u/CommieGhost

Agreed, probably better than risking looking like one of these, which is the effect too-slim pants can create sometimes.

Honestly, your comment really is exactly the kind of ecologically ignorant visceral reaction they were referring to, with shallow rationalization on top to boot.

EDIT: To expand on this: Mosquitos larvae are a crucial component to freshwater ecosystems, serving as prey to predatory animals and hosts to microbiota, parasytic or otherwise. Adult mosquitos are also an important food component to a number of invertebrates and vertebrates, act as ecosystem engineers responding to microclimate variations, and are crucial in the lifecycles of a number of parasytic organisms - which is a good thing. Brain-eating amoebas, Giardia and Plasmodium are as much a part of the ecosystem as pandas, capybaras or buttleflies, and the ick 95% of you are feeling right now after reading this is exactly what u/-Knockabout was referring to. Human-caused environmental disturbances are not an excuse to ignore that!

Does this mean I think mosquitos are more important than people or that I enjoy getting stabbed in the legs for half the year? Of course not - I spent years living in the Amazon and still do field work in the jungle yearly, and I don't want to catch fucking Dengue either. But the fact is that a numerically insignificant proportion of mosquito species are directly harmful to humans. People hate mosquitos and fantasize about exterminating all of them because they are annoying, but then 1) so are crying babies, and I don't dropkick random children when I'm in the supermarket, and 2) being annoying can be ecologically important by itself.

What isn't normal is to condense five of those consecutively into three months.

In the OP there were three in three months, plus the second that took four weeks, and the first that took three weeks. Don't know where you're getting five in three months from.

EDIT: Which is not to say the story isn't fishy of course, but you seem to have miscounted in this particular point.

As someone who spent years living in the Amazon and routinely goes back to do field work there, I assure you that the indigenous peoples there do, in fact, wash themselves and their feet.

No, haven't you heard from this comment section? Obviously anyone with an addiction is an inhuman monster incapable of emotion and any time they fake humanity they are just waiting for your vulnerable moment to strike, right?

Because Jesus fucking christ some commenters on here feel like I walked straight into an 80s Reagan rally.

Admitedly I haven't exactly run a meta-analysis on SCOPUS or some other fancy methodology, but from a relatively quick search I can find that RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) talks about grooming only in the context of children. Same with Darkness to Light, Think UK Now (which specifically states it "involves the offender building a relationship with a child, and sometimes with their wider family [...] in preparation for abuse") and the NSPCC, while similarly the American Bar Association only seems to have an article about it in reference to CSA cases. Even Wikipedia only has an article refering to child grooming, with no equivalent material on adult-on-adult grooming as would be expected if that definition was actually used in any degree of relevance. While it is relevant that most of those sources are from organisations that specifically deal with CSA, it is still obviously relevant that these kinds of sources are the majority of the ones dealing with the subject.

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The only source I could find that does not mention children specifically is this article from the NY Times, which claims it to be "a gradual process whereby an abuser wins the trust and cooperation of a potential victim" as defined by vague legal experts, but even then the article is set quite specifically about the charges brought against Ghislaine Maxwell on Epstein's CSA ring.

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...alright, that's actually not the only source. There are also other people using grooming to mean adult-on-adult abuse, but all the ones I've seen happen to be located on this subreddit, which leads me back to my first comment either way.

I do wordle, quordle and all three forms of term.ooo - which is the Portuguese language equivalent.

The concept of a roman bean burger haunts me for some reason.

oh man, now I really want one

Eh, he is, but his ideology isn't. Most of the right-wing in Brazil believe in essentially the same catastrophic policies regarding the economy, environment, health system, etc, they're just less crass about it. If a "terceira via" right wing candidate wins next year the result will likely be the entrenchment of military participation in government and a consolidation of Bolsonaro's policies, even if he and his family end up arrested.

yes

Americans love licking dogshit off boots, just corporate ones instead.

Actually “anon1984” (you’ve never read the book, let’s be honest”, the Oregon police state is supporting them.

It is not. Portland police has a history of collaborating with and covering for right wing groups organising protests, and has actively spread disinformation regarding left-wing protests i.e the unfounded "quick drying cement milkshakes" allegations in the most recent one.

No, the mainstream referred to in the article is clearly and explicitly the international mainstream.

