dessa_dangerous
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Posts posted by dessa_dangerous
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54 minutes ago, john g. said:I don't do colour.
Well, the whole world does color. Just not often in your direction. It's one of the great advantages of not being seen to HAVE a color. Can there be any more privileged statement in the world? Guess what, many people don't have the luxury of not being confronted with color (their own) every day.
john, if it makes you feel any better (and it shouldn't), you're only one of a handful of people I'm mad at right now. You're the only one getting yelled at for it now because you were the only one with the balls and/or utter folly to open your mouth and try to defend it.
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what the fuck, john, the man is from Tanzania, nothing to do with Nigeria. You and the others obviously don't believe they have lawyers in Tanzania? You think they're just all bobbing around their huts chucking spears at each other to settle disputes or what? What spam? He wants to talk to OTHER BLACK lawyers, how does that even affect you, or the majority of anyone on Toytown? Or *anyone* on Toytown for that matter? Pretty weak plan for a scam. If he'd have made a ridiculous offer, like the other person did, say, for a too-cheap apartment sold from a different continent, that would have been one thing. But no. It was simply too unbelievable that Tanzania has just one lawyer. €50 an hour is a fucking ludicrous amount of money to pay for that service yet we've got you fawning all over its OP and another member actually signing up, hope she makes sure to exercise a healthy skepticism and ask the right questions before traipsing over to the home of some stranger luring her with a really baffling offer. Like to me that sounds like what a bad person does to get stupid people over to their house so he can do bad things to them. But the black man can't be a lawyer. Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.
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so when a lawyer makes a post trying to network it must be a scam but when someone claims they're going to pay €50 an hour once OR TWICE a week to play with their two-year-old in English, no one bats an eyelid. Where are the trolling comments and multiple reports about how there is something fishy about offering to pay €50 an hour to a glorified babysitter? The racism on this forum makes me sick to my fucking stomach sometimes.
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I've sent you a PM.
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On 6/3/2021, 7:23:10, optimista said:I am wondering if my FIL was an incestuous monster. Would this explain the screaming nightmares and fkd up sexuality of my hubby? Why did the SIL spend only two minutes with him when he was on his deathbed and come out as unruffled as if she had just dropped off a cheque at the bank? Why did no-one utter his name or mention him in any way for years after he died (and then only the SILs) ? Hubby says it is none of my business. I doubt I will be getting any more information than that. So I can just feel bad about asking the question. Just what are they hiding?
might be incest--frightfully not uncommon--but it might be any other number of forms of abuse, too. Other things that might do the job include dad beating the mom, dad being emotionally abusive to everyone, dad cheating on the mom and everyone knew it, or being totally checked out, disinterested and indifferent since forever. But that's not to sweep sexual abuse off the table. It's only one of many things that might make a family fail to mourn their relative. I was at a funeral for a father and grandfather some years ago. 40 of his friends and family were in the church. No one wanted to speak, not his wife, none of his kids. The pastor did his best to say a few words over this man he never knew, and had a hard time of it, too. It was very awkward. At the wake afterward no one mentioned his name. We ate and drank and talked about our lives. There was not a moist eye in the place. I don't know if it was incest (though I doubt it very much). But he was a grumpy, shitty old git that made the lives of everyone around him harder and by the time he died no one was particularly sad to see him go.
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I think they think boomer means "annoying, out-of-it old person". When in fact the last generation to truly, properly dislike and resent the Baby Boomers and be able to enthusiastically and in great detail name the myriad reasons why, are those of us with Boomer parents.
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The weather forecast for the next two weeks is truly giving me life, y'all. Cool temps and a decent amount of rain. None of this frying like a lizard on a rock stuff like in the last few years where it basically starts boiling in April and doesn't let up until October. A mild, rainy summer would be just what the doctor ordered not only for Berlin and its trees but also for my mind, body and soul! If it had been so unbearably and oppressively bright, dry and muggy (yes somehow both dry AND muggy, sticky-dirty city air and no breeze and no rain for months at a time) for six months out of the year when I first arrived, I may well not have ended up staying.
