I’m a user experience designer. My favourite story is from aviation engineering. I don’t remember the year or all the details, but the US Navy had put stupid amounts of money and time into engineering a new fighter jet. It was worked out on paper and built to exact specifications. Then, during the first human test of it, the pilot ejected on the tarmac before it took off. The plane crashed, obviously, but the pilot couldn’t explain what happened (apparently he had a concussion from his unscheduled landing).

The plane was built again, and shortly after takeoff, the pilot again ejected without explanation.

What the fuck was going on?

In the retelling I heard, someone finally noticed the design of the cockpit was to blame. In trying to cram all the standard controls plus new ones into the smallest amount of space, the designers had moved the eject lever right next to the lever to adjust the seat position – they’d coloured the eject lever red, but the pilot couldn’t see that since it was below and slightly to the right of his ass, and both levers were the same size and shape. Nobody noticed this was a problem until at least two pilots accidentally ejected on takeoff.

This might be apocryphal, I don’t know, but I learnt it as an example of how things might look good on paper, but you can’t really know until a user fucks everything up.

I’m 54. When people ask my opinion of this war, I change the subject. I’m not proud of that, but I’ve seen this war more than once.

I have strong opinions about many things, but I’ve seen what this particular war does and I’ve learnt there’s no winning it. I donate to Gaza, but nothing I can say will change the horror the latest flare up of this war will bring. Im sorry.

Most of us don’t want to till fields and milk cows, and we’d rather trade things like iPhones with people who are cool with shovelling cow shit.

I know, that’s surprising. We’ve only been trading like that for a few hundred thousand years. Fucking millennials.

Less than two steps between that and eugenics, and one step between eugenics and genocide. We’ve seen and documented that. It’s a logical but sociopathic mentality.

Conversely, when we realise that we’re stronger together and act empathetically as a society, every one of us and all of society benefits. When we care for the least of us, crime goes down and we find geniuses who improve life for us all, who would otherwise die in anonymous poverty.

Living like barbarous animals – not rising above the ‘brutality of nature’, as you said – helps sociopaths who take advantage of our better nature to enrich themselves. Indeed, if we structure our society around that, as we have done lately, our society will devolve around the lowest common denominator (people like Musk or Trump).

We can and must do better than that.

I hadn’t heard of that, thank you! That trailer looks amazing. I’m excited for it now, too.

This physically hurt me.

Who can I sue? Any lawyers in the chat?

Your man card wasn’t forfeited, it’s gilded. Only real men can appreciate art.

Have you seen Sondheim’s Into the Woods? It’s a masterpiece. It’s on Prime if you haven’t seen it. It stars Chip Zien, Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Tom Aldredge, and other big names. I’d like to see anyone say Zein, Aldredge, and Sondheim aren’t ‘real men’.

Yes, and the man who proposed the theory retracted it later, saying it would be like basing human behavioural theory on observations made in a supermax prison.

That actually makes sense that these losers would venerate it, since the behaviours they idolise are very like what you’d see in prisons: machismo instead of real manhood, narcissism and subjugation instead of empathy, and hatred instead of compassion.

you ended up wading through mud

Horse shit. In cities, you waded through horse shit.

As someone who has done extensive reenactment in period dress, sometimes in towns dedicated to realism that banned cars and relied on horses for travel, you wouldn’t believe how terrible even a dozen carriages and a few dozen private horses can be to your skirts/trousers and shoes. Especially when it rains.

People sometimes make light of women in the past who changed their outer clothes two or three times a day, but if you were in town, your attire would be absolutely foul after a few hours in the same outer skirt. A long cloak helped immensely to keep your skirts or trousers from soaking up horse sewage.

Once cars took over, that stopped being a problem, cloaks weren’t as desirable as they obscured fashion, and coats became shorter and more for protection from the weather than from horse shit.

There was a bit of military influence, but that was more about fashion than functional influence.

e: clarification

… so far. Just wait til fascists are in control, and they kill all social programs then reallocate those resources to shit like that. The German government did that in the late 30s. They started using all government and private records to root out undesirables.

Ten years ago I wouldn’t have worried either, but now? I wouldn’t give my information to anyone.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone arou-und.

Fuck you.

(Sigh, okay, it’s not your fault I’m old. I’m just angry about it.)

This was literally the next post in my feed, lol:

You can also take deductions for costs relating to criminal activity!

That’s it, I’m done for today. Nothing can top that.

I thought having dropped my son off at daycare sufficiently aged me. That part was true.

I had just dropped my son off at daycare. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. Give me five bees for a quarter, you’d say. Ah, there’s an interesting story behind that nickel…

The advice to wash your dick is a sure sign that you weren’t heavily involved in raising a child.

That’s quite an arrogant statement.

