Fruck
Lacks all conviction
Fruck is just this guy, you know?
User ID: 889
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4mo ago
I hold this position despite being severely depressed, with occasional suicidal ideation. I recognize that I don't want to be depressed or suicidal, and want that part of me excised. I'm quite confident I would never act on that (and doctors know how to make it quick, painless, and irreversible), and if my disease somehow overwhelmed my true volition, I would want to be saved.
But how confident are you that you would never act on that if you had been raised in a society that not only tolerates suicide but excuses and justifies it? In the depths of despair, when the abyss swallows your vision and knowing that doctors could do it quickly, easily and painlessly, then are you confident you would never go through with it?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5mo ago
There isn't this movement of moderate, centrist liberals out there
I might be misreading you, but while I think you nailed most of this post chum, here you are wrong - there is, it's called the maga movement. Also I think actual moderate centrist liberals are definitely nationalist, it's the natural cultural foundation.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
6mo ago
There are scum bags everywhere, for sure, but the perverse incentives start with the insurance companies. You can't pull a surprise out of network anaesthesiologist out of your pocket if there aren't any networks. It's the insurance companies who ban pharmacies and doctors from talking about the price of medication and offering cheaper alternatives. And it was insurance companies who instituted the policy of denying every claim first and forcing patients to pull teeth getting their claim covered.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
6mo ago
I no longer believe in cross-ideological discussion. I no longer believe in good faith, or shared values in disagreement, or the merits of discourse.
That's a dumb thing to say bud, especially if you are going to follow through with it. Always be willing to engage, always be willing for dialogue. If someone starts talking about something you don't want to talk about, you be as nice as you can as you stumble over basic definitions or gish gallop by condescendingly explaining some pedantic mistake that has zero bearing on the issue at hand. Do it well enough and you can tie your enemies up in useless conversations for ages.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
This is totally on point however, figuring this out is how I stopped getting banned all the time.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1mo ago
Fucking everybody bud. If the zeitgeist position on vaccines wasn't 'they make you immune' the politicians and the media wouldn't have been so cavalier about safety concerns. If your gish gallop needs names, start with Kamala Harris - "The vaccine will prevent you from getting covid."
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
This was an interesting post, cheers. I wanted to push back a little on your thing with your dad and grandfather though - not to say that you are wrong, but there might be factors you didn't get to see - with an experience of my own. See my dad passed away not too long ago too and it was tough. He'd been on dialysis for half a decade, gone through one quadruple bypass and had a stent, so we weren't expecting him to last much longer, but I had looked after him (during which time we had grown very close and had a lot of hard but rewarding conversations about our issues with each other) and my youngest brother and sister adored him due to growing up with him after our parents divorced, so we were very broken up. But my other brother, the one closer in age to me, lived interstate and when he saw us at the funeral - particularly me - he was perplexed, because he loved our father, but also despised him for the way he'd treated us older kids growing up.
We grew up before the concept of child abuse really existed in the public consciousness and dad didn't think twice about using violence to poorly solve his problems - he felt it was part of his identity as a former soldier I think. He put my brother through a wall once for mouthing off at him, threw me down a flight of stairs when I swore on Jesus' name that I hadn't shoplifted something he was sure I had (I hadn't) and beat both of us with a bed post once when we didn't do washing he'd forgotten to ask us to do. Those are just a few of the more fucked up examples, I can keep at this all day because dad's violence was one of the defining aspects of my growing up - I still remember sitting in the lounge room watching the six o'clock news about one of the first cases where a parent was convicted of child abuse, and when mum went out of the room to get a cup of tea dad turned the TV down and quietly told my brother and I that if we ever even thought of doing that he would kill us and he wouldn't need 30 seconds to do it.
And I'd forgotten how much I resented looking after him when he first got sick - I certainly didn't want to do it, but he'd looked after me when I was sick so I felt I owed him. I spent a lot of time with him though and like I said, we had some difficult conversations, and I learned that he had genuinely grown since our childhood, and over time we grew to be each other's confidants - I still miss him every day. But my brother never got that and so his image of him was still those dead sharks eyes in the lounge room that night.