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Oh, I see. Thank you for explaining.
Well, you don't have facebook, and apparently know different people than I do, so I guess you don't know about all the German qualified AND English-speaking therapists from all parts of the world who take insurance, nor about all the good-earning foreigners who are able and prepared to pay for counselling not covered by insurance. Through my women's and POC groups on FB I've learned just how large these networks are. Still, there's more demand than supply most of the time.
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@engelchen There are really a lot of freelancers as well as employed English-speaking foreigners here making very decent money, I don't know who you know.
You completely lost me on the point of insurance. You don't think foreigners are insured in Germany?
Or what point are you trying to make that has eluded me?
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On 5/21/2021, 10:13:07, BethAnnBitt said:I'm a retired therapist. ... In Germany I can see why one needs to be fluent in German. Turkish would help, or another language of a minority population, but English? It doesn't compute IMO. This is not the 🇺🇸, where fluency in Spanish helps. It's 🇩🇪.
The demand for English-speaking health professionals--particularly for therapists--is through the roof in this part of Germany, waiting lists are very long and it can be very hard to find a therapist that speaks your language and who you also get along with. That's also not just limited to native English speakers, consider how many people are much more comfortable using English than German, from all countries of the world, even years after living in Germany and having learned a fair bit of German. The demand is there and it is high. Maybe a little less in Munich than in Berlin, but in any city where there are foreigners, there will be people who prefer services in English.
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I mean, the Chinese do kind of have a policy. Not sure what religion has to do with reproductive practices in either of those regions. For that you want to bother the Catholics. There are other contraceptive-refusers in the world but they're usually in places where the people are dropping dead of disease and starvation before they can become overpopulated.
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Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read.
Well, as usual, I conclude that the food isn't the problem, the population is. You've got, let's say, at least 3-4 billion people eating rice as a staple every day, some for every meal, with over half of those living in just two (!) countries. I don't know if India and China consider themselves to be overpopulated, but for sure overall, many of our practices would be sustainable on much smaller scales.
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@Tap, I think it was, and @kiplette too I think? What's the reason you don't buy rice anymore? I did some googling but could only find that a lot of rice contains arsenic, which is putting some people off it. Was that it or was there another humanitarian/political reason? It was the wording that got me, both of you wrote that you don't "buy" it rather than that you don't "eat" it.
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I don't own a single piece of IKEA furniture (we have some bed coverings from there though, terrible quality honestly, and a couple of dishes) and I'm still sitting in the same lightly upholstered wooden chairs we always had. I was too slow to invest in a good office chair at the beginning of the pandemic when the models I liked were still available for a price I was willing to pay. Actually, if they had started out at the price they are now, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelid, but watching them go up in price by 50-100% after everyone started having to work at home greatly soured me and I refuse to be price-gouged for a chair that was half the price a little over a year ago. I'll die before I pay an artificially inflated price made to take advantage of the situation. To compensate, I started doing a bit more calisthenics and stretches in addition to my usual exercise and I also feel much better than I did before adding those things in. If you're healthy. you can probably work on a regular chair, but you might need to invest more in keeping yourself loose and limber.
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5 hours ago, alderhill said:More generally, personally, I don't think it is wrong with liking things that taste like other things, or half the food we eat would not exist. When's the last time anyone chewed a spoon of black peppercorns raw, raw cacao beans instead of icecream, or a handful of mint leaves instead of gum? Long live artifice.
I don't know if that's an appropriate equivalency. You add pepper to other foods, you don't make fake pepper out of a hundred things that aren't pepper. You use cocoa in ice cream, you don't make artificial cocoa (well, there's carob, but I don't think that's what you're talking about). Mint extract/essence is added to gum. Not the same at all. They're just ingredients.
