Oh yeah, that last point rings true for my dad too. My family hired a health aid to assist with our relative who he’s helping care for in home hospice, and we fought with him for weeks to defer to the aid’s expertise. He believes, despite the fact that this is literally her career, that he knows better how to take care of someone on their deathbed. Despite not having gone through it before, or having any medical or healthcare experience. He would snap at the aid for showing him how to do something.

We ultimately had to have a heart-to-heart with the aid to apologize for his behavior and to teach her how to use his own narcissism against him so he would do things the right way.

I think he’d be a grandiose narcissist. He truly believes he’s the best and can’t be wrong. And when someone calmly and carefully explains why he is wrong about a particular thing, his mood flips 180 degrees and he blows up and gets super defensive. If we don’t give up trying to convince him, his mood gets even more sour and he essentially mopes like toddler. This can be for anything, even the most trivial bullshit that wouldn’t phase anybody else.

And he does all that while bragging to anyone that will listen that he’s open-minded and loves being proven wrong.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so this is all observational for me, but my father is a narcissist so I can at least tell you what he’s like.

In conversation, or any interaction, if the topic veers into anything that my father can’t relate to or isn’t aware of from his own personal experience, he immediately reframes the topic so it’s about him. This consistently happens in the middle of a conversation, and it usually interrupts someone speaking. The interruption is always unrelated to what the person was actually saying, so after he interrupts you can always see the person he cut off deflate and shrink away from the conversation. Because it’s clear he wasn’t participating in a two-sided conversation, he was just waiting his turn to cut in and take over.

He manages to come across as caring, but that’s only because he knows exactly how to act so he appears that way. But his motivation is only to be praised for his apparent empathy, because if you probe his behavior even a little bit, it’s like a switch is flipped and he goes into a full on angry defensive mode.

For example, a close family member is dying, and he is the only one available to care for them. And he is taking care of them physically, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that, but whenever another family-member asks for an update on their condition, his framing is always about what he has done and how he has learned what to do in a particular situation, it’s never about the condition of our dying family member.

He takes credit for every idea and new concept he comes across, even if the person who gave him the idea is in the room with him. It sometimes even happens in the same conversation.

Anyway, those are just my personal experiences living with an extremely difficult and selfish father who is incapable of thinking genuinely about other people. I learned a lot about myself and him by reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Worth a read even if you’re not thinking about a parent.

Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.

This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.

In case you’re not aware (many people aren’t) journalists almost never choose their own headlines. It is usually written by an editor after the article is finished. Journalists, especially at large papers like the Guardian, usually have no say in the headline.

I’m furious about this, and I don’t live in Georgia. The way the state treated opposition to this fascist fever dream was abhorrent and Anti-American. When I think about what these facilities are like, I can’t help but picture those propaganda videos of Al Qaeda training in the desert. I mean, they will certainly be training police to perfect the terror tactics that have kept Georgia law enforcement so racist and untrustworthy (no-knock warrants, swatting, shooting before asking questions, killing every dog they see for fun, etc. etc. etc.).

Curious though, why include this part? Without any explanation it seems completely out of place. Also, why is this true, tariffs?

It’s estimated that Atlanta’s 85-acre, $118 million training center — an increase from the previous estimate of $90 million — would cost more than double to build today.

Yes! I listened to a couple chapters when I didn’t have the book with me, and ended up going back and listening from the beginning. It’s a great audiobook.

The Darth Plagueis novel also added a ton of context to The Phantom Menace for me. It’s a long history of Palpatine and Plagueis that goes all the way up to the Battle of Naboo, so it really feels like you can see clearly Plagueis’ influence on Palpatine and his scheming. If I remember correctly, Luceno even does a couple of the scenes from the movie, with way more detail. I rewatched it after finishing the book and got a lot more out of it.

Heh I will remember that! Thanks!

I’m sure I won’t find a fresh one, but I remember seeing something that looked like that at one of the local Asian supermarkets I spend way too much money at.

