Fuck.

Ouch, man. Why you gotta attack me like that?

If someone intentionally caused harm to any of my cats, I live near a large national forest, and once you get a few hundred yards off a trail, no one is going to find a body.

Who tf gets a pet cat and doesn’t let it outside?

People that love their cats and don’t want them to die young. Outdoor cats live an average of 2-5 years, indoor-only cats live an average of 10-15 years. By allowing cats outside, they’re exposed to pathogens, parasites, and dangers that they wouldn’t otherwise experience. In my area, there are coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and owls, all of which will quite happily make a meal of a cat. There are also cars; they don’t tend to be able to stop on a dime.

fertiliser is applied in tightly controlled doses based on aerial analysis

Gotta say, this should be a huge red flag for everyone. Soil quality is declining sharply, and fertilizers simply aren’t making up the difference. Switching to robots farming will almost certainly accelerate this.

Use some Rokset on all your fasteners; the only way to break the threadlocker is with heat, and heat would also destroy the bodywork. So you could still replace damaged panels, but you couldn’t steal them.

You’re trying to defend the point of a genocide denier, but hopefully you’ll agree with me on that, right [emphasis added]?

First, that’s a manipulative way of stating something; it’s intended to force agreement. Although it’s phrased as a question, it’s not. This is a common tactic used by both high pressure salespeople, and by cults. It was one of the ways I was taught to pressure people into joining the Mormon church when I was a missionary. My suggestion is that, if you want to argue in good faith, then that’s a rhetorical device that you should stop using entirely.

You are confused and mix up country and state.

You are correct. I am confusing them. However, in the context of Israel and their genocide against Palestinians, they’re very nearly interchangeable. Hamas–and Iran, I believe–want to abolish Israel. Yes, the land itself would still be there, but it would not be a Jewish state/political entity. The country that Israel is would functionally cease to exist if Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran had their way.

Do you believe the third reich had a right to exist?

If you’re limiting the question to existence, then yes, I do believe that the 3rd reich had the right to exist. However, I don’t believe that they had the right to murder 6M+ Jews, Romani, LGBTQ+ people, and political dissidents, or to start a war of aggression. The force used to stop their murders and aggression also happened to be the same amount of force that ended the 3rd reich, but it’s not necessarily that way.

They’ve done nothing but ignore UN Sec Council resolutions.

Well. Not exactly. I’m pretty sure that it’s usually general assembly resolutions. I believe that the UN Security Council needs to be unanimous to pass a resolution, and the US–as a permanent member–always objects when it comes to condemning whatever atrocity Israel is currently committing. Which is pretty goddamn awful. And Russia does the same thing when one of their allies is doing awful shit. The ability of one member of the security council to hold up resolutions effectively de-fangs the council.

But - to your point, I agree entirely that the government of Israel, with the support of the majority of the Israelis, is committing and has committed war crimes against Palestinians.

“does that mean that Russia has no right to exist”,

Yes, sorry, I flipped Russia and Ukraine there. Me no type good sometimes.

But, at that–it is true that Russia has been severely sanctioned (…although $10 says Trumps ends most/all of those sanctions; did you see that Russia was the only country that didn’t get tariffs?). But should the state of Russia be entirely wiped out? Should Russia–as a state–cease to exist? (Russia certainly wants Ukraine to cease to exist as both a country and a state; Putin wants it to be part of Russia.) And no, Israel has not faced any consequences, and that is an utterly shameful failure of leadership in the US and in the rest of the world.

…But it’s also not directly relevant to the narrow question of whether Israel should be allowed to exist.

You’re trying to defend the point of a genocide denier

How so? He lit. said that he thinks Palestinians should have the right to self-determination, and that he didn’t support Israel’s genocide. (“Palestinians have a right to self determination as well. I don’t support genocide.”)

Israel commission of genocide is independent of their right to exist; they DON’T have the right to commit genocide, and the world should be–should be–united in stopping it. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran want to wipe Israel out, and commit acts of terrorism in pursuit of that; despite their actions–which I can understand given the actions of Israel–Palestinians and a Palestinian state also have, or should have, a right to exist.

I’m not sure where the disconnect is here.

