HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
In the past, dating seems to have been less serious, as well. You could go out on several dates a week with different people, so long as you weren't supposed to be exclusive/serious with one person. A date might just be a one-off thing with no expectation that it would develop into something more. And of course, the expectations around sex (on the first date? wait till the third date?) were completely different. You might take a woman out, buy her dinner, and hope that would lead to more than "goodnight, Horace" on the doorstep, but if it didn't... she was behaving just fine by the standards of the time.
Now dating seems to be a cross between a job interview and a judgement of your entire life. If you don't get another date after this one, you've wasted your time. If she doesn't put out, she's wasted your time and money. If she doesn't answer your messages on the dating app... if you haven't the right profile and the right photo... if you can't get a date on an app you'll never get one anywhere else... you're a failure, women are too picky, women are to blame, men are to blame, something is wrong and someone has to be held accountable.
It really seems impossible.
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
Something can be both racist and true.
There is a sub-population of white people in my country, called Travellers (other names were used in the past and, via the euphemism treadmill, are now considered slurs). They do have a worse life than settled people. They are victims of discrimination. They do have a reputation as criminals, scammers, and the likes. This is unfair because indeed not all Travellers, and judging someone solely on their ethnic/racial/outcast background means you can condemn someone who is not guilty.
But at the same time, it is true that Irish Travellers do engage in welfare fraud, theft, petty and large-scale crime, both here in Ireland and in countries where they've immigrated. Construction fraud is an old reliable (they'll turn up, often to the homes of the elderly, and through a mixture of persuasion and coercion get them to agree to unwanted home renovations, spend lots of money on this, and when they've got as much as they can squeeze out, then decamp leaving shoddy work and often need of proper rebuilding behind).
That latter scam happened to a family member of mine. I've got war stories from a job about Traveller scams.
At the same time, I have known since childhood respectable Travellers, many of them settled.
So yeah: it's unfair to judge all Somali-Americans as scammers and low-IQ thieves, but at the same time, scams and crime are likely to happen in the Somali-American communities. Any group which is set apart from the mainstream of society will develop a "them and us" mindset where 'we' are the only real people, and it's perfectly fine and indeed our right to pluck the pigeons among 'them' who we owe nothing to at all.
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
because they're less concerned about fraud than they are the fact that Somalis may be the ones doing it.
The exact same way you are. You're not addressing the fraud, you're going on about "stop blaming Somalis! stop being racist!" If this was an allegation against a network of Christian day cares in Texas, would you be stepping up to defend them on the grounds "stop being sectarian about Southern Baptists!" or would you be gloating over "everyone knows those so-called Christians are hypocrites and liars, more worried about persecuting the gays and trans than doing good"?
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
Conservatives by and large don't read Hanania, that's true. The only times I see him quoted are liberals and the very right-wing who are eager about "see, the so-called right wing aren't, you guys need to come over to us!"
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
Seeing is believing. Reading a news report, you can ignore it, or skim over the headline, or go "yeah well this outlet is biased" or "it can't be that bad".
Seeing with your own lying eyes an empty daycare centre where there are supposed to be a hundred kids is a lot more difficult to ignore or explain away.
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
As always, let's divert blame onto those kicking up about the scandal with "they only knew about it now because they are too stupid to be able to read, while we smart liberals can read and knew about it years ago, so these fools are wrong in everything they say".
Scandal? Well yes scandal, but look! a squirrel! The amount of "it never happened, okay it happened but it was going on for years and we knew about it, so shut up shut up shut up" I'm seeing online is disheartening.
HereAndGone2
6hr ago
For the local news reporter, I think the problem there is being employee of the network. If he (or they) come right out and say in a public broadcast "this is fraud", then they leave themselves wide open to being sued (see Trump and the BBC, where I do think the Beeb did put its thumb on the scale).
So unless they have good reason to believe the state is looking into this and next week they'll be reporting on the cops showing up to arrest the operators, they have to be careful and festoon the story with "it is said", "some claim", "officials are investigating".
