Yeah, a LOT of Americans are treating this as business as usual, and it most certainly is not usual. Just because bad leadership has blown over in the past doesn’t mean this is the same thing.
People are not panicking anywhere near the level they should because we need to take care of this NOW. Like now, now. I can’t believe it ever got this far to begin with, but you are 100% right in saying that 4 years is far too long, and by then, it will be too late.
I think it’s more like a sibling that you grew up with who was taught the same moral code as you. They were living a healthy, normal life for a while but got offered a very high paying job that is at odds with those childhood morals. They decided to take it, and at first, they did just a few unethical things. Then, they realized that they could make more money by being more unethical and the people who were supposed to be chastising them were not very good at punishing people with money and were really easy to manipulate, so they leaned in to the lack of ethics.
They know what their doing is hurting people, and they don’t care because they want to drive their Lamborghini to family Christmas and bring an ostentatiously expensive bottle of wine so that people can praise and fawn over them. But, if you call them on their bad behavior, they become enemies because how dare you?! Now we’re the sibling who is powerful but has completely gone awry due to that same power.
I’m hoping we gave a nice family reunion someday where my country has learned the error of its ways and can once again be accepted by its lovely Canadian relatives.
Yeah, me too. I just started on that med, and I found that I have to schedule my meals with reminders and then force myself to eat some of them, or I will go the entire day not remembering/wanting to eat.
My understanding is that when they bite you, they also inject a bit of anticoagulant to prevent clotting as they suck blood out. The foreign material creates an allergic reaction that itches.
I don’t think there would be much of an evolutionary advantage to irritating your victim until they start a pesticidal war against you and your kind.
I’ve never had unclaimed funds, but I have been the person who submits funds that have been unclaimed to the state. I work at a law firm that handles a lot of settlements, and sometimes, people are issued a large portion of the settlement while we wrap up a few other things on the case. Once those are taken care of, I reach out to our client to give them whatever funds remain.
But sometimes, I can’t find that person no matter how hard I search. Sometimes, our client disagrees with the additional amount that they are receiving and refuses to cash their check. After a certain number of years, and after every possible attempt to give our client their money has been made, I have it sent to the state.
Absolutely; I agree. I appreciate your thoughtful response. There are always going to be selfish people and users in every gender, and they do give the whole group a bad rap. I’m never going to say that all women are above the description the poster I replied to gave. And, like you said, we can call these specific people out while still uplifting others who don’t engage in such behavior.
The poster that I was replying to seemed like they had been burned by a person like that, and while I understand that it must be awful to experience being with someone who uses you only for what you can provide and that it can easily make you jaded, this particular post comes off like they have extended that bitterness to the entirety of women, whether or not those women have chosen (or seek) a partner with wealth. It’s frustrating to watch so many great women be reduced to greedy users, and I don’t want to allow the continuation of someone spouting blanket assumptions toward my gender without addressing it. That’s how I ended up with a multi-paragraph response to a simple statement.
But I absolutely agree with your assessment and really appreciate the thought and effort you put into it. It’s incredibly refreshing to be able to have an actual discussion about a topic.
Okay, I’ll bite. The reason women end up choosing to be with a man of means, and I am in no way saying that all or even most women want this, is because we often don’t/didn’t have the opportunity to gain those means ourselves which thereby impacted our ability to survive and control our own lives. This is due to the oppression of the very men that you think we seek. Over the course of thousands of years, men cultivated a world where they steadily sought, gained, and ever increasingly obtained as much power as possible. In order to gain more power for yourself or your group, you have to take away power from someone else.
One of the people or groups whose power was regularly stolen is women. I’m sure this was a slow transition over a long period of time, but it ended with a world where women were rarely allowed to gain the skills or implement what skills they had in order to earn money. If you don’t have the ability to earn money yourself, you are forced to be reliant on someone else who is allowed to earn money. My point being, if you want enough money for you and your children to survive, you basically had to marry as rich as you possibly could.
Enter the modern women’s rights movement. This is where financial freedom became incredibly important to women. We collectively realized that we, much like any other human beings in existence ever, wanted to be able to have some control of our lives, our families, and our fates. This is why we entered the workforce in droves. Women who were suffering under the control of men who beat them and their children, potentially raped them, or demeaned them regularly with the full acceptance and support of society, wanted a way out. The available options were pretty bleak, so we worked in solidarity to find another way to survive with both our physical safety and dignity intact. Now, as an obligatory caveat, not every man was/is oppressive to women. But, since men as a whole created these arbitrary restrictions on women’s lives, they are the ones who have to suffer the aftermath of this system of control that was developed, especially since they are the ones who continue to experience advantages and benefits because of those exact lingering effects.
