I’ve been here a while, and that’s an awesome new sub for me.

This was an even more satisfying find because my beast of an elderly cat is loudly purring on my lap. Thanks softcat!

Oh yeah, that last point rings true for my dad too. My family hired a health aid to assist with our relative who he’s helping care for in home hospice, and we fought with him for weeks to defer to the aid’s expertise. He believes, despite the fact that this is literally her career, that he knows better how to take care of someone on their deathbed. Despite not having gone through it before, or having any medical or healthcare experience. He would snap at the aid for showing him how to do something.

We ultimately had to have a heart-to-heart with the aid to apologize for his behavior and to teach her how to use his own narcissism against him so he would do things the right way.

I think he’d be a grandiose narcissist. He truly believes he’s the best and can’t be wrong. And when someone calmly and carefully explains why he is wrong about a particular thing, his mood flips 180 degrees and he blows up and gets super defensive. If we don’t give up trying to convince him, his mood gets even more sour and he essentially mopes like toddler. This can be for anything, even the most trivial bullshit that wouldn’t phase anybody else.

And he does all that while bragging to anyone that will listen that he’s open-minded and loves being proven wrong.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so this is all observational for me, but my father is a narcissist so I can at least tell you what he’s like.

In conversation, or any interaction, if the topic veers into anything that my father can’t relate to or isn’t aware of from his own personal experience, he immediately reframes the topic so it’s about him. This consistently happens in the middle of a conversation, and it usually interrupts someone speaking. The interruption is always unrelated to what the person was actually saying, so after he interrupts you can always see the person he cut off deflate and shrink away from the conversation. Because it’s clear he wasn’t participating in a two-sided conversation, he was just waiting his turn to cut in and take over.

He manages to come across as caring, but that’s only because he knows exactly how to act so he appears that way. But his motivation is only to be praised for his apparent empathy, because if you probe his behavior even a little bit, it’s like a switch is flipped and he goes into a full on angry defensive mode.

For example, a close family member is dying, and he is the only one available to care for them. And he is taking care of them physically, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that, but whenever another family-member asks for an update on their condition, his framing is always about what he has done and how he has learned what to do in a particular situation, it’s never about the condition of our dying family member.

He takes credit for every idea and new concept he comes across, even if the person who gave him the idea is in the room with him. It sometimes even happens in the same conversation.

Anyway, those are just my personal experiences living with an extremely difficult and selfish father who is incapable of thinking genuinely about other people. I learned a lot about myself and him by reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Worth a read even if you’re not thinking about a parent.

Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.

This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.

In case you’re not aware (many people aren’t) journalists almost never choose their own headlines. It is usually written by an editor after the article is finished. Journalists, especially at large papers like the Guardian, usually have no say in the headline.

Yes! I listened to a couple chapters when I didn’t have the book with me, and ended up going back and listening from the beginning. It’s a great audiobook.

The Darth Plagueis novel also added a ton of context to The Phantom Menace for me. It’s a long history of Palpatine and Plagueis that goes all the way up to the Battle of Naboo, so it really feels like you can see clearly Plagueis’ influence on Palpatine and his scheming. If I remember correctly, Luceno even does a couple of the scenes from the movie, with way more detail. I rewatched it after finishing the book and got a lot more out of it.

Heh I will remember that! Thanks!

I’m sure I won’t find a fresh one, but I remember seeing something that looked like that at one of the local Asian supermarkets I spend way too much money at.

If you have a general interest channel that includes most/much or your company on slack or something similar, you could post links to articles that explain the problems with relying on chatbots or best-practices for using them in a professional setting, and hope the person in question sees it. That way you don’t have to call them out personally, and the whole company can benefit from a reality check on how these things should or shouldn’t be used.

No, I don’t think I’ve tried durian. I don’t recognize the name, but the fruit itself looks familiar, so I’ve definitely seen them around. I’ll pick one up the next time I see it!

Yeah, I never thought fruit could taste this good.

I have trouble remembering the names of the specific hybrids, but I believe that variety is called “Dapple Dandy” or “Dinosaur Eggs.” When I was was trying to find the name, I came across this photo of some of the varieties of hybrids. It’s wild how different they can be.

This is really well said. Throughout history, you can reliably find people on both sides of moral and humanitarian issues like this. There were Roman elite who spoke out against slavery in antiquity, there were Brits who mocked the American Colonies for owning slaves while founding a country based on freedom, there have always been men who believed in equal treatment and rights for women. Right and wrong is usually pretty clear, and in general regular people throughout the ages have been able to recognize which is which. Our values haven’t changed much, but our systems of power and accountability have.

That said, I also believe a good amount of the right wing backlash against the internment camps was performative. Because up until relatively recently, many racists themselves understood that their beliefs were terrible, so they at least tried to hide their true feelings and spoke out against obvious atrocities like this in public. But that was only so they could be accepted by the wider culture, and so they could continue to participate in left-coded spaces. They don’t need to hide how awful they are anymore because the president is leading by example.

It’s almost stone fruit season in California!! My local farmers market was selling the very first batch of peaches last weekend, which means they’re coooming!

Can’t explain how excited this gets me. If you haven’t tasted a fresh pluot or some of the huge variety of hybrid stone fruit, you’re missing out on one of life’s greatest pleasures. They’re colorful, they’re sweet, they’re subtly sour, they’re juicy, and they have the most satisfying crunch. There’s so much variety, and some amazing genetic combos. You ever had a peach that looks like a green apple on the outside and is the color of a beet on the inside? Well that’s my most favorite goddamn fruit on the planet. Fuuck I’m getting too excited…

At the peak of stone fruit season, sometimes I’ll just chop up a bunch of different kinds of pluots and that’s my meal for the day. Not kidding. When I first moved here, this shit changed my life. Best fruit I’ve ever tasted.

Your whisky preference is indeed correct.

Yeah, I wouldn’t say he’s a pressing problem, but he’s also not part of any active solutions or any meaningful movements so it’s time for him to go.

I totally agree that term limits would solve many of these issues.

It’s about damn time. This guy is one of the least compelling Democratic senators and has been way too comfortable with his incumbency. It’s a good sign that he finally sees the writing on the wall. I hope more of the geriatric ruling class is able to recognize reality like this, and step aside before being primaried by younger more competent candidates who are actually willing to fight.

In the early aughts, I asked my high school history teacher where he thought was the likeliest place for a global conflict to start. His answer was Kashmir.

Yeah that’s very true…