A Progressive Writer Was a Bad Boyfriend. And Then He Was Fired for It. (I found this at Clarissa’s Blog.)

According to this definition of “grooming,” literally every woman I’ve ever dated has “groomed” me and vice versa.

Also, I am strongly against portraying women as mentally frail, weak-willed and in constant need of male praise and validation, as the Jezebel piece does. Anyone, do you think this benefits women? If so, why? I need to understand. I really need to.

I am so very glad I did most of my, for lack of a better word, courting in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s before social media really amounted to much. If some of my love notes from the 1990s survived, as tame as they were, I’d never have another job again.

It was inevitable that #metoo would be used this way, of course. Time to go by mob rules: only say anything in a noisy restaurant with no recording devices present, and then all else is done by lawyers. If you must have sex, a legal waiver comes out, and a recording held in escrow is made that is destroyed when the relationship is dissolved.

You simply can’t gain muscle while eating at or near a caloric deficit. You might be able to not lose muscle but you can’t actually gain much.

So now I am going to have a walk a more delicate dietary line between eating a little surplus, thus gaining weight so I can put on muscle, then losing a little weight when I’m not attempting to build more muscle.

I’ve done it all before, but it’s been a long time so it’ll take a while to get back into the rhythm. For me it usually helps to go about 8-10 pounds over my normal weight, work out like a beast for a few months, then cut back eating to get back to regular. We’ll see how that has changed since I’m now 20 years older than the last time I was really fit.

I agree with the spirit of this, but if I didn’t use my car — and this is true for 90% of Americans — I’d have 4-6 fewer hours available in my day, and I’d also probably be dead in a few years as I would be run over by cars.

There is nowhere convenient to walk, and in Florida particularly, one would show up every day drenched in sweat to work. Most places have no work showers, nor are ever likely to have any, so biking or walking is just not an option in Florida unless it’s just a few hundred feet. There are also generally no sidewalks in many places in the US, and none are likely to be put in.

Currently, my commute by car to work is 10-12 minutes. The bus would take between 1.5 to 2 hours, and is not nearly frequent enough. This is the case in all but 3-4 metro areas in the United States (where only about 10% of the population lives). And most people can’t afford to live close to city centers or their jobs. This is only getting worse.

A friend of mine tried cycling for a year or so. He was hit by three cars and hospitalized once. He gave that up pretty quickly.

Not having to use a car is appealing. In fact, really appealing. But it is a fantasy and likely to remain so for a good while yet. This alteration of circumstances would require a huge number of sacrifices from most Americans and make their lives substantially worse in the short to medium term. The thing about human nature is that people tend not to make their lives substantially worse so that someone, someday might benefit (even if that someone is them).

And I know I am not going to spend 4+ hours a day on a bus or die on a bicycle so in 30 years someone can tell me or my partner that it was worth it, because I can tell you it won’t be.

The world is becoming dimwitted in ways I could hardly have imagined a decade ago. No, I am not talking about Trump. That stuff is expected. I mean events less predictable. For instance, people seem to prefer phones the size of the Gutenberg Bible (16 1/4 x 11 3/4 inches) and want e-readers the size of Teeny Ted from Turnip Town.

And how they vociferously insist that practices and activities that cause them great hardship and cost them enormous amounts of time are “more convenient,” largely because propaganda works and the acts are in fact “more convenient” — for corporations.