Might I suggest volunteering for a while at a women’s shelter? That hardened my stance on tolerating male fee-fees quite a bit.

There’s just a lot of words that have entirely lost meaning and are mere verbal tics used to identify a tribe. “Leftist.” “Feminist.” “Woke.” “Liberal” (in the American sense of the term). But also: “Fascist.” “Nazi.” Even “racist” often.

While sometimes these are still used in ways that have their actual meaning, mostly they’re just a way of saying “I don’t like you and I identify as <X> tribe”.

Almost. Yes. Almost.

I call this the “immigrant effect” based on Canadian immigrant waves.

The single loudest voice against new immigration in Canada is, of course, conservative white folk. That’s just a given. But very close in line to them are … immigrants. And I don’t mean just the children of immigrants, I mean the people who actually immigrated.

As an example, I have a very dear friend in Canada who is a Russian Jew. His family fled persecution by the Soviets to Italy, and then while in Italy as refugees, finally emigrated to Canada when this friend was 14.

Now you think with the hardship they’d faced, the family would be understanding of and supportive of immigrants and refugees. You would think wrong, however. While my friend is, both of his (refugee, immigrant) parents are firmly opposed to each and every immigrant group that came after them. They opposed Iraqi immigrants. Somali immigrants. You name the group that came after them, they opposed it. All using the same language that was used by the conservative white folk against them when they were the refugees.

Privilege is a powerful drug that hooks you rather quickly. DEI beneficiaries are just following an old, old pattern in a slightly new sphere.

Mentioning women in a non-sexual context is as instant a downvote magnet as is mentioning China in anything but a negative light.

Watch this comment get downvoted for both now. 🤣

Does being accused of “writing off half of humanity” and “driving them into the manosphere” because I say women need to be wary around men count? Because if so, yes. Right here in this community.

I have had dozens of scotch samples over the years from the kinds of people who, like you, insist that I’ve just “never had the good stuff”. The range of prices has been from bottom-shelf as you said to stuff that there’s no way in Hell I could ever afford.

I hated them all.

Is it really that hard to comprehend that sometimes people just don’t like what you like? I’m getting a lot of this vibe from scotch fans here:

and I’ve personally warned about the problem for almost 20 years.

You and me both. 😟 Even as I was hearing the jackboots marching closer and closer from around the corner, friends would tell me that I was overreacting and overthinking things. Friends who are now panicking because they’re somewhere that can be actually hurt by the USA tearing itself apart from within (Canada).

Statistics show that around 84% of repetitive tasks and transactions can be automated across 200 government services

Whose statistics? Reviewed by whom?

I’ll need citations here, complete with methodology, questionnaires used, if any, and the raw data. Oh, and did you do a literature search to see if someone has already assessed and found wanting the conclusions of this purported study? I don’t want to reinvent the wheel after all.

Or, as is far more likely, did you find a “statistic” that suited your bias and stick with it?

Is anybody at all genuinely surprised that Kaptain Ketamine is a hypocrite?

I’ll bet you he’d also fire anybody who tested positive for ketamine…

There was once a business facing problems that negatively impacted them.

“I know,” said the CEO. “Let’s use AI!”

Now they have two problems that negatively impact them.

Why believe either?

Trump and Musk and that entire coterie was never the cause of the USA’s problems. They’re symptoms of the problems.

This “race to the bottom” is called “risk management”. When literally one person in four of your social group has been attacked by men, only an idiot assumes good faith when faced with men.

This is not saying that all men are bastards. This is not saying that all men should be jailed (as some very extreme 2nd generation feminists said once). This is saying that you absolutely must be very careful when dealing with men. Let’s look at the payouts, shall we?

• He’s Not A Bastard + You Trust = Possibly good things.
• He’s A Bastard + You Trust = Violent injury or death. (Yours.)
• He’s Not A Bastard + You Don’t Trust = He gets miffed.
• He’s A Bastard + You Don’t Trust = You’ve got an edge in escaping violence. (Or reversing it.)

Me? Personally? I’m very averse to violent injury and/or death. That’s kind of the -♾ payout that basically overrides all others. And when one in four of my sisters have already experienced this outcome, you can’t even say that the probability is low. Any strange man (and, tragically, often even those you think you know) is a potentially violent thug with a game-ending outcome in the game theory analysis. Suspicion and assumption of bastardry until proved otherwise is a survival strategy.

