FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
6hr ago
Would I be right in saying Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman were not personally responsible for the genocide of any ethnically distinct Native American tribes?
FtttG
7hr ago
You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.
Just because the people who work in the industry think that these paradigms aren't conducive to human flourishing, doesn't mean the paradigms in question didn't ultimately arise within that industry. I'm sure there are Catholic priests who have misgivings about this or that component of Vatican doctrine, or people who work in the gambling industry who feel guilty about how they've been complicit in ruining so many lives.
Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.
Of course, but lots of therapists are incompetent and aren't weeded out quickly enough, if at all.
FtttG
8hr ago
Relevant: https://youtube.com/watch?v=isafYIg0o3c?si=Ag1feI3cQNjZ8ZQM
I don't know how good AI is at generating a video of a woman pissing into her own mouth but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "man bites dog" stories.
I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.
As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.
Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.
FtttG
19hr ago
I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.
FtttG
20hr ago
Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.
FtttG
22hr ago
The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.
FtttG
23hr ago
Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man
Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.
FtttG
23hr ago
I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.
FtttG
23hr ago
As of February last year he is still poly.
FtttG
23hr ago
I still thought it was funny.
For clarity, I did think the AITA story was funny, and I was laughing at the absurdity of it throughout. It wasn't so much that it was bad as just a little out of place: it would have been perfectly fine as a self-contained story. Even if the protagonist's "love interest" had been someone other than Alison (e.g. Linda, one of the protagonists of Private Citizens would have been a better fit), I think it would have been stronger for it: "Pics" is such a depressingly down-to-earth, plausible series of events, it just strained credibility for me that its protagonist could then immediately wander into this over-the-top absurdist satire. Imagine a hypothetical episode of The Wire which crosses over with Twin Peaks and that was pretty much my reaction.
Unless you have some external sources for this
I follow him on Instagram. Granted that I might be falling for the parasociality trap, but in my view he really does seem to do the whole "ha ha I'm ever so lonely ha ha" gag a bit too often for it to be wholly insincere. I could be way off-base.
I expanded on this review a bit with the intention of submitting it to Scott's book review contest, only to find out he's not running it this year. Quoting from my expanded review:
Obviously Tulathimutte was worried that he didn’t go far enough [in attempting to distance himself from The Feminist], so he labours the point by making various edits to “The Feminist” from its original publication, in order to put further distance between himself and the character (a strategy which, as mentioned above, he more or less cops to in the book’s closing “rejection letter”). In its original incarnation, I believe the titular character was intended to be read as Thai-American, given the way his Tinder bio mentioned how much he enjoyed cooking Thai food (which he presumably learned in the course of his Thai upbringing). This meant that the story was just as much about the sexual frustrations of Asian-American men unsuccessfully pursuing white American women as it was about the incel/Nice Guy™ experience more broadly. But in Rejection, The Feminist has been retconned into being a white man named Craig, and his Tinder bio now states that he enjoys Thai food, rather than Thai cooking. Likewise the fact that the Tinder bio is stuffed with broad yuk-yuk jokes (to show off his feminist credentials, the character describes himself as “Abortion’s #1 fan”) which were absent from its original publication: these are meant to reassure the reader that we’re dealing with a caricature, not an uncomfortably believable character who could easily serve as a stand-in for Tulathimutte himself.
To put it another way: I can imagine “Trans women are women (duh)” and “All body types very welcome!” appearing in Tulathimutte’s own Tinder bio, even if meant insincerely. “Abortion’s #1 fan”? Not a chance – he’s not that socially inept and clueless.
...
I have not read Private Citizens, and I think I will.
I can hardly recommend it highly enough. When thinking of all the books I've read in the past five years, I think the only one I enjoyed more is possibly Never Let Me Go. Obviously it was bound to be a tough act to follow.
I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
FtttG
1d ago
Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.
I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"
I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".
FtttG
1d ago
Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.
I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.
Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using "therapy" to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.
"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.
FtttG
1d ago
The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.
FtttG
1d ago
Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.
FtttG
1d ago
The Holodomor was a half-deliberate half-targeted famine which killed 4 million.
A quibble: some estimates put the death toll as high as 5 million.
The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).
My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.
Ender's Game.
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