Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
I’ve stewed and ideated about what I could have done differently, why I’m a grown man who let myself be treated like a pathetic plaything by individuals who are my social and biological inferiors in every imaginable way except for that I’m diminutive and even-tempered while they’re large, high-testosterone, and well-acquainted with violence because it’s literally the only tool in their toolbox.
Amusingly enough, there is a sentiment in much of the alt right, from the likes of Vox Day and even our own @KulakRevolt, that is basically "Yup, if you're small and weak, suck it up and endure whatever your more powerful superiors choose to inflict upon you. It sucks to suck."
Your power fantasies are just that, the revenge fantasies of every bullied nerd ever, the copes of someone telling himself he's smarter and better and "biologically superior" to the jocks picking on him.
Now, I say this not out of a lack of sympathy for your experience (I am hardly a Batman or Punisher myself), or even disagreement with your central point (that it's terrible that we allow schizophrenic homeless losers to threaten people because we don't have the political will to do something about them, especially when they're black). But to point out that basically, you're not complaining that it's bad for the strong to dominate the weak. You're just complaining that the current social order doesn't put you among the strong.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
8mo ago
You have a point about people kneejerk complaining about "white progressives," but while you can argue all you like that it's a handful of POC dominating and terrorizing nice white boys like yourself, they would have no power if not for all the white progressives abetting them. You stay in these ultra-woke environments but keep complaining about the wokeness. You can't like everything about the white progressive environment except for the fact that they allow non-whites to have influence. That's part of the environment.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
You were warned the last time you engaged in literal Chinese cardiology that you are allowed to develop weird theses, but it can't just be cherry-picked examples of why your target group is bad.
Do we realy have to litigate this one?
Yes, if you are going to offer anecdotal observations as "evidence" that the Chinese are lizard people, you have to actually justify your just-so stories.
This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable. Lots of people come here with very particular ideas about certain racial and ethnic groups, and as you are no doubt aware, we don't prohibit that, but you actually have to make a well-founded argument, not just "Look at how obviously alien and inhuman these people are." We have rules against weakmanning, and rules about writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
Just to take an obvious example, we have several posters with very obvious antipathy for Jews. Yet when they go off on their favorite topic, they usually manage to post in such a way that there is at least something to engage with, it's not just "Jews bad." Complaining about Holocaust memorials or the amount of dollars that go into funding Jewish NGOs might be a veneer over their real agenda, but it's a veneer that allows even Jewish posters to argue at the object level.
What you offer a hypothetical Chinese poster to engage with is "true or false, you are an alien bugman of a hostile alien species."
Since you were already explicitly warned to stop posting like this, banned for three days. If you want to come back and keep riding this hobby horse, you will need to seriously up your game.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
If I understand correctly, your argument is that forced segregation and requiring blacks to sit in the back of the bus was actually just because without those measures, blacks are criminals who make cities unliveable?
If the case were about Corner Man, the legal principal would still be whether it is just to treat black people, criminal or otherwise, different than white people. Making Corner Man sit in the back of the bus and use different water fountains doesn't become defensible because Corner Man is a criminal (unless you're actually suggesting we can identify criminals as a class and segregate them).
You may believe that blacks should be treated differently based on your moral or social principals, or you may believe blacks are extra-prone to criminality and this justifies treating them as such, but that's not a legal principal that can be found under the Constitution.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
I'm just going to say that I do not believe you are a "former leftist and atheist who's cringing at other atheists." This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.
As an atheist myself, I could never help but cringe when atheists responded to the “without God how are you moral” of the Christian evangelicals with the “Are you saying the only thing stopping you from murder is God’s judgment”?
The rejoinder you are complaining about is indeed a certain kind of smug gotcha line that's kind of cringe, but it's a rejoinder to an equally smug and cringeworthy argument. When theists try to play gotcha like that, they invite gotchas in return. This is why atheists who've gotten over their "arguing with evangelicals" phase usually aren't interested in that kind of debate. I'm fine actually talking about why I do or do not believe in God. But the sort of Christian who uses the "How can you be moral without God?" argument (usually followed by some variant of "You don't actually believe there is no God, you're just pretending") isn't interested in genuine discussion, but in seeing who can win the gotcha contest.
