpsuit…

Call me a cynic, but I suspect it would be entirely possible for representatives of the US government to say something is bad without paying a penny to do anything about it.

I both agree and disagree. It would be good for America to take some level of responsibility for what happened, but I am also of the set that says Iraq is a cross-cultural region that should probably be redistributed according to local understandings of the territory rather than the economic desires of early-middle-of-the-last-century English and French people, because Iraq’s governments have had trouble trying to establish enough legitimacy to override longer standing cultural ties. Either way, America should probably cough up something, at the very least an acknowledgment of fault, and stop interfering in what should be local matters.

As much as it might suck for some victims, once your victimizer is dead, that’s it. We can’t all be held responsible for the crimes of everyone in our genetic lineages, let alone our national histories, or we would all be lined up for capital punishment for the uncountable rapes and murders our predecessors committed in near total impunity.

Ah, but have you considered that pierogi are delicious?

Mmm, pierogi regatta…

Briefly misread that as ‘Germanophobe’ and the the thought of there being nations that specifically eat a dessert because they hate Germans is delightfully absurd.

Thanks for pointing this out. Blocking it now.

What should they do? Responses sit either in the non-violent space, which is only effective when the people in power have a sense of shame for ‘failing to represent their constituency,’ or the violent space, which is self-destructive and, if you’re facing the gigantic american system, suicidal, and feeds into rhetoric about how the government needs to crack down on violent extremists, helping to legitimate further authoritarianism.

Two guys in overly complicated clothing fighting over who’s the daddy? What is this, Thursday night at the BDSM club?

Splinter sect? Are we about to get some great schism in our historical shitshow soup?

Marketers chose the “thwack” slogan after consulting an AI tool for suggestions, Shinsegae Group said. It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material.

Yet again, we see that marketers being harmful lying parasites and managers being overpaid slackers.

At least Andrew of the royal family of the UK has been stripped of title. Still wealthy and not in prison last I heard though.

Think paintball guns that shoot the absorbent gel balls used to fill vases for cut flowers.