▪️There is a bizarre genre of memes like this which try to obliterate and redefine basic concepts we’ve understood since preschool, in an attempt to become more inclusive or something. But claiming a woman and her cat are a family doesn’t make it so!
▪️The purpose of definitions is to identify the essential characteristics of a concept and distinguish it from all other concepts, thus keeping our language coherent and grounded in reality so we can make sense of the world.
▪️Let’s take the concept family. What distinguishes that concept from others like household, friends, roommates, pet shelter, homeless encampment, crack house, etc.? Is the distinguishing characteristic that a family inhabits the same dwelling or cares about each other?
▪️No, the essential distinction is children. The essence of “family” is the parent-child relationship, not a couple-plant or woman-cat relationship. You can narrow the concept of family by using a modifier like nuclear family, or widen it with extended family. But pretending you and your roommates, or you and your cat, are family is delusional and an embarrassing form of cope.
It’s bizarre to see them seesaw back and forth that Trump is totally clueless and aloof, just golfing all day, then all of a sudden he’s a dangerous king/dictator who’s diligently plotting to seize absolute power.
▪️This one is frustrating because, while it’s nice to see the vigor and speed that DOGE is acting with, they’re also sloppy with some of their findings. This is not some bombshell, millions of dead people’s SS numbers aren’t being paid out to fraudsters.
▪️This problem has been known for some time, you can read an inspector general’s report from 2015 about millions of names on the SS “numident” not being correctly annotated for deaths, even though they were older than 112 (the oldest known American at the time).
https://oig-files.ssa.gov/audits/full/A-06-14-34030_0.pdf
▪️There are innocent explanations for some of these. Expatriates that died outside the country, for example. Or immigrants given temporary work permit who returned to their country, people issued new numbers for various reasons, etc. However, most are simply due to the govt not diligently keeping track of deaths.
▪️It’s embarrassing that the govt has millions of numbers on the numident that are ...
