domain:questioner.substack.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
Perhaps they’re at work.
Probably not. I go on weekends around opening time. I realize the demographics might be different at 1pm, 3pm, or 5pm on the weekends compared to opening.
TitaniumButterfly
1hr ago
I don't disagree but you're probably going to want to delete this before you catch a (justified) ban.
oats_son
1hr ago
I am glad that you painstakingly offered the experience of this procedure you did. I always wondered what it was like to donate sperm, and I bet that's somewhat similar. I would have thought you'd have to do it on site or something. Did you wait a week or a few days from your last "emission" so that it would be a larger quantity? Well, good job, anyway. I thought you both were over 35 and already parents or happily not-parents or something.
I think female infertility would be a serious blow to a relationship. The way I see it in my mind's eye is that sperm is cheap, so if yours didn't work, you could just go get Chad DNA from a sperm bank or something. Chad DNA has its own benefits, because I would want my kids to be successful and having good genetics like tallness or lack of mental or physical illnesses are very helpful, but some people really want their kids to be "theirs". Personally, I would just want something to dedicate myself to that doesn't have any baggage like a preexisting child would. I guess I'm not evolutionarily correct, though the thought of my hypothetical wife cheating on me is still horrifying. On the other hand, female infertility leaves you in the same position that The Gays are in: either hundreds of thousands of dollars paying for another uterus, or tens of thousands of dollars for decent adoption, or a few thousand dollars for an adoption of a subpar kid or foster-to-adopt.
roystgnr
1hr ago
Bernie obviously wasn't a Condorcet winner even among Democrat primary voter preferences, and probably would have done even more poorly in a general election, sure. But the non-creepy-to-the-public solution to this problem is to switch to an election method that's more clone-proof, not to get all the clones in a smoke-filled back room together to play "draw the short straw" or whatever. (As a point of fact I dispute the collusion interpretation in this particular case - Klobuchar was getting creamed when she dropped out, Buttigieg too, and Warren was getting creamed well before she dropped out - but in theory "Deciding not to let the less popular candidate win" can be a good sort of strategy to collude on in a plurality race, if only you don't mind how creepy it is to see collusion in an election.)
They're not going to switch, partly because even the people who try to improve election methods these days don't seem to be very smart about it (IRV is only one form of RCV, and it's not clone-proof either), and partly because any party insiders who are smart about election methods are probably smart enough to realize that escaping Duverger's law is a bad thing for political party insiders.
But making people sit through these sorts of weird "your favorite candidate dropped out before you even got a chance to vote" races is still a self-inflicted wound. If you put Democracy in the very name of your party, you're signing a "we'll be good at democracy" check that you'd better not bounce. The drop-out-when-you're-losing-badly system and even the smoke-filled-back-room system are probably improvements over plurality voting at democracy's job of trying to pick a good leader (though in hindsight it's hard to see how they could have done much worse), but they're not an improvement over plurality at democracy's equally-critical job of convincing your voters that they were the ones who picked the leader.
Imagine what the primary could have looked like under approval voting. Plurality's "Buttigieg dropped out before 46 states could vote because Biden had nearly half of South Carolina's voters" kinda looks pathetic, doesn't it? Even if the final outcome were unchanged, "Buttigieg stayed in until the end, but he only had 70% approval and Biden had 80%" would have been much more inspiring statistics. It's arguable whether we can do that in a general election without a constitutional amendment, but a party can do whatever weird superdelegate shit they want in the primary, and they ought to be able to make their primary better too.
Sloot
1hr ago
However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40.
Perhaps they’re at work.
It reminds me of how pre-COVID—but even to a lesser extent to this day—if I saw another white-collar-looking young man in the wild during the weekday daytime, we’d often briefly gawk at each other out of surprise like the Umbrella Academy driving meme, such as when we’re pushing shopping carts past each other at the grocery store.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I see things in sort of the opposite direction. I think shutting the great art behind the enormous paywall of university means that only members of the elite will ever see it or get anything out of it. It made sense in the era before printing, video, or the internet to keep the high classical artwork and literature behind the walls of a university. But just because I, a peasant, can buy and read a copy of Aristotle’s metaphysics doesn’t mean that you can’t. Nor does being outside the system mean that there are few helps to make the thing easier to learn. Furthermore, how does a culture keep interest in things that most people will never see?
faceh
1hr ago
I just now realized how both the pager operation that decapitated Hezbollah leadership and the decimation of Iranian military ranks with precision strikes sort of pattern match to the idea of an angry God smiting the enemies of his chosen people.
Stellula
1hr ago
All of those things exist and are practiced within Catholicism.
There is a sortof eastern-mysticism/orientalism that is left over from the 70s where westerners seem to think that eastern versions of this are different, but they're not.
Luckily, that is fading quickly, perhaps largely because of social media/travel. People have been able to travel to the places where these things are popular, and the picture is...not pleasant.
faceh
1hr ago
I tentatively agree, but in the sense that "people need to reach a breaking point before they will return to the thing that they've been avoiding all along."
The church has the advantage of having been around for centuries and centuries, so they will be the default option people return to when most else fails.
But in the meantime I think the phones will probably win the attention game.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
1hr ago
The irony inherent in that decision tickles me something fierce.
