FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
11d ago
About a third of the way through Speaker of the Dead. It's much slower and more cerebral than Ender's Game, which I found both more entertaining and more emotionally resonant. I'm engaged enough that I'm certainly going to finish it, but so far it comes off as something of a step down from the first in the series.
FtttG
11d ago
I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.)
High agreeableness?
FtttG
11d ago
The first post I read was "The Toxoplasma of Rage", probably in 2015. I'm almost certain I came across when it was linked in a comment in the subreddit /r/TumblrInAction. I attended my first SSC meetup four years later.
FtttG
11d ago
getting a test done at all even knowing you're clean still involves a) talking to a professional about your sexual history
In Ireland, you can send off for free STI tests in the post. They arrive in discreet packaging, you pop your blood, urine and stool samples in a postage-paid envelope, and less than a week later you log into a portal and it tells you the results. I think it's a brilliant idea and wish it was the norm everywhere. I'd love to know how much of the transmission of STIs is ultimately downstream of people being too embarrassed to discuss their sex lives with doctors.
FtttG
11d ago
I sincerely doubt anyone ever gets charged
George Michael excepted, although it was rather a different time.
FtttG
11d ago
The prankster would clock someone as likely gay, and then play the matching notification sound standing close to them. I think they used women in some scenes, to minimize the assumption it was them. You'd see a lot of men jump and pat their pockets. Including quite a few who definitely didn't look it to my untrained eye.
That's hilarious, do you have the link? Reminds me of this Jeopardy contestant who mispelled "Tinder".
FtttG
11d ago
This and the IRA (who put bombs in them) are the two reasons Britain doesn’t have nearly enough public loos.
I just had a great idea for a comedy sketch.
FtttG
11d ago
still I feel like I've had the most headway with conservatives when I explained that deep down we just want to be free to live the same lives straight people do
I think the "we" is doing a lot of work here. I don't dispute that that's how you want to live your life, but I expect your desire might be quite far removed from what the median gay man wants.
FtttG
11d ago
they were offering to hook-up with you despite you having clearly stated you were heterosexual from the get-go
Among the gay men I've met personally, "turning" a straight man was by far the most common sexual fantasy. Many straight men have similar fantasies about "turning" lesbians.
FtttG
11d ago
I'm grateful that no gay man has ever been this crude with me in person.
Gay Scots don't beat around the bush.
FtttG
11d ago
In the gay bar near my apartment, the bathrooms are downstairs. At the top of the stairs is a little dispenser from which you can get free condoms and little sachets of lubricant.
FtttG
11d ago
He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more.
Have you investigated this claim?
FtttG
11d ago
They explained that no gay man would casually open his gallery in public. Too high a risk of unexpected appearances.
The day of my city's Pride parade, I was standing on a street which hosts the city's second-biggest gay bar (and which hasn't undergone mission drift, devolving into yet another drag queen theme park ride for straight women) surrounded by hundreds of LGBT people. Me and my friends were standing in a circle drinking cans, when I glanced at the next group over. One of the men was holding his unlocked phone at about shoulder height, and I could see that he had WhatsApp open and had just sent someone else a photo of his rectum.
I couldn't help but laugh. He was making zero effort to be discreet. His friend noticed me laughing and I just shrugged and was like, come on dude, that's funny.
FtttG
11d ago
Kind of sounds like a smaller-scale version of Mattress Girl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattress_Performance_(Carry_That_Weight)), without any sexual contact between complainant and defendant alleged to have taken place.
FtttG
12d ago
Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.
Someone sent for me?
Whereas AI pooh-poohers, in their vast majority, will not admit their biases, will not own up to their emotional reasons to nitpick and seek out causes for skepticism, even to entertain a hypothetical.
Right. For any opinion about any factual question (does God exist? is climate change happening? are the police systematically racist against black people?), it will always be possible to throw together an impromptu just-so story about the psychological motivations which mean that your interlocutor's opinion is only the result of motivated reasoning. If your interlocutor is humble and honest enough to admit his biases, then you have a slam dunk - "see? He even admits he's biased!" If your interlocutor refuses to admit he's biased, you can just say he's in denial.
These psychological explanations almost always scan as superficially plausible no matter what the topic under discussion is - and hence, they're useless.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
FtttG
14d ago
Apple seeds contain about 0.6 milligrams of hydrogen cyanide.
I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
You might be able to buy a pack of .308 or 12 gauge buckshot and press your head on the entire thing while you heat it up somehow, maybe a frying pan.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
FtttG
15d ago
the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things
Do you agree that the people he disagrees with believe in provably wrong things? If so, what are they?
FtttG
15d ago
It's a piece of legislation I fully support. Some Irish legislation carries a whiff of nanny-stateism, but I really can't imagine why a household would ever need more than 24 paracetamol pills in a week. I think implementing something similar in the US would be a no-brainer, especially when you consider paracetamol poisoning is the leading cause of death by acute liver failure. I assume a significant portion of that is accidental: because it's an OTC drug, a lot of people severely underestimate how toxic it is. My dad (PhD in organic chemistry) says there's no way it would have been made available OTC if it was discovered today. I always urge people to use ibuprofen instead when possible.
FtttG
15d ago
No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens is a joke for a reason. Most other first world nations don't seem to have nearly as much gun violence, and they also have more restrictive laws.
The obvious counter-examples being Canada and Switzerland, first world nations which have similar rates of gun ownership to the US but nowhere near as much gun violence, suggesting the problem is a cultural or demographic one rather than with guns in and of themselves.
FtttG
15d ago
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
I don't think the OP was referring to libel laws, but rather to laws that make it a criminal offense to mock police officers, criticise immigration policy or dispute that trans women are women.
Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
Did you read Less Than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms?
I can't say I found the characters in Glamorama any more insufferable than in any other of his novels.
Incidentally, the film adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Attraction_(film)) of his second novel The Rules of Attraction doesn't get enough attention. Director Roger Avary wisely followed Mary Harron's lead in doing what she did with American Psycho: dialling down the more extreme content and dialling up the comedy. It's much funnier and less depressing than the source material (although still quite depressing).
The Rules of Attraction, incidentally, is set at the same college as Donna Tartt's The Secret History (much-beloved in these parts).
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