domain:cafeamericainmag.com
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
1m ago
The abortion debate below brought to mind something I've been thinking about for a while. There's been a convergence of sorts between mainstream Republicans/conservatives and the far-right, but there are still many differences, such as on the Single Mother Question. The far-right (which includes most people on this website) views single mothers negatively, while the mainstream conservative view is very different. For instance, here's what Speaker Mike Johnson said about Medicaid:
Medicaid is for single mothers with small children who are just trying to make it. It's not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couch playing video games. We're going to find those guys, and we will SEND them back to work!
Mainstream conservatives and the far-right agree that the welfare state serves to subsidize single motherhood, but only the latter thinks it's a bad thing. Mainstream conservatives' embrace of single motherhood is connected with abortion politics. One mainstream conservative pundit put it succinctly: "you can't be pro-life and anti-single mom." Many on the far-right responded to her tweet with "just watch me" and others scratched their heads, wondering what she meant. But there's a certain logic to it. Much of the motivation for abortion comes from women not wanting to be single mothers. You can respond to this in two ways:
- Tell them not to have premarital sex.
- Tell them to keep the baby because single motherhood is a heroic thing to do; you're CHOOSING LIFE.
The far-right prefers option 1, I've heard it many times on this website. But do you think it will actually be effective in changing behavior? I personally suspect that given the options of not having sex or having sex at the risk you might have to drive out of state and get an abortion and then get shamed by some online anonymous far-rightists, the latter will be the popular option. Just a vague suspicion I have. So it doesn't surprise me that many conservatives choose option 2. It also harmonizes better with the current conservative political coalition, which is increasingly reliant on the votes of low-class and non-white voters who have higher rates of single-motherhood. We wouldn't want to be elitist, looking down our noses at the salt-of-the-earth working class now would we?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2m ago
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead
40 years isn't that long in the scheme of politics. It's merely long enough for Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell to have voted for the 1986 amnesty earlier in their careers. Three of the four were either President or their respective party's leader in the Senate six months ago and nothing in the 40 years that followed Simpson-Mazzoli suggests that any of those had an ideological change of heart.
oats_son
7m ago
I don't find it bad difficult. I do struggle to comprehend what an actual programming job is like. I don't feel like my codebase is that complex, and when I do figure something out, it feels ultimately simple in hindsight. I use grep a lot to look up related functions, which works out most of the time, though sometimes I miss where something is being modified because it's too indirect to be found by grep.
You know, I think you might be right. I think I will dust it off and find something to put on it and fake it 'til I make it, just head to the library with my laptop. Maybe the industry isn't so bad after all. I guess no one here may know, anyway.
WhiningCoil
9m ago
I fucking love programming, and noodle around in random unprofessional bullshit all the time.
But i spent my childhood obsessed with computers. I also did Computer Engineering with a software focus versus straight comp sci. I felt it gave me a better perspective of how computers actually work.
What's been good for my confidence has been contributing to a smattering of open source projects I used, but which had bugs that annoyed me. Emulators, open source bios, etc. Jumping into foreign code bases is great for experience.
From where I sit, the industry is scary. My little corner in my small government contractor company is fine. But I do wonder if the ladder got pulled up behind me. Some of it is hardcore culture war material, so I have to leave it at that.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
16m ago
I would guess they also genuinely believe that its different when we do it. Most people are unable to take anything as literally as they would need to to see the symmerty there. (This is in part why I was surprised. I have strongly internalised that people are crazy, much crazier than being against abortion, and I would have thought you have too) I suppose you could say that they are therefore unable to really believe anything, but that doesnt seem productive.
fribble
25m ago
Yes. I enjoy it for one but I also ended up with a baby who hated being in the car. Music and poetry recitation got us through so, so many rides in the car. And when she got older it was handy being able to recite on command on boring road trips, at bedtime, or just for fun.
I am old enough that one junior high school English teacher said we needed to be able to recite 100 lines from Romeo and Juliet from memory so we would have something to focus on when we were held hostage in Iran. It stuck, I guess.
Bartender_Venator
30m ago
From an essay Richard Rorty wrote while he was dying:
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
33m ago
Since an accident is the equivalent of pregnancy in this analogy, yes I absolutely think both should be held to the same standard. i.e. both a reckless and responsible person have to deal with the pregnancy.
Its not about the inconvienence. Its about Officially declaring that this is not the thing Good People are supposed to do. Its not a trivial inconvenience countering milgram-power, its taking away milgram power by defrocking. Who a conservative government can actually do that for remains to be seen of course.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
36m ago
fribble
38m ago
Do you find it bad difficult or just difficult? I love solving problems that I first saw and thought, there's no way, it's too hard. Then banging my head against that wall and thinking I am the biggest idiot who ever was. And then finally getting a glimmer, or a thread to tug and then ... Boom. This can be done! A lot of my programming life has involved a lot of that, also because it self selects. I will grab the impossible over the mundane because I find it more interesting. There are also plenty of keep-the-lights-on programming jobs. That VB6 app that the company needs and also doesn't want to pay for rewriting? Someone has to be willing to baby it and surround it with as much protection as possible. And then there are folks who are in between. But if all this sounds awful, it might just not be for you. Is there other stuff in computers you like? Don't limit yourself - I (think I) got a job offer because I bonded w/one of my interviewers about hours spent making patch cords in my early career. The job has nothing to do with patch cords, cabling, and the only networking was virtual. If something interests you, give it a shot!
