Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone who celebrates it! And a very merry Thursday to everyone who doesn’t.
Because I haven’t provided a health update in a while (outside of the comments) I just wanted to reassure everyone that I am still here, and still trying to sort through a bunch of medical issues with the help of assorted doctors, some very competent and others not so much.
The issues I’m facing aren’t lifethreatening, but they are still debilitating enough to keep me from regular posting here. Sorry to be so vague; I’ll offer more details once some of these issues are sorted out a bit more. I’ll return to posting as soon as I am able but I cannot predict when that will be.
I appreciate everyone’s patience and continued support. Thanks!
Thanks, dreemr. This whole thing is just tragic.
I think some hunters carry one in case their rifle incapacitates but doesn’t kill a deer. They could just shoot the deer point blank to put it down but I guess they want to save the rifle ammo.
@PV
Only among assholes. Don’t know a single person (in any country I have hunting friends) who would even think of it, though as Fabe says a lot of the people I know in the US do carry a pistol as an “in case” against a poor rifle shot. Pistol shots don’t go very far if you have to put a wounded deer down.
Sure, it’s doable – a pistol will kill a deer if you’re a decent shot. Usually though, it’s not a clean kill which means you’ve got to track an injured animal and put it out of it’s misery. An asshole move, in other words. There’s nothing wrong with hunting (for food, not sport!!!), but a clean kill is the prime directive.
Thinking on the story with my fiction hat on – it’s a hell of an alibi for a targetted murder, isn’t it? “She was accidentally shot by a hunter” is up there with “Hit by a drunk driver” in terms of shifting the charges of murder to manslaughter.
@PeeVee You’re very unlikely to be able to kill a deer with a handgun, most just don’t have the stopping power at the kind of range you’d want to shoot a deer from. The only kinds of handguns I could really see effective deer hunting with are .357 or .44.
Also, rule #1 of hunting is to positively identify your target. If there’s the slightest possibility what you’re looking at isn’t what you’re hunting, you should never shoot at it.
I agree ,I was thinking in a situation where a deer is down but wounded for the use of a pistol.
@Catalpa
The insulin analogy sounds like something she would understand. She knows enough people in her life with diabetes to know that there’s nothing wrong with taking something for a common ailment.
@Dormousing_it
And I hope your antidepressants keep you on the up and up for more years to come.
@Hippodameia
Oh the possibilities of a Van Gogh living a long, happy life, content with his art.
@Robert Walker-Smith
Sorry to hear that about your son. At least he has you two to rely on if/when he needs to take his antipsychotics.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
Tbh I don’t really worry about stigma. Some people take inhalers for asthma, some take regular blood tests for their diabetes and some take painkillers so they can go about their lovely days. I don’t really see how it’d be any different for me. In regards to stopping them, a few months ago I forgot to refill my prescription for a few days. I felt completely awful, the basic act of even walking felt hazy, like someone turned off my internal drive. I’m just glad that when that happened I was just walking rather than driving.
@dreemr
Sorry about the years of suffering you had prior to taking anti depressant medication. But at the same time I’m glad to hear that the meds have given you decades of you allowed to be who you want to be and feel. In fairness to my mom, I was the one who brought it up by mentioning I refilled my prescription. I made the mistake of thinking that talking about it was a good idea. Then again I kind of wished she’d just noticed that and moved on to another topic instead of framing my depression like a flu that eventually goes away. Well at least she and my relatives aren’t very confrontational when it comes to that subject. As long as I don’t mention it, they’ll almost never talk about it.
Re: hunting and the poor lady that was shot.
The image I’m getting is that she was shot in a residential area and not out in the deep woods. Surely this can’t be right? Are there really cowboys with rifles walking round small rural towns in the hopes of killing a deer that might happen to appear?
@sunnysombrera : that kind of incident happen in France, even if I can’t point to an example where the shot actually wounded someone. It come from hunters who follow their target in the suburbian area.
One time they killed the deer with daggers. A litte girl watched the life reenacting of Bambi.
(also, people killed by hunters taking them from pretty much anything, ranging from duck to bear to rabbits is a common occurence in France. Local law enforcement is *WAY* too lax with people who hunt while drunk)
@Dormousing_it
A particularly entertaining bit of this whole ridiculous episode is the authorship of the paper that these idiots are holding up as a manly way to manlily boost their white western manliness:
Mohammed Z Allouh, Haytham M Daradka, Mohammed M Al Barbarawi and Ayman G Mustafa. I eagerly await the backlash when some of them decide that this is an evil muslim plot to pollute their precious bodily fluids.
