For better or for worse, her name and her connection to RFK junior gives her a platform. She is leveraging this, in combination with her terminal cancer diagnosis, to criticise someone who is actively undermining public health. I think that’s a pretty admirable thing to do, and as long as there are assholes like RFK jr fucking things up, criticism of them is important, whatever the source.

That’s a cool way of thinking about it.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with a friend the other day. I was trying to ascertain whether other people experience mild, easily dismissable intrusive thoughts, as I do. It feels weird to call them intrusive thoughts if they’re easily dismissed — I feel like that phrase better describes thoughts that stick around and cause distress due to not going away. What I experience is fairly frequent thoughts that are like “imagine if you did [awful thing]”, and then I mentally reply “yes, that would indeed be awful, which is why I have no interest in doing that”, and then I’m fine.

I like your framing of it as self check diagnostics. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that feels like an accurate description of what goes on internally for me.

Not all memory foams are equal. I’ve found that quality makes a huge difference. Unfortunately, the good stuff can get pretty pricey. It sounds like you’re talking about memory foam insoles, and I know that a lot of those tend to be the rubbish kind

That’s so funny. I feel ridiculous enough owning one (the reason I own it was because I went to a weird university where fancy white-tie events were common and most students probably went to at least one of those in their time there. )

“Any attempt to quantitative measure intelligence is pro eugenics.”

Oh definitely, I’m with you on that, 100%. Regardless, it’s not productive to just accuse people of being eugenicists when it’s infinitely more likely that they weren’t aware of how problematic it is to frame intelligence in the way they did.

I’m firmly of the belief that far more important than any seemingly innate intelligence is the support and opportunities for learning that we have access to. It sounds like this is in line with what you think also. That in mind, I hope you can see why your initial comment wasn’t helpful towards anyone learning.

IQ is borne out of an ideology in which there is a class of special people, who should do all the thinking, and everyone else, who should just be mindless drones. Rejecting that ideology means reckoning with the fact that our thinking and reasoning capacities depend massively on our circumstances — and our ability to grow is limited by not knowing what we don’t know. For me, recognising that we’re all equal in all the ways that count means that I feel a duty to facilitate people having access to opportunities to learn and grow. I’m not saying that you should feel obligated to explain complex topics to people who you don’t know will even be receptive, but I am saying that the least you could do is avoid lowering the quality of the discourse.

I initially took the time to reply to you because although your comment was hostile and unnecessary, I have enough background knowledge on the topic to guess that you’re someone who is well-informed and principled. Indeed, it sounds like your views here are quite similar to my own. You could’ve written a comment that might’ve usefully challenged the person you replied to, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to see that.

That’s overly harsh and a not very good faith comment to make. I agree that mentions of IQ is often a red flag due to its association with the eugenics movement, and even if we try to extricate it from that, it’s not even a particularly effective measure of intelligence. However, the regrettable fact is that IQ has become so embedded within pop culture that it’s not reasonable to assume a random commenter is a eugenicist for referencing it.

If you wanted to highlight these pernicious aspects of IQ, and how using it in common parlance like this perpetuates eugenicist ideas (even if we don’t mean to), then I’d be jazzed to see that kind of perspective. Alas, your comment as it is now isn’t really adding to the conversation.

Yeah, I think you’re right. Trump is a dumbass in almost all respects, but he is pretty good at reading and playing to a crowd.

If I punched you, that would be assault.

If I hit you with a hammer, that would be assault with a weapon.

If I stood beside you with a hammer and did not harm you at all, then I have not committed any crime.

No-one is going to be charged with crimes they didn’t commit because of this. Classifying them as a weapon is only relevant for cases in which they were actively used to commit sexual assault, much the same way that a hammer only counts as a weapon if I assault you with it.

Though I understand why you came away with the impression you did — I am often exasperated at weird drug laws that are overly prohibitive and often unscientific in how they criminalise relatively low risk drugs, which meant that I also initially had the same reading of this news as you did. Fortunately, it seems that this is not an example of one of those silly drug laws, but an actually sensible measure.

Exactly. Money buys breathing space, and that’s essential for actually building things to be happy about in one’s life

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Man, this is fucked up.

Good luck with your company. That sounds like a lot of pressure. I’m glad that you have a few more years of buffer room, and I hope that you’re able to look after yourself in the meantime; I know how easy it is to burn out when you’re trying to run your own business.

Wise person. I got good at sharpening, and I ended up monetising it as a hobby, which I inevitably regretted

I got good at sharpening because I had a bunch of weirdly shaped knives, like this saddler’s round knife

I love it when accessibility features like this are embedded into the environment in a manner that’s functionally invisible to most people. So much design expertise goes into our built environment that most of us aren’t at all aware of.

The 99% invisible podcast comes to mind — they look at things like this (it’s not specifically about accessibility, but rather design more generally)

I saw a bunch of projected signs like this in Finland that were used for marking bike paths. Projections mean that the markings are still visible even in thick snow (I saw a few people cycling through knee deep snow. Finns are absolute madlads, even by Nordic standards). They’re useful because even when paths are cleared (which was impressively thorough — the vast majority of paths had been ploughed)

Stuff like this is why I love travelling — I’d have never thought of the issue that regular snow would cause for road markings, nor would I have thought to solve it like this.

Whenever I see that happen, I think “wow, thanks for showing why this community needs that rule in the first place”. If dudes were more chill about women trying to build their own spaces, then perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary to have such a hard rule.

I think the lesson was that the holocaust was bad because it was against Jews, rather than it being bad because it was a fucking genocide

Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.

"taint’ is an informal word for the perineum

Because they’re in solidarity with their own class interests. No doubt that there are a bunch of elected officials who would feature in the Epstein files if they were released in full, but even those that wouldn’t still have a vested interest in stabilising the current order. Doing this sets a precedent that even if consequences come for some, they will be protected.

Not every elected representative is a corrupt asshole, but I’d wager it’s the majority. Some of them probably even think they’re acting benevolent in acting to reinforce and protect their own power.

The system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as intended.