I feel like a lot of postwar US cooking could be explained by the following facts:

• A Americans lived through the great depression
• All Americans lived through world war rationing
• A huge portion of Americans grew up in a world where things like refrigeration, grocery stores, etc didn’t exist.

The end result was the food equivalent of giving a thirteen year old from the 1990s a smartphone for the first time. Just pure disgusting excess with no real rhyme or reason.

Does anyone have the actual sales numbers for these things?

They are basically perpetually on sale at Aldi and other discount grocers. I feel like you don’t do that unless you’re hurting for sales.

At this point you’re clearly intentionally misrepresenting what I’m saying so you don’t have to question your own beliefs in the slightest.

I feel you’re being disrespectful of my viewpoints, and intentionally being obstinate in refusing to understand them.

I am mad about toxic behavior that is justified by liberal rhetoric. It is more egregious when it comes to sexism, but that is not the only issue. These behaviors are upsetting to watch, and it is frustrating to live in an environment where this is not only justified but portrayed as moral.

This post is about the real world. As in, in person social interactions. That limits your options, and means you have to on some tolerate things that frustrate you or become a hermit.

I live in a city of moderate liberals. I am a nerdy college educated millennial. While I have made a choice to avoid the worst of it after witnessing a lot of things that just crossed the line for me, on some level I simply have to live with elements of liberal culture that I find toxic.

I have no idea where you live that you can find people that perfectly match your political/moral philosophy in such numbers where it’s possible to meet people and strike up friendships, but let me assure you that isn’t how it works where I live.

A lot of my friends are good people overall, but do or believe at least one thing that frustrates me. I consider that part of life. However there’s some line I have to draw. In my experience the type of people who are extremely vocal about being liberal and how morally awful conservatives behave in really shitty ways, but get away with it by leveraging progressive rhetoric.

I have made a decision that on some level that rhetoric is bullshit, and to not involve myself with people who do things that I think are beyond the pale regardless of their justification. That by definition means rejecting or displaying extreme skepticism in regards to some parts of liberal culture. Hence the “more conservative”. You seem hung up on the words conservative, so you can use the term “less liberal” if it makes you feel better. I am friends with a grand total of person who defines themselves as conservative in absolute terms.

What you’re saying makes sense in theory, but I don’t think it makes sense in practice. The word that has defined politics since the mid 2010s is intersectionalism. There simply isn’t any sort of genuine political lane for, say, a socialist who hates #girlboss culture. I’ve actually watched the video you sent me and while I appreciate it, the opinion is rather niche. There isn’t really a corresponding political faction or identity to really latch on to.

I also personally haven’t experienced this lack of intersectionalism when I “touched grass”. In general there is such a tight coupling of all things political to the point where you can do things like guess someone’s opinion on the middle east by how they feel about bat roosts in suburban areas. To be fair, that has faded significantly since immediately post covid. However, it’s still strongly present. There simply aren’t people I meet in real life who espouse those kind of unique political values.

At the end of the day, I’m sort of in a rut. I can avoid certain people who behave in what I define as a toxic manner, but I can’t really avoid all of this toxicity in the context of modern society. Identity politics coding is everywhere, and on some level I need to “pick a side”.

I get where you’re coming from, but I think you misread my original post. I said more conservative.

Pretend the temperature is 0 degrees outside. The next week, it is thirty degrees warmer. Someone would be 100 percent correct in saying that it’s much warmer today than yesterday. However it would still be objectively cold.

That is what I am saying. I’m not conservative, but I am more conservative. I don’t see myself belonging to either group.

I also live in a liberal area of the country. I don’t really have to worry about running into someone who says homosexuality is a sin or a woman who isn’t white and pure on her wedding day is a whore. On the other hand I do run into women blatantly hate men or will leverage tolerance rhetoric to gaslight and cheat on their partners.

Look Trump is a uniquely awful candidate, but why should I be associated with liberals? I’m a Jewish man. In liberal culture sexism towards men is normalized and antisemitism is normalized.

There’s nothing stopping me from just coming up with my own philosophy while treating both liberal and conservative culture with skepticism. While right now that’s gonna be more on the liberal side, I don’t see why I should associate myself with people who normalize toxic behavior towards people of my religion/gender. That’s basically asking to be next on the target list.

I always bring up the ethical non monogamy because it’s the most objectively insane thing. It’s so obviously toxic and unfair. It would soon obviously be considered emotional abuse if genders were reversed. Yet the more liberal someone is, the more they’ll suggest I’m sexist for having an issue with that behavior.

You’re literally making excuses for women cheating on and gaslighting men. Bullshit you’d be behaving the same way of genders are reversed.

You didn’t read my comment with an open mind. You asked for my input so you could give me specific things to lecture about.

I am not in an “ethical non monogamous” relationship. I have never been. However I have seen multiple men in long term relationships get strung along because their partner decided they want to leverage dating apps to have a harem. It has always ended up being a slow motion train wreck, that always ends up essentially being akin to cheating plus gaslighting. They always justify it in the same way you are doing.

You are sexist, plain and simple. You are sexist because you hold men and women to completely different standards in a comical way. You just use liberal rhetoric to justify it.

Your mentality is incredibly common. The world is full of assholes justifying shitty behavior under the guise of liberalism. It’s just an updated version of how evangelicals operated in the 80s and 90s. I’m sick of giving this shit a free pass.