Tldr - your dad probably spent a lot of time with a very different person than the granddad you knew and loved, because they lived in a different time with very different standards of behaviour. I don't mean to denigrate your granddad, just saying violence used to be a lot more acceptable as a solution and even monsters can become decent people.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
My outsider's perspective is Australia is in a tough place, because trumpism is imo actually a natural fit for the Australian red tribe, and in several ways builds on the Australian nationalism of the nineties and noughts. But the nationalism of those days was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of the public, smeared by 'both sides' of the mainstream and balkanised, so while there is a tremendous undercurrent of support and hope for something similar here it is tempered by suspicion and the Australians' natural proclivity for cynicism. Their greater willingness to accept temporary hardship for future prosperity gives me hope though, as does the visible anger you can often see on people's faces when you talk about covid. The land acknowledgement business seems to be dying down more recently thank goodness.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5mo ago
How do you feel about the Aussie term for it - soft drink? I love it, it's so different to the usual Australian slang, where who cares what it is just take the first syllable, ignore everything else and slap a vowel on the end. D'ya wanna have a barbie for breakie? Nah, me and Kev are gonna take the tinnie out when he gets back from the bottle-o, I'll just have a cuppa and throw some stubbies in the esky." But then you get to carbonated beverages and suddenly it's euphemism city! Soda is starting to make some in roads here though, although despite coming from old soda country, I don't like it. Stick with soft drink Australia! Or if you really have to use something else go with the other Australian slang for it, albeit much less common - fizzy/lolly water.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7mo ago
What else is there to say except "we shall see"? I would note that everything you quoted before Yarvin is well known to Musk and Trump and has been discussed at length, and was a large part of project 2025 - they do have plans to deal with an entrenched and uncooperative bureaucracy.
As for what Yarvin said, I just think it's premature to laugh off Trump's plans before he's even in office, mainly because he won the election, secured funding for the border, escaped impeachment, pulled out of the Paris accords, met with North Korea, put an embassy in Jerusalem - my most consistent recurring memory of the 2016 cycle is "Hahahaha Trump is such a fucking moron, can you believe this chump? He can't just... Oh holy shit he did it!"
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
22d ago
It is very validating to see so many people long for my life. For almost a decade I have worked two days a week and I have never been happier or ironically more successful. I don't really go anywhere or do anything most of the time, but I didn't before either. But it is also very alarming. I have one of the few mental illnesses we know is hereditary, there is no future for me. That ate me up for a long time, far too long. But my fate was a precondition of my birth, your fate is still within your grasp. Don't give it up without a fight. That said, if you feel you have already fought to your limit, I understand.
one cannot choose to have faith when it does not exist
One other thing - you only ever choose to have faith when it doesn't exist. Faith without choice is belief.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosiphizing it.
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
Refusing to be vaccinated
There it is! When I read the first paragraph I quoted here I was confused. I actually know full well that at least I am capable of not capitulating to threats, and it is crazy to assert, 5 years after covid, that no one would use the threat of deadly force to make someone 'close their fist' - aka give up bodily autonomy in a trivial way. That is not a convoluted thought experiment, it's actually slightly less crazy than what many governments in the world tried to do to their citizens. But you wanted to paint the people who refused to capitulate to the abrogation of their bodily autonomy as the ones harming society.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
Another non-monetary benefit of a job is potential for advancement. The dish washer can level up to cook. The garbageman can not really expect to advance much from experience, being the one who drives the truck is more a matter of having the right driving license than being an expert in garbage collection operations. I am doubtful that leveling up your sex skill will significantly increase your income from sex work. By contrast, the cashier might plausibly get promoted to assistant manager at some point.
Driving the truck is determined by experience and seniority in garbage collecting - it's not much easier than being the guy who gets out when necessary, but it is easier. But your point still stands because there's nowhere to go from there - you are either the guy who drives garbage around all day or you are the guy who drives around with garbage all day. You can't collect garbage so well you get promoted to management, not these days.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4mo ago
Those are good measures, although like pusher_robot I would expect them to scope creep a lot. Rules or laws with any ambiguity seem to inevitably fall victim to the death of a thousand cuts. We've already seen euthanasia for a depressed 29 year old in the Netherlands.
