George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
The things you lean on / are things that don't last
User ID: 107
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
Well I'm happy to have contributed to the biggest something in your life. I really dislike the neologism "cope" used in this way--rationalization/delusion is what you mean?
Whether aging and death are good or not is beside the point, or beside my own point. They've always been part of the human condition. Knowing your time is limited--and it will always be limited, regardless of how much progress longevity science makes--is a large contributor to what gives that time meaning.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
I am certainly not suggesting that medical science and longevity are net negatives. Looked at from your materialist perspective, again, your viewpoint makes perfect sense.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
When they perceive a thing to be common in their little sub-society they start doing it.
You just described the entire nation of Japan.
I'm not physically decrepit. Well, not yet. When I say old I mean mainly my perspective is different from that of the generation that grew up online.
Edit: As for the remainder of your comment, I'm at a loss. The human condition is its frailty and finitude. The Gift of Men, as Tolkien wrote.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
4d ago
I hate VR, but I used to, maybe 15 years ago, play WoW, and I enjoyed running and flying and interacting in that world--sometimes I'd think "If this were the real world, there is no way in hell I'd still be running right now" after crossing the entirety of Eversong Woods. I spent hours playing, then one day my wife took a photo of me in my headphones staring seriously at the screen and I had a moment. I quit not long after.
But to answer your question "do I enjoy being embodied and doing stuff with my physical body" the answer is what I suspect it would be for most: Sometimes. Most of the time probably. Even after having my ass kicked and thrown all over the floor in Aikido, when I come home and shower and then get into the furo I feel sore as hell--but I feel alive. I was having this conversation with my oldest son recently: I feel most alive when I am walking in the freezing cold at 4:30 am going to the train station. If it's pissing down rain or snowing, all the more.
I am not a masochist. But you don't get to my age without having experienced a lot of physical discomfort (and I am relatively whole and healthy with all my limbs, unlike many.) You learn to enjoy the relaxing moments in the warm bed, or in the pool, or on the couch, or having a glass of wine at the kitchen table with your wife where the room is heated, while at the same time holding in the back of your head that this is only a brief respite from the freezing cold or burning heat, from hunger and fear and extreme exhaustion and a walking journey with a big pack where the end will not be for hours and hours and you have to make sure of not only your own safety but that of others, and you're scared shitless but that's your lot. That's an earthquake away. Or fill in your disaster. To say nothing of the eventual hospital or hospice bed where you may someday be in constant freakish pain without IV analgesics.
Yes I enjoy being embodied. Or more to the point, until your post, I've never questioned that "being embodied" is anything but reality, or that anything that is not that is unreality, or a Baudrillard hyperreality. Maybe when I was a kid and I watched that Star Trek OS episode Spock's Brain where his mind is literally disembodied (Brain and brain! What is brain?)
I'm intrigued at your feelings of what you're calling "severe distaste," particularly in that you say you've felt them since childhood. It makes me wonder if gaming has knocked loose something in the human brain that shouldn't be knocked loose.
Nota bene: I am old. You will get different perspectives on this.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6d ago
Thanks for the info!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
7d ago
Excellent. I am not entirely happy with just taking statins, and will probably ask for either a calcium scan or stress test (which takes longer) at my next visit. We'll see what happens. The statins I'm on (rosuvastatin) are typically prescribed at 10mg - 20mg. My dose is...2.5 mg. But my LDL has gone down considerably. I don't know if my dose is low because Japan, or because my age/numbers/something else.
User flair checks out.
Seriously, though, excellent quote by Lewis.
My additional advice is that if you want to be a good orator, know what that means--have an idea what you think is good, and explore why it's good, or why you think that said orator is good at it.
Christopher Hitchens was, to my way of thinking, an excellent speaker, as was James Baldwin, and in very similar ways. We no longer have anyone like Hitch, alas, though some may come close at times. This is not to say I agreed with Hitchens (or Baldwin) on all or even most of what he spoke or wrote about. But their skills were undeniable.
Each speaks with a music, and each uses various tried-and-true rhetorical devices {<--PDF warning} in speaking, and quite naturally, without, almost, seeming to think about it at all, or plan in any way what word comes next.