Re the woman shot by her neighbour – that story just popped up in my WaPo feed, after I’d read people’s comments here.
She was 200 yards away, and what really struck me was she was walking her two dogs at the time. Easy to say “How did he mistake a woman + 2 dogs for a deer?”, I know, but given the poor light, why in hell did he fire in the first place? Even the “it was self-defence, I thought I was in danger” clearly doesn’t apply here. It’s so sad. I can’t even begin to get my head around what some of you are saying about staying indoors during hunting season.
@Oogly – I’ve missed my Zoloft script a couple of times in the past and it was so horrible that I’m super careful now to never run out. Brrr.
And wrt to stigma, I was thinking more of your mum; i.e. she needn’t be concerned because it’s not something that everyone can see, unless you choose to make it known. Anyways, I hope that she’s more understanding if it comes up again.
@Ooglyboggles – I hope I didn’t come across as blaming you for your situation with your mom. I understand wanting to talk to her about important things. I probably get overly-defensive about that kind of thing as I was never able to share personal information like that with my own mother without the fear of her using it against me somehow.
In any case, I hope it works well for you and that your relatives can find a way to be more supportive of you.
@Mish
Wow, just hopped over to the Wonkette breakdown of that NYT article and holy hell, that there is a clinic in how not to do an article about the local Nazi. And I’ve actually been a proponent of doing profiles on 4chan /pol/ dwellers just to get to the root of what draws these people in so the same pattern can be avoided, but as the Wonkette article notes, we don’t arrive at that key element and it just comes off as humanizing a man who calls Adolf Effing Hitler “a chill guy.”
It’s possible evil is just inexplicable as the Wonkette article says, but there’s gotta be some kind of throughline here; it takes effort to burn empathy out of people to the point where they think it’s funny to post gas chamber memes. Whether it’s economic hardship that’s stressing families to the point parents don’t pay heed to what their kids are doing online, a failing education system that’s not providing either kids or adults with enough historical perspective or socialization to adequately understand the ramifications of online interaction, white people not having any attachment to cultural touchstones of the past or just bigots being bigots, I’d like to know where this stuff comes from.
The closest we got is his Charles Murray/Pat Buchanan gateway, and you know who I thought of when I read that? Dylann Roof. “I was just a regular (albeit troubled) kid doing regular troubled kid things and then I Googled ‘black on white crime’ and I was hooked on white supremacy….” Plenty of kids come from abusive homes (as many here have attested) but don’t latch on to hate just to find some kind of purpose. Is it because it provides easy answers and scapegoats to one’s problems? Are these people that hard up for a network that they go to the armpit of the internet to find it?
I’m sure social scientists are studying the radicalizing of white people as we speak, but journalists really need to step up to the plate in changing the narrative from “Aren’t these Nazis charming and quirky” to “Sure they might act like regular people, but their online activities actually do end up hurting and in some cases killing people.”
Girlschase is the self proclaimed most popular PUA website on the internet, with almost 1 million visits per month.
They recently wrote an article on the numerous sexual assaults being condemned in the media recently.
http://www.girlschase.com/content/harvey-weinstein-gropocalypse-and-metoo-campaign
@Shadowplay:
I know this is a few days old now, but this always gets me to twitch:
Gah. Laser isn’t just a word, it’s a bloody acronym: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. You can’t just change a letter.
Estrogen in plants: yeah, that has been a thing with the ‘purity of (manly) essence’ crowd for many years now. Doesn’t make any more sense now than it did then.
Re: Cuphead. I’d managed to entirely miss that controversy, though the game looks fun and very Fleischeresque. Given Mish’s summary, it doesn’t sound like I missed much. A whole lot of special snowflakes laughing about how other people must be ‘triggered’, while said other people are mostly going ‘what are you on about?’.
@poglodyte:
Writing is great for running through ideas. I know I need to get back to doing more of it. I originally joined an APA (Amateur Press Association) because having deadlines and a minac (minimum acceptable contribution) encouraged me to actually write things. Then I became one of the editors of said APA, though APAs are kind of falling by the wayside in general because the Internet is the ultimate vanity press. I recently retired as editor due to being overwhelmed, the other editor is now overwhelmed as well, and I’ve been kind of casting about for a new writing inspiration of late.
(And yes, I know it’s still NaNoWriMo. Never got that to work for me. I’m too much of a compulsive editor and tweaker; I can’t seem to do the streamed first draft you need to do for NaNoWriMo.)