Which is one of the main failures of the simplistic and revisionist redefinition of left and right to mean "regulated economy vs free-market economy". The left is anti-capitalist and posits that the distinction between "crony capitalism" and "true capitalism" is non-existant or irrelevant. Using that as a guideline loses all meaning if you try to go beyond the reformist centre-left, which wants to reform away the perceived bad parts of capitalism instead of doing away with it wholesale.

Yes, that was the 505th PIR mentioned in the body of the text. The other two presumably hadn't jumped yet.

Did you not even click the link? There is a strong continuity with the White Man's Burden, one of the foundational ideologies of colonialism, existing in some form since at least the 16th century. It by and large predates modern race relations - or, more correctly, modern race relations exist *because* of it, to some degree.

Amazing answer, thank you.

So your speech in question, if it occurred at all, would have taken place many years before the Romans had adopted superior acoustic engineering for public speaking. (And the Colosseum was not completed until 80 AD, so it could not have occurred there.)

Small nitpick: in the movie the scene doesn't happen during the actual Second Punic War, it is a gladiatorial re-enactment of the battle of Zama.

Dogs have special categories such as "Most false alarms justifying illegal searches of black people" and "Most people mauled and mutilated for life".

First as tragedy, then as farce...

Theoretically radon could be an excellent propellant but with a half life of 4 days it's not particularly practical.

What exactly makes an element a good or bad propellant?

Aren't you overlooking the beans a little bit? The little fellas are really damn nutritious and remain a staple source of protein throughout Latin America nowadays. They were widely cultivated by pre-Columbian cultures from Peru to the Great Plains in companion planting along with maize and gourds, which together formed a pretty nifty nutrient package that'd have supplied easily obtained starch, proteins and vitamins. Even with the Mississipian cultures focusing their agriculture mainly on Maize it wouldn't be unthinkable for them to cultivate beans as a consistent intake source of protein to be supplemented by wild protein as needed.

"Old" TCM covers a vast variety of changing practices spread through an extremely large area of space dating back some 2.500 years, so it is by its very nature very much heterogenous. The one OP refers to was a systematized and standardized version of it created roughly around the 50s. The goal was purpotedly to integrate modern understanding of anatomy, physiology and pathology so that it could be eventually exported to the West. Despite that neither of them are in the least bit scientific (or evidence-based, as used in modern medicine), with most practices having no plausible mechanism of action based on actual physical reality and with wildly inconsistent results every time they are tested in controlled setting.

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Essentially it is as if Napoleon had created a canon of "Traditional Western Medicine" based on an odd mixture of Ancient Greco-Roman and Medieval medical theories.

I'm not celebrating his death, I'm celebrating the fact that 95 million Vietnamese outlived a monster who hated them for having been born and not being slaves to American imperialism ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And alcoholism isn’t hereditary. You don’t have an alcoholic gene in your DNA.

Just jumping in to say that this is straight-up false:

Abundant evidence indicates that alcoholism is a complex genetic disease, with variations in a large number of genes affecting risk. Some of these genes have been identified, including two genes of alcohol metabolism, ADH1B and ALDH2, that have the strongest known affects on risk for alcoholism. Studies are revealing other genes in which variants impact risk for alcoholism or related traits, including GABRA2, CHRM2, KCNJ6, and AUTS*2.

All in all, genetic factors seem to account for about half the risk of developing alcoholism, with the risk being attributable to exposure, abuse, and so on. Besides genes specific for suscetibility to alcoholism, there are multiple known genes for addictive behavior.

Both genetic and environmental variables contribute to the initiation of use of addictive agents and to the transition from use to addiction. Addictions are moderately to highly heritable. Family, adoption, and twin studies reveal that an individual’s risk tends to be proportional to the degree of genetic relationship to an addicted relative. (1)

Furthermore, because of addiction's nature as a multistep pathological process involving exposure, formation of dependence, and continuation of use, environmental and genetic factors play different roles in different stages:

The relative importance of these factors varies across the lifespan and at different stages of addiction. For example, peer influences and family environment are most important for exposure and initial pattern of use, whereas genetic factors and psychopathology play a more salient role in the transition to problematic use. (2)

Just passing through to clear up some potentially harmful misconceptions, because otherwise I agree with the sentiment of your comment. Her reaction is unhelpful and counterproductive in more ways than one.

Ironically, the original definition of Latin America was created in France to refer to ex-French colonies. Later it was expanded to include all regions speaking Romance languages, and in some contexts today it definitely can and does include Haiti, the French Antilles in the Caribbean, French Guyana and Quebec.