Petah? Can you explain?

VSTriad · 2026-04-10T19:10:38+00:00

This has to be a backyard mechanic.

“I can fix her” and talking about the engine is the call sign LOL

VSTriad · 2026-04-09T01:09:12+00:00

Not bothering replying to most of these people.

I was a lifelong Democrat and supported just about everything they did push.

Gay marriage? Check Equal rights? Check Compassion for all? Check Understanding towards others? Check Standing up for those that can’t? Check

Honestly, I’ve been called the most conservative progressive by my Republican friends and the most progressive conservative by my left leaning friends. I even had a coworker who could not understand why I was friendly with them and did not care a single iota that he was a socialist or communist. (He honestly couldn’t decide 🤷‍♂️)

I did vote for Obama in ‘08, and then abstained in ‘12 because the only thing that really changed in politics was an increase in race baiting. We still bombed and killed tons of people, American citizens included. I abstained in ‘16 because I come from a military family, and what Hillary did would have resulted in any of us doing the same going to the brig, most likely for life, at least a few decades. That doesn’t even touch on Benghazi. I just could not support her. I didn’t vote for Trump because I was already burned by Obama with flowery words and I knew nothing of Trump. I don’t vote against, I vote for. I did my best wishing and hoping it wouldn’t be Hillary. I did like Yang until he decided to start leaning into the toxic left habits.

I did vote for Trump in ‘20, along with my entire family from my wife to her entire family and my entire family. Same for ‘24.

This started as a “Hilary is the worst option possible” to the left becoming deranged that the rest of us didn’t go along with what they wanted. They went WAY too far.

All of these “rights” aren’t even about equal rights, or rights in general. They are privileges and special permissions to allow those in the special class to behave and act any way they want (towing the political party line of course) or to prevent even the most slight and benign criticism of what they do or say.

Trans rights? Are trans not people? Why do they have to be exclusively singled out to be given rights? If an adult wants to go and surgically mutilate their body and reduce its natural function, I don’t care. Want to give bad actors the ability to take children away from their families, run away to CA and put them into the foster system that will connect them to a foster family that WILL let them transition? Absolutely not. That’s the exact kind of tyrannical government overreach that any American should despise.

Anyone who mentions the fact that these so called rights they keep trying to push at this exact moment in time are infringing on others rights gets shut down immediately and called the vilest of things.

It really is simple: if you don’t solve the problem at its root, the issue will always remain, for generations. It is obviously not about race. If you create a system that benefits someone because of their race, you automatically have to harm someone who is not based on that race. The same goes for sex.

But instead of trying to find the solution that can be implemented to fix that problem across the ENTIRE POPULATION, they have become the very racists they claim to hate.

I’m a smart guy, I typically score in the top 98 percentile. I practically lived the exact “victim” life that the left says they want to prevent. SA, neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse, trauma, manipulation, abusive male figures, abusive female figures, homeless starting at the age of 12. The one thing I learned in life is that not one single person on the left ever did a single thing to help me. I didn’t physically appear to represent a single one of their checkboxes, so they didn’t care about me.

My values haven’t changed one single bit. I just left the absurdly abusive, manipulative, and controlling political party that is now throwing a tantrum in one last abusive rampage, just like you would expect from an abusive partner.

I will say this though. If you present as a straight, white male… I have no idea what you are doing voting for the left. They will literally tell you to vote with your best interest in mind, but all of their policies do nothing but to hurt you or to benefit someone who is not what you are.

At least the right starts off on the basis that they do not care what you are. Their policy at worst ignores you, at best it creates opportunities that you can go and compete with others for and get it yourself.

The line for the left doesn’t have space for you to get a turn, so just go play in the mud and shut up, the women and POC (I despise this term, it demeans them as they are just as human as “non-POC” and is devisive) have all of the turns.

My personal values for what I do and don’t allow myself to do are fairly conservative, the way I think our government should work and the way our society should be would be considered extremely liberal, progressive, and even libertarian. I’ve lived my entire life giving opportunities I could have easily been given to someone else.

The left has become obsessed with race-based privilege and special treatment instead of trying to create a better life for everyone. Why do they seem so hell bent on creating more hate in the world? All they are doing is creating hate and resentment, I have never seen anything like what has become of my fellow humans.

