Did you see his eyes? He’s a black guy with astonishingly green eyes. That’s enough to make a guy stand out, without his “dick game” even factoring in.

It’s important not to discount that he used charm and love-bombing to manipulate these women. That isn’t a matter of “desperation” - these women were unwilling victims of a con man.

Please don’t insult muppets like that. Trump’s a puppet, absolutely, but he lacks the warmth to be a Jim Henson creation.

It’s time to play America’s favorite game, “Find Something Made in the U.S.A.”! Check the clothing in your closets, check the produce in your fridge, check the toys in your child’s toybox!

The first person to find five different items labeled “Made in the U.S.A.” wins the game!

I recently bought a small generator that charges via solar panel. With weather events getting more severe each year, and my boyfriend needing a sleep apnea machine, it seemed a good idea to get a portable source of power that’s completely off the grid.

I don’t know what’s going to be happening in the near future, but I figured I’d rather have it and not need it, than need it and be unable to get it due to scarcity and potentially-dramatic price increases.

That’s supposed to be a patty?! Goddamn, I thought they put a slice of beef jerky in it or something.

I felt like I understood your original post, so I hope you’re okay if I try to bridge the misunderstandings? If at any point I misunderstood, let me know.

They aren’t going outside and saying these things where at least one man would smack him upside the head in order to correct bad behavior.

Expecting men to beat the shit out of people doing the “wrong” things is also a really big problem and isn’t a solution either.

I feel like this boils down to: having men use physical violence to coerce other men into “proper” behavior isn’t the solution. The scare-quotes around “wrong” imply the term being potentially misused.

I remember in the late 80s when i was really young hearing about gay bashing as if it was a perfectly okay thing to group to and go do.

You note that groups used violence against gay people in the 80s, and that it was considered acceptable. I read this and the next sentence as being an example, provided to support your first sentence.

I remember people talking about Freddie Mercury coming out as gay and not feeling comfortable asking why that is a problem for fear of being targeted myself.

The fear of violence was such a severe deterrent, that even questioning why being gay was “wrong” could have led the group to assume you were gay and thus become violent against you.

I don’t have any answers

Although you don’t believe in corporal punishment, you don’t know what the answer would be. (Which is totally fair, IMO.)

Is that the gist of what you meant?

If so, I suspect people lost track of your point around the term “gay bashing.” Most people these days probably associate that term with someone speaking poorly of gay people, which sucks, but is relatively tame compared to what I thought you meant - which was, groups that went around literally bashing, as in physically attacking, gay people. (Which was, and still is in some places, an absolutely real thing.) It’s possible that this misunderstanding derailed the rest of your comment, leading readers away from your point.

If it makes you feel any better, I can ping you next time I encounter misogyny on Lemmy? It’s far less toxic than a lot of online places, but it’s definitely got corners where offensive takes get upvoted.

I have no idea what I’m looking at here.

May Day is the perfect day to educate one’s self about the history of union suppression. If you think you see a pattern, you’re right, but the reasons for the pattern have nothing to do with the workers’ abilities and everything to do with powerful people using everything in their arsenal to prevent collective action.

Wish I could just be lazy and have the troubles go away, but that isn’t how it works.

I feel this so hard. I’ve been more active this year than ever, and it takes so much out of me to socialize. But I’ve been giving talks, canvassing, and attending protests because we really don’t have a choice anymore. This government sure as hell isn’t interested in helping anyone, so it’s all on us.

Any advice on getting your money converted to Euros? I’ve been trying to figure that out, but online searches for information are complete garbage now.

You make great points, especially the fact that people are often pushing some kind of bias. However, there definitely is a skill to determining the reliability of a source, it’s called Information Literacy. You’re also right that each person has to develop this skill for themselves.

For those who truly want to strengthen their Information Literacy, I’d recommend starting by learning to recognize various common cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Simply being familiar with how these things work gives you a leg up on identifying nonsense, even if you can’t recall the exact name of the bias or fallacy that may be occurring.

Skepticism will get you far in determining accurate from inaccurate, and it’s important to apply it universally - question everything - instead of simply applying skepticism toward things you don’t like. Similarly, be open to changing your mind when presented with new information, because the more you learn how to see through the misinformation, the more you may find the world around you is different from what you’d been told.

