Posts made by surreality

@Shiggy said in RL Anger:

@surreality said in RL Anger:

@Shiggy Tell you what, Rick. When you're able to admit your hilarious reading comprehension fuckup on the welfare thing, while trying to insult my reading comprehension? Maybe then you'd be worth more than moc--

...nahhhhhhh.

Here's the thing: I don't believe you when you tell me you aren't getting subsidies.

OK! You're allowed to believe the moon is made of green cheese, too, if you like.

But even if this were a reading comprehension issue on my part,

...if?

or I simply forgot that you said your husband has a job (I'm surprised you can find a man so beta as to pay your way through life), it still wouldn't even come close to putting a dent in the overall point.

Unlike the man so pathetic and full of himself that he used to send me PMs all the damn time to say he was bored at work so I should talk to him, and got ignored because boring assholes who have no idea how to entertain themselves and feel entitled to demand entertainment from me are so alpha?

Honey, I hate to break it to you, but I married a smart, hot, well-hung massage therapist who doesn't have to blame 'everybody else getting special privileges' for whatever problems or challenges he has in his life because he's actually a reasonably mature adult with the ability to take responsibility for himself.

Considering how many times I told your sad ass I wasn't going to waste my time entertaining you when you'd PM since I also have a job? Oh, Rick.

What I don't get is why this line of thinking so consistently triggers you.

Like all of your other assumptions about what does or doesn't "trigger" me, well. Have fun with that green cheese moon? I have zero interest in this argument, therefore I am not going to waste my time having it, no matter how much you want me to. You think you're right? OK! I don't care, I have no interest in the 'point-scoring' game you try to force people into playing with you on the regular; watching you spout about how persecuted you are was funny to me the first time and it continued to be funny until it became as boring as the rest of the antics you pull that you consider so damned clever that never actually are, quite.

But you get upset every time and segue into personal attacks and calling me "it" whenever this comes up -- or sometimes your friends use "it." I forget. I get you people mixed up sometimes.

I get bored, dear. Bored. Not upset.

You even admit that you have a drinking game when you get blown the fuck out with this conversation.

For someone who has trolled here repeatedly, how the existence of the WORA drinking game and its long history has eluded you, I cannot even imagine. But then again, you "forgot" stuff from one page to the next in your pursuit of means of attack, so I guess it's not too big a stretch.

It's like being confronted with objective reality provokes an alcoholic episode.

<gigglesnort> Yep, that's totally it, exactly.

It's like you just can't handle it or some shit. I'm not even giving you shit right now, but maybe you should just grow the fuck up. You can't cackle and drink your way out of this one; this isn't high school theater club anymore; you've got to do some reflecting on this matter or eventually face the reality that you're just wrong.

You and your green cheese moon just go on believing that all you like; I'm sure your alternative facts will keep you entertained immeasurably.

@Shiggy Tell you what, Rick. When you're able to admit your hilarious reading comprehension fuckup on the welfare thing, while trying to insult my reading comprehension? Maybe then you'd be worth more than moc--

...nahhhhhhh.

@WTFE I dunno, hon. It really should smile more.

@Shiggy There's a simple fix for that one: stop trolling the forum, Rick. The drinking game is probably older than you are, too.

(Oh, gods, people. The WORA drinking game actually is old enough to vote now.)

@Shiggy ...which is the other classic Rick argument. BINGO!

@Shiggy I'm utterly aware of how pathetic I find you. First, you assume @WTFE lives in Canada, and now, that I'm on public assistance of some kind... after mentioning my husband and I pay insurance through his employer and thus do not get any subsidies this very day.

...what was that about reading comprehension again?

I'm not bothering to argue with you. I am having fun mocking you. You're the only one who thinks there's an argument to bother having here, it would seem. In the wrong forum for those, and the wrong thread, and... well, yep, between the 'rustling jimmies' and the 'NEET', you definitely outed yourself as Rick again. HI HI. Wanna wish another rape on me again so I learn how to properly respect the big strong superior white straight males like you this time?

It's cute how you think anyone's even bothering to argue with you at this point.

(This is only true because I actually have enough vodka to participate in the drinking game along with the rest of the forum on hand, for once.)

