100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
Posts a thoughtful essay on defending Aella while also discussing the many sided argument about her public persona, her personal history, and how we should think about judgement in the twitter sphere.
Or some fucking bullshit like that.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
Nitpick and I know it wasn't your intent, but I have a hard eye for Walmart hate.
Your average Walmart does a little more that $1milion / week in sales. The average customer is a suburban woman making between $40-$80k per year. The average supercenter employs 300 people.
The trope of "lulz Walmart is for fucked up redneck towns" is categorically false. Walmart is an amazing, massive company. They were FAANG before FAANG was a thing, having picked up RDBMs for inventory management in the 1980s. They promote from within to an extreme degree. Walmart Labs, for data science and engineering, is as prestigious and as lucrative as a FAANG job currently. Their buyers are some of the best negotiators, marketers, and logisticians in the world. The conslutants (no, I spelled the right, go back and read it) from McKinsey etc. would give their left nut to get an in house job at Walmart - most don't.
And walmart sells what people want and need for ridiculous prices. In a modern consumer economy, it is the triumph of scale and American purchasing power. Walmart is why, how, and where we go to not only feel like but actually live better than 99.99% of all historic royalty in human history.
Amazon imports junks from all across the world. Google and Facebook make you the product by using surveillance capitalism to capture and re-sell your data. Walmart sells you a ridiculous TV for less than $500.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
That said, her entire schtick is stirring up controversy, posting provocative things as "thought experiments," and bragging about her gangbangs.
I truly love this sentence. The first 75% of it is kind of ho-hum internet drama and then it hits that hard left turn to close it out.
And it's 10,000% accurate. Aella is a twitter clickbait troll. But she's "attractive" (sincere personal opinion: she is not). Okay, there are other attractive twitter spammers. Hmmm, how do differentiate? Rationalist community! Pretty good, but I need that x-factor, that pizzazz!
Oh, i'll just fuck a bunch of people and talk about it all the damn time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Here's the security video. The link is foxnews, so there's .... oh so much javascript and other crap. The victim is fully blurred out and there isn't any gore or shocking content, but still probably technically NSFW.
The interesting thing is that there are half a dozen children who act as nothing more than curious onlookers. I could give you 5 paragraphs on Kitty Genovese, but that would be wasted here on the Motte.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
WHOOOAAAAA WHAT?
You're going to pair "tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum municipal incompetence" with serial kid impregnator? Damn, homie.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20d ago
Yes and no.
Biden / Pelosi style catholics are definitely solidly blue tribe and do vote democrat. There's even vestiges of old school machine politics for these kind of folks in states like Rhode Island and Massachusettes.
The problem is they aren't actually catholic. Just as "culturally Jewish" is a thing for totally non-observing "Jews" in the bicoastal cities, I believe "culturally catholic" exists as well for many democrat strongholds. To me, it's almost stolen valor. People like Biden etc get to say "faith is at the core of who I am" blah blah blah and infuse their speeches - and votes - with high minded moralism. But they aren't actually living or even trying to believe the doctrine of their faith. The Church is pretty damn clear on abortion and divorce, among other issues.
Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith. A lot of the politically motivated (and serious) American Catholics also get really into issues of religious liberties. One need look no further than the recent SCOTUS decision on tax-exemption status for faith based charities.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Positive vs negative discipline.
Positive discipline is doing things that are good but that require the completion of a behavior; working out, reading more, writing more, learning a new skill, whatever.
Negative discipline is abstaining from things - mostly that are bad from you - but, more generally, that you want to abstain from for whatever reason in order to shift habits. Drinking and drugs, obviously, are the big ones. But this is also dieting, masturbation, social media consumption, etc.
Positive discipline activities give you a generous feeling of accomplishment and instant reward. "I worked out today!" Negative discipline is more complex - while it creates, for me, a sense of "momentum" and the feeling that I'm "on a streak", if I focus too much on it it warps into an "oh no, don't break the streak!" feeling of anxiety or anticipation. So, the mental model I use is to treat it like a savings or investment account - set it up to be automatic, then don't think about it. Check in on the "balance" every once in a while and smile as it will often be larger than you remember.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
I'll take a Jersey Mike's over most of the other sub shops, especially the execrable Subway.
