Remember that smile gave Moscow Mitch gave when they confirmed Trump’s lame duck Supreme Court nominee, despite rejecting Obama’s?

Still a predator. Your sister is not adult enough to not get taken advantage of by this kind of freak. Your parents should step up but a 16 year old should not be with a 21 year old.

If I had a daughter who was losing to a team with a 6 foot 2 trans female

How many transgender girls play in any high school sport in your state? Or I guess, played last year because I think they’ve all been banned.

I had a student on puberty blockers. She was tiny. No “advantages” I could see.

Ultimately, it should be case by case, working with the doctors and individuals.

Also for god fucking sake it’s fucking evil to harass individual athletes who are abiding by those rules and participating in a sport they love. The fact that I scroll past virulent hatefests against Lia Thomas on Facebook, or that Imane Khalif’s personal medical history is apparently everyone’s personal business is gross and evil.

The Sunset Tree captures those feelings in a way no one else really has. It’s a concept album about being in the hotel room, the night before your abusive stepdads funeral.

rarely from pediatricians and other medical professionals

There are huge issues with abuse in congregate care. “Troubled teen” facilities and inpatient facilities that care for foster or “unwanted” children. A “troubled teen” who is sexually abused can be written off as “manipulative” or lying for attention. (The requirements and pay for working in such facilities are both minimal.)

“Dr.” Phil was cheered for sending several children to Turnabout Ranch - many children were sexually or physically abused there.

The problem will occur any time there’s an imbalance of power and access to the vulnerable. Institutions that deal with children must face this fact and enact policies to protect children.

Abuse is going to happen In any organization that works with children (or adults even, anywhere there is the potential for power to be abused). It’s how your organization handles that abuse that matters.

If the Catholic Church/Mormon Church/Jehovah’s Witness didn’t train their leadership to keep these allegations of abuse internal, if the policy was “when you hear allegations get the police involved” - these places wouldn’t become havens for these kinds of problems. They create cultures where they just move these bad actors around to hide the problem, which lets others know that they’re free to prey on kids.

The Boy Scouts implemented the “rule of two” in response to their own lawsuits. You never have a child and an unrelated adult alone together.

Ultimately though - there’s something about the religious aspect that also makes it easy for them to justify this. They think of these children as tempters, that [individual] is a really good guy but that kids going through something to make them act like that. There’s also the infinite mercy of Jesus which we can throw all sins at, so obviously the way [individual] broke down crying and said the Sinner’s Prayer with me is a sign that they’re better now.

She’s a character that seems to want to escape the story she’s in. She starts out as a stereotype of a college student who’s been corrupted by her studies at Yale because you need to be afraid of sending your kids to college, it turns them into liberals.

She converts with token resistance when her shitty cheating dad “finds” god and then is promptly married off to a guy more than a decade older than her.

The blog Slacktivist did/does a really long running breakdown of the series, and she was always a popular character in “fan”fiction in the comments.

At least Heaven’s Gate kept to themselves. Applewhite was a repressed, self hating gay man who developed that kind of friendship damaged gay men and damaged gay women do. They didn’t proselytize in the later years, they didn’t kill others.

Trump is more a Jim Jones. Pretend to hold an ideology you don’t necessarily believe (Jones was known for being progressive on race - but was a sexual predator and one wonders what the benefit was). Once the jig is up, take everyone down with you.

I’ve had friendships end over basically that statement.

The series is pleasant to read. It’s no different than reading a Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Colleen Hoover novel, just targeted at a younger audience. The fandom culture around it was fun - especially for those of us who essentially “grew up” with Harry by being roughly the same age as him at each release.

Not every novel needs to be Pale Fire or JR.

I rank them 3>2>4>1>5>7(w/out epilogue)>6>7

I think the ending of the first book was planned, just clumsily executed. It’s a mystery novel - she places all of these red herrings/misdirection. The reveal that Snape was actually saying a counter course with the flying bludger incident is “cute” and goes with the muddled messages and themes she has around that character.

She knew where she wanted to get to, it’s just one of the more “Idiot Ball” driven plots of the series (along with the fifth book). Harry does stupid impulsive shit because that’s his character, and the world just has to react to it. Harry logic isn’t normal people logic, so by the end of the story we’ve kinda lost track of the plot.

It’s no Earthsea but it’s serviceable paperback detective fiction for children.

I’m stoned so:

The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)

COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.

Luigi is Kaworu, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.

The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.

Rei is obviously the internet/technology.

The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.

They aren’t supposed to be cheering for the antichrist and his companions though! (And the dumbass premillennialism. Sola scriptura my left foot.)

