Check the outside drain into which that pipe exits if there is one. The hair and gunge may well now be partially blocking it. Ours backed up under heavy rain quite frequently until I installed chicken wire an inch above the grid down there

Removed by mod

That’s just restating your conclusion, not explaining why. What on earth have oligarchs and plutocrats to fear from the russian oligarchy form of government being installed in the USA by putin’s man trump? Further wealth? Uncurbed power and influence? No, they fear none of this. Consequences are for the little people.

Interesting that this is so absolutely true and we all share this experience so keenly that they didn’t even need to mention ai in it yet we all knew that was what it’s about.

Alcohol disinhibits us, but I don’t think it reveals our true selves. Our inhibitions are an important and truthful part of who we are. There’s a real and important difference between someone who hits on women all the time and one who only ever tries it when he’s had a glass or two.

I was slightly confused by your comment until I realised that I think you mean that you find masc men gross or stereotypical straight men gross rather than all straight men.

(Particularly since you come across as a male person who prefers feminine people and you find "other femboy"s attractive.)

I’m too tired to unpick all these negatives right now.

I don’t see why. People took a fairly partisan view over whether it was true that trump had Russian help in the election and I think trump is right that he would get away with shooting someone in the street and his base would still support him. I don’t think being in the Epstein files is what’s hurting him, it’s not releasing them. I think it has embarrassed him to have given a blowjob to “bubba” but I don’t think it has harmed his rating.

Interesting. I like it enough to give it my upvote.

Why unupvote it? Do you normally do that? Is it a principal? Or was it just that one?

Sigh. The EU banking sector is not destroyed and seizing Russian assets did not destroy it. That’s what Putin wants to be true, and it’s what he gas announced to be true, by Putin is no more truthful than trump is.

That’s a strawman.

Lol, it was you who made it! I said trump is under Putin’s influence and you said that this or that group would never allow Putin to take over. Putin doesn’t need to take over when his deputy is already running the country and destroying a lot of what America stood for during my lifetime.

In the UK, the government is formed by the party that has the majority of seats in Parliament. It’s unusual for the government to not have near complete control over what gets passed in Parliament. There’s also a principle in our unwritten constitution that Parliament is sovereign and no Parliament can bind its successor.

So for example, when the LibDem/Con coalition of 2010-2015 formed, they passed a Fixed Term law saying that (instead of the prime minister being able to choose the election date as long as it was within five years), the election date would always be five years after the last one, unless two thirds of Parliament voted for a general election.

You’d think that when the Cons gained an overall majority that, as usual, was under two thirds, they would have to stick to fixed terms, but no, of course not! They simply passed a new law revoking the old one.

You seem to think that rights means something that’s in the constitution, and Britain doesn’t have a written constitution, nor does it seem there’s a way of getting one, but the American constitution is illusory, because it binds only honorable presidents who pay attention to the supreme court and the supreme court ruled itself out of power when it ruled that trump couldn’t be prosecuted for actions he took as president. Of course they left themselves room to call a Democratic president’s act not official on the grounds that it was illegal or unconstitutional, but they were too busy ruling trump king to realise he was never going to party attention to their adverse rulings anyway.

Tyrants are enabled by sycophants who deny it’s happening right up until they support it happening. On which topic, your denial that Putin couldn’t possibly have trump in his pocket because this or that group wouldn’t have allowed it flies in the face of the facts that (a) absolutely it was known that Putin wanted trump to win because that would weaken America and strengthen Russia and (b) the people you mention that would have stopped it all really like an extreme right wing government.

It was hyperbole.

You mean it was wrong, but you don’t accept that word when used about you.

But this is a gish gallop on your part. Steve Bannon would be proud of you of he gave even one tiny shit about who you are.

No, confiscating Russian assets did not destroy the EU banking sector, it just provided a bunch of cash to spend. The EU banking sector is doing very nicely post brexit. London used to be the main hub for European banking. Now we’re not in the EU, not so much, and Frankfurt etc are thriving.