My parents can be dysfunctional to the point that I’ve considered cutting ties and going no contact with them before. I couldn’t make a plausable excuse this year and i was pretty anxious. Bringing my boyfriend over this year was surprisingly chill. They smoked their turkey and it was fantastic. I can barely stand my folks, but by God did I miss their cooking.
The boyfriend and I had an argument on thanksgiving that sent up big red flags. He’s been staying in his mother’s vacant house and hour and a half away for free trying to start a business out of the garage. He is also renting an apartment with me, and pays his half of the rent with money from his grandmother, which makes me uncomfortable because that means a stranger is supporting me as well. He also got me kicked out of my lovely cob in my intentional community by clashing with the token tyrant. He wasn’t entirely the instigator, but he also ignored my concerns about issues like bringing his dog.
Now I’m looking to buy a home to get out of this sketchy complex and he has all these criteria, but gets super hostile when I suggest he get a temporary part time job until he gets his business established to add just a few hundy to our monthly budget so we don’t have to struggle, even just ten to twenty hours a week. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, but his reaction was that if he wasn’t allowed to focus exclusively on his business I was taking away his dream, and that I was basically calling him a loser.
I don’t appreciate being made into the bad guy, and I’ve been down down this road where a partner doesn’t step up and it the relationship sets me back at square one.
So tomorrow morning I’m going to check out another hobbit house the mountains that has stipulations that will prevent him from coming with me. I love him, but I don’t feel like he’s at a place in life where he’s emotionally or financially ready to be taking on this commitment. I feel like I’m at a crossroads where I can either accomodate this person for love, or pursue my personal idea of an idyllic life.
Wish me luck, and sorry for the ranty run-on sentences
@dreemr
No worries, you didn’t come across as blaming me. I’ll just have to wait for the right moment to try to discuss it.
@GenJones
Best of luck to you. That’s not a situation anyone would want to be in.
@Jenora
I know, right? Actually swore at the screen when I saw that (and checked to make sure there is no Z in laser).
Still, I expect very little from infowars – and thats exactly what we get. 😛
Double post
By “I’ll just have to wait for the right moment to try to discuss it.” I meant discussing it with my folks specifically. You all are greatly sympathetic and knowledgeable about the subject.
@No one
Yep, that sounds like the rational of a PUA site. First point about being an mra. Second point is them thinking that what weinstein did wasn’t wrong, it was just that he did a poor job. They are partially right about the last two points. Without social media this would have easily been put under by traditional media sources.
re: deer hunting with handgun, it’s regarded as much the same as hunting with a bow or with a black powder rifle/musket. Just a different weapon for the same task. Two hundred yards is a damn long shot for any handgun, imo. The larger caliber cartridges, e.g. .44, .454, et. al. will have the range to make the shot, but not the stopping power to ensure that the animal is down if the shot is not in a vital point. That aside, the hunter was apparently hunting after sundown, which is not only illegal, but mind-numbingly dangerous… obviously.
@GenJones
Good luck!
and, Nancy Pelosi punts on defending victims of sexual assault on Crapitol Hill….
shit, it makes my stomach turn, the way people in power defend their own. The behavior is wrong, regardless of the merits of the people engaging in it.
@ genjones
Your post really struck a chord with me because the situation you describe tallies so much with something a friend went through.
Now it’s obviously not for me to suggest how you manage your own relationships, but maybe I can just mention a bit about her experience so you can see if it sounds familiar or at least have things to look out for.
In her case, hubby is a musician. Or at least wants to be. She had the same thing of effectively providing all the finances. When she suggested he might like to take a part time job to help out that was met with accusations of lack of support/belief in his talents. When he did finally get a job he blamed all his lack of success in becoming a big star on the fact she’d diverted him from his true calling and sabotaged his chances.
When he was in nice guy mode he’d say how his plans were best for both of them and how it would allow him to be the breadwinner. But generally he was just a moocher/dreamer who blamed every setback on her (selfishly) not supporting him.
I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t let him emotionally blackmail you; although you seem to have the situation pretty sussed anyway.
So I very much do wish you well, and really hope whatever you choose it all works out for you.
Regarding the fact that laser is an acronym: so is taser.
Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle. Jack Cover, the man who invented it, was a fan of the eponymous book series. He added the A because tser was hard to pronounce.
The characteristic prose style of the books also inspired the Tom Swifty.
@GenJones
Best of luck!
@Jenora
This!^
@GenJones – I hope for the best outcome for you, however that plays out. I think I know what I’d do in that situation, and it sounds like you do, too.