Instigate

And herein lies a big issue - only a minority of men are creeps towards women, but because they’re creeps towards so many women it means that women ubiquitously experience creepy dudes. That causes women to become (understandably) more guarded and jaded and makes things harder for the majority of men who aren’t creeps.

Essentially, yeah! There were three driving modes - kart, hovercraft, and plane. Some tracks only allowed certain driving modes and you would pick your driving mode before the race started. It was pretty novel for the era!

Diddy Kong Racing was the best racing game of this era and yes, I am most definitely willing to die on this hill.

I mean, Homo sapiens are apes. I never understood why calling a person an ape was an insult. It’s taxonomically correct.

That figure absolutely staggers me. The fact that it’s so commonplace to irreversibly mutilate the genitals of a baby that has no capacity to consent to such a lifelong alteration really says something. Conservatives being up-in-arms about trans kids taking hormone blockers to prevent puberty but not about taking a scalpel to babies’ penises would be genuinely baffling if I didn’t already expect that without double standards, they’d have no standards.

It’s been Israel’s playbook against Palestine for a very, very long time.

Many forget that a meme is simply a concept or idea that grabs hold within a human community and is propagated and promulgated. Patriarchy is a meme. Capitalism is a meme. Doing ‘bunny ears’ behind someone’s head in a photo is a meme (h/t Parker and Stone). Doing cave paintings of animals is a meme. Fashion of an era is a meme. Our entire social structure runs on memes.

You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.

I had a little chuckle-up myself

Exactly right; sex work has always existed (relative to the existence of currency/bartering tribute and some semblance of homo sapien societies) and will always exist in some form. There have always been those who are willing to be in relationships with sex workers and those that won’t. The landscape has changed, but the world’s oldest profession remains.

Simps don’t suck; they do the dating world a service. Anyone whose concept of self-esteem is so external that they derive it from the admiration of strangers is not someone who is ready for a serious or monogamous relationship. Simps help identify those people and weed them out of the regular dating pool.

Straight men can, and should, touch each other more often (CONSENSUALLY. I can’t stress that enough). Hugging, holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, giving a gentle backrub etc. between straight men should absolutely be more normalised. We’ve been conditioned that any physical affection between men is a sign of sexual attraction, when history (and many extant cultures) show us that men can physically love one another without any sexual attraction whatsoever. The only reason we’re touch starved is we’re too afraid to be vulnerable with other men.

Being an incel is a choice; mental illness is not. You wouldn’t refer to incels as disabled and it’s similarly unfair to refer them as being mentally ill. Being an incel is just another form of bigotry. Racists, sexists, queerphobes etc. aren’t mentally ill. The most generous descriptors I could give them is that they’re either misguided, brainwashed, or both.

I also think it’s not great to equate incels with mental illness. I have CPTSD, depression and anxiety and none of those make me act like a fucking misogynistic twat. Inceldom isn’t mental illness, and equating it to or calling it mental illness does a whole lot of people a massive disservice.

I don’t agree with your position that my ultimate penalty was congruent with my crime. EDIT: nor that it represented a just outcome.

The area in which I was speeding was a distributor from our major city, with no pedestrian, bike or parking lanes available. I had exactly zero chance of hitting a child running out from behind a parked car because there’s no capacity to park cars on that road nor are any pedestrians present on the road. I was also driving on a wide corner, where speed/velocity can be easily distorted by many factors when measured from a stationary perspective, so I cannot be sure that the reading was entirely accurate. There are no pedestrians allowed on the distributor either; nor is there a walking space or lane. My only chance of causing injury or death to others due to my minimal speeding was in a collision with another vehicle.

This instance is the only time I’ve ever been fined for speeding in my seventeen years of driving. I’ve personally driven ~5km/h over the limit without any further fines or punishments, including past police cars with active LIDAR guns pointed at me and through speed cameras, indicating that there is simply no viable reason to stop and fine drivers who are over the limit within a reasonable margin of error.

Beyond all of the above, I’ll note AGAIN that I was happy to pay the $560 fine (which I deemed appropriate but costly, and costed me $80 for each km/h over the limit while I was earning $13/hour) but fought only the suspension of my licence. I didn’t believe that a single instance of driving 7km/h over the limit justified a suspension, and I still agree with that idea.

My issue was the severity of my punishment with reference to my crime. I definitely committed a crime (yes, I am a criminal), and deserved punishment for doing so, but I disagreed with the severity of that punishment. That doesn’t infer that I learned nothing; nor that I am uncaring of my fellow citizens.

I don’t think I’m a great driver, mostly because I’ve taken Low Risk Driver courses, have a Bachelor in Psychology (including driver/traffic psychology) and am acutely aware of the effects that driving hubris has on capacity - statistics often show that those who rate themselves as ‘better than average’ drivers are more likely to commit traffic offences. I do, however, know that I’m a competent driver which my last sixteen years since this event without demerit should indicate.

By the way, I’ve been a child protection caseworker for almost a decade now, and so to infer that I don’t care for the safety of children might not be the best argument to make.

If this Biden feeling ‘jacked up’, I shudder to think what he’s like when he’s not. He’s not doing a great job of spruiking his own achievements and his answers are devoid of stats or figures - likely because they weren’t able to bring notes in. He’s sadly making trump look more coherent and lively by comparison.

Not if she’s got the Black Death.

The logic is that road deaths go up during holiday periods (which is sadly a statistical fact here) so they ramp up enforcement and double the penalties for those periods to try to correct for it. I’m not a huge fan of the idea, but from a purely statistical and scientific standpoint it does at least make some amount of sense. My individual circumstance is a bit of a curveball because my punishment was way outstripping my crime, but I do have some understanding for the idea of double demerits. I think my issue was that what should have been a one-point offence (doubled to two points) became an eight-point offence just because I was on a provisional licence. That part I’m still very salty about.

Yeah, I was on my P-plates (provisional licence) at the time where you have can have up to seven demerit points before losing your licence. As a P-plater, every speeding offence automatically is moderated to the maximum value, four points, and because it was a ‘double-demerits’ weekend (for public holidays), that four points was doubled to eight points. I received more demerit points than km/h I was over the limit.

For reference, if I was on my full licence and it wasn’t double-demerits, it would have been one point out of a total twelve. Instead, I got eight points which suspended my licence. Thankfully the magistrate I had was reasonable and granted my reduction - that also meant I didn’t have to pay court costs and I represented myself, so the whole thing cost me the initial $35 court booking fee. I managed to get something that resembled justice out of it, but I’ll still have a bitter taste in my mouth because of the whole rigamarole for a long time to come.