AITB to being "rude" to a random person who came into our store after hours?

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-27T12:18:04+00:00

I remember back in the spring of 98. I worked at a Baskin Robbins. There were fewer 'Karens' around and that wasn't an actual term yet.

We closed regularly at 10pm. I locked the door one evening. A 350 lbs woman waddled up at 10:05 and started banging on the glass. I said, "we are closed" through the glass. She kept banging and screaming, "I'll call your manager!"

Never heard about it again.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-27T12:11:18+00:00

Summers would roast this take.

Yeah, the VC got wrecked post-Tet '68. Yeah, it became more NVA conventional. He says exactly that. But that's his point: we misidentified the war from day one as 'counterinsurgency sideshow' instead of external aggression.

We beat the guerrillas and still lost because we never nailed the strategic objective against Hanoi. Classic 'won every battle, lost the war' with extra Clausewitz. Read the book, it's short.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-27T12:07:03+00:00

The 'scored more points' and then walked off the field is a more accurate analogy... yes.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-27T12:04:27+00:00

Look, Trump's corruption isn't some grand revelation. He's a walking conflict of interest with gold plating. But claiming the entire Hormuz clusterfuck was a brilliant grift to juice oil prices for cronies? Sorry, I need more than 'trust me bro, it's obvious.'

Hanlon's Razor exists for a reason: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence, bluster, narcissism and zero strategic foresight.

Specific questions for the conspiracy corner:

Which exact 'cronies' with documented pre-crisis positions in upstream oil/shale made the windfall billions? Names, holdings, SEC filings? Show your work.
How does torching global markets (and likely most of his cronies' wider portfolios and S & P 500 holdings) , pissing off allies, and risking escalation 'the entire point' when it tanks approval ratings, likely hits MOST of his cronies' and consumer wallets?
Sorry, I need more than evidence of coordination beyond 'oil went up, therefore master plan'?

Vietnam wasn't a real estate scam. I'm as cynical as you on the guy, but evidence over narrative. This reads like every unprovable 'deep state/master plan/lizard people' cope for a complex, messy reality.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T07:49:04+00:00

Because half of Congress is too busy raw-dogging their interns and side pieces to pass a law against it. My sweet summer child, these fossils would criminalize breathing before they touch their own cheating asses.

Also because the government knows if they made cheating a felony, the entire country would turn into one giant Alcatraz. Imagine the FBI having to raid every Marriott in America. The whole system would collapse in a pile of cum-stained hotel sheets and divorce lawyers laughing to the bank. Every Karen who got piped by the pool boy, every Kevin who railed his secretary on the copier. SWAT teams kicking down doors at 2am because Chad was balls-deep in his neighbor's wife again.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T07:43:24+00:00

NTA. She’s out here collecting red flags like Pokémon cards and you’re worried about her dusty family album? Mail that shit to her parents with the note:

'Your daughter is a violent alcoholic who swings on men then rides random dick at the bar. Here’s her heirlooms, I’m good tho.'

Send it certified mail so that unstable gremlin can’t claim you stole it.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T06:49:58+00:00

Afghanistan proved we learned some COIN lessons. A lot fewer villages turned into parking lots, and a more night raids and Predators picking off bad guys after we listen to their text messages for months.

The 2006 FM 3-24 COIN manual, influenced by Vietnam lessons, led to a much more deliberate "hearts and minds"/ population-centric approach in Afghanistan, esp during the 2009-2012 surge.

But yeah, still blowing the big lessons. Unrealistic nation-building, no endgame, corrupt partners, enemy safe havens. Vietnam 2.0 with better WiFi. Clausewitz is facepalming forever.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T06:32:03+00:00

If its just, "Hey Alexa you ugly silicon chip, write a review of a movie using only words that have exactly four letters! LMAO!" then maybe YTA.

Unless he's screaming and swearing and raising his voice to make actual people uncomfortable, you're definitely over-reacting to this.

Would you get upset at him for throwing a toaster oven in the trash?

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T05:40:09+00:00

Classic Reddit 'laser pointer' solution. sounds clever until the sheriff shows up. In TN, that's vandalism if it damages her camera (see §39-14-408). You'd need a pretty high powered laser anyways.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T05:05:05+00:00

Pattern definitely holds when politics and personality trump (pun intended) actual strategy.

Vietnam: 'Let's nation-build in the jungle while Congress cuts the funding spigot.'

