Women are like, “You’d change your tune about attention if you faced potential danger and violence like women do on rejecting someone!”
Sister, I can assure you, absolutely fucking assure you, I’ve experienced more danger and violence than you have ever seen in your life. Unless you’ve been in combat or something consistently, I can 100% guarantee it. And I’d still — like most men — prefer not to be an invisible chair or a walking wallet.
Bullshit argument.
The Talks That Could Have Ended the War in Ukraine.
Anyone who believes this terrible article is a Putin propaganda victim. I’m sorry for you but it’s true. Russians are masters at propaganda as they spent so very long perfecting it.
And it works. These “peace talks” were to buy Russia time so they could regroup and invade again after Ukrainian defenses were down.
Russian intelligence (FSB) even said that themselves. Believe Putin why? Gawdamn y’all stupid.
I’m sad for my country. We have so much potential here; so much we could do. We’ve never met even a fraction of what we could be and could achieve, but we’re further away now than at any other point in recent history.
And the nation is effectively controlled by China and Russia at the moment. I knew Trump was corrupt and dishonorable but I had no idea the extent to which he and Musk would sell us all out for a bit of money and power. It is not an exaggeration to say that we’re now substantially a satellite state of those two countries.
What do you do exactly when your nation is in the hands of enemies?
One of the reasons the liberals and left deservedly receive a lot of hate is that they play idiotic words and numbers games like this to “prove” how smart they are.
What a fucking assclown douchebag the guy who wrote that tardicle is. He is both falling for the “austerity” propaganda and the perfect vector for said propaganda. Here’s a clue-by-four, goofus: “austerity” was never intended to slash spending — it was always a program calculated very precisely to privatize the resources of the state, to enrich those seen as worthy with redirected government largesse and to enforce neoliberal values both in monetary and ideological terms.
Spending has nothing to do with this, other than it’s important to the neoliberal project that public funds intended for the common weal be redirected to “deserving” private ends and hands and away from public provision.
As someone in the comments points out, during this alleged time of absent austerity the NHS was gutted, uni was made vastly more expensive, and other important services were worsened greatly by diminished funding and by privatization. Which, of course, was the actual goal of austerity — and not any decrease in spending.
Are people born this stupid or does that transformation happen in college? Fuck.
You just know there was going to come a terrible reckoning when the liberals started claiming crazy shit like that biological sex doesn’t exist, humans have more than two sexes genetically1, that bio men belong on women’s sports teams, and that it’s wonderful for a wild-eyed vagrant to have a little sexual assault, as a treat.
And now here we are. You idiots are just as responsible for Trump and his destruction as the Project 2025 people.
Own it. Of course, I know you will not. Fucking dumbasses.
This is a lost cause. This company will lay him off within a few months of moving back. This fake RTO was designed to force him to quit so they did not have to do a formal layoff. He should cut his losses and look for another job ASAP.
Never trust employers and always have a large reserve of funds. Never put yourself in a precarious position like this. An employer will screw you over the very moment they think it will make them more money than not doing so.
People like to talk about how it’s impossible to lose weight and always reach for some made-up number like only 1% who try to do so keep it off. The real number is between 20%-30% are successful. (Though that is still not great, admittedly.)
However, I lost a lot of weight and kept it off now for 15 years1. Seemed pretty easy, really. What’s so different about me?
Fat Acceptance bullshit is so clownish and harmful. And greatly contributes to the problem by accepting defeat preemptively.
There are more than a few, but they are all massive dumbasses who couldn’t find a taco in Taco Bell.
A lot of people here in the US like to pretend that there is anything at all normal about the US healthcare system. But I’ve lived in other countries and I also have friends in various places around the world. And I can assure you that we have the dishonor of having the worst in the developed world.
It’s two things that allow them to believe this absolute delusion of how amazing and flawless the US healthcare system is. The first is status quo bias and the second is that they identify with the wealthy, who mostly support the current system. Perversely, this is true even if they themselves are not wealthy and would get the usual subpar health care and denial after denial if anything happened to them.It’s true that some countries (usually ones in decline, like the UK and Canada) have long wait times for some exams and procedures. I’ve yet to see anyone explain to me how that was better than denial of coverage, ruinous medical bills and general thievin’ at every layer of the US healthcare system.
