Well Labour wanted a leader who could appeal to Tory voters…

“White” has always been more about fitting a certain narrative than a specific shade of skin. Ask any black soccer player who’s ever missed an easy shot whether there’s a problem with racism in Europe. Or anyone of Roma descent.

Most of their countries do not have the same issues of structural racism that the US does (largely because there weren’t enough people with recent non-European origins to make a viable political constituency to target), and they don’t have the legacy of dealing with a country that was involuntarily multicultural from the beginning, but in some sense that has allowed casual and personal racism to fester in a way that most Americans would find disconcerting.

I’m generally of the opinion that most people, even stupid people, are fairly chill when there’s only a one visible minority in their town, even if clueless and rude. Where things get dicey is when you combine economic insecurity from any source whatsoever with whatever number of visible minorities is enough to make a particular stupid person think, “hmm, that’s a lot of visible minorities.” Bonus racism/xenophobia points if any significant percentage of the minorities are gainfully employed. Double bonus points if any of them has ever committed a street crime.

While imprisoning an old lady for “corruption” is pretty rich coming from a coup-loving military junta, there’s a pretty good reason that calls for her release have been lower on the priority list.

Play authoritarian games, win authoritarian prizes.

I think this is the second time this has happened in recent months. I am wondering if the UK bureaucracy has some sort of training about not violating trademarks generally, or some sort of software filter to avoid trademarked terms. Regardless, it seems like a fairly petty annoyance that affects a tiny number of people and can be worked around.

Or hell, maybe it’s the same clerk and Gareth from Slough is sticking to his guns.

He has a little German Shepherd in his DNA, so that’s where we think the tri-color/saddle came from but I absolutely see the beagle resemblance.

“If it works for the humans, it’ll work for me!”

Yes, they do, and 99.99% of parents who fuck around and neglect their kids do indeed lose them forever. So do 99.99% of biological parents who did nothing except sign the papers under duress. It’s just that it’s a statistical non-issue that someone is going to even try to steal your baby back, and the 4-5 years of court cases are there specifically to make sure that all parties are heard. Honestly, the only time I’ve really even seen this recently has to do Native American tribes, who have a very different relationship with this process and some pretty strong reasons to distrust the system.

I can tell you feel strongly about this, and I don’t want to imply there’s no room for nuance or that negligent parents deserve an unlimited number of re-tries, or that adoptive parents don’t love their kids. My adoptive parents are/were broken people in many ways, but I never felt unloved or unwanted. I do feel very strongly that infant stranger adoption has an outsized role in family planning options that pushes it to a darker place than it needs to be, and that in foster situations reunification should be the goal if it’s practical. For both, if all parties are acting in good faith and in the interests of children, then the numbers will land where they land. I just don’t think we’re there right now, through a combination of cultural norms and governmental policy.

1. The genetic details absolutely matter. There’s no one factor that’s determinative, but it’s utter bullshit to say the nature half of nature versus nurture doesn’t matter. It matters even for adoption within similar ethnic backgrounds, to say nothing of trans-racial adoption.

2. The main thing is the child’s welfare, and what’s best for kids is that as many natural families as is at all practicable have the resources to raise them. The fact that we route so many resources to get babies into the hands of rich white couples instead of supporting communities and families so that an unplanned pregnancy is not a disaster is what is bad for child welfare.

Yup, and even apart from that they say it like it’s not a health risk to carry and deliver a baby, a professional risk to even be pregnant, and that separation is lifelong trauma for all involved. It’s perfectly possible to raise an adopted kid well enough that it’s a not a major component of their personality, but it’s a challenge that must be handled.

And that’s best case. I’m super pleased to have been born, but honestly I’m not sure my birth mother thrived how she might have if she’d made a different choice with her own body. She’s a sweet, sensitive lady and the couple of times I’ve met her I can tell it weighed on her for decades.

It’s also super expensive.

This is because adoption of healthy infants in the US is a market. A regulated and yet still dysfunctional one, and one with a pretty weird relationship to its supply side, but that’s absolutely what it is. It was even worse in decades past.

As an adoptee from the Mormon system, let me tell you that if I hadn’t already bailed on that bonkers religion, it would have happened after visiting the “Family Services” office by slinking through the side door in the food storage warehouse in the light-industrial park in search of my legally entitled information, only to learn it was a one-page printout of nonsense and very much did not include the letter I was later told by my birth mother that she’d given them. I also grew up knowing that I cost approximately as much as a small speedboat, and later realized that my mom’s conversion from being a died-in-the-wool baptist to the LDS church happened almost exactly a year before I was acquired. Hmmm…

This is extremely rare and focusing on it promotes an unhealthy mindset among potential adoptive parents. No one is entitled to a healthy infant with no strings attached, and adoption inherently does come with strings attached, even if people try to pretend otherwise. I daresay if this is explicitly on someone’s mind, they should consider whether they should be adopting at all. It’s literally a smaller risk than that your kid will die in a car crash, with the added relief of said child not being dead.

