SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on ohh ... 1 week ago:
Waiting times are atrocious here in the U.S. The earliest in-person appointment that I can get with my GP is about 6 months out. Non-urgent surgeries are sometimes take close to a year. A friend recently had to keep a bladder drain in after surgery for an extra week because there were no doctors who could do the 5-minute removal available.
Anybody who says that long wait times are unique to public health systems is lying.
- Comment on Do you consider Taylor Swift to be of the working class and why? 1 week ago:
No. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of the working class that everybody agrees upon, but there are some common ones. She’s certainly not part of the Marxist proletariat, since I’m certain that she and her management team are smart enough to have invested her money so that she never need work again, if she so desired. Also, she employs a small army of people to put on tours. Similarly, she has far too much money to be part of the working class as loosely defined by people who must sell their labor to survive. From what I understand, she came from an upper-middle class family, so she’s not even working class by culture.
I can sort of see an argument that she puts on a very physically-demanding show, exchanging her labor for money, but performers traditionally haven’t been considered working class.
- Comment on I don't have a purpose in life and feel like a robot. This cannot be good for my mental health, but I don't know how or what to change. How do I change? 1 week ago:
I suggest reading the book Running on Empty by Dr. Janice Webb. Maybe it will explain some things. (Or maybe it won’t. I’m no expert.)
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 weeks ago:
Seems like the author could’ve cited plenty of examples, then, but just didn’t?
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 weeks ago:
With that title, I was expecting that the author could name more than 3 alleged smears from long ago.
- Comment on This world is cruel… 4 weeks ago:
First thing I thought of was the “Elementary School Musical” episode of South Park.
- Comment on True Story 1 month ago:
You say that, but “vote blue no matter who” is exactly this argument under the paint.
- Comment on True Story 1 month ago:
I’m on this kick of pointing out that the utilitarian ethical calculation still works with 100% Hitler and 100.1% Hitler. Harm minimization, baby!
- Comment on True Story 1 month ago:
Oh boy, if you haven’t, read its history. Its real history. Wild stuff.
- Comment on True Story 1 month ago:
To continue this thought, you might be interested to know how neuroscience tells us the brain works: In short, the unconscious mind decides and acts, and the conscious mind makes up stories about why. Quite often, the story is just wrong, or at least misguided. Those voters have a real reason that they don’t understand or won’t admit to themselves, and a million reasons that they give instead to explain it.
Yes, we need to drop the misconception that people rationally decide about much of anything, and learn about their real reasons.
- Comment on Nuclear Demonology 1 month ago:
They’re missing out, then.
Villagers: Let’s sacrifice a virgin to the volcano god.
Virgin: Help me, step-bro!
“Plot”: proceeds as one would expect
- Comment on Nuclear Demonology 1 month ago:
Yeah, the real question about him: Does he accept his payoff in rubles, or is he the kind of two-faced mercenary who demands dollars? (I know my guess.)
- Comment on Simple as that 1 month ago:
This is my plan to colonize Mars: Send a billionaire. As a self-made man, he won’t need a huge team of workers and costly infrastructure support to build a successful business.
- Comment on Honey 2 months ago:
Kinda tongue-in-cheek questions, but: Honey isn’t an animal body part, it isn’t produced by animal bodies, so if it is an animal product because bees process it, is wheat flour (for example) an animal product because humans process it? How about hand-kneaded bread? Does that make fruit an animal product because the bees pollinated the flowers while collecting the nectar?
- Comment on Pesto!!! 2 months ago:
But have we tried feeding a human infant 24kg of fish per week? Y’know, for science.
- Comment on Anon wants a cute girlfriend. 2 months ago:
Hmm, methinks that Anon (and all of us straight men) might do better by treating women as people. If we feel it’s so important to have a cute girlfriend, then should we not respect that a woman might want a cute boyfriend? If we think women should keep an open mind about us, maybe set an example, and keep an open mind about non-physical traits that make a woman cute?