I think that a true 2-state solution is the only realistic option, with borders returning to the, what, 1947? borders. I think that the world probably needs to have UN Peacekeepers there for the next century or so, and those troops should be allowed and required to use force to stop aggression from any side. I think that it was probably a mistake to have shoehorned Israel into the middle east in the first place; we should have given them Florida instead. (…Except that hardline Zionist Jews really, really wanted Jerusalem, because that was the territory that the believed god have given to them.)

a) I’m not sure about trusting second hand parts

It’s pretty much plug n’ play for wiring harneses. If you are placing the replacement while removing the original one, it’s hard to go wrong. The wiring harness that I bought for my CBR was a little wonky; the service manual covers 2007-2012, but they made some very minor changes for '11-'12. One of those changes was moving a single pin where the harness connects to the ECU. The result was that I had an engine code–knock sensor malfunction–and I had to re-pin that single wire. It was a bit of a pain in the ass. It was annoying mostly because the person that sold it didn’t realize that there was a difference.

Lots of 2nd hand motorcycle parts are just fine. Things that are damaged in crashes are usually catastrophically damaged.

multi-part disassembly and - more critically - correct reassembly challenges me.

That’s fair. I’m in the process of trying to turn a naked sport bike into a cafe racer, and just to change the headlight assembly, I need to remove the wheel and then the fork. It should be a 10 minute job, but instead it’s several hours. When I was checking valve clearances on my CBR, I ended up having to nearly remove the engine to get to the cam shafts. I hadn’t thought I was particularly mechanically inclined, but I guess I kind of am?

I used to have a fairly large collection of skulls that I’d found while walking around in the woods.

Not sure what ever happened to them… Probably lost them in one of my many moves.

I dunno, bourbon is nice too. And it has the benefit of usually being a lot less expensive than a Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, Ardbeg, or Lagavulin. Rye whiskey is another one.

But Jack Daniels can fuck right off.

But isn’t that irrelevant to whether the country has a right to exist as a country? Does a country only have a right to exist when they do nothing wrong? Are all people in a country responsible for the actions of leadership?

Trump is crashing the entire world’s economy, because he’s a fucking short-bus slack-jawed special-ed moron. Does the harm that Trump and his oligarchs are causing mean that the US as a whole has no right to exist? Does Putin’s invasion of Ukraine mean that Ukraine has no right to exist?

And let’s flip that; Hamas attacks and kills civilians as a political stand-in for the Israeli government. That’s the very definition of terrorism. Hamas is the government in Gaza. Does that mean that Palestinians have no right to a country of their own due to the actions of their gov’t?

Let’s face it, a lot of these people would absolutely hate to be part of real socialist organizing

Oh yeah. I’ve worked with an anarcho-socialist group, and shit was rough. And I was just volunteering because I believed–and still believe–in their cause. But eventually I had to give it up, because it was so chaotic that I never knew what my schedule was going to be, and I was wasting tons of time waiting for them to decide whether or not I would be useful that week.

I was a member of another group that was ostensibly anarchistic in theory that ended up being authoritarian in practice, and I quickly dipped.

Shit’s messy and complicated. Getting groups of people to point in the same direction can be hard without some degree of arbitrary authority. But when it all comes together, it’s amazing.

As for the suicide attempt, that’s something incredibly heavy for anyone.

The irony is that some of the people I had mistakenly believed were friends were (are, I believe) in an anti-suicide advocacy group. I guess it was easier for them to say the right things than to do the right things. 🤷 Lessons learned, etc.

I wonder where the cool emotionally available people all are?

I met some when I was a member of The Satanic Temple. And then Lucien Greaves/Doug Mesner went full-on authoritarian, I bailed because I’d already escaped from one cult, and the people I knew stayed. Now I’m the out-group, rather than a friend, because group/social identity is harder to let go of than individual friendships. I met some when I was in art school; hopefully the world hasn’t beaten that tendency out of them yet.

I suck at making friends

I hear you. It’s hard to make plans with anyone now; no one seems to follow through. And without spending time with people, you can’t build those bonds of friendship.

