This is the problem. I’m in my mid-40s and I have seen new “good ol’ boys” move into the system as their predecessors die or retire.

The system is self-perpetuating.

I have access to a microwave, but there’s usually a line, so I take things that don’t need to be heated. Pasta salads, regular salads, and yogurt parfaits are easy go-tos for me.

My parents got divorced in 1981. My mom was raised Pentecostal (the Tammy Faye Bakker kind, not the long skirts kind), and she was intermittently ultra-involved in the church.

During one of those times (in the mid-'90s), she came to the understanding that she could never remarry because the only “biblically acceptable” reason for divorce was unfaithfulness. Since that wasn’t why she and my dad got divorced, dating anyone else would be considered adultery. So she swore off dating.

To be fair, I don’t know if this is something that came from the church or something she came up with on her own. I just remember thinking it was pretty ridiculous.

So whether it’s official church doctrine or not, I do think that the more extreme the church, the more extreme the rules are.

Wait. You’re saying that The Mirror, noted bastion of low-quality tabloid reporting, has stated something incorrectly?

Shocking.

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I live in Latin America and I don’t even have a heater. My climate control options are “window open” and “window closed.”

• 40% Iron
• 40% Osmium
• 40% Chromium
• 40% Dolomite
• 40% Platinum
• 40% Titanium
• 40% Zinc
• 0.04% Nickel impurity

Anyone who thinks I’m a bot can bite my shiny metal ass.

Oh, yeah, I had to learn how to block communities pretty quickly when I arrived. It’s been so long that I had almost forgotten about that process.

My experience with Tumblr was largely the same. My list of filtered tags there is rather long.

Lemmy currently feels a lot like reddit used to in the beginning, when posts came from real people who just wanted to share ideas about things they cared about. I’d rather keep it as is than see it grow into the bloated bot farm of garbage and advertising that reddit has become.

If you’re not acting on behalf of a government or its military, I think it’s usually considered terrorism instead of a war crime.

The bar thing just sounds like they don’t clean their taps very well.

So much this. I live in a country with a sugar tax, so almost every soft drink on the market has part of its sugar replaced with some kind of sweetener. I didn’t drink a lot of soft drinks before, but now I can’t drink them at all.

My uncle was a factory worker and a daily regular at his favorite local bar for more than 30 years.

My mom wouldn’t allow me to go inside the bar (because drinking alcohol is a sin, you know). But in the '80s and '90s, before cell phones, I knew exactly where to find him after school if I needed anything.

Unfortunately, 30+ years of excessive drinking caused a lot of really serious health problems that caught up to him when he was in his 50s. The owners and staff sent a huge flower arrangement and all came to his funeral.

I also always access .world through my VPN.

I’m still here at .world because every time I think I’ve identified a better instance to go to where people seem to like it, I see someone else who recommends blocking it.

I definitely see the appeal of (and need for) blocking individuals, but I think that instances are too big and varied to neatly paint everyone with the same brush.

This is fair.

It’s exhausting to try to have a conversation with someone who isn’t engaging in good faith.

It’s perfectly understandable if you don’t want to spend your time and energy in that way. And (as I argued at length here) it isn’t your responsibility.

I call bullshit on this. Education does not, in fact, “go both ways.”

Generally, in western society, we accept the idea that adults should be responsible for themselves, with exceptions for those who are physically or mentally unable to do so. We value principles of autonomy and personal responsibility, so we’re generally expected to do the work of educating ourselves (or paying someone for their help) in adulthood.

When a person has a child, they make a choice to be a parent and to take on the responsibility to raise that child. Of course, we know that not everyone follows through on that responsibility.

That person’s child has not been given any choice. They should not be required to take responsibility for their parent(s) just because of the accident of their birth. Many children choose to care for their parents in their old age for various reasons, usually for love or money.

As a society, we agree that we owe protection, education, and the fulfillment of needs to our children … because we choose to bring those children into the world and because we need them to perpetuate the social order we rely on.

Those children do not, when they become adults, automatically owe the same things back to the full-grown adults who raised them. Generally, we expect them to provide stability for their elders by contributing to the social and economic order, mostly by paying taxes and keeping infrastructure functional.

Parents are able to control aspects of their children’s lives in order to raise them in what they deem to be appropriate ways. Children don’t get “a turn” to control all of the same aspects of their parents’ lives. My mother kept me from playing video games and watching MTV as a teen because she thought it would “rot your brain.” But as much as I’d love to, I can’t keep her from watching Fox (or NewsMax, or OAN, or TBN, or whatever she’s on this week).

Some people might choose to try to reverse the effects of 20+ years of a 24-hour propaganda machine brainwashing their parents out of love or a sense of familial duty, or whatever. And that’s admirable.

But I absolutely reject the idea that it’s somehow “my turn” to “educate” 20+ years of Fox News programming out of my aging conservative parents.

I call this “the Fox News approach to reality.”

That’s just a vending machine with extra steps.