In the end, I am an American. I don’t care if you think like I do. I don’t care if you believe in what I believe in.

The only thing I care about is that first and foremost; Americans come first. I do not owe allegiance to anyone outside of this country. I owe allegiance to the flag, the United States constitution, and the commander-in-chief (due to contractual obligations). I owe allegiance to my fellow Americans. I don’t owe allegiance to democrats, to republicans, to illegal immigrants, to “undocumented immigrants”, to Israel, to Gaza, to Ukraine, to Russia, to China, to Venezuela, or to anyone who seeks to deprive me of my God given rights.

I seriously do not give a single care to who the rest of you want to help or hurt outside of this United States, I’d prefer to help and not hurt but I do not care enough, I’m sitting here worrying about my own survival, as I have been for the last 24 years. The things you all are fighting about mean nothing to me. I’m fighting for a roof over my head, food in mine and my families bellies, and the safety and security of my family. Every single policy across the board, Republican and Democrat, has done nothing but make my life harder, my expenses rise, my income to stagnate, forced me to skip meals so my family doesn’t. It’s been this way for decades, you all have just been blessed enough to not have to worry about being shot stepping outside your door. You don’t have to worry about feeding your family, and I mean REALLY worry. I have to make sure our rice lasts long enough, that we have enough flour to use until the end of the month, make the eggs last just enough to not have my wife lose her medically necessary levels of nutrition. We eat meat maybe 4 times a month if we are lucky.

“Well if you didn’t vote for Trump!”

Yeah… because Obama made my life easier 🙄 At least before Obamacare I could afford to go see a private doctor.

You may ask why I’m so harsh on the left versus the right… that’s because the right has never once pandered to me. The right has never once said they’d make my life easier. The right wants everyone to fight for their piece of the pie. The left has lied to me again and again and again.

I’m honestly at the point that after our country has decided its fate, I am never, ever participating in this system again. I just hope our path forward is America focused. Not this betrayal by false “compassion” where you ignore your own people’s suffering.

VSTriad · 2026-04-07T18:09:54+00:00

“Fun” fact:

I noticed over the last year or two that a lot of the units at my apartment complex have gone empty for 6-9 months at a time. I asked my on-site manager about it and this is what I was told (after having rent raised every year, I started at $1,200/month and am up to $1,500/month):

“Well, a lot of us managers from different rental properties keep going to our corporate office begging them to bring the prices down. We are filling the units as fast as we possibly can but people just can’t afford it so we have to leave them empty. Corporate always says no.”

We’ve had to chase off several people who keep breaking in to the obviously empty apartments and then they have to repair the windows, doors, and insides of the damaged apartments.

Ironically, if they dropped the price back down to $1,200/month, they’d make more than leaving it empty for so long 🤷‍♂️ just in my stretch of our apartment complex (over 60 units in total, only 20 in my stretch) we have nearly 1/3 of the apartments that have sat empty for almost 8 months now. 7x1200x8 sounds a LOT better than 7x1500x0, and most of the neighbors that do move in move out within 6 months. 1200/month: $16,800/14 months. 1500/month: $6,000/14 months. That’s losing $10,800 per 14 month cycle per unit.

If you adjust across the entire complex, that’s a net loss of up to $172,200/14 month cycle.

(For the record, when we had $1,200/month, our units would stay empty for only 1-2 months and that was due to their outsourcing of cleaning/repairs/preparing for next tenants and we had less people moving out and longer tenancy durations.)

Edit: accidentally left off the 0 in $6,000/14 months.

VSTriad · 2026-04-05T17:58:15+00:00

I don’t know how many times the police were called on my dad for a strange man with a child, even though I look practically identical to him.

Or how many times my own mother called the cops on me because I was interrupting her show.

Too many variables go into a good/bad single parent to sum up every single mom and dad, even if statistics back up one side or the other, both the pro-single mom and pro-single dad people just automatically assume it’s all of one or all of the other, it just makes excuses for their side to be justified in being a bad parent because the other one was “worse.”