Shirley and those like him, who are in essence one-man-bands who can fall back on "I'm a private citizen", are freer to make such accusations.
Doesn't take away from the Minnesota state government apparently sitting on its hands for years while an entire range of scams went on, but the journalists can only do so much. Now, indeed, it is a question "did they do as much as they could? were they, too, worried about being called racist?" but sometimes the media is hobbled.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
why would I go out to a bar or another coffee date, when reading/exercising/friend activities are so much more exciting and less stressful.
We need Everett True to get you bashful young men sorted out 😁
HereAndGone2
1d ago
Stop sending so many women to college.
Still not going to work, because now the "34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income" (1) doesn't want to marry just yet because there's so much out there to achieve both in professional life and in personal life having fun (2) ugh, why tie myself down to some dull 20 year old who can't even earn her own living and will be a leech dependent on me instead of a partner?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
So ONCE AGAIN. The problem is with women.
So you keep saying. Women would argue that the problem is with men. We could go back and forth on to what degree this is self-centered female narcissism (your preferred theory) and to what degree this is men being of genuinely lower quality and women not actually needing to settle to avoid starving.
To be blunt, a lot of the complaints on here are men getting to see what it was like from the female point of view over those centuries of "no free choice for you but men can sow their wild oats and they decide if they finally want to marry at age forty".
My God, any potential mates are out there having sex, commitment-free sex, and are economically independent, plus picky about who they'll eventually settle for? They have options and freedom and exercise those options? How appalling!
Shoe on the other foot here, gentlemen, and very funny to see the solution being "force them to marry!". To take the example of one comment above, about "being this person is so disadvantageous in marriage, you are recommended not to marry" - if you're 34 and not married by that age, what is wrong with you? why so picky? why not get married straight out of high school (as some suggest women should be steered into it) and have your mother pick your potential spouse for you?
HereAndGone2
1d ago
"This scam was only $1b. The other scams, well, we have to wait for the figures".
HereAndGone2
1d ago
It doesn't take fancy footwork at all.
'We call him Augustine, not Saint Augustine, because we don't venerate saints. We ignore that he was a bishop, because some of our denominations don't accept the office of bishop. We glide over the fact that he would have performed a lot of the Superstitious Roman Catholic Add-ons we claim are unScriptural and later accretions of erring men. To sum up, we declare his theological was perfectly Reformed and he would have had no quibble with Calvin or others' formulations. Take that, Papists!'
"Dat's Raciss" is the easy, stop-gap answer. I hate to bring up Rotherham in this context, but that was exactly what stymied investigation in part: when eventually the pieces started coming together that no, this wasn't just a few, isolated cases of underclass girls gone wild, people in charge put blockages in the way because "oh no, investigating this would seem to blame the Muslim community and that would be racist/racists would use it as a weapon".
"But they wouldn't do it to Christians" - well, if Christian church groups are engaging in this kind of fraud, they damn well should do it to them.
Also, there seems to be a general fraud problem going back years in Minnesota, if allegations of $9 billion going down the Swanee are correct. Governor Tim says it's only $1 billion but that may just be "cases known about for this specific scam":
Minnesota has been under the spotlight for years for Medicaid fraud, including a massive $300 million pandemic fraud case involving the nonprofit Feeding Our Future. Prosecutors said it was the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scam and that defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
In 2022, during President Joe Biden’s administration, 47 people were charged. The number of defendants has grown to 78 throughout the ongoing investigation.
So far, 57 people have been convicted, either because they pleaded guilty or lost at trial.
Most of the defendants are of Somali descent.
Numerous other fraud cases are being investigated, including new allegations focused on child care centers.
In news interviews and press releases over the summer, prosecutor Joe Thompson estimated the total loss from all fraud cases could exceed $1 billion. Earlier this month, a federal prosecutor alleged that half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds that supported 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.
