This isn’t about guys’n’gals.

This is simpky about how people work:

If your peers (friends, colleagues, family) have an opinion (any opinion), their default expectation is that you share that opinion - this is what being a peer is mostly about.

You can demonstrate solidarity by agreeing - this is virtually always the safe option.

You can demonstrate backbone by disagreeing - this can generate respect or animosity.

You can refuse to weigh in - this is mostly a middle ground between the two above.

How it actual shakes out in reality will depend on a myriad of factors, many of which you’re not even consciously aware of.

Thus, this random internet stranger can give you only three pieces of advice:

• Trust your instincts on how to handle this. Your subconscious is very well wired to navigate social situations as best as possible.

• If you ever change your opinion or “change your opinion”, announce it clearly and give/make up a reason. People disrespect people who are inconsistent, but they respect people who can admit to mistakes / learn.

• Sometimes, you can’t win. Sometimes, someone will be pissed off, no matter what you do. It’s no fault of yours, some situations are just not salvageable to begin with.

Thanks, that’s helpful.

Question from someone outside the US who’s genuinely curious about why law-abiding citizens feel the need to carry guns to begin with:

If you’re aware of this, how often are you carrying a gun in the first place? When/Why?

Following what you say, there’s obviously the scenario where you have to defend your life (not your property).

On the other hand, as I see it, the victim in the article would not have benefited from a gun in the car and the odds of a shell-shocked BF turning the whole thing into an actual shootout would’ve been >0.

I’m not trying to argue crime statistics or morals here, I’m genuinely interested in a gun owner’s perspective.

A subjective perspective from outside the US:

If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.

And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.

This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.

Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.

Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.

The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).

Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.

(I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)

All the advances in execution methods haven’t been made to make it more humane to the victim - they’ve been made so it seems more humane to everyone else.

AFAIK, statistics-wise, the execution method with the lowest quota of horrible mishaps is the guillotine. A sufficiently fast 4t weight to the head would probably be even quicker for the brain to go, although it’d also require more cleanup.

(Yes, even overdosing on narcotics has more mishaps - and there are little to no narcotics abailable for executions, because the producers don’t want them to be used for that.)

All of the more reliable methods are… grisly, and civilisation doesn’t want grisly. We want to press a button and the victim goes to sleep to never wake up, because that makes it easier on us.

I had something vaguely similar happen to me.

We got called out of the line for a manual luggage inspection because, as a surprisingly bored security agent informed us, X-ray showed a knife of about a foot length in our luggage.

We had no idea what they were talking about.

We were half-way through unpacking the whole pack when my SO lit up and asked “could it be my ice skates?”

Agent took a look at the X-ray, nods, and lets us pack it back up without any further checking.

Overall, turned out harmlessly, but the sheer confusion of where that supposed knife had come from, combined with how blasé that security person was about the whole affair from start to finish stuck in my mind.

Good thing you’re not.

The only thing you’d achieve would be causing her to have to deal with this BS while her husband is in jail.

I genuinely can’t parse this argument.

Criminalizing the victims of human trafficking makes said crime easier, because it creates hurdles for it’s victims to report it.

To cut back on the hyperbole that you’re receiving for your comment: Even badly managed oversight would be better than none at all.

Amazon warehouse workers are being exploited brutally in a system that needs fixing, but there’s much less trafficking and violent coercion involved.

There is no way to save those people without destroying privacy.

I disagree. Legalizing prostitution and fighting the social stigma would prevent many of those crimes.

If you criminalize a service that will always be in demand, you won’t kill the market - you’ll just turn it into an unregulated black market run by criminals, who are much less inhibited than legal employers to use any means at their disposal (even threats and violence) to maximize their profit.

The exact same thing happened during the prohibition.

But if you have a legalized market… using threats and violence to force people to perform i.e. call center work is much less common.

Cheating on taxes is a crime, but in certain circles it’s nit stigmatized.

The same goes for ignoring the speed limit in other circles.

A desperate mother shoplifting to feed her child would probably get compassion from many.

On a side note, it is also possible for something to be a crime and not be punished. It is a way for a society to condemn something, but acknowledge that is just necessary under certain conditions.

(Some countries use this trick for contentious topics like abortion and, yes, prostitution.)

Nah, I’d argue that you’re both partially correct.

The romanticized ideal of starting a family/marriage on the basis of “true love” has been around forever.

Reality has been more of a mixed bag throughout large patches of human history. Accidental pregnancies, dynastic politics and plain economical necessities were probably foundations for many more marriages than actual love.

(There’s also that whole can of worms of whether “True Love at First Sight™” even is a good foundation for marriage, but that’s neither here nor there.)

My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.

Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.

I might be misreading your situation, but just from this limited context, your father seems to have his priorities straight. Feel free to tell him that a random internet stranger thinks good of him.

Office buildings would like a word with you.

It’s the reason so many large corporations a talking about RTO, office real estate prices are set to plummet if everyone’s keeping to WFH.

Sadly, that’s only tangentially related to housing (although I believe to have read something about new subsidies for landlords converting office space into appartments).

I’m fairly certain that’s the same area where wild hogs no longer find enough food in the wild and are currently enthusiastically reclaiming said golf courses.

I, for one, am rooting for the four-legged pigs on this one.

Hypothesis: what matters here is a social toolbox for engaging with “attractive”/compatible women in a non-romantic/sexual way.

I.e. someone who, even as a teenager, had lots of female friends, is likely to have a learned how to deal with them as persons, beyond “I’d like to hit that”.

(Paradoxically, such a person is more likely to find a romantic partner, because they might have lots of M-F acquaintances/friendships that can potentially become something more.)

Someone who never learned that, can only interact with (to them) attractive women through the lens of “I’d like to hit that”, which has a much higher risk of ending in failure.

If someone in the second category was always raised on the values of romantic success being a requirement for a non-failed life, and possibly with a touch of chauvinism/misogyny, they might wind up caught up in a frustrating loop of failure.

This is how incels can happen.

Because one common assumption was that the universe might contain as much antimatter as matter.

Which begs the question: Where did it go? We would notice a huge amount of annihilation reactions in the solar system.

“Antimatter falls up” (is gravitationally repelled instead of attracted by normal matter) was an easy hypothesis to explain that.