HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
I had phimosis and frenulum breve. I was completely unable to retract my foreskin. But instead of circumcision, I opted for a prescription topical steroid cream that loosens the skin. After applying that regularly for a few months, I was finally able to retract my foreskin at about age 15. It was still pretty tight for a while, but it kept getting better over the years (I didn't have to keep applying the cream, though). By my late teens to 20s, I was completely functional and everything was working as it should be, with no complaints.
By the way, when I was first able to retract my foreskin at 15, I was so incredibly sensitive that I would wince in pain if water touched my glans in the shower. I think that illustrates just how sensitive the penis is when it has a foreskin to protect it for the first dozen or so years of life. It's not as sensitive as that anymore, but it's still too sensitive to comfortably touch with, say, dry fingers. That's a good thing.
Anyway, if it's not too late, I would definitely recommend trying steroid creams first. There's no harm in it, and there's presumably no urgency to resolve this in weeks rather than, say, months, right? The foreskin is just so amazing; it'd be tragic to lose it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
11mo ago
I certainly can't think of any downsides of trying the less invasive options first. It may be that your frenulum breve is worse than mine was, I don't know. I'd try to find a urologist that seems sympathetic to wanting to remain as intact as possible and see what they think about the feasibility of these options given your particular anatomy.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
10mo ago
It's sad that one must use forks of Firefox to get the customization that used to be Firefox's selling point. It seems all they're interested in doing is focusing on privacy and otherwise competing to be Chrome in terms of UX. The enshittification of the web in the last decade isn't enough, so we have to endure shit browsers too?
I settled on Vivaldi. It's a proprietary Chrome-based browser that's sort of a descendant of Opera. It's very customizable, but development is slow. It's frustrating that it suffers from a lot of bugs, but I was simply even more frustrated with Firefox.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
10mo ago
I think with FF you get enough customization that you can actually achieve more or less the same effect, they just don't offer it out of the box.
Yes, but it requires CSS tweaks which, if you aren't fluent in that language, can take several hours to troubleshoot when an update screws everything up. And in my experience that happened several times a year. Eventually I just stopped updating it, which isn't a good idea for security reasons.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
9mo ago
I've found that what's distracting about music is the lyrics, not the music. So I'll play music with lyrics if I'm doing menial housework or something, but if I'm concentrating on something important I'll play soundtracks, orchestral, etc. Two Steps From Hell is a favorite of mine lately for that purpose.
The problem with it on desktop is that the left-most vertical line is invisible for some reason. Consider this example. Doesn't it seem intuitive for a reasonable user to think that both pro_sprond and Quantomfreakonomics made top-level posts? You have to mouse-over the invisible line to even see that it's there!
Reddit (old reddit, new reddit, and RES) and most other websites like substack, etc. are more sensible, displaying the top-level line at all times.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
I've often wondered a similar question: how many gay men are attracted to men but find the idea of having sex with men to be repulsive? Disgust at fecal matter and anything that's touched it or contains it (e.g., rectums) seem to be pretty instinctive and probably evolved because of its association with pathogens. By contrast, vaginas have evolved for penises and, more generally, evolved to be pretty clean despite contact with the external environment (e.g., extreme acidity to combat pathogens; permeable membranes to allow easy access for the woman's white blood cells; constant low-level flushing via cervical fluid, etc.)
I just see no reason to assume that attraction to men needs to come bundled with a desire to... do extremely unhygienic things that go against our instinctive disgust.
Does anyone know gay men who don't want to have sex with men?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Hmm, what's going on here...
I feel like a cat cautiously exploring a new object in the environment, ready to startle-jump straight upwards at the slightest sign of a potential threat. But I'm just so damn curious that I can't help it.
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized.
I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
- Ideological expedience. The Left is primed to hate police because of the race angle, and libertarians are primed to hate police because of a general distrust of state power. Both of these groups are very disproportionately likely to be in a position to influence public perceptions (e.g., academia, journalism, opinion magazines, blogs, etc.)
- The availability heuristic. People see the most egregious police abuses/mistakes and have no sense of how astronomically rare those events are. For every iffy police shooting that crosses your radar, tens of thousands of police interactions occur without any violence transpiring whatsoever. The occasional douchebag officer encounter makes the rounds on social media, but the vast majority of officer encounters that are professional and courteous - even in the face of obscenely disrespectful and obnoxious civilians - never get shared.
- Osmosis from the general anti-police zeitgeist. Even without ideological bias, it's easy to find oneself assuming that there's a problem if so many people seem to think there is.
- Lacking domain-specific knowledge. If you don't understand that police don't have quotas, or that civil asset forfeitures aren't as simple as police being bandits, or that qualified immunity only applies to civil lawsuits and doesn't permit police to engage in criminal acts without being prosecutable, or that police don't "investigate themselves" for wrongdoing, or that they do indeed get more training than hairstylists... well, then you simply don't know. And combined with some of the other numbered items on this list, it's easy for people to lazily round these things off to "yeah, I guess they are probably just rotten about this and that thing".
