Cardinal Pizzaballa

That cannot be his real name.

Looks it up

Huh, TIL.

If it were an ordinary sentence used in casual conversation, sure. But for a news headline, it makes sense to put the most important information at the beginning.

So, caring about the environment = cool

But caring about animals, which are inextricably a part of the environment (a link which can be demonstrated by the pollution produced by industrial farming) = not cool?

Seems an odd place to draw the line, but ok.

Or just about fighting each other and it’s all about drama because they don’t have the apparent ability to just simply talk to each other.

Classic sitcom formula. I never got into a lot of the “family” shows in the 90s, because almost every plot revolved around someone being a poor communicator - and that’s it. Person A can’t talk about event/topic Y, and now Person B assumes reason Z and the entire episode and all its hijinks only exist because of it. Everything could’ve been avoided if Person A and Person B actually talked things through, like healthy, sane people who actually want to avoid conflict. But writers couldn’t think of a way to both model proper communication and create a compelling storyline, so here we are.

When that show was popular, I had a boyfriend that didn’t seem able to handle the idea of us liking different things. I never cared for zombies, but I’d heard good things about The Walking Dead and gave it a try. I pushed myself to watch the entire first season before deciding, “Nope, I can’t.”

But when I told that boyfriend? Apparently I “didn’t watch it enough.” When I told him I didn’t care for zombie stories, he insisted, “But it’s not about zombies! It’s about the people.” Uhh yeah, it’s about people in a world with zombies. I could watch a million shows about “people” that don’t involve zombies, so why would I keep watching this one that I already don’t like?

It makes me happy to see others shit on Friends.

When it first aired, my mom was a fan and it would regularly be on in the living room, which was the crossroads of my childhood house - you had to go through it to get anywhere else. Which meant that Friends was impossible to ignore. Walking by, the highest praise I could conjure was, “Wow, that laugh track is doing a lot of heavy lifting.”

At the time of its popularity, I never heard anyone else dislike it. When the show ended, I felt alone in not being sad about it. Since then, I can’t tell if people look back on it with nostalgia or if they are truly still amused by the bland, low-fruit, celebration of stupidity that makes up most of that show’s humor.

The theme song was good though.

It’s been years since I’ve crossed the Canada/USA border, so things may be different today. But when I went, the Canada side was more concerned about smuggled weapons, while the USA side was more concerned about smuggled drugs. Still, it doesn’t take much to trigger a border patrol search.

Apparently if you go from New Brunswick in the morning, spend the day driving through Maine/New Hampshire/Vermont, and cross into Quebec the next day, that’s suspicious enough to get detained for several hours and to have your entire car searched at the border. To me it just made sense to do a straight line drive through those states, since staying inside Canada between those two points would have been a much longer, more convoluted route. Silly me, being logical about my route without considering how others break international law.

What makes you the ultimate authority on what terms a woman can consider “derogatory”? Where do you get the power to decide what words other people should use to describe their own feelings? What makes your opinion about it more valid than those of others?

Have you considered that the same word can make two different people feel two different ways? Unless you’ve got the power to know exactly what another person is feeling, there is nothing that makes your thoughts more valid than the thoughts of others in this matter. Doubling down that “derogatory” isn’t the right word to use gives the impression that you don’t believe “female” actually feels derogatory to a lot of women. Gotta wonder why that might be.

Croatia definitely blocks it better. Argentina still has lots of access to the Atlantic, and blocking Bolivia is a team effort between Chile and Peru.

Yet Croatia’s geography is basically a “Fuck you in particular,” practically going out of the way just to block Bosnia & Herzegovina. Chile doesn’t try anywhere near that hard.

Why not just attach Trump’s name directly? Adding his name to (terrible) things is practically his hobby.

“Time to lie in bed and do nothing for a few hours” ?

My college English professor absolutely hated the narrative device of “fate.” He felt it was a lazy excuse authors use to signify a character as “special” without having to work hard to justify it. Why work on character development to turn an average character into someone worthwhile, when you can just say they were born to be special? You can still use tropes like the refusal of the call to round out a protagonist and give them some illusion of choice, but ultimately the stamp of “fate” can only go one way.

if that was the correct explanation then we would expect to see (1) people in countries where it’s worse having even fewer children, which we don’t see, and (2) people in countries where it’s better having more children, which we also don’t see.

That’s not how things work. In fact, that’s practically the opposite of how things work. Increased access to educational opportunities for women is strongly correlated with lowered fertility rates. It’s a well-known pattern. Or another way to frame it, is that poorly-educated women are more likely to have more children.

Part of the pattern is missing from this picture too - before this baby bust, was the baby boom, and before the baby boom, child mortality was a lot higher. A lot of medical advancements took place around the middle of the 20th century, which resulted in more children surviving to adulthood. Prior to this, people typically had many children because so many of them wouldn’t survive. It takes time for a society to adjust to higher life expectancies, resulting in a period where people continue to have many children just like their own parents did, despite no longer needing to.

However, those high rates don’t last. People adjust to the new health expectations, leading the next generation to have fewer children than the one before.

Add in other factors of a prosperous state, such as educational opportunities and access to comprehensive healthcare (which would include birth control), and it makes sense that “countries where it’s worse” would have more children, and “countries where it’s better” would have fewer. (Check the link above for more explanation. It goes into way more detail.)

That link was a frickin’ roller coaster and I’m left with more questions than answers now. From the employees having previously reported that the walls were too low, to the worker who refused to let the young men into the cafe after the tiger got loose, to the random drama about the impounded BMW, to the guys who were attacked having already been facing charges of public intoxication and resisting arrest…

Trump has crossed so many lines but I really do not see any outcry, mass resistance or opposition?

Be mindful not to mistake suppression of dissent with lack of dissent. News media is actively avoiding protests. We’re out there, even if the news cameras aren’t.

According to the article, she first was admitted at 34 weeks.

Using this opportunity to plug the Lemmy 50501 community: [email protected]

Also, here’s the main 50501 website in case anyone wants more information.

It made me think the man was caught riding the horse like this:

I’ve mentioned this before in other threads that seek a women-centric Lemmy option, but there was at least one secret community on Reddit like that. Invitees’ post histories were vetted before an invite was sent, both to find women specifically, but also to prevent trolls.

I don’t know exactly how they did it, all I know is that I got an invite one day and found the most open, comforting community I’d ever seen online. It was a place where we could talk about anything from silly stories that made us smile, to complaining about specific issues with bras, all without fear of trolls hijacking the thread, or turning an ordinary thing for us into something sexual.

I miss it.

It’s called “being an ally,” and it’s far more productive than faking outrage and borderline-doxxing people we disagree with.