But, much like @FiveHourMarathon, I identify as a Wawa Hypernationalist. When one factors in value in calories-per-dollar, Wawa is even more of the clear choice.
Now, if we're talking about ultra-premium sandwiches from traditional Italian joints, we have to confront the truth that the meats are secondary for overall quality to the bread itself and the freshness of the veggies, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Tony Soprano ate his "gabagool" raw, or dipped directly into a mustard jar. Tony Soprano was a trash goblin from New Jersey who lived a caricature of his own life. This is not who you model your sandwich rubric on.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)
Eh, this is a misrepresentation. The RCC views abstinence outside of marriage as not only praiseworthy but necessary - all sex outside of marriage is sinful. But, regarding "not asking someone out on a date", the whole idea is that God has an individual level plan for everyone to use their gifts - we need not all follow the same path. The point is to actively follow the path God has set before you and to do so faithfully. Perhaps you aren't meant to ask someone out, marry them, and procreate. Perhaps your role is more monkish. If you're playing too much Warhammer, you have to ask yourself if you're being slothful, negligent in your duties, or complacent and self-indulgent. I think you might be right that God isn't pleased with incels - who stew in their imagined slights by imagined women. But he isn't displeased with those who have actively chosen a celibate life (be they clergy or otherwise) - so long as its done with care, intent, and intention.
As an aside, I really do like your deconstruction of birth control as "fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Unfortunately, I think that there are two layers of nonsense compounding on one another in the article.
- The reporter isn't specific in exactly where and how the cuts are being made, much less the reasoning behind them.
- Satya Nadella saying "1/3 of Code is written by AI" is a nothing burger all its own.
First, the obvious question is "what kind of code?" Does he mean boilerplate stuff that, before LLMs, was handled mostly by copying previous projects and re-using the basics? Does he man config files and deployment scripts for infrastructure? This is very much still code, but not in the user-facing, self-contained full product sense.
Looking deeper, the next questions are "so what?" and "how much code can AI actually write?" I am reminded of the classic The Mythical Man Month. Writing code isn't a linear function. 1.5x inputs does not yield a corresponding ratio of 1.5x outputs. The actual writing of code is often a pareto or power law function; you spend 80% of your time on 20% (or less!) of the codebase. Much like the hard part of writing is editing, the real slog in coding comes in debugging and, later, refactoring. Shitting out shitty but "hey it works" code is easy.
Every mid-to-senior level developer, data scientist, and ML engineer I've had discussions with more or less comes to the same conclusion space; AI is really handy, right now, for discrete problems. It's a massive time saver. It's actually extra handy for writing tests. In the not so distant future, it will probably be able to do some real system engineering work.
But it can't replace all the devs because, at some point, using more LLMs in your development will actually cause the project to take longer (again, reference The Mythical Man Month). If you look at the "thinking" output of Chain Of Thought models, you can see how it flirts with recursion loops. It tells itself to think about x but also to make sure it considers y too and, oh yeah, definitely make sure z is in there too. And that's for simple chat based prompts. If you have an LLM read a detailed system design plan and then hit the "do it" button, my worry isn't that it would output broken, non-internally consistent code, but that it would never actually output anything functional. Instead, I imagine millions of lions of incomplete functions with a lot of extraneous documentation and the wholesale swapping in and out of design patterns. Spaghetti code, but without even a "fuck it, it works" level of functionality.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
I was trying to draw a parallel between "those in the know" in the tech industry and the same in the finance industry.
People who work in data science and engineering know walmart labs. Great reputation. People who work in finance know Allen and company. Great reputation.
People who do not work in those industries have never heard of either Walmart Labs or Allen and Company.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
I don't know if she's capable of that, though. Again, doing untrained psychoanalysis over the Internet, but by all accounts her method of dealing with her traumatic upbringing was "do a shit load of LSD and permanently fry my brain" which is not really helpful.
If she's compounded her trauma through years of maladaptive behaviors, then the question has to be asked: to what extent is she culpable for her own behavior? If that answer is "below the level of generally agreed upon adult responsibility" then we're talking about involuntary psychiatric commitment.
