Also like, yeah, D.C. probably IS dirtier than Bumblefuck Mountaintop or wherever else on earth is so uninteresting that only 5 people want to live there, and 4 of them only stay because they don’t have enough change between the couch cushions for a bus ticket out.

I am, essentially, an athlete of food and snark! (The other inadvisable thing I’m prone to doing being “getting into huge arguments on Gawker - but then, I’ve got to get those snark muscles ready for irritating family members!)

What about that guy who shot that Muslim couple and their sister because he was an Atheist who hated religion so much?

If that’s not a sterling recommendation for Why You Should Travel Alone, I don’t know what is.

Haha. I had a version of Prague Syndrome when I moved there - they don’t show you in the pictures how everything is covered with graffiti, dog shit, and a thin layer of grime!

And since it’s not like most Americans are going to get on a plane from Peoria to Paris to donate blood or sweep glass off the street, it makes no sense to berate people for falling back on ideas like “thoughts” or “prayers” in order to express the very strong emotions they otherwise have nothing to do with.

Hospitals are great incubators for disease, particularly the resistant ones that you have to spend forever treating.

And most of those cities do have the experiences that everyone dreams of visiting them and having - one of my friends lives right by Tower Bridge in London, and goes past it every day on her walk to work, and she says that when it’s kind of misty-sunny and beautiful, she can’t believe how lucky she is. And then…

When I was working at the Smithsonian in DC, a teenage girl once asked me if I “lived around here,” because all she had seen for a week were monuments and museums, and thought that was all there was.

Okay. Prove it. Or talk about it some more, I don’t care.

Because it’s so inconceivable that a French person would express distaste for a mosque?

“Anything in our power” for someone who doesn’t have $9,000 for a boob job but has $60 for the latest VS monstrosity, encompasses the buying of a push-up bra where it would exclude the boob job. I’m not sure why you’re choosing a bad reading of a fairly simple sentence as the hill you want to die on, but I suppose…

Right, because “anything,” encompassing, as it does, anything, can’t possibly mean buying a push-up bra and must therefore mean getting breast implants. You’re the one who made that leap.

Women do any number of things, from buying drug-store makeup or push-up bras or diet pills, to achieve the other ideals you named. In fact, the proof that those are cultural ideals is that everyone at every economic level is being sold something to achieve them, and almost everyone buys into at least some of those…

This is a deeply weird comment to make on a thread devoted to nothing else but talking about it.

That’s probably why only a percentage of a percentage of a percent of women actually do it, because as we all know, women are not at all likely to do anything in their power to attain cultural ideals.

I mean, what do you think the other reasonably possible outcomes were? She rides home on a unicorn with a million dollars in her backpack and marries her One True Love and gets to eat nothing but chocolate pudding forever? Because I’d prefer that for her, too, but it doesn’t fit the category of “reasonably possible.”

Sure. And we are, and I never said that they were.

I know at my friends’ mosque they talk openly about the dangers of radicalization, and urge people to reach out for help if they think a friend may be becoming radicalized. I think it’s probably helping parents, at least, be aware of the signs.

Hey, if the only way you can hide the fool you made of yourself is to delete my comments, then I’m all for it. It’d be a real shame to make the other adults read your droolings.