Writing well is another game, but related. And each (speaking, writing) is bound by the context of topic and audience. Edit: warning not warming
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9d ago
I found several parts of the article weirdly at odds with common sense interpretation.
This sentence, of Karl Popper:
Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community entirely, labeling it as disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who dared cherish as special his own homeland and history as a dangerous “racialist.”
...is frankly bizarre. Popper did not denounce national community entirely, and didn't imagine any sort of patriotism as "racialist." He did argue against tribalism and extreme nationalism, but that's hardly the same thing. He opposed totalitarianism, yes, and national ideologies when they justified xenophobia or authoritarianism. He did question when national pride became linked to racial superiority or exclusion, but the book referred to was published in 1945!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
10d ago
Link fixed, thank you.
Well with female couples one of them conceivably (cough, I keep doing this sorry) is the biological mother, with the seed of some guy. True enough the male part is erased in that case, and there is much to be said about dads also getting wiped from consciousness.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
Well I feel you're being consistent here with your belief system based on what I understand of it, so I won't necessarily argue with you, and I certainly won't say your view is "sheer stupidity," but from my point of view there are many points besides the purely materialist view of conception and birth as simple physical acts.
If one subscribes to a purely materialist view (as possibly you do), your argument makes a certain sense--though your analogy of surrogacy as just another job collecting a big paycheck for work done seems pretty thin to me. There is no equivalent to motherhood for a man that comes to my mind, and you and I as men are therefore just in our heads here. Going out on a hypothetical limb, what if you could saw off your own leg and donate that to another person, who was for some reason one-legged? Would you make the argument that the mendicant who did so would be in no way being exploited, that hey we all work for the man one way or another, this is just a logical and acceptable extension of that? It's a weak analogy and to my knowledge this isn't quite possible, but a similar (again, not exact) principle applies.
You write:
especially when countries like India now ban surrogacy for pay.
Do you think this law is equally stupid? If so, why?
There's something metaphysical (in the most literal sense of that word) about motherhood, much that we do not understand about maternal bonding to children (or paternal bonding, for that matter). I am not sure that we are yet at the point where we are as a species ready for gestational surrogacy, or if that point will ever come.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
Points taken, but I'm not so much asking for the woman's identity to be unveiled (any more than a birth parent would need to be identified if an adoption were referred to in such an article) just the fact that a woman was involved in some way.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
I found myself withholding judgement, but foolishly so, for as I say she is divorced and the husband took custody of their child (probably for the better for everyone.) In gestational pregnancy the ovum of the donor woman and sperm of the donor man are implanted into the womb of the surrogate woman, complicating who the mother is. As I say for me this is unpalatable, less a technological breakthrough as much as a dystopian realization of how morally bankrupt our world has become (well probably always was). Others may disagree.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
By MILF-enjoyer I do not know if you mean the workaday attraction to women who happen to be mothers (I am part of that club, as I am part of many dubious clubs, at least if lust-in-our heart counts) or if you've been making it with mothers and wives of other men. That's its own drama and none of my business, but yeah, if you're going to balk at swingers, probably having sex with a married woman is somewhat inconsistent. At least the swingers go into it arguably somewhat open-eyed. I won't quote Woody Allen regarding what the heart wants. (Or as we say in the South, wonts.)
As for being called handsome, I think everyone has their button, but that seems a paltry bone to snatch at. I'm sure you're handsome, and as you're a doctor you're batting, if not 1.000, pretty damn well on the scale, @SkookumTree and his self-loathing pathologies notwithstanding. What I mean is don't sweat the handsome bit, it's just a word. In Japan I've been told probably a thousand times that my face is small (which is supposed to be a good thing here.) It doesn't hit quite the same way, but it's words, is what I'm saying.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
I probably very idiotically did not even consider infertile straight couples, but that point is well-taken. I don't even know if we should be thinking in terms of equality or equity here, just a willful blindness to how woman + man is what makes babies. I don't care what technological breakthroughs have in store for us.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
11d ago
Sam Altman and his husband had a kid.