I think your Lizzo/Muslim analogy is kind of ridiculous. I don't personally care whether or not Ayan Hirsi Ali really believes in Christianity, but I can see why actual believers would care if someone is just wearing Christianity as a skin suit. You are overthinking the attraction to Islam; it's been pointed out here plenty of times that the left's infatuation with Islam isn't because of any intrinsic qualities of Islam (if it were practiced mostly by white people, they'd be condemning it as a Bronze age death cult). It's purely and solely because Islam is mostly practiced by brown third-worlders.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Yes, do you not?
I do not. Or rather, I do not thing the things you believe Jews specifically do are part of a biological imperative. If you're asking do I think Jews are human beings whose behavior has been shaped by evolution, well yes, of course, but that's not really what you're asking, is it?
Yes, do you not?
No, I do not think Jews act to undermine and disempower their outgroup, or at least, no more so than any other human beings.
You keep throwing chaff in response to questions by quoting more Jews who endorse policies you consider inimical to you. Why should I care what Bryan Caplan thinks? Why is what Bryan Caplan thinks a statement about the malignant evolutionary path of the Jewish race?
More to the point, if all you are saying is that Jews act like every other human being, why do you care about them so much, and why do you think I should care about them in particular?
I don't believe it's a predilection that "all Jews possess", sometimes it's a psychology that manifests in different ways, even as Jews who are especially contrarian and themselves anti-Semitic. Many Jews are apolitical altogether. Why is it when we talk about IQ you understand we ware talking about averages and distributions, but when it comes to talking about Jews we can only be talking about every single one at the same time? Why do you insist on pushing this fallacy that is pushed by the IQ deniers all the time?
I've already addressed this. I understand you don't think literally every Jew is a Cylon. (Probably a better metaphor than "lizard person.") But you think the "Jew average and distribution" is such that most Jews are basically Cylons - meaning, they will naturally act as hostile, subversive agents among non-Jews.
This is what you believe, and you believe this is true of Jews generally and not true of non-Jews generally. True or false?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
8mo ago
Have you uh… forgotten whom you’re speaking to?
No, I have not. That's my point. As I understand it, you still live and work in that same environment (I don't know how much progress you have made in leaving it, but you seem like you are still very much a theater kid).
Again, an incredibly bizarre accusation to make toward me in particular. You actually believe that my only complaint about wokeness is that some non-white people believe in it?
No, I think you basically like the white progressive environment, you just don't like the non-white people in it (and all the things they bring), and you think non-white people invented wokeness. Well, in a sense they did ("woke" was originally African-American vernacular), but we have had many people here over the years write extensively about how wokeness is just the natural endpoint of the Enlightenment. Which is quintessential white progressivism. Maybe you disagree with that take, but I haven't seen you offer an alternate hypothesis.
I’m responding to a specific claim that “privileged white people” are the ones primarily responsible for driving wokeness.
Yes, and I think that claim is correct.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Next They Came for the Dead White Authors
Apparently, Ian Fleming is next on the list for posthumous editing by sensitivity readers.
I've read a bunch of Bond novels. They are hilariously and unironically racist and sexist. Much moreso than the movies, which were already notorious for being un-PC even in an un-PC era (remember Octopussy?).
The Bond novels are fun but schlocky; Fleming's output was wildly erratic in quality. Casino Royale was actually pretty good (the Daniel Craig remake was the most accurate-to-the-book Bond movie ever made), while Dr. No was just hilariously bad (and bore almost no resemblance to the movie).
I guess I don't need to say much that hasn't already been said or that most people here won't agree with.
I will point out that editing children's books to be more acceptable to modern readers is much older than Roald Dahl. For example, I read the original, unedited Dr. Doolittle by Hugh Lofting a few years ago. I was actually unaware of just how racist it was. Modern editions have removed the "niggers" and other slurs, and the plot about the little African prince who wants Dr. Doolittle to turn him white. I don't actually object to this, so long as the original is still around. In itself, this isn't some new practice that only started happening in the woke era.
