Lurker > Gaawa_chan

It depends on the website, but it's usually some sort of big corporate news site that does that and I refuse to give them any ad revenue or even clicks if I can avoid it; if I'm interested in an article I'll usually look to see if someone has posted it elsewhere.

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*Shrug* A lot of people seem to not understand the point of reparations, largely due to ignorance about history, law, and society at large, particularly post-Civil War stuff.

I'll put it as simply as possible. You know how when someone is treated like garbage by someone else, the victim or the family members of the victims can sue for damages? Reparations are kind of like that, just on a broader scale due to the pervasive systemic effects of slavery, Jim Crow (red-lining, etc), and use of the exceptions written in the Constitution allowing for the continued enslavement of black people by abusing the justice system (aka, mass incarceration in for profit prisons). It's not about "handouts" anymore than the parents of Sandy Hook victims suing Alex Jones is a matter of "handouts." It's a matter of justice.

As for my personal thoughts on it, I don't object to reparations, though I have mixed feelings about its implementation (personally I think the subject does need to be studied more first. Cory Booker is not a politician I like but he's right in that it ought to be studied thoroughly before we attempt to implement it on a broad scale). In particular I think that reparations need to be implemented in such a way that predatory organizations can't get their hands on the money. That is something that happens a lot with systems like this- probably the most obvious example is predatory groups preying on people of color from red-lined areas that have lead poisoning, with Freddie Grey being the standout instance:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f2a6/66d0c425cdb7e8f19bae3878f56df2e36c94.pdf
If reparations are to be done, then they ought to be done properly so that the money/resources in question actually get into the hands of the people they're meant to.

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The_tall_midget posted...

It's not society's job to pay for your mistakes.

Yeah, tell that to rape victims and women with ectopic pregnancies.

That aside, I guarantee that you pay more for unwanted pregnancies that are carried to term than you ever could for abortions anyway. If you object to having to pay out to people for their "mistakes" then you should support women's health care MORE, not less, because carrying a pregnancy to term, giving birth, and raising a kid is a hell of a lot more expensive both for the individual and for society than terminating a pregnancy.

Oh, and about your sig. Incels are INVOLUNTARY. Meaning they DON'T want to be single. Are you trying to make yourself out to be stupid on purpose or something?

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Dogs are fine but they are definitely not for me. I live with five cats atm, rescues no one else wanted. We have too many of them, but it seems wrong to re-home them.

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Good riddance. She was awful.

That said, there are very few running in the Democratic primary that aren't awful. You can thank the New Democrats from the 90's for that.

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GanonsSpirit posted...

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-12-05/democrats-2020-race-california-poll

Can't wait for the DNC to announce that all their superdelegates are supporting Biden.

They can't do that unless the primary goes to a second vote. They changed the rules due to outrage from voters. That said, superdelegates shouldn't exist at all.

That the establishment wants to stop Sanders so badly ought to be enough for people from any party to support him during the Democratic primaries at the very least, but people buy into the corporate fearmongering and often fail to participate in primaries when they otherwise could.

However, speaking as someone who lives in a small town in Idaho... I went to the 2016 primary here, and it was stunning. There were so many people that you could barely move; it was like being at a packed concert, and the line to get in was several blocks long even hours later. Sanders won 83% of the vote in my district in the primary. In Idaho. In fact, he only lost in one district in Idaho by 2.5 points, and had a massive lead in most other districts.

You might not think that's relevant, but it's important to keep in mind that Sanders has been growing his following ever since 2016. He can bag states in the primaries that no other candidate in the primary can appeal to and he's got the raw outreach to actually get people to show up for the primaries, even more so than in 2016.

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GanonsSpirit posted...

You'd have to be a gullible moron to believe that Trump wasn't fully involved in Epstein's goings-on.

One of my sisters apparently works with a Qanon guy who constantly talks about Epstein and the Clintons while completely denying any connection between Epstein and the Trumps. It's funny.

