DCUM Weblog

Because I didn't post over the weekend, today I'll look at the most active threads over the past three days. In the Relationship forum, regardless of the question, the answer is always "divorce". Increasingly in the College forum, no matter the question, the answer is "test optional". That was the case with the most active thread over the past three days which was titled, "Why is it so much harder to get into a top school now?" and, of course, posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster believes that selective colleges are harder to get into these days and that there is a larger pool of qualified candidates and wants to know why. While some of the first to respond mention the availability of student loans which enable more students to pursue such colleges and the presence of international students who are full pay and, as such, financially attractive to schools, much of the discussion focuses on test optional admissions. The argument goes that due to grade inflation everyone has a high grade point average and standardized tests scores are no longer available to distinguish the top students. These means that there is a large pool of applicants with similar qualifications. Some posters go further and suggest that colleges and universities also focus on minority applicants who are less qualified, making things even more difficult for non-minority candidates. However other posters throw cold water on this suggestion by providing statistics showing that the minority acceptance rate has been stabile for some time. I just skimmed the 22 page thread and it looks like arguments about the validity of various tests dominates discussion and leads to several off-topic tangents. This thread again illustrates what I am officially dubbing "The DCUM Paradox". Families move to highly-educated, affluent areas where they target the best schools in hope that this creates a direct line to the top universities. However, come college application time, they find that they are competing with students from the same school in the same highly-educated, affluent area who all want to attend the same group of top universities. Because the top universities are not going to accept the entire senior class of the best high school in this highly-educated, affluent area, what was supposed to be a direct line is is anything but that. The family would have been better off choosing an economically depressed area with rundown schools and having the student become the high school valedictorian. Or, at least this is the impression one gets from reading threads like this. Frankly, I have no idea if the DCUM Paradox is grounded in reality or not. But repeated anecdotes in threads of this sort certainly support the idea.

I'm sorry to say that the British Royal Family has again reared its head, or more accurately, its head has been reared, in yesterday's most active thread. Titled, "King Charles evicts Harry and Meghan from Frogmore" and posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum, the original poster offers little beyond the subject line and a hope that Meghan and Harry get reimbursed for renovations for which they paid. But, that was enough to launch this thread to the top of our charts. Obviously I am not going to read this thread and therefore have nothing to say about it. I was surprised to find just now that the thread is locked because I have no memory of locking it. If I have somehow developed the ability to lock Royal Family threads in my sleep, I will count it among my greatest achievements. For those of you with, shall we say, more refined tastes than me, you can still read 11 pages of what I am sure are scintillating posts.

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "13yr old's pediatrician just told her she is overweight and I am pissed" and posted in the "Tweens and Teens" forum. The original poster says that during her daughter's well visit, the pediatrician talked to her about beng overweight based on her body mass index (BMI). The original poster, who provided her daughter's height, weight, and clothing sizes, is convinced her daughter is of normal weight and was very offended by the doctor's comments. I've mentioned before that weight, especially where girls and women are concerned, is a hot button issue on DCUM. Still the 23 pages of replies that this thread garnered in less than a day is extraordinary. There was no way that I was going to read that many pages this morning, so I just started searching for the original poster's posts, thinking that might give me an idea of how the discussion developed. Instead, I immediately discovered repeated sock puppeting by the original poster throughout the thread. Because of that, I've just locked it. I won't spend time discussing the thread because now I don't care about it. But, this is another example of why I think DCUM needs a fulltime psychologist on staff. Not only to provide help for the large number of posters who are clearly in mental distress, but to analyze this sort of behavior. Frequently the goal of sock puppets is simply to prolong a thread, sometimes fairly innocently because they think their thread is being ignored and they want to encourage legitimate replies, but other times as a form of trolling. In this case, I feel like the poster was not getting the support that she was seeking and couldn't stand being told she was wrong. Therefore, she came to her own defense. This was not a close call in regard to sock puppeting. The poster literally posted replies agreeing with her own previous posts. Even on the 22nd page, she was posting messages addressed to the original poster and arguing that the original poster was correct and everyone else was wrong. In all, the original poster posted at least 24 times in thread.

The most active thread yesterday is one that I won't name because I immediately identified the poster as a troll and deleted the thread. The next most active thread was one that I've already covered. So that brings me to the third most active which was titled, "This is really bothering me- always being ‘on’ as the parent" and posted in the "Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)" forum. The original poster says that her husband is an involved father who generally pulls his weight around the house. However, he travels for work frequently, recently has had to work late for several nights, and some times behaves in an inconsiderate manner in which he takes the original poster for granted. The couple has toddler and preschool-aged kids and the original poster is, as the title says, bothered that she always is the default parent who is always expected to be responsible for the children. She asks how others have handled such situations. I've only read the first page of this nine page thread, but I suspect responses didn't change much. There was fairly unanimous agreement in the responses that I did read. Posters described this scenario as very common and, in fact, most of those responding were themselves experiencing it or had experienced it. Most of the posters also agreed that the original poster's husband likely had no clue about what the original poster was experiencing because he had never acted as the primary parent. As such, posters advised talking to him about her the situation, standing up for herself more and not just willing accepting that she would automatically be the parent who had to be "on", or taking a lengthy trip and leaving her husband alone so that he would experience what she goes through. A male poster weighed in to second the idea of a trip, saying that his wife had done that and it had multiple benefits. However another male poster responded that he was actually the default parent in his relationship, showing that this phenomenon is not strictly gender-based.

