FriendOfDeSoto

“They” don’t like the term “woke” because like all good music it has Afro-American origins. It started off as describing somebody who was aware of racial discrimination and over the decades broadened in meaning to include a host of other social issues. And then it was thrown into the culture war meat grinder.

I like the parallel to the “wake up, sheeple, do your own research” crowd. I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s funny how two uses of this inoccuous verb that can probably be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indoeuropean language have ended up on opposite sides of the aforementioned meat grinder.

I think 47 and his cronies will manage to blame it all on Bill Clinton and sweep the rest under their carpet, along with his conviction in court and the impeachments. It’s a media war. It’s hard to play the game against the reality-tv-schooled incumbent to keep anything in the headlines. He’ll just throw a dead cat on the table and take all the oxygen out of the room, i.e. annex Canada or Greenland, 100% tariffs on everything, ICE jackboots raids, national guard in all cities run by Democrats, any late night tweet while he is constipated. It’s hard to keep anything in the news that is not conning from him. And this story is one of the few with staying power and the potential to be damaging to him before the judiciary has entirely lost its independence and maybe some of his followers rediscover their human decency in the attic. As such it is the only recruitment tool with oomph for Democrats to mobilize opposition to the fascist in chief. And, boy, do they need it!

It is there to give men an idea of what childbirth is like. (Tongue very much in cheek)

So what did the dog find? What? WHAT DID THE DOG FIND? TELL. ME. I HAVE TO KNOW!

That’s just YouTube speak. The implied drama gets them more clicks. It’s how to frame the ancient medium of public debate for millenials and genz. It’s like YouTubers pulling the dumbest, silliest possible face on the thumbnail. It’ll have more views too.

It’s also a sign of the times since Y2K that you couldn’t just have an enlightening discussion. Somebody has to get owned. Hitchens was forthright in his rhetoric but I never heard him be disrespectful. I’ve only ever seen him tracking the ball, not the players. But that’s boring so people add their own spice to it. And they tend to cut out any counter arguments if the footage was from a public debate.

You should add your age for context. You’re either a normal adolescent/young adult figuring shit out like all of us have to. Or you can consider yourself part of the spectrum, maybe in aceflux. You can do that at any age to be fair. I would just wait until maybe ~25 before you make your own identity ruling here. And keep in mind stuff changes over time still even after you’ve reached that age, maybe just at a slower pace.

In the end, you do you. I would recommend honesty with your partners. They could be pretty pissed when they find out by accident that you’ve been more like holding your proverbial nose to enable intercourse.

Having info on the heliocentric solar system could land you in a dungeon or worse back in the day.

This is too simplistic. I know conservative voters who didn’t vote for 47, many not even for 45. Conservative is a value set and the Venn diagram of that with MAGA is far from a perfect overlap. If you replace “conservatives” with “47’s cult-like followers” I would come closer to agreeing with your take. I do take issue with “everyone else” though. I think that doesn’t hit the mark either. I think there is more purple between this red team/blue team thinking than there are both extremes of this scale added together. Stop digging deeper trenches. And don’t shoot your political opponents.

Lol I read that as “first responders or 911” as in nine one one. I would say the addition of a / might have clarified it. But that doesn’t diminish my failure at reading comprehension.

I’m fairly confident that you are generalizing this a bit and that there are police and fire fighting departments on this planet that employ nurses. In general though, first responders who get injured end up in the same system than the people they save and need medical attention: hospitals. If you are in need of nurse aftercare, you are probably off on sick leave - so what would the nurse actually do? Especially in the smaller bf-nowhere operations, I don’t see how you could justify the cost. Plus, most firehouses have paramedics already. They’re not the same as a nurse but bring a lot of similar skills.

If we are honest with ourselves, we all have biases that end in -phobia. They are on a siding scale and get more pronounced in certain situations. The assholes in society don’t gaf about their biases and don’t care if they say or do hurtful things as a result. The more enlightened people know about their lizard brain biases and try their best not to act on them.