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slacker03150 posted...

The number of pro life people who get abortions but somehow think their situation was different or it was warranted in their situation is kind of funny.

When someone else needs it, they were just a slut who couldn't use birth control. When they need it, it was an accident and this is an unfortunate consequence.

I've run into this as well.

Anyway, C.

We don't force people to give blood, tissue, and organ donations to save other people.

We don't even take organs from corpses that haven't been pre-approved for organ donation.

Standard medical practices have already laid out the way abortion OUGHT to be treated, which is that the personhood of the fetus is actually completely irrelevant; even if you view a fetus as a human being, you STILL cannot violate the autonomy of the mother to preserve that fetus. If we don't do it to corpses, we shouldn't do it to women.

But generally speaking most pro-lifers are coming from a position of misinterpreting religious texts + complete ignorance about both medicine and women's bodies. There is no reasonable argument you can make when someone prioritizes their feelings over facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/05/10/sponsor-an-ohio-abortion-bill-thinks-you-can-reimplant-ectopic-pregnancies-you-cant/

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Prosecutors messed up big time with the charge they decided to go with in the Zimmerman case and as a result we have an ACTUAL thug still on the streets. I'm sick of this guy popping up in the news. He's a killer and an attention whore.

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There are VERY few. You can find lots of cool old male characters- even a lot of playable ones.

Wynne from DA is a very rare example of a playable older woman. Compare to, say, the Final Fantasy series. I'm pretty sure that (magically young people aside) the oldest female PC is Rosa in the sequel to FFIV, who is in her 30s in that game. Ah, there's an old lady boss in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. She's cool.
Society at large, particularly media, tends to see older women (especially if they are not wealthy) as more or less worthless and not worth consideration unless they're comic relief or some sort of tension (typically as villains or as people to kill off for feeelz).

Also, if you think they're aren't many cool older women, that's because your social spheres don't include them, not because they don't exist. I really rather doubt many of you have old women as friends who aren't also related to you by blood (this is not a condemnation, before someone jumps down my throat, just a consequence of the way society is roughly structured).

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Yes. Animals are not capable of rationalizing away their pain and they have little to no control over it. It is not love to force someone to endure unnecessary suffering to spare your own feelings.

That said, I once had a cat that family members of mine had euthanized because she had severe behavioral problems, but was young and seemingly otherwise healthy. She was MY cat and I DID NOT consent to it. I still get extremely angry whenever I think about it.
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"entrapment is a practice whereby a law enforcement agent or agent of the state induces a person to commit a criminal offense that the person would have otherwise been unlikely or unwilling to commit."
"* the defendant's state of mind; entrapment can be claimed if the defendant had no "predisposition" to commit the crime.
* the government's conduct; entrapment occurs when the actions of government officers would usually have caused a normally law-abiding person to commit a crime."

So let's see. Did a member of law enforcement/the State do it? No.
Was he "induced" to commit an offense he would not have otherwise wanted to commit? No, apparently, because...
Was the guy unlikely to have tried to rape an underage child otherwise? Apparently not. :-/

Not entrapment anymore than TCAP is.
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I asked why free tampons is not typically considered an economic issue

Because it's a hygiene issue and it likely saves more than it costs because it means you don't have girls bleeding all over school property and clothing.

I can't believe this even needs to be explained.
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Well, there probably are more bi people than we think. If they find an opposite sex partner, they may just not see any reason to come out. It's pretty likely that a lot of people who claim being gay is a choice are doing so because they themselves are actually bi, lol.
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Uh, guys, strength isn't as simple as
A beat B...... B beat C....... so A would beat C.
.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Depends on your tool-kit and the state of being of both fighters prior to the fight and the environment, etc...
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Yes. He's a well-off Microsoft guy in Seattle, but people are always sucking up to him just for his money so we never talk to him about money even though we're basically on the cusp of financial ruin. Seems tacky.
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Schools provide feminine hygiene products for the same reason that they provide toilet paper, paper towels, and kleenex, and the only reason you don't see it that way is because you don't need them and therefore do not think of them as hygienic necessities. :-/
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Everyone knows the best exam fight was Gaara Vs Lee. Why even ask?
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Oh, another nice place to go is Salt Creek.. Crescent Bay, I think. I haven't been there in years. This area is interesting because depending upon where you go you can end up either on a sandy beach or rocky beach, both fairly close together. The tidal pools in the rocky areas are really cool.

