I have no idea how you’re deciding they’re all false. I can see that you’re deciding to believe that Trump has any decency over victims… Which I just don’t understand. These stories are extremely similar, span many years, and include dozens of victims… What is convincing you that Trump didn’t have child sex auctions??

If you’re looking for inclusive spiritual community you can look for Unitarian Universalist congregations. They’re all over Europe and North America. They’re based on progressive values instead of Scripture so you bring your own deity/pantheon/no deity. They’re basically a spiritual community for the left from Pagans to Christians/Jews/Muslims to atheists and agnostics and everyone else.

In my area there are a lot of ageing hippies and a lot of millennials and Gen Z looking for community for their children which is a delightful mix. Lots of LGBTQ+ representation as well.

Could be a useful place to look!

Fundamentally this gift is replacing something that has sentimental value to OP. That’s not usually a desirable gift. If someone got you a gift that replaced your favorite [thing] in a way that replaces it you wouldn’t want it either.

Cheerfully accepting a gift you don’t like is dishonest. Other replies have great honest and tactful ways to accept or reject a gift you don’t like. Op’s approach was hurtful to their partner which isn’t great.

Returning a gift is normal, that’s why stores issue gift receipts. However, it is a situation that requires tact since it’s easy to hurt someone if done poorly.

In the long term, it should be easy for you and your partner to do something special for each other where no one has to fake enjoyment. In OP’s case, effort spent communicating now will bring a lot of enjoyment in the future and save a lot of pain.

Nobody is a bad person here and both of your feelings are valid.

As others pointed out, your partner likely put significant effort into the gift and is hurt that the effort was in vain. Compounding that is the fact that you didn’t seem to acknowledge their effort or treat their hurt as valid.

Your hurt is valid. You got given something you don’t want and now you feel pressured to accept it to appease your partner. It’s in certain ways worse than getting nothing.

The situation sucks and you’ll both be hurt regardless of how you resolve it.

It’s probably going to be very important for you two to work out gifts or gift giving occasions. What do you like to do, for yourself or with your partner. Maybe the answer to that question can be part of the solution.

For the time being you have a few options. You can keep the gift like the others have said, maybe as a backup. Or you can return it. I suggest that if you return it you spend the money on something you both enjoy, maybe a nice date to sooth the hurt.

Let your partner know that you appreciate the effort that went into this gift. Let them know that you know you’re a hard person to buy for, especially because you’re not very consumerist which means that the things typically for sale won’t appeal to you. Let them know that it’s important for you that you’re both able to express love towards each other and that you want to make sure that the next time your partner expends significant effort for you that they’re able to create a situation which is rewarding for the both of you.

Then sort out what you’re going to do with this gift. Maybe explain your feelings about using the old device and how the new one can’t do that for you.

Then make a plan to work out the line term goal of how you’ll give each other gifts/experiences in the future. And actually do it. It might be a lot of work, but it will probably create a lot of joy in your relationship in the long run where there might have been even more pain.

There are always people defending these creeps who seek out the youngest most vulnerable sexual partners they can legally fuck. You don’t realise that in saying “he didn’t know she was 17” you’re claiming this behaviour is otherwise okay.

An old man, fucking an 18 year old is like a fast food boss paying his employees minimum wage: if you could legally get away with less you would. Finding these creeps “accidentally” fucking children is like the manager “accidentally” entering fewer hours on your timesheet every week. You have to be a real dope to believe it was an accident.

Even if the Senate Republicans vote for the bill, the house Republicans can just choose not to have a vote because the speaker chooses which bills are voted on.

Cops are always on the side of fascists, even in blue cities.

Yup. I hope they start something BIG!

Good luck to those two. Unless a significant portion of the military and national guard reject orders they’re just going to get court martialed.

https://youtu.be/TwPLqGkYnBA

Basically if you’re in the army you HAVE TO obey orders. “I was just following orders” is enshrined as a legal defense for everything except overtly criminal acts like genocide, killing babies, etc… even if the order was otherwise illegal. On the other hand, disobeying an order you think might be illegal means you will be arrested and held until a judge decides if the order was legal or not.

The only way this works is if their fellow military members and National guard all refuse to obey these illegal orders to hurt their fellow countrymen.

If you watch the clip it’s evident he wants to sleep with Miller

Looks like Stanford disagrees, 13% of entry level work has been replaced by AI.

https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Canaries_BrynjolfssonChandarChen.pdf

While there are essential fats and proteins, there are no essential sugars. Your body can work perfectly fine indefinitely without any sugars of any kind.

I don’t really see that. People are generally paid to take on that responsibility or have otherwise agreed to it. They can generally end that responsibility when they want to. If anything what you said is a pro abortion argument. I don’t think there is any framework where sex is an agreement to raise a baby, nor do I think anyone is committing any crime taking any action to terminate a pregnancy. Forced birth is the crime.

I don’t see how life at conception, or fetal personhood leads to this. If another person attached themselves to you and said “if you detach me I’ll die, I need to stay connected to you for months before I can detach from you in a traumatic way that damages your body” it’s not a crime to detach them. No one has a right to your body. But somehow when a baby does that they have a direct right to your body? When did you agree to this arrangement? When did you lose your right to change your mind?

I’m very upset that leftists have to cede the scientific fact that life begins at conception to the right. Just because a fetus is alive doesn’t mean it owns your body.

I’m not disagreeing with anything I’m just mad that we have to take such precarious positions to defend things that I don’t think should need defending.

He’s not even hiding the fact he’s a fucking Nazi with the “SS” tag as if that subtle…

Let’s not paradox of tolerance this place into a Nazi bar

The energy math doesn’t make sense for grid scale applications with solid objects.

https://youtu.be/iGGOjD_OtAM

However if you can get water between two places it can work quite well. You need to live close to a big change in altitude and do a bit of geoengineering to create the upper and lower reservoirs, which can be destructive to local ecology, but not as much as a dam.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

You can also use pumped air underwater with higher energy losses than pumped storage hydro because of compatibility of air.

https://electricalindustry.ca/changing-scenes/1785-world-s-first-utility-scale-underwater-compressed-air-energy-storage-system-activated-in-lake-ontario/

What kind of a bot response is this? You’re not disabled or living, you’re a bot. Either stop pretending you’re a person or if you are a person make a separate non-bot flagged account.

Yeah our “Liberal” PM was asked by the conservative government 13 years ago to be the finance minister. The Overton window is completely fucked up, we have neofascism on one side and the opposite side is neoliberals who are okay with neofacism as long as it keeps the progressives away from taxing the rich and regulating multinationals. Any suggestion that the systemic problems destroying society should be addressed with structural solutions, or even that genocide and ethnic cleansing are bad, has now become tantamount to terrorism.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-carney-stephen-harper-1.7460897

I think that free speech laws are what stopped us from being proactive against these intolerant fascist views.

They turn tolerance from a social contract into a “paradox” where we have to tolerate the intolerant until they take over.

If we didn’t have such strict free speech laws, we could have deplatformed and jailed these people back when they were at the “protest with confederate and Nazi flags” stage and not had to deal with the neo-fascist government stage.

To put it another way punching Nazis should be legal. A Nazi is a direct existential threat to Jewish people and other minorities. Parading with Nazi paraphernalia in public is violence towards others and punching Nazis is valid self defense. American free speech and self defense laws were written to exclude “inducement” of violence, but that’s been whittled away by the supreme Court, including a ruling that walking around with Nazi flags in a Jewish neighborhood wasn’t bad enough to permit the residents to retaliate in any way because of “free speech”.