And men who are really allies? They get this. They understand that the woman’s calculus of navigating the world around them is very different from the man’s. (And let’s not even start down the path of what happens to the sisters who are trans.) And while maybe it may grate on them a little, they’re not going to start whining about it except possibly to their closest SOs, etc.

The men who do whine? The men who use this, and I can’t stress this enough, survival strategy as an excuse to go the direction of the Tates or down the MRA/PUA/Incel/whatever rabbit hole? They never were allies. They never will be allies. And they can rot in Hell.

writing off half the human race seems like the wrong approach

Nobody is writing them off, FFS! As strident as I am about this (again, for emphasis) survival strategy, I have an SO that I have been together with since 2003. Before that I dated. I partied. I met men and enjoyed their company.

But one in four. One. In. Four.

You can bet that my eye is on the exits and my knife is not far from my grasp.

Perhaps the CD is theoretically capable of better. In practice, however, it seems they don’t use that capacity (which leads me to suspect that “in theory, theory and praxis are the same; in praxis, …”.

I don’t have the technical chops to assess this. What I have are ears. And those ears tell me that actual physical CDs that I have held in my hand and put into a good sound system myself sound … well, sound perfectly fine for most music. It’s just some outliers (like the aforementioned “Firth of Fifth”) that sound far better on vinyl than any CD pressing I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never seen a CD that can produce bass that you feel rather than hear. I have seen vinyl that pulls it off. I suspect there’s something intrinsic to the formats that causes this.

If there were channels available to, my money would be going to them annually in a subscription. So no argument here.

A woman crossed the street to not walk on the sidewalk where he was waiting for a bus. […] But then he asked how different would that be if he crossed to street if a black person was waiting for the bus? I’ll be honest I didn’t have an answer for him. […] What’s different?

I have a difference right here: a rather sizable fraction of women experience violence at the hands of men. A very small fraction of people in the USA experience violence at the hands of black people.

A study performed by Statistics Canada put the number of women over the age of 16 who’ve experience violence at the hands of men at 50%. Now this study had some very deep flaws in the interpretation so take that number with a huge grain of salt. Statistics Canada being, however, a respected organization for statistical information (until Unka Steve gutted it about a decade and a half ago at lest) had its questionnaire, its methodology, and its raw data available for acquisition.

And me being the obsessed lunatic that I am acquired it all. And went over the numbers and methodology with a fine-toothed spork. Once I found the biggest flaw (conflating everything from a single shove once in their life after the age of 16 to aggravated and repeated sexual violence as “violence against women” and being put into the pool), I recalculated the number with just the violence that was any kind of assault, sexual or otherwise, that resulted in bodily harm.

And even there that number was shockingly high. It was just a hair under 24%. One woman in four, basically, had experienced some form of violence from men that could have been a court case with a jail sentence.

One. In four.

Look around you, wherever you are right now. Count the number of women in sight. Divide that by four. In Canada at least that’s how many of them have experienced violence from men. (Actionable violence, note, punishable by detention in a penitentiary.) Count the number of women in this community. Divide that by four. That’s how many of us here in this community have done so. (And the rest who weren’t so unlucky as to have experienced the violence almost certainly know several who have.)

Now I personally don’t have access to any studies’ raw data for acts of violence committed by blacks against non-blacks, but I have a very deep suspicion that this number is nowhere near 25% of white people, or even just white guys.

That’s the difference right there. Most women have either been assaulted by a man or know someone who has. Most white guys do not have similar experiences, direct or vicarious, with black guys. That’s why it’s racist to cross the street when a white guys sees a strange black guy, but not necessarily sexist to cross the street when a woman sees a strange man. (And also why it’s the bear, duh.)

I thought the “it’s not all men” response is sort of the classic incel defense?

It is indeed. It’s the “defense” of people who are convinced they’re “nice guys” and don’t understand why women are keeping away from them. It’s why I just reject the #NotAllMen crowd, no matter where they come from. The actual nice guys (instead of the incel “nice guys”) fully understand memes like “Man or Bear” and this one.

Survival.

It gets obnoxiously hot and humid here, see. 😅

I did that a while back too. It’s remarkably liberating.