Cacciato posted...

Just stay out of the shithole that is Yakima.

Can't speak on Yakima but several towns I know of have been completely ravaged by the drug epidemic like a lot of areas in the USA. You can't go to playgrounds in certain towns because there's drug paraphernalia all over the place. Port Townsend is still okay to visit and Sequim has a nice lavender farm and a beautiful trail called the Railroad Bridge Park that's still in good condition. Forks and Port Angeles have been changed (no joke) in great part due to the Twilight book series, economically.
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Mead posted...

Biden wont win the primary, Warren has already overtaken him

Yeah she's been pretty clever about courting big money support for the general behind closed doors. She's definitely the media favorite atm.

That said, we should take polling with a grain of salt as most of it is conducted using landlines which... that's a garbage way to sample voters, let's just be frank. It's not going to give accurate information. Remember that most polls had Clinton beating Trump.
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No, I don't think so. As I've said elsewhere, the Senate will shield him from any potential issues. What happens to Trump in 2020 will depend largely on how many mistakes he makes when handling this issue rather than anything involving impeachment. I don't know how much Americans actually care about Trump trying to extort another nation, but depending on how badly he continues to handle the situation, it may cost him a small amount of support. Not much though.

As for Biden, I've known about this particular aspect of his family since... it was either 2015 or 2016, I forget which. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; the corporatist democrats are brazenly corrupted just as much as the corporatist republicans, and Biden has always been a trash presidential candidate. He made it very clear even early on in his career that he was a corporate cash sucker like all the rest. His popularity has been largely drummed up via vast amounts of media coverage over many years... heh, sort of like Trump in that respect.

This is all a byproduct of the state of US politics today, though. Republicans whining about corruption or Democrats and vice versa... while just tacitly accepting it on their own end. Sanders and Gravel are probably the only people running for the presidency right now who made lack of corruption a key part of their strategy. Gravel had to drop out (no surprise, he has a reputation for being a bit odd and most people don't actually know much about him). In that way, Biden supporters have more in common with Trump supporters than Sanders supporters; they don't really care about corruption or even policies. They just want to win because they don't like the opposition.
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Yes. The region's more varied than one might think (beyond ocean, rivers, forests, mountains, I mean) as it also regions east of the Cascades, including Eastern WA, Idaho, and sometimes Montana depending on how broadly you're talking. That means that while it does include the well-known oceans, mountains, and forests to the far west, it also includes places like this:
https://www.durlandphotoart.com/images/02aDSC_8088.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/Palouse_fields%2C_Washington_from_Kamiak_Butte.jpg
https://live.staticflickr.com/3680/10186905996_f54933d74f_b.jpg
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/11/28/scablands/2-scablands-MM8155_130512_3242.jpg
https://i.etsystatic.com/19331101/r/il/f28ac7/1806464654/il_794xN.1806464654_geha.jpg
While most massive trees that weren't destroyed via rampant deforestation exist west of the Cascades, you can find a few east of them, like this area:
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/idaho/ancient-forest-in-id/

The rolling hills area of the Pacific Northwest (Palouse) used to be vast meadowland covered in flowers with very few trees before it was converted for human agricultural use. Apparently, this would result in hills being completely covered by singular types of flowers, making them purple or red, etc. Purple was pretty common, I think? Been a while since I learned about the Palouse region.

Even within ecosystems, there's some unexpected stuff. The San Juan islands have a native cactus species, for example.