The two most active threads yesterday were both threads included in yesterday's blog post. So, I'll skip to the third most active thread to start this post. That thread was titled, "Jessa Duggar had an abortion" and was posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. As a topic, the revelation that Jessa Duggar — a rabidly anti-abortion reality TV star — had undergone a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure following a miscarriage, probably was the most active because there was a second thread about it in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum which I locked. Pro-choice posters in this thread were quick to describe the procedure as an "abortion" and criticize Duggar and her supporters as hypocrites. Duggar backers, on the other hand, argued that the miscarriage caused the death of the fetus and therefore, no abortion had occurred. I haven't read all 14 pages of this thread, but from what I have read, most of it consists of variations of these two arguments. What the thread highlights is the unclear legal environment in which the overturning of Roe vs Wade has left much of the country. Duggar is a resident of Arkansas which prohibits abortion and has strict limitations on D&C procedures. Because so much of the law surrounding abortion relies on individuals' interpretation and judgement, making absolute determinations in cases such as this is difficult. Duggar's supporters were quick to interpret things in her favor while those viewing her as a hypocrite did exactly the opposite. What is clear is that other women in exactly Duggar's condition have been denied the same procedure. Moreover, this highlights another complaint by the pro-choice movement: the wealthy and connected will generally find a way to access such procedures either by favorable interpretations by their doctors or through travel to another state, or even country. The rest, however, won't be so fortunate as we are already learning.

Because I didn't write blog posts for a couple of days, today I'll cover the top threads for the past three days. The most active thread during that period was titled, "Man killed in Tyson’s Corner shooting" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum. Crime in general has been getting a lot of publicity lately and violent incidents in or near the Typson's Corner mall have been popular, if heated at times, topics of discussion on DCUM. As such, this thread fits perfectly with this trend. The thread was first started on March 22 with a post linking to a WTOP article about the police shooting a suspected shoplifter. Very few details beyond that were available and, apparently bereft of anything more important to debate, posters immediately engaged in an argument about whether a strand of trees where the incident occurred could properly be described as "woods", Beyond that, some posters, despite not knowing any important details of the shooting, immediately weighed in to claim that the police had acted correctly. Others questioned why shoplifting, especially if it is only suspected, should result in the use of deadly force. As more information came out, many of the pro-police posters held firm in their conviction that the shooting was completely proper and that, hopefully in their view, it would act as a deterrent to future crimes. Other posters, however, insisted that they support the police but were still uneasy about an unarmed shoplifter being shot while running away. Those who thought the shooting was unjustified presented a variety of arguments to support their case, but most vocally argued that those who thought death was the proper punishment for a property crime should move to Saudi Arabia. Some posters justified the shooting after the fact by pointing to the victim's criminal history, suggesting that he presented a violent threat. Of course, the police officers would not have known that at the time.

Fixed again and I'm going to bed.

Broken Again. I tried to fix a problem with the Nanny Forums and something went wrong. Working on it now.

This evening I was doing some maintenance on the database cluster when suddenly an error message appeared and the forums stopped working. The cluster consists of four nodes and two of them had crashed completely and two were in a not-working state. I tried several times to bring the cluster back up, but what appears to be a corrupt file prevented that. I am now restoring yesterday's backup. Unfortunately, since backups are done at night, any post or thread from about 4 am Friday morning will be lost.

UPDATE: The DCUM Forums are back up but are working very slowly. Posting is very slow. The page times out but the posts actually go through. Please don't resubmit because that will cause duplicate posts. Recent Topics also doesn't seem to be working. 

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Most young men are single - most young women are not" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum. The thread, which was started with the original poster linking to an article in "The Hill" discussing a survey showing that 60 percent of young men are single while nearly half that number of women are unattached, gained a whopping 23 pages of responses in less than 24 hours. Given the length, there is no way that I am reading much of it. But, from what I see on the first couple of pages, discussion is divided between those blaming men for their own bad luck and those thinking these numbers don't add up. The numbers do raise the question of just with whom the women are involved? The answer seems to be a combination of "each other", "the same guy", and "older men". Another explanation suggested was that men and women view relationships differently and while a woman might answer a survey question by saying that she is in a relationship, the guy with whom she is involved might not view things the same way and, therefore, answer by saying he is not in a relationship. If this is true, the disparity might not be as stark. It would be kind of ironic if a guy dating three different women resulted in three women saying they are in relationships and one man saying he was not. This thread is ripe to attract DCUM's Incel Battalion, but I didn't read enough to see if they actually showed up. Even without their overt appearance, some posters were already arguing that society is biased against young males. In contrast, several posters insisted that young men need to put down their phones and start paying attention to other people if they don't want to end up single.