Correlating ear-piercing with decapitation, and holding a picket in front of “Forever 21” with a big sign that reads “STOP MURDERING CHILDREN” and a picture of a tunnel drill going through a baby’s forehead.
Circumcised men compared with uncircumcised men have also been shown in clinical trials to be less likely to acquire new infections with syphilis (by 42%), genital ulcer disease (by 48%), genital herpes (by 28% to 45%), and high-risk strains of human papillomavirus associated with cancer (by 24% to 47% percent)
Which, particularly back in the 60s-90s period, was a bfd given the stigma around contraception and other genital protection measures. Significantly less so now when condoms are so readily available. But even then…
It’s a non-issue but people have to be mad for something I guess (because there’s no other big reasons to be mad/s).
It does feel like people are looking for something to fixate on as a rabble-rousing issue that’s a-political-ish. But the loudest anti-circumcision advocates tend to have truly awful surrounding politics. It feels like a… trojan issue.
I’ve seen people lose their shit over babies with pierced ears and young children getting tattoos. There’s all sorts of dental work you go through as a kid that you have functionally no control over.
Even had someone chew me out because a foster kid I was taking care of got a haircut (three years old and she’d literally never had one before).
At some point, it is the parent’s duty to take care of the child, and that extends to medical decisions with profound long-term consequences. I get wanting to change the culture, but the degree to which people exaggerate the harm of circumcision struggles to eclipse the degree to which it is defended.
Cutting off your legs also makes them easier to clean.
There is some substantive utility to legs that doesn’t extend to the bit of flesh around the tip of your dick.
When the marketing department is more important to a company than the customer support.
The marketing department is easier to integrate with AI. Those stupid customer support folks have to actually think about the problem and determine a working solution, rather than regurgitating a random assembly of buzzwords and spicy graphics.
I have seen the amount paid in property taxes in USA via Zillow and… It is HUGE
A snake eating its own tail. Lenders keep cranking out cheap loans, inflating the money supply. Buyers keep bidding up prices, inflating the cost of housing. Municipal governments need the extra cash to fight the endless “crime wave” that mysteriously crests every election cycle, so they’re always ratcheting up their spending for larger and more comically overequipped police departments. And then we’ve got another big economic downturn, so its time to lower interest rates and send out a new wave of cheap loans.
Nobody can afford to have housing prices go down. Just look at what that did to the economy in 2008.
Cause enterprieses and billionaires don’t pay taxes and cause they put their huge capitals also in real estate, raising the prices.
The threat of capital flight (which would leave you with a large number of unpaid and extremely irate police officers) means you can’t risk upsetting the ultra-wealthy.
And besides, their job isn’t to pay taxes, its to create jobs. They employ people in your town and then the employees pay the taxes. The employees get to see their housing prices rise, so they grumble but don’t complain too much. And then you have more money to hire more cops to protect against the latest Crime Wave that just so happens to be paired with a wave of housing foreclosures from lay-offs. So its time to clear the streets, re-list the houses at a higher price, and issue new mortgages with another wave of subprime loans.
If you really want to spice things up, maybe we denominate all our accounts in bitcoin, so we can really start speculating.
Vomiting into the toilet with zen tranquility, because I understand why seven tequilas was a mistake and am simply undergoing the aftermath of my decision.
Staring down the barrel of a gun and experiencing perfect serenity because the universe is beyond my control.
Strapped to a chair and having my fingers tenderized with a meat mallet, but its okay, because all my available decisions have been made.
Literally on fire, but this is fine, because there’s nothing around to put me out.
one of them screams about something that doesn’t matter
I mean, one of the challenges of child care is having empathy for kids who are still struggling to regulate their emotions. If you’re openly dismissive and adversarial to kids, their behavior tends to get worse over time.
There are plenty of people who simply aren’t mature enough, themselves, to know how to interact with children. That’s one big reason why its helpful to have large extended family homes. Grandparents - particularly those who are retired, experienced, and nostalgic for parenthood - can be way better at dealing with little kids than adults who are themselves too emotionally congested and socially anxious to know how to respond.
But people routinely overstate how difficult child care can be, in large part because they fixate on the grumpy and frustrated children while suffering total blindness towards the happy, well-adjusted, and well-behaved kids.
Its a grueling slog in a good state and a fucking nightmare in a bad one. My experience with the Texas adoption system has me convinced that the entire agency is run by a collection of sadists. Feels like it exists just to traumatize people further.
There are few things sweeter than sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to a clean, quiet house.
Waking up early, making pancakes for a couple of gleeful little munchkins, and then going out to the park to run around and have fun is one of those things you forget you used to love doing when you were younger.
The differences are heavily overstated, primarily as a means of dismissing native people as “primitive” and necessarily subservient to the arriving colonists. The main difference with the Cherokee was simply geographic. They lived in land not heavily settled until later in the colonization process and had more time to acclimate to western legal norms. It didn’t save them, but it gave them these neat little anecdotes that we can pretend made them “some of the good ones”.
The Cherokee, famously, were perfectly happy to leave Georgia and Florida on the grounds that “Hey its not like we really recognize a claim to the land you guys can just have it” and never once contested the confiscation of land, much less by taking it all the way to the Supreme Court and winning an unenforceable injunction against their forced removal.