So, I was specifically trying to allow for scenarios like yours by saying it shouldn’t be in the “culture of family planning.” It’s extremely sad that people who want children can’t have them. If they feel a calling to build a family and care for a child whom the universe has failed, then wonderful. They should seek out fostering opportunities, get training and counseling to understand their role in the process, and to find the joy in reuniting when birth parents get their shit together. If that doesn’t happen and they adopt or assume permanent legal guardianship, then they are doing a service by mitigating the trauma experienced by a child. Unfortunately, people like this are exceedingly rare.

What happens more often is people are made to feel like they deserve a healthy infant with no strings attached (look at some of the other posts in this thread), and the large number of them creates a culture of pressuring birth mothers (usually indirectly, but not always), putting resources into tracking down babies or jumping the line, or when that fails, throwing money at the international process where their relative wealth brings out the bad actors and the temporarily desperate. In America at least, there are something like 20 qualified birth parent couples (to say nothing of the single folks who also have the means to support a child) for every healthy infant that enters the system. The normal thing would be to go to the back of the line and hope a call comes before you age out.

Instead, you get a scramble and competition and agencies that are nominally non-profit, but certainly have financial incentives to preserve their jobs and status (to say nothing of attorneys in truly private adoptions), pop up to serve the demand, and there are only so many ways to procure and price a supply, and most of them are at least somewhat unsavory. The international market tends to serve people who couldn’t bubble to the top of the domestic process, so it’s even worse.

Honestly, stranger adoption really just shouldn’t be a part of the culture of family planning, and it’s one of those little out-of-the-way corners of American life that’s unexpectedly toxic. Seems like in other Western countries, the mainstream culture is a little better and lack of “domestic supply” means that the overseas adoptions still happen a ton, so while I guess it’s better in aggregate, it’s obviously still devastating in the particulars. Of course, then you have to unpack whether and how much a resistance to adoption is a symptom of small mindedness, but that’s a different discussion. Enough to say the American approach is awful.

Adoption outside the natural family should be a trauma-mitigation tool when all else has failed or a birth mother is personally determined to see it through. Few (not zero, but few) things mess up a parent-child dynamic more consistently than a rich couple trying to “save” a baby.

I’m sure he would say think you by cheeping sweetly, then hissing like an asthmatic snake.

I should make him pay rent!

Yes, I work from home, but he’s been to workplaces before, and nothing so boring as a simple office. My wife got him as a chick in college, and he still needed a little bit of syringe feeding, so for a week or two she took him to the restaurant where she was a server and got her manager to put him in the business office away from any food prep areas. I’ve known him since he was around 5, and I’m not entirely sure whether my being able to get him to fly to me made her jealous or made her love me more. Maybe both. :-)

He’s finally, in the last year or so, visually showing his age just a bit, though he’s still got the energy to molt and grow new feathers, and he’s also still loud and an active climber, although he doesn’t like to come out of his cage anymore, even when the door is open. “Flying” is also more “falling with style” these days, but he gets quite the attitude when he needs help to get back to the cage. I feel pretty good that we’ve still got a year or more with him, though you never really know with birds. I’m just glad his vain little self has decided to grace us with his presence for so long.

The best moment in our current house was the day a local hawk caught sight/ear of him through the cracked-open window, then perched on that black fence you can just see in the background, and finally lazily swooped in for an easy meal, only to thump into the “force field” of glass. Hawky boi was fine after a few minutes resting back on the fence, but I wouldn’t have thought you could identify “WTF” as a bird emotion before that day. He’s returned once, though he didn’t try the swoop again.

And yet very possibly not the worst person nominated for that specific vacancy.

Samuel Alito, a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was nominated four days after her withdrawal and subsequently confirmed.

Literally. They are all forming some kind of axis… of evil…

Note to that Katalin Novák, part of Orban’s party, had to resign due to the fallout from pardoning an asshole who was in jail for pressuring child victims to withdraw their testimony against a literal pedophile.

But when I went back to my alma mater, the University of Iowa in Iowa City, I went to the library where they have all my papers, and I was stunned to see an exchange of memoranda between me and Gene Roddenberry that I had totally blocked out. Once I read them, I understand why I blocked them. It was very toxic, very venomous. He hated the script. I guess I didn’t know any better, so I was intemperate. I responded intemperately.

Anybody at UI who can get access to those memos, LOL? That sounds catty and fun. I know Roddenberry never truly came around on TWoK, but IIRC he acknowledged it was well-made for what it was.