5434a
11mo ago
If you have ever seen anyone who was charismatic enough to inspire people to willingly endure disgust, or misery, or chronic pain simply to make THEM happy, how did they do it?
Slavoj Zizek travels the world speaking to paying audiences of intellectuals, has been married four times and he has two children. According to wikipedia his third wife was an Argentinian model. His current wife is thirty years younger than him. The precondition for how he did it was in not dismissing it as impossible or insurmountable. He achieved those outcomes despite being a flabby book-nerd who can't get six words into a sentence without twitching, stimming and flecking his t-shirt with spittle.
Stephen Hawking had three children and his wife married him despite his being diagnosed with a condition that would condemn him to life in a motorised wheelchair. Later he divorced his wife in order to marry one of his full-time carers. He spoke through a computer and his most graceful gesture would look like a mild spasm if anyone else did it.
I'm not saying you'll get married to a model if you ""just be yourself"". All I'm saying is that there are normal average women out there who don't need you to be an impeccably dressed millionaire bodybuilder before they'll give you a chance.
Things are going slightly better
That's all you need. Achieve the same outcome enough times and eventually things begin to go well.
5434a
11mo ago
Purely idle curiosity: Could someone following the Charles Atlas exercise program achieve Charles Atlas's physique?
5434a
11mo ago
1.) Yes.
2.) No. I currently only wear a suit for weddings and funerals only, but I'm not anti formalwear either.
Hawaiian shirt
?
5434a
11mo ago
It's not Arnold tier but as I understand it his Dynamic Tension program was unique in being largely about what he called non-apparatus methods. I've just had a flick through a copy on archive.org and it's not much more than a few basic bodyweight exercises (dips, leg raises), some stretches, some weird self-resistance exercises (climbing an imaginary rope, punching yourself in the abdomen), and plenty of fresh air, a balanced diet without sugar and caffeine, and a cold cloth on the genitals each morning.
I assume a diligent follower could achieve a basic otter mode and no longer be a weakling who gets sand kicked in their face but Atlas claims he had a 47" chest. Taking a quick skim through an image search that looks more like a juiced up underwear model who lifts weights than the dad bod + clean diet physique of Atlas who supposedly didn't touch apparatus and had no access to steroids. Apparently Arnold was 58" at his biggest and he used every means available.
5434a
11mo ago
Hexstatic - Rewind. Ticks the simple, fun and danceable box, ticks the audio-visual video synchronisation box. Might be a bit too retro in its references to Speak'n'Spells, Space Invaders and Kung Fu films that were already explicitly retro when it came out in 2000.
5434a
11mo ago
5000 dollars to a person of your choice
This will rapidly result in effectively paying the meanest prisoner $5000 a head to bring the life of weak prisoners to an end and making it look like suicide. It's a death penalty by proxy with cash rewards for the most ruthless serial murderer. You could try and close that loophole but they'll remain incentivised to the tune of $5000 to find new exploits, and each $5000 will give them additional capacity to find them. It's a persecution racket.
if you want prisoners to die you should assume the responsibility for killing them.
Your English Vocabulary Size is: 30100 ★★★ Top 0.01%
Bit annoying that it doesn't say which ones you missed. Most of it was very easy but one or two were educated guesses for words I'd never seen before. I can't remember the word (something like "avular"?) but I chose "
5434a
11mo ago
Thanks, that was pretty much my reasoning too. "I suppose
5434a
10mo ago
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
5434a
10mo ago
If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.
Let me switch from the general to the specific.
If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.
Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.
[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]
5434a
10mo ago
Lately it's been the robin because it's sociable and likes to join in with the gardening.
If I want entertaining reading material then usually something like /r/hobbydrama or /r/bestofupdates / /r/bestoflegalupdates, as they tend to be fairly longform, varied in subject matter and end at a conclusion. Theonion is still funny, and there's McSweeny's if you like your humour dry and literary and sympathetic to the blue tribe, but it's easy to burn through a month's worth of new posts on both of those sites in less than an hour.
5434a
10mo ago
it’s a complete fucking riddle to me if someone discloses that they “identify as a woman” or whatever.[...] what I’ve repeatedly experienced is a marked reluctance to offer up anything more than the vaguest of details.