@Shiggy Here, have this spare tube of gynecort. It really does help, I swear.

@WTFE He really is living proof of what goes wrong with those trophies for participation, you know? He's due things, now, just because.

@Shiggy Psssssst. @WTFE has lived in China for years and years and years.

@WTFE I'd bet on it at this point. He cannot stop himself from talking about how he's the most persecuted of all God's creatures because he's a white straight male.

Indeed, I do not know how he survives a day on the street; maybe if he invests in a rainbow burkha and fake tits he'll be able to survive without being murdered to death by the rampaging mob.

@Shiggy Very astute! It was a snarky comment. Yours was a tragically unimpressive meme image.

(You stopped being worth any actual argument when you trotted out the "I am the most persecuted of victims because I am a white male" shit again, and again, and again.)

@Shiggy ...tell us the one about how you can't stand hearing people tell the hispanic janitor at work how he is affected by discrimination again, Rick, please? That one always puts me right to sleep like all the bestest bedtime stories do.

@Shiggy You just get a <pat pat pat> at this point. Keep raging on, man. Whole world's clearly against you.

@Shiggy said in RL Anger:

If a party expects me to sacrifice my own interests in the interest of gay wedding cakes and tranny bathrooms, a significant amount of public dignity is going to be due to me in the long run.

Due you, is it? (And here, there are giggles. Oodles of them.)

Unless your interests are somehow against LGBT folks having wedding cakes, or have some pressing concern about restroom usage, you sacrifice nothing, you lose nothing.

I mean, how dare those people want to bring attention to the fact that they desire same rights you already have. The nerve! Clearly, you're due some attention for... wait, what, having already had them all along or something?

You are getting dumber by the post, dude.

@WTFE And still, the difference between one year and the next is dead vs. not dead.

I'm pretty fucking grateful for that progress.

@ThatGuyThere I don't disagree that it still sucks. It has a ton of room for improvement. What we have now, though? Is one step of improvement from where we were previously, and sucks less than the reality that preceded it. Still having a long way to go doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. Slow, awkward, imperfect progress -- but it's still progress.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

@Admiral And a piss-poor turnout in general, from what I saw. Lots of voices, not enough people out doing the voting thing.

This is a very true thing, in the broader sense.

Everyone wants to argue about what to do. Very few are willing to do that thing, whatever it may be.

Depending on the issue, it's either laziness or cowardice. Laziness explains some, but being afraid of facing the consequences of doing a thing vs. simply arguing about what to do is an enormous stumbling block there's no real fix for.

@Shiggy said in RL Anger:

I'd really like to have a conversation about how to make Trumpcare better than Obamacare, but instead all we can have are rabid defense of Trumpcare or rabid defense of Obamacare, both of which are deeply flawed in different ways.

This is a common sense, realistic, sane human being approach to the current problem, even if we may not ultimately agree about what 'better' would look like.

Have some coffee, spike it if you gotta, because yes, pretty much this, this is the point I see from where I'm sitting.

I do not agree with you about the idea that people think white, straight men are the devil. Some, yes. Some people think any grouping of individuals is precisely that.

Any realistic discussion of privilege? Recognizes that it exists on a spectrum, and any given individual is going to fall at different points in different ways. You will never have to live in fear that if you become pregnant, you will be relegated to spend the remainder of your life in a wheelchair at best; that is a privilege, and it's real. I will also never have to face the potential of a former sex partner come to me out of nowhere and, a decade after I have heard from them, say: I have had your baby, and you need to give me money going forward for the support of that child. That is a challenge you could face and I cannot; that is a privilege I have that you do not.

Both of these things require an attempt at understanding and human empathy is required to even begin to achieve that understanding, because these things are outside the realm of our possible and personal experience. When we make decisions about them, we cannot only think of ourselves and what we want.

You and I will not face the problems someone who is not white will face in America. That's just a fact. It does not mean that as white people, we cannot have problems, we cannot face suffering, we cannot be subject to unfairness or harsh circumstance. It means that there is a subset of experiences we have the privilege of not being subject to in this country that have a real impact on people's lives.

This is not a difficult principle to understand on the most basic level. Most people of my generation and those after -- I'm 43, for whatever that matters -- understand this as a general principle.

