I detest people like Mackey, who believe that illness (and poverty, and a number of other conditions) is a result of poor decisions rather than a result of a million underlying factors over which an individual has little to no control. Trust me when I say he will have an abrupt change of heart if and when he’s ever…

Universal healthcare would not cause billions of new unfunded deficits if we got rid of for-profit insurance companies and if people like this dickwad paid his fair share of taxes. Maybe he should ask Steve Jobs how successfully his vegan diet helped his pancreatic cancer. Oh, wait...

Hey Mckey: tell me which of your overpriced products will cure my muscular dystrophy and I’ll buy a truckload of it.

Since everyone and their sibling on my timeline got their family a pandemic Christmas puppy, I’ve been seeing a lot of Christmas Day “we’re getting a puppy!” reveal videos with explanations that the puppies won’t be coming home until this month because of the whole “puppies need to stay with their mom for 8 weeks”. If…

I think it’s even worse than that, I hear a lot of “I didn’t get it, why should they” when topics like maternity leave, universal healthcare and tuition free college comes up.

I was talking about empathy with a group of people the other day, trying to get a consensus on what it meant to everyone. The religious types in the group were all very empathetic to individuals while ignoring the groups of marginalized people that those individuals identified with.

My son (9) woke up this morning long after I started work and asked me to make him breakfast (it’s his last day of break). I asked him what he wanted (pb toast) and I said I’d get the bread down and in the toaster, but he’d have to finish it himself (which he’s extremely capable of doing). I walked in the kitchen a…

Does it harm you permanently? No. But she was already hungry when she went to them, and being hungry is an uncomfortable experience, probably even more so for a growing child, and he inflicted that on her for six hours. Not everything has to be permanent to be considered “harm.” That seems like a form of harm to me.

She said she was hungry. That’s why she asked for food. I’m not sure what you mean when say “abuse would require that she actually ‘went hungry’” when she was literally hungry, apparently hungry enough to undergo six hours of frustration. If she wasn’t really that hungry, presumably she would have just given up rather…

Everyone needs to learn the skills. But you don’t do it by throwing the kid off into the deep end without direction. You’re not just teaching the skills, you’re teaching self-worth and self-confidence. You understand that. It comes through when you post about your tiny human. I woulda done anything to have a mom like…

I feel you! I work in a library and this is a pet peeve that I’m having to learn to swallow.

Great comment. The lima bean addendum almost lost you my star. Almost.

Don’t trust Ken Jenning’s apology of this dude. I personally was at a Half Priced Books browsing used stuff when I heard 2 kids just screaming and tearing up the place like heathens, no parent reigning them in or getting them to go outside - they were Ken Jenning’s kids. I’m just saying ...

My parents did the same. But they cooked a lot of gross stuff and I've been a disordered eater/food waster since. So maybe it isn't a black/white issue?

When I was about eleven, my mother announced that henceforth she would no longer do my laundry. I would be responsible for my own clothing.. Bit of a problem, though. She gave me no instructions and oh yeah...the building we lived in at the time didn’t have a fucking laundry room. The laundromat was about fours blocks…

It feels like sometimes folks from marginalized groups who attain a crazy amount of success - enough so that they’re essentially inoculated to hardships by money, power, fame, etc - and are able to take a far more forgiving stance on things, especially when it comes to friends. I’m thinking similarly of Ellen paling…

My mom bought me a really nice kid’s dictionary when I was a kid. One time, I was reading some version of the Pied Piper, I came across the the word “plague,” which I had never seen before, and I asked her what it meant, and she pointed me to the very nice dictionary she had brought me, and told me to look it up…

I realized how fucked up corporal punishment was as a young teen — tasked with keeping an eye on my eight-years-younger sister (she’d have been 7-ish) during a family vacation, I grabbed her arm too hard and pulled her along a path (out of a semi-dangerous situation) and apparently bruised her arm. It was exactly the…

Last year, when I was age 39, my parents and I had our first ever frank conversation about all this. My dad used the belt on me when I was little. I was generally being punished for not doing something I should have done (like clean my room); I rarely got in trouble for doing something wrong. (I did some very bad…

I think people don’t want to come to terms with it being child abuse because then it’s trauma and shame not romanticized “cultura” that only insiders know about.

My mom hit me because she was frustrated. There was no lesson to be learned other than that I was bothering her. She worked a physically demanding job for…