FriendOfDeSoto

I can see dead people.

I don’t think it would be weird. It’s up to them if they accept or not. I would just suggest you make parallel plans as well to meet new people. A hobby group, a book club, etc.

I think there are two general (human) media preferences at work: “if it bleeds, it ledes” superceded by which deaths are more extraordinary. So soldiers murdered in peacetime is noteworthy. They could’ve become accountants but chose a career where there is a real and high risk of death. Btw I fear it’s that death math that made medical professionals drop out of noteworthiness post-pandy, i.e. the threat is real but the risk has gone down again. I think children dying generally of tragic circumstances will be noteworthy. Nurses contracting AIDS or non-famous people dying of natural causes become less noteworthy. And I use noteworthy here as what they chose to cover in their newsrooms. They have financial interests to consider as well, which brings us back to “if it bleeds.”

The American filter generally erases many “mundane” gun deaths from visibility. Either people are so numb it doesn’t register as the tragedy that it is or it doesn’t get covered. There are plenty of places on earth where a single gunshot fired in anger that would make headlines.

There is a worldwide blindness to traffic deaths. We have just accepted that this is how many people die. So if something more interesting happens elsewhere, the t-boned accountant on the way to Walmart just gets dropped.

So there are a number of factors that influence what makes the news or not. The list goes on.

I would also say that media coverage is not prescriptive for who you should feel empathy for. We cannot all feel all the tragedies on this planet at once. We’d go mad. You pick and choose as a defense mechanism. So if you don’t feel that much empathy for these national guardsmen, I kind of get it. If you don’t like how much media coverage it’s getting, I can definitely understand that. The problem is just that when you say this out loud you open yourself up to criticism, like: you don’t feel for the people who died while sworn to defend your freedom! What about children and nurses? That’s just whataboutism! Etc. So I would suggest you follow your own heart and change your media consumption when it bothers you. Or you’ll end up in a culture war debate about whose lives matter more.

You don’t show him the stupidity of his ways by sleeping with that lady. You either find a way to confront him about that. Or you unattach yourself from this toxic person by finding other, better friends. Frankly, I would give him a piece of my mind and then find other friends anyway.

I don’t think I’m leaning too far out this window when I say: no, there isn’t an optimal size. It depends on so many factors. How many people? Is this urban or rural? What’s there neighborhood like? Facilities, public transport, doctors, grocery stores, etc.? What’s the crime rate like? How long is the commute to work? People have different priorities and make different choices as a result.

I think the telephone sort of fits. It’s attributed to Bell but that’s mainly because he wiggled his way into a US patent before his competition. The telephone has many fathers though: Bourseul, Manzetti, Reis - just to name three. The latter is also the father of the word telephone but died before it took off. There were many engineers tinkering so if Bell hadn’t taken the crown, another person would have done it.

Bonus answer: penicillin. Alexander Flemming. A lucky, accidental discovery. If mold hadn’t gotten sloppily into his cultures we might all have died of the plague or something nice like that.

Trusting judges is not uniquely American. You’ll find similar processes on the continent across the channel. The hurdles of who can sue and under which circumstances may differ. The appointment of judges is often less politicized. I think the UK is the unique case here and I believe that’s because by and large there isn’t a written constitution, at the very least not in the same way as in the US or France or Poland. Supreme courts are there as a check on whether or not laws conform to constitutional values and have the power to overrule a legislature when it passes laws that don’t. It’s not an “upper hand” deal, it’s checks and balances.

The American legal system is not great. I don’t know the details of the case you mentioned. One bad decision doesn’t mean the whole system needs to be abolished. If that were so I’d like to have a word with the UK’s highest court on what constitutes a woman.

Which part is infuriating here? The law that will be difficult to enforce and probably has all sorts of unintended side effects? Or that lawyers, and indeed layers funded by big internet companies, are suing?

Fundamentally, let them sue. Not everything coming out of the legislatures the world over is pristine law and this is how the system can correct for mistakes. Also, I’m sadly more on the side of the Googles and the Metas. Their freedom of speech argument is entirely self serving but that doesn’t make it wrong. Any age verification has itself a chilling effect on speech online. Forcing it creates more data sets to be leaked and hacked and in this case of minors’ information, not grownups’ who can make an educated decision if they want to go through with it to go watch porn. This is not a clear case of mild infuriation.

Is it porn the deceased spouse created or is it porn the widow created with the deceased husband’s likeness? And which would indeed be sadder?

If you are referring to the UK government, I’m going to guess no. They either don’t have the full version or they won’t be interested in releasing the files themselves. The brother of the current pointy hat wearer is up to his non-sweaty elbows in this mess and they don’t want to have to deal with this and damage the monarchy further.

If you’re referring to a UK publication, they will probably not be able to release the full dossier. They would have to carefully tread around any UK citizen or noble d-head involved because they don’t want to be knee deep in defamation lawsuits.