My son is 25, and happy with my decision not to have him circumcised. I know because I asked him based on this discussion.

He never once got any sort of infection, because I taught him basic hygiene.

Our bodies having parts doesn’t make them inherently useful or purposeful or superior to life without. We still have tail bones

The foreskin is not a vestigial trait. It’s a 100% relevant and useful organ today. (eta: I know about vestigial traits because I have one: Darwin’s tubercle. I’d also not have appreciated having my ears docked at birth.)

Ask anyone who has a foreskin. That’s a profoundly ignorant comparison.

we grow teeth that don’t fit it our mouths

That’s an adaptive trait that serves us quite well, because our hominid ancestors fed their young the most high-energy fruits, which also increased the risk of cavities in our young. Being able to shed and replace juvenile teeth meant we were able to commence adulthood without the risk of starving. Our wisdom teeth weren’t a problem until very, very recently, because the evolution of our bodies haven’t had time to catch up with our modern diet. That’s nothing like the foreskin, where our sexual activity has not changed in millions of years. You should learn some paleo-anthropology before making comparisons like that.

and we get auto-immune diseases.

I have very severe autoimmune disease. Many recent studies point to environmental causes, which are recent and our evolution cannot account for.

None of that has anything whatever to do with the continued and relevant importance of the foreskin to sexual pleasure.

I am a mother who decided not to circumcise my child (who is now 25 and is happy to have his foreskin), a decision I made after talking to my father who had to have his removed in his teens after developing a rare condition. I know more about this topic than many people, and certainly more than you.

The reasons this procedure is commonly done in the US are questionable at best. We have learned better, and this archaic practice should not be advocated any longer.

If you had it done to you and/or had it done to your child, I’m not here to shame you. Until recently, it’s just what we did, but going forward, we should do better for our children and our species based on what we’ve learned. And we shouldn’t be a dick when presented with information that goes against our cultural norms (pun intended).

e: link to my 4 month old comment about my vestigial trait. I had to scroll through nearly a thousand comments to find it, whew.

Again, cite sources?

Yes, I’m aware it’s a week of recovery time later. I made the decision not to circumcise my son after talking to my father who had the procedure in his teens after he developed a condition. He told me exactly what it was like. (My father is 88 and was born before circumcision was common.)

You can do almost anything to an infant and they won’t remember the trauma. Infants have been subjected to near-fatal child abuse, including having their femurs broken, and they don’t remember it. That doesn’t make it right.

Having your wisdom teeth removed takes at least a week of recovery and we do that in late teens or early twenties. There are lots of things that take a week to recover from, and having to have your foreskin removed because it’s causing issues is far, far more rare. That’s not a reason to take that choice away.

Like I said, they can always have that procedure later if they want to, but once it’s done, that choice is basically gone.

Also like I said, I’m not trying to make people feel bad for having done it when we didn’t really know better. I’m not shaming anyone. It’s just what we did until recently. Going forward, though, it’s not justified and we shouldn’t be advocating for it now that we know better.

eta: and Kellogg isn’t irrelevant. That’s exactly why the practice has been embedded in American culture, so when we’re talking about why we do it, he’s extremely relevant.

It’s a totally valid comparison.

Removing the foreskin has real ramifications for not only looks but sexual pleasure (which, by the way, was why it was popularised by puritan Christians in the US – the original point was to stop teenage boys from masturbating by making it less pleasurable).

Cutting off the foreskin at birth takes something from a man that he can’t really restore later, whereas doing nothing gives him the bodily autonomy to make that decision later. You can always remove it if you want, but once it’s gone, you can’t just grow it back.

A baby is at your mercy and has no choice in the matter.

It does happen in slow motion, and every single time, some people see it happening. They march and wave their arms shouting FASCISM! whilst their neighbours call them hyperbolic.

If you read contemporaneous accounts, you can feel the frustration.

Or… I thought I could feel the frustration, until recently (eta: if you haven’t read They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, please do as soon as possible). Now it’s doubly frustrating. I keep wracking my brain, wondering what I can do that they didn’t. I can’t stop this, so I keep saying ‘if you were a German in the 1930s, knowing what you know now, what would you do?’

I don’t know the answer to that. I know many Germans saw it coming and couldn’t stop it.

What the fuck can we do? Because it is absolutely coming.

e: oh, and worse, trump isn’t actually the problem. He’ll likely lose, then everyone will high five that we’ve defeated The Problem, but Trump is just their carnival barker. He could die tomorrow and the threat wouldn’t change. There’s a solid fascist movement in the US and elsewhere that will not stop with trump’s defeat. There are thousands of them in high levels of the US government , and they’ll barely miss a beat without trump. He barely matters, and I’m afraid when he loses, the fascist movement behind this will find a wide opening.

That’s what history suggests, yeah.