But it appears increasingly that it will no longer be acceptable to acknowledge that attitudes in the past were different; a warning label won't be enough. I expect the march will continue with Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell's novel is a magnificent epic and a glorious, unapologetic paean to the Old South, and should be preserved in its entirety both for its literary merit and for being such a cringeworthy time capsule of Lost Cause mythology. The movie was actually toned down a lot even in 1939 (they removed the part where Rhett Butler literally joins the KKK, for example), but I would not be surprised if it's next on the block for expurgation.
Here is a good news/bad news thought for you to ponder: I think sensitivity readers will soon be out of a job. Why? Because scrubbing "problematic" texts out of old books seems like a really easy job for the next generation of ChatGPT.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Because I'm trying to calibrate our understanding of what we can consider "disempowering their outgroup." Caplan is acknowledging ethnic anxieties behind his support for open borders- he doesn't want the legacy majority to have power and organize against him. So in this case the support for demographic change is explicitly based on disempowering the legacy majority.
I think your understanding is hopelessly flawed, and frankly, I think your analysis is as disingenuous as most of these link drops you do.
Bryan Caplan wrote an essay about why he worries about any one ethnic group having too much power. Notice that he included Jews.
From there, you have spun many other conclusions without foundation: (1) That he is motivated by "ethnic anxiety"; (2) That this is why he supports open borders; (3) That he feels this way specifically because he is Jewish; (4) This his particular concern is "the legacy majority" (I notice how you sneakily slipped that buzz phrase in there, even though, as I noted, he actually said he is worried about any majority, including his own); (5) That all this is a Jewish trait which he shares with other Jews; (6) That this does not arise merely from shared cultural experiences, but their DNA.
I mean, any or all of those things could theoretically be true. But put together it's a narrative that obviously fits your ZOG worldview, but it is all nothing more than a just-so story. You're pointing at random Jews who say things in the media and saying "See? See???" like this is supposed to convince us of the --Joo--Cylon menace. When you can't even avoid ignoring points in the very examples you cite (like Caplan himself not excluding Jews from his point), it becomes patently obvious how you are ignoring, say, all the Jews who don't conveniently say things that pattern-match to "Cylon" and even say things that contradict it.
What about anti-racism, where disempowering white people is the specific goal of that cultural movement?
I am not particularly interested in steelmanning "anti-racism," because we'd get bogged down in definitions starting with "racism" and not ending with "disempowering" or "white people." But you are still overgeneralizing. Not every person, Jewish or otherwise, who is "anti-racist" is Ibrim X Kendi or subscribes to Kendism, and even of those who do, your assumption is that they actually support that because they consider white people their enemy and they are waging tribal warfare against them. And not, say, because some people actually believe racism is a bad thing and this is the best way to combat it.
Say theoretically there are Jewish professors or Hollywood producers who prioritize the production of anti-racist content. Would you agree that they are being hostile and subversive?
No. I actually think racism is a bad thing and fighting racism is a good thing. I'm certainly not a Kendiist, but I do not classify everyone producing anti-racist content as "hostile and subversive" and my racial enemy.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
All he did was verbalize a reasonable request.
You think asking a female classmate "Hey, wanna be my fuck buddy?" is a reasonable request?
If he’d made a physical move, it would have amounted to the same thing, except it might have worked.
I'm not sure what you mean by "physical move" here. The only thing I can think of is pretty uncharitable - surely, you're not suggesting he should have just grabbed her?
You serve him the ‘freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences’ hogwash. “This is sad”, indeed.
You know, sometimes that's actually true. If I approach a woman and say "Hi, wanna fuck?" I am not breaking any laws, but I am certainly committing an egregious faux pas and should expect consequences for that.
People decided to punish him. Should he be punished for such a crime?
Yes. Not literally, since it's not literally a crime. But yes, if you fuck up socially, you get punished socially.
Do you think it should be socially acceptable for men to just straight up ask women for sex without fear of women finding that creepy?
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate.
Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?
While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize
This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Every discussion with you reaches this point, where I observe that for post after post, you have ignored all my direct and specific challenges to each point you made, and simply try to grab the ball and run in a different direction with it.