What we need is a country that no one thinks they’re biased or has an agenda or much to lose under a 250,000 percent US tariff. So not Russia or Venezuela. Or China or Iraq or Afghanistan or Canada or Denmark … Maybe Vanuatu will do. The only problem is that even if the entire dossier was accurate and unedited, you won’t have to wait long until reasonable doubt gets injected into the public debate that it was doctored before release. The effect of the release will not lead to immediate resignations, firings, arrests, etc.

I would guess that leading English speaking newsrooms probably have access to enough of it already and that what’s there is not enough for a spectacular release. And a possible kill order of the pedophile in prison will probably not have left a paper trail. And it will not clearly say Trump or Bubba raped teenagers although the smoke around the fire will be tough to ignore. Circumstantial evidence is not the same as proof.

Set alarms on your phone and pretend it’s phone calls from work, a friend in need, etc. Go hide in there bathroom and take a ten minute break.

Do you have allies in the family? Make a pact to take turns. Get them to lure you away on a pretense. Go help clean the kitchen.

If you can’t wiggle free, give yourself permission to switch off. You don’t have to fight every battle, you don’t need to set everything right. It’s amazing how long you can keep a conversation going if all you do is repeat the last thing they said to you back at them but you raise your tone at the end to turn it into a question. Make plans on how to compensate yourself for enduring this shit. Pat yourself on the back for maintaining peace in the face of adversity.

Nothing bores people more than showing them “a funny video” on YouTube. Or some really boring vacation pictures. Or have a non-controversial topic of your own and stubbornly steer conversation that way. Tell a story with no point. If you’re sitting in something comfy, like an armchair, pretend to fall asleep because you worked so hard. Praise the food and how good it was every time you’re biting your tongue and you really want to say fuck you.

It’s family, it’s the holidays. I’m not saying you should swallow all bullshit. But raise the bar in the interest of family peace. And remember that folks will blame the loudmouths, the ones who raised their voice more than necessary, and not the quiet one for any fracas.

None of these strategies will work by themselves. It’s the mix that does it. It’s better to go into the situation looking at it like a game you play. Not like: fuck! Uncle Bob is going to annoy me again. You have your armor on and uncle Bob can’t do shit.

That release was batshit if you ask me.

BatOS obvs

Yes, because my point is that your point doesn’t make sense.

That’s a remarkable statement in the context of a hypothetical, counterfactual scenario where we are attempting to interpret the possible thinking of a long deceased man displaced in time for the benefit of said scenario.

You may disagree with me. You haven’t changed my mind either. So let’s leave it at that.

You’re citing my text but cutting off just before the point I was trying to make. I think be would still side with the people who claim to follow his ideology (yes, piss poor efforts objectively speaking but that’s irrelevant to him because he would prefer them over the folks entrenched in capitalism on the other side).

Ideologs are a dangerous breed because they are surprisingly flexible under realpolitik conditions when the alternative is having to admit defeat. Or in Marx’s case admitting that his ideas didn’t work or the fact that they didn’t work as intended cost the lives of millions. Surely he wouldn’t like Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China and well apoortioned crticism thereof (or of the GDR or wherever) would have eventually spent his good will capital (pun intended) with the local leadership and he would end up in a gulag or erased from history. Karl-Marx-Stadt would have been renamed sooner.

Trump doesn’t care about peace. Trump cares about Trump. And his mindset is reality television. He wants to be in the headlines. Hero or heel, he does not care.

Obama got the Nobel. That stings. He wants one so he can “equal” if not best the accomplishments of Obama, who openly mocked him during that White House “comedy” press gala. That personal vendetta drives him.

I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist. But they were his team so he would publicly support them. You can sell his stance as an evolvement of the theory rather than admitting mistakes. Not too dissimilar from the way the PRC sells its version of communism to its people: communism “with Chinese characteristics.”

Chances are though that he would have perished in one of the purges happening in whichever communist country he would have chosen to reside in. He would have enough clout to niggle at leadership openly about stuff going wrong and eventually be would deliver the straw that broke his camel’s back. He would be mind-holed and his legacy rectified so he wouldn’t be the lighthouse of the movement that he could only become because he died early. And he didn’t starve millions. And communism would become the thing created by the people through an arduous march and not a system dreamed up by some German philosophers.

Limited and generalizing.

In your example, I think this is a defense mechanism more than anything. People deal with grief of separation in different ways. This looks dumb on the surface but it’s like burning your hand on the stove. You only need to do it once to be fearful of and therefore extra careful with all stoves. Person who likes blue and broke their heart = stove.

Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.

I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.

I don’t think this is genetic though. Critical thinking is something you should learn how to do. It’s a failure due to chronic underfunding in education.

I do agree with you that the people who can do it, often despair and withdraw from public discourse out of frustration. But they could be making babies like rabbits at the same time.