But we're not talking about that because she's obviously a high agency, capable individual. That's my whole point - she's making these choices on her own. And, thus, my compassion is effectively zero because I know she can change but she chooses not to.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Serious and genuine question:
Why not just shave your head? I ask because I've been balding since 26-27. I took the "plunge" and shaved it at 28 and ... everyone says I look better, I don't stress about going bald whatsoever, and I can get a dirtcheap haircut from anywhere because nobody can fuck up a zero buzz cut.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
I have been helped quite a bit by therapeutic modalities, even though it took me years to find ones that worked with good practitioners.
Your choice of words alone in that sentence suggests a verbal IQ (if not general IQ) in the top 5% (and I'm probably underestimating). You're posting on a niche forum that hyper-indexes on good argumentation. The most liked posts on here routinely surpass 500 - 1000 words.
Therapy didn't help you, you helped you. I know, that's an outlandish claim to make. I don't know your whole story. How could I be so presumptuous blah blah blah. But this is yet another part of therapy culture I find so contemptuous. For the success stories out there - like yours - I believe 99% of them are just that person improving their life. The therapist was in no way necessary. But the therapist then takes the credit. And invites well-intentioned and genuinely praiseworthy people - such as yourself - to proclaim the advantages of therapy. At best, at the absolute best, you could maybe view a therapist as a coach in the sports sense. They help you stay disciplined, offer nurturing advice, whatever. But who went out and did the thing? You did.
Where therapy isn't a satantic self-religion, it's a grift. Where it isn't a gift, it's non-sexual emotional prostitution. Where it isn't even that (in the academy) it's a rent seeking non-scientific field that shits out pop self-help books backed by "TeH scIencE" and propagated over social media. Evil turtles, all the way down.
Semi-related tangent: Can't find the article / essay, but I remember a ACX style post about how most alcoholics who aren't a) extremely low agency (i.e. retardation levels of IQ) and b) past the point of the dangerous chemical addiction wherein cessation can be fatal, will self-resolve their alcohol consumption to manageable levels over the course of their life. Alcoholics Anonymous is more or less a placebo. I'd love to find that article again as I have enough people in my personal orbit who essentially have been functioning alcoholics for several years at a time, become completely sober for several years, and then resolved to totally responsible occasionally social drinkers after about a decade mixture of the preceding two phases.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
Can you actually point to any societies that collapsed as a result of, say, not exerting "sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice"?
I think you can point to a lot of societies that absolutely failed to flourish because they didn't do this. I remembering reading the goofy book "Sex at Dawn" some years ago. It purported to show that monogamy and marriage was unnatural and that, akshually, tons of totally fine societies had practiced various forms of poly-like relationships.
Except all of its examples were undeveloped hunter-gatherer tribes that are still mostly existing in the stone age. Lots of sub-saharan examples and even a few from Papua New Guinea, aka the actual murder capital of the world.
When life is a constant battle against starvation, you don't have the luxury of resources to have to think long term. You live that beautiful, simple, horrifyingly savage life of "one day at a time." Once you figure our larger scale agriculture, you start to have more stuff and then you upgrade to the perennial problem of how to organize society. Every society that's flourished has settled on long-term pair bonding and marriage-til-death. Some have carve outs for lawful divorce, but the intent is clear.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Can We Circle Back With Rome On This?
WSJ Article on Pope Leo and his concern about AI
Request: Tech ninja's of The Motte, find the non-paywalled version of the above.
The article states that Pope Leo has a specific interest in AI and it's potential impact on humanity. This makes Pope Leo perhaps one of only a few billion people who are concern about AI and it's potential impact on humanity.
There's some background about Francis, brief commentary on Catholic Social teaching, and some pithy quotes. I'd like to avoid the surface level of discussion on "Well, what does the Catholic Church think of AI?" and try to poke at the deeper issue here -
Why does Silicon Valley feel the need to build a lobbying strategy for the Vatican? Obviously the Vatican does not have the legislative or regulatory authority of the United States Government or the EU. They aren't going to try to fine Big Tech for anything. If there is a condemnation of "AI" (a term becoming more meaningless by the day) it's going to be predictable - we must respect human dignity, people should not be commoditized, avoiding sin on the internet is as important as avoid sin elsewhere.
Looking at it from a positive endorsement perspective, perhaps Big Tech thinks they can get the Vatican to offer a milquetoast endorsement of AI? We know there are dangers and we must be wary and ask for Christ's help, but AI is a liberating technology for the masses (or something along those lines). But, does BigTech think that this would actually significantly help their bottom line?
