Also got pressured in the sub…

(I’m sorry. That was terrible. I also feel for the kid but I couldn’t pass on the pun.)

That’s hard to deal with. You are clearly an empathetic person with deep concern and care for this friend.

When dealing with grief, the best practice is to not seek solace/comfort from someone on a more inner circle of the grief (with the circles being like immediate family > close friends > extended family, and so on). Like it would be generally seen as inappropriate if a man’s wife died and her coworker went to him to process their grief.

Your friend’s ‘joke’ about murder summarizes simply how a lot of victims feel like rape is a loss of self, of personhood, in a way that parallels the loss of that in death—except the victim has to live through it and process it. So getting back to the grief circles, with rape those same circles may exist except with the survivor at the center. And it seems like you needed your own space to process the grief but you were trying to respect the circles and so you didn’t have support in that.

I’m just rambling thoughts that all mirror what you’ve said—I think I’m just trying to acknowledge what you experienced in my own words.

I hope you and your friend are more at peace now or at least on your way to it <3

I appreciate your thoughtful response and consideration of how you phrased this originally. I know you are making the point with the best of intentions in trying to ensure that the word “rape” isn’t diluted down.

I struggled for many years to move beyond my experiences of being raped. I’m in a good place now, but it took time. I generally wouldn’t say I’m suffering from it any more (even if there may be moments where I’m triggered), so I think the comment here just hit me hard.

I also know there are other victims who have gone through weird levels of guilt and self-doubt because they haven’t felt the level of suffering that’s “expected.”

We both have the same desire here, but slightly different stances on where that line should be drawn and that’s ok.

I’m responding a second time because I think this is an important point to make as a top-level response.

the suffering of a living victim is an essential part of what makes rape rape.

This is a fucked up take. This says that a rape victim must suffer, and if they aren’t suffering, then it wasn’t rape. Just, no. People process things differently. Some will be more and some will be less traumatized by being raped.

Forcing a particular experience onto a victim, saying they must feel a certain way, is just so incredibly problematic. A victim can feel whatever they feel and process a crime against them however they want. And the way they do so doesn’t change whether a crime was committed against them.

Edit: And with a very literal reading of the statement, it also says that if someone kills their victim after raping them, then it’s not rape—because there isn’t a living victim who is suffering. I’m sure that’s not what you meant, but it’s important to think about these things and how we convey them.

From the details given, it’s not clear if the person was dead or only unconscious at the time of the assault and it’s not clear whether the attacker knew either.

I’m not clear on your second point; you say that it doesn’t seem right that defendant knowledge matters in one case and not the other. So if:

1. Defendant commits arson not knowing they kill someone in the building > call it murder
2. Defendant sexually violates a body not knowing if they are dead > don’t call it rape?

It seems like not calling it rape is what would apply a double standard here based on defendant knowledge.

Our society treats bodies as an extension of a person; for example, we do not harvest organs from a body if the person didn’t consent to be an organ donor while they were alive.

Your focus on the victim’s suffering as what determines the severity of the crime seems problematic to me. If a victim doesn’t let being raped destroy their life, do we not punish the rapist as severely? We distinguish between manslaughter and murder based on pre-meditation and intent, even though the victim is still dead in both cases, and similarly I think that focusing on the attacker’s actions and intent should be the key factor in calling their actions rape.

If the defendant were going to a morgue or funeral home and defiling bodies, I may feel differently but given the timing here it feels way too grey to not treat it as rape.

FWIW, I’m coming at this conversation as a rape survivor myself. I know the level of mental devastation it can cause. And personally, I don’t think that treating the sexual assault of someone who may or may not have been dead yet (and if they were dead, had been so for no more than 30 minutes) as rape takes anything away from the severity of the crime or my experience as a victim of it.

And anyway from a semantic perspective, according to the article it is being charged only as attempted rape.

I mean, the dead can’t consent.

Also the article says “unresponsive passenger.” We know now the person was dead, but that doesn’t mean the rapist was clear on that fact at the time.

I agree with most of what you said, but you are severely overestimating the cost of t-shirts at Walmart. They start at $4 for plain or $7 for graphic tees from what I can tell. Even band tees and things like Mickey Mouse are in the $9–14 range based on a cursory glance on their site.

The problem is with receipts on thermal paper, not those printed with normal ink, so [edit: many some] receipts are not an issue any more.

If you want to tell the difference, you could try applying heat (like a hair dryer or iron) over the receipts and see which ones change color (usually turning grey or black where heated).

Once you find a few, you’ll likely get a feel for which ones are likely to be thermal paper just by looking and you can practice extra care with those. (Tip: they are usually the ones that appear a bit glossy.)

The idea that vaccines cause autism and therefore we shouldn’t give vaccines inherently implies that autism is a worse scenario than any of the diseases vaccines protect against. We have a measles epidemic killing children, and people would still prefer to not vaccinate because of a fear of autism.

If people think having a dead child is better than having an autistic child, that doesn’t bode well for autistic folks.