I had a lot of dreams of standing up to Nicolai Carpathia - the antichrist who is clearly evil because he leads the UN and wants nuclear disarmament and world peace. (He was also conceived via surrogacy for a gay couple IIRC)

It just felt like the whole point of the series was how badass it was to stand up to the anti-Christ - like when Rayford Steele (author self insert) sneaks some kind of wooden gun to shoot Nicky, even though he know it has to fail through prophecy. Although I guess both main characters do work for the antichrist for the first few books - oh shit. (The token Asian side character gets the mark forced on to him by his parents who are very committed to him being able to get a prestigious career working for the Antichrist is also waived of the normal ramifications of the mark, while keeping its benefits as it benefits the plot)

IRL there definitely are accelerationists and a desire for the end of the world - those that cheer for events in Palestine and hope that Hamas will perhaps retaliate in a way that would destroy symbolic sites in Jerusalem. There are programs dedicated to breeding a specific red calf for prophecy.

Everything about Trump just seems like such an in your face deliberate insult to the tenants of the Protestant Christianities that these people claim to be following. Like it just sometimes seems like things are winding down, and that God is playing a joke on them to teach them some sort of lesson. To show that Christianity for many had in practice become a way to cover up a private revulsion/latent guilt related to homosexuality and transgender people. That Christian nationalists are more the latter than the former.

As well as the Mark of the Beast as a Neurolink microchip.

In the Left Behind series, you had to implant the chip in your forehead or right hand. They guillotined anyone who refused. If you get willingly chipped you are permanently unsaveable (so it must be the “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit” thing that Jesus was on about)

It’s amazing that I’m not seeing more Christians freak out about this. All of the church basement videos,the Hal Lindsey, … was I the only one who took that shit seriously? Chloe’s death in Left Behind traumatized me - like I don’t think any of the film adaptations have gotten that far but I can picture it like a movie. If they weren’t going to take the warning seriously, why did I wake up some mornings in a quiet house terrified that God had abandoned me?

It’s not too hard to find a bison burger.

With butterflies though, things like migration are going to be a huge problem - even if you can make some areas safe, some species have wide ranges. We really need to cut back on our use of pesticides as a species.

The decline in insect populations is the scariest thing though. It’s difficult to motivate people to care about protecting insect species, but they are critical to our ecosystem. We need wasps and bees and fly species, but they aren’t “cute.” Small scale conservation projects targeted at a media friendly species are likely to be effective; protecting the bugs is probably going to require uncomfortable and unpopular changes that will never happen.

Stories don’t have to have “hard” magic systems to be good. I’m a big fan of the magical realism popular in Latin American fiction - where the magic is ambiguous and never quite explained at all.

The problem is the way that Rowling uses magic.

Rowling was clearly writing mystery novels, while lifting a lot of ideas for her setting from like The Worst Witch series. She uses magic spells like a Checkhov’s gun kind of thing, usually establishing whatever magical principle will save the day earlier in the novel. With a relatively self contained story, it works really well. Prisoner of Azkaban is one of her stronger books - the way that she sets up the mystery with the time turner as well as the stuff with Sirius Black, etc - because it’s very “clean” in this way. She introduces a bunch of new elements to her world, but they are all tied around supporting her story. This is good writing.

The problem is that Harry Potter books don’t work as an overarching story. It is abundantly clear that the Horcruxes and Deathly Hallows were not planned from the beginning. Rowling got to the last two books, realized that she needed to write some kind of ending, and then completely drove her plot off the rails.

You could say because she didn’t have an established magic system, it made it easier to drive off the rails, but really, it’s more that she’s competent at writing stand alone mystery novels (which really, that’s what books 1-4 are and they’re the best in the series for it) and not larger narratives. She doesn’t know how to convey the scope of a war, she doesn’t know how to tie together an Epic fantasy.

If you like the green/iridescent, sweat bees are beautiful.

Common names for insects are very regional honestly. Ie, in my locale, we call “crane flies” “skeeter eaters.”

Or how “June bug”/“June beetle” covers hundreds of species.

Baeus are absolutely adorable though, how could anyone hate a chubby wingless wasp?

Cookoo wasps are gorgeous.

Many solitary wasp species incapacitate and lay eggs in spiders - the spider bodies make tasty snacks for the babies. If you don’t like spiders - the enemy of your enemy?

It’s really only the social wasps that are aggressive though - which makes sense. They will sting and defend their hive with their lives, because that’s where their sisters and nieces live! But all wasp species are essential. We need paper wasps for pollination - even if a Polistes sting will ruin your day.

Anecdotally, not a fan of the incest association but guys who’ve referred to me as “bro” have been excellent hookups. I do look more like The Dude though.

To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.

You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).

You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.