oats_son
6mo ago
It is unusual for a Christian group to not let someone join them, since they usually believe that their way is the only path to salvation.
From what I've seen of the Amish, they could probably use some more people in the community who don't share DNA with them. But that's not realistically something people would think about. I agree with the rest of your points.
oats_son
6mo ago
Are politics in Japan as vicious as they have been here lately? Can you summarize the "sides"? Maybe material for Transnational Thursday.
oats_son
6mo ago
Surely there are other game companies with impeccable reputations, right? From Software is extremely respected, for instance; I would also put Nintendo in the running for mostly having very well made games put out for their main IPs (maybe not Pokemon, but I don't care about Pokemon). Perhaps also Remedy Entertainment, maybe a little lesser known.
It does make me realize how many IPs on this page have had at least one serious misstep, though.
oats_son
6mo ago
As a bald man: Ha! Ahahahahahaha!
As the below poster said, those supplements will work. But also, consider just letting yourself go bald so you don't have to take that stuff forever. Just know that once you get to a certain point in the Norwood stages, a hair transplant won't save you. So really, you'd want to take a hair supplement mrvanillasky mentioned, get a hair transplant if necessary, and then keep taking hair supplements.
Or go bald. Then you can get a cool wig or something. If you're already married, ask your wife if she'll let you go bald instead of chaining you to the wall and applying minoxidil to your immobile scalp twice a day.
oats_son
6mo ago
I wonder if Rohan has agreed to interview Trump
Gondor calls for aid!
Oh, yeah?! Well, Rohan calls for Trump!! Make Middle Earth Great Again!
oats_son
7mo ago
That's some super bad luck on Alpha-gal syndrome. I remember my boss and the company owner talking about a tick bite that makes you allergic to red meat, and they both agreed that life would not be worth living if that happened. I disagree, I like chicken a lot and surely there are other meats that can be eaten and even an older adult would eventually adjust, but I honestly didn't even know it was a real disease that happened to real people. I'm sorry to hear that.
oats_son
7mo ago
I'm not an economist either, but I don't think a loaf of bread being a million dollars is too much different from a turkey dinner in 1960 costing 60 cents versus now costing $7. I'd guess we start seeing the dollar like the Japanese see the yen, where $10,000 to buy a pair of shoes is just what's expected and perfectly affordable for most people.
oats_son
7mo ago
You're right. I still think Trump shouldn't have run, but this is no longer one of the reasons why.
oats_son
7mo ago
My problem with that is that Trump is not just affecting Trump, he's affecting any Republican out there by pressuring them to align with him. If they do, they endorse all the utterly stupid statements he makes and have to defend them, or slip out of questions about them somehow. If they don't, they're weakening the party and lose support from MAGA diehards. JD Vance really couldn't answer properly on the "was the election stolen" question. He couldn't outright say he thinks it's stolen, and he couldn't say that Trump is wrong on this. Trump has forced his own side at large to confront similar conundrums.
This will not end after Trump wins or loses. This will hang over every Republican Party member who endorsed Trump for the rest of their careers. And the ones that didn't endorse Trump have to shut up about their Trump supporting friends get screwed over in the media, showing themselves as weak in the process.
He should not have run again.
oats_son
7mo ago
And why shouldn't they run again? So you and yours don't have to see them, or hear their complaints, or address their concerns? So that the manufacturing of votes and stealing of elections can go on unimpeded?
So that we don't lose again, pretty much. I've said my thoughts on Trump in another post: it's not just the election claims, it's everything. I don't understand why some people are so attached to him. He scares the hoes.
oats_son
7mo ago
By the way, I also enjoyed this exchange, which I forgot to mention in the original post. My enjoyment was purely because of @naraburns's writeup on the subject:
TW: Yeah. Well, the question got asked, and Donald Trump made the accusation that wasn't true about Minnesota. Well, let me tell you about this idea that there's diverse states. There's a young woman named Amber Thurmond. She happened to be in Georgia, a restrictive state. Because of that, she had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care. Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth. The fact of the matter is, how can we as a nation say that your life and your rights as basic as the right to control your own body is determined on geography? There's a very real chance, had Amber Thurman lived in Minnesota, she would be alive today.
What's funny to me is that Tim Walz actually got the story wrong, didn't he? Amber Thurman didn't die in any journey back and forth, she failed to go to the hospital for an infection and died in a hospital in Georgia. What an incredible lie. And it makes me wonder about the other examples he mentioned earlier.
oats_son
7mo ago
If it was just questioning the election alone, it could be okay. But that is not the case. It's questioning the election, plus questioning it really hard, plus frequent misspeaks and off the cuff remarks, plus unverified claims about Haitians in Springfield, plus getting really easily baited about rally sizes, plus making inflammatory nothing statements about an hour of violence, plus running a social media site where he rants against anyone and everything and declares he hates Taylor Swift in all caps...
All of the above and more make him look really out of touch and pathetic. I will say once again that he disappointed me greatly in the last debate by failing to even mention any of the Biden policies that made immigration go completely out of control, instead just shouting about immigrants over and over again. He's unarticulate. And he's old. And his policies are either nothings that he won't be able to follow up on or they're bad. If it wasn't Kamala Harris he was running against, he would be unelectable. He deserves to lose. He is terrible. He does not represent my views except in the vaguest sense. And yet, I will still vote for him, because I despise progressive politics.
oats_son
7mo ago
I'm not entirely sure why this matters, but I read The Motte pretty regularly, as well as /r/moderatepolitics. Occasionally I will check Tracing Woodgrains's twitter, otherwise, I pretty much let all my political information seep in through The Motte, reddit, or Discord. I don't click on articles often, and I very seldomly watch videos. I am pretty disappointed by the amount of left wing partisan links that get posted to /r/moderatepolitics. If you have any other forums where intelligent people talk about politics, I'm all ears.