Most of us have internalized the idea that the color of someone's skin or their gender should not matter in regard to how we treat that person as a fellow human being, for instance, but our lack of being someone different than ourselves is still something we cannot understand in the same way, and the lesson of listening to those experiences in order to enable us to come to that understanding is a more difficult lesson to internalize. As a result, we treat others 'just like us', and think this is enough to balance the scales; in an ideal world, this would be the case, but it is not functionally so in a reality that is still riddled with flaws, because our experiences are different, and we are still in some ways blind to the ways in which this is so.

Broadly speaking, intentions are good. Very few people actually embrace hate and shrill horribleness and othering with the intent to do so.

It still doesn't change the basic fact that you and I might face certain class or income-based suffering that someone of another race in another social class or with considerably higher income does not. That's something that happens, it's something that's real, and it's something we collectively ignore at our own peril. It also doesn't change the fact that that same person of another race may face suffering that we do not, even if it isn't the same suffering, which we also ignore at our own collective peril.

@Shiggy I frankly wish everybody would leave all the political talk to that space, because many of us come here to get away from that shit. You'll notice my first reply was to yell at someone I consider a friend of mine about it.

I really don't care what you think about abortion. Having formerly been a mod on a board about that debate for years, I have seen more crack-pottery on that front than you can even begin to imagine. I'm also that chick who got "legitimately raped" even by the crackpot definition and thought she was pregnant from it and should never be pregnant (yay for luck breaks that I wasn't) because it'd do me major bodily harm at best, and was very pro-life at the time (not now, hello learning experiences), having been raised Catholic.

To say I have investment in the subject would be an understatement.

So please, want to ban it all you want! I will be over here laughing at you about how all the shit people claim never happens to support their merry visions of handwaving away the issues actually does fucking happen to real people all the fucking time.

Then we can get into the time the docs thought I had an ectopic pregnancy, and when I was sent in to have bloodwork to test for pregnancy, the pro-life med tech drawing blood not only did not know what an ectopic pregnancy was, which is horrifying for a medical professional, but how my not being thrilled with the idea of it and starting to merrily decorate a nursery was totally awesome justification to break the actual law and leak my personal phone number and address to the people who covered my car with the word MURDERER, throw flyers and hand-written in my door for literally years with the same, and call the house with abusive bullshit. That one was fun times.

The irony that it was a burst cyst and the pregnancy test came back negative, I suppose, was lost on positively everybody but me.

Zealots don't tend to bother with education, or, apparently, actual facts. And plenty imagine they're well within bounds to break the law, harass, or abuse others in pursuit of their zealotry. I am frankly watching every aspect of political life in the country dissolve into precisely the same sort of zealot-think, and there is no single issue that sends up a tornado alarm so loud about the negative consequences of that than the abortion debate.

That's why you don't want to get into that one with me.

On the ACA costs: ours is about $850+/month, which is a huge chunk of what we earn. We can't get subsidies for it since it's through an employer; we could buy something similar on the exchanges for about the same, but since there's an employer option available to us, we would get no subsidies for it. Yep, there's broken shit in there, to be sure. That is still better than dead.

The year I didn't have coverage (not married; unable to afford it; my income qualified me for medicaid but our state is funky on 'this month you made $200, the next you made $3k, even if the $3k month is a single month aberration' and they need to sort that shit out, seriously) I would have had to pay a fee that would have been under $400 or so, tops, but my income was low enough I didn't have to pay it anyway, because they do, actually, take that into account at a certain point. Which is less than half a month's coverage currently. While that sucks, it is not the insurmountable sum that people scream about; it's the principle of the thing, and I don't entirely disagree with that.

A friend of mine worked in a bank. Regularly, she would get calls at the call center about how the percentage of a penny shaved off this or that should be rounded up instead of rounded down, and these calls would descend into endless screaming about 'the principle of the thing'. Even I would earn more money than a penny for arguing with someone for twenty minutes about a fraction of a penny. There is a point at which the argument costs us more than what we're arguing about, and rather than digging in heels to scream about principles, practical common sense awareness needs to kick in at some point. Collectively, people are moving away from that practice to factionalize, and down that road lies an equally collective ruin.