Whereas if Putin takes over

What? What an enormous straw man! Putin doesn’t need to be US president when he has trump appointed to do it for him. And he wouldn’t be eligible to be US president and the Americans wouldn’t allow him to stand for either party, and they would rebel if he tried military occupation and it would be impossible for Russia to overcome the US military. But Putin isn’t anywhere close to that stupid! He doesn’t need to be US president, he just needs someone who will so what he wants. Enter stupid, nasty, thin-skinned, easily duped, flattery-swallowing, compromat-laden, racist, geriatric, easily influenced donald trump. Putin had this idea a long time, I suspect, but it was only really with the reach of twitter that he could pull it off.

You’re increasingly openly taking Putin’s side of every point, which is probably why you set off my bad takes alarm in the first place.

As I said elsewhere, it would be unusual for a vast number of folk to not contain annoying or argumentative people, but I worry about tarring a whole category by always bringing up examples of bad behaviour and mentioning the category as part of it.

For example: “There was this manager shouting at all the women that they needed to keep in shape to impress the customers, but he was obviously badly unfit and overweight and dressed really shabbily.” OK story. But “Fat middle aged guys who don’t lift a finger to try to live healthily can be so annoying when they dress badly and then shout at women that they sold keep in shape and to impress clients.” Not OK, makes it about the category of people.

But, clearly I wasn’t there and I didn’t know that you were criticising a drawing!

It sounds like you had a bad experience and whilst I very much don’t want to generalise from it, I also don’t want to belittle it.

Monsanto paid a bunch of scientists to “discover” that Glyphosate, the patented active ingredient in their RoundUp weedkiller is safe for humans, but the article was ghost-written by Monsanto employees without acknowledgement. The article claimed that Glyphosate does not cause cancer, but The World Health Organisation found that it does. Some people have trouble figuring out who is lying between the company making vast profits and the organisation tasked with keeping people healthy across the globe. RoundUp is used a LOT on genetically modified foods made by guess who to be “RoundUp ready” - resistant to RoundUp. These genetically modified foods were also found to be safe initially, but guess who funded that research who are only now, 25 years later, found to be ghost writing the articles instead of letting the scientists do their own work and draw their own conclusions.

Did you downvote your own post?! The scores are +0-1 when I’m seeing it (and the-1 isn’t me).

Considering there was a 17 hours gap, it’s quite possible that someone had the time to read and downvote it before you saw it.

Yeah, but on my instance, anything you post automatically has a +1 from yourself, which you must have removed.

Your takes on trans people and intersex people seem to all be from concern trolling media and third hand stories. Trans people are like witches that hand out curses that cause harm? I think your skepticism alarm should be going off.

For the record, molesting children is absolutely not OK under any circumstances. I forget what the statistics are, but I remember that the number of incidents of trans people being sex offenders is far lower than you would expect from the prevalence of trans people and of sex offending in the general population.

It seems to me that you were fed a lot of negative stereotypes of trans and intersex people when you were young, and I worry that you are interpreting finding the lack of evidence of any of this in the real world now that you are older as a change in the world when it might be wiser to take it as evidence that the negative stereotypes were always sensational, overblown and inaccurate.

My main argument is that Trump is not under Russian influence because the billionaires would have never allowed it.

Would never allowed what? A stupid and easily manipulated old man who thinks he’s one of them and sticks up for them to be president? They love that about him. He let Musk dismantle regulatory controls just because he was rich and said nice things about him. And why do billionaires need to fear Russian influence? Billionaires only fear taxation of the rich, and Russia is not about to try to get Trump to do that! Russia is an oligarchy and the US oligarchs and plutocrats would love to run the USA that way.

Wait a bit more. The EU is a tool of American influence. Brexit will shine when the EU reveals its true face.

This is conspiracy theory nonsense. The EU is how you resist US influence. When you form a union, you become stronger than the individuals.