...Among those running schemes to get funds for child nutrition, housing services and autism programs, 82 of the 92 defendants are Somali Americans, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, has said fraud will not be tolerated and his administration “will continue to work with federal partners to ensure fraud is stopped and fraudsters are caught.”
...Walz has said an audit due by late January should give a better picture of the extent of the fraud but allowed that the $1 billion estimate could be accurate. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud. He has long defended how his administration responded.
As an aside, is there anything Kamala touched for her presidential campaign that hasn't come back to bite her? Timmy boy here was her hand-picked choice because he was biddable, and now here's the track record of This Could Have Been Your VP come out to haunt him.
HereAndGone2
1d ago
But Protestants can claim Augustine and everyone else from his era just as well as Catholics.
While doing some fancy footwork about "ah but they were really Reformed/Baptist/whatever and not Catholic", even though they would have called themselves Catholic, and engaged in stuff Catholics did (e.g. St Augustine as a bishop would have celebrated Mass).
The example of this that makes me laugh is Northern Ireland Presbyterians claiming St Patrick as one of their own, yes he was a true-blue Wee Free No Pope Here Calvinist, ignore what those Papists down south say!
HereAndGone2
2d ago
I guess we'll find out if he does agree to the proposal and how his wife behaves afterward. You can ask him if the first thing that happened when they got home after this was her jumping his bones?
HereAndGone2
2d ago
Knowing that a guy is desirable is one thing; having it rubbed in your face that your husband is so hot to trot he'll agree right in front of you means he doesn't find you desirable in the same way, and that's insulting.
The sad truth is that scammers often are much better at navigating the hoops, and way more willing to play the game for social workers etc. (e.g. one example from the job of "I am a poor single mother in fear of domestic violence from my partner" who prevailed with this on the social worker to get the guy kicked out, when it was he doing the childcare and she was drinking, betting on the horses, and negligent of the kids*. Mommy's rationale? if she could present herself to the housing department, and public sympathy, with this story then she would get preferential treatment for 'I want that new build house and if you don't give it to me I'll go public with my sob story') than honest people who are genuinely in need.
As a government low-level minion, you may suspect the hell out of "this is a scam" but unless you have rock-solid undeniable evidence and proof that will stand up in court before a bleeding-heart judge who believes it is the responsibility of the local/national government to hand out money and goodies to the needy, you can't do a thing about refusing to process the application, because any whiff of anything that can be deemed to be used in a court case for discrimination by an ambulance-chaser lawyer will get you, the department, and everyone in trouble.
So the incentive is there, even if you're not a bleeding-heart yourself, to just tick the boxes and go along with the CYA process.
- Ireland being a small country, one of my colleagues** came from the same village as this woman and her mother and sisters, who were the local terrors, so she knew the real facts behind the 'boo-hoo I am only a poor single mother trying to do the best for my kids' story this woman went on local radio to tell about how the housing department were all heartless red-tape bureaucrats denying her and her kids their rights.
**Even funnier, her dad owned the local bookmakers, so she knew what she was talking about when she said 'this woman and her maternal family spend all day drinking in the pub and betting on the horses'. But of course, all this is only hearsay so it can't go down on the official files. And of course, nobody from the office can go on the radio with "this story is a heap of bullshit and she's a lying bitch", so these sob-stories get into the media and are believed uncritically by the public who don't know any better, who get served this by a journalist all too eager for a good human interest story that will grab headlines and attention. If you ever hear/read "We contacted Department/Office Z about this and they refused to comment", this does not mean "yeah the story is all true and they have no defence", it means "legally they can't say a word because bound by confidentiality".
HereAndGone2
3d ago
That's what is so astounding about this, because generally fraud is miniscule; when you get into cases of (say) social welfare fraud in my country, it's often genuine mistakes. Certainly there are also cases of deliberate fraud and the amount mounts up over the years, but this is €24 million out of a total budget of €27 billion, so around 0.09% which is not great but which is not huge huge either.
