THE RANT THREAD!

[Medusa]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

[ChainLightning]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

Epic classic, there^!

[Malflick]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

uuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... look... Can people stop idolizing Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as secular saints already? I mean, I am a theist, but a sexist guy and a sexist pedophilia apologist just... Aren't good spokespeople. Believe or don't believe whatever whatever you want when it comes to religion, this isn't about that. There are plenty of people of all religious/non-religious beliefs who are terrible people to idolize. Pat Robertson, The Borgia Popes, the Westburro Baptists, for instance, are all fairly nasty.

I'm just going to lay this out there bluntly: saying Pedophilia is tolerable is wrong, and seeing posts on my facebook dash everyday dash laying this man out to be a wise font of modern wisdom beyond criticism is ridiculous. (And no, his statements on pedophilia were not "more nuanced" than that... ) Can we just all agree that just because someone agrees with something else you believe in has little to do with their character?

There are plenty of atheists who are in fact wonderful people worthy of the sort of praise and adulation given to Dawkins and Hitchens, and the more those two get idolized, the less time is given to people who deserve the praise far more.

(And once again, since anytime you bring up religion/ non-religion it gets touchy, let me say once again this isn't about theism vs. atheism. This has to do with idolizing people who espouse awful things but who say witty things which makes them 'above scrutiny'.)

[Doc_Holliday]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

uuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh..... look... Can people stop idolizing Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as secular saints already? I mean, I am a theist, but a sexist guy and a sexist pedophilia apologist just... Aren't good spokespeople. Believe or don't believe whatever whatever you want when it comes to religion, this isn't about that. There are plenty of people of all religious/non-religious beliefs who are terrible people to idolize. Pat Robertson, The Borgia Popes, the Westburro Baptists, for instance, are all fairly nasty.

I'm just going to lay this out there bluntly: saying Pedophilia is tolerable is wrong, and seeing posts on my facebook dash everyday dash laying this man out to be a wise font of modern wisdom beyond criticism is ridiculous. (And no, his statements on pedophilia were not "more nuanced" than that... ) Can we just all agree that just because someone agrees with something else you believe in has little to do with their character?

There are plenty of atheists who are in fact wonderful people worthy of the sort of praise and adulation given to Dawkins and Hitchens, and the more those two get idolized, the less time is given to people who deserve the praise far more.

(And once again, since anytime you bring up religion/ non-religion it gets touchy, let me say once again this isn't about theism vs. atheism. This has to do with idolizing people who espouse awful things but who say witty things which makes them 'above scrutiny'.)

[Malflick]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

,
I feel similar about him to how I feel about La Santa Muerte. Both are fascinating folk religions that are (awkwardly) shoehorned into the framework of Catholicism, and have become associated with the drug and gang cultures in the area. If the two were not so often religious mascots for crime, I'd be more enthused about the whole thing.

Jesus Malverde is more problematic though, because while for some La Santa Muerte is just a death goddess, Jesus Malverde is almost intrinsically tied to the drug cartels.

I wouldn't say the majority of Mexicans consider him a saint though. Hispanics in my community got La Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde products removed from shelves in our local stores, because they didn't want them there. For many they represent only violence, fear, and hatred.

So, I don't like them. But I do think they are fascinating, the way that a sort of Pagan Folk Religious element seeps into the local culture.

[Doc_Holliday]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

,
I feel similar about him to how I feel about La Santa Muerte. Both are fascinating folk religions that are (awkwardly) shoehorned into the framework of Catholicism, and have become associated with the drug and gang cultures in the area. If the two were not so often religious mascots for crime, I'd be more enthused about the whole thing.

Jesus Malverde is more problematic though, because while for some La Santa Muerte is just a death goddess, Jesus Malverde is almost intrinsically tied to the drug cartels.

I wouldn't say the majority of Mexicans consider him a saint though. Hispanics in my community got La Santa Muerte and Jesus Malverde products removed from shelves in our local stores, because they didn't want them there. For many they represent only violence, fear, and hatred.

So, I don't like them. But I do think they are fascinating, the way that a sort of Pagan Folk Religious element seeps into the local culture.

I was thinking more Mexican nationals, not Mexican bloodlines. But yeah, I only heard the majority think he's a saint, I'm probably wrong. I figured it would make sense since drugs and gangs and outlaws are a part of their everyday existence, and since he's patron to outlaws, maybe they'd figure he could protect them from them too.

[Dust]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

Really sick of desperate and emotionally unstable men finding their way into my life. But I guess it's my fault for being so damn nice all the time.

[DanieMarie]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

Ugh. So, I got an even higher cell bill this month, even though I didn't make any calls. I get a text message each month from my service provider with the billing amount. I can pull up the details online if I want to. I didn't know my password and login so I never did so and my bills were always straightforward so I never had to. Well, this month I got charged 50 Euros for my basic 30 Euro service, when I didn't go over any of my limits. My last two months were also high, but I had assumed it was because I made a lot of calls.

Nope. Because of this bill I went online to try to recover the password I never got sent. Turns out that I just had to create my own login by typing in my customer number and a code that they texted to me. I pulled up my bill and there was a 20 Euro charge from a 3rd party service. The previous 2 months also had charges from the same service.

I did some digging and this service is a subscription service that acts as an in-between for smaller companies and mobile providers. I called my service provider and they said they could block my number from future 3rd party services but I'd have to deal with this one on my own. I emailed the company and told it that I want to cancel the subscription and want my money refunded, as I never signed up for any service.

