[Ah yes, a solid B+ troll, using the “are you all right” trope to get a rise out of me. The following would be my “rise.”]

Oh for cripes sake, can you not see I was leaning into your trolling mindset with my first bit?!! Keep fuckin moving the goalpost, y’all are good at that.

[Yes, I clearly suspended my disbelief in trying to see what exactly is legitimate under all of what you’ve said so far. It’s a fascinating occupation you’ve taken on, Professional Troll of Dubious Intent (PTODI), but if even if you actually don’t harbor these shitty thoughts against people, you are literally, actually right this moment making the entire platform of discourse shittier. I guess I should step outside my human brain and understand that some purported humans just want to watch the world burn. Sigh… Fuckin PTODIs.]

Aaaaand now I wonder if you (and your friend) are experiencing a wicked case of DID. Please consult your totally real psychologist on that for more info on how to reign in your diverging personalities. (Wouldn’t wanna have to get your lawyer involved, you know, like if your online troll personality state starts wreaking legal havoc in real life. Who would be to blame? You?! Or you?!!?!)

Serious question. And making the forgiving assumption your “friend” wasn’t just a cover story. This troll business you opened up here, do you you actually believe and stand behind what you profess?

It took me all of 90 seconds to read through your comment history and confirm you are in some kind of pain, the kind that breeds misplaced anger at the lack of stability in your own identity.

You did, however, ponder one valuable bit of insight at the end of your recent AITA post (15 days ago) regarding your wife quitting her job and her not listening to you. Please follow your instinct here. Please do be open to your wife about going your separate ways.

Real talk, she will be better off without you. You act as if she’s holding you back, all the while it sounds like she’s been holding you up. It seems you are the one holding both of you back, and projecting this financial and identity instability onto others is illustrative of your own issues.

You don’t seem like a legitimate troll. You seem like you’re fighting for your own identity and you’re projecting your frustrations by asserting other people are deluded in knowing who they are and somehow insane for wanting a modicum of human respect. Yet I think you and many, many others like you, are those truly struggling.

I think you are currently showing a lack of respect to others because, deep down, you don’t respect yourself. And that is not okay. Needing and seeking help and direction from others, including mental health professionals, is not a blue-haired liberal thing, it’s a human thing. Please consider it.

Nobody seems to like you here, Mister Bias Bot…

I must admit, I am a bit high right now, but I tittered heartily at your lighthearted turnabout, and then my mind, well, now it’s blown, because I now must ask… Does any particular ethnicity or racial identity have a statistically significantly higher birth rate than any and all other identity groups simply because, and with all other factors controlled for, they find themselves and people like them just so irresistibly sexy that they can’t help but have the sexy sex with each other, and because they are both so damn sexy they can’t even right now, and “we’re having sex can’t you see” and ask you to come back later to ask your weird sex questions???

Any particular one? … Anyone?

When you said “check for [spy] bugs,” I first thought you meant literal insecty bugs, and that made plenty of rational sense to me, because who wouldn’t come back with even more potent insecticide to douse those couches, maybe some Super-Potent Fabric-Penetrable Bug Annihilator, one formulated for Previously Penetrated Couches, in order to kill the very particular kinds of creepy crawly bugs that JD seems like he carries around on his creepy crawly body.

You know, I’ve been thinking … There’s gotta be another layer of complexity in all that projection vectored through his hating on “childless cat ladies” nonsense, other than the obvious “I’m scared of happily independent women” business.

Fleas. I’m thinking he has fleas. JD Vance has fleas. You know, because something, something, cats.

Bed bugs would also make sense. Him fucking furniture and all. Bed bugs are, after all, the herpes of the craft couch-coitus world.

I think maybe it’s both? Too harsh of sentences (in some cases or jurisdictions) might contribute to a general police mindset which “conflates” the legal repercussions of rape with murder. This leads to or reinforces victim-shaming questions like, “do you really want to ruin their life over this?”

The rule of law and law enforcement need to strike a better balance in both directions I think.

And not to mention tough for their UNDERAGE CHILDREN!!!

^/s

I get where you’re coming from, and you make a point with “deplorable” being meme-ified into some twisted identity thing. But I also think the collective “basket of deplorables” doesn’t apply here. Harris isn’t calling Trump supporters weird; she’s calling just him weird.

This does a few things: it keeps the focus on Trump, allowing supporters to distance themselves from the statement. The lack of attachment to any particular action, statements, belief, etc. lets a person think about it “nakedly.” Why is he weird?

Yes, we both know why, but this flips the script from the last 10 years from “here are various reasons why Trump is horrifying and could also be considered weird” to “Trump is weird, I’ll let you chew on that.”

It’s all in the delivery. Stating what he is without explaining why.

