leftzero

The government parties do.

The government parties who approved these regulations..?

In general the default for cats and dogs is the male form, though it can be ambiguous between male and don't know / don't care.

For instance if you saw a random unidentified cat you could say you saw “un gat / gato / chat”, and it would be impossible to tell whether you were referring to a male cat or a cat of unknown gender (while if you used the female form it'd be unambiguous).

Romance languages really could use a neutral form, but “gat@”, “gat*”, or “gatx” just don't work when you try to figure out how to say them out loud, and using the female form for neutral just moves the problem to the other side.

About 80% of orange cats are male; not as clear as one in three thousand for calicos, but stilll.

The problem is that what sounds good in German doesn't necessarily sound good in other gendered languages (romance languages, for instance), so if you know both you need to know multiple mutually incompatible lists of arbitrarily gendered words.

Many romance languages have both; for instance, in Catalan “gos” / “gossa”, “gat” / “gata”, in Spanish, “perro” / “perra”, “gato” / “gata”, or in French “chien” / “chienne”, “chat” / “chatte”.

And if I did, you deserved it

Didn't he sort of skip all the way to this point back in 2006 at Howard Stern's when he set his minimum age for girls to have sex with at zero, sorry, thirteen..?

“Do you think you could now be banging 24-year-olds,” Stern asked in the 2006 interview.

“Oh, absolutely,” Trump responded “I have no trouble.”

“Would you do it” Stern clarified.

“I have no problem,” the future president said.

Stern’s co-host Robin Quivers then asked, “do you have an age limit or would you…”

“If I- No, no, I have no age–. I mean, I have an age li…” Trump replied.

Then, when asked to provide his “upper bracket,” Trump said, “I don’t want to be like Congressman Foley, with, you know, 12-year-olds.”

empathy should be a basic requirement for any political office in a democracy

Empathy should be a basic requirement for participation in society, period.

The whole concept of a social contract is based (and dependant) on empathy.

You lack empathy, you get put into a mental hospital to get it fixed, and to prevent you from harming others and society in general.

If your case is currently incurable (probably because it's not acquired but due to some as yet unfixable brain malformation), you get taken care of as well as possible for the rest of your life (or until a cure is developed), but prevented from ever interacting with society.

This alone would fix most of humanity's problems.

I think a good number of them have it educated out of them, by growing up in an environment where empathy is actively discouraged and portrayed as a negative trait.

There's also conditional empathy, where you're taught that there are certain groups to whom empathy doesn't apply (or that empathy only applies to your group), or applies to a lesser extent (e.g., your pet dog deserves empathy — unlike the neighbours' —, but that empathy only extends to taking it behind the shed and shooting it, not to paying for a veterinarian to take care of the minor problem it's suffering from).

sandman

I'm pretty certain gods in Sandman work like in American Gods or Discworld, i.e., they're created by people believing in them (and die when people stop believing). See for instance Bast, who's surviving on a handful of old believers, if I recall correctly.

(That said I haven't seen season 2 of the adaptation, so maybe they changed it from the books and you're referencing that..?)

I remember that guy who did some minor parts in Hollywood (and also did some side work as a camera operator), was told he had no future in the business, became a carpenter to pay his bills, did some carpentry work for a minor producer who got him a minor role in some fledgling director's second (and first successful) film, said director liked him enough to hire him to read lines for his third film's castings, and since he turned out to be more charismatic than the guys who were actually auditioning ended giving him one of the main roles in said film... which turned on to be one of the most successful films of all time (mostly thanks to said director realising the power of merchandising). That carpenter went on to have a pretty good acting career in Hollywood after that, it turns out; he's still working now at over eighty years old.

That probably wouldn't happen these days, and Hollywood is the poorer for it.

Exactly.

What we did to dogs was monstrous.

Take a wolf and give it the brain of a neurotic brain damaged human toddler, biologically enslaved to us to the point of needing constant work and praise to avoid being a bad dog.

(And we didn't stop there; no, we had to keep meddling and turn them into misshapen shrunken parodies of themselves, living in constant pain and horror.)

I suppose it was somewhat fine back when we spent all day working together, but keeping that locked up all day in a small house or flat with nothing to do but bark at the occasional passerby is downright animal torture.

I don't need another reminder of humanity's hubris every time I get home. I have more than enough guilt as it is.

At least cats did it by themselves¹, on their own terms, and won't tolerate the kind of abuse most dogs routinely endure, if given an option.

1.– Except for designer breeds, of course. If cruel and unusual punishment had a place in society it'd be being applied to child abusers, people who talk or use their phone in theatres, and pet breeders.

I grew up with dogs. I swept several cubic metres of dog hair every spring and autumn for years. I've been on many several hour long trips in a car with a dog and no air conditioning, in the summer. (And I mean dogs, not those pocket abominations bred by people who obviously enjoy causing lifetime suffering to innocent animals.)

Yeah, if I meet a dog that hasn't been too badly trained and I have somewhere nearby to wash my hands and I don't need to keep my clothes clean and not covered in hair and drool I'll pet it, and tell it it's a good dog, and if I've got time and space I'll probably toss them a ball or a stick for them to catch for a bit.

But otherwise? Yeah, I can do without dogs. Too much work, too much brainless need for attention, too much stink, too much hair, and drool, and grease, and noise. And pain, when they go and die on you (I had the misfortune of living with a boxer for a few years; lovely animals, drool aside, but the way they suddenly explode into a ball of tumours at around five to six years old is just not right).

Cats are cleaner, smarter (sure, some dogs are smarter, but they're work dogs, and have no place in a house unless you can dedicate 150% of your time to them), much less needy (though they still do need attention, which is why I can't have one either, poor critter would spend most of its time alone, which is no life for a pet), live significantly longer, and you actually need to earn their love instead of them biologically having no choice but to love you.