Until next time, I am done playing "Look, squirrel!"
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish
This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.
and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.
This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."
Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.
Well then not all Jews (NAJ).
Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.
Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.
This is something that has seemed obviously true to me for a while, but of course you can't prove it unless you are deeply inside the system. You express concerns about children being casually, almost instantly, referred for "gender affirming care" up to and including surgery, and clinicians and trans activists say "Don't be ridiculous, of course we don't think doctors should just write blank prescriptions everyone's needs are carefully assessed they get a comprehensive evaluation it's all very cautious and evidence-based blah blah blah..."
Every bit of anecdotal evidence I have ever read - but it's still anecdotal! - is that in practice a trans-identifying kid will be "confirmed" as trans basically on their say-so. I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, "Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans? Let's work on some of your other mental health issues and then revisit this."
I'd love to find out I am wrong, that the typical clinician is in fact cautious about going along with every child who presents as "trans" and pursues other avenues of care first. But I have yet to see any evidence that this happens... anywhere. Rather, it seems increasingly like anything other than immediate and unreserved validation of any child who presents as trans is treated as transphobic and life-threatening.
Jesse Singal does the lord's work, and he has two problems.
The first is that his work is very wonky. Like, he does deep dives into statistics, he actually reads the charts in the papers cited (and mis-cited) by activists, and points out all the errors, but it's not something easily summarizable if you really want to have an understanding of what he's saying. All his opponents see is "There goes Jesse Singal, known transphobe, obsessively bullying a marginalized community again." Who actually reads and parses his work in detail?
I'll admit while this whole thing was happening on Twitter, I didn't quite get the back and forth the first few times until I finally sighed, dug in, and reread the entire comment chain to figure out who said who said who said what about what when. And I'm fairly current on the issues, reasonably intelligent, and sympathetic to Singal. Meanwhile, everyone else is just posting dunks and high fives and "yikes!" And even after this fairly comprehensive vindication of Singal, I doubt a single person on the other side actually had their mind changed or their priors shifted an iota. What I have seen in response has been a lot of tepid "Well, obviously it's a very complex topic mumble mumble but jeez why does Jesse Singal care so much anyway?"
Which brings me to my second point: Jesse Singal does himself no favors fighting these things out on Twitter. I get it - I understand his mindset. "People are lying about me on the Internet! People are saying I said things I clearly did not say! They're also wrong about the facts! They're saying things that aren't true, just read this damn paper right here that proves it!"
He cannot shake the conviction that if he yells this often and loudly enough, he will make them see. And he won't. Ever. So he ends up looking like deranged Reply Guy who is obsessed with this topic and wants to fight everybody. Meanwhile, his enemies, who don't actually care whether he's right or not, only that he's on the wrong side, see that they can keep winding him up by saying "Look at Jesse Singal being transphobic again."
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Breaking it down into specific rules which are questioned on the basis of the justice of the particular rule changes the framing of the question from one that is fundamentally about results - "we care that we have cities that don't drive whites out through targeted robbery, rape and murder" to one about process and procedure - "the most important thing is that our procedures be found valid by a cabal of people - but those people aren't responsible for the results of the system as a whole".
I admire the skillful tap dancing you are doing, but this is merely using a lot of circumlocution to avoid stating your premise explicitly. If you believe that forced segregation and unequal treatment is the only practical way to avoid "cities that don't drive whites out through targeted robbery, rape and murder," then you need to make that argument explicitly, you don't get to handwave in the direction of "results" and therefore claim that forced segregation and unequal treatment was justified based on what you perceive to be the downstream effects of not doing that.
Stopping that is more important than the details of the rules.
Actually, no, it isn't, because that's an infinitely generalizable argument. "Stopping rape and murder is more important than the details of the rules." "Stopping terrorist attacks is more important than the details of the rules." "Stopping narcotics trafficking is more important than the details of the rules."
The details of the rules matter a great deal. They matter even when you think they will only be applied to your outgroup.
I could say that this is just as much found in the Constitution as any of the things that the Regime has found in it in since FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court and Earl Warren decided to totally re-write American law but instead I'll be honest - I don't care at all if it's "a legal principle that can be found under the Constitution" because I have observed that my enemies don't care about that either and they don't care about having a functioning society either.