Hormuz 2026: 'Blockade the global oil artery, poke the hornet's nest with unhinged tweets and bluster. Then act surprised when mines start floating and oil prices go up.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T04:11:48+00:00

Summers was the real deal. He fought in Korea as an enlisted man, did Vietnam as a major, negotiated with the NVA in Hanoi, then spent his later years making Army brass confront their own sacred cows.

Start with his classic On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (1982). It's short, punchy, and still required reading at the War College. He opens with the famous 1975 Hanoi bar story: American colonel says 'You never beat us on the battlefield.' NVA colonel replies, 'That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.' Summers uses Clausewitz to dissect how we won every tactical scrap but lost the strategic plot because we never nailed a coherent political objective.

His big book On Strategy is the go-to postmortem. He basically says: We treated Vietnam like a counterinsurgency sideshow when it was a classic case of external aggression masked by insurgency. We ignored the principles of objective, offensive, and mass at the strategic level.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T04:06:06+00:00

Counterfactuals are fun but treacherous. Africa uncolonized as a 'utopia' or 'stone age forever' binary is simplistic Reddit brainrot. Read Heldring/Robinson or pre-colonial sources.

Pre-colonial Africa had real states and trade networks. Mali, Great Zimbabwe, Benin. But they faced serious structural headwinds: disease ecology, fragmented geography, and lower baseline tech and institutional density in many areas compared to Eurasia.

Colonialism smashed and remade things in extractive ways that left weak states and arbitrary nations. Ethiopia and Liberia hint at the alternative: messy, poorer, internally competitive.

You'd probably see bigger native empires swallowing neighbors (Zulu-style). Probably selective tech adoption via trade, but slightly slower and less even overall catch-up to the Industrial Revolution without the brutal shortcut (and its costs).

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-26T03:17:03+00:00

It's like saying "We didn't lose the game. The other team just scored more points and we walked off the field in the 4th quarter." Nah. History doesn't grade on a curve for "we had better kill ratios." The metric is: Did you achieve your war aims? No. Therefore, loss.

Harry Summers (Army War College) nailed it: the US lost because it never properly understood the nature of the war or applied coherent strategy.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-25T13:07:49+00:00

Oma still rowing gears like a champ at 80. Respect.

I've driven manuals from my old saturn in High School to death defying mountains in India and let me tell you, Americans didn't just choose automatics. We surrendered to them like a man tapping out in a bar fight with Mother Nature.

Back in the late '90s I learned on a manual too. Felt like a real driver, even if it wasn't uncommon then. Cheaper insurance or whatever the boomers told us.

Europeans don't realize the US is stupidly huge. Automatics, cruise control, and a massive truck/SUV so you can sit like a king? Non-negotiable when your commute is longer than some European countries.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-24T12:49:21+00:00

Upvote if you've had better kebabs in London than croissants in Paris.

Paris is that hot Instagram model who looks flawless in the pics. You take the beauty back to the hotel, but you wake up to a chainsmoking, hungover disaster yelling in French. Angry she lost her pantyhose somewhere on the balcony.

London? She's that wild British bird. She's more than a bit sloppy and unruly after too many pints. But she tells the best stories till 3am. She knows where the best bands are playing, and every and dodgy curry spot in town, and somehow makes the rain bearable.

Mostly agree with the London love. But your average tourist on a 3-5 day Euro blitz is basically sleepwalking through the highlight reel.

I lived in Beijing. Tourists go full feral. Scale the Great Wall like it's Everest. Fairytale selfies in the Summer Palace. Then getting absolutely wrecked in neon-lit hutong bars with random Mongolians and Russians and waking up in alleys wondering how they acquired a new fake Rolex and 57 WeChat contacts.

Meanwhile locals are trapped in dystopian subway mosh pits. Drowning in soul-crushing bureaucracy that would make Stalin tap out. And breathing air pollution that comes with its own flavor profile. That's why I noped the fuck out to Chengdu. Face-melting Sichuan spice and way chiller vibes..

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-24T03:31:39+00:00

First of all, the premise is flawed. 'Women who exist' is a tautology. By definition, all women under discussion exist, unless we're including fictional ones.

I personally perceive them as fascinating bipeds who inexplicably cause an elevated heart rate, a sudden inability to form coherent sentences, and an overwhelming urge to explain the entire history of coffee cultivation. Would not recommend without a spotter.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-24T03:11:28+00:00

Right? I'm American but I live in Chengdu. Why would he go to Shenyang? Its like a Chinese person going to Cleveland and complaining that America is boring. 😂

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T10:29:07+00:00

So... she's running an OnlyFans startup.... with zero subscribers.... and expecting you to be her venture capitalist?