Yeah, it’s always down to luck—that’s just life—but being a good dude is putting your thumb on the scale in your own favor.
- Comment on Ok boomer 2 months ago:
Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!
Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!
That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.
- Comment on Burning Up 3 months ago:
Tell me it’s 68f out and I will fight you.
Note to self: High heat levels make Canadians cranky.
- Comment on Burning Up 3 months ago:
Around here, 32°F is very cold in October, but an occasion to wear shorts in February. (Both are still cookout temperatures, though.)
- Comment on Burning Up 3 months ago:
No, that’s not it, we’re measuring in incredulity units, which are syllables.
“One hun-dred and se-ven?!” == 6 syllables
“For-ty one?!” == 3 syllables
Also, the first one has more vowel sounds to really draw out to indicate higher levels of I-can’t-even. It sounds only golly-jeepers in Celsius, and much more I’m-so-done-with-this-shit in Fahrenheit.
- Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election? 3 months ago:
Indeed. Notice, too, that the concerns about Biden’s cognitive abilities have instantly stopped? He’s still the President, and still in charge of the nukes. But no more news stories.
Meanwhile, the other guy has recently developed a habit of swearing at rallies, and there are a few articles about his wife asking him to knock it off, but nothing pointing out that a sudden increase in swearing is a symptom of dementia. At a town hall in La Crosse, WI the other day, he didn’t know why he was there at first. Still radio silence from the news media.
Funny, isn’t it?
- Comment on Coming up with new names is hard 3 months ago:
Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.
But I’m always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It’s a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.
- Comment on Coming up with new names is hard 3 months ago:
Cairo in Illinois, pronounced KAY-row.
- Comment on How do people in this day in age become nazis/neonazies sexist or even incels when there is so much knowledge against it? Do they get anything out of being that way? 3 months ago:
Our society really needs to lower the barrier to entry for this stuff, but I have no idea how you’d go about that.
I know. At least in the US. It sounds wonky, but think it through: Cars and zoning law. Between the two of those things, there are fewer and fewer third places. There’s nowhere to go to just be around other people. First (home) and second (places) are incredibly isolated, too. You get in the car and pull out of the garage, and interact with nobody until you pull in to the lot at work. At best, you interact briefly with fast food workers for a free second at the drive-thru window. There’s no “local,” no stores, no restaurants, no cafés in the neighborhood; you drive to those. They draw from a large area, so you never see the same people twice there.
Proximity has always been the best builder of community in human history, and we’ve done away with it.
- Comment on Anon is a soyboy 3 months ago:
Add some fungus to that bacteria shit, and that’s my favorite. Pair that with a yeast shit water, and it’s heaven.
- Comment on Hail our true supreme leader 4 months ago:
The arms in the second image are much too short. I can’t unsee it, now that I’ve noticed.
- Comment on What has he done to deserve this? 4 months ago:
Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
- Comment on Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term? 7 months ago:
Right, which is why I’ve been saying that the Democrats should restore the filibuster. What they have now is not a filibuster, in practice, it’s more akin to an administrative hold. One Senator indicates an intent to filibuster via email, and they move on to other business.
Make 'em do it. Pick a popular issue, and lean into it. Make the Republicans actually stand up there at the podium and talk for hours. Get them on camera on the news every night as obstructionists, blocking the will of the people. Yes, it will waste Senate session time; that’s a perfect opportunity for all of the Democrats to roast them non-stop to reporters. It’ll be painful for a while, but at least has a chance of breaking the log jam. (And if the GQP doesn’t take the bait, hey, popular thing gets passed!)
- Comment on Pancakes 7 months ago:
It’s one of the earliest memes, from over 20 years ago. Google “rabbit with pancake on its head.”
- Comment on Pancakes 7 months ago:
Little-known fact: These crabs sometimes camouflage themselves on top of the heads of rabbits.