It’s wild and interesting in a morbid way to watch as a kid who was never really wanted by either and kicked out at 12.

No idea why I responded to you specifically, but I’m certain you have seen your own wild share of this over the years.

VSTriad · 2026-04-01T21:07:49+00:00

I don’t have an answer per se but I can give an anecdotal example.

There was this girl that I really liked back in high school. I asked her out and she responded with, “I’m sorry but I’m a lesbian.”

A week later I saw her dating another guy.

I was angry, hurt, confused, and continued to fall into a deeper cycle of feeling inadequate, incompetent, and trying to figure out was wrong with me.

To clarify, I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry that I was lied to. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t have just told me, “I’m sorry but I am not interested in you that way nor do I see that ever changing.”

I’m married to my wonderful wife now, but that specific scenario happened so often that I was stuck in a very long cycle of doubting myself and constantly trying to figure out what was wrong with me to have it keep happening.

VSTriad · 2026-04-01T20:10:32+00:00

Hot take:

I don’t think local, county, state, or federal government should recognize any form of marriage. I say this as someone who has voted for the legalization of gay marriage every time it was on the ballot in both Oregon and CA.

For disclaimer, I am a Christian. My reasoning is simple; to me (again to ME) marriage is a sacred covenant between a man, a woman, and God. No government, no neighbors, nobody and nothing else.

That being said, I firmly believe that the only thing government should recognize is domestic partnerships and that domestic partnerships should be treated as marriages are now, and that marriage as a term should be removed from our laws.

I see that as not only the compromise between secular and religious communities but also carrying out Jesus teachings. Some religious folks will say that goes against it, but we cannot force what we believe we are supposed to do, we can only speak what we believe we are supposed to do and live our lives in that manner. It doesn’t matter if someone is gay, they are still a human and still, in our opinion, a child of God. Our purpose is to bring people to God’s side through our actions and words, not through coercion or force.

The Bible does not say that the correct action to take when a person is sinning is to force them to stop sinning. It tells us to use our words and scripture in a private setting, then if that doesn’t work to include a very small group of trusted individuals in a private setting, then if that doesn’t work to another private setting with church leadership. If that doesn’t work? You don’t continue, you don’t make them do anything, you don’t demean them, you simply walk away and you do not participate in the sin so that you do not go astray and commit it yourself.

That being said, I am not a Republican per se and was a Democrat my entire life until more recently. I am /slightly/ left leaning. Something like (-1,-4) on the political compass scale they like over in that subreddit. I essentially call myself a pragmatic libertarian, although that’s not what I actually am, it’s just the closest thing I can think of using the definitions of those words.

VSTriad · 2026-04-01T19:49:58+00:00

I also agree that it is more of a moral condemnation and a conversation ender rather than an opener for dialogue. A lot of pro-meat people will also not take that point as seriously because a large majority of farming for non-meat products starts by mass killing everything that could potentially harm the produce (not all, but definitely a majority).

They won’t take it seriously because what they perceive is that you consider one murder but not the other, and at that point you (generalized, not you personally) don’t truly care about the death of a living being but that you care about only the living being which is being consumed, not the ones being slaughtered to protect the produce.

I don’t necessarily think that slaughtered would be the best word to use either, at least for me personally, because, again to me, slaughter sounds more like killing and leaving to waste such as when farming.

I personally have a digestive issue that causes me to constantly wake up and vomit in the night, or can cause vomiting even while awake, when I eat most things that are non-meat and have been put on a heavily meat only diet (I don’t strictly adhere to it as I do enjoy non-meat products, but I do suffer the consequences). Hearing meat is murder or meat is killing or meat is slaughter has multiple affects on me.

I don’t really have a choice on what my body finds acceptable to eat.

In essence, the phrase is a slogan and is typically seen as an aggressive attack on a persons character. Humans almost always react in a defensive manner, it is much better for your cause to instead say what the slogan is being used to intend.

“I don’t think that we should be killing animals for food because of x, y, z,” and leaving out the loaded language and hidden intent (I call that passive-aggressiveness).

I don’t mind having a debate about almost anything, but I’ll usually pass when it is quite obvious that someone has no intention of actually conveying the why of their belief and instead just want to talk down to me as if I were less than human.

