Wouldn't they have been calling China "Cathay" at that point anyway? Historians?

Brantford is famously the town where they shot Silent Hill on location without really having to change much. The clowns are a bit much, but the house isn't creepy to me (especially in comparison).

You want to dare Bill Gates into doing some sort of massive, risky, incredible thing to help the environment? Tell him that this is his chance to absolutely fucking clobber Steve Jobs' legacy forever. Future historians are already probably going to look back on Jobs about as kindly as we look back on Ford. This is…

Are you forgainst it, then?

That's exactly it. To objectify someone is, I think, to engage with a sort of mental simulacrum of them instead of the real person. Instead of engaging with them as a subject (someone who can initiate sentences, so to speak), you interact with whatever version of them you've constructed in your head. To me, it's…

I guess I'm just trying to understand what people mean when they talk about objectification. I think of it as an act where people reduce someone to some aspect, so I think that lust isn't necessarily objectifying (you can lust after someone without reducing them). I think that most others here are using it…

I don't see why it has to be ranked. Both of those activities can be the worst. It's like a miracle.

Music lessons!

- The right kind of specificity. I've read my share of things where the author seemed to think that good verisimilitude involved page after page of people talking vaguely about accounts or describing the house's soffit and fascia, all while occasionally forgetting what they've named the characters.

You're too kind. I'm glad that what I said helped in some way.

I ran into a situation a bit like this once, where I saw one of my friends on OKCupid while she was in a long-term relationship with another one of my friends. I mentioned it to her as a "ha ha, OKCupid" sort of thing and received a politely terse request not to look at her profile, so I didn't. After the…

That'd make sense. I remember it as sounding super new wave.

That'd be cool if it were consensual. This guy, however, sounds like he has no idea what the hell is going on. If both those things are the case, then it could be that she's using him for her kink without telling him about it.

Unless the whole "only I was supposed to enjoy it" thing is their kink, that situation made very little sense. What did she think was going to happen?

Is that necessarily objectification, though? I had taken objectification to mean that one is treating another person as the object of their attentions without thinking of them as a fellow subject. Can one not lust without doing this, or is this a matter of different definitions?

I wouldn't call them diametrically opposed in terms of politics. Both of them ran as conservative populists, both relied on appeals to nostalgia, and Harding's politics were only conciliatory in their rhetoric; in practice, he favoured the same interests pretty consistently. I'd argue the differences between them…

Looking back, I can see that it looks like I was talking about the electoral college. I was trying to find a quick way to sum up a number of possible factors in the election of such a weak president. Calling it a weird cultural situation probably would have put the point across more effectively. I'm talking about…

I still think Trump is the second coming of Harding. Won because of charisma and a weird electoral situation; immediately turned out to be a complete power vacuum; spent his days cursing the presidency; eventually had all of his worst scandals come out at once.

Sorry for the loss. If it helps, my mom apparently had a few miscarriages while she was trying for me, and I have two younger siblings. You'll have your baby yet.

Don't be sorry. Detail is good. I apologize for the delay.