I think it’s worth returning a bit of agency to people in general to assess how they feel about that statement and come to their own conclusions. Edit: Especially because many of these people have attached themselves to Trump because they feel they have no agency otherwise. Could this be a means to cracking through the brainwashed masses? Something akin to, “wait, why am I idolizing this guy again?” Wishful thinking, yes, but being"plain weird" is such a broadly sweeping generalization that something should organically pop up in trump supporters’ brains, without our prompting.

The following was initially part of a reply to another person:

Maybe the simple, gentle, “everyday” language here is truly the point? There are so many things to attack about Trump, so many legitimate concerns for his fascist, racist, sexist, ad nauseum behaviors. We’ve heard it all before. But simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters while obviously delivering a shock to Trump’s vanity.

It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.

Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with.

It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird and how you should deal with it. It prickles something very basic in the human psyche. So I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.

Maybe your annoyance (understandable) is part of the point? There are so many things to attack, so many legitimate concerns, that simply calling him weird could spark a little reflection in his supporters and would-be voters, let alone the obvious shock to Trump’s vanity.

It’s not something you can easily deny as a conspiracy theory or fake news or any other excuse about his words and behavior. The man is weird. And psychologically, I think it’s harder to defend a person described that way, or at least makes a defender get a little self-conscious. Trump being deemed weird is really indefensible, and I think it could work in deflating the cult of personality around him.

Not everyone can identify maniacal dictator rhetoric for what it is, and the power dynamic is clearly alluring to Trump supporters. However, knowing a weird person or even being called weird at some point is something almost everyone has experience with. It’s uncomfortable. It makes you ask yourself what it is about a person that makes them weird. I think they’re on to something here. It might give supporters pause and will most definitely give Trump a complex.

Thanks for the link! The prudent thing would be for me to just not donate monetarily. As you said, no sense in jeopardizing my situation over what would maybe be $100.

As far as I can tell, political activity outside the building in which I work should be fine as a contractor employee and not a directly hired government employee. Maybe I can just offer to shuttle people to/from polling locations when the time comes!

I got the email at work this afternoon, and boy did I let out a sigh, not so much in relief, but in hope. Good for you for finishing your presidency on top, Biden. I hope he, Harris, and their staff are seeing the (general) commendation in communities like this. I really hope we can rally people to get behind Harris; I think it will be so much less of an uphill battle now to get the indifferent and the disillusioned and the “but they’re both old” voters out there with confidence.

I was holding back on donating, but I want to pitch in now. Does anyone know if you can donate as an employee of a federal contractor (i.e. I don’t hold the contract or a subcontract, I get paid by the contractor like any other employee, but my badge does say “contractor”). I can’t find a confirmatory answer online, and I don’t want to make a compromising donation since “not a federal contractor” is a requirement in the ActBlue fine print.

I had just opened my Max app for some Saturday night distraction when I saw CNN Newsroom suggested front and center, with the description “…the rally where President Trump was injured.”

This is terrifying on so many levels. At this point, it doesn’t matter who wins the election; the stage is completely set for violence come November.

I haven’t found any active comment threads on this yet, and I don’t even want to entertain the inevitable conspiracy theories and possible acts of retribution that will rise after this attempt, so I’ll leave it at this: I would be utterly shocked if “Donnie Van Gogh” memes don’t exist yet.

And it sounds like you are still overlooking all of the qualifiers and nuance in my nonscholarly, inebriated statements. In neither post did I assert “society is not racist.”

Exactly, that’s why I qualified that statement with the terms “generally” across the globe and also distinguished being plainly racist (which I view as hate because of race itself, stereotypes at individual level) from racism that seems to primarily precipitate from fears of or for the state (hate because of the larger stereotyped idealogies or propaganda of that person’s race, whether or not an individual espouses them).

I am not Black, this is true. I primarily worked my hypothesis out from a purportedly Chinese person saying they wouldn’t trust the hiring of people from China. Now, their comment does seem to have a racist component. I don’t know to what levels internalized racism is related to geopolitical fears, but if we consider that this Chinese person is likely not racist to themselves, e.g. hating their individual attributes, we can assume that they are not wary of the Chinese person for being Chinese. Their mistrust in the state makes them so wary they can’t even be supportive of hiring people from China, in what I assume is the US. It seems like racism is only secondary to the primary fear of the state (or some geopolitical facet), the racism coming from a position of self-preservation rather than overt hate of the race.

Fear is going to be the death of us.

Also, I am high and pretty sure I just took the scenic route in describing xenophobia. Shit tits.

This is actually really fascinating to me, the idea that citizenship/nationality is a bigger factor in how you feel and that race isn’t a key factor. It tells me maybe society (globally, generally) is getting less plainly racist, but anxieties around nationality (and what that could indicate about individual attitudes and intentions) is obviously rising and taking its place, so racism ends up being obliquely adjacent to the more direct fear of the state. In other words, general society is making progress with being comfortable with people of different races, whereas country of origin becoming more worrying and slowing down progress.

