5434a
1yr ago
Despite not being a parent myself I have a solid sympathy with the idea that you're not really eligible for real grown up status until you're a parent. The difficulty is that making parenthood the benchmark is that it would accord a teenage single mum higher status than a childless man like myself while incentivising the creation of yet more teenage single mums, so I added the educational criteria to tilt the balance back to a range of more long term pro-social outcomes (promoting stable relationships, increased fertility rates, parental responsibility/discipline). Totally unworkable in practice anyway as it would never get support, people would be anywhere between their 30s up to their 70s or even 80s before they were granted status.
Fight 10 different guys in a row, five minutes per round, with 5 minutes of rest in between each round.
It's a reasonable idea, definitely more feasible, but that's 100 minutes in total. By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial. Presumably the guys in question are your peers? Seems unfair to fight older or younger opponents. Then again maybe participating as one of a younger-than cohort of opponents would be good preparation and pre-qualification for the initiation and act to rebalance the advantages.
standardized tests that try to capture the would-be adults' actual understanding of the world and the implications of entering certain kinds of contracts and relationships
I think I would have understood enough on an intellectual level to have passed such a test at age 13 and then promptly spent the next ten years learning the same lessons the hard way. Analysing it at a remove isn't like knowing it in your bones the way you do after you've been through it, so I think the tests would have to embody a strong practical element somehow.
5434a
1yr ago
there should be some kind of more literal rite of passage that, upon completion, triggers said emancipation
Any suggestions? One of the few things I can think of that satisfies being challenging, demonstrating (limited, for the naysayers) competence and is broadly recognised as (again for the naysayers, largely) legitimate is military or some comparable form of national service. But last time that idea was floated at the old place it was dismissed as being literal slavery (beside the objection that the army and every other profession doesn't want them). Which, hyperbole aside, is admittedly a problem: How can you place demands on a populace under threat of withholding rights and still call yourselves defenders of freedom? Whichever way you look at it it boils down to a state-to-citizen quid pro quo.
The trouble is for it to hold any significance it must impart a cost, and even if the benefits outweigh the costs people will still bristle at the need for any measure of sacrifice.
Pilgrimage? Mortification? Or something altogether more milquetoast like graduating high school, which many here are just as eager to condemn as little different from slavery and imprisonment. Or how about tying it to your first point and make it necessary to have raised a child who graduates high school? Three birds with one stone!
5434a
1yr ago
When I bake bread I put 7g (one teaspoon) of sugar in ~400ml of water with 600g of flour.
That Pepperidge loaf seems to be 624g, which at the same 1:0.66 ratio would make it roughly 380g flour, 250ml water, of which some part is 48g of sugar.
7/600 = 0.01g sugar per g flour
48/380 = 0.12g sugar per g flour
So roughly 10x as much sugar.
For comparison a can of Coke has 35g of sugar in 330ml. They're making bread with water that is more sugary than Coke.
5434a
1yr ago
One of the best ways is while driving. It doesn't require a lot of mental focus but it's otherwise very engaging, plus you can turn it up and listen through some halfway decent speakers instead of headphones. If you don't have a car then computer games are a good subsitute but that can be tricky to balance the audio if you're listening through the computer or you want to hear the game's sound effects but not the game's music, etc.
5434a
1yr ago
That's the emotions-over-reason spirit of the romantic movement though isn't it. It's not supposed to make sense, making sense is for squares. Think about it logically - the less sense it makes the more potent and authentic the emotions must be!
5434a
1yr ago
view 18+ youtube content
https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restriction-Bypass
5434a
1yr ago
I'd be weirded out, but only in the "this is too good to be true, and if it's not true then it's probably up to no good" sense. Even then we know that men have a greater propensity for risk-taking so a lot of them will play those odds regardless if the potential reward is high enough.
A watered down version happens all the time on dating sites when you get unprompted messages from accounts that use what looks like a photo of a professional swimwear model modelling swimwear. Yeah, riiiight.
it’s like they’re intentionally there to shock or provoke
What would you say they're trying to provoke? I think that's the bone of contention and also the disconnect between the sexes. I suspect straight men are limited to being provoked to lust, and thus hope that sending a dick pic will get the same reaction, while women are provoked to... Fear, maybe? As if it were a threat rather than a grossly miscalibrated offer. And it's much the same with the yoga pants and the thongs and the button-popping blouses - I don't think the woman looks cute or slutty or some other moral-aesthetic judgment, I'm too preoccupied with, having been prompted/"provoked" into doing so, thinking about what she looks like under those clothes (and how I shouldn't be preoccupied with that (and how I am anyway, so let's try to be subtle about it instead of gawping like the cartoon wolf)).