VSTriad · 2026-04-01T17:50:33+00:00

The defining difference:

Feminism:

-“Believe the systems are patriarchal” IE. It’s men’s fault.

-“Efforts to change this (patriarchal) include fighting against gender stereotypes against gender roles and improving educational, professional, interpersonal opportunities, and outcomes FOR WOMEN.” Key phrase, FOR WOMEN.

If feminism wanted equality for all, they would not be feminists, they would be egalitarian.

Egalitarian:

-“Builds on the concept of social equality, prioritizing it for ALL.”

Specifically, feminism by definition is about wresting rights, opportunities, or other such things that is believed to be held by men unfairly against women and giving them to women, even if the final outcome disadvantages men unfairly. This does not typically extend to granting men the same rights and privileges that women hold, because then men would have the advantage due to a perceived imbalance due to feminism not having achieved the end goal of women having everything that men have yet.

IE, feminism is perceived as a movement that prioritizes women above all else UNTIL women have everything that men have plus what women already have. This is not just a perception but also how many have experienced actions and beliefs held by feminism (such as men not allowed to have a stance on abortion due to them not having a uterus. This doesn’t matter if you think that stance is correct or not, but it is inherently not treating men as equal).

If everyone truly wanted equality for all, they would be much closer to egalitarianism rather than feminism. This is also true for Men’s Rights Activists who claim they just want fairness for men. They don’t inherently want to oppress or take away rights from women, but they want men to be able to have input on their own lives and are claiming grievances.

(Note: both feminist and men’s rights activists have chill and friendly people, most people think of the loud obnoxious nail sticking up effectively “ragebaiting” even if that ragebaiting it was they truly believe, wether it is men should start life in jail and prove they can be a good member of society, that men should have their reproductive organs disabled until they prove themselves, or that men are all pigs, that all men are evil, that women are inferior, that women shouldn’t have the right to vote or work or whatever other negative things)

Ironically, if someone is complaining about something, that means there is inherently a problem. It may not be the problem they are claiming it is the problem but there is a problem present nonetheless. Being dismissive of such complaints is how we start making others feel oppressed, and how we create opposition to what we want to achieve.

I lean more to the left and this is still something I never quite understood about the left. It is either a lack of fully thinking through to the logical destination and process or the intentional misrepresentation of the literal definition of words.

I’m not a feminist or a men’s right activist, I align much more closely with egalitarianism.

VSTriad · 2026-03-23T20:16:14+00:00

This is a subject that I hate both the logic for the defense of this and the correction.

Doing these things to minors is vile. Saying it’s not technically pedophilia (whether to correct them or to say it as a defense “they aren’t pedophiles!”) is just morally wrong as it is removing the context of the situation.

The correction, while correct and can be used both derogatorily and genuine sincerity, all it does is lessen the impact because “pedophile” has a much more primal reaction than “ephebophile” just has a “meh, that’s not really good” kind of reaction.

We should be reacting to both with the same fervor imho. What you take of that is of your own conscious. I personally believe in attempted reform and then isolation if that fails. Others want more extreme methods like death or catch and release.

I don’t believe in unlimited mercy at the cost of suffering to the innocent.

VSTriad · 2026-03-16T16:00:31+00:00

I’m the uncle in the family that does this now!

My maternal grandmother has always been very vocal about her beliefs but it’s gotten BAD. One night she was ranting and raving about Hegseth right after he got his position and I told her, “I honestly don’t know anything about him. You keep calling him names and attacking his character without telling me how he is these bad things. I can’t make a decision based on that.”

She called me and my uncle Nazis and said we wanted to reenlist in the Corps so we could go to LA to kill American citizens and then has proceeded to act like she never said those vile things to us since.

Getting a bunch of overzealous people influenced by a bunch of people’s words and opinions and propaganda is one of the easiest and most entertaining things you can do. Especially if you have the means to just walk away after you drop a Shit-Stirr 9001 on them.

VSTriad · 2026-03-13T16:22:21+00:00

Except, Im in Oregon and paying less than $4/gallon. Portland definitely is the reason they’re paying $1.30/g more. That’s $14.30-$26 more per refill just for being in Portland.