But I'm not so worried about patients requesting assisted suicide as I am about the people with access to buses and bridges who suffer in silence and don't have educated medical professionals to help them. It's not really peer pressure, I'm talking more about a society where the emotional valence of suicide is not negative and how that will impact the depressed in general. A world where the water we breathe says 'suicide is an option actually' instead of 'suicide is a tragedy'. I am strong enough in this world to not submit to despair, but I don't know if I would be strong enough in that world. Not when that black dog has me and suicide seems like the only chance for something resembling relief.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4mo ago
In the comics scene for sure, but in a "here's the 6 classic graphic novels you have to read" sense where most people have maybe read the first issue for the cred then nothing else. Although Ellis got cancelled a few years back, so he has been downplayed in normie spaces.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
6mo ago
Has anyone else played Indiana Jones and The Great Circle yet? It's out now and is up on gamepass if you don't want to pay a hundred bucks for vidya, and it's pretty great if you are a fan of Indiana Jones.
It's an action-adventure game. That is the best way to describe it really. It plays like an im sim - in the Vatican level I caught myself considering using a water arrow on a light the thief vibes were so strong. But it has a lot more direction than most im sims and it is chock full of puzzles of varying complexity. It's no outer wilds or talos principle of course, and you can actually ignore a lot of the puzzles if you like, which makes sense in such large, detailed and open levels.
I don't know how much of my enjoyment is the actual game being good and how much is my love of Indy though so I'm looking for alternative opinions. It definitely feels really comforting to get a new Indiana Jones story that isn't bogged down by stupid fridges and whatever a phoebe waller bridge is supposed to be. The music is fantastic, Troy Baker mostly nails Indy's voice (the guy doing Marcus does a great job too) and it all actually feels like something Indy might have been doing between raiders and last crusade. And it's Tony Todd's last role and he's awesome in it.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
2mo ago
My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her.
Yeah it took me a while to figure out that's the right way to do it - you know you can handle it, because you handled it as a kid. Maybe not perfectly, or even well, but better than all the people who couldn't. Borderline personality disorder's manipulative aspects make me see red, but it seems to me like they can't really stop themselves, it's a soul crushing irony that their abandonment issues drive almost everyone away. You're a good son for staying by her side though anyway, it might be your cross to bear but I know it can't be easy.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
The primary focus I see here is the propaganda angle, we don't need to watch the show to know little white boys aren't The Problem. Also this criticism would sting more if woke media wasn't always so fucking generic. If safety and inclusivity and ad-friendliness didn't dull creator's creativity even before they get around to making the story advance the same insipid globohomo agenda every fucking thing else is advancing.
Also that attitude privileges positive criticism over negative criticism. Nobody gives a shit if you gush about a show before watching it, in fact that is a significant part of most media's promotional strategies. And you can spin up all kinds of lies about a movie you haven't seen if it codes right wing. Therefore it is the duty of every good, right thinking person who doesn't want globohomo corpo-friendly slop jammed down their throats to loudly and repeatedly badmouth anything that even looks like it. This is the world progressives apparently wanted, it would be unkind not to give it to them.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
Worse at what? Faking normality? What is the correct level of social media engagement beyond which one appears dependent? Which conspiracy theories does he gullibly believe? You have no doubt these things are true, so I assume you have conclusive evidence.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3mo ago
I watched a movie that I thought was awesome recently and I want to talk about it. The Wailing is a Korean horror film from 2016 my brother told me to watch, with the explicit instruction to tell him who I was think the villain was. Obviously him telling me that put me on alert (it was a 'hey you'll get a kick out of this' type request, not a 'good lord that made no sense at all' request), but I am now going to do the same to you, because having watched it twice now, I'm still not sure who brought the curse,
See the movie is about a cop, Jong-Goo, living in a sleepy rural town in Korea (played exceptionally by Kwak Do-won), who notices his community falling apart after a stranger arrives followed by an affliction that drives people homicidal. When his daughter starts showing symptoms he becomes desperate to stop it, but he doesn't even know where to start looking for answers. He mostly tries to get them from the people associated with the crimes, including a mysterious young woman dressed in white who keeps turning up nearby. It's a good allegory for germ theory, but there's a lot more to the film than that.
