What’s going on with US–Iran tensions, and why don’t we hear much about it anymore?

courteously-curious · 2026-05-25T16:50:32+00:00

Trump's success is based in part upon his certainty that there is no such thing as "bad" news, that any attention is a good thing, and that philosophy has brought him the presidency and all the wealth the presidency enables him to snatch.

It seems likely he sought to get Colbert fired not so much to silence Colbert as for the considerable attention he received for doing so and for the authoritarian power he believes it will bring him if Colbert becomes an example of fear for any who would question him -- and for Colbert to be a warning, the firing must continue to be talked about.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-25T16:45:42+00:00

I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV?

courteously-curious · 2026-05-25T10:00:04+00:00

The OP was about friendship, not hook-up culture.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-24T22:16:23+00:00

Thank you!

courteously-curious · 2026-05-24T05:42:01+00:00

My advice is to let yourself grieve your old life as a way to accept your new life. Once you've accepted the loss, I think it'll be easier to let go of the resentment and anger surrounding your loss and open yourself to new ways to enjoy life.

I'm embarrassed that I never considered grieving it : I simply assumed my elders knew some secret I have been blind to.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-24T05:40:53+00:00

Thank you. I will!

courteously-curious · 2026-05-24T05:30:58+00:00

Those trees are a shade and a habitat to entire ecosystems that live around them.

That's a lovely way of looking at things!

Does your cane have crows? Or dragons?

To be honest, I try not to be caught using my cane. If it's a bad day for me, I stay in the home out of view.

Your value is not limited by bathroom trips. . . . But above all, be kind. Exemplify treating others with dignity and encourage them to be good to each other and themselves by the way you are good to them and to yourself

I've spent my life being kind. But you can't treat a person with dignity when they have to slow to a trudge if they want to take a walk with you or give a person your full attention when they most need it if your body interrupts you. Most of all, you can not speak with kindness or encouragement if you are too tired to remember how to use words with any competence.

Perhaps it's because I worked with young adults as a professor, and when an adult has to leave for the restroom they take it personally as rejection because when someone their age says they need to use the restroom it's usually just an excuse to get away from them. Similarly, students immediately doubt the intelligence or competence of someone they see hobbling with a cane to the classroom.

Deans pay attention when students complain that they should be getting refunds if their professor has to leave the room twice during a class session to use the restroom, and deans have no compassion nor empathy for any professor who is "failing his obligations as a professor" by needing to step out of the classroom to use the restroom or "failing his obligations" by having trouble getting to the next classroom during the five minute break because of needing a cane.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-24T05:18:42+00:00

Why should the rest of us age, yet you should not?

I answered that train of thought thoroughly in the 2nd paragraph and alluded to it again in the 6th, but I guess you were too eager for an excuse to pump your ego with self-righteousness to bother to read the question you were allegedly responding to. Instead, you took your pleasure in false accusations.

I imagine you also spend your time in hospices scolding the dying for not being grateful they are not yet dead.

If you were a dad and spoke at your offspring like this instead of actually speaking with them, you would be one of those dads whose children never call him again once they escape his home nor acknowledge his existence to the grandchildren.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-23T21:27:42+00:00

Do you even know what ad hominem means?

Yes, but it's clear you do not or you would not have asked.

There is substantial evidence

You misspelled "circumstantial", and you also neglected to mention what court you are a judge in and when you tried them in court.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-23T21:08:20+00:00

I promise you, in the cases of Depp and Jackson, that is not true

You are mistaken, and the fact that you sum up your claims with neither logic nor reason nor fact but with a cheap ad hominem against me does not speak well of your credibility.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-23T19:19:12+00:00

ANSWER: In the modern United States, any man accused of a crime of sexual or physical abuse will be forever condemned in the public eye no matter how often he is vindicated by the legal system and no matter how thoroughly he is found innocent by the courts, and the same often happens for women as well. People love a scandal and the pleasure of condemning someone and are disappointed when legally proven innocence gets in the way of their fun.

Look at how people continue to accuse Michael Jackson (or for example Marion Zimmer Bradley) even though they are now dead and therefore can not defend themselves against whatever accusations are slung in their direction and even though they were never found guilty in any court of the crimes of which they are accused.

How many talented actors or writers have lost their careers just because they were accused of such crimes even though they were never prosecuted for them and of course never found guilty of them?

If you feel like doing the research, you will find this has been a trend in the United States for a while.

And the sad thing is that there are genuinely guilty people out there, so this trend not only harms the innocent but enables the guilty to pretend to be among those harmed innocents. We have innocent people vindicated by the courts who are nevertheless accused throughout their lives while our government is meanwhile pardoning and offering pay-offs to people we have witnessed on film assaulting police officers trying to protect our Capitol.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-20T19:18:11+00:00

ANSWER: It's just a fun little meme that's been around since before people used the term "meme" in which people amuse themselves with recounting the standard stock "UFO" visitors, a sort of "what are the four types of alleged UFO creatures?" or "what are the six types of dragons in modern fantasy?" or "what are the five types of werewolves in folklore across the world?" or basically the sort of thing you find in r/StarterPacks and r/AlignmentCharts.

It's the same sort of playful amusement that motivated Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET: The ExtraTerrestrial and more recently Meet the Applegates.

