I don’t see what your relatives have to do with this, Doctor.

I tend to call it Romneycare.

clarify something

They’re bowling for soup, not butter.

finding a few good ones shouldn’t be hard

Ha, good one.

Wouldn’t those combine as a monolisk though?

Hmm…sounds like something you might see in a Starcraft mod…

I think we’re trying to say the same idea in different words

Wouldn’t it be tragic if aliens came to make contact and start a friendship with us…only to be laid low by COVID, which for us is like a bad flu, but for them ended up being more like ebola?

Oof.

Normal? Yes, I suppose so. I see people post about it enough.

Okay? Definitely not. Rejection hurts, but it’s no excuse to lash out like a toddler who didn’t get their way.

I used to get so mad at my grandparents for calling them that. They were COMICS, and it was Very Important to call them by the proper name.

I like to think I’ve loosened up a bit since I was a kid.

There is no such thing as a moderate conservative

IDK, I’d think most Democrats in Congress this decade are moderate conservatives (stupid Overton window shift).

Conspiracies or conspiracy theories?

There is a difference, you know.

“well, technically”

I think of it as a funhouse mirror. Everything online reflects something in the physical world, but there are a lot of distortions.

Heh. Anything on the internet invites comment. Who comments? People who feel strongly about the topic. Yep, it fits.

It can change, too.

When I was just out of college, I wanted kids “someday” (but was afraid of parenting badly).

Same when I met my wife, but she felt conflicted.

Fast forward a couple of years, she definitely doesn’t want to have kids.

I’m at peace with this path. I’d rather stay with my wife and have no kids than get divorced and try to find someone else who does want kids. My wife is amazing.

Ahh, gotcha, yeah, I misread you there. Sorry about that.

besides not being physically colocated

This isn’t neglect IMO. Kids should have at least some time separate from their parents (tbf, this means different things at different stages of childhood).

The rest of your post, OTOH, is spot on.

I heard about voat back in the day and thought “Oh, cool, like reddit without some of the overbearing crap from the admins”.

Then I went to voat and read a few posts.

Well, shit. I didn’t want to be on a nazi site. So much for that.

Also, you don’t need to uncompress plain text.

Content-Encoding: gzip would like a word. :P

Agreed on all points other than that nitpick

IDK about this. Today’s extreme focus on helicopter parenting seems to view “having room to play” as CPS-worthy neglect. Shouldn’t there be a middle ground?

I used to. When I was a kid in school, I figured it was a holdover from “the racist times” back in the 1960s.

Then I saw how people treated Obama. Real eye opener.