You sound stuck. Dust off your resume. Think about perfect world jobs. Could you, or someone who really believed in you, make your resume look ok for one of those jobs? If not, what are you missing and how do you get it? Just do one step today. One more tomorrow. You can look for and even apply to jobs just for practice. You have a job. You're in good shape. Just poke your head out, see what other opportunities there are, see if there's something you would love to grow into.
One of the benefits of looking for a new job when you have a job is when you get an offer, you can decide if you want it. It's safe. (OTOH it is a tough job market right now. My kid is a new grad and she's made it through more 2nd and 3rd round interviews with no offer than is reasonable. Since when does a job suitable for a 21 yr old with the ink on the diploma still wet need 3 interviews?)
oats_son
42m ago
Well, I have had some limited ability with it. Changing my Discord password to something I can't remember or access at work can help, as Discord is my biggest leech, but the problem is that I can waste time in a lot of different ways. Wikipedia, Google Maps, many things I would have to block that I think would probably not be great to block. I just need to find it within myself to focus, but some days, it's hard.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
42m ago
In my eyes, the international law thing I mentioned feels like blatant belief substitution (I don't think "rationalisation" is quite the right term for the postulated mechanism, where a low-status value is replaced by a higher-status subgoal that serves it) due to how self-serving and selective it is - but it seems to be believed by absolute majorities in countries like Germany without even having a well-defined proximate outgroup rejecting it. Why would it not be plausible that pro-lifers, who are less of a majority and are in a mutual chokehold against an outgroup rejecting this premise, could do the same thing? (Though to begin with, it's not really well-defined where the boundary between rationalising and normal belief formation even lies.)
aqouta
45m ago
The boomers didn't just shaft the whole next generations coming up, they implemented tons of policies meant to rebalance the racial makeup of the party. Because they weren't going to give up their positions the only way for this to work out is to aggressively discriminate against white up and comers. So they mercilessly culled them and made it clear that they wanted the next generation of the democratic party to be anything but straight white men.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
47m ago
Glad we agree the underlying issue is that you don't want anyone in Louisiana to have access to abortion pills and I do. The governor of NY agrees with me, thus she is not extraditing the doctor, as is her right.
Tenaz
49m ago
I think trust your instincts. If it feels culty, it is culty. If it doesn't seem dangerous, though, and you feel you're not too susceptible to peer pressure / brainwashing, it might be worthwhile to participate so you have more credibility when you try to get your friend out.
Coincidentally I'll be in SLC tonight. Happy to come pick you up on the off chance you need to make a quick exit.
Tenaz
56m ago
When I graduated in 2006 my starting pay as a programmer for the company I interned with was $65,000. I moved out, paid $1200 in rent to live 5 minutes from the office, and had more money than I thought I could ever spend. I was super confident, wading into code bases and fixing difficult to find memory leaks, or converting a small C++ code base for an ArcGIS extension into C# because that's what they converted the SDK to primarily support going forward.
How did you get to this point? If you don't mind I'd love to know
- How inherently interested you are/were in programming
- How many hours a day you put into effective study
- Whether you think the job market is still good and worth putting that time in
I'm at a dead end in my CS career and have been contemplating going back to school to actually become a good programmer. I'm smart enough but find programming itself quite boring. Not sure I have the work ethic. Having a good idea of how much work it would take would be really helpful to me.
Rov_Scam
56m ago
There are no legal tricks to protect your assets, unless you put everything in a trust that you have absolutely no control over several years ahead of the conduct that led to the lawsuit. And there better not be any evidence that you actually control the money. Aside from that, there is no reason to default on a lawsuit. Even in credit card collection cases where you'd think there would be zero case I tell people to file the necessary paperwork and show up for the court date to avoid a default. Why? Because there's a 50/50 chance the creditor's attorney doesn't show up. When I was doing bankruptcy a few years ago I'd get calls from people who were getting sued but had no other debts, and I'd represent them for fun. One credit card company was using a small law firm in Harrisburg to essentially collect default judgments. I knew they weren't going to pay for someone to come to Pittsburgh for a $4,000 debt. Even if the firm is local, the attorney is often unprepared. I've gotten out of a few cases because the Plaintiff couldn't produce the original signed credit agreement. This can be a serious problem when the plaintiff is a collection agency that doesn't actually have the original agreement and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. And then there's the fact that a bank representative needs to appear as a witness, again a serious problem if the plaintiff is a collection agency who can't testify to any relevant facts about the agreement or about the bank's recordkeeping procedures. And then there was the case where the lady from the credit union had everything and showed up without a lawyer, not realizing that companies can't appear pro se. The point is that even in hopeless cases, there are defenses that can be made and can be successful.
In this case, he filed an answer shortly after the default judgment was entered, and courts will usually give you a little leeway.
dr_analog
razorboy
1hr ago
I think working as an embedded systems C programmer actually signals a lot more competence even if the salary isn't impressive. The embedded space is notoriously low pay since the economics around that are for the manufacturing industry rather than pure software industry which tends to be able to spend a lot more for software development.
Tenaz
1hr ago
Busy is not the same as capable of thought. Whales' brains, for example, have much more total cognitive activity than our waking brains, but are less capable of thought.
We have some level of thought while sleeping too--I can remember reasoning some things out in dreams--but dreams/REM are the most mentally active part of sleep, and I'm not sure most of us are smarter than babies even in REM.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1hr ago
pineapples
Lol, I love that this is a thing here now.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
That might create people.
If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?
TIRM
1hr ago
Your brain is not deactivated whilst sleeping. It is quite busy.
I take your point if applied to sci fi suspended animation or something very unlike sleep.
The voluntary form is something I can appreciate, if not endorse. Reactionary on deep love, and all.
The involuntary form can fuck off. Murder is bad, news at 11.
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