One place that's pretty neat is Fort Worden, in Port Townsend. That's just west of Seattle across the water. It's got this weird mix of being right near the sea, partially in woodland, and also having some cool historic stuff. The fort began being built in the late 1890s.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f6/c2/85/f6c285ac2f532ac72a52e64c850fb038.jpg

Bit of everything in that region, really. If you can manage it, try to visit the Puget Sound region (Hood Canal is probably the best place to go) during the late summer and get in a canoe or kayak or whatever at sundown. Get onto the water and watch your paddles and the edges of your boat. Alternatively, you can stay on land and use a stick, but it doesn't have quite the same effect.


Thanks for coming to my TED talk or whatever. I know a decent amount about the region so if you have questions I can oblige I suppose.
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I mean... that sort of metric is kind of difficult to put into words. It would have to be a character with mass negative influence, so probably a political figure that orchestrates/participates in mass murder/exploitation on an interstellar level, or some sort of alien/magic being that does roughly the same thing.

Alternatively, I think evil can be measured in terms of framing as opposed to scope, in which case you'd pick a villain whose portrayal you find to be the most vile and visceral.
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"No ethical consumption under capitalism" aside... yeah, I agree. I've never purchased a microtransaction, and tbh I still don't like preorder bonuses or even paid DLC much. I haven't played a lot of mainstream games in great part because I don't want anything to do with their monetization practices but that hasn't been a huge issue for me anyway because it typically affects genres I'm not interested in much to begin with.

That said, sometimes I see a game that belongs to a series I've loved for a long time that has them and part of me is like... "hey... hey... you could make an exception, you know. You could get that. You don't have to buy any of the extra stuff..." and another part of me is like "Nooooo they're poisoning everything curse theeeeeeem!"
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FLOUR posted...

Is it really that hard to have an other option in this day and age? My favorite one hit wonder is Ristar, hence I can't vote as usual.

Polls should always have an Other option.
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Yeah, sometimes. It can be hard to avoid it all though since there are so many scumbags out in the open lol.

Tom Cruise is a pretty standard example. It's hard not to see anything he's in and not immediately start thinking about what an exploitative waste of skin he is.
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RedPixel posted...

These people pushing for change are not our friends.
Set all political biases aside when you ask these questions, and the puppeteer is revealed.

As opposed to the people pushing for things to stay the same, like Exxon Mobile. They're blocking investment in modern infrastructure purely out of the goodness of their hearts.
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I mean, I don't really know what to say to climate deniers on a more practical level. I once befriended an elderly gentleman who worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. He had a lot of old papers and research books, but in particular he had a collection of studies ranging from the 1890's to the 1950's concerning emissions affecting the climate (the terminology varied). No joke; I've held the papers in my hands and read them... could barely get through some parts because I only have a high school understanding of chemistry but there you go. While their time-frames are off, the predictions made in those papers are remarkably accurate.

When most people call climate change a hoax... I don't think they realize just how far back we've known about it happening. Trump certainly doesn't if he thinks it's some sort of scam from China, lol.
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There is a bit to unpack with this.

Pelosi is obviously not willing to take any more heat for NOT pursuing impeachment anymore. This is largely a political move on her part; it's not her problem anymore if she sends this off to the Senate and she knows it will die in the Senate. If the House sends it to the Senate, they can tell people to stfu about impeachment demands leveled at House Democrats. I don't think I need to tell you why that would be appealing, lol. It basically means that absolutely nothing will happen at all but Pelosi will stop getting nagged.

This isn't to say that Trump didn't do something that constitutes an impeachable offense; he's done numerous things that constitute that, particularly with respect to Saudi Arabia. This is also not to say that the Biden family isn't also corrupt as Hell. I think I first learned about Hunter Biden's corruption back in... 2015? Politically informed people have known about the Bidens for years. I find it kind of funny that this is only breaking out now because of Trump's (not unjustified) belief that he is above the law.