If OP's current social setting is frequently little more than two small bits of fabric more modest than a nudist beach I can understand how a monastery might begin to hold some appeal because if I was at a nudist beach then I basically have the option of looking and feeling lustful, or else studiously not looking at all. Outside of more limited contexts like, say, medical exams or such I don't see how I could take a value-neutral look at a woman in no clothes. He can choose not to go to a nude beach but it might feel like short of joining a monastery, or the army, or some other strongly fraternal institution, he can't opt out of this society.
5434a
1yr ago
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
5434a
1yr ago
Without that definition [trans women as completely matching the category of "male"] the category "women" is actually more accurate than the category "male" for predicting the action of trans women
[...] part of being a trans women is performing womanhood such that if someone were to try to predict your actions based off of a gender identifier, then you would try to act so that "women" was a better fit. Since categories are used for predictive modeling then perhaps the category "women" is more accurate.
Strong disagree. Disregarding the fact that trans women are males reduces accuracy in both description and prediction. You're arguing to make their target bigger rather than our aim truer.
5434a
1yr ago
I kind of see what you're getting at, there is something profound in using our human intellects to engineer away bodily suffering and codify the processes of doing so, or formulate an elegantly simple solution to a knotty problem, but it lacks the aesthetic dimensions that satisfy the more earthly senses.
There are some fairly simple principles to what most people consider beautiful and aesthetically pleasing and they carry across from art and architecture to music and magazine models, and they can indeed often be codified in mathematical terms. Repetition, rhythm, ratio, harmony, symmetry, dynamics, variation, proportion, and other more human or purpose specific ergonomics, plus any embedded textual and subtextual communication. These are not idiosyncratic preferences. They're timeless, real, and to a degree they're intuitive. It's the same things that make clowns and caricatures funny by getting it wrong via exaggeration. We have thousands of years of practice and improvement in these matters, and while cost constraints are a perennial consideration there's no reason to abandon them entirely or pretend they don't exist.
It's a bit like cookery. Only the most wretched poor, prisoners on punishment, or an ascetic monk would be expected to eat plain grains. But on the other end of the scale even the richest royalty aren't eating an entire bowl of pure saffron. There's a Goldilocks balance of complexity to aim for and a lot of post-war culture has either gone for too little (brutalism, soylent meal replacement drinks), too much (3D cinema, "experimental" ""music"", 87 flavours of hot sauce, Times Square, tinnitus level audio amplification, etc) or a ruthless bean-counting (sub)optimising (I don't know, plastic cutlery? or pockets that are only deep enough for your fingertips). To paraphrase Marie Kondo, those things don't spark joy, or comfort, or contentment. They spark under/over-stimulation and alienation, and those make society a sad panda.
5434a
1yr ago
Not practical at all but sleeping outdoors has that kind of invigorating effect. I'd guess it's the combination of cold night temperatures, unlimited fresh air and natural levels of daylight. Probably the closest you could get at home is some kind of techno fix that draws your curtains and opens your windows wide.
5434a
2yr ago
Dig. Find something, or just one aspect of something, that you like and follow its tracks backwards to find out where it came from, then find out what else came from that person/team/place/era/tech/genre.
How are you finding your media currently? The idea that going to a shop and talking to people is a foreign experience makes it sound like you're fairly young and have grown up scrolling through Netflix and Spotify.
5434a
2yr ago
once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look
That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.
5434a
2yr ago
I don't know about hiking in particular but there's a conformity to a lot of these activities that at the most charitable are reflective of status and at the least charitable are indicative of pretense. A reasonable rule of thumb is whether a local could do it cheaply, an outsider couldn't do it without paying, and the modest locals might arbitrage their resource to the wealthy outsiders. The status anxious locals save up to imitate being a wealthy outsider, often somewhere else, and the wealthy outsider is already partially imitating the modest authenticity of a locale. It wasn't a PMC careerist who came up with fishing, horse riding, making wine or any of the other stuff that is typically for toffs and peasants, but PMC careerists do come up with sales plans and can probably demonstrate a level of critical insight into that activity that is potentially more interesting than recycling what they've been told about a wine's terroir.