It has definitely become more obvious lately, but this isn’t new. Anti-Zionism has been conflated with Antisemitism for as long as I can remember. I remember being called a “self-hating Jew” more than 20 years ago, for probing the myth that the IDF was the “most precise and humane army in the world.” That was a common trope in the 90s and 00s, but has always been utter bullshit.

I was told I couldn’t be Jewish and called an “Arab-lover” for talking about my countless positive experiences being friends with Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims in general. That they thought this was an insult just exposed their bigotry.

Terminology changes, but there is rarely logic to raw hatred.

If you have a general interest channel that includes most/much or your company on slack or something similar, you could post links to articles that explain the problems with relying on chatbots or best-practices for using them in a professional setting, and hope the person in question sees it. That way you don’t have to call them out personally, and the whole company can benefit from a reality check on how these things should or shouldn’t be used.

No, I don’t think I’ve tried durian. I don’t recognize the name, but the fruit itself looks familiar, so I’ve definitely seen them around. I’ll pick one up the next time I see it!

Yeah, I never thought fruit could taste this good.

I have trouble remembering the names of the specific hybrids, but I believe that variety is called "Dapple Dandy" or “Dinosaur Eggs.” When I was was trying to find the name, I came across this photo of some of the varieties of hybrids. It's wild how different they can be.

This is really well said. Throughout history, you can reliably find people on both sides of moral and humanitarian issues like this. There were Roman elite who spoke out against slavery in antiquity, there were Brits who mocked the American Colonies for owning slaves while founding a country based on freedom, there have always been men who believed in equal treatment and rights for women. Right and wrong is usually pretty clear, and in general regular people throughout the ages have been able to recognize which is which. Our values haven’t changed much, but our systems of power and accountability have.

That said, I also believe a good amount of the right wing backlash against the internment camps was performative. Because up until relatively recently, many racists themselves understood that their beliefs were terrible, so they at least tried to hide their true feelings and spoke out against obvious atrocities like this in public. But that was only so they could be accepted by the wider culture, and so they could continue to participate in left-coded spaces. They don’t need to hide how awful they are anymore because the president is leading by example.

It’s almost stone fruit season in California!! My local farmers market was selling the very first batch of peaches last weekend, which means they’re coooming!

Can’t explain how excited this gets me. If you haven’t tasted a fresh pluot or some of the huge variety of hybrid stone fruit, you’re missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures. They’re colorful, they’re sweet, they’re subtly sour, they’re juicy, and they have the most satisfying crunch. There’s so much variety, and some amazing genetic combos. You ever had a peach that looks like a green apple on the outside and is the color of a beet on the inside? Well that’s my most favorite goddamn fruit on the planet. Fuuck I’m getting too excited…

At the peak of stone fruit season, sometimes I’ll just chop up a bunch of different kinds of pluots and that’s my meal for the day. Not kidding. When I first moved here, this shit changed my life. Best fruit I’ve ever tasted.

I was thinking the same thing. Not to belittle OPs comment, because it does sound like a super annoying problem, but I’ve literally been unable to calm down or relax for the last few days, because the lease on my apartment expires tomorrow, and I haven’t been able to reach my landlord to get his approval to go month-to-month. I’m genuinely terrified I’m going to have to spend the next solid month looking for a new place to live (much easier said than done here), but all of that could turn on a dime if my landlord decides to take a second and call me back.

I’m so sick of the constant stress and uncertainty of renting and not knowing if this place I’ve poured all my money into might just not get renewed, I’d love to have the problem of trying to find a handyman or contractor. Oh and I know if my landlord finally does let me stay beyond the initial lease, he’ll raise the rent, because he can.

Nothing Rowling has said should even be remotely controversial.

What an obvious flat out lie. I snorted when I reached that line. I can’t understand how the author could include bullshit like that. Doesn’t pass even the most casual smell-test.

Here’s an article that Vox keeps having to update to ensure everybody can track Rowling’s detailed history of transphobia. Rowling is transphobic, that’s a fact.

Your whisky preference is indeed correct.

Yeah, I wouldn’t say he’s a pressing problem, but he’s also not part of any active solutions or any meaningful movements so it’s time for him to go.

I totally agree that term limits would solve many of these issues.