Corruption is not a partisan issue.

Cacciato posted...

...what? And where was this indignation when Obama arrested more whistleblowers than any previous president and used that threat to intimidate other people from coming forward?

Have you been living under a rock or something? People hated that about Obama on both sides of the political aisle. The only explanation I can come up with for you saying something so stupid is that you don't actually have any idea what people on the political left have been doing for the past few decades because you don't listen to people who disagree with you on subject X long enough to realize that they're with you on subject Y.

Obama is not as popular on the left as people like Biden would have you believe. He just had great PR, lol.

I personally despised the man, particularly for what he and Clinton did in Libya. "B-bu-but Obamaaaaa" is rendered utterly useless the moment you run into someone who criticizes both. Maybe find a better argument?
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I wouldn't be getting UBI under Yang's proposal because you have to choose between it and other benefits. It's a f***ing terrible plan from both a left and right perspective. From the right, they think it will cost too much and engender passivity, and from the left, it's got no price anchor and it is a blatant attempt by corporatists to dismantle more economically stable social safety nets.

Now a federal job guarantee like Sanders is supporting... THAT is a transformative plan, one previous presidents said they supported but either died before they could implement it or they were just paying lip service to.
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^ So your argument is "I personally am ignorant as to how this can be fixed on a systemic level, and therefore demand that it is fixed on an individual level, and since that isn't really possible, we should all throw up our hands."

Perhaps it's never occurred to you before, but your personal ignorance on how things are done is not a justification for society not doing those things.
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If I could have any job I wanted? I like learning and educating people but the idea of just focusing on one thing doesn't appeal at all for me too specialize too much. Hmm, I don't know. Maybe become an advocate for preservation of historic or environmental sites by producing documentaries or something. That sounds fun. You'd get to travel all over the place and learn a lot.
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Nothing makes you feel like a big macho man like dunking on a far more successful and influential teenage girl via ad homs, eh?
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Mead posted...

Id still be in favor of sustaining the habitability of our environment.

+1. Sustainability isn't just good ethical sense, it's good economics.
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Amano, though all of them have designs I like and dislike.
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Let's waste money shuffling the problem around instead of actually addressing it! That makes perfect sense!
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Didn't you know? It's only "big government" when Democrats do it.
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Was obviously from people in Yemen considering what Saudi Arabia is doing to them. Trump isn't satisfied with bombing just eight countries at any given time, apparently.
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Yes, it exists, but how much of it you're aware of is going to depend a lot on where you live or what people in your immediate social circle do, tbh.

Just for one example... if you take two identical copies of a job application and one has the name "Brad" and the other one has the name "Damian," the latter one will be rejected for hiring significantly more often than the former, despite the only difference on the documentation being that one has a name more associated with black people.

FinalFantasyVII posted...

Branding the lack social adversity white people face as White Privilege was a huge mistake.

I agree. It makes people take this stuff way too personally. In general poor terminology like this makes it difficult to talk about subjects with people not already very familiar with them and you usually end up spending the conversation trying to divorce their interpretation of it being some sort of personal attack from the topic at hand because if you can't, they'll just say it doesn't exist at all.

It's like when talking about how toxic masculinity may result in emotionally neglected boys committing suicide more often and someone runs in and starts losing their mind over how maleness isn't bad. They're getting torqued out of shape over the term rather than the substance.
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There's not enough information here for me to draw any sort of conclusion about the situation. I'm in favor of suicide and assisting a suicide not being crimes for the most part, and if the guy genuinely thought he was helping his friend then I can't really fault him for it save to say that they should have held out a year. On the other hand, he may be a vile person who was in great part responsible for the victim choosing to commit suicide, but unless there are records proving that, there's no way he would admit to it.

The fact that he was present when his friend died suggests to me one of two possibilities. Either he was wanted to see it... or he was there for moral support because his friend didn't want to die alone.
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Yeah I can see that, actually.
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GMOs are fine and in fact help reduce starvation and malnutrition as they can produce crops that can grow with greater ease.

