FtttG
User ID: 1175
Had a sexual relationship with someone in HR at a workplace.
Now here's a man who likes to live life on the edge.
Regarding the double reality thing, do you think there might be a partisan element to it? Richard Hanania had an article last year discussing how conservative women who work in politics tend to be very overtly feminine (right up to Mar-a-Lago face) and conspicuously flaunting their assets, whereas progressive women tend to dress more in a more modest and androgynous style. Going through the AAQCs, Sizzle50 made a similar point comparing female newsreaders for Fox News vs. MSNBC.
Not that every woman who dresses provocatively is promiscuous and vice versa. In fact I'd hazard a guess that most Dem-voting women would be more receptive to the idea of open relationships than GOP women.
FtttG
59m ago
Sometimes a smile and an arm touch is just a smile and an arm touch.
Oh Lord. Years ago I was having lunch with three female colleagues, one of whom I had a slight crush on (she was engaged). I told a joke, whereupon the girl I was crushing on burst out laughing and placed her hand on my forearm. In my head I was just like "be still, my heart". I'm sure nothing was implied by it – unless...?
FtttG
1hr ago
FtttG
1hr ago
Then girls do make-up together.
Learning how to make oneself look more attractive is but one component of learning how to seduce someone. In courtship, men are traditionally expected to take on a more active, agentic role compared to women (e.g. women expect to be asked out, not to do the asking), so the skills associated with seduction are not generally ones that women learn by default.
FtttG
8hr ago
I think, once again, you're interpreting me as making an anti-abortion argument when I'm really not. I'm not saying that every woman who gets pregnant should be forced to carry to term. I'm simply saying that it's dumb and facile to argue "I may have consented to sex, but I never consented to pregnancy" as some kind of automatic get-out-of-jail-free card. If Y is a likely and foreseeable consequence of X, and you know that Y is a foreseeable consequence of X (i.e. you are informed when you make your decision), then voluntarily consenting to X entails voluntary consent to Y. Abortion is the only case I'm aware of in which people claim otherwise. I would genuinely love to see a second example of a situation in which consenting to X is not taken to consenting to Y where Y is a likely, foreseeable consequence of X. Actually, even "foreseeable consequence" is underselling the point I'm making: pregnancy is the purpose of heterosexual sex! It's like claiming you consented to aiming and pulling the trigger, but never consented to firing the gun.
If pro-abortion activists argued "when I had sex, I implicitly consented to getting pregnant, but I didn't fully appreciate the gravity of that decision until after I actually got pregnant, and now I've changed my mind", I would find that line of reasoning perfectly coherent. When they argue "I consented to unprotected sex but never consented to pregnancy, therefore abortion should be legal", this just strikes me as a complete non sequitur.
FtttG
8hr ago
True. From paintings, Cleopatra doesn't look like much to write home about, but her seduction skills are the stuff of legend.
he got caught up in a Chinese Honeypot
Awhile ago, someone had a post talking about feeling oddly disappointed by the bribes people associated with the Trump administration had been caught taking, as many of the dollar amounts seemed pitifully small. Scott made a similar point in Too Much Dark Money in Almonds: when you consider the power and influence afforded to the executive and legislative branches, the amount of money invested in campaign donations and PACs seems impossibly small.
I feel the same way looking at photos of the Chinese honeypot in question. I'm not saying she's ugly or anything, but she seems decidedly... mid? And this is coming from someone who has a thing for Asian women! There are plenty of Asian women who aren't even famous for their looks who are more attractive e.g. Tiffany Fong, Yvette Young, Jia Tolentino. I've personally met Chinese women who were hotter than her.
FtttG
11hr ago
For reference, I voted in favour of legalising abortion in Ireland. This is one of those "there's nothing I hate more than bad arguments for views I hold dear" situations.
Regardless of whether one believes a fetus is "alive" – unlike a tumour in one's lungs, it has the potential to develop into a sentient human being. Removing a malignant tumour presents no moral quandaries even if the presence of the tumour is the direct result of actions you freely undertook. You can't escape the moral quandary associated with abortion just by saying you never consented to getting pregnant.