Jesus fucking christ why do I bother. You didn’t ask because you wanted to actually know what I thought. You just wanted to lecture me why I’m wrong. There was absolutely nothing I could have said that you wouldn’t have used as a launching off point.

So the behaviors are the same kind of things that you’ve seen forever among people who can get away with it. Immaturity, bigotry, cruelty, etc. However I myself am a liberal, and live in a liberal area of the country. A lot of people use liberal rhetoric to behave in an objectively toxic way, often by coding criticism of their actions as conservative or the toxic actions themselves as liberal.

I mentioned sexism from women, so I’ll focus on that:

• As I mentioned earlier, a lot of “ethically non monogamous” relationships that are basically a woman gaslighting their partner into letting them cheat on them. This is often talked about as a sort of a sexual identity, with the implication that hating on this is the same as hating on a gay relationship or a woman who chooses to be single.
• As I mentioned earlier, women are highly encouraged to support other women regardless of circumstances. A failure to do so is implied to be sexist.
• In general there is this default assumption that a man is nefarious, usually with some reference to true crime or “the implication”. This assumption is not only a massively sexist generalization, but is never logical. If a man is tall and built he gets the benefit of the doubt, despite being objectively more of a threat than a short chubby guy. The first thing I do when I meet a woman I don’t know in a social setting is to somehow work in that I have a girlfriend in a way that feels organic, and a good amount of times I can see their body language shift. This is despite the fact that my SO is often not with me, and that there are a million different true crime stories involving a heterosexual couple both being evil. All of this is justified with progressive #metoo rhetoric
• There are a lot of single women I know that are very much architects of their own misery. They have super shallow dating standards, unrealistic expectations, and this mentality that if a man is attractive enough red flags are just misunderstanding. When things inevitably go wrong they make sweeping statements about men. Despite this being more or less nonsense, it’s considered sexist to call them out.
• There are multi hundred member Facebook groups of women in every city that gossip about the men they date. This is obviously toxic, but the organizers frame it as a #metoo thing so it’s widely considered acceptable.
• Basically everything I mentioned would be considered absolutely unacceptable if genders were reversed, but if you bring this up then you’ll get a pseudo academic lecture about historical oppression and the patriarchy that basically boils down to “it’s different when I do it”.
• This isn’t a big deal at all, but it’s sort of ridiculous that most women I meet both consider themselves feminist but will get peeved if men don’t pay for the date.

Of course, sexism is just one example. I use it because I find this stuff is the most egregious. I also have a lot of frustration about other things, most notably shitty people making a huge deal about how much they love drag queens in what I view as an effort to obfuscate from how shitty and judgmental they are.

My response to all of this has been to become more conservative. Note the delta. I’m not conservative. However I am also in no way shape or form a progressive anymore. I don’t think liberals have nearly the moral superiority they think they do when it comes to how you treat people on a day to day basis. I support queer identities, but have become more conservative in my idea of monogamy and commitment. I even briefly considered staying home this election when it looked like the main line of attack democrats were gonna do was just to call republicans weirdos over and over again until November, because I’m personally just done associating myself with middle school mean girl politics.

So my post was explicitly about how I dismissed a lot of things I read on the internet as BS until I encountered them in real life. The part about “ethnical non monogamy” was something I didn’t truly believe until I saw it more than once, including some explicit details at a 4th of July party provided by a wife with a visibly uncomfortable husband.

What is your definition of “outside”?

Idk being more social after covid has made me more conservative. A lot of behavior that I assumed was exclusively online turned out to be surprisingly common in real life.

A lot of the sexism parts in particular were jarring. A significant minority of grown ass women basically used #metoo as leverage to behave in a sexist and immature manner. There’s also a culture where other women are extremely reluctant to call out that behavior, or else they might be accused of “internalizing their sexism” and not sufficiently supporting women. I dismissed the postings about that as incel-bait during the pandemic, but it turns out it’s extremely common.

America places a lot of value in the concept of the person having the final say over our armed forces being a civilian. There are multiple very good reasons for that.

Multiple presidents have served in the military prior to becoming president, many of whom have seen combat. The last American president to do so was George HW Bush, who served in the air force and was shot down over the Pacific in WW2.

As to why that hasn’t happened more recently, it’s because the American people don’t see it as a priority. HW Bush was replaced by Bill Clinton. W Bush won over purple heart recipient John Kerry. Obama won over veteran and POW John McCain. Clinton, Bush, and Trump went even farther and essentially dodged the draft.

See I have to believe at least some of this shit was because the leader of that group was a federal informant. This is the kind of thing the FBI agents in Ms Congeniality would think is funny.

I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

How old are you?

Kamala Harris was already middle aged when the DOCX standard was released or the workflow of converting a word to pdf became common. All of that stuff really didn’t hit mainstream until the Obama administration. It would have probably even been longer for a legal office to adopt it.

I think it’s safe to say she knows how to use Microsoft Word (or something like Lotus Notes), print a document, and even scan something to a pdf. I bet you could also teach her how to use ether “print to PDF” function fairly quickly. However if you just plop her in front of a computer and tell her to go at it I think the most likely result is Kamala swearing at the ribbon interface…

Nurses also have a reputation of being former high school mean girls, for whatever that’s worth.

That’s generally how progressive tax brackets work, yes. Technically speaking if I rich person wants to take out a 30k HELOC they’d also not get taxed on it.