Yes, I'm an American voter. I'm in the Midwest, Illinois-but-not-Chicago.
oats_son
7mo ago
I want a vice presidential debate top level post.
So JD Vance sounded pretty good here overall. If you ask me, both speakers were miles ahead of their presidential candidate counterparts, which is sad. There is probably a lot that can be read from the debate, but I did want to discuss a couple moments making waves on other social media. First I will mention I was surprised to hear JD Vance support nuclear energy, and I will also mention a lot of people were probably unhappy with how he handled the gun control/mass shooting question. But back to the two I wanted to mention
The first such moment originated from a fact check:
JD VANCE: ...Now, Governor Walz brought up the community of Springfield, and he's very worried about the things that I've said in Springfield. Look, in Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes...
Tim Walz responds to his statement, and then a debate moderator comes in with this:
MB: Thank you, Governor. And just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status. Norah.
DV: Well, Margaret, Margaret, I think it's important because…
MB: Thank you, senator. We have so much to get to.
NO: We're going to turn out of the economy. Thank you.
JDV: Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.
MB: Thank you, Senator.
JDV: That is the facilitation of illegal immigration, Margaret, by our own leadership. And Kamala Harris opened up that pathway.
MB: Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to.
TW: Those laws have been in the book since 1990... a few more exchanges continue before mics get cut
I will cut it off there to not balloon this post. You can read the transcript here.
It seems many blue tribers saw him complaining about a fact check and seeing a win. Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying? This is another example going back to Scott's post about the media rarely lying. Hey, they're temporary asylum seekers, so since they were allowed in with little hindrances to speak of, they're legal. Fact checked. This is an example of why I tend to dislike fact checking in a debate. It introduces an opportunity to use unfavorable framing on an opponent with lawyerspeak on technically true things. Let the candidates do it themselves if they want.
Next up, the January 6th and failure to concede the election:
TW: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
JDV: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
TW: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.
Once again, there is more to this exchange than that. I said earlier that they had good performances, and I'll go further here and say that JD Vance had a pretty great night. I'd never heard him speak before and he sounded very well spoken, very well informed, and brought up many issues that I so dearly wished that Donald Trump would have brought up, like specifically naming the asylum system and mentioning the partial birth abortions allowed in Minnesota (I noticed Tim Walz's denial was not fact checked). That is to say, JD Vance is competent and might have won against Kamala Harris, representing a return to civil debates and "normal" politicians, despite the "weird" allegations.
But he is really dragged down on this issue. It's lame he has to defend election denial claims in the first place, and leave room for challenging more later. I know many of you have strong feelings on the truthfulness of the claims. I will say this: if someone goes and makes those claims, they shouldn't run again. That is very powerful ammo for the other side. And it's far from the only ammo. I am very disappointed with the rhetoric Trump throws around. His lashing out against Taylor Swift reads as totally pathetic. And it is sad to see someone with as much talent as JD Vance have to try to slip around all this crap coming at him, from both Tim Walz, the debate moderator, and untold amounts of unhappy people on Twitter.
oats_son
7mo ago
The day I learned that there existed fake soy sauces (like La Choy) was a sad day indeed. Soy sauce is great. Now I check any new soy sauce to see if it's fake or not, and sure enough, last time I went to a takeout place, the soy sauce there was fake.
My boss insists La Choy is the best soy sauce and Kikkoman is inferior. This might say something about his tastes.
oats_son
8mo ago
My God, I can't believe it's really there after seeing such an atrocious article from them.
oats_son
9mo ago
Sad to hear that about Japanese dramas, I had hoped it would be a better paradigm than America's film industry with horrible writing and ridiculous plots. I know I like their pop music a lot better than ours.
oats_son
9mo ago
Pretty cute if you ask me, especially for someone in their late 30s. https://youtube.com/watch?v=NebtveWRFGM?si=r1c-ZxR98Olf3Y5V
oats_son
9mo ago
I'm attempting to learn Japanese, and something to do while learning any language is to just sit there and listen to a native talk and try to make sense of it. Since I'm still a beginner I use the Comprehensible Japanese channel/site. That's the one I "watch".
oats_son
9mo ago
Haha, the Japanese woman I watch for immersion practice is learning Korean precisely for K-dramas. What's up with that? What's good about K-dramas? Do you know of any good ones? Are there a lot of Japanese who are super into K-pop like there are in America?
oats_son
9mo ago
Can you share what some of those might be? I am afraid to say I mostly hold the same opinion as No_one, but that might be a lack of perspective on other options.
oats_son
9mo ago
Good writeup. How do you learn new swimming techniques? I basically only know how to do a breaststroke while keeping my head above water the whole time, and doggy paddle.
From what I recall of this issue, male "milk" isn't even really milk, is it? Does it have any caloric value? What is the actual benefit of men engaging in this behavior? It seems to me to be pretty obviously fetishistic, and if I were the founder of the company and on the council, I would resign too if I had to pretend it isn't fetishistic and actually worth talking about.
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