Mostly_Gristle
I don’t think it’s idiocy. I think it’s cruel people who delight in doing cruel things. And when a guy like Trump, who has managed to use cruelty to get rich and powerful, comes along and gives them permission to fully indulge their cruellest instincts, makes them feel like it’s right and good, they’ll follow that person straight into hell. They’re so excited to finally be able to go out and hurt all the people they don’t like that there really isn’t any line they’re not willing to cross anymore, no moral they’re not willing to betray, to finally get that.
I don’t even refer to Evangelicals as Christians anymore. They are two different things at this point. If you look at modern Evangelical doctrine and compare it to the ministry Jesus laid down in the Gospels, they are just about as polar opposite as you can get while still name-checking Jesus. I don’t think it’s useful to conflate them anymore because real Christianity, using the actual words of Jesus, might be one of the few effective ways left to argue against all this Evangelical nonsense. I’m honestly surprised that the Christians with real faith aren’t already out there doing it.
The thing I’ve always loved about the Labor party is how they really set themselves apart from the Tories. I mean, it’s just night and day. Really makes you feel like things are going to change for the better. So inspiring.
))<>(( Back and forth forever.
Rom-coms are aspirational fantasies. They’re modern-day fairy tales of getting swept off your feet by a handsome prince and living happily ever after, never wanting for anything ever again. Material comfort is always a factor in these stories. If it’s not overt, as in Pride and Prejudice where the main character betters their station by ending up with the mega-rich guy who seemed like a dick but turned out to have a heart of gold, then it has to be implied by the setting and the lifestyles of the characters. If the material wealth of the love interest isn’t going to be a factor in the story then it has to be demonstrated that those financial needs are met in some other way.
You’re probably never going to see a rom-com where the main character gets their one true love, but being with them condemns them to a life of struggle and poverty. No matter how you try to spin it so it’s ok because at least they have each other, that would never be a truly satisfying ending in this type of movie. Material needs to be taken care of too. Even in movies like Overboard where the whole point of the movie is Goldie Hawn learning to be a human being by struggling through a working class lifestyle, they still have to end up rich at the end for the story to feel fully resolved.
It’s polite to pretend that money doesn’t matter, and a lot of rom-coms try to down-play it, but it does. It does matter. And it always shows up in one way or another.
If this meme were intellectually honest your man in the top picture would be getting measured with parking and/or gas meters.
I don’t know that I’d consider myself an audiophile, but I am a musician. I run a pair of powered studio monitors out of the back of a Focusrite Scarlett usb audio interface for recording, and it’s way better than any computer speakers I’ve ever owned in terms of sound quality and fidelity. Of course, I’m also not trying to have a dance club setup that’s going to rattle the windows on my nextdoor neighbor’s house with super-ultra-mega bass, but it’s an avenue to consider.
It’s not that we can’t afford to pay you $15 an hour, or even $30 an hour, but if we did that then we couldn’t give that money to the shareholders. You see, they’ve purchased a certificate which entitles them to the wealth created by your labor. We assure you we can imagine it must be somewhat uncomfortable to live in constant grinding poverty, but you can understand how our hands are tied here. They have a certificate. What are we supposed to do, ask a rich person to be a teeny tiny bit less rich? That’s just crazy talk.
I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn’t even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.
Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.