I'd hazard a guess that it has nothing to do with the bottom line. And this is my worry. As a free-markets, pro-growth believer, I've always thought we should let corporations be corporations and do what they are designed to do; make money. Civil liberties, the vision for society etc is what should be left to government and culture (and war about both we shall!). Corporations, in my view, should just be big dumb money-makers. "All they care about is money!" says the sophomore year self-proclaimed communist. To which I have always said, "Good! Then they're staying focused on their job."
This seems different. This seems like an ideological campaign. It's setting off a lot of tropey conspiracy theories in my head about Silicon Valley transhumanist techno-religion beliefs. Is this a trojan horse where the Zuckerbergian Lizard People are smiling to the face of the people while plotting to replace him? Perhaps that's too dramatic.
So, I offer it up to the Motte. Looking for explanations and perspectives on this while positing, at the outset, that this isn't just about the money. Which makes it a lot more important.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Apologies for being presumptuous.
You have two options. Option 1 is the Jock Wilink "bleak discipline" route. You do your workouts, without exception, every time you plan them. It will not get easier. You just develop discipline. If you miss a workout, it kind of doesn't matter, you immediately get back to the discipline. It's much a more of a mental shift than anything else, and pain and discomfort are kind of the point. Will this work? Sure, in tautological sense.
Option 2 is to find a way to enjoying the workouts in and of themselves. You aren't seeking the reward function of completing them, you are enjoying the process of doing them. This makes you outcome independent. Gym time is equal to fun time. This is what works for me. I did this by combining the "bleak discipline" approach with awareness of the exercises I intrinsically enjoyed at the gym. For whatever reason, I like doing deadlifts the same way that I like the color blue -- I just do, it's "built in." So, I dead deadlifts a lot. And, at first, I didn't do a lot of bench press. But, slowly, I was able to replace my total "bleak discipline" motivation with a mix of "hey! deadlifts are fun!" on the one hand with "okay, fine, I'll bench" on the other. Repeat this cycle a few times and, now, bench is a core part of my routine and I don't find it hard to motivate myself to do it (still like deadlifts more).
I don't know if there's a formal definition for this mental pattern. You're creating new, adjacent in pathways; you put "fun" as close as possible to "have to do it" until the circuit jumps the two wires. Yes, I know that's not how the brain works on a neurological level, but this is actually the same principle as cognitive behavior therapy. You're creating new thinking-acting repetitions until they become habits.
Doing hard things is hard and they don't get easier, but you can become better at doing the hard thing.
There are also indirect positive feedback loops to employ. I enjoy lists and handwritten stuff - so I mark off "workout complete" on a physical sheet of paper sometimes when I feel I'm dragging. Does that "help" in any objective way? Fuck no, but we don't care about the objective here, we're literally trying to alter the subjective experience. So, a wastepaper basket full of "go me!" stickynotes may be the best way to a new squat PR.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
26d ago
I am a cradle catholic, but with two caveats. First, I was raised in the very definition of a "leafy suburb Novus Ordo" parish. Second, almost all of my 20s I was totally away from the church - zero mass attendance, zero daily prayer.
I'm now a (developing) traditional catholic. Latin mass, much better (re)cathechesis, real theological reading and study - although this last part is largely just do to my ability to sit still now.
However, I didn't have any specific moment of reawakening. The journey was longer and sort of ... academic? I started reading about epistemology when I was working in Data Science. I did this because I found it profoundly preposterous how professional "data scientists" and their managers would find some very weak frequentist statistical relationship between two variables and present it as 100% iron clad evidence for some sort of business decision. After letting myself become jaded with business data science, I wanted to at least recover faith in an analytically rigorous process of both induction and deduction. So, lots of books on epistemology and prob/stat.
Pair this with a growing awareness of culture war topics starting in the mid 2010s. That led me to a much quicker "conversion" from a wishy-washy tits-and-beer lib to an Old Right style conservative. Philosophically, I went hard into the idea that at least the conception of an absolute morality is required for a functioning society.