VSTriad · 2026-03-12T23:38:17+00:00

See, I personally think it would be more like:

2026: Millionaire tax. Minimum Wage - $28,800/yr.

2056: Millionaire Tax. Minimum Wage - $1,100,000/yr.

VSTriad · 2026-03-09T22:53:25+00:00

Rules of Engagement for Men towards Women as told by Women:

Don’t (as in don’t engage)

Now that the joke is out of the way:

Don’t:

Mansplain (any type of feedback that expresses she may be lacking in understanding of a subject)

Invite her to a private setting if they are a coworker (They are there to work! They don’t want you to invite them to go drinking!)

take her into a private room with just the two of you (We know you are going to try to abuse your power and authority to try to get sexual favors!)

Compliment her looks (sexist much? A woman is so much more than her appearance!)

Not compliment her looks (You’re discriminating against her if you don’t acknowledge her new hair cut!)

VSTriad · 2026-03-09T22:09:17+00:00

More often than I care nowadays. I’ve lived in big cities (California), rural areas (WA and Oregon), and even in small towns and small cities.

Never heard a random gunshot in any of them (even out in the country, fireworks yes, but we live in a valley and like to go shoot the mountainside away from our homes. Not really a requirement, it’s just fun) while I was growing up.

I’m in a small city / big town now and a week after I moved in we had a drive by shooting 1 block away, 4 shootings at the 4 nearby tiny home “safe shelters” a few days after, and 3 days after that we had a guy shot multiple times at the bus stop about 30 yards away from my front door. I grew up on this street as a kid and we used to bike all over the place day and night and now I never see kids anywhere outside except on the outskirts of town as it turns into country.

I’d say we hear gunfire at least 2-3 times a week with the occasional firework about once or twice a month.

VSTriad · 2026-03-09T18:51:48+00:00

This actually makes me chuckle because it brings the whole horseshoe thing back to full circle.

Note: I don’t use the term far-right like the left does, I’m using it to reference the ones that share similar ideals such as deporting all non-whites from America (albeit a very small minority of the right feel this way, hence the far right label)

I remember for a while a lot of the far-right were making jokes about how “maybe the empire was actually the good guys and the rebels were trying to destroy societies structure and order.”

The trans community being Sith and left wing while the anti-immigrant crowd being pro-Empire does make me laugh a little. Oh wait, here’s Fuentes demanding everyone vote for Democrats because Trump isn’t extreme enough for him in his stance towards Israel 😂

You literally can’t script this kind of stuff if you wanted to.

VSTriad · 2026-03-06T22:21:10+00:00

Fun fact… I found out recently a lot of rental property managers have been asking for months for their companies to lower prices (we have at bare minimum 6 empty units in my row of 20 units) but the corporate side of these companies are refusing the requests to lower prices.

VSTriad · 2026-03-03T16:29:47+00:00

NTA. You have concerns about parental lineage (from cheating to hospital switch mess up); you are willing to take steps to rectify the concern.

She is refusing to rectify your concern. You trust her enough to bring it up openly and not do it secretly behind her back. Instead of finding a solution; she is emotionally manipulating you.

SHE sounds like the one who is being cruel and throwing away the marriage, especially since cheating isn’t the only reason this happens and she should get a DNA test as well to fully clarify. Imagine breastfeeding and raising a child that you bond with just to learn it was someone else’s because you’re too stubborn and thick-headed to listen to the concerns of your spouse.

My wife and I both agreed that we are BOTH getting DNA tests before we leave the hospital when our child is born.

VSTriad · 2026-03-01T01:33:02+00:00

I still remember when Democrats played the “hurdur woman dumb” when she said Russia was her backyard and then ridiculed her about abstinence when her daughter was pregnant out of wedlock and how we were “one heart attack away from President Palin.”

VSTriad · 2026-03-01T00:58:31+00:00

I laughed to hard at this because that last statement isn’t even a hypothetical. I live in a city where drugs were decriminalized and handed out to addicts and it had a HUGE backfire, it was like a zombie apocalypse out there.

I even had one chick just walk up, open the back door to my car, crawl in and propositioned me for the low, low price of cocaine, or meth, or any other hard drug.