My divorce was nine years ago. I got remarried a whopping five days after my divorce (…because that was the statutory minimum time; my ex-spouse had dragged their feet so long with a divorce they initiated that I’d had three serious relationships, met someone, gotten proposed to, and was ready to get married before the divorce was complete). I can say without reservation that my current partner is leaps and bounds better than my ex-partner. I’ve long ago accepted that many people that said they were friends were not friends, even if it still sticks in my throat. In the time since my divorce, I’ve lost an average of 1.1 cats per year, and it never gets easy to hold someone that’s been a friend and companion for over a decade as they take their last breath.

Am I okay? I’m as okay as I ever get. I’ve been through therapy multiple times, and I’d probably still go to therapy if insurance was affordable.

Do I have friends? Not really. If I make plans with people too far in advance, they forget and make other commitments. If I try to make plans too late, they’re already booked. It’s possible that I’m simply unlikeable; I tend to lean that way.

My only point was that, anecdotally, this is the experience that a lot of men have when they try to be emotionally vulnerable and honest with their male friends. Perhaps Gen Z isn’t getting this kind of shit; maybe they’re able to be more emotional. I kind of doubt it though, because young Gen Z men are trending far more conservative than Millennials, and conservatism isn’t friendly towards emotional intimacy among men. I hope that they do better than my generation did.

It wasn’t necessary for it to be in the equation in the way that you think it wasn’t. They could see the past; it was easy to trace the evolution of arms and armor. They could easily see that, in the 1400s, a single knight in armor was more than equal to multiple men at arms, and that the handgonne had entirely changed that equation. Seeing the past, they could easily foresee that the tools of violence would change in the future.

But hey, lets drill down here. The point of the 2nd amendment is twofold; first, the people were intended to be a check against the government, and second, they recognized the common-law right to self-defense that they had taken from English law. Remember that they’d just been through a revolution, and they were well aware that a gov’t could become a tyranny (which is exactly where we are very, very rapidly heading); the idea of the people being armed with military weapons meant that it would be more difficult for a hostile gov’t to subjugate the people. To that end, militarily useful weapons should have more protections against banning than sporting arms. As to self-defense, well, assault rifles happen to be the most effective tool for that job–as far as defense at home goes–along with ‘high capacity’ magazines in handguns for carry guns. So even taking your claims at face value, if the founders somehow didn’t foresee changes in the tools of violence, they hold no water.

My account has under 400 until I can find a new job that doesn’t have so much down time between contracts…

Yikes. That’s scary as shit. I’m sorry to hear that. I hope that you can find something soon. I’ve been there–it’s been a while, thankfully–and there’s just nothing good about it.

It also opens buds to help you if they’re up for it.

My experience has been that being emotionally open tends to make people withdraw. Should it be that way? Of course not. Should I get better friends? Yeah, that would be cool, and I wish that was as easy to do as it is to say. I’ve found that many relationships and friendships end up being somewhat transactional; people are there for the good times, but aren’t interested in the emotional labor when shit gets real. I try to be there for people when they’re going through shit, but that doesn’t seem to be reciprocated.

If I sound bitter, well, I am. And cynical.

A lot of people I had thought were friends ghosted me when I failed to complete suicide and had a 72 hour hold. My ex-spouse held me in utter contempt because I was struggling emotionally. A lot of people I had known for a decade or more ghosted me when my ex-spouse and I were getting divorced; in fact, I only got to keep one friend in that divorce.

I suspect that this is part of the experience of being on the autism spectrum.

They kicked me out. They were already unhappy that I had started getting piercings–conservative Christians that they are–and then they found out that I had a LOT more piercings than they were able to see. Like, about 2x as many. And I had a lot of visible piercings. That led to a long period that was very, very difficult, including being kind of homeless for a while.

Bad times.

Just ask him what he’s doing when she makes those noises, because you want to try it out on your girlfriend (or have your boyfriend do it to you, either/or, I ain’t gonna judge).

But isn’t that also true with snakes? All of the times that I’ve stumbled across copperheads or rattlesnakes, they’ve just wanted to do their thing, and go on their way. They didn’t want to bite me. And 99.999% of the time, as long as you back off, the snake isn’t going to do anything.

…Except there’s that .001% of the time when a snake is going to chase someone, and attack them. And that makes everyone terrified of all snakes, because they never know which one is going to be that .001%.

It’s understandable, but it’s not fair, and yeah, it sucks to have people think you’re a threat when you’re trying hard not to be.