What?! Only fools believe what the professional journalists say! Dintcha hear? It’s all fake news! The only real news is the stuff you see online, in random and especially backwater Internet forums, because why would some random, anonymous person lie or have things wrongly worked out? Trust in the obscure and unverifiable!

Who is John Galt?

Beat me to it. 6.6 IMDB, 33% RT. It stars Antonio Banderas as an Arab, but goddamnit I love this flick.

Maybe my comment was limited to what it commented on and you shouldn’t be assuming a whole bunch of other things I didn’t say?

I use a case and I have (very rarely) dropped my phones, but I’ve never broken one (or even significantly damaged one) by doing so. I suspect that might be because the lip of most cases protects the screen from direct impact with flat surfaces. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

And I do agree with you that a case bulks up the phone a bit and you lose that satisfying thinness. However, to me, there’s a positive trade-off: if you get the right case (like a silicone one), you can significantly increase the tackiness of its surfaces, giving you a much better grip on it. This, to me, is the chief benefit of having a case—not to protect it should you drop it, but to make it so you’re much less likely to drop it in the first place.

Don’t call therapists “friends-for-hire.” It’s a lame insult to a serious and needed profession.

Agreed. I never thought it would happen in my lifetime, but it looks like we’re going to have Star Trek computers pretty soon.

I’m an American atheist Jew, and I’ve had conversations with my (converted) mother about it. She’s pretty solidly on Israel’s side, but she’s also not very educated about the conflict. She just kinda goes by the mainstream media’s narrative and doesn’t think too much beyond that. When I present her with information, she’s horrified and agrees with me that “Israel is going too far,” but it never results in her thinking the U.S. should stop sending them money. She hates Netanyahu and his conservative government, but she’s very hung up on Hamas being a terrorist organization. And I suppose I am too, to be honest. I want a free Palestine and for the Israeli settlers to be expelled, but I don’t want to support Hamas and I think they should pretty much be eradicated. I’m just much more willing to condemn Israel for their actions than she is; she’s very caught on the idea that Israel has a right to defend itself from Palestinian terrorism, and has a hard time seeing that it’s gone way past that at this point.

Mental health counselor here.

The outcomes of treatment for bipolar disorder are unfortunately very variable. It depends on how severe your son’s symptoms are, how well he responds to the medications cocktail he’s being given, what that medication cocktail is, and how well he adheres to it.

The important thing is that your son controls what he can control, which is largely whether or not he takes his meds and how much he engages in therapy. Therapeutic skills involve insight/mindfulness work (i.e. how well your son can recognize his symptoms as they’re happening) and resource use (i.e. does he inform his therapist and/or psychiatrist when he notices he’s be king symptomatic). Mania often feels amazing to people experiencing it, so they’re often motivated against treating it when it occurs, and this is major barrier to treatment.

A big component is whether or not symptoms of psychosis are involved in either the mania or depression. Psychotic symptoms are: 1.) hallucinations (false sensory perceptions, like hearing voices, seeing things, smelling things, etc), 2.) delusions (false beliefs that don’t conform to “normal” societal beliefs, like “I am Jesus” or “God has a mission for me”), and 3.) paranoia (i.e. feeling people around you are hostile to you or are spying on you, etc). These can be experienced in either mood state, but are most often seen in manic states.

I would suggest getting in touch with an organization called NAMI (National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) as they have tons of resources for people struggling with mental illness and family members of mentally ill people.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Alright, dude, bye.

Not my point at all, try again. I said the point of the case for SCOTUS was to decide whether majority groups had a higher standard of evidence to meet discrimination claims. Which Justice Kagan stated quite clearly:

The only question the Supreme Court had agreed to decide, Kagan said, “is whether a majority-group plaintiff has to show something more than a minority-group plaintiff, here, whether a straight person has to show more than a gay person.”

SO. PURE.

“Terryology may have some merits and deserves consideration.”

I don’t hold this opinion, but I can guarantee you it’s unpopular.

All right, so taste aside, I would make the argument that Dickens’ writing is absolutely not “top class” by virtue of the fact that he was paid by the word and many have argued this contributed to his style of employing a lot of run-on sentences in his work. Don’t get me wrong—I do think he was a good writer, but I tend to agree that his verbosity detracted from the quality of his writing, not added to it.

No, that’s not how humor works. The person telling the joke never knows the comedic mechanism they’re employing, that’s why it’s funny.

So, riposte and reverso! You are the one to be Hellbound!

My empathy for coal miners holds until they refuse to retrain to get out of their dying industry and support politicians who fight to repeal laws meant to stop us from poisoning the world just so they can keep their admittedly shitty jobs.

Institute drones. So, underground MIT shadow government.

I would think being tall would help when you’re protesting women’s rights—more people can see your neck beard.

The ATM’s not working for you, I take it?