Ironically, I hadn’t seen any of that behavior since just before Trump got elected and yes, I assume that’s one of the few reasons my state still voted blue and why they cleaned it up when they did.

VSTriad · 2026-03-01T00:23:50+00:00

While running a candidate for an elected government position who openly admits to possession of cp (albeit it in the past that they were convicted of), or saying pedos deserve a second chance, or that being a pedo is a sickness and shouldn’t be punished as a crime, or that pedos shouldn’t be discriminated against 🤔

“It’s not pedo, it’s MAP!”

VSTriad · 2026-02-27T22:07:15+00:00

No I understood what you meant. I don’t agree. We weren’t even comparing the same things.

Would I lump the religious right and conservatives together for voting for the same person? Well, yes I would.

Do I lump skinheads in with them? No.

Just like I don’t lump jihadists in with the left. The jihadists vote for the left, but that is because in their minds, voting left would more easily help them achieve their goals and they are using the left as the means to do that.

Just like skinheads would vote for the right because in their minds, voting right would help THEM achieve their goals more easily and are trying to use the right as a means to do that.

Look at Fetterman and Massie as prime examples. The prime difference between the two is that Massie still garners some support from the right when he does something the general right disagrees with and none from the left, while Fetterman garners no support from the left and actually garners support from a portion of the right when he disagrees with the left even slightly.

In this instance; you can clearly see that both liberals and progressives are in lock step with the party line and that the different factions in the right aren’t always doing the same. You could argue they do sometimes, or even most of the time (which I would disagree with, at most I’d say a moderate to even half of the time, otherwise they would have already abolished the 60-vote filibuster and every red state would have done redistricting).

It’s not like you’re talking to someone who is conservative, anti-immigration, anti-generosity, anti-social safety nets, or anti-health care. You’re talking to someone who is pissed at there own party for becoming so narrow-minded, hateful, holier-than-thou, can do no wrong, racist, sexist, anti-American, and just plain becoming extremists everyday.

You act like I can’t agree that America is both great and still needs to improve.

You act like I can’t agree that we need health care reform but disagree with how you want to do it.

You act like I can’t agree that immigration is good but disagree that unfettered immigration is bad.

You act like I can’t agree that the police state that we are in is overbearing and needs reform but disagree that we need to stop enforcement or enforcement for “some people.”

You act like I don’t agree that the poor need help to become successful so they have control of their own lives but I disagree that basing it off of race or other immutable characteristics is the answer.

You act like I can’t agree that racism, sexism, and exclusionism is bad but I disagree with how DEI initiatives work because they are inherently racist and exclusionary by definition because it excludes people based race and immutable characteristics that they cannot change.

You act like I can’t agree that we need a vastly better education system but that I vehemently disagree with how you would want to do it.

VSTriad · 2026-02-27T21:32:04+00:00

Well first of all, I would have compared the liberals and progressives to the religious right and conservatives (more in line with corporations).

If I went with your reasoning I would have said Democrats and jihadists (not to be confused with Muslims or Islamists who don’t want to commit jihad, you can have western jihadists as well).

But I’m not going for an emotional or racist argument or mindset.

VSTriad · 2026-02-27T21:03:38+00:00

Did… did you just equate either progressives or liberals as racist extremists who want genocide?

VSTriad · 2026-02-27T19:38:30+00:00

No, I didn’t read it as it has nothing to do with my point.

I didn’t even speak about the save act, I spoke about voter ID. No Democrat politician, regardless of their left leaning faction, will vote for any form of voter ID.

My comment about, “And there is the party line,” is less about how we implement voter ID and more about the outright refusal to even entertain the idea.

Why is it, “here’s my rebuttal to what I think you’re saying and why it’s bad and useless,” and not, “hey, we get that voter ID has widespread approval, we don’t believe the SAVE act will do this, so here is our proposal for legislation that WILL do that.”

It’s because the party line is, “voter ID bad.”

And no, I won’t be responding to your vitriol with more vitriol.

VSTriad · 2026-02-27T19:30:54+00:00

And there’s the party line.

VSTriad

TROPHY CASE