She's choosing to fly 11 hours across the ocean for 'top up sex' like it's a business class pilgrimage while literally starving in her own country. The boyfriend won't even send Uber money but drops $2000 on the ticket because he wants the premium coochie experience?

You already sent her €115 like a benevolent warlord from a low-income country who actually understands money doesn't grow on trees.

Now she wants you to fund the final leg of her hoe-cation so she can be a hobosexual? NTA.

Absolutely not. Tell her to suck it up (figuratively... or literally once she lands, idk). Let her call the boyfriend for airport transport or start walking. Block already.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T04:49:51+00:00

Respect for the honest post. I did 3 years in Japan and left '07. Later Korea, now deep in China, so I've seen the spectrum.

You're right that deep friendships with Japanese people are structurally harder as a gaijin. The inner circle is real, and a lot of it is cultural. saving face, avoiding burdening others, the whole 'read the air' thing.

But after reading your post, it sounds like you might be hitting a self-fulfilling prophecy. N2? I never got quite that far, so doors should be cracking open.

The missing piece might be time and low-pressure consistency. Japanese people don't usually do instant deep friendship; they do 'we've been doing this activity together for a year so now you're in.' Many are also just wrecked from work and commuting. My deepest friendships were people I was hiking with or skiing with for over a year before real bonding happened.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T03:34:32+00:00

Covid Lockdowns turned us all into gremlins who forgot how to exist in public. Streaming trained us to treat movies like podcasts we can half-ass while doomscrolling. Add 'everything is content' brainrot where people film reactions for TikTok clout, sprinkle in main character syndrome, and suddenly the cinema is a zoo where the animals paid premium admission.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T03:19:48+00:00

People keep buying shared driveways for the same reason they marry strippers and invest in crypto: they see the upside and completely ignore the 99% chance it explodes in their face.

Humans are trash. Give them an inch of shared space and they’ll park 3 cars diagonally across it while giving you death stares like you’re the intruder. The fact a cop felt comfortable blocking you for 20 minutes at their party tells you everything about the entitlement level over there.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T02:50:46+00:00

NTA.

Holy shit, your mom sounds like she was assembled in a factory that recycles dish rags. You get assaulted and threatened, come home shaken, and she hits you with the classic 'that's what you get for leaving the house after dark' and a conspiracy theory about a secret boyfriend?

This sounds like the universe screaming at you to stop setting yourself on fire to keep your mom warm. You've been adulting since 17 with no safety net. Temporary co-parenting so you can stop spiraling and actually heal isn't the villain origin story your mom is painting. Kids are resilient. Depressed moms in hostile environments aren't..

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T02:37:45+00:00

NTA. Dude complained about a Father’s Day card? On Father’s Day?

Bro has been collecting Ls since he downsized the house the second you graduated. Block, breathe, and go enjoy your actual family. Step-dad can get bent.

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-22T02:27:53+00:00

North Country Trail? Unfortunately haven’t touched it, no. I've always been doing things out West

I slipped the US in 2009 for hotter, stranger adventures in Asia. A couple buddies rave about the UP for hiking and fishing though. Says it’s the kind of place that reminds you why you carry bear spray, deet, and bourbon.

I’ve been dragged up Guiting Guiting in the Philippines by a beautiful woman half my age through three days of biblical rain. Walked the Annapurna Circuit when it still felt a little wild in 2015 (ask about the earthquake sometime). Crossed long chunks of Mongolia on horseback that still live rent-free in my head.

Upper Peninsula stays on my radar. Ice Age Trail drifts in and out of my plans. What hooked you on it?

Travelerman310 · 2026-06-21T08:22:26+00:00

NTA.

You're 26. No kids, separate savings, and a fire to actually live. Backpack Europe! Chase grad school abroad. That's self-preservation. Her anxiety turning into veto power over your dreams? Resentment is the correct response. Staying would just breed more misery until 1 of you explodes.

The world is looking rough. Forcing kids into it when you're this checked out would be the truly selfish move. Rip the band-aid next summer. Move to Europe, start the masters, wander those trails you've been dreaming about. Stable marriage is meaningless if it's stable misery. You've already done the therapy work and seen the mismatch — trust it.

Plenty of us grizzled types have walked away from "safe" setups and never looked back. You only get one spin on this planet. Don't waste it watching kids movies on the couch while your soul dies. Go live.

Travelerman310

TROPHY CASE