But how would one wash the dish? Surely not with a dishwasher pod?

The point: “stop wine-ing”?

By French law, bread can only contain flour, yeast, salt, and water. Sadly, he must be cake.

Whoa, the Eat The Rich people are serious.

Anything even slightly better than the idiocy we have seems amazing to me, apparently

As an American, I have no room at all to judge this decision. But

proposals need a majority of both voters and cantons to pass.

That sounds amazing. Let’s do that, please.

I mean, straight popular vote would probably be better. But this could really do what the Electoral College stans say that it was made to do, without doing what it actually does.

Most of the birds on New Zealand are flightless, because they evolved without natural ground-based predators (they only had threats from birds of prey). Cats’ impact on the avian population is actually pretty dramatic.

Meanwhile, a significant percentage of the islands remains undeveloped. The population of the entire country is only five million, on a landmass larger than the British Isles (population 65m+). Human settlement in NZ is actually pretty light-touch, which is why a ton of movies that need lush outdoor sets are shot there.

What would be a more respectful alternative?

As I understand it, most of that group prefer “Aboriginal Australian.”

Given Australia and New Zealand’s proximity to one another on the map, it makes sense to assume that the latter was originally settled by explorers from the former; and, indeed, Aboriginal Australian people can be credibly dated back more than 50,000 years, when they were able to walk to the continent from what is now New Guinea.

But no! There’s no real archaeological sign of Aboriginal Australians (or anyone else) settling on the island that would become New Zealand until the Maori arrived from Polynesia, around 800 years ago.

I didn’t leave out a zero; human habitation on New Zealand has a history of less than a thousand years. In fact, the Maori only beat Europeans to New Zealand (which they called “Aotearoa”) by about 300 years, and archaeological records indicate that they brought invasive species with them, too. They also caused the extinction of at least two bird species before European colonization even began.

Maori are great, great people. But I don’t think that they’ve “proven [themselves] capable of co-existing with the local ecosystem” any more than the European descendants have.

(As a side note, the word “aborigines” in that part of the world carries a potentially problematic connotation. Some Aboriginal Australians see it as a holdover from that country’s colonial era.)

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.

Honestly I kinda feel like “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide” sounds more damning than just “Israel perpetrated a genocide.”

Still, Jimbo, you should probably stay out of this. Wikipedia’s whole thing is that no one person is in charge.

C. G. P. Grey’s “Rules for Rulers” is illuminating on that front, but I don’t think you mean soft power. I think you mean gangsters. And I think that most US presidents avoid such a thing by virtue of being the C in C of the biggest military on the planet. Though maybe they get a little bit of it from the Pentagon, I dunno.

I’ve been in a lot of blue collar environments in a previous career, and this is definitely something that happens. It’s not normative, but you’ll usually find a few construction companies or factories or warehouses in an area that employ a much more equally-gendered workforce.

You see, growing up in white conservative christian america, my brain has this old deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or who have different priorities in life than me and think of how stupid/worthless that makes them.

It’s so interesting to see how other people’s experiences of white conservative Christian America can be so different from mine. I have this deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or have different priorities and be curious about their choices and experiences, specifically because of my upbringing in a little country church.

In fact, I remember being cautioned to pull back on the reins a bit when I was in my “angry conservative” stage in college—back during W’s first term, when I was super far right for the time but still had beliefs that would make me a “radical lib’rul” today. Some of the people I went to church with were like, “yeah, I can see that your heart is in the right place, but you’re kinda over the top about this and this.” Most of what brought me out of that phase was meeting people who were different from me, but another part was Christian people I trusted saying, “that’s too much.”

That’s part of why I had so much cognitive dissonance when Christians started supporting Trump; it felt out of step with everything we had ever been taught as children, and even as young adults.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I (and my parents, more recently) just aren’t going to be welcomed back into that community again, because it has gone so deeply maga. But it wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

their stupidity isn’t gonna frustrate me into being like them again.

That’s a really great way to say it. I feel that way myself, though I couldn’t put it into words.

I’ve never been so insulted!

I suppose.

“Rival” is definitely the wrong word here, right? That implies that they, like, steal each others’ mascots and compete in a big football game for some dubious prize once a year. If Alabama and Auburn literally shot anyone traveling between the two of them, that’d be one thing, but this is not a “rivalry.” It’s a cold war.

He also thinks he’s smart, attractive, beloved by all Americans, and good at golf. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just thinks that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s never occurred to him that he might not deserve anything he wants, from companies to political victories to sexual conquests to accolades.

“I don’t disagree that she’s been treated inhumanely after capture while on an errand of mercy, but she hasn’t been subjected to literally every war crime” isn’t the gotcha you think it is.

Whoa. I’m American and I just discovered that I had been using that word…uh…wrong for my region but right for the rest of the world? I thought it was phonemes in general, and that the vowel thing was an archaic usage. Interesting.

I knew it wasn’t alliteration, since it isn’t all the first syllable sound. But it’s always fun to learn new stuff about the language I’ve been speaking for nearly forty years.