He’s not wrong about the squirrel…

Note that I’m the original commenter rather than the one you’re replying to. I don’t want to talk about fertility but I do have a few questions for you.

As an elder Millennial, I have zero interest in someone half my age. Or younger.

I think you and I are about the same age. What do you mean by “interest” here?

Emotional intelligence and availability, shared experiences, and common ground are also factors in potential mates. Add societal factors like education, financial stability…

Those sound like your criteria for long-term compatibility rather than your criteria for sexual attraction. I think they are different things. I have met people who would have been great long-term relationship partners if not for the fact that I was not attracted to them. I have also met people I was very attracted to who turned out to be terrible partners.

Some people (usually women) say that someone who wasn’t initially attractive to them became attractive once they learned what a good person he was. I was taught that judging people based on their appearance was shallow and wrong, so I tried very hard to make relationships with good people I wasn’t attracted to work. They never did. They were doomed from the start and there would have been less pain for everyone if I had been honest with myself immediately rather than pretending that my initial lack of attraction didn’t matter or that it could change with time.

The dip only lasted a few months. By August of 2020, VTI was back to where it had been before the dip in February.

Another thing to consider is that Melkor was never known to show understanding or mercy to his servants who failed him. I would have to think that any balrog who failed to come to his aid would have been killed (or worse as you postulate) as soon as Morgoth was freed.

Hah, now I’m imagining an alternate, sillier Arda where the balrogs had the same conversation as the villain’s abused lackeys did at the end of Disney’s Hercules. (A really underappreciated movie, IMO. Just don’t watch it expecting it to be about the Greek myth.)

He’s not going to be happy when he gets out of there.

You mean if he gets out of there!

If. If is good…

There’s nothing wrong with it in the moral sense, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. This guy was ultimately successful. However, he had to spend years living very modestly, working very hard, and borrowing money. That whole time, he was under a huge amount of stress because the whole endeavor could easily have ended in failure, leaving him with nothing.

That’s not something most people would want to do even if they were capable of it, and I actually wonder if he would have been better off if he had gotten a normal job instead. He wouldn’t have as much money as he does, but he would still be quite comfortable, he wouldn’t have gone through panic-attack levels of stress, and maybe he would have married and had a child (which made him very, very happy) a lot earlier than he actually did.

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The actual transcript:

But [Dick Cheney’s] daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK, let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face, you know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, oh, gee. Well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy, but she’s a stupid person. And I used to have, I have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.

I’m no fan of Trump but this is unambiguously not a threat. The clear meaning is that she would would change her mind if she was one of the soldiers who would be fighting a war that she supports, not that Trump would threaten her with a gun until she changed her mind.

Not all older people are sexually attracted to other older people. A 70-year-old friend of mine confessed that he’s sad and frustrated because any woman he is attracted to is way too young for him. (He’s not a creep who would actually bother younger women.)

I worry about this myself. I’m still young enough that I think women my own age are attractive, but to be honest I can’t imagine being attracted to a retirement-aged woman unless she is one of those celebrities who have a hidden painting that ages instead of them.

I think “freedom” resonates emotionally in different ways for different people. If you try to pass a law making it illegal to drink bleach, I will oppose that law. I certainly don’t want to drink bleach, but right now I have the freedom to drink it and you would be trying to take away that freedom. It has value to me even though I intend never to exercise it.

Taxes, unlike drinking bleach, are a matter of trade-offs. I’m not categorically against them. However, I don’t buy into the argument that I shouldn’t oppose them as long as I will never have to pay them.

A caveman would just use his finger and then lick the salsa off of it.

I did a 1000-calorie daily deficit for a few months, in order to lose two pounds a week. I got used to being hungry all the time after a couple of weeks, but having a lot less energy and being sleepy during the day were harder to deal with. My body was trying to conserve calories that way, but pushing through it was possible.

The hardest part was actually accurately counting the calories. It was relatively simple for off-the-shelf food, but a lot more annoying for things someone else home-cooked for me. I had to ask for the recipe every time, weigh how much I ate, and then track the calories per ingredient on a spreadsheet. Restaurant food was effectively impossible to count, but that didn’t matter much because I was so focused on filling food that I wouldn’t have eaten it anyway. I’m a vegetarian, so I ended up eating mostly beans, tofu (which is also beans, now that I think about it), and vegetables. Other things weren’t as filling per calorie as those foods.

I talked to a guy who was trying to found a start-up and I asked him why he was doing it. He said “Because I’m unemployable.” Another person I know is working on it because she eventually wants to be in a position where no one can tell her what to do. Not being OK with working for other people seems like it might be a common trait.

I do know one guy who went through with it simply because he thought that the thing that he invented was so cool that he couldn’t stop working on it. I suppose that’s also not something a normal person would do, but it’s more positive.

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I think you know much more about the legendarium than I do, but I want to nitpick one point:

Also, there were no more than 3 or 7 balrogs ever according to later writings by Tolkien, which indicates that no balrog was weak or cowardly.

I think I should have phrased what I said differently. No balrog was weak or cowardly in an absolute sense. Durin’s Bane attacked and defeated all the dwarves of Khazad Dum at the height of their power. It wasn’t initially afraid of Gandalf. However, Ungoliant was another matter. She had consumed the light of the Two Trees and overcome Melkor himself. She might also have been capable of doing something far worse to a Maia than destroying its body and banishing its spirit. I think that though the balrogs were able to drive her away, their victory was not inevitable and I can imagine even a balrog faltering when called to face such a foe.

Have things really gotten that bad?

A house can’t literally be branded, so the use of “brand” in that context must be metaphorical. People, however, can and historically often have been branded quite literally.

As for othering: it is irrelevant to the point I was making, so your reference to it here is a good example of how people make a false and inflammatory statement, and then when challenged about it, those people retreat to a much weaker, uncontroversial claim. Meanwhile the public has seen the original, false, and inflammatory statement but not the challenge or the retreat.

No one would care if the headline said “Israelis see Palestinians as fundamentally different from themselves” or even “Israelis sometimes don’t treat Palestinian prisoners with respect.” However, what the headline does say is that Israelis physically mutilate Palestinian prisoners. Here in the comments you make a pitiful argument that the claim of physical mutilation is in fact just a metaphor, although even then you try to sneak in a comparison between Jews and Nazis. Jews aren’t tattooing anything on anyone, but apparently they still have less decency than Nazis according to you.

I think they’re almost certainly deliberately using ambiguous language to push an agenda. (Either that or both the author and the editor are incompetent.) And I would add that the language isn’t even actually ambiguous. It’s simply deceptive. “Brand” in this context would be interpreted literally by a normal reader and claiming it’s a metaphor is disingenuous.

Are there a lot of Ukrainian Americans voting for Trump? The ones I know tend to be relatively conservative by American standards and a couple of them are voting for him, but most of them support aid to Ukraine and so they support Harris.

Finally, a day when it is acceptable for me to lure children into my van!

They had to prove themselves worthy by fighting the oven with nothing but their bare hands, man to microwave.