As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
5434a
10mo ago
In practical terms it wouldn't matter. In philosophical terms there will remain a meaningful and distinguishing difference from the fact that they haven't always been women. They would enjoy full licence to roam the bailey, but the motte of womanhood will remain inviolate. Even with a "blank" body grown from the embryo up from their own stem cells the implanted brain-mind-self would remain trans in the definitive sense of the prefix. Only a man could undergo such a process whereby he became a woman.
5434a
10mo ago
Read the non-zero days post on Reddit. Acknowledge that x isn't going to do itself. Work out what the barest of bare minimums is that you could do, do that, and notice that you've given yourself some impetus to overcome the inertia.
Whatever you like, or whatever you think might be useful. Fix something broken, make something new, kick a ball around, play cards or boules or dominoes. Something low stakes and easy access is going to get more takers than something that requires commitment and/or investment. Even if all you do is drink beer and eat pizza you can reframe it as a tasting session.
The trouble with climbing and that kind of activity is that it combines needing special arrangements with lacking a concrete purpose. Special arrangements make sense if you're trying to achieve a concrete objective like mending a car or remodelling your kitchen, it's a challenge you can look back on and see the result. It's not bounded by when you lose interest. And something that lacks a concrete purpose like playing cards is fine because it's so low stakes that it doesn't matter what the outcome is, you put the cards back in the packet and say see you next time. Or say fuck cards and throw them in the bin, who cares, it's less than the price of a beer.
The point is that you've got something to chew on conversationally beyond "So, how about those headlines? And did I tell you about my wellbeing lately?" Those will still come up but if the conversation lags there's a convenient external focus to return to that doesn't actually require talking. You can drift between talking and doing and talking about what you're doing without either one demanding precedence.
5434a
10mo ago
Beeps were made even worse when I bought a humidifier that has polyphonic beeps just from the knowledge that there's another way. Instead of the flat monotonic beeep it chimes a piiing with the decay and everything, like a digitised rendition of flicking a china bowl. At least our washing machine has a volume setting, the microwave is brutal though and doesn't have a "2" button to try out your suggestion.
I'm just thankful I don't work in a hospital.
5434a
10mo ago
Identity politics is bullshit. [...] look upon each particular thing and ask what is it's nature? IE what does it do? where does it come from? How does it behave? The answers you get are what that thing is.
As I understand it identity politics caught on as an alternative to class politics. It was a means for the left to scoop up the various previously un/under-represented minorities in an effort to gather enough extra votes to tip the scales in their favour. In the 1970s politics was class politics with labour unions playing a significant role. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along, crushed the unions and identity politics followed. It had little to nothing to do with what you "identified as" and lots to everything to do with who you voted for. It was about politics, not identity, and although the academic material and its derivatives that explore identity are 99% socially corrosive bullshit the political appeal is arguably pragmatic, albeit on a short-term and short-sighted basis.
It seems to me your point is that people from outside the left have adopted the identity lens with the difference being that they largely denigrate the minorities to flatter the majority. This has taken over from the socially synthesising MLK colour blindism and classical albeit imperfect liberalism that preceded the idpol era. Well, yeah. You can't form an ingroup without creating an outgroup. This is what has always baffled me about the identity politics of the true believers rather than the pollsters. It makes sense for the majority to adopt idpol, they're the majority. The minority are at a democratic disadvantage by definition, and the only way it worked/works is that it depended on the majority adhering to fuzzy social liberalism while the minorities rally around their flag/s. Once the idpol mindset takes root in the wider discourse, even if it's just via objection to it, you get the opposing side being drawn onto the pitch and you start to see MRAs, HBDists, trans denialists, principled free speech trolls and so on take up position. And if the idpol nonsense gets too fevered you arrive at the yeschad.jpg ethno-nationalism of white people, after having been identified as such externally, coming to a position where they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. It ain't pretty.
In summary the idpol left promoted it, the minorities adopted it, the classical liberals and class-first left adapted to it and the majority are progressively shifting from passively accepting it to being boxed into actively adopting it in kind. It's less The Matrix's "you think that's air you're breathing" and more the fish noticing the water it's been swimming in. It's less red pill vs blue pill and more black pill vs white pill.
Identity, to the degree that it represents something meaningful and real, exists for the benefit of the identifier rather than the identified.
Quite, and like the saying goes just because you do not take an interest in [identity] politics doesn't mean [identity] politics won't take an interest in you.