It is amazing to witness a nation learning from another nation’s mistake. It’s such a smart, sensible thing to do. Voters in Canada were able to identify a pattern, imagine the consequences happening to themselves, and make a decision to not do the same failed thing as the U.S.

That’s gotta be a crucial distinction between Canada and the U.S.

Here in the U.S., people ignore and downplay patterns (especially if the patterns hurt their feelings.) When pressed to explain an identical set of patterns, we’re more likely to blame whoever is experiencing the patterns for causing them than to critically analyze the cause and effect surrounding them. [Examples I’ve heard through my life: “Poor people suffer because they’re drug addicts.” “Women don’t get paid as much as men do because women are worse workers than men.” “Black people live in violent neighborhoods because they’re inherently violent.”]

Too many of us are entrenched in the propaganda-sphere; we are too arrogant, vocal, and either unwilling or unable to engage in critical thought against our zeitgeist. I imagine that if the situation were flipped and Canada had been the first to fall to fascism, the U.S. would still follow. After all, if another country messed up, it’s because they did it wrong. But we’re too special, too important, Too Big to Fail™, so we could do the exact same thing and be confident that [consequence] could never happen to us.

Lotsa shocked Pikachu faces going around these days…

Might as well. It’s still safer than driving right up to people who will arrest you, and worse.

Somewhere between January 20, 2025 and today.

I guess we’re at a point where the safest thing to do in this situation would be to just abandon your car and walk away. It’s better to sacrifice your car and inconvenience traffic than to risk your life interacting with ICE.

I mean, I know other drivers would be pissed, but so be it. In the (hopefully) unlikely event anyone here finds themselves in this situation, don’t buy into the sunk cost fallacy - just cut your losses and keep yourself safe.

As a Millennial whose teen years were filled with adults pushing me to gO To cOLleGe constantly, I’m pretty pissed. I could make and fill a Bingo card of bullshit reasons people repeated ad nauseum, yet in retrospect there is one critical reason that nobody mentioned - that if you want to emigrate, other countries only want you if you’re “educated.” (Or “skilled.”)

I can’t imagine most adults I knew were even aware of the requirements for becoming a citizen in another country. I had dreams of moving to Canada at that age, so if somebody had known, it would’ve been a very convincing argument on me. For those that don’t know - the system is set up to prevent most people from going anywhere, but having a specialized degree makes you desirable internationally. It’s one of the few ways that ordinary (read: non-wealthy) people have that allows them to move to a new country.

Way to absolutely miss the point.

I don’t need to be or decide it and it’s not my opinion: the language community is the ultimate authority of their language. Their collective choices establish observable conventions. Linguistics is dedicated to that approach.

A not-insignificant amount of women think using the term “female” is derogatory. Women who feel that way are part of the “language community.” You’re talking like we’re some outsider group, whose use of English is less valid than yours.

Language has conventional, established meanings.

Language is alive - it evolves, it changes. As well, English famously doesn’t have an established body to define meanings. Rather, English words are based on common usage. Women commonly experience the usage of “female” in a derogatory sense. We didn’t designate it this way - all we’re doing is pointing out that it’s used in this way. Just because you don’t feel a derogatory sense from a given word doesn’t mean those that experience it that way are wrong.

If you had gone out to research the usage of “female,” including how people perceive it in different contexts, you’d see just how many anglophones disagree with you. But those people would probably, by and large, be those who’ve experienced that word in a derogatory way - in other words, they’d be women. So how about we stop acting like this is a semantics issue and get to the point you’re really saying, which is that women’s experiences and opinions are somehow worth less than yours.

If it were an ordinary sentence used in casual conversation, sure. But for a news headline, it makes sense to put the most important information at the beginning.

What makes you the ultimate authority on what terms a woman can consider “derogatory”? Where do you get the power to decide what words other people should use to describe their own feelings? What makes your opinion about it more valid than those of others?

Have you considered that the same word can make two different people feel two different ways? Unless you’ve got the power to know exactly what another person is feeling, there is nothing that makes your thoughts more valid than the thoughts of others in this matter. Doubling down that “derogatory” isn’t the right word to use gives the impression that you don’t believe “female” actually feels derogatory to a lot of women. Gotta wonder why that might be.