Thus, you have a combination of adherence to the concept of absolutely morality paired with a constant suspicion in how humans reason and come to believe things (side note: a pure rationalist / empirical stance is epistemic downs syndrome). That's a pretty good petri dish for faith formation. I think that maybe the specific bridging function was reading Alasdair MacIntyre (RIP, homie) combined with all of my latent catholicism - as lame as suburban NO history is.
I'm a big hiker and I do "find God" out there more than I do in other places. I think you said it well in your own post - looking at something the Wyoming Rockies and shrugging it all off as "ehh, random collision of atoms over billions of years. All noise." seems far too trite. It's overwhelming beauty that your brain can't fathom beyond "oh my god this is wonderful" (see what I did there?).
Obviously I'm going to make the unsolicited recommendation that you look into the Roman Catholic Church. Adult cathechesis - at a traditional parish - will tickle your lawyer brain. It's very structured, very grounded in philosophy and theology often in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas.
In terms of finding that personal spark, sorry to be trite, but that's on you, bud. There's no way to force it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I feel like I was more productive with them a year ago than I am today.
I don't think this is just you or even a mystery. I've noticed the same thing, but I was talking to a friend and he came up with what I think is an excellent theory.
Through about mid 2024 (this is a rough timeline), the major AI companies were focusing totally on model performance broadly defined. The idea was that whoever could "break out" with the absolute best model would capture a $1 trillion+ market. Then, as open source and/or cheaper models began to not only keep up with the Big Boys but, depending on how you evaluate them, actually surpass some of them, the realization dawned on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini; model performance is a race to commoditization. Commodity products can't sustain valuation and growth desires for companies with tens of billions in investment.
What's happening now is that they're all re-using their tried and true playbook; build products for customer engagement. The models from the Big AI firms today, I believe, are developed to maximize engagement instead of developed for maximal performance. I don't mean that they intentionally dumb them down or force them to produce knowingly inaccurate responses. I think it's more in the structure of the response. Take software development for instance. A response nowadays for "how do I design an API for my database" comes out in a nice, concise little five step plan. The LLM will conclude by saying "let me know which section you want to dive into first!" It all feels so "on rails." You think, "shit, this might be pretty easy" and you start to whip something up. Flash forward several hours and ... well, you said it.
My memory seems to tell me that asking that same API question last year would've produced a fairly technical blueprint for designing APIs in general. I would've looked at it and thought, "okay, that helps, but it looks like this is still going to be work." And, here's the important part, I may have then gone to a different website to research good API design. I would've disengaged with the LLM.
It's no surprise to me that a lot of the recent hype cycle has been "LLMs are replacing google as the primary means of interacting with information on the internet." Google's cash comes from the fact that most people don't even navigate directly to the URL they're interested in but, pop open google and type "nytimes" and hit go. It is actually "the front page of the internet" (sorry, reddit). If you have that same situation with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini where people start at those chatbots everytime they want to do anything on the internet, it will support the user growth and engagement numbers that might be able to support the valuations of these companies (although I have some serious doubts about their unit economics).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Not the commenter you were responding to, but I'll bite:
First, re-create high social penalties for promiscuity for both men and women. I'm not the first to say this but the sexual revolution of the 1960s can be accurately viewed as the fight to let women behave in the same ways as the absolute worst of men. Being a "cad" or a "cocksman" should be socially treated the exact same as being a homewrecker. Dating is fine, but it should be used to figure out if there is an alignment of values and a shared vision for the future.
But, but, consenting adults! Who cares if two people just want to f*ck! Well, everyone, judging by this thread and many others like it. You have the situation now where promiscuity is not only tolerated, but lauded as some sort of expression of personal discovery, autonomy, and that most meaningless of words, _"empowering." Leaving aside the fact that this isn't true, the circumstances create a situation where the most antisocial of people can hit "defect" a million times and benefit greatly from it while those who are looking to cooperate are in a constant state of paranoid suspicion about any sort of medium length relationship they may find themselves in.
Second, get rid of no fault divorce. I know this is politically untenable, but I'm offering what I think is a correct solution. Marriage has to be meaningful and a real commitment, or else it's just a temporary tax arrangement with unbalanced incentives for the two people in it. Because of the history of marriage and family law in the US, women are usually the one's with the counter-incentive to staying in a marriage long term.