I will confess that I eat "veggie" slices daily, but they're made from milk protein, so the animal didn't necessarily die, but probably still suffered :/ again, I'm not vegetarian, I just don't like meat. And the veggie slices don't market themselves as Mortadella, but to me it tastes almost the same, except without ground up pig bits in it.
It's actually none of my business how vegetarians feed themselves, I just find it a little funny that in the end people who eat stuff that is manufactured to resemble animal products wind up outing themselves as basically jealous of meat- and dairy-eaters, when a good chunk of the former definitely consider themselves morally superior to consumers of animal products. There are honestly so so so so so many things to eat in the world, being vegan is not that hard as long as you don't have meat-and-cheese envy, or need to "replace" things from your old life. (I purchase nutritional yeast by the kilo--cheaper that way--and consume it daily.) I love vegetarian food primarily because it doesn't have meat in it, which is (to me, ha ha) objectively disgusting. And vegetables are just so wonderful. And also cow milk is gross. (But quark, sour cream, cheese, yogurt are all foods of the gods LOL)
Fake stuff is fine, everybody can do what they want to do, but they shouldn't be surprised if someone fails to take them seriously once in a while, especially if they're big into "vocal vegetarianism." It's like, dude, your diet could, should even, be so much more interesting than a frankly lazy plate of meat, potatoes and one veg but here you are wolfing down glow-in-the-light neon pink bacon, loooooooooolz! Just say you're mad cos you're jealous and your entire personality would be completely invalidated if you ate a piece of meat every once in a while.
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It's funny, I'm not a vegetarian but I don't like meat, and I always preferred a Garden Burger over one of these things that are supposed to taste like "meat", and Tofurkey and the like.
Really, sooo many of the vegans and vegetarians I know are into eating fake, over-processed, over-packaged products with 29847 ingredients that are supposed to taste like "dairy" or "meat." I don't even care for bacon but I'm offended on its behalf. Have you ever seen those fake bacon strips? *shudder*
I love soy. I love soy milk, I love tofu, I love soy granulate, give it all to me. And then someone pokes their head around the corner and wants to "remind" me how bad soy is for the planet and how anyone who's not a jerk has already switched to oat milk. Please go bother the industrial vegans and the meat-every-day people and leave me in peace.
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8 hours ago, kapokanadensis said:Of course, this was a gigantic deal as it always seems to be. Anything where you put effort into make someone else's life easier, especially a neighbour's (gasp!), is just not cool among the locals it seems. This may just be a Stuttgart thing though.
I don't think that's specific to Stuttgart. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd think it might have something to do with people being used to giving an inch and having a mile be taken. I don't think the locals are necessarily intrinsically disinclined to be helpful to people outside their inner circles (though it can sometimes seem that way), I think some people are cautious of being bulldozed as they have been in the past. A strange phenomenon I have observed many times here, both from the inside and the outside. It really does seem to be a thing for some people to impose and impose and impose until they are firmly in a dominant position, exploiting the good will of others in order to gain total control of situations. See: every Nachbarkrieg ever. I don't think this is a standard German thing but definitely a recurring phenomenon. Maybe the neighbor is concerned that if they do you all this favor once, they'll be slowly but surely edged out of their parking spot forever. Or something like that.
