Well, if you ever get the opportunity to punch Trump in the nose, I hope you take it and more.

Well, it matters for us if there's enough people to punish everyone. It's like speeding - there aren't enough traffic cops to catch every speeder, so while my mom would've gotten plenty of tickets if there were, in reality she rarely ever got one. If we organize, we can overwhelm the criminal justice system. It's not a fun prospect, and I'd really hoped we could pull ourselves out of this situation by other means, but our current president is actively advertising his plans to become a dictator - working within the system is no longer an option.

I suppose you could be right. I do think it'd be strange not to ask your girlfriend why she randomly gives you a singular M&M all the time.

My mom used to always speed like crazy, and when people would complain, pointing to the speed limit signs, she'd always respond with something along the lines of "signs can't limit speed, let me know if you see a cop instead." Some people just don't give a shit about the forms of soft power meant to keep people in line without taking real action against them. My mom was one, and our current president is another. The funny thing is that we're going to have to ignore them as well to stop him.

Well, wait, are you assuming she's not already saying “I’ve noticed peanut M&Ms cheer you up when you’re sad, you want some?” because I have been. The thing she's been "hiding" is the concept that she's training him like a dog, which as I said in my original comment isn't true; she learned the skills from training dogs, but they are skills that offer the same love and respect you would give a human.

Her friend focused on the fact that she treats dogs and humans the same, thought that meant she was disrespectfully training her boyfriend like one might train a dog, and believed that she was hiding this secret training from her boyfriend, which is just an incorrect assessment of the situation.

So yeah, she could tell her boyfriend that she's treating him like she would a dog, which technically would be the most honest thing to say, but I think it would just lead to him forming a negative association with what is ultimately a caring act, the same way her friend sees it. It's enough to just stick to "I'm giving you candy because you're stressed" rather than "I'm giving you treats in the way that I would give a dog treats."

It's funny, your hypothetical made me realize that OP's example specifically does involve consent. Your example removed the inherent consent of the situation by making the HGH dosage a secret thing they're doing behind their partner's back.

When my wife has a hard day I'll bake her a batch of her favorite cookies because I know they'll help cheer her up. I don't need to ask consent for that because it's just a thing I'm doing on my own. She always has the option not to eat them when I offer her some if she doesn't want to, and on the rare occasion she turns me down, she knows I'll just bring them to work to share with the office. That's a normal relationship - seeing when your partner needs something from you, and offering it to them - that offering is the point where consent is asked.

Yeah, if I secretly ground up cookies and mixed them into her cereal in the morning in an attempt to force her to eat them, that would be bad. The consent comes at the offering, not at the loving act of choosing to offer it in the first place. This guy is giving consent when he takes the candy, and denying it when he chooses not to take it, just like my wife is giving consent when she takes the cookies, or denying it when she refuses them, which is always a known option.

The vast majority of the people who would actually fight on the right side of history have been thoroughly pacified by the rhetoric that using a weapon would be unacceptably barbaric, and that if you can't make the change you want with words, you're just not finding the right words. We'll be holding quippy signs and chanting about justice even as the country literally crumbles around us.

I feel like the context of "the opposite of 1 hole per beverage" gives a good vague explanation. Another is "how I pictured women's anatomy before I took a health class."

That's fair. If you're used to not receiving emotional attention, then suddenly receiving it might be something so novel that you need to give it your blessing before accepting it. The relationships I've been in have generally defaulted for both parties to a sense of "I'm going to do what I think is best for you, so let me know if I'm ever wrong," rather than "Can I do this thing for you? Ok, good. How about this one?" But I've been lucky to have mutually caring relationships.

If this person has gotten used to people not having their best interests in mind, then maybe even their partner's good intentions need to be given consent just to show them that people can have good intentions. I do worry that, by being told what's happening, he'd associate candy with being stressed and get defensive whenever offered candy, but hopefully she's been doing it long enough to at least show him that it's an effective de-stressor coming from a place of love rather than manipulation.

I hope you find someone who cares for you as well. It took me a lot of time and effort to put myself out there before I found my wife, but I'm really glad I did.

It's not an experiment to react to someone's fear and trauma with kindness, even if you learned those skills through helping rehabilitate dogs. She's not doing this to try to figure out how he reacts to the stimulus of M&Ms under certain conditions, she's giving him candy when he's stressed because she knows it helps him calm down. That's just being a caring and attentive girlfriend.

Yeah, this person isn't disrespectfully treating a human as they would a dog, they're just respectfully treating dogs as they would a human.

They're wryly saying that when Trump inevitably ignores this latest of judicial orders, there will continue to be no consequences save for more angry reminders that he's not supposed to do that.

As an adult, I now celebrate the day after Halloween, when I can get to the grocery store right as it opens and grab several giant bags of candy on clearance.

They don't just want to choose not to think, because then they might have pangs of regret from making that choice. They want others to tell them that women aren't allowed to think, so that it's no longer their decision, and so it can't be their fault if it's a bad one.

Oh boy! Soon there'll be a new court ruling for Trump to ignore without consequence!

I've said it before and I'll say it again: they don't support Trump because they agree with him, they agree with him because he's Trump. It doesn't matter if he flip flops on topics every couple of weeks, it doesn't matter if he directly screws over his own followers, it doesn't matter if he spits in the face of all things America has ever claimed to stand for; if Trump says or does something, his followers will support it. Every time.

The same people who were convinced Mexico would pay for the wall. At least until it became undeniable that we were paying for it, at which point they instead claimed that they always believed we'd be the ones to pay, and that it was a necessary sacrifice. The same thing they're starting to do for this.

That's the thing - his supporters have no idea what's going on, but they don't want to lose face by admitting it, so they're constantly just pretending that whatever is happening is part of the plan, and make up whatever reasoning they have to in order to justify it. We're a country of naked emperors pretending we're wearing clothes.

And I'm sure at Easter dinner my whole family will still be saying "Thank god Trump's second term will be over in 4 years and things will go back to normal!" as if anyone in the government will actually be willing and able to prevent him from simply continuing on with his dictatorship. This cinches it for me - I'm convinced that we're not getting out of this without American Revolution 2.0.

First we got Link's Awakening, a Zelda game with some Mario stuff thrown in, and then we were supposed to get this, a Mario game with Zelda aspects. I wonder if they were trying to combine the two somehow.

Exactly. We can't treat this like a schoolyard bully who just wants to make himself feel big, no matter how much the big man acts like it - the government has real power over us, and is already putting legal citizens in foreign prisons to die. This isn't pulling our beards and flicking our faces, this is putting a gun to all of our heads, and pulling the trigger for some.