Much like @Amadan, I'm not actually that worried about following marriage rates because 1) I think most marriages today are shams anyway and 2) We're approaching a situation where 1/3 to nearly 1/5 of children are born out of wedlock. Marriage is so hollow now that policy positions that try to nudge people toward it aren't really serious about solving the problem.
I also agree with @Amadan in another way - blackpilling is not only (by its own definition) futile, I think it's just wrong. Once you pair secular materialism with battle-of-the-sexes blackpilling, the question has to be asked; why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend and then end it with a 9mm breakfast? Usually, the responses I hear are along the lines of, "I don't want to take such a cowardly way out", "I still want my life to mean something", "You should still try to be a good person." Hmmm, interesting how that kind of sounds like there's actually a higher level moral and ethical framework in play. Maybe these hardcore secular materialists really are trying to both fill and not acknowledge the God Shaped Hole.
Not to blow the scope of this comment into the stratosphere, but I do often think that we might be living through an inflection point in human history on par with the invention of writing, if not even moreso. The technological and political change over the last 100 years (which is a single long lifetime or about 1.5 - 2 "standard" lifetimes) is truly a phase change when compared to all of human history before. We've mostly outpaced our cognitive hard-wiring. So we see the effects of that across nearly every facet of life. I don't doubt that in 1000 years, it's likely some humans, looking at our times, will say "lolol, they totally had no idea wtf was going on during pre-Nuke early-AI." But this is no excuse to smash the like button on fuckItAll.mpeg. Do the best you can and try to find genuine happiness where you can. Even better do the "right" thing, so long as what you define as the right thing is a self-contained and demanding moral framework.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
I look forward to his polyamorous wedding with Aella after a tearful, twitter-gangbang based reconciliation. Just like in the movies!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
23d ago
If you had to guess at a ratio, how much of state disability is:
- People who genuinely need it, but are also trying to maximize what they get
- People who genuinely need it, and will take what's offered without much pushback
- People who the "disability industrial complex" - who use family/friends experience, attorneys, and "community organizations" to bilk benefits that they do not need nor honestly qualify for.
Please and Thank You.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
22d ago
Is this the same Nicholas Decker who wrote the "when to kill Trump" essay or whatever?
Yep. Pretty common for sin to feel good in the moment. That's the whole "trick" of it.
Childhood trauma does not entitle you to a lifetime of unlimited compassion from others.
I've been seeing this meme more and more across wide swaths of social media - and from all corners. People are starting to point backwards to "childhood trauma" (ill-defined, subjective, and often shrouded in mystery) as the root of all their problems. This is neo-Freudianism but, somehow, with less rigor and logic.
The entire process of adolescence and early adulthood is the process of recognizing that when bad things happen to you, you have some level of control in how you react to them. Yes, there are some things that are incredibly and objectively traumatic. They will take time to heal, but you have the tools and capability to fuel that healing process if you developed emotional maturity.
When people fail to do this, they not only become unreliable, they become socially dangerous. Most of the men in prison right now had a childhood of neglect and abuse to at least some degree. They are repeating the patterns they were exposed to. Sadly, many of them lack the IQ to even sort their emotions into reasonable buckets, let alone manage them constructively. Should we extend our inexhaustible supply of compassion there way, let them out, and hug them until they've changed? Alarmingly, about half of the voting population would YesChad.jpeg this idea.
This is all part of the rot and incipient counterproductive nature of "therapy culture." It invites negative feedback loop rumination on bad feelings, the opposite of personal agency, all while promising constant absolution from responsibility that one can presume and demand of others. It's a kind of inverted religion; a kind of satanism, if you will. A self-referential cult of the victim ego.
Returning to Aella, and the sexy-rationalist-e-girl archetype, perhaps you had some level of childhood trauma. Let's assume this trauma was real and not cultivated by a very online life that invites all of us to make emotional mountains of molehills. You're (self-proclaimed) like, really, really smart or whatever. Perhaps you ought to take the time to sort through your own emotional baggage and then move beyond it. In her tweets, she is literally calling for internet friends and strangers to defend her honor to other (mostly) internet strangers. This is an obvious sign of emotional immaturity. She is outsourcing emotional regulation to other people through the odd mode of chivalrous honor codes.
(Side note: I bet Scott does it)
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