Stephen

@HistoryBoutique Where were you getting turned away from on Kiawah?

I was in a nice restaurant in Paris and my 9 month old baby girl started crying. An older woman, the owner, power walked up to me with her arms stretched out, speaking French, and grabbed my baby and held her against her cheek. So sweet, in broken english, she demanded I sit down and enjoy my meal and that she would take care of her new little princess. They both looked so happy after a few minutes of pacing, and I swear the chef prepared a comically large, full chicken and mashed potatoes for my bay girl of which she had half of all over her face within minutes. This was not the only time on my trip that an older woman stopped what she was doing to help us. I walked into a bar, midday, asking to use their bathroom changing table. They laughed and said that was not a thing in Paris. They moved everything off of the bar and insisted I change her diaper right there. Gross right? Nobody in the bar was phased!! They looked happy to be helpful! It was embarrassing to accept help at first until I realized that it was truly their pleasure and their culture. (Now that a couple of my kids are looking more like adults than babies, I get it. You miss having those babies around.) I LOVE helping women with their babies. I do not claim to know any more than them, but sometimes it just takes someone who is “not mama” to distract them. And for the parents, this empathy means the absolute world. I rarely experience family friendly moments like this, even in the South. Asheville restaurants have turned away my very well dressed family, and even said comments like “we’re not that family friendly. You should try the pizza place down the street.” We went to Kiawah Island every summer for years, but after multiple experiences of being turned away after them seeing we have a toddler with us, I am done. It’s really sad because it’s not just the restaurants fault, it’s our culture that is allowing this to happen. If people were excited to see children in public, their restaurants would follow their lead. I would love to get back to traditional southern culture, where children and babies are welcomed members of society. Where it is not just OK to bring them out of the home, it is encouraged. I would love to get back to a culture of community.

@MurrayHillGuy1 M-F is 90% Work/Kids/Clean house, so it's nice to get some variety.

How do people in the suburbs genuinely look forward to Friday night on the couch, Saturday morning at Costco, and call that a weekend? Like you really moved out of the city just to LARP as your parents at 34?

@BarrettSallee Unless Clemson decides to suddenly dump a bunch of money into the program, he's maxing out what's possible. Making the tourney should be considered a great season, and he's done it three times in a row now.

Clemson fans … your thoughts on Brad Brownell …

I think there was one year where I watched 60+ movies in theaters. Now I'm at maybe one a year 😔

RIP youtu.be/FSCY11BfvCE?si…

read through the qrts and replies if you want to experience what the internet was like 15 years ago

@bewgalew @AFpost Tbf Dans is the literal definition of a carpet-bagger

@AFpost Patriot. This guy should replace Graham or South Carolina is now part of the north and will be referred to as fucking Yankees. Gamecocks are out of the SEC too

Project 2025 architect Paul Dans is refusing to accept AIPAC and foreign PAC money for his campaign against South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, whom he is challenging in the GOP Senate primary. Dans and Mark Lynch are currently projected to receive enough votes for the race to be forced into a runoff in South Carolina. Follow: @AFpost

Went a few years back and the volume of scooters genuinely made the experience worse because of how big and inconvenient they are to everyone having to navigate around them. Also pissed me off how it made boarding the shuttles 5x longer and cut down the number of available seats because they get priority treatment. Young tired kids having to wait an extra 15-30 minutes because a few people don't want to walk. It's absurd.

Arrested development. They turned their lives into a nightmare by being huge, so they turned back to a time when everything was good. For a lot of people, that time involved Disney. They escape their woes in a place where their life seemed magical and full of hopes and dreams.

People today forget or simply can’t believe how depraved Ehrlich really was: Demanded that the FCC require TV shows to depict large families in a negative light, so that parents with multiple children would be shamed and ostracized by society. Proposed forcibly sterilizing millions of Americans by poisoning the water supply to make them infertile. He couldn’t think of a drug to do it “safely,” but wanted to do it anyway. Supported actual forced sterilization campaigns in India and China, where millions of people Warned that population growth would lead to starvation, but also proposed cutting off food aid to “overpopulated” countries to reduce their populations… by starvation.