5434a
2yr ago
It's not moral authority, it's regular authority. A tyrannical monarch could write a law that says "all gold belongs to the king" with no reference to morality.
I don't understand what you're driving at, if you'll pardon the phrasing. My starting point was that we're not free in the west/democracy, we're free-er, and that there is no radical freedom where we can do whatever we like under any system or lack of system. That's omnipotence.
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions
Certainly I did not.
I feel this is straying further from my central point but what kind of christmas cracker cereal box licencing body grants licences that don't require abiding by the rules? It doesn't make sense to me. If they don't require abiding by the rules what's the point of a licence? It would be no different to not needing one. The first rule of licence club is "you need a licence". The second rule is "if you don't have one you're not authorised to do it". The third rule is "if you break the rules you lose your licence; refer to rule two".
5434a
2yr ago
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions when you applied for a licence to drive on the state's roads. You're free to walk at whatever speed you like.
The democratic sausage machine aspires to the freedom to be user serviceable, the other sausage machines don't. It's not like you can get away from the butcher.
5434a
2yr ago
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
5434a
2yr ago
Both the state and the public fail in their own ways, and it can be due to legitimate difficulty or cynical dishonourableness.
A simple example is speed limits. We accept a state regulated limit on our freedom to not drive faster than say 70mph so that our journeys are safer than they would be otherwise, and at the second order they're more efficient too (less road closures due to pile-ups). Our freedom was reduced in exchange for those benefits, but we retain the greater freedom to change or remove that limit via the democratic process. Yet some people still choose to defect from something as easy as not speeding.
There's a difference between failure to deliver on the social contract and failure to honour it. Say we gave the police £200 to patrol a motorway and eliminate 100% of speeding. They would inevitably fail to deliver, point out it's not a realistic target and reasonably request an increase to the budget. But if we gave them £200 million and there was no improvement in their performance it would be reasonable to assume that they're not trying.
On the other hand say we offered a homeless person a subsidised house so that they could get back on their feet and become independent. If the house was cold, damp, and next to a factory pumping out toxic smoke they might have understandable grounds to reject the deal and go back to sleeping rough in the posh part of town where the air is sweet and the begging is easy. But if the house was plain and adequate with access to suitable work nearby and it turned out they sold the copper and then turned it into a combination knocking shop and trap house it's hard to justify trading away more social goods of state expenditure and the loss of potential responsible residents to enable further defection.
In short the rights and privileges we experience as freedom come with responsibilities and associated costs. We, as public and the state, are free to renegotiate the costs and benefits rather than suffering them by diktat or anarchy but we are responsible for exercising good faith in upholding the agreements. The N-word screamer wants the freedom to defect at will and neglects to realise his stance implies other people's freedom to blast a combination of spam advertising and malicious slander back at them. The anarchist/libertarian neglects that zeroing out the state monopoly on violence and legitimacy re-opens a competition which leads back to where they began only de facto instead of de jure.
5434a
2yr ago
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
5434a
2yr ago
I like reading seminal genre classics. They're like the ultimate prequel after growing up in a world of derivatives.
5434a
2yr ago
You're looking for consistency on the wrong axis. It's not "children are mature, adults are vulnerable". It's "this claim suits my agenda, and this separate claim suits my agenda too".
It appears to me that their mind is made up and it says that old trad white male capitalist able-bodied neurotypical cis hetero normative patriarchal [progressive stack intensifies] is the enemy; the source of all that is evil. It's a totalising blend of identity politics plus politics as identity. It's "are you with us or are you one of them?"
5434a
2yr ago
scenes like this
Lmao. Reminds me of my own school textbooks apart from the dicks and absurd gay sex were added by students who would get a detention for their vandalism if they were caught. What do naughty kids do now, add clothes to the characters and turn the dicks into cans of beer?
5434a
2yr ago
I read it after falling for the hype. I thought the notion of a house that is irresolvably slightly larger on the inside than the oustide was an original surreal idea. The rest of it was just a haunted house story wrapped in layer upon layer of meta. That might be thrilling if the reader isn't familiar with meta-reference but if you are it begins to feel over indulgent.
There's a good enough short horror/surreal story at the core, but it's not quite as big and clever on the inside as it looks on the outside.
What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.
Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!
I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.
The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.
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