I did my part, I yelled at the truck driver.

I still feel bad about when I caught a ban for trying to joke with you on there.

Oh shit, are you in the Dearborn area too? One of the flyers we got in the mail was like this:

It was like a full ten seconds before it hit me that they really shouldn’t be dumb enough to send this and it’s possible it was mailed by a Trump association, and another minute before I decided being mailed by a GOP affiliate was actually the more likely case. Looked up the super PAC listed on the other side and it’s a Trump-linked PAC.

As someone who does not want Trump to be president, it’s at least relieving to know how easy it will be for the democrats to counter these dirty tricks. All they need to do is have their candidate make a clear public statement about what she finds wrong with this.

It does kind of upset me that you texted the republicans back the thing they wanted to hear though. I get that the dems deserve every bit of the scorn, but the republicans don’t deserve a drop of the satisfaction.

Unless you’ve left something out, I feel like you’re being unfair to the instructor here by assuming malice for giving oral exams. Have you voiced this concern with her? My reaction is that this instructor is putting enormously more effort into her students than she’s being paid to, I’m not sure you realize how much more of a time investment that is.

I’ve had students come to me about test anxiety and if I trust that they have a decent understanding then I’ll offer an option to test orally instead. A lot of students do much better with oral exams. It allows me to say okay, you can’t answer this particular question, but I can probe adjacent things to give partial credit. I can see you do have some understanding of what the question is meant to test for, I realize that this specific detail is tripping you up and you would do fine with a question that didn’t involve that one hiccup. With a written exam, I’m just grading on how well you answer the one question. It’s not reasonable to take stabs at how much better you might do with a slightly different question, because that would be massively influenced by the biases of what I’m expecting out of you before the exam starts - it’s hard for that not to end up at better grades for students I like more. I can’t look beyond how well the steps you’ve written on the paper lead towards answering the question you were given.

In a better world I would offer them for everyone, but it’s a massive time investment. I’m reluctant to make that offer unless I already have some confidence they’re decent with the material, because if I give an oral exam and they’re struggling it might be hard for me to not leak frustration with having two hours of my time burned for no benefit, and if they read that on me it won’t help with test anxiety and won’t be better for anyone.

Seriously, just start a dialogue with her about this in private.

That’s why you open a window with less embarrassing porn and leave it running in the background.

I don’t know if this counts, but I recently made a mastodon account for my original screenplay ideas and need some opinions on all of these: link

Is that a parody account

I fooled you guys, I wasn’t actually confident at all.

Not opening the article, but I’m pretty confident this is a real quote that was actually said and not a reference to something I’m not familiar with.

It’s still much worse than what you’ve written here! You used the word “while” when the word “because” is much more accurate.

Everyone is making this out to be a terrible thing for a candidate to say but I’ve dreamed my whole life about having an honest politician in this country.

I thought your post said compress with them and I was like what the hell does that even mean.

I remember thinking the Smooth Criminal cover wasn’t bad, but I was never interested in digging deeper on the assumption that a band whose one hit song is a cover that is worse than the original is probably not writing great music.

Am I allowed to also be nude when I squeeze through?

I’m thinking more seriously about this and I don’t think there’s a way to do this that doesn’t just end up with performative forced apologies. Obviously bad views and behaviors can be changed and worked on, but very often coming to terms with things is a hard and long process, and asking someone to speed it up can actually counteract positive progress by creating resentment.

I think a better option than requiring self-crit is just having a comm for “help me work on this shit” so that it can be more voluntary, but still easy for everyone else to block. Maybe temp bans could be for everywhere except there, but with no obligation to use it, and bad-faith use would extend the ban length (or other options). Obviously though it would require a lot of moderation work though to not devolve into a bunch of jackasses reinforcing their own shitty beliefs. Very easy for me to volunteer this great idea that would be a lot of work to implement and maintain and also I’m not qualified to do that work.