Let me say outright I wish him, him, and the child well. Certainly growing up in a wealthy family affords a child many benefits that would not be had without that wealth, so good for the kid. Let me also say I am, as a person tangentially involved in medicine and medical science, not adamantly opposed to IVF, personally, though admittedly I have not spent a lot of time poring over the moral aspects of it. It seems like one of those things that generally contributes toward the good, inasmuch as it is creative, in the most literal sense of the word, and not destructive. My mind might be changed by a persuasive argument.
What irks me though, is that in the linked article there is no mention whatsoever of the mother of this child, the woman who carried the child in her womb, from whose egg the child generated (whether you view this as the mother or not is of course up to you.) It is as if the two men just somehow had a child, as if that is the most natural thing in the world, and there should be no questioning of it by anyone for to do so would be, I don't know, wrong or backward-ass.
Yet here I am, wondering. Should there not be at least a rhetorical nod toward the woman, a phrase in some sentence saying that the child was brought into the world via gestational surrogacy--a good way to introduce the term into people's vocabulary, the regular working men and women among us who may have never thought of the term. Yet there is nothing. Nada y pues nada. Can anyone steelman this beyond the assertion that it is a required newspeak in our Brave New World?
If I were to be dramatic, I'd say a woman has been literally erased here-- a maternal unpersoning. I know at least one woman (white, American) who "had" a child via gestational surrogacy--she is now both divorced and living about 4,800 miles (7,725 km) apart from her daughter. Life's a bitch. I never outright asked her about the woman who carried the child to term, though I know that this was a so-called "commercial surrogacy" and the woman who did carry the child was from India, probably without much financial means, and the whole affair was generally unpalatable to me. But I loved the (egg) mother as a sister, though she is unrelated to me, and still do, though she is a little nuts.
But Altman and Mulherin are both men, and thus the egg came from neither of them. I don't know, I just wish the goddam media would throw me a bone sometimes.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12d ago
Something about this screams Danger, Will Robinson, to me.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12d ago
The rent thing sounds dodgy, truly. I'm surprised it is only now becoming evident, and not when you were shopping around for places. As for swingers, from what little I know of the scene people go elsewhere for their dalliances, though there are "known" venues for meeting like minds. That could be the internet now, for all I know. The drunken lady also could have been full of more than just alcohol, so there's that. People love gossip even when it's unfounded.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12d ago
I agree with all of the above. My main issue is when complaining becomes a hobby, a pastime, a personality trait.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12d ago
More info on the swinger thing please. How was this discovered?
Note: Swinging is far from my thing, but I do have some weird stories about others. You first.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12d ago
Congratulations!!! Fantastic news.
To you, as the wife: Don't change, as much as possible, from the woman he married. Some change is inevitable, but he shouldn't look at you some day and think "Who the hell are you?" He probably still will.
Avoid becoming a complainer like you would avoid getting bubonic plague. You needn't be always positive all the time, but a nice rule is: The first thing you say to him on meeting after any time apart should be something positive. If he can depend on you for positivity, you will be worth to him more than Africa's ivory and Asia's gold. This is true even if you complain together about things.
Let him have his downtime, alone time, whatever he does to have that, and almost all men do. It's nothing personal.
Finally, and this isn't an exhaustive list but I'm in the bath and it's past midnight: When and if you do have kids, remember that he is not one of them
I wish you many healthy happy years together. Mazel Tov!
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16d ago
Note I didn't intend to call you unmanly. I'm talking about dads who don't dad, who don't give a rat's ass about their own children.
I don't think anyone particularly describes the metaphysical well, at least as regards the concept of "eternal life." I also would suggest that there would be no "day-to-day," as you put it, no longer a time at all in the sense that we comprehend; thus to wonder what someone might be eating for breakfast in heaven, or whether there will be Playstation, etc. is a misapprehension of the concepts. This may ultimately cover all of your earlier listed adjectives (boring, pedestrian, and horrifying), I don't know.
I appreciate the humor in your last sentence, though its preceding paragraph lists several woes for which I have sympathy. I have also added the word "forking" to my vocabulary.
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