Note that I’m the original commenter rather than the one you’re replying to. I don’t want to talk about fertility but I do have a few questions for you.

As an elder Millennial, I have zero interest in someone half my age. Or younger.

I think you and I are about the same age. What do you mean by “interest” here?

Emotional intelligence and availability, shared experiences, and common ground are also factors in potential mates. Add societal factors like education, financial stability…

Those sound like your criteria for long-term compatibility rather than your criteria for sexual attraction. I think they are different things. I have met people who would have been great long-term relationship partners if not for the fact that I was not attracted to them. I have also met people I was very attracted to who turned out to be terrible partners.

Some people (usually women) say that someone who wasn’t initially attractive to them became attractive once they learned what a good person he was. I was taught that judging people based on their appearance was shallow and wrong, so I tried very hard to make relationships with good people I wasn’t attracted to work. They never did. They were doomed from the start and there would have been less pain for everyone if I had been honest with myself immediately rather than pretending that my initial lack of attraction didn’t matter or that it could change with time.

The actual transcript:

But [Dick Cheney’s] daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face, you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee. Well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy, but she’s a stupid person. And I used to have, I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.

I’m no fan of Trump but this is unambiguously not a threat. The clear meaning is that she would would change her mind if she was one of the soldiers who would be fighting a war that she supports, not that Trump would threaten her with a gun until she changed her mind.

Not all older people are sexually attracted to other older people. A 70-year-old friend of mine confessed that he’s sad and frustrated because any woman he is attracted to is way too young for him. (He’s not a creep who would actually bother younger women.)

I worry about this myself. I’m still young enough that I think women my own age are attractive, but to be honest I can’t imagine being attracted to a retirement-aged woman unless she is one of those celebrities who have a hidden painting that ages instead of them.

Have things really gotten that bad?

A house can’t literally be branded, so the use of “brand” in that context must be metaphorical. People, however, can and historically often have been branded quite literally.

As for othering: it is irrelevant to the point I was making, so your reference to it here is a good example of how people make a false and inflammatory statement, and then when challenged about it, those people retreat to a much weaker, uncontroversial claim. Meanwhile the public has seen the original, false, and inflammatory statement but not the challenge or the retreat.

No one would care if the headline said “Israelis see Palestinians as fundamentally different from themselves” or even “Israelis sometimes don’t treat Palestinian prisoners with respect.” However, what the headline does say is that Israelis physically mutilate Palestinian prisoners. Here in the comments you make a pitiful argument that the claim of physical mutilation is in fact just a metaphor, although even then you try to sneak in a comparison between Jews and Nazis. Jews aren’t tattooing anything on anyone, but apparently they still have less decency than Nazis according to you.

I think they’re almost certainly deliberately using ambiguous language to push an agenda. (Either that or both the author and the editor are incompetent.) And I would add that the language isn’t even actually ambiguous. It’s simply deceptive. “Brand” in this context would be interpreted literally by a normal reader and claiming it’s a metaphor is disingenuous.

You mean some honorable people out there.

My impression has been that Harris is indicating that her economic policy will move in the opposite direction with her talk of “price-gouging”. Is there a reason to think she will do what this article suggests, other than the fact that some donors are asking her to?

societies have utilized shame in order to shun unwanted or undesirable opinions forever

Using shame isn’t new. Using shame in this particular way at this particular time appears to be a poor strategy. It’s deliberately divisive and conservative reactionaries aren’t the only ones who are motivated to vote against it. By now many people who call themselves liberal and have a history of reliably voting for Democrats oppose it too. I think Nate Silver does a good job of expressing why in the context of Israel, although he’s looking at a much bigger picture. Most of these people are still voting for Democrats, because Harris is a centrist and Trump is, well, Trump. It’s still not helping.

Lemmy is a place where it often seems like leftist views are almost universal among Democrats, but Lemmy is not representative of the large majority of Democratic voters. I don’t think most Harris voters (as opposed to just the vocal Democrats online) despise Republicans.

In 2364 they have invented new ways of sitting that are far more advanced than any which exist today.

That always sounded like a huge pain in the ass to me.

She’s a doctor so it was even more of a huge pain than usual for her, both times.

I knew a guy who had his wife’s name tattooed in huge letters on his neck.

If he gets divorced, Facebook can give him a list of all the other people with that same name.

The time I got married, I asked my wife not to change her last name because the women in my family don’t. (Even if they did, I think I would still find it off-putting. It’s my last name. You have your own last name.) She insisted on changing it regardless of what I wanted, and that was the “red flag”…

The joke is on her. She had to go through the trouble of changing it back after the divorce :)

The police are thinking that too.

Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

In either case, the actions of one person don’t prove much about the larger movement that he intends to support.

This law was already not being enforced. Only 463 people actually got in trouble for breaking it in 2023, so the odds of being punished for jaywalking that year were about the same as the odds of being murdered.

I do wonder what effect repealing the law will have on civil suits. If a driver hits a pedestrian, are there now new situations in which the driver is liable? The article says

People may also still be liable in civil actions for accidents caused by jaywalking

but that’s quite vague.

I think that’s quite a stretch. Girdusky’s comment is clearly a response specifically to Hasan’s expression of support for Palestinians. What’s the connection between “all supporters of Palestinians are terrorists” and being an Arab?

My problem with Windows is that when I want to eject a USB drive, Windows refuses to do so, refuses to tell me what program is apparently still using the drive, and certainly refuses to kill that program. I am removing the drive. I can’t just not remove it!

On Monday’s prime time show, after Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan stated that he supports Palestinians, conservative commentator Ryan Girdusky responded, “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”

The remark is offensive, but how is it racist? The implication was that Hasan’s ideology is similar to that of Hezbollah, which isn’t a race.

I don’t see much of a connection between the two stories: one man is a politician falling in line with Trump’s policy against illegal immigration and the other man was a legal immigrant who died after working for too long in very hot weather. The article does briefly mention that the politician is also against increasing legal requirements for protecting workers exposed to heat, but the article devotes almost no attention to this. (Apparently already-existing legal requirements for protection were not being followed.)

“[Hancock] presents his theories as being superior to what the first inhabitants of the area say about their own history,” said Stewart Koyiyumptewa, tribal historic preservation officer for the Hopi Nation.

The Hopi people have lived in or near the Grand Canyon for at least 2,000 years and claim a sacred site inside the canyon as their place of emergence. They also have strong ties to Chaco Canyon.

Obviously Hancock is a crackpot but saying that he offends other people with equally falsified theories is not exactly strong criticism…

I think the proposed approach would be perceived as defeatism. Voters would see one candidate saying “the problem is too big to solve” and the other candidate offering solutions. It doesn’t help that Democratic policy is what has been making the “problem” bigger recently.

I also think that restricting immigration (especially illegal immigration) is not inherently fascist.