At some point I came to terms with the realization that when I ask friends or family for help, or even talk with a counselor, I stubbornly fight with every suggestion I’m given, and then in the coming days the words start to sink in and I consider the ideas more seriously and usually realize my thinking was bad. I have a lot of love for the people in my life who accept this and still try to help me. The process is who I am and it works for me, but it makes it harder to inquire about anything potentially inflammatory, because I don’t want people to see the stubbornness if I’m defending a repugnant idea, even if I really need to hear the arguments against my thinking. And if I still believe it, it’s really hard to know if my rationale is actually repugnant or not without another voice.

Like I have a couple recurring thoughts that I’d like to ask about and have challenged, find out if they’re well-founded or if they’re bigoted, reflect and fix if they are, but if they are problematic and do need to be corrected, I know that I’ll have at least a day where I’m still trying to defend them anyway. The time spent afterwards ruminating on a discussion like that would allow me to fix the issue. But, fragile ego and everything, if this is a public discussion and I get called out on being an asshole/bigot, the result is I ruminate more on my own identity and character. When I start thinking deeply on “am I a bad person?”, I get completely sidetracked from the thoughts I need to be having to correct the original belief I still need to get sorted out. I’m not pretending that’s a healthy way of thinking or that I shouldn’t fix it, just saying that I’ve been trying to fix it for a long while now and still am not there.

Basically, having a space where I can ask “is this belief repugnant?” and a day or two where I’m allowed try to justify my reasoning would do wonders for identifying and correcting problematic thoughts I still have, but it requires the listeners to assume good faith (an absurdly gargantuan ask when talking about randos on the internet spouting offensive nonsense), and requires a lot of effort from moderation on top of that.

I definitely have blind spots and would benefit from guidance on how to be better.

I’m ashamed of this, but I’ll share: I caught a temp ban from ml for misogyny a few months ago. I had already been in a place of bad self-loathing for a while and when I got the ban I basically checked out from online posting everywhere for a month or two. I PMed the user an apology afterwards. Thread was here.

I didn’t even realize it was problematic until I logged in the next day and saw the ban. In my mind I use “girl” in colloquial speech with friends, so if I’m joking around with someone I think of it as a similar situation. I normally say “dude” but I know “dude” can be considered male-coded so I’ve been trying to work on that when a stranger has female pronouns displayed. In this case it really wasn’t better. When I re-read it, if she didn’t believe I was joking around it would come across as misogynistic, the joke was one-sided. Keep trying to edit this to make it sound less bad and rationalize my way out, but I fucked up.

Open up pornhub, click a video. Starts to play.

I’m Kamala Harris and I approve this message.

I miss skippable ads more and more every election.

When I read the quote typed up above it’s clear as day that what she’s saying here is objectionable, but when I listen to her say those words in her voice, I’ve lost track of the plot before she’s done. Given that the OP is correct that Kamala was not supposed to say this, I have to wonder if she lost track near the same point I did.

edit: Rewatching and changed my mind, the point where I get thrown off is when she awkwardly tacks on “or a result of many things including” before finishing the sentence, which is likely just realizing midway through that she wants to tone down crediting the US for what’s happening there. The actual quote is more tempered than what OP has transcribed, she caught where it was going to go right before she finished.

So the statement that only an idiot would believe a word Elon Musk says has now been legally certified thanks to his own lawyers?

I hope there was a fanboy on the jury who tried very hard to push back on the other jurors that it’s not stupid to believe this stuff, before finally caving, being consoled by the fact that from the start he didn’t want Musk to lose.

edit: Actually, a funnier idea is Elon’s lawyers desperately trying to disqualify a fanboy from being a juror because the plaintiff’s lawyers have an expectation of what the defense will be so aren’t interested in doing that themselves.

Initially, we’d hoped to publish our endorsement on June 27, 2024, in the hours after Joe Biden’s first televised debate against Donald Trump. Then, we’d hoped to publish it a few days later, following Biden’s highly anticipated July 5 interview with George Stephanopoulos.

Now, on Oct. 2, 2024, we are finally…

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