I got a reply saying that my "subscription" would be cancelled but that they will not refund my money (almost 50 Euros to date, which is a lot of money for me). They claimed that I clicked on a banner ad and got sent to a website, where I clicked on the product and confirmed it through my phone. I did NONE OF THOSE THINGS. I may have accidentally clicked on a banner ad, but that should not be enough to order a service that costs 3.99 per week (or anything that costs any money). I absolutely did not confirm anything. While my memory of August is hazy, I can definitely say with 100% certainty that the service in question is nothing that I would click on or order. It's not something I would want and the whole premise sounds like junk mail to me. "get pictures, apps, and more, etc". Stupid. I did get a text about it (I scrolled through my phone to find it), but it didn't sound like a confirmation. I probably just assumed it was an advertisement. I get advertisement texts all the time and ignore them.

I wrote back to say that I did not order the service and that if my money was not refunded, I will pursue action. Hopefully that works. Otherwise I have to follow through (I can't just let stuff like this go).

[Corvus]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

No, my dear brother, I wasn't doing homework. Of course you can turn off the light and plunge both my textbook and I into darkness.
I guess I'll work on that paper I need to do. I really don't want to write this. It's my individual piece for the class project but my partners for my section didn't enter data correctly so it's all wrong, or at least skewed and difficult to read. This should be fun I guess....

[DanieMarie]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

I really need to stop trying to cut my own hair. It hasn't looked good in a year, and that's my fault. Still, I'm not really worse at it than a cheap hairdresser and I can't afford a good one...

Maybe I should just take a cue from the past, grow it out, and wear it up a lot. The low 1920's bun looks really good on me....

[Medusa]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

I really need to stop trying to cut my own hair. It hasn't looked good in a year, and that's my fault. Still, I'm not really worse at it than a cheap hairdresser and I can't afford a good one...

Maybe I should just take a cue from the past, grow it out, and wear it up a lot. The low 1920's bun looks really good on me....

Ug, I know that feeling. My friend, the bartender at the bowling alley *is also a hairstylist at her other job* cuts my side bangs for me. She told me how easy it was to trim them. I did. The slant turned into a choppy mess. And I covered it by smushing it to the side with bobby pins. Now my bangs are way down here and I'm too traumatized to cut them. I have to wait to go in to work and have her do a quick 2 minute job.

In other news: I'm financially screwed for the next two weeks even though I JUST got paid. Shorter hours on my last paychecks. Plus the paid time off I requested didn't go in. Grrrr....

[iflewoverthecuckoosnest]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

Ug, I know that feeling. My friend, the bartender at the bowling alley *is also a hairstylist at her other job* cuts my side bangs for me. She told me how easy it was to trim them. I did. The slant turned into a choppy mess. And I covered it by smushing it to the side with bobby pins. Now my bangs are way down here and I'm too traumatized to cut them. I have to wait to go in to work and have her do a quick 2 minute job.

In other news: I'm financially screwed for the next two weeks even though I JUST got paid. Shorter hours on my last paychecks. Plus the paid time off I requested didn't go in. Grrrr....

Good luck with the hair and money situation, Medusa.

As for myself, it's been a crazy week. Backed into a ditch and got stranded in UFO country for 3 hours, made a terrible cosmetic decision that will leave me with weird eyebrows for at least a month, got a truly bizarre contact high when I didn't even know my brother was tripping, my cell phone tweaked out and had to be revived from the dead, and now I'm arguing with a truly condescending, prejudicial christian girl who used to go to my school. She made this status about how she felt sorry for a "gullible" boy who tried to walk her back from class because he believed in evolution. Made my blood boil

[Medusa]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

One more day. I worked the last two days 10am to 6pm. Since I have to go by bus it's wake up at 6:30 and get home at 8:30pm. Now tomorrow it's wake up at 6a. Work 10-3 first job. Then work 5-11 second job. I'm taking the extra hours because I'm covering the head cashier's shifts while she's on vacation in Texas.

Monday. Dead day.

[Liandrin]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

So, today I just got the letter that my husband and my health insurance will be cancelled come January 1st.

I went looking on the exchange to see what we could get.

We are not rich people, we scrape by and save what we can.

This year we're going to earn a whopping $13,500 between the two of us. The exchange tells me, our insurance will be $6,250 with no subsidy. We earn just over the line for Medicaid in Montana, so that's out as an option, and to go without health insurance I'm not sure I'd be able to survive without my meds, because we sure couldn't afford them without the health insurance we have now.

This mess has me up the late because I'm so worried that we just won't make it through next year financially. We're lucky that we do not have a mortgage, but electricity, phone, gas, food, water, car insurance, gas and sanitation leaves us with less than $100 a month for spending and savings. We keep the gas forced heat at 54 just so the pipes won't freeze when we're not at home, when we are at home we burn wood and grass, most of our food we grow ourselves from seed we save, and the animals we free range. I haven't had an orange in 3 years to tell you how spend thrift we are.

I'm really at a loss at how we are supposed to handle this. Writing to our Senators is a waste of time, Baucus wrote the bill, Tester supported it, and we only have 1 representative. Getting another job isn't an option, as there is no work. When I say there is no work, I mean there are no jobs available at all within a driving range that it wouldn't cost more for the commute than the extra paycheck.

I thought this law was supposed to HELP people like us. We did look into, how much it would cost if we divorced. This is the disgusting part. We'd each have a cost of $3,096. BUT! We'd have a $2,856 subsidy, so our insurance would be $240 out of pocket for the YEAR and that's if we each earned the $13,500!

How can this be correct?

[Hawkfeathers]

Re: THE RANT THREAD!

It's a crack some people fall into. I'm in a unique situation where I don't get much "income", but I do have "assets". For Medicaid you have to have no assets. Like you, there are no subsidies for me, but I can't get Medicaid. Luckily I'm able to keep my existing plan for the next year. Then we'll see what shakes out.

Speak up - write to the local newspaper, etc. - whatever you can do - I don't know how or why they established these cut-off points with no room for exceptional cases, but it's really got to be looked at.