GMOs have a guilt by association status due to other awful things the company they are most closely associated with (Monsanto) has done. Putting aside their unethical economic practices with respect to seed hoarding in particular, you should not forget that Monsanto is the company that made and sold Agent Orange to be used in Vietnam. Yeah, Monsanto literally profited off chemical warfare that destroyed the lives of both the invading forces and the invaded people. A company willing to do that is inevitably going to end up being distrusted for anything else it produces.
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No. Violent radicalization and religious indoctrination is not equivalent to mental illness. This is just people attempting to simplify a complex phenomenon and make it more easily digestible to the general masses. Blaming mental illness for all the terrible crap that people do is an enticing proposition to those who aren't mentally ill.
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I wouldn't overthink it if it doesn't affect you directly. All you need to know is that the most effective way to alleviate gender dysphoria has been proven to be gender confirmation treatment, be that hormones, surgery, whatever.

Whether or not it constitutes a mental illness is irrelevant but... well, I think a lot of people here could stand to do some reading on treatment of mental illnesses, particularly people who have delusions, hallucinations, or some form of cognitive decline, because even if gender dysphoria is a mental illness... that doesn't mean what I think a lot of people assume it means. I'm just going to use dementia as an example because that's what I have the most experience with.

It used to be, some decades ago, that people in the care industry were supposed to correct any false beliefs or confusion that a person suffering from dementia expressed. The idea was to try and ground them in reality. Doesn't sound bad in theory, right? In practice, this means that when a man with cognitive decline asked where his wife was, you had to tell him that she was dead, inflicting a completely unnecessary grieving process upon him... and then have it happen again an hour later, and again, and again. It should go without saying that this wasn't actually helpful. Another example would be that of a woman whose mental state had regressed to the equivalent of a small child. When she asked for the caretakers to play with her, they would try to re-orient her by informing her that she was an adult. The end result was that they were essentially emotionally neglecting a child in their care.

I think it should go without saying that such treatment of people could be considered nothing short of torture. It did nothing but cause completely unnecessary anguish and stress in people, and while that form of "treatment" was framed as being a way of trying to prevent mental decline... in truth, it was done because people cared more about how they wanted the patients to be than they did about figuring out what the healthiest treatment was.

Even in the case of mental illness, it is NOT always in the interest of the person in question to be treated in a way that tries to force them to conform. If you can't divorce your own idea of how someone else should live their life from what is actually medically best for them, then your opinions on the subject of the treatment of any given mental illness is virtually worthless. Today, when an old man asks you where his wife is, you tell him she went to the store, or a friend's house, or whatever. You meet them where they are, because that is what is healthiest for them, and you don't have to like the fact that this is the best way of handling that illness to acknowledge it.

It has been proven that gay conversion therapy does more harm than good. It has been proven that gender confirmation treatment is the most effective way to treat gender dysphoria. It has been proven that meeting people with cognitive decline where they are rather than where you want them to be is healthier and kinder to them. Someday we may find some alternate option of treating gender dysphoria, but until then, this is the best treatment we have.
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I've had some really good meat substitutes, especially when it comes to faux sausage. The bacon ones I've had were utter trash, though I've heard that they've gotten better over the years.

The biggest problem with meat substitutes is that if you're making them at home, they can take a LOT of work to prep. That's one of the reasons why they tend to be more expensive to buy; they can get away with charging more because of the convenience of buying something that's more work than average to make at home.

I should really just go back to being a vege/vegan. A lot of my favorite foods fall under that category anyway so it's not like I'd be missing out.
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If someone can be rehabilitated, they should be. If they can't be (and in this case, it seems extremely unlikely), then they should be in a psych ward for life so they can't hurt anyone else, not a prison system.
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Sanders' rural revitalization plan alone makes him the best candidate, especially after the damage that has been done to agriculture under the current administration.
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