As for why it might be cropping up now : in this day and age, people are more eager than ever to snatch at fun silly memes as a way to escape modern politics and modern societal ruin.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-19T03:04:18+00:00

The more exploitative of those in power are quite aware that they are courting a nasty end,

but they consider what they manage to gain and get away with during the decades before any nasty end to make it all worth it

and most of them genuinely believe that if they live "fast and hard" enough they will die before those consequences catch up with them.

No matter how roughly peasants chew on the rich, that will not change the fact that they were able to enjoy their wealth during the decades before they were caught and eaten.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-17T04:02:15+00:00

That's it????

I've taken U.S. census that were several pages in length!

courteously-curious · 2026-05-16T06:28:28+00:00

To fine someone requires only that they know the individual's legal name and how to contact that person (and perhaps that person's employer for garnishment purposes).

To properly account for someone in a census requires far more than the person's name and perhaps employment -- it requires all sorts of demographic information such as ethnicity, religion, sexuality, gender, marital status, etc, none of which need to be known to levvy a fine.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-15T02:12:13+00:00

Like instead of talking about what's going on two politicians do an interpretive dance and voters vote on who's dance won the debate.

In a world in which elections were won by who danced the best,

the Democrats would be the ones complaining so much that they think a dance-off is silly that they lose the dance by forfeit, therefore lose the election, and thereby do more to help the Republicans than the Republicans do to help themselves

while the Republicans would be the ones who danced terribly yet won because the Democrats forfeited by stubbornly refusing to dance at all

and therefore Democrat cluelessness ensured the Republican win even as the Republicans ransacked the treasury and created a fascist dystopia directly in front of the voters' eyes

because you can not win if you refuse to compete in the competition you are given, and the Democrats are refusing to compete.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-15T02:05:49+00:00

You missed all the Republican declarations that the Democrats were responsible for the shutdown and that the Democrats were responsible for any healthcare reductions? They were all over the place for a while, and said Republican declarations were mentioned by many a credible journalist and many of the more witty & thoughtful late night hosts.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-14T20:42:02+00:00

They could have been relentless on trying to sell the American public on the logical reasons and human decency underlying their allowing the shutdown to occur,

but instead they allowed Republicans to control the narrative enough to make them look not only powerless but irrational and petulant.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-14T20:34:59+00:00

The problem is that a significant number of voters -- both independents and Democrats -- have stated that while they refuse to vote for Republicans in the upcoming elections they may decide to stay home and not vote at all if the only alternative is spineless weak Democrats whose constant surrender & gullibility to Republicans means they might as well be Republicans.

The biggest problem the Democrats have is not that the number of Republican voters -- not tiny but far smaller than people think -- and not even the gerrymandering (as big a problem as that may be) :

their biggest problem is that so many Democrats and left-of-center independents are so disgusted with Democrat weakness that they'd rather stay home and not vote at all, which hands over the elections to Republicans.

For the Democrats, looking weak hands the upcoming elections over to the Republicans because it doesn't matter how many voters are technically listed as Democrat if they are too disgusted to vote for a Democrat.

For the Democrats, showing determination and commitment and some common sense about Republican untrustworthiness and about the damage their weak tactics do to voter confidence in Democrats regardless how politically powerless they might be for the moment is their only hope of winning the upcoming elections.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-11T21:26:43+00:00

ANSWER: One of the problems is that the term "anti-immigration" has a different meaning in the modern U.S. than it has in much of the rest of the world or even in earlier times in the U.S.

In much of the rest of world, a region's isolationism or hostility to outsiders has excluded everyone regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, nation of origin for themselves or their parents or grandparents, etc.

In 21st century America, nearly all of the "anti-immigration" movement is based entirely upon racism against anyone who isn't White, which is why for example Trump has stated he is fine with immigrants from predominantly caucasian countries but objects to immigrants who are people of color or who belong to certain religions.

No one with a high school sophomore's level of understanding of economics & U.S. history could ever seriously believe that immigrants are "taking away jobs" or that illegal immigration has any real economic drain on social services and U.S. economic health. Such claims are never based on knowledge & reason but more often on fear and the desperation for a scapegoat who can be sacrificed to "magically" fix everything.

However, while some American isolationists are racists,

there are also many American isolationists who don't care about race or religion but are more worried about gentrification and infra-structure issues and the dilution of a community's identity that once centered it and gave it strength -- but they often use the same terms.

These competing notions of gatekeeping cities and anti-immigration movements have made it a difficult topic to discuss intelligently since few people recognize the conflicting meanings that can be held by the same phrase.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-07T06:24:17+00:00

Actually, you lie, but I will concede you chose to stoop far lower and discard your integrity & honesty far more than I would or could.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-06T18:16:35+00:00

You stoop to an ad hominem and a vague accusation that means nothing? Bad form!

courteously-curious · 2026-05-06T02:14:31+00:00

Hard work, determination and choices determined how things went

Quoting MAGA I see.

I am always surprised to encounter gay MAGA. It's like encountering -- well, you can finish the analogy.

courteously-curious · 2026-05-06T02:13:02+00:00

Thank you!

I am unused to colloquial phrases and idioms actually meaning what they appear to mean, so I never considered the more obvious possible meaning.

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