Well said on all counts.

Reddit was never perfect, but in my 12+ years there, it was never as bad as Lemmy has been the entire time I’ve been here.

Basically I’m only still active here because Reddit’s mobile app is such trash and Lemmy is more convenient to browse from a phone.

Honestly I’m not on the spectrum at all (that I know of) and your SO’s half of those exchanges sounds utterly exhausting.

Like, in their shoes, I’d probably just start sharing less and less about how I feel, especially when I’m not feeling well, specifically because I wouldn’t want to have to play 20 questions every time until you finally gave up on the analysis.

Like, I totally get that you’re just trying to help because you love them…but maybe you could simplify the process (and cut to the chase and give them some more agency) simply by saying something like “Ugh, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. Is there anything I can do for you?”

That lets them express their own thoughts/feelings/desires without having to pass a gauntlet of questions.

Again, I totally get that you mean well (I end up on your side of this exchange whenever my own SO isn’t feeling well…you just want to fix it for them), but I’ve also learned by time and experience that often my best move is to offer help, and if the answer is just needing some time and quiet, I just tell my SO what I’ll be doing nearby (but not up in their business) and if they need anything at all, just let me know and I’m happy to help.

Or it has little to do with emotions at all and more to do with physical changes based on environment.

And the middle east and their known long history of free expression.

Isn’t she that crazy woman that ran the bakery with her criminal husband?

This is a good point, although maybe I’m just unlucky, but quite a few times over the years, I’ve encountered friends, and friends of friends, who were vegetarian or vegan and seemed to make a primary hobby out of shoe-horning that information into any and every conversation they could. And every time, it was very deliberately and openly presented in a way to praise themselves and demonize anyone not like them.

Not only is food very foundational, as you’ve said, but I also strongly feel that a reason this particular set of -isms is such a lightning rod is because (perhaps due in large part to that foundational aspect of food in society), it seems like vegetarianism and veganism very much becomes who someone is, as opposed to simply describing an aspect of their lifestyle.

Not only that, but it becomes a part of their Identity in a way that frequently impacts the people around them.

So someone is a Catholic. That’s cool. I’m not one and I might have my issues with the Catholic church, but unless they’re extremely devout, chances are, their Catholicism is more “how they worship” and less “who they are” in everyday interaction. It just isn’t likely to affect me, and as such I’m much less likely to really care. As such, I’m cool with Catholics. Add to that: most Catholic people aren’t painting their religious belief in superiority either overtly or implicitly these days. They’re just going to mass on Sunday and doing their thing.

On the other hand, someone is vegan. That’s also cool. I might have preferences and a lifestyle that conflicts with their views and vice versa but we can coexist, and our preferences on what to eat won’t ever lead to conflict between us, right? Well…if they’re a coworker…or a member of a friend group, now any and every time that group of people wants to eat, that foundational aspect of society, now the group must accommodate that -ism which they don’t share. And that’s probably fine for everyone in the group sometimes…and some of the group all the time…but generally speaking, looking at all of the group, all of the time, that’s statistically likely to eventually rankle at least a few people. Then, depending on the individual, there’s a very real chance that they eat with this group, some of which may already be annoyed by having their food options limited by the choices of this individual…and on top of it, that individual takes that opportunity to make a comment that invokes morality into the situation…and it should come as little surprise that this type of person gets a generalized negative reputation.

If you’d like to break the stereotype of insufferable vegans, you might consider starting that process by not being one.

I’m not even sure these GOP reps are getting a dime from Russia.

More likely: they’re not getting anything from Russia, but their god-emperor Donny sure is, and he’s also got a vendetta against Ukraine after the whole Biden investigation debacle, so he’s using his inexplicable political clout within the party to pressure them into doing his bidding, with the penalty for falling to do so being that he says bad things about them, costing them an election.

Come for the spite toward Reddit, stay for the lack of content and somehow even worse community!

Yeah anytime I’m in too good of a mood and need to be infuriated, I know I can always read about the aftermath of WW2 and the fates of so many nazis and how so very few of them faced any sort of actual justice, let alone anything remotely proportional to their actions.

If gay would mean many things, the word would be useless.

Yeah, totally. I mean, that’s definitely why there aren’t any words at all in the entire English language that have more than one strictly defined meaning, and that meaning has never, ever changed.

The OGL bullshit, while absolutely scummy, I could at least understand as a business move, even if an absolutely unconscionable one.

Getting Pinkertons (who should’ve been eradicated from existence long ago) involved in anything is enough to get me to write them off forever.

Man, the more society progresses in open and honest conversations about sexuality, the more I’m sure that “spectrum” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the vast, bizarre complexity of human sexuality.

It’s more like…that crazy 3 tier chess they play in Star Trek.

Using the beforemath to avoid the aftermath!

I’ll use it to fix the hyperdrive and gtfo.

Unless you’re watching the Director’s Cut.

Well said.

I have no problem with the State having its secrets. It’s a necessity, and one of the many reasons that public trust in their government is so important (which itself is another can of worms).

I just feel that it’s equally if not more important that individual citizens are also entitled to their secrets, and in fact the presumption of privacy absent consent or significant circumstances.

Okay, fair point, but now you’re changing what they said.

Right?

The older I get, the more I realize how much I’ve been screwed by the older generations, and because of that, my positions on issues have sort of “forked”, having both a “what I think should reasonably be our course of action as a democratic republic” and “what I’d do if I were supreme overlord”…but both of those forks skew further left now than they did when I was in my teens.

Grim acceptance of the reality of our current sad state of affairs has led some of my “do what’s feasible and don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good” positions to be fairly moderate…but for every one of those positions, there’s a “supreme overlord” opinion that basically consists of “they’re a blight upon mankind and should be dragged through the streets to a public place where they’re thrown in a pillory for a day or two then hanged, with their assets liquidated and the funds used to undo their damages”.

Yeah that was gonna be my question: does Italy not have any legal mechanism in place that would be the functional equivalent of the US’s supremacy clause?

Like…not saying shit like this isn’t attempted all the time in deeply conservative areas of the US, but in most cases where the far right leadership has even a shred of strategic thinking, they often don’t even attempt to pass or enforce laws like this because it’ll trigger immediate challenge in the courts, the challenge will be 100% taken up and the decision will come down against them (since even in a conservative court, the only thing they hate more than ruling in favor of “liberal” causes is any ruling that would limit the court’s power in the future), and at that point there’s a permanent legal precedent in the books, against the repression they’d like to carry out.