What a strange disconnect there. We don’t fear individuals, we fear what they represent.

(I ate a gummy an hour ago tho sooooo I feel like I’m just stating the obvious so … Maybe?)

Alright, so I quite literally haven’t stepped foot into Walmart since June of 2015. The only money I’ve given them since was for two grocery pick-ups during early COVID when it was in a 5% cashback category on my CC. I have no idea of what changes have been made in the physical stores since then, and this sounds … Horrifying. What happens if the price changes before you check out? I would feel duped. Are they going to make you “check in” when you enter so they can give you the price at time of entry? Or are you SOL if you don’t make it to the cash register in time? And wouldn’t that extra rush to get out make them lose money on stuff you pick up wandering around? Or maybe they want you in and out as fast as possible. What a clusterfuck.

I do love telling people about my Walmart-less living when it suits the conversation, and 90% of the time they are shocked, absolutely flabbergasted. “How can you do that?! Where do you get all of your stuff?!?” Well, like many middling American cities home to at least 20,000 people, there is a Target, Walgreens, a regional grocery store, Maurices, and for some reason like 12 auto parts stores right down the street. I can’t recall anything in Walmart, aside from exclusive clothing brands (if you can call them that), that I haven’t found elsewhere in at least some quantity-per-package. I get that people want a one-and-done shopping experience, but besides my routine Aldi stops, I don’t shop that much anymore, even online.

My reasons? I would like to say that I am boycotting them for paying shit wages, being viciously anti-union, and all the other ethical shortcomings that never seem to improve. And that definitely is a part of it. But the main reason, the one setting me on my path toward Walmart Recovery (I should start up a Wal-Anon) was from the experience I had the night I needed to buy a broom, my last night or day in that store.

It was somewhere between 11 and 1 am (definitely after 11) and I had just moved house into a… House. (I was in an apartment previously.) The place needed a serious cleaning, and I simply did not have the correct broom for the job. Picked out the broom and a few other cleaning things, all was well. But shortly before checking out, a group of rowdy youngsters in their late teens sidled by me, laughing about something while also eyeballing my cart with the broom and other boring household accoutrements. I was but 23. I guess I hadn’t shaken the adolescent anxiety of feeling judged about appearances and actions at that point, but the thought that these slightly younger peers were making fun of my broom shopping was too much to bear.

“Oh my gawd, who buys a broom on a Friday night?? Get a life, ya loser.”

“I did. I did get a life! I’m moving on up, bitches! I went from a 500 sqft apartment to an 800 sqft house with fuckin windows on all sides! I can put plants in every room, every nook and tiny-ass cranny! And I can bring my cat! And if that damn house of mine needs a broom at midnight, then my gods, I am going to go out and fucking GET ONE.”

Anyway, that’s my story about how I broke up with Walmart. DM me for requests to join Wal-Anon, we have plenty of seats for everybody! (The room will be free of any and all Mainstays furnishings and the coffee will be served sans Great Value cups, I assure you.)

Just an FYI, although they aren’t physical products like this Roku, many apps and digital services have added the very same binding arbitration clauses recently.

The McDonald’s app for one. I ended up deleting the app after it tried to force me into binding arbitration and I didn’t want to go through to opt-out process for marginally cheaper, shitty food, so I just deleted the app altogether and haven’t eaten there since November.

Watch out for it if you drive for doordash or ubereats as well. I opted out of both, although they claimed you couldn’t opt out in an new contract when you didn’t before (a bunch of BS, if the current contract you are about to sign says it supercedes all others, you can’t make the lack of an opt-out on a previous contract hold up).

On-going services might make sense for these shitty enough clauses, but to be strong armed into it for physical product you bought free and clear … Disgusting.

It’s like all these companies are locking themselves down to minimize legal exposure because they know that their services and products are getting more awful or something.

Unfortunately there are young fucks (relatively) who do the same damn thing. In re: Kristi Noem, SD gov (if anyone hasn’t heard of her, she’s a potential running mate for Trump, and hasn’t paid an ounce of attention to her state since she was sworn in, in 2019). She flipped out when SD passed their recreational measure in 2020 and had the state supreme court overrule it with an incredibly flimsy argument essentially saying the measure wasn’t valid in the ballot as written (the state’s fault really, or was that “oversight” some kind of conspiracy?). Went against the majority, in a state where 2/3 of voters are Republican, forfeited millions in easy tax revenue, all to reject the will of the people simply because she doesn’t like it.

Party of small government and freedom, eh? Her words are like her lips: bloated and fake, fully ingenuine.