We've moved on to the late 90s with Creed's "Higher."

@Legal_Fil Noticed a similar thing with his brother-in-arms @drmoore not even acknowledging the Dobbs decision when it came down.

Not to draw out the David French discourse any further, but I wondered whether I was being unfair, so I thought to scroll his feed. What's noticeable is not what he highlights—which I often agree with—but what he consciously avoids.

I have mentioned it before, but this connects to one of the more interesting theories I've seen on here about the Cold War and the devastating social changes that came in the '60s and '70s: what if it all happened because the government believed nuclear war was imminent? Take the destruction of our cities What used to be functional metropolitan zones full of factories, workers, capitalists, the middle class, and so on are now largely urban slums full of felonious, welfare-reliant denizens. There are others there, of course, primarily highly compensated professionals and a (very few) old money types...but largely those who actually live in cities are the worst among us rather than the best. If the bombs were to fall...the welfare class would be eradicated, while the productive classes in their highly dispersed suburbs would mostly escape nuclear hellfire... Similarly, the factories and other centers of production in which the productive classes work have been dispersed outside of the few big cities in which they used to primarily exist and are now all over the country. Like the people who know how to work in and run them, they're everywhere rather than being just a few targets in big cities. Maybe they'd still be hit...but tens of thousands of individual targets all over the place is much harder to deal with than the industrial zones of a few dozen major cities. Were those cities hit, those who suck up the bounty would be hit rather than those who produce it Same thing with our diet. The shift from real food to processed food composed mainly of corn and soy derivatives seems odd, as do the massive stockpiles of said unhealthy calories...unless you think nuclear winter is coming and factory farming, paired with huge reserves of stored and processed grain calories, will be the only way to pull through; corn is much more useful than dairy cows in a nuclear winter. Yet further, the shift to fence-to-fence factory farming came during the Cold War, around the same time as the destruction of our cities Of course, the hollowing out of the productive elements from cities, the warehousing of vast numbers of criminal elements in subsidized urban slums, the dispersal of industry, the massive expense on asphalt roads instead of rail infrastructure, horribly unhealthy dietary changes, and so on now seem bad. But what if they came about because the Cold War technocrats were once planning how to best increase the chances of recovering from a nuclear strike, dispersing the productive people and condensing the problematic elements while storing food the productive could use to survive would probably be the best bet At the very least, it's an interesting theory of what the planners were up to

we can fix this

It's been a few years, but I always liked working with the Gold Star team. Really good people.

I dunno man seems like wars are super easy when the objective is to win and not launder a trillion dollars to your friends in the DC-VA-MD area for decades

Some legends just kidnapped their groom-to-be for the bachelor party, dressed him up as Maduro, and dragged him through the airport like it was totally normal😂

I did stat keeping in grad school and watched a lot of collegiate men's and women's sports back-to-back. In soccer the noticeable difference was the speed they played at. Women's soccer was often touted as being more physical, and to some extent it was, but getting shoved while at a slow jog vs a full sprint makes a difference. In basketball what stood out was the athleticism. I watched A'ja Wilson play and she was dominant, both skill-wise and physically. But she was like 6'4. Meanwhile there were forgettable guys who were like 6'10 on the men's team who would have been the most athletic person on the women's court by a mile. For soccer I'd say it ultimately felt more like a difference in taste. Basketball there was a difference in quality because of how freakish the athleticism gets.

Both of my daughters are volleyball players, and I’ve watched elite girls’ varsity volleyball for years. This season I’m getting to experience boys’ high school varsity volleyball for the first time with my son and I’ve realized that it’s barely the same sport. Males’ speed, vertical, and raw power is on a completely different level beyond anything I’ve seen even from the best female players. The physical gap is undeniable and in sports there is no doubt that exclusion protects women.

It's honestly the most spiritually AI thing I've ever watched.

@GeringerAdam It's both. I feel like you mainly hear it with older guys from the Midlands. Governor McMaster has a similar one. x.com/i/status/20187…

Rare accent. Never heard this in North Carolina. Might be a generational thing or a South Carolina thing