Faith is probably the main theme of the film, and multiple religions are called in, with Buddhism, Catholicism and the folk religion of Korea all playing a major role as the protagonist tries to find a solution to an apparently supernatural issue. The Korean shaman (Hwang Jung-Min nailing it) performs an exorcism and good gravy if you think Christian exorcisms are insane and scary you are in for a treat. I was surprised to learn the director Na Hong-jin was a devout Christian, because the film inverts the typical western perception of Catholicism - whereas typically these days in the west the church is portrayed as frightening and strange and not fully in touch with reality, in The Wailing it is the source of reason - the catholic priest is the only religious person in the movie who tells him to trust the doctors and the hospital. Given there is absolutely a supernatural element in the film though, it positions Catholicism as the least useful religion of the three. There are also direct references to scripture in the film, specifically it begins with an epigraph of Luke 24:37–39 - They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
It's a fantastic film that I highly recommend if you don't mind downer endings - and now I feel like I've revealed too much, so if it sounds like your thing and you haven't seen it yet stop reading this post and go watch it. If you have seen it already though I'd love to discuss it, because my favourite thing about it is that
I was primed to look, but it was the scripture references that first made me think something was up. At first, knowing nothing about the director (or Korean culture really) I ignorantly thought it was an esl type thing - the foreign director wants to reference Christianity somehow, saw a passage mentioning ghosts and went with it (sort of like how Osgood Perkins jammed T. Rex into longlegs). But it is referenced again later in the film by the girl in white and by that point in the film I had seen too much self-awareness to accept my original assumption about the use of scripture, I'd already started beating myself up for it. It was too on the nose, I just couldn't accept that this apparently clever film was now going to make the girl in white a christ figure by having her actually quote Jesus. When Jong-goo denies her three times before the cock crows I realised I had it completely back to front. The Christian symbolism is a deliberate subversion, part of the film's attempt to prime the audience to trust the girl in white and give the appearance of a twist.
The girl in white is definitely supernatural - she reads minds, has telepathy and ultimately must have control over time itself if she is telling the truth, as she tells him she wants to save his family, but they are mostly dead before he gets back home. But his she evil? Her emotions seem genuine, and she has a very apathetic attitude to villainy if we're seeing how she operates. The Japanese stranger (the ever popular Jun Kunimura) is definitely doing something weird and creepy - whether they're covered in blood and barbed wire or clean, he's taking secret photos of the dead. But is he evil, is he really a friggin oni? Once again he has a very laconic approach if he is. And don't forget that The Jap (a term I didn't expect to see in a movie again) was right about the deacon, he had already made up his mind about the stranger and we already know that the curse can make normal things seem monstrous. And the shaman definitely appears to be corrupt and ineffective at best - his exorcism fails, he charges exorbitant fees for his services and pinpoints the stranger as responsible while also apparently working with him. But once again, some of his actions are pretty dumb if he is evil. He explains the mechanics of the curse to Jong-goo and puts himself in harm's way during the exorcism, and he seems genuinely terrified and out of his depth at the end.
I know it's a cop out, but my read is it is the paralysis of ambiguity that is the real villain of The Wailing. That's what makes it so brilliant - the girl in white, the Japanese stranger, the shaman - all are red herrings, bringing that paralysis out of the screen and into our hearts. Jong-goo's desperation mirrors our own as viewers, every clue is a double edged sword, every act of faith a potential misstep. The girl in white quotes scripture not to subvert or emulate Christ, but to instill the seed of doubt in the viewer's mind.
So my question for you motters is this - what would you do in Jong-goo's shoes?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4mo ago
Lmao did I offend you somehow? That was not my intention, but this is a terser response than I expected.
No I am not 'insanely' projecting my post-protestant American work ethic on a culture that blah blah blah. I am describing the mindset of a particular type of person, the kind of person who gets given everything by the government but still works - as a doctor no less - and still also finds time to lobby the government, but still thinks he failed at life. That is the kind of guy who sees handouts as stripping him of purpose - if he didn't he'd be like your pot smoking buddies, languishing in ennui.
No don't you see it man? When the state gives you everything it takes away the only thing that matters - purpose. You have 'failed at life' because you were just given all that, you didn't achieve it through hard work, and it is therefore worth less to you. This is felt especially innately by men coming from a culture that values the masculine provider, like the middle east - no matter what rationalisations our Muslim freeloader hears, deep in his heart he knows his father thinks less of him and his father's father wouldn't even spit on him. And it's not like he's too busy at work to brood and plan.
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