EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

It’s more about comparing his audience to toddlers, but I see your point and I submit myself before the court of online discourse for judgment.

Flirting is showing or reciprocating sexual or romantic interest in a way that is intentionally ambiguous. It’s a way for people to gauge interest with one another without obligating either party to make any sort of direct commitment or statement of interest. Any party can choose to not reciprocate or disengage without needing to make it overt, and thus avoid embarrassment or misunderstanding.

Eventually someone has to make some sort of overture to either establish mutual interest or rejection of interest, but flirting is sort of the quantum superposition between interest and non-interest (look up ‘Schrödinger’s Date’ for the most extreme example of this).

Foreplay is the build up to actually engaging in sexual intimacy of some sort. Unlike flirting, mutual interest has already been established. More importantly, foreplay happens after, or in the process of, some form of mutual consent. Without consent it’s just assault/harassment, obviously. Depending on your relationship dynamic, flirting might be part of foreplay.

Phone sex is purely contextual. It’s either flirting or foreplay depending on whether or not it leads to sex, whatever your definition of “sex” is.

This observation has been made many times over the years, but Chris Hayes acts like he’s learning everything for the first time every single day. What’s worse is that there are people who watch him every day and go “wow, he’s totally right!” He’s Ms. Rachel for cable news libs.

Really there’s no reason why moderation shouldn’t be more decentralized/distributed. As you say, you want to have people vetted to a degree for practical purposes, and it makes sense to have people who are dedicated mods for sake of consistency, but an auxiliary mod corps isn’t a terrible idea. There are likely plenty of people who would happily take on the responsibility a week at a time here and there, but wouldn’t want or be able to commit to being a mod full time.

This is not a criticism of the current mods or efforts to moderate the site to-date, just an interesting thing to think about.

Sadly, Hank is exactly the type of person to do that. The details he shares about his lawn care show that he’s all about artificially tweaking variables and removing uncontrolled factors. This should be Bobby lecturing Hank about his industrialized and unsustainable landscaping practices.

Critical support for Elon continuing to lose money in embarrassing ways.

The most troubling part is first-time buyer age rising to near 40 in only a few years after being stable at ~29-32 for decades. The tipping point has been reached where there’s just nothing left for people to do to be able to afford to own their own home aside from wait and continue to save money and increase their income. Profoundly unstable system. China is going to look really good in a few years when their real estate system has been rationalized and everyone else is still scrambling to figure out how to deregulate and tax-incentive their way to keeping prices stable for just a little bit longer.

I love when Alex is on the pod. Just a great third mic.

Surely someone is already turning this into a site emoji

I knew there was a reason other than pure pettiness why PR statehood has always been a nonstarter.

I’m grateful that the Canadian parliament isn’t allowed to name legislation. I doubt it makes that much difference overall, but it’s less disrespectful to the public.

Take “evangelical” out and I’m like “can I sign up for his substack?”

If they could find a way to refine copium into fissile material they could become a nuclear superpower overnight.

Edit: Also, just fucking sue for peace like a normal goddamn country! You aren’t special!

It’s not stealing if someone is just giving it away.

“Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him—at least until I don’t like him,” Trump joked

lmao Elon is getting thrown under the bus so fast

Anything to avoid having to present a marginally better option.

I will not unwrap gifts given to me by people who voted for a party that has talked about building internment camps and mass deportation

You’re going to have to be more specific.

I assume that’s the case for people running PR for the criminals. Probably also helps with the framing for people shamelessly claiming to be canceled when they haven’t experienced any real career consequences and just want to pretend that criticism is persecution.

I feel exactly the same way, I was literally just about to make the comparison to seeing a Marvel film. I knew it was going to be bad, but I made a point to see it in the theater because I wanted to see the result of this bizarre experiment in the medium for which it was intended, and I was not disappointed. Total mess of a film, but bad in ways that you simply would not see coming out of the Disney/Warner/Universal/Sony big-budget theatrical ecosystem, which gives it some redeeming value as a sort of historical artifact of filmmaking.