And Brexit is a turd that is killing our economy. It will shine like Farage’s sphincter.

They weren’t your rights if you could lose them.

This too is bullshit. Governments write rights into law and governments write rights out of law. By your logic there are no rights. WTF do we use the word for?

You were looking for examples of you being incorrect. There’s a good few right here.

The EU is not the single source of good

Straw man completely swerving my point.

But it’s not just that. It’s the other bad takes. They’re nearly all yours.

Are they wrong?

Sometimes wrong by containing factual inaccuracies, sometimes wrong by containing selective truths and painting a misleading picture, sometimes wrong by drawing the wrong conclusions from accurate facts, sometimes wrong by consistently picking the most negative interpretation and defending it vigorously and ignoring anything else someone has said to derail the conversation from a balanced and nuanced discussion into one that solely debates your taking points.

The EU is of course imperfect, but it’s also the most responsible of the governments I’ve lived under and Brexit has been an almost completely unmitigated disaster that we brought on ourselves. It didn’t even succeed on its sold terms because illegal immigration and dangerous boat crossings to the UK soared under the absence of the EU’s “first safe country” rule, so we can’t she everyone back over the channel any more, and the brilliant trade deals we would be free to sign around the world are few and far between and frequently on worse terms than the EU got. Why? Because we don’t have the purchasing power and negotiating clout & experience of the EU.

The people like you who can’t do anything but talk down the EU because “MuH fReeDumb” cost our country EU investment, foreign investment, healthcare workers (during a recruitment and retention crisis), tax income, trading partners, shedloads of small export businesses, GDP, respect, soft power & influence and real power & influence. We used to have a seat at the top table. Now we sit outside the room. The single most stupid act of national self harm we could have taken short of starting a war.

Whose freedom? Boris Johnson’s freedom, that’s who (and he would have been a much better prime minister without it). Not us, not ordinary people. We have the freedom to pay more and lose our rights.

So no, your takes are crap and this one in particular is stupid.

Of course, some people have always wanted the EU to be a single country, but that’s not how it was sold.

In 1993?! Or 1957?! Make the EU the EEC again!? The only good way to live is in the past? Back to the golden age of low consumer, worker and human rights! Less economic power and regulatory influence globally! Yay! /s

How reactionary is that?

But it’s not just that. It’s the other bad takes. They’re nearly all yours.

Did you downvote your own post?! The scores are +0-1 when I’m seeing it (and the-1 isn’t me).

You’re right about me not meeting an unreasonable trans person. All the trans folks I know or have known in real life are fantastic people who I have a lot of respect for and have gone through a lot of shit from other people. I think it’s worth me doing my best not to add to that and definitely value them as they are.

(Some people who are bullied go on to be bullies, but far, far, far from all, and statistically, yes, there should be some trans people who are unreasonable or bullies, and I think I’ve encountered an unreasonable trans person on lemmy, but I will only ever criticise the mean things they say or their politics, never their gender or presentation.)

Generally, I don’t understand why people think that trans folk haven’t had enough criticism, “explaining”, social rejection, etc etc etc.

attributes malice to your words, and refuses to change their perspective when you try to explain, while demanding an apology for what is essentially an innocuous comment as if you killed their cat.

You see, that’s where I find it much easier than you. If I accidentally offend someone that I really didn’t mean to, especially if they’re in a marginalised group that has had plenty of shit thrown at them for it their whole life, I find it very easy to apologise, back down, maybe try to explain that I didn’t mean it the way they read it, but being careful to very clearly restate my apology for the offence I caused afterwards if I do.

You would rather tell them that they were wrong and that you were right, and you’re prepared to argue it long and hard. I find that completely unnecessary, because I don’t need to win if I didn’t mean to beat them in the first place.

I have difficulty backing down in lots of scenarios but accidentally upsetting someone I didn’t mean to isn’t one of them.

Well, yeah, I know how to behave.

Not how to back down when you didn’t mean to upset people, though.