George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Sure that is the problem, but at least there was a plan A. There's never going to be a perfect answer where everyone gets along in all possible situations (remember, I've been married 20 years.) The alternative to trying to find common ground--which I'll boil down to: "Fuck 'em"--is, at best, expedient, but falls prey to an arguably worse problem of wholesale generalization (since you mention suicide bombers, Muslims leap to mind) of a group that is not homogeneous.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
When I first came to Japan I'd eat a cookie or something and think "What? Where's the fucking sugar?" Now, these days, 20 something years on, I do taste the sweet in Japanese snacks (usually, still not in wagashi which in my mind should not be termed a sweet), but when I go back to the US, and have, as I did a few times ago, some peanut butter chocolate doughnut at Krispy Kreme, I feel as if I am about to go into a diabetic coma. And my friend had two! My point is you can wean yourself off really sweet stuff. I used to love it and now I have far less of a tolerance.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Do you stop eating once sated? The really fat people I've known don't necessarily eat giant portions, they just eat all the time here and there. And eating even when full is something I've heard people do. I've never had that problem.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
As for food waste, just decrease portions? Also I'm interested, does Switzerland have very strict norms regarding this type of medication, such that you don't think you'll be given a prescription?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Once I recognize that a set of people doesn't share my values, what is there to do?
Search for shared values and go from there.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Maybe he was doing the Terran salute from that Star Trek episode.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Fun fact, the African Headmaster of the school at which I taught in the Peace Corps used to wear a Hitler mustache. I have a photo somewhere of him at a school function wearing on his lapel what I believe he took to be a corsage but was actually the bow for a birthday present. He was a notorious drunk, but more of a pathetic man than an evil one. I suppose that's why they posted him in BFE out in the Kalahari.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
And yet, as an older man with older contemporaries, I feel as if the small breasted women are now the ones not, in Brando's words, "playing soccer with (their) tits."
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
One of the great internet disappointments for me, Reddit. It was so good in its day. Perverted in parts, poisonous, like a loaded gun ready to go off--though even loaded guns are harmless if you know how to handle them. But also brilliant, funny, expansive, daring, poetic, a real scope into the lives of others, worse and better, and of course of our own familiars far off.
Now it's like an IV where you push for more stupidity and lies, push the button, push, until it euthanizes you.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Whoah whoah whoah, who have you been talking to? If it was Ingrid, don't believe a word, plus we dated in the winter time, so there's that.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
What would you imagine drives that demand for boob jobs, if women's wants are indeed the driving force (maybe they are, I'll take your word for it)? Women imagining this is what men want them to look like? Personal self-consciousness before the judgment of other women? Or something else?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
I would suggest if he's serious it's not an unreasonable point. Straw(wo) manning a view isn't a compelling argument for any but the already devout. There are, as well, a gamut of feminist views, from the pathological (Andrea Dworkin) to the clear minded but currently criticized (Germaine Greer) to Ms. Male Gaze herself (Laura Mulvey). He didn't need to write a treatise but not even naming any of these people suggests he just has an idea of what Womyn TM think. I agree the author should read a few books of Camille Paglia's.
I enjoyed the first few paragraphs as I leapfrogged the weird AI pics mixed with what looked like Flashman illustrations. Then he started using lovedolls as evidence for what all men want, then wouldn't stop with the lovedolls already. By the time he got to the picture of I think peak Tyra Banks along with a few other supermodels in their prime wearing lingerie and his caption was "Not really what men want" I felt certain either I am an extreme outlier (because I want) or he was blinded by his own biases for thicc. Admittedly I have not finished reading, and probably will later
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Any game My boys play some in the PS5 and sometimes I think "That would be fun to play." I used to play WoW probably oh 15 years or so ago until I realized it was making my wife hate me. Also I believe suddenly pandas became part of gameplay and that really brought me out of it. These days I don't have the time to devote to a proper game where you learn kits and builds and lore and all that. Sometimes we all play Catan but not really since COVID, when had many game nights.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
but did they feed you?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
In Japan the word ジュース or juice means anything not tea, coffee, or booze. So yeah, any fizzy drink (boom!) It's annoying.
I grew up saying Coke because Coke was what we drank. My relatives--good, country people--used to say "Co-cola."
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Yes, I think legally it has to be investigated anyway. Thank you for the link, apparently I am much further delayed in my news stream than I suspected.
