lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.
Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.
“Retiring” and “resigning” are different things. He may have been near retirement age, but the statement he made makes it clear this was a resignation for a cause. With a good reason.
Quit framing the war as the cause. From the article:
A spokesperson for the UN in New York sent the Guardian a statement about Mokhiber, saying: “I can confirm that he is retiring today. He informed the UN in March 2023 of his upcoming retirement, which takes effect tomorrow. The views in his letter made public today are his personal views.”
So he informed the UN in March 2023 that he wanted to step down and now he did it.
Maybe tell that to the government who spent billions on a rail line that doesn’t even deliver on what it was designed for. In the mean time thousands of acres of irreplaceable countryside has been destroyed, including internationally protected wildlife sites, ancient woodlands and legally protected sites of special scientific interest. The only people prospering from this white elephant are the Tory party and HS2.
Uh.... what? No. Biden failed fucking miserably. Our economy is about to literally crash because off his failure to address this. Not to mention THIS IS HIS FAULT! When he was a congressman, he created the legislature that made student loans unforgivable if you declared bankruptcy. From that day forward, college tuition skyrocketed. He is solely and directly responsible. This dude is a lying scumbag in orders of magnitude.
i don’t think “solely” (he alone) is correct, given the myriad problems with how the USA funds higher education: he may have contributed to 1 of many problems
also “about to literally crash because of” is a stretch and a half when there’s a war going on, the aftermath of a global pandemic, and the various other issues that have cropped up in the last few years
being hyperbolic doesn’t help move discussion forward; in fact often it will put people off-side because they assume the underlying facts are bogus
There are reasons to do with the history of this particular literary form, as well. It may be that, for a number of fair reasons, women are allowed to denigrate men in print, but not the other way around. “I think some of the things I get away with saying about men would seem a bit gross from guys, because of the obvious power imbalance,” Annie Lord, British Vogue’s dating columnist, told me. Women can write about dating because on a heterosexual date, society generally accepts that women are the underdogs.
Perhaps the presumption that the same privileges equally translate to different contexts plays a part. I don’t see any “fair reasons” listed here. I see a group that is allowed to say negative things about one, and another that is shut down for the same thing (but that they have fair reasons to be allowed to). Maybe nobody should be denigrating anyone and it is just, in itself, unfair to denigrate others?
On any dating advise site/community I don’t exactly see women as the “underdogs” with regard to support and who is ‘right’ in any given situation. The first examples that come to mind are reddits dating advice and “AITA” subs where I’ve seen more than enough examples of the old “switching genders completely changed people’s opinions” posts to not feel comfortable there.
Maybe nobody should be denigrating anyone and it is just, in itself, unfair to denigrate others?
I think this is a fair point and we should really avoid denigrating everyone. However, ignore any differences between any of the genders and their assumed roles is not helpful. There are differences we just need to recognize that one isn't better or more correct than the other.
P.S. the AITA subs are always kind of a mess. Especially with people justifying their terrible behavior.
AITA is garbage because it isn’t about finding the best course of action but about whether you can pretend that your behaviour is justified, which is not helpful.
However, ignore any differences between any of the genders and their assumed roles is not helpful.
This is part of what I was saying in the first bit. There are absolutely differences in genders that should be recognized and respected. But context is key. Assuming women are the “underdogs in heterosexual dating” that does not translate to talk about dating. In the context of dating advice and online discussions about relationships, I very much disagree that women are underdogs. But the author is using this, presumably, to support the prior sentence’s argument that women can “fairly” denigrate men in print for this reason.
But also, we’re not talking about dating, we’re talking about sex, and women are the definite underdogs when it comes to sex, or at least casual sex. The stats on who gets to orgasm through casual sex are just abysmal for heterosexual women… Maybe we all would benefit from sex columns for men more than we’d like to admit.
The amount of false info around, " it’s just much harder for women to orgasm" and " a lot of women simply cannot orgasm no matter what" is pretty easily disproven by orgasm rates in homosexual female couples, which leads me to believe it’s the men in the equation that lead to women having trouble orgasming, not some inevitability.
And this is all women are clear underdogs in sex before you even touch on the difference in dangers to men v women with sex /sexual violence/ coersion
Are you suggesting that those are valid reasons that “women [should be] allowed to denigrate men in print”? Because that’s the thing I was talking about.
I am a professor as several different schools in France (business, notarial studies, agricultural engineers, communication). I would day 95% of my students are from well-to-do families. But, most of them are required to find paid internships. The notary students usually get unpaid internships.
As an internship advisor, I can confirm one thing: paid or not, they put in the hours and take the same crap as a paid employee. Sometimes it is worse. For example, if an intern is absent from work, the message gets to me, and I send it up the chain of command and sometimes parents get involved. It is stressful for the students. My business students get paid internships (about €1400/month) but still need help from their parents and many of them will be doing something they don’t really want to do (think finance instead of marketing).
Now, being a professor I am in contact with a rather large network of of profs spanning the private and public sector… My colleagues from the public sector are worried about this looming change to laws. It would lead to an overhaul of the system as the internship is counted as a credit. If it is decided that they should be paid, how many companies will want to pay when they can just hire a part-timer for the summer?
This shocked me as well because my parents weren’t involved with my work or education after finishing high school.
In France, this is not the case. The majority of people are supported by their parents until the end of secondary education, especially when it comes to my students who are all in private institutions.
It is extremely rare for a student to have a job, for example.
Parents do get involved for even minor things, and will come stomping into the school flanked by a lawyer.
Why would they be involved?
Because they pay. That’s all.
Now, university is practically free and lots of students get a bursary (not a loan) to help them along. But, their parents will still pay rent sometimes because a full-time student with a job is seen as the most amazing thing here.
I will often bring up this stark contrast to how when I was a student I had 4 different jobs and still ended my studies 60k in debt and didn’t even see my parents during the school year, let alone get any money from them.
I am french too and while my parents do pay for my studies they are never directly involved. Maybe it’s a school difference but I find this so weird, because I am in a public faculté
If I remember correctly, my teachers were saying that they were legally restricted from sharing informations to student’s parents emailing them.
theguardian.com
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