Maybe you are a bit homophobic. But you are aware of your biases and you can make sure you don’t act on them in a way that is hurtful to other people. Knowing is half the battle. So don’t beat yourself up over it. From what I’ve been reading in your post you are doing it right.

Asterix

There is no simple answer to this. It’s like at least three factors interacting. How much empathy do you feel towards the other person? How close is your relationship on the scale of strangers bumping into each other on the street to best friends forever? How big an issue has any of this been objectively (or as close as you can get there)? So that’s three sliding scales to adjust to get an outcome. The closer a relationship is, the harder this can be because there is history and people (I’m including myself in this) can be very petty.

Just judging by the hints you dropped you should probably reconsider your approach to your coworkers. And I don’t mean you need to be submissively apologetic all the time and share everything from your private life, even your hemorrhoid problems, with the crew. You’ll probably make your life easier just on a human level plus improve odds of promotion if you do more of that, even if it feels more line cosplay to you. I share your “grow the eff up”/no bullshit stance but that only works in a group of like minded people.

I think it’s the wrong label, anti-intellectualusm. Sense of reality might do it more justice. I think there are two factors at play. 1) how much does higher education cost you? Does it put you in debt you’ll be lucky to have paid off before you retire? Have other people gotten degrees and still ended up unemployed? Why get majorly in debt to get no job in the end? That’s more a North American specific problem. I’m in Asia and I haven’t heard anybody shit talking college degrees in favor of the trades. 2) We need plumbers and carpenters and welders and whatnot. And due to declining birth rates in many places and the fact that the numerous birth years of the boomers are retiring and will continue to retire in the short term, we are running out of sparkies, masons, and HVACs. So if you had to career advise people today, you’d be silly not to bring up a profession with near certainty of getting a job once you’re trained up.

Shitty work environments exist in more high brow professions as well.

People are mad. There are mad people on both sides.

Consumers can feel very empowered by a few hundred followers and one bad experience. And that translates more into a diss track, embelished and dramatized, than an honest review. Entrepreneurs justifiably fear this because this can hurt their businesses significantly. So they fight back with this legal retcon attempt. It’s most likely not enforceable - and they probably know that too. If they wouldn’t mind you speaking positively about you online, they cannot keep the negative stuff out either (as long as it is based in fact, libel is a different story). This little boiler plate serves only to give pause to the consumer. It plants a seed of restraint in their minds (if they actually read it).

Humans are a complicated species.

That was only option 2.

You need to try for yourself. Or consult a therapist who knows you well enough. Us idiots on the internet cannot look inside your head.

Wortfindungseuphorie.

Kids are probably old enough to get it. I would just think that you will be loading a shotgun that’s going to shoot you in the face down the line. Either the ladies will get in each other’s hair or, worse, they’ll team up against you. I think your girlfriend is either insane or not entirely honest when she says she would be fine with your arrangement. I would sooner suggest you look for a place closeby. I’m guessing the 15yo is eye rolling you hard and the 13yo will soon not care about you either. You’ve carried them through the divorce rough spot with your unique living arrangement. Take a bow and let it go. Provide a better environment for your new relationship.

We are just asking old questions here. The printing press, novels, and pamphlets were the end of truth! We struggled, many people died, but life moved on. Then newspapers, more death, radio, world wars. Television, photoshop, the internet - fewer deaths in between but still. And life moved on.

Every new medium brought a phase of uncertainty (and possible carnage). That’s where we are right now. Every time we think “this is the worst EVER.” Until the next thing comes around. We will figure out the slop tsunami as well. I think fewer people will die than during the reformation.

Some people will successfully bend truth to generated video or whatever. But in the end, most will not succeed. Because we get wiser at spotting the bullshit. Q Anon showed us the learning isn’t a linear development; it follows more of a two steps forward, one step back pattern.