I think this is nonsense, but even if it's not, until you get your white nationalist revolution and get to impose your will by force of arms, you are arguing for a position that can only be defended and implemented through the laws in existence.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
You never even bothered answering my question re: Caplan
This is a falsehood. I wrote an entire paragraph in response, which you have chosen to ignore. "Caplan directly contradicted your entire premise, and also you snuck in a lot of assumptions that weren't actually there" is not a non-answer.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Language Learning
I've always loved languages. I had aspirations when I was younger to become a polyglot. I had (according to the DLAB) a high aptitude for language learning.
Unfortunately, I have also always been a lazy student, and so initial enthusiasm always ran into the reality that learning languages, especially to anything approaching fluency, is hard. (Yes, I know a lot of you non-Americans grew up in multilingual environments and spoke two or three languages by the time you were in high school. Americans generally have to make a serious effort, outside of our sparse language offerings in high school, to acquire another language.)
Over many years, I have acquired bits and pieces of nearly a dozen languages, and true proficiency in none of them. I can read Cyrillic, Hangul, Arabic, Hiragana and Katakana and a few Kanji. I know enough Russian, German, Korean, and Japanese to express my ignorance.
Over the years, I have dabbled or studied in:
French: One semester in junior high school. I remember "Marie est une fille" and "je nais parle pas Francais."
German: In my opinion, the easiest language for English speakers to learn. With my rusty high school German, I retain the basic grammar and can still occasionally pick up phrases, and if I studied in earnest and built up my vocabulary, I think I could quickly reach at least conversational fluency.
Russian: Oh my god. Second hardest language I ever studied. I began studying Russian because my first girlfriend was Russian, and I took a few semesters in college. What are these cases? How do Russians even verb? And what am I supposed to do with my tongue? (My girlfriend endlessly made fun of my pronunciation, said I couldn't even pronounce her name in Russian correctly.) I am never, ever in a million years going to read War and Peace in the original Russian. (I am actually reading the Maude translation now.)
Irish: Too bad @FarNearEverywhere isn't around anymore to make fun of me. I took a semester of Irish Gaelic in college. Fucking incomprehensible. I remember zero grammar and maybe two words (including my username). They should never have used the English alphabet for written Irish; borrowing Chinese characters, or just refining ogham, would have made as much sense.
Esperanto: Yes, I also took a semester of Esperanto in college, for fun. One of the first conlangs, it was meant to be an easy-to-learn universal language, made simple with the absence of irregular verbs or complicated grammatical rules or any of the other things that make most languages difficult. It still has a fairly large global community of enthusiasts (though maybe now they are outnumbered by fluent speakers of Klingon or Dothraki), most of whom are still living the pre-USSR socialist dream. Fun fact: William Shatner starred in a 1966 horror film called Incubus, with dialog entirely in Esperanto. You can watch the whole movie (yes, including William Shatner speaking in Esperanto!) on YouTube.
Japanese: Took several semesters in college. Did terribly, but despite not practicing it since then, I can still read hiragana and katakana and remember a few kanji, and even manage some basic polite phrases. Although many people say Japanese is hard, I actually found it surprisingly - I would not say easy, but practical. There are no sounds in Japanese that do not exist in English, so it's not hard to pronounce, and I find the grammar to actually be pretty logical. The hardest part is the many different pronouns and inflections to indicate different politeness levels, and of course, fucking kanji. Chinese characters that the Japanese borrowed, much the same way Irish borrowed Latin characters, but to be literate in Japanese you need to know both the Japanese and the Chinese readings, and Japanese elementary school students are expected to know over a thousand. I remember maybe 20.
Korean: I never studied it very intensely, but I can still read Hangul (which is much easier than Japanese hiragana and katakana). The funny thing about Korean and Japanese is that linguists say they are completely unrelated languages. I suspect some cultural bias is at play here (Japanese and Koreans accuse each other of stealing pretty much everything from one another). It's true that Korean and Japanese share very little vocabulary (unlike, say, English and German or Spanish and French), but I found the grammar to be very similar.