Something this big going on for years is amazing, and it seems to be all kinds of schemes, so $250 million for Covid child nutrition programme, other Covid support programmes, this childcare scam - allegedly $9 billion in total? That's serious money sloshing around.
Minnesota budget spending in 2025 was $59 billion, so if we spread $9 billion over 5 years, that's roughly $1.8 billion per year, which comes to 3% of annual budget for 2025. Not a huge amount relatively speaking, but not nothing either. And if we leave it as $9 billion out of $59 billion, that's 15% which is getting up into respectable figures.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
But on the 26th December I would expect the entire place to be closed down for the Christmas break, so the investigator guy would have been faced with a locked door. As mentioned, probably this was filmed beforehand and since we don't know how long before, the general expectation would be to keep the kids as near as possible to the closing date (because parents often need/want the kids in daycare since they're still at work themselves).
I have seen some online comment to the effect "this guy is a shitty right-winger racist but a more credible source does mention something funny is going on" so there does seem to be an indication that the story is not baseless.
His wife would be more attracted to him if he indicates that he's looking around for a chance to cheat on her?
One of us is mistaken in our views of how women behave!
Look, these are (1) friends of wife (2) lesbians/bisexuals (3) possibly some indication of a crush at one time on wife. She's mildly flattered but not interested by the idea, and is happy to maintain a friendship with them. Then out of the blue comes "we want your husband to give us a kid" and the offer comes from the bisexual member. Husband does not (if I'm taking the right interpretation here) immediately respond with shock and horror and flee into the night to preserve his virtue, but admits on here that yeah he's kinda into the idea.
I very much doubt missus would be happy for another woman to be this upfront about taking her husband, especially if the impression missus had was that one or both of the ladies was interested in her, and I very seriously doubt missus would be delighted to learn husband was already thinking about putting it about, even if that was only on a theoretical level. And the end result will be to produce a kid, which may well have a demand on husband's time/money/attention and will be a rival to her own kids.
(A) They're out in public, hot woman subtly indicates interest in husband, husband seems not to notice, goes home with wife, is clueless when wife says "so about that hot woman..." "what hot woman?" Result: yeah she may well in that case "love the reminder that their man is attractive and desirable to other women", because there's no real danger of a rival there.
(B) They're invited over by friends who make the request that husband father a child on one of them, husband is signifying some level of interest, now there is a real danger of a rival or replacement here. Result: wife is not going to be happy about this scenario.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
America, the land of opportunity, where anyone can make it big!
HereAndGone2
3d ago
I should clarify that I'm in Ireland, not America, but I do find it hard to believe that American community services getting government (be that local or national) funding don't have to comply with broadly the same checks we do.
If you really can set up a "childcare centre" with no kids and get $$$$$ for it from the grateful local government, we are definitely all in the wrong lines of work.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Not alone that, this is money supposedly going to the needy, and this means the needy are left unserved and in want, while some people are enriching themselves hand over fist. It's screwing everybody over - the taxpayers, the honest people working in these fields, the people who really do need and deserve the services.
HereAndGone2
3d ago
Are such investigations downstream of DOGE etc. querying of government spending? That is, would they be happening if Trump wasn't in office and it was President Kamala and VP Tim?
I have a depressing notion this is so, and I would like to be proven wrong (honestly!)
So you're happy to be linked with a worthless woman who doesn't manage the household or do anything in regards to family bonds or much of anything at all? Because unless you mean "hairdresser's worthless male relatives" (which is what she was complaining about) and "me and my brother", I don't see this working.
Your mother was boasting of her filial sons. Her hairdresser was talking about how the guys in her family were not like that. If you think that out of that "hey, we both have unattached male relatives, let's get them together and see if anything clicks" is what you want in order to get married to a woman and have kids with her, I don't think it'll work.
If you want to marry a hairdresser or woman of that social class, nothing is stopping you going to a hairdresser's salon and trying to find out if any of the women there are single.
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