The other thing I’ve recently seen pointed out is that they don’t have doctors administering it. Given the doctor ethos of “do no harm,” they can’t be involved and keep their license. So it’s just a bunch of underqualified people trying to figure out what to do.

Full transparency: I haven’t fact checked this myself, but it seemed feasible when it came up so it stuck with me.

You must live in a big city and not fly a lot of places then… Flights from where I live are nearly always that size or smaller.

Fair enough on your use of air quotes!

This disease is stupid. Before my first surgery I had six tiny little lesions, like smaller than a cigarette burn. And yet they caused debilitating, near constant pain.

Small correction as one of those women: hysterectomy is rarely a cure for endometriosis. What’s necessary is a skilled surgeon fully excising every endometrial lesion, which are frequently places other than the uterus. If there are endo lesions on the uterus, it can help.

However, adenomyosis is commonly comorbid with endometriosis and can be just as painful, and the only cure for that is a hysterectomy. And the only way to actually diagnose adenomyosis is to do a biopsy on a uterus after a hysterectomy.

(I say as someone in the process of planning my second surgery for endo, with a hysterectomy this time because I don’t want babies and might also have adenomyosis.)

Thank you for taking the time to read it! The metaphor gives us a simple way to convey a big, difficult concept.

My partner and I both deal with chronic physical issues and mental issues. A common question is, “How many spoons do you have for dinner?” And it opens the door to discuss things like I might have (physical) spoons to cook, but I don’t have (mental/social) spoons to go out to get something. It still feels like a chore to figure out dinner, but it’s at least easier to talk about. (Oh, and meal prepping or cooking a large meal for a week will typically use up all my spoons for a day and sometimes more, so as nice as it would be to only need to think about it once, I just don’t have the physical capacity to do that kind of prep.)

I also work for a large corpo org here, but instead of “DEI” we have “Belonging.” Under that label we have a council that informs and recommends things to our senior leadership, groups which offer support and community (LGBTQ+, Latinx, women, etc.), and provides learning resources. Overall I’m proud of the work we do. (I’m also proud of the two of people I’ve hired internally who were chairs in Belonging groups at some point!)

A couple months ago at a large event, someone asked if we’d be getting rid of DEI. Our Chief People Officer was able to say something to the effect of, “We’ve never had a DEI program but we are committed to continuing our Belonging practices.”

So basically we’re not backtracking on anything, and we have pretty good DEI, but because we never used the term “DEI” she was able to deflect the challenge to it. I never thought about it before that happened, but it made me wonder if it was an intentional choice to avoid the buzzword and so some of the criticism that comes of it.

Anyway, cheers to you also having a safe place of work!

I got my membership as a 20-something living alone and have never regretted it. Purchasing contact solution alone made up the cost of the membership! Then if I got gas there a couple times a year I was definitely saving.

The one thing I dislike about Costco is that I have to psyche myself up to go. I hate shopping in general because it uses up a lot of spoons for me, and Costco tends to take even more. It’s usually crowded, there’s so much stuff that I typically want to wander, and then everything I buy is huge so loading up the car can be a pain. By the end my back hurts, I’m tired, and I’m sick of people.

And yet I still haven’t even considered giving up my membership in over 10 years.

The statement was 1% of the US population is watching it on any given night. Some quick searching I found the most-watched cable news show is The Five from Fox News with 3.57M viewership.

335M people in the US, so that number is actually a bit greater than 1% of the entire US population.

• 36% of eligible voters didn’t vote last year(I know this is not equally representative across all ages but I’m trying to keep it back-of-napkin)
• 60+ accounts for 24% of the population (80M people)

335M * 24% * 64% = 51.5M

If the all their viewers are >60, then about 7% of all >60 people who care about politics could be watching that one Fox News show.

That’s not quite 2/5, but it’s still significant! And again, that accounts for only 1 show’s viewership. I couldn’t find easy numbers for how many people watch Fox News in a given day or week.

Sorry, you probably don’t care but your comment made me curious.

Better resumes are good, but there are plenty of studies showing bias towards the name alone on a resume and that a white-sounding name gets more bites than names more associated with a minority race.

People have biases, conscious or not. Did you know that women’s positions in orchestras increased greatly after switching to blind auditions? And I can’t find a legit source in 2 min of searching, but there’s also been indication that the sound of high heels affects hiring outcomes even in blind auditions.

Example studies on names and hiring outcomes: 2004, 2023, 2024 (even the “best” companies still showed a 3% bias towards white candidates vs 24% for the worst), 2016

So yeah, there are a fuckton of steps to addressing systemic racism and starting early in the process is a critical step. But the narrative that an equivalent resume is all that’s needed to close the gap is false and dangerous.

Is it awful that a part of me is glad Terry Pratchett is gone and doesn’t have to face this about someone who was a friend and co-writer?

Given how progressive Pratchett’s stories were I would have a hard time believing he was a bad person or could support bad people, and I imagine this would be hard on him. Then again perhaps I’m just selfishly glad that I don’t have to know if he didn’t respond appropriately by distancing himself.

Don’t know if I’m even making sense. This is just so disheartening given how many people I know absolutely loved Gaiman.