FriendOfDeSoto

Would you agree though that there is a qualitative difference here? Platonically befriending a person and having an intimate, probably sexual relationship with a person are two different scenarios. And the question was about dating in particular. I’ll have a much easier time trying to humor a person I don’t share a bed with. People tend to not take one for the team to get them over their misogyny.

I suspect the lack of experiences of being with or even having a significant other is what drove the majority of these bastards to this proto-SA. Where they can be powerful grunt grunt and dress up in GI cosplay. There is this lordofthefliesification that takes place when all these frustrated men get together. Anyways, that’s why I suspect this is almost a trick question. How can you detect if you’re dating an ICE prick? You won’t have to. Chances are they are socially very awkward, behaviorally weird and therefore undatable. It’s this quality that set them on an authority loving, very likely misogynic, for various reasons chronically underfucked path in life where they thought hunting and terrorizing innocent people and shooting them if they can get away with it is a great career choice. It shows.

I would like to add to my upvote a personal note of gratitude for the time and effort you put in here.

I think that is a slight misconception. The full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK≠GB. Great Britain is just the three contiguous home nations (and possibly all the weird little islands I think). And then the British Isles include all the islands including all of Ireland. It is no wonder people are confused.

It’s a question of shorthand and relative distance to the country. In most European languages, the spelling equivalent of America refers to the country by default. The continent as an entity doesn’t get mentioned that much and when it does either context gets you there or a regional attribute like a cardinal direction or central. In my experience this applies to British English as well. “The United States” is often more cumbersome in translation and might require grammatical inflection when used in a local language - and confusingly could refer to Mexico as well. Funny enough though some languages adopted “USA” as another way to refer to the country, even if in translation this should get you a different letter combination.

Because of the dominance of the English in the United Kingdom, a lot of continental Europeans lazily refer to the UK as their version of “England.” Might be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, a channel island or what have you. We gave up in trying to distinguish. People and how they call places are like that. Quiet understanding beats accuracy.

I think you overthought that one.

Yes, they are. Me thinking something in the early 90s and it being objectively so at the time are not the same thing. I’ve already let 90s me know that you think my opinion was wrong.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

I’m sure there was harder rock in existence. My point wasn’t they were objectively the hardest. It was that our perception of music changes over time.

You grew up in a world where Rock’n’Roll already existed. They liked it because it didn’t before and it took a while to slap a label on it. You grew up in a world where people bought music or paid to stream. When Rock’n’Roll started sheet music was the big seller. They had just introduced vinyl as a medium. You are exposed to all sorts of music today. Back in the 1940s US, predominantly, white people listened to white people music and black people listened to black people music. It’s only when some white people saw the black music was better and then unabashedly copied it for the more economically impactful white audience that this became a hit. It’s not just the quality of the music; it’s the culture and the change within it that came with it. It’s a big package.

I remember listening to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit when out came out thinking this was the roughest rock could ever go. ~30 years later it sounds rather tame. That’s the way our musical ears work. We tend to have a hardcore recency bias.

a few years ago

Like 15+ years ago.

They performed horribly

I mean, this is all a matter of opinion. They promised stuff they couldn’t do - like everybody else. They gave us a revolving door of PMs - like the LDP, the party that won all the other elections, does as well. I think what broke their back was having to deal with a big earthquake, massive tsunami, and exploding nuclear reactors. The LDP can consider itself lucky they weren’t in charge then so the stink of failure to deal with an impossible crisis didn’t attach to them. They really aren’t the more capable politicians.

There is enough crime happening on either side of this 15-year divide to care about.

Zufallsbegegnung, chance encounter, is as close as we can get to it, I think. Germans don’t dress to impress. Look at us. I mean, look at us. Norm core to the max. If you are caught wearing the same shirt twice on different days, people tend to think you are merely handling limited resources responsibly.

I’m gonna go out in this limb: without more detail you won’t get any good answers.

It’s not just the SS, the Wehrmacht also “suffered” from having to shoot all these people. Read up on Babij Jar, Ukraine. Even Himmler is on record expressing sympathy for his killers. That’s why the bullet based plan turns into a gas based one. Because it’s “easier” to flip a switch on a room full of people than to shoot naked people to fall on other corpses already in the ditch.

I think what’s standing between us today and the bottom of the genocidal slippery slope is the (relatively) free media. There are too many ways to check up on them today. Commercial satellites, FOIA requests, people with smartphones. If ICE were building a death camp or digging mass graves now, we probably would find out.

So it’s important to look at how CBS gave in and how the pentagon restricts coverage in exchange for accreditation - those are your first dead canaries in the news coalmine. When commercial satellites are suddenly forced to blur or not cover ICE camps …

I would be surprised if they hadn’t killed more people in detention already. The aim of ICE is to be state terror, their people are of questionable character, poorly trained or vetted. A duty of care is probably not first and foremost on their mind. There probably is a way to brush some cases under the carpet. Deaths by “natural causes,” “misplaced” death certificates, “corpses” on repatriation flights. The spotlight of public attention needs to be on these motherfuckers constantly.

No, it isn’t.

Maybe I’m out of the loop but can you point me towards some western liberals advocating for a stronger China?

I think it depends. I’m my experience, towels last longer if they get thrown in the dryer. Wouldn’t throw my cashmere sweater in there though, if I owned one. The quality of the clothes you own plays a part. And most of us tend to go for the bargain over quality.

I feel like this depends on your climate as well. If you have sufficient sunlight outside, why do you even have a dryer? If it’s humid and stuff takes forever to dry on its own, a dryer might prevent certain bacteria to build up in the fabric and thus expand longevity. Although any act of aggressively drenching the fabric in water and chemicals and then blow drying it ought to age it by default.

I know I deserve to burn in hell for stopping them. But I’m also not sure what was I supposed to do.

I’m not sure why you feel this way. It looks to me like you tried to do your best looking out in a reasonable way for a colleague in your group who was in a chemically altered state.

In the end, you’re not responsible for him. Don’t go partying with him again. If you end up in hell, it won’t be due to this stuff.