Utilitarianism holds that what is best for the largest group of people is correct (summarizing). What is best for the largest group of people is apparently, deontology. Thus utilitarianism can be explained as the belief that deontology is correct.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
I've been thinking about the role of shaming children into desirable behavior recently. My wife is firmly against shaming in any form---she's a practicing psychologist and so is used to seeing the ways that shame has been used to emotionally torture people. But my experience is that judiciously applied shaming can greatly motivate people of all ages. Your story here is a good example.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
My wife is really hoping for twins for the economies of scale. Quadruplets would be a bit much though, I don't think I can come up with 4 precisely equal names.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
This is true, but also still feels atypical. This goes back into childhood ignorance, but I remember precisely zero about George Bush Sr's VP except people clowning on him. Al Gore I remember precisely zero about during his term as VP. Dick Cheney was always more of a shadowy figure, presumed to be pulling the strings from the shadows, but rarely out in front doing anything visible to the public. The only thing I remember about Joe Biden as VP was when he got in trouble for saying "Shylock" and the ADL came out and said he was up to date on his protection money donations and that he was absolutely not an antisemite. Oh, and when Obama put him in charge of curing cancer during a State of the Union address. Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.
That Vance is out there, regularly, and seemingly successfully, advocating the President's agenda feels atypical across all my life experience. He gives on strong podcast "Debate me bro" energy that might just be an artifact of the times we live in.
I've been trying to nail down what I find so off-putting and alienating about the way you express your opinion.
It brings to mind the social structure of the Qing dynasty, who puts the working class - the peasantry, workers and artisans, and merchants - above entertainers, soldiers, low-level bureaucrats. For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone. That someone has to do the hard work so that you can spend all day doing intellectual and creative things is a basic fact that is the root of nobless oblige.
Every elite class that has ever existed recognizes the need to respect their lessers for doing this.
But you don't.
The fact that your contempt is so nakedly obvious, and that you're either foolish or conceited enough to not have the grace to keep it to yourself. You are not a wise man. You are not an intellectual sticking it to the hidebound hicks who don't recognize your genius.
You are Grima Wormtongue.
faceh
1hr ago
I think that might be how it feels until she slips into a particular corner of tiktok or where-ever that starts shaping her mind in ways that you will truly dislike.
In such cases you might prefer being the main sort of her validation.
Unless she has a good mental filter of her own to keep nonsense from taking root.
PokerPirate
1hr ago
There's a couple at my church who were having trouble conceiving. For them, the doctor did say "you just need to do X and then it'll all work out" where X was a hormonal injection into the woman. Apparently she wasn't ovulating and so this obviously resulted in no babies.
Well the hormones worked too well. She started releasing multiple eggs/month, and now they have a set of twins and quadruplets... 6 kids under 5 years old...
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I feel like we've heard more from Vance in the last six months than we heard from Harris for her entire term. Maybe some of that is at the President's discretion (giving speeches to NATO and such), but I think Harris could have been more visible if she wanted. Vance is posting that-which-Trump-is-probably-contractually-bound-not-to to X, and had that notable incident on Bluesky recently.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
I saw maybe six white people in the entire store, and no white or even hispanic employees.
When I go to Costco, there is not necessarily a shortage of white people. However, there seems to be a total lack of white people under 40. I assume it's related to day/time when I go, but it's an ominous feeling.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
You don’t like Bernie, that doesn’t mean that other people don’t. You probably didn’t think Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell at winning either. If Bernie was so unpopular, why did the Democratic Party have to undertake heroic action every single primary to thwart him? And even if Bernie couldn’t win, it would have been better to let him take his shot, lose bigly, and put the issue to bed for good instead of creating a permanent Lost Cause myth and losing the left wing of the party for good.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
2hr ago
Because we don't study history, and we lose the cultural understanding that made those works great in the first place. We forget the lessons our fathers learnt in blood when we forget the art that touched their hearts. We doom ourselves to falling into the same pits they did.
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something
You must be frequently annoyed then.
The modal chick’s interests and hobbies consist of consooming, painting her face, taking selfies, and teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, but she will complain men are BORING with no sense of irony. Men have the burden of performance.
and is generally not in great financial shape to boot.
Reminds me of a Tweet from some chick that was making the rounds, along the lines of:
Boyfriend: “Would you date a broke, struggling guy?”
Me: “No, for personal reasons”
Boyfriend: “What if I told you that to me, you are that struggling guy?”
I can’t stop thinking about this convo
And naturally some Noticers laughed at her phrasing it as “personal reasons” rather than acknowledging hypergamy.
Someone who would be a nice supplement/complement to your own life and isn't going to disrupt your own routines.
One chick I casually dated at least had some self-awareness on that front.
No one:
Her: “If we got serious one day and moved in together, I don’t see how I would contribute to your lifestyle, you even know how to cook and clean better than I do”
Me: *Anakin face*
Her: “There is something I could contribute, right?”
Me: *Anakin face*
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2hr ago
Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
yofuckreddit
2hr ago
This is exactly what I did. Eventually.
- Got a balance bike. But a cheap one with no handbrake, so it didn't really work on hills and was too small for a big kid.
- Got a training wheel bike. A grandparent got this without my real authorization, so it was ultra-heavy chinesium crap (heavier than my adult bikes) with awful geometry and impossible to pedal up hills. Led to a ton of frustration and balance anti-patterns.
- Splurged on a higher-end kids bike with handbrakes (In this case, I think you go with Priority or Woom. Guardian sucks). Used it as a balance bike. Added the pedals after a while. Voilia.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
2hr ago
Trump isn't a Clinton Democrat as much as he is a 90s era labour-oriented centerist. IE the sort of "old Democrat" that the Clintons and thier "New Democrat" coalition displaced.
I would guess that Upper-middle class have summer jobs that requires certifications (like lifeguarding), managing your own client list (like tutoring and babysitting), and internships programs. Jobs that were more difficult to outsource to immigrants.
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