Arabic: The language I have the most experience with. It's hard to pronounce, many sounds are difficult to distinguish for English speakers, the script is difficult and non-standardized, the grammar is complicated, and verbs have a billion different inflections. Also, you usually learn Modern Standard Arabic (or "Fusha") in class, which is basically media Arabic that zero native speakers actually use in conversation. Dialectal Arabic is broken into several different regional variants that are sometimes mutually unintelligible.
Of course I hadn't actually practiced any of them in many years, and language skills deteriorate rapidly without practice. So I occasionally looked at my shelves of books and told myself someday, I would brush up and get back into language learning. Realistically, though, it was never going to happen.
But recently I got on a language kick again. It started with DuoLingo ("Let's see how well I do with all those languages I studied back in the day") and now I am seriously cracking books again, watching YouTube videos, and even considering italki lessons.
I am concentrating on Arabic and Japanese. (Yes, for really serious language learning I'd stick with one; expert opinion is mixed on the effectiveness of studying multiple languages at once, but there's no question that it means dividing your time.) If I can stay motivated, I have decided to set a goal of someday achieving a CEFR level of C1 in Arabic. (Currently, I am, generously, at A2-B1.) I would like to do the same in Japanese, but right now I am actually doing a lot of Arabic practice and just dabbling in Japanese.
If I stick with it, I may post updates on my progress.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.
I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.
There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"
From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
4mo ago
Man, the OP has generated some of the worst discussion here in recent memory.
I'm just going to tag this response as one of the worst offenders because you're the most blatant about it without actually being willing to speak plainly.
If you want to say "All our problems are because black people are stupid criminals," you need to say that (and then be able to defend it, because just saying that is clearly a sweeping generalization, so get your arguments properly formed rather than just taking the opportunity to vent your hatred of black people).
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
5mo ago
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
10mo ago
Tell you what - when you answer some of my direct questions, I'll take up the task of dissecting yours again.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1yr ago
@cjet79's reason was good enough (it's perfectly obvious this was a trollish shit-stirrer asking questions in bad faith), but in addition, @bigtittygothgf is a ban evader, so the ban has been made permanent.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
1mo ago
Unfortunately the OP deleted his comment. But I think what you say is largely true. Especially about the course that almost every other forum takes- I've seen it on RPG and boardgame forums, on fan fiction forums, on writing and literary forums, even (to a lesser degree) on tech forums. Some of the places I hang out at which are ostensibly "apolitical" have threads explicitly about "How can we support Biden in the election?" You can imagine what would happen if someone started a thread about how to support Trump.
I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.
(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
9mo ago
We seem to be having a spate of low-effort ramblings that are basically "I'm mad about something and want to vent." I am sorry if you're having an existential crisis over Trump (for months at a time now?) but if you are going to post a top-level post, please make it relevant, interesting, or at least present an argument. We don't want to see free-form rants about how Trump or Biden or whoever is The Worst, devoid of anything but your own undigested disgust.
IIRC, it was Neil Gaiman who first wrote "the problem of Susan." It's been repeated endlessly, of course.
I liked the Narnia books as a kid, but they are much too earnestly Sunday School for me now. However, I always assumed that the line about "lipstick and nylons and invitations" was not about Susan becoming "sexual," but about her becoming too worldly. The whole Narnia series is of course a Christian metaphor, so Susan is a metaphor for the person who has left the church to become "of the world." (IIRC there is even a line about how it's possible she'll eventually get her head out of her ass and return to Narnia, i.e., repent and come back to the church.)
Like @self_made_human says, the part that bugged me was that it completely fails to pass the suspension of disbelief. Very young children might believe in magical kingdoms and talking animals and then grow out of it, but when you're a teenager who's literally ruled a magical kingdom and been there long enough to know it's not just a big game of make believe, I don't buy that she "grew up" and convinced herself it was all pretend. If Lewis had been writing for an older audience, maybe he'd have explored her psychological state in more detail and it would have emerged that yes, she knew Narnia was real but she turned her back on it for more complicated reasons, not just because she wanted to go to parties.
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