5434a
10mo ago
Is that the 2 button on a 0-9 keypad? This microwave doesn't have a keypad. IIRC it has +10s, +1m, +5m, maybe +1h, a button to cycle through power levels and a button to cycle through cooking modes (micro/combi/conv). And a start/stop button.
5434a
10mo ago
It might have made more sense for the mods to switch to work-to-rule instead of the 48 hour lock out. One of their main objections was that without API access via third party apps their work would be made harder, so show what the effects would be by modding using only the Reddit app. Submissions take longer to get approved, spam slips through, reports go unmodded, trolls go unchecked, duplicate posts proliferate, custom scripts stop posting whatever special features the subs use them for, admins get more tickets from mods asking for support and missing features, and the invisible janitor work begins to become more visible in its absence. If mod work is valuable and the Reddit app makes mod work less effective the result ought to be that Reddit gets worse. What's Reddit going to do, complain that they got what they wanted?
5434a
10mo ago
As I remember it it was after Trump mentioned it. At that point it stopped being a point of legitimate query and started being a matter of acknowledging Trump's query as legitimate. It became tribal. Once Trump was out of the picture it began losing that valence and started becoming legitimate again.
OP's family member "suggested that they've shifted right". Right-coded is still assessing the subject in tribal terms but it's an attenuation from being Trump-coded. And I'm not sure it's grossly off target. Is OP excited about the report because he has a material interest in whether covid came from a lab, an academic interest in "the science", or because he has a political axe to grind? He may well be a pure intellectual, but his family member can have justifiable reasons for assuming otherwise. How many people were excited about virology before covid made it cool and the Trump era made it tribal.
5434a
10mo ago
That bit confused me too. What does "accruing undesirable" constitute? Did people see a better kept park and start monopolising it? Are better kept parks considered fussy and unnatural? Were you encroaching on somebody else's remit?
The "assigned at birth" is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp. It applies to intersex babies because assigning them a gender is a pragmatic approach to an imperfect world that doesn't make accommodations for intersex individuals. Trans adults weren't assigned a gender, their sex was observed. They want to retcon the idea that sex and gender are the same thing in this instance and in this narrow interpretation because it serves their ends to conflate this aspect of intersex conditions with transgenderism. They want the right to edit their documentation. That's all. If you ask them if sex and gender are the same things in a broader interpretation of an other instance that would nullify a transgender identity they'll deny it. It's a waste of brain cells to think it through. Does editing their documentation render them the other sex, or even the other gender? No. It's just another point in their fuzzy cloud of subjective signifiers that conveniently proofs (sic) that they always were what they became (because that's what they want to be (...which they weren't (...)).
We could talk about cars the same way. There are right hand drive and left hand drive, and there are converted handed cars. Intersex are like a single-seater - they don't get to drive down the centre line and they don't compare to either handed type. Typical handed cars have no use for the handed conversion, the qualifying prefix, or the need to edit or amend their paperwork unless they're being transported to a country where they drive on the other side. Editing the paperwork doesn't mean the car has or hasn't been converted or has or hasn't come from another country. It's a fiction, and a fiction that is only worth pursuing for the convenience of the car owner. The single-seater faces no such issues. It wasn't made with mandated lanes in mind. It was assigned a lane, not a side for the steering wheel. No paperwork is going to make it more or less suited to one lane or the other or reassign something that wasn't there to be assigned. (This analogy is not great and so I won't defend it but I've spent the brain cells on writing it now and it serves the point: the mandated lane is not the steering wheel's position, some tiny number of cars don't embody those organising principles, and the documentation is not the car).
Is/ought, plus game theory. Women will always have an unfair advantage in this arena because men will always gain an advantage by handing this advantage to women. The man who boycotts the ladies night at the bar, or any other low stakes garden variety simpery, out of offence to his high-minded egalitarian principles will lose out to the pragmatic man who accepts the phenomenon and potentially uses it as a pivot to open a conversation and flirt with those women. ("You women get half price drinks? Nice, that means you can buy me two! No? Ah, so you're a hashtag trad wife. Cool, I'm more of an equal rights feminist. A very thirsty equal rights feminist with an empty glass. Oh okay I get it, maybe those dodgy pick up guys were right about women after all. Hold on a second, are you a pick up artist girl? No? So where did you learn your undeniable skills? In that case I guess it must have come to you naturally. Naturally blessed with half price drinks. Imagine that." Or something significantly smoother and less terminally online, I don't know).
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