Obviously there's a lot in play, though, and I expect that some of it
is misogyny - woman judged harder and expected to be nicer; woman married to heartthrob [heartthrob to some, at least in my circles anyway] Neil Gaiman must be run down as... [
more]
favorited 17 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Oh, and you might enjoy
Lud-In-The-Mist - it isn't feminist though it's by a woman and its class politics are dreadful, but it is dreamy and strange and has lots of wonderful visual images; truly a tour-de-force of the field - and certainly no... [
more]
favorited 2 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a... [
more]
favorited 68 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Okay, look, I understand that I am late to this thread, but Minneapolis has had banh mi at least as long as I've lived here - so that would be, like, since 1997, courtesy of Vietnamese people living here. Banh mi is just one of life's eternal... [
more]
favorited 1 time
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Blaming one half of the party based on the other half's intentionally vague story doesn't solve anything.
It's not even
blame, though. It's that it
always happens - it's as though I have only to admire a male intellectual or... [
more]
favorited 17 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
To respond to far upthread: if you haven't read about the miners' strike that was basically Thatcher's defining moment, it's simply unbelievable. Troops, police infiltration, people getting shot - it's like the 1968 Democratic convention, or one of... [
more]
favorited 171 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
One thing I learned from housing a friend who was in a situation similar to yours - in general, most people who have stable jobs and stable lives
do not understand how hard it is to pull yourself up from disaster. They are not able to... [
more]
favorited 79 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
At least in the 90s, you could see capybara at the Shanghai zoo, pent up in a rather horrible concrete enclosure with a sort of moat. I had never seen any before and had no idea what they were; as we approached they all jumped into the water and... [
more]
favorited 2 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for allowing people who have gender-reassignment surgery switch the bathroom they use. These people have made significant sacrifices to change their lifestyle, so I'm willing to assume good faith on their part.... [
more]
favorited 34 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Another couple of things that occur to me:
1. You might ask yourself why trolling sincere anti-racists or anti-homophobes is so funny. Even if someone is all choked up with sincerity or being kind of straight-laced about it, ask yourself why it's... [
more]
favorited 28 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I mean, all this is really the capitalist sublime, right? The assumption being that once we learn to
consume correctly, to make an artistic performance out of
consumption itself, our problems will fall away and we will be perfectly... [
more]
favorited 21 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Also, on the "but he is so hot" front: I've said this here before, but sometimes when a person is depressed and feeling low-self-esteem-y, the fact that the person is Bad For You is what makes you see them as hot. Like, your unconscious... [
more]
favorited 20 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I was kind of hoping that he jumped in
on the side of the sperm whales. Not as some kind of neutral observer of nature's murderers attacking the gentle, hippie giants of the seas. Tsk.... [
more]
favorited 3 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
The union contract will cover all of this. It will be negotiated to outline volunteer responsibilities and how they differ from paid staff responsibilities. I mean, presumably there is a reason that the paid staff are paid, right? Either most of... [
more]
favorited 9 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
You can conclude therapy with this person if you want; it's okay. I agree with everyone else that her response was probably much more "I am worried that shiggins thinks I am horrified by her problems and perhaps that I see her mostly as a... [
more]
favorited 1 time
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I doubt that you're in love with Beth, per se - you haven't been super emotionally intimate in a long time, you haven't shared much about your lives in a long time (except for the interlude when you weren't dating Alice), you have undoubtedly both... [
more]
favorited 30 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I had
the most depressing conversation with my father recently. My dad has always been sort of a climate optimist - "oh, global warming is happening, but I lived through predictions of Soylent-Green style overpopulation and followed by... [
more]
favorited 5 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Your friends would probably be horrified to find that their casual venting had been noticed and had hurt you that way. I know that if I were to find out that a friend had heard some of the casual comments that I might have made, I would feel awful!... [
more]
favorited 6 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Sperm whales are hardly "gentle, hippie giants of the sea." We are talking about the world's largest predator, an animal with teeth the size of your hand that dives thousands of feet into the inky depths to do battle with giant squid,... [
more]
favorited 4 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Is this kind of idiocy really your best response to this kind of situation?
OmniWise, I've just realized that I tend to view "people in a less privileged position getting kind of depressed about that situation and speaking with some... [
more]
favorited 12 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I find it incredibly depressing that the split turns out to be the result of the male half of the couple having an affair. (One assumes with a younger woman.) I had hoped that it was just, you know, a
divorce, not a "famous dude can't... [
more]
favorited 10 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
It looks European - German or possibly English or Italian - to me, based on nothing but the fact that I used to collect vintage ceramics before the thrift stores around here got too picked over. The English stuff I've seen is more finely detailed... [
more]
favorited 1 time
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I feel like I've noticed some increased anxiety around clothing-conformity in recent years - the thing about how some people will throw out your resume if you interview in nylons and some people will throw out your resume if you interview without... [
more]
favorited 6 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
But anyway! In retrospect, I recognize that I should not have turned this in the direction it's going! I will personally stop going this direction! And hope others will too, except it would of course be fair for OmniWise to reply.