Maybe lung cancer is a bad example. Supposing Alice has a lot to drink and knowingly gets in the driver's seat of her car, fully cognisant of the fact that she's too inebriated to drive safely. Predictably, they have an accident in which a pedestrian, Bob, is killed. Upon their arrest, Alice defends herself by claiming that, while she did drive drunk of her own volition, she never consented to hitting Bob with her car, so she can't be held responsible for it.
No one would be persuaded by this reasoning: the entire reason drink-driving is illegal is because it makes motor accidents vastly more likely. Choosing to drive drunk entails choosing the likely consequences of driving drunk. Choosing to have unprotected sex entails choosing the likely consequences of unprotected sex. As a society we might still determine that abortion should be legal, but the idea that we can just dissolve the ethical dilemma by announcing "I never consented to getting pregnant, so you have to let me do whatever I want" strikes me as exactly insane as letting Alice off the hook because she never consented to hitting Bob with her car.
FtttG
12hr ago
No. My point is that it's meaningless to say you didn't "consent" to the entire foreseeable, biological consequences of pursuing a particular course of action. You might as well legislate against the tide.
So what if you didn't consent to getting pregnant? You are pregnant.
FtttG
16hr ago
If you sign up for baby-making, then you can't act shocked when you make a baby.
I once saw someone on Tumblr (who, in their defense, was probably a teenager at the time), try to square this circle by arguing "I consented to having sex, I didn't consent to getting pregnant".
Pregnancy is a foreseeable consequence of sex in much the same way that lung cancer is a foreseeable consequence of smoking. If you're an adult who smokes a cigarette, you are consenting to the increased risk of lung cancer that might result.
FtttG
20hr ago
This is closely related to the distinction between conflict vs. mistake theory.
FtttG
1d ago
This is probably the most frequently requested feature request for Substack. I'd love if they had a credits system where you could buy €10 worth of credits, and pay €1 to unlock one article in perpetuity.
FtttG
1d ago
I love that his name is Peter Magyar. Imagine if the POTUS was called Joe America.
FtttG
1d ago
Seconding archive.is or archive.org. Smry.ai works really well for certain sites.
I think about this a lot. In purely abstract domains (mathematics, music), people tend to produce their best work at a young age. Basically every notable popular musician in this century and the one before it produced their most recognisable work in their twenties: there are precious few examples of a rock band whose seventh album is widely considered their magnum opus. No one in the world would take Lennon or McCartney's solo material over their Beatles material. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty, in part because there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths when they were older than that.
For less abstract domains like writing fiction, a certain amount of life experience seems to be necessary to composing something that really works (Douglas Coupland once said that almost no one is prepared to write a novel before the age of thirty). Unlike in music, there have been cases of novelists producing what is widely considered their best work in their forties or fifties.
From a personal perspective, while I still consider myself musical, I know that I'm far less musically creative than I used to be, and think it's increasingly unlikely I'll ever top the mathcore EP I recorded when I was 24.
FtttG
3d ago
Ludonarrative Harmony
On TV Tropes they call this "gameplay and story integration" as opposed to "segregation".
FtttG
3d ago
It became more apparent to my more experienced eyes that a few of the levels in the second half of the game are pretty sloppily, borderline amateurishly put together
TV Tropes has a YMMV trope called "Disappointing Last Level" for when the end of the game doesn't live up to the same standard as previous sections. The ending of Half-Life where Gordon travels to an alien planet called Xen is such a notorious letdown that this trope used to be called "Xen Syndrome".
FtttG
3d ago
I do legitimately think Half-Life is a groundbreaking shooter, and fun and engaging enough to be worth playing through to the end. I loved Half-Life 2 on release, but a lot of that came down to novelty: it was the first successful video game with an even passably realistic physics engine, and the facial animation was (if you'll pardon the pun) jaw-droppingly impressive – it still looks better than plenty of games released 10 or 20 years later. But the way the game introduces a whole new mechanics set every two hours is a bit gimmicky. I rather think it peaks early on in the fourth mission on the riverboat.
Agreed on 2, 3 and 6. I have noticed that Chinese men seem to favour a more androgynous look.
I once dated a woman from Taiwan who would be considered slim by Irish standards. She told me that, back home, the beauty standard is for women to be exceptionally thin and flat-chested, to the point that her classmates in secondary school teased and mocked her for her comparatively big boobs. (Needless to say, I wasn't complaining.)
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