Starship exploded. I'd link to some Twitter video but the X posts run from "This is actually a win!" to "Embarrassing disaster, must be investigated now!" Musk seems to be on X silence, at least as of this writing.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
I read this site and often have a tentative familiarity with the topic at the beginning of a set of comments, then get to the point slowly, as I keep reading, where I am just seeing words, stories and events that seem to have occurred somewhere outside my ken, like big events that everybody dreamed the same night except me. Odd, isn't it, really, in the end, these forums--like listening to people behind you on a bus.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
I wish that clip actually went on. I'm going to search for the entire interview. It's true Harris looks bad here, but he's not wrong about Trump necessarily, he's wrong about everything else. In other words, he isn't wrong that Trump has a laundry list of obvious cashgrabs and scams--which should give anyone pause --he's wrong that he and the big brains should do any and everything to impede Trump's election. He also doesn't seem, when he says "but that's not conspiracy," to realize that he is perfectly describing conspiracy.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
I feel like you're the healthiest most badass motherfucker on here.
Jesus H Christ. Headaches yeah, fine, we all get them, but blue balls without the aching hour of unrealized foreplay, that seems like the curse of an angry god. Sorry to hear it.
If it takes the edge off what is already a blunt non-edge, I'm way past 33, not nearly retirement ready, feel like probably my whole life I've been depressed-ish but just lived it (no jibes meant against the truly nonfunctional depressives out there) and I just pre-ordered a tuxedo for a shit ton of money from my Sikh tailor. But my wife and I laughed at the dinner table tonight (lemon chicken pepperonccino pasta my recipe) my oldest son cut up a big pomelo fruit and ate it on tissue paper, and my youngest sang the melody to an old George Benson song (turn your love around) without prompting. What I'm saying is life, in the words of Anne Sexton, is a trick. Life is a kitten in a sack.
Edit: past, not passed
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
5mo ago
Are you suggesting that surviving relatives of a murder victim are legally required to view the murderer's execution? Because I would be surprised if that were the case. If you're simply questioning why these people would be granted the choice to view an execution, I think you've answered that by suggesting the right to be granted "closure," or, if not that, a sense of finality, or justice served--something they can see with their own eyes.
It's interesting that you bring up circumcision. I have two sons, am myself circumcised, and I can recall prior to my first son's birth, when I brought up the issue with the Japanese doctor who was at the time very possibly the one who would be the attending surgeon (as it turns out, it was another doctor altogether) I remember him looking at me with what I can only describe as a kind of uncomprehending loathing, probably the same way I would look at a Somalian midwife explaining to me the ins and outs of how she would circumcise a girl. He told me circumcision had no medical basis, and was "just a kind of superstition." He said he had never done one, wouldn't really know how, but could probably get someone to try it if I really wanted my son to have the procedure done (I obviously declined.) Interestingly at this hospital there were posters on the walls regarding 戌の日 or "day of the dog," which is the 12th day of each month in the traditional Japanese Shinto religion. In the fifth month of pregnancy on the day of the dog women are supposed to go to a shrine for some type of blessing. This was posted in the hospital on the wall. This is only one such tradition surrounding birth and children in Japan. The argumentative part of me considered bringing this up to the doctor, but I didn't. Obviously in practice going to a shrine for a blessing is qualitatively different from slicing off foreskin. in principle, I wonder.
Anyway it's a good illustration of a kind of basic value that some have and some do not--I used to ask people I was out with in Japan whether or not to have my sons circumcised, what they thought. All the gay men said Definitely do (a small sample--notably they were also American). Some heterosexual men also said yes, but others said no, and asked why I would even think about it. I didn't have much of an answer other than that it had been done to me, and it seemed normal to me, and that they (my sons) might wonder why I was different than they are (turns out they have never once asked about it. Which also makes sense. I can't imagine as a kid asking my dad about his dick.)
If the "system" is not sufficient to handle differences in values, what would be a solution? Just keeping certain people out? One would be screening for very specific values, I suspect. I also think about Japan and how I, as an immigrant, fit in here. I am one of those who tries to learn the language and behave, if not completely Japanese, at least in a way that doesn't actively annoy people. In certain areas (one city I pass through on my commute which is a type of hub to the airport) you have large areas of Vietnamese, Chinese, and other Asians living. It is a noticeably different vibe--louder, less clean, probably also to some degree more relaxed--and I suspect they have been housed there (via their rental agencies) purposefully to keep them contained. I have often found myself shaking my head at "all the damn foreigners" in parts of Japan where I frequent. The irony does not escape me.
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