On that note,... [
more]
favorited 2 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
My sense of this question is that you want permission to break up your marriage but don't want to feel like a bad guy about it. If that's the case, go ahead - no sense in staying married if you aren't into it. But I would do some thinking, myself,... [
more]
favorited 10 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Okay, here is my experience with left environments and identity politics:
Some of those people
can be jackasses. Sometimes people can be shallow, sometimes there can be orthodoxies that are not sufficient to the needs of the day.... [
more]
favorited 24 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I worked for a nonprofit bookstore and they sold things for what they could get for them, which was closely tied to the price of the books online. The store had an Amazon store and entire online order fulfillment department.
I worked for a... [
more]
favorited 2 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
We might look at the past - what about societies where it was pretty normal for many men (a far greater percentage than are considered "gay" in contemporary terms) to have same-sex relations? Obviously, ancient Greece, also samurai Japan,... [
more]
favorited 2 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Okay, I can tell you something from
within the radical left, based in many years of experience:
No matter what Fox says or how the media tries to spin it,
there is absolutely zero fucking traction on the left for mass violence... [
more]
favorited 28 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I really like Joanna Russ and Samuel Delany, both SF writers famous for their prose.
Russ's canonical, difficult work (not that difficult!) is
The Female Man, in which I warn you that she tries to make a subsidiary point about gender in a... [
more]
favorited 4 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I might conceivably pay good money to have a Fancy Thing (probably not coffee, as I'm not really fussy about coffee) made by someone at a Fancy Hipster Shop provided that there didn't have to be a lot of ideology associated with it. Like, what about... [
more]
favorited 7 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
All these people go to the expensive espresso bar with a hipster, rockstar barista. That’s not what we do. We want people to relearn what was lost.” Martijn and his friends thought the first step in this reeducation was breaking down walls.... [
more]
favorited 56 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I think one thing that tends to happen is that individual corners of the internet tend to develop highly specialized analysis and vocabulary - often very
good analysis and vocabulary, I consider that I've learned a lot from the much-demonized... [
more]
favorited 26 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Perhaps. I didn't get that from it though. It read to me like a microcosm of what life in the United States has become for so, so many people. Shitty jobs in service industries with little or no opportunity for advancement or wage increases, for... [
more]
favorited 50 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
All my supermarket check-outs are "guilt-free", because
feeling guilty about food is not helpful. Some days I think "hey, it was entirely nutritionally appropriate to buy what I bought, including that chocolate bar" and... [
more]
favorited 45 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
Capitalists are such frauds. They appeal to "market logic" when it's for themselves - "oh, we can't offer benefits, we can't afford it!" or whatever - but when people who are not desperate economic refugees refuse to work for... [
more]
favorited 167 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
See, this whole business is the result of a chronic inability to address the truths of capitalism. It's just like how the United States absolutely
will not endorse a living wage or meaningful worker protections, so we sneak in social welfare... [
more]
favorited 185 times
MetaFilter comment -
Last month
I began to feel hurt and to have real doubts about whether we were a good match. I said this to him. He then said it was very important to him to have me in his life, I am special, he likes the reflective conversations we have, but I was blowing... [
more]
favorited 52 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
What about Finn Comfort? I've seen them and they look like good quality, plus they're made in Europe.
I will also plug the non-sandal Trippen Vivienne just in case what you're looking for is merely "sturdy somewhat feminine shoe that can be... [
more]
favorited 1 time
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
I kinda chuckle to myself when I see chicks on the subway with huge tattoos of birds on their arms, really hairy legs/armpits, and a short cropped haircut, buzzed in the back and heavily styled in the front. Oh yeah.. the legs and armpits really... [
more]
favorited 24 times
MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
I know you marked this "answered", but I thought I would add a bit:
1. You're living with a fellow who does not understand that
looking for work is work (kind of like a lot of mefites, I guess) and who assumes that because you're... [
more]
favorited 31 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
So did I totally misread the linked story or did Facebook
take down somebody's comments complaining about Fox? That, to me, is actually creepier than the business with the hats.
Just now, I was walking back to work from a work-related... [
more]
favorited 48 times
MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
Yeah - I think the "Thatcher Destroyed Industry" narrative misses where the UK was in 1979. Rampants strikes, blackouts, demarcation, inflation up at 30%. The Labour party was in freefall, and industry was on its knees.
But the... [
more]
favorited 50 times
MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
She was a woman ahead of her time. There's nothing she did that political leaders around the world aren't doing today; they're just doing it in a more stealthy and underhanded manner. At least she was open about it.
It's not just that - it... [
more]
favorited 168 times
MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
Join organizations - whatever grabs you. There are undoubtedly intramural sports teams, film societies, volunteer groups, religious groups - pretty much anything you could want to do, there will be some relevant group on campus. Here is what I... [
more]
favorited 5 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
I have had this problem! In fact, I'd say this problem defined my romantic life until I was...um...about thirty. Or rather, until I'd had enough relationships to have enough distance for reflection.
Here's what I think:
I grew up with... [
more]
favorited 25 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
Here's the thing: as stated, almost everyone has issues with their parents, and almost everyone finds a way to come to terms with that eventually, with or without their parents continued involvement in their lives.
By contrast, I think that... [
more]
favorited 16 times
Ask MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
That's not how it works. It's not a zero-sum game. You should be ripshit because this racism crap is taking money out of your pocket - if people were given truly equal opportunities, more people would be producing at their best potential, which... [
more]
favorited 31 times
MetaFilter comment -
2 months ago
