You’ve really hit on the crux of what’s going on here - that South Africa doesn’t have jury trials. A jury decision has to be reached unanimously, or if that’s impossible, the case has to be retried. It is an assumption of the American legal system that if you can get 12 people to agree to something, it must be true,…

And of course, as we all know, if you have more than one reason for doing a good thing (or if some random internet yahoo so much as thinks you have more than one reason) it is no longer a good thing at all, but really a very, very bad thing, even if objectively it had positive results for, say, victimized children.

Um I don’t know if you’re aware but she voted for the war in Iraq? Forget about how damn near everybody who had the same information as her did the same, and how almost the only people who didn’t are those who are so anti-war that it trumps their interest in national security. Forget about how national security is a…

She was also the first female partner of her old law firm, and a lifelong advocate for the rights and safety of children, often working pro bono in child advocacy cases while working in other areas of law. Whenever people accuse her of being cold, or lacking progressive cred, I think about how progressivism is…

I think one real strength Hillary’s got working in her favor is that she’s been around long enough (she’s been working with Congress since the early 70’s) that she is able to be calm and candid in situations that others find so stressful they can only fall back on scripted responses. That’s why any tactics that rely…

I’ve thought about this a bit, and the only way I can think of that they could prove he knew he had it is if he was already being prescribed treatment for it. Which actually would be a bit of a slam-dunk in that case - people have previously sued for knowing nondisclosure of STD status, and won.

Also the mouth-breathers who don’t understand the difference between liking someone and having them be competent to steer the richest country in the world for a minimum of 4 years.

A fine example of nominative determinism.

Or a servant could hold it for you. There’s a moment in Gerard Depardieu’s 2000 film Vatel that shows a servant kneeling down and holding the bourdaloue for the Queen of France to piss in.

This image really gets to the heart of what kickstarted the real change in public sanitation - cheap microscopes. They not only gave scientists the ideas that go into germ theory, but once they became inexpensive enough to be readily available, a certain number of interested laypersons could see for themselves what…

Well, for me, one of them is and one of them isn’t. My mother loves me, but love is an emotion, and under the level of emotion, the person she is is mean and judgmental, and a lot of the time she can’t help letting that surface. So I’m better off than a lot of people (I’ve got one good one) but I still know what it’s…

I’m sorry that happened to you. It’s gutting, and it can damage the foundation of the relationships that are supposed to be fundamental in your early life. While I think we can all agree that kids can definitely be assholes (almost by definition) I hope the parents who blow off steam by expressing this opinion to…

I get the Baby, baby, OHHH one stuck in my head on the regular, despite never having heard any more of it than that line.

I mean, if she looked happy in this shoot, wouldn’t that be weird? Would that not go against the styling? Maybe she doesn’t look happy because that’s not part of the job she’s trying to do right now. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how she feels about the job itself. No one is saying Angelina Jolie is…

To be fair I don’t think she gets to choose the scenario. And IDK, maybe she is incompetent as a model (I have no knowledge that would help me asses this) but I’m pretty sure the scenarios chosen for her to model in are really hindering any choices she may have made within them.

This is so true. One of my best friends from high school was incredibly wealthy - unfortunately, everyone was living off money that Grandpa made, and no one realized that if ~6 people are living off a dead guy’s profits, and no one knows how to make any more money, eventually the money’s going to run out. My friend…

I said this to my mom over Thanksgiving, and she said that it was true to the best of her knowledge. That’s probably good enough confirmation for me.

I am fairly certain that my father has never said a disparaging word about me to another human being. He has called me out on bad behavior (and god, I was pretty much awful from birth to age 23), and I’m not claiming he hasn’t used the full scope of the English language in his head, but I would put down $1,000 in a…

I had a roommate once whose father is now an Ambassador to an African country, who had grown up her whole life with literal servants. We lived together for 9 months, during which time she literally never did the dishes nor took out the trash nor even moved the trash that she generated in the common living areas into…

I mean, I’m fine. The same privileges that meant I didn’t need to work in college helped me make up for the lack of work experience. While my friends had to take any job they could get to start immediately paying their student loans, I went overseas and taught English for a year - I was financially independent, but I…