When I was in the UK some years ago (before they had started to go downhill so severely), I mentioned to a friend of mine while we were at a pub that my stomach hurt pretty badly. She said if it kept hurting that we could “Pop over to a clinic down the avenue.” And I, being an American, balked — because in the US, there’d be a 2-10 hour wait, it’d cost $5,000 and it’d be just a general nightmare where I’d probably be misdiagnosed anyway.
She laughed and said the wait would be like 10 minutes, it’d cost at most £30, and they were very competent. I told her more about how the US healthcare system worked and she was appalled, as are people in most normal countries are when they hear how it is here. She said it sounded like we “lived like savages.” Which, you know, we do.
I think nearly everyone who is not rich has known someone murdered by the US healthcare system. I know of at least three, and as I’ve said before I don’t know many people.
We have the worst health care system in the world by far of any rich country, yet people still defend it to the death. Which they’ll probably receive if they go to any US hospital and then get denied coverage.
Did the overlords of media outlets and Reddit (et al.) really believe that suppressing views critical of the health care industry would actually help? I mean, what is even the point of that?
This suppression just increases anger and causes people to hate the system even more. But I guess it temporarily makes the advertisers happy enough to spend another buck.
These people are fucking delusional and are still claiming the near-certainty that phones serve ads based on overheard conversations is a conspiracy theory:
I’ve told it before but I’ll relate it again. I was hanging out with a friend in a hotel room. Neither one of us had used our phones to search for barbecue grills. Ever. She has no interest in barbecue grills and doesn’t own one. I at that time did not own one and had not for a while.
So we were joking around about barbecue grills for some reason. It was all of a 20-30 second bit of a longer conversation. After we were done talking, she got on her phone to look at something and said, “That’s odd. I just got an ad for a barbecue grill. I’ve never gotten an ad for that before and we were just talking about it.” She went to a few other sites and also got some ads for grills. I confirmed with her after that she’d never searched for barbecue grills, didn’t own one, and had never had one as an adult and that no one in her household did or was likely to have searched for one.
Now, what’s more likely — that her phone was listening to her, or that a random ad for barbecue grills (that, again, she had never seen before) just happened to pop up 2-3 minutes after we’d discussed it?
Hmm, I wonder.
People just accept the corporate line without even a single fucking thought in their heads, don’t they?
Bird flu might be coming. So won't somebody please think of… the gain-of-function researchers?!
I'm baffled by how often big newspapers advocate for actively bad stuff, even when it won't get many clicks. It takes hard work to be so consistently wrong; how/why do they do it? pic.twitter.com/zfyPOkzCwI
— Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) December 24, 2024
Especiallly since it was those poor, besiegned GoF researchers who almost certainly caused Covid. Insanity.
In so many areas of life, as in that video from the 1980s I linked below, we used to have a level of freedom that people who did not live through those times quite literally cannot even imagine. When you tell them about it they deny it was real and claim it only happened in movies. That’s how far-removed we are from human flourishing now.
We’ve all descended disgustingly into slave morality and have no will it seems nor desire to transcend as we once did. We used to have so much more, be so much better. Now we click and drool and laugh at anyone who says anything else is possible.
“Slim doesn’t always mean healthy” and such claptrap is functionally equivalent to a lie, though it’s semi-true just often enough that it’s not quite a complete fabrication.
The truth of course is that being slim means someone is far more likely to be healthy and stay that way. Where the Fat Acceptance and related self-harm movements allow their nonsense to slide in is that some (a few) slim people are in fact unhealthy. Those such as anorexics, cancer patients and people with genetic defects can be svelte but on the edge of death.
This allows in the faulty logic that slim == bad. Which of course is heavily promoted by the obesity-benefting food industry in the US.
Fat Acceptance really did a number on us (with food industry financial and propaganda assistance).
Noah Smith really, really does not understand how health insurance works or that insurance is a tug-of-war between providers and insurers. He sees insurers as a blameless mediators caught between costs and providers, principally because they do not make much obvious profit. In reality, they are a source of inflationary pressure in a continual arms race between how much money required insurance drives up de facto costs, how much providers attempt to grab, and how much they are bilked and can bilk.
It’s a multi-layered fraud combined with financial conflict and beset with huge inflationary pressures, mostly caused by insurance itself.
In other words, they are all villains and none are blameless. I’d say providers and insurance companies are about 40/40 villain, with other 20% being various other health care parasites.
The entire US medical system is a scam and insurance companies are no less evil and no less crooked than any other component.