Most women would prefer to be able to support themselves and their family while having their partner contribute equally, either through earning money or doing an equivalent share of the household/family tasks. But, since something that becomes systemic is difficult to remove, we are still trying to shake the ramifications of this exertion of control. I assure you, most women would rather have less money and more autonomy when given the option.
This brings me to the point you’re trying to make. If the “primary motivator” of a woman is to choose a man who can provide adequately for her offspring, it is only because of the lingering effects of historical oppression that men created in order to exert control over women. It’s very frustrating to be in a world that constantly tells you that you should be pursuing a partner with money so you can have a stable future, but then simultaneously reprimands you for actually making that choice. Just as it’s difficult, but required, to acquiesce to the control of the man who holds your money.
I don’t think it should be presented as though this woman is shallow or terrible for making such a choice. Who wouldn’t choose a life of stability over one of chaos or continual financial stress? I know many men who would make the same choice if offered it. Like you said, I’m sure he was doing a good job of providing for their family financially, but let’s not be too reductive about her choice to have him as a partner. You say it in such a way that you are not only chastising her for her choice of husbands but are chastising all women for prioritizing their and their children’s survival and safety. That is something that comes across as offensive to the entirety of my gender because it implies that we shouldn’t consider ourselves of value or of having worth.
You may be right that this woman chose the CEO of UHC as her husband because of his wealth and ability to support their children and family lifestyle. Most likely, she knew what her husband actually did for a living and it’s effect on the lives of others and chose to ignore or not look into the deaths, horrors, and financial destruction that were created by the company her husband controlled.
But, one way or another, let’s not reduce the struggle that women go through at the hands of historical, and often modern, men to blanketly imply that we are all naturally money hungry and that we are obviously all using men for our own gain. I’m going to go ahead and assume that women, including myself, disagree with such an unfair assumption.
Yeah, I live near a state park named “Bong.” To be fair, it was named after a person. There is also a Wang Town in Minnesota.
I’ve never seen a truer post.
What are bakery gloves? I’ve never heard of that before, and Google was not helpful.
Ditto. Then, when we went back to “normal,” I felt like I had to pretend to hate it because everyone else hated it so much. For me, it felt like freedom and relief.
I agree. They are better looking than they are tasting.
One of the biggest things I learned when I started working in the legal field is that the only justice you’ll get is the justice you can prove. Things like this might be true, but if you can’t prove it, you’ll get no justice for it.
Is that fair? No. But the system we created is based on the assumption that people are going to be wrongfully imprisoned or charged for actions that they didn’t commit simply because the government wants them imprisoned. We designed it that way because that used to happen often in other countries, and we didn’t want that to happen here. So, we created rules to avoid wrongful imprisonment by the government without finding a way to also protect victims who may not have enough evidence to prove their victimization.
I’m not saying that what this woman is asserting happened or didn’t happen. I have no idea what went down. I also don’t know how we fix the system. People are wrongfully imprisoned, victims don’t receive justice, etc., but this is how the system is designed, so whether or not it’s true, she is required to demonstrate it, or she will receive no justice.
Okay, I normally try not to be this guy, but in this particular situation, I believe a little pedantry is called for. You mean that you couldn’t care less. If you could care less, that means you do care at least a little bit, which is not the point you’re trying to make.
Ditto. I feel like I’m the only one who still listens to the radio in my car. The only thing I want my car to have that it doesn’t is cruise control. Otherwise, she’s perfect.
I won’t lie; I cried a little when I read your comment. It’s really validating and rare to truly be seen. I do tread very carefully to be appropriate, fair, and reasonable in my responses, but I never really expected anyone to see that. I appreciate your comment more than I know how to say.
This is a tough topic because, like you said, it affects literally everyone, no matter their gender, and everyone has different experiences and opinions. I just want everyone who is forming an opinion to see as many different sides and experiences as possible to, at the very least, make an informed decision on the state of gender politics. I know that everyone has their personal biases, and no one wants to give up privileges or power, but at the end of the day, again, like you said, the patriarchy hurts all of us.
I appreciate you. <3
Yes! This is the exact approach a good teacher takes with students who struggle with behavioral norms. There is a reason they are doing what they’re doing. They are reacting to adults the way they have been trained to react by other, shittier adults.
Once they trust you as a person who actually cares, they seem to become a whole new person. They are no longer scared to be vulnerable in front of you. It’s a sacred level of respect that teachers and/or mentor adults need to take very seriously.
I used to be the person who specializes in working with students who struggle with behavioral problems, and I can 100% assure you that exposure to violence from or among adults they are around is what led them to my classrom.
Barbaric, weird, and ineffective. It doesn’t actually address what is causing the behavioral issue. It only punishes the kid for reacting normally to whatever stimuli they are experiencing. It’s especially frustrating when the fix would have been something simple like listening to the kid’s concerns or trying to have a conversation with them to address the root problem.
Tired or not, you’re absolutely right.