First, I think there’s some risk if she’s telling people you two are dating. Definitely tell your wife, but you should also probably talk to her parents about it.
- If they start hearing stories about their daughter and you, they already have context for it
- You can work with them to decide how to proceed
This is an opportunity to teach her about boundaries, appropriate behavior, and unrequited love in a relatively controlled environment. She will listen to you in ways that she won’t listen to parents.
You could have a direct conversation with her about how it’s not ok to tell other people that you’re dating. Tell her that it makes you uncomfortable that she knows you have a wife but still told you she has feeling for you. Tell her that you are happily married and not interested in dating a fourteen year old. Model clear communication.
And empathize with her that it’s hard to have feelings for someone that doesn’t like you back. Talk about how you’ve handled it in the past. Tell her that it’ll pass. Tell her what she should know as she grows up.
She’s a teenager, so her feelings for you will go away regardless, but I think you can make the rest of her life tangibly better by having a real conversation with her.
Which people, motherfucker??
Again, no shit. Everyone thinks we should be hiring on merit alone.
We can’t just wave a magic wand and say “don’t discriminate.” We need to identify WHO is not being hired based on merit and then take real actions to make sure that they’re hired fairly.
The subtext of anti-DEI is that white men are being discriminated against. The evidence for that is that many white men are struggling financially. And I agree, white men are struggling!
To fix that problem, we need to understand the cause of it.
White men are not struggling because of DEI. They are not struggling because of programs designed to fix discrimination. There are plenty of cases where folks overcorrected, and they shouldn’t have, but those programs do not cause the systemic problems that white men are dealing with. Ending those programs will not help white men, because they are not the cause.
White men are struggling because they live in a system where their bosses want them to work longer hours for less pay. Every product they buy is designed to maximize shareholder ROI, so prices are jacked up. You no longer own things, you subscribe to them, even houses. White men, along with everyone else, are being squeezed on all sides by corporations seeking maximum profits.
Ending DEI is the wrong solution to a real problem. It is a distraction.
The corporations that run this country don’t want you to think they’re the real cause. They need you to believe that maximizing profits is good, actually. They’ve built up a mythology that keeps you from seeing them as the cause of your suffering.
If they’re fucking people over, “it’s just business” and we stop asking questions.
They need you to believe that your suffering is caused by something else, ANYTHING else, because people WILL fix their problem.
DEI. Woke. Immigration. Nobody wants to work anymore. Feminism. Welfare queens. Trans folks. Abortion. Please, dear god, anything but capitalism.
Bernie Sanders got the closest. His campaign resonated with millions of people because he was accurately identifying some of the worst symptoms of capitalism. And Democrats killed his campaign to run Hilary, because they would rather lose than help people.
The two parties work together to advance capitalism. Republicans are the party of throwing wrong ideas at the wall and seeing which ones stick with people. Democrats act outraged at the ideas that don’t catch on, and quietly concede the ones that do (e.g. immigration). It’s the ratchet effect, and the result is that political news is inundated with arguments about things that don’t matter.
Capitalism is the cause of the problems that people have. There are many solutions, but labor unions are easy to recommend to almost everyone.