On topic: I sorely miss my hometown, but I realize that firstly, it doesn't exist in the form it did when I left, and second, that at least half of what I miss is the era. Like every generation of humans since the dawn of civilization, I'm convinced that my youth was a simpler and friendlier time and I long for ways of being that are simply no longer existent and/or no longer possible. Some philosopher somewhere said suffering is caused by holding on to the past or refusing to accept things that have changed, so I do my best to abandon my frilly fantasies of times and places long gone. Like other Berlin residents my neighborhood has undergone massive changes in the last ten years, which distressed me for a long time (that thing with the hating of the change) but I've learned to roll with the changes a bit more. I hate my stupid hipster neighborhood sometimes but it is definitely my home--I have lived now in the same complex for 15 years (in two apartments, ten years in the apartment I'm in now) which makes it the longest I have lived anywhere in my life, including the house I grew up in. As I left the US when I was 23, I've also spent more or less my entire adult life in Germany. So yeah, it's home. Like anywhere, it's not perfect, but the US is also not much of an option for me and Berlin is definitely home, which I notice most acutely when I return here from anywhere else.8 -
It irks me that some people order the internet empty and then rely on their neighbors to play post office for them. Neighbors that get several packages weekly and know they won't be home to get them but are too cheap or lazy to just arrange to have the packages dropped at a pack station half a block away. (There are like five within a two-block radius of here.) That's what the Lotto man takes a fee for. I have other visions for my time spent at home than interrupting what I'm doing ten times a day, every day, to answer the door. But what really soured me on taking packages for neighbors are people who serially, consistently leave their stuff at my house for days at a time. I can see or hear them coming or going, yet their shit is still taking up space rent free in my hallway. The last straw was a package the size of a small refrigerator that my neighbor simply left with me for the better part of a week. When I got fed up and tried to "deliver" it to them, they simply didn't come to the door, although I knew they had come home and could hear them inside. Two nights in a row, after it had been in my apartment for several days already. Eventually I got tired of tripping over it fifty times a day and left in front of their door. Guess who got chewed out by the indignant deadbeats next time we met in the hall? Oh; so now you know where your package was the whole time? I don't know what the deal is but I'm 100% over it at this point.
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DHL ring my doorbell out of its socket literally every single day (today on two separate occasions, and the first one was before 10am) to try to get me to take packages for other people, but when I order something, I've got about a 50% shot that it'll make it to my door. In the event that it does show up here, I'll be pressured to take packages for a hundred other neighbors that are *definitely* at home or in other buildings even. #defundDHL
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On 5/13/2021, 11:25:48, Anto P said:The title is pretty self explanatory
now it is.
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2 hours ago, cybil said:secret hit list
oh no. I have worked with people like that. It sucks to be sure but remember to breathe, breathe, breathe and keep in mind that they are already way worse off than you. Happy and fulfilled people don't go around torturing others. Little comfort in the moment, I'm sure, and I have also gone toe to toe with such assholes even knowing that it is futile and a waste of time and peace. Best way to handle people that landed on you for their daily harassment target is to smile and wish them a great shift or lay your hand on their shoulder and ask them if everything is OK because they seem REALLY stressed out and it shows. I don't usually advocate passive-aggressive approaches but sometimes you are forced to beat them over the head with your point in order to get your point across and you would never stoop to the level of actually treating your co-workers badly so are left only that as an alternative.
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9 hours ago, Auntie Helen said:personality/style clash with the Betriebsleiter
whatever you do, please DON'T cite this as the reason for leaving your job. I have read that this is a big red flag for prospective employers. You think you're being diplomatic by not writing "my boss was a huge asshole" but without knowing you, all they see is that you don't know how to get along with others.
That being said, please get out of there! My heart goes out to you so much. I know the deal. Furchtbar. And I never even had to sign out sick. So you're really suffering.
You can make up any old shit for why you quit. In your place I would even be honest if pressed for details. The leadership changed hands at some point and took a turn that you felt didn't leave you any room or prospect for advancement. You can say it was too far from your house, took too much time away from your needlepoint, whatever. Just don't say the thing about the personality clash. I wish you sooo much luck and please please look after your health above all. Fuck that asshole. Do what you need to do.
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Coincidentally stumbled across this video today. Mai is great in general, but this video also sums up pretty well "moderate" moderation policies and why fighting fire with fire rarely brings about the results you want. Start the video at 13:42 to find out their team's "secret weapon" against trolls and all-around nasty people. For those who don't speak German, the English subtitles are above-average IMO.
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Things to ponder
in Special
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no, but you greened the very rude, demeaning and nasty comments left to troll him. Those comments got removed. Yet no one reported them, either, for being utterly unnecessary, unkind, combative and hostile.