- On a related note: most jobs aren't exposed to the public like policing is (and not heightened in exposure for reasons of #1 and #7). Programmers, lab analysts, manufacturers, logisticians, consultants, actuaries, etc., etc. aren't jobs people are in any position to notice or think about or care about. I suspect most people would have similar groan-worthy misunderstandings about most jobs if those jobs were similarly criticized by clueless (and/or dishonest) ideologically motivated actors and trotted out for viral outrage bait.
- The sort of people who hang out in the greater rationalist sphere or in highbrow publications probably know fewer police officers in their personal lives and so have few opportunities to ask basic questions, correct misunderstandings, or even just harbor a modicum of charity (especially given the class difference between them and police officers).
- Relying on faulty intuitions about how policing ought to be done, especially the use of force. Violence is actually not something most people understand very well. For example:
- People don't seem to understand that the presence of a gun on an officer's hip completely changes the dynamic of a physical altercation between an officer and a citizen - the officer must interpret active resistance as ultimately a fight for the officer's gun. And the officer absolutely cannot afford to lose that fight, ever.
- Your hands justifiably scare the shit out of a police officer, because your hands are what is going to kill him. Fishing around for something in your car or your pockets is a potentially life-threatening situation for the officer, and you're doing yourself no favors by raising his alarm like that.
- An unarmed person does not mean a non-dangerous person. See bullet point #1 above. Also, cars are deadly weapons.
- Tasers are not a substitute for shooting. Where deadly force is justified, a taser is never an appropriate tool (unless there are other officers providing lethal cover). They are simply not reliable enough.
- The use of stern language and/or sudden violent physical control (e.g., grappling, tackling) is de-escalation. Failure to rapidly put a belligerent person into handcuffs only increases the likelihood that that that person will obtain a weapon or get into a vehicle and cause further harm to themselves, officers, or others.
- There is no such thing a shooting someone's legs. First of all, leg shots are often fatal anyway because of the femoral artery. But more importantly, if a situation justifies deadly force, it is imperative to maximize likelihood of neutralizing the threat. That means rapidly putting shots center-mass until the threat ceases.
- It is just kinda seen as "cool" and "righteous" to try to notice and stand up to supposed abuses of power. There's no esteem to be had in being perceived as a bootlicker.
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Honestly, in a lot of these crime- and dysfunction-ridden neighborhoods, the suburban cops who commute are among the few functional, decent, and caring human beings that a lot of these people will interact with on a regular basis. I think we absolutely should want to be hiring all the officers we can who want to police these neighborhoods, even if they don't want to live there. Hiring exclusively from those problematic neighborhoods is not only going to be recruiting from a narrower pool of recruits, but I highly suspect it will lead to more incidents like the Tyre Nichols killing in Memphis where you essentially have the same thugs from those streets, just in a police uniform.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Yes, evil bastard cops and good noble cops are very different. The bastard cops are doing their bastardly deeds, and the good cops look the other way and close ranks to defend their brothers at any cost. Such great difference.
Why do you assume that the good cops are even aware of the corruption? It's not like the corrupt cops are telling the other cops about their misdeeds. And if an accusation of corruption appears, it's appropriate to give the accused the benefit of the doubt. If an accusation of inappropriate force comes to light, the appropriate response is usually "Look, I wasn't there. I'm not gonna Monday morning quarterback what he did based on hearsay. If the investigation reveals misconduct, then by all means he should be held accountable."
People seem to think corrupt cops are telling all their cop bros about the shit they're getting away with and they all snicker together about it or something. And they think that the non-abusive cops hide and protect the power-trippers (for reasons that are seemingly never specified by ACABers - somethingsomething brotherly solidarity?) Do they not realize how much harder it is for cops to do their job when a power-tripping asshole shows up at the scene? Cops hate those sorts of cops!
I could see isolated incidents in very small departments (e.g., tiny towns and counties) of things like this happening, but mostly because of the tight social and kin networks in places like that and the far more limited resources and oversight. But it's rarely those departments that ACABers express issue with; it's almost always the big city departments.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Part of me is tempted to respond to the individual complaints you cite (e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?) But I hope you won't begrudge me for instead getting at what I think is the core of the disagreement. Let me explain.
In general, I've never been impressed by examples like what you're citing. Here we have an institution - police departments - who, unlike corporations, churches, NGOs, etc., are public-facing, held accountable by the public, and have a significant degree of open records. Along come actors (people working at leftist/libertarian publications) who are extremely ideologically and professionally motivated to find fault in this institution and its members, whether or not fault exists in general or in any given instance. And they have 18,000 police departments to sift through for ammunition, with all the evil and human failings that go along with the approximately million fallible people in those departments, and little to no motivation to identify innocent explanations or exculpatory context.
Given that background, don't you therefore agree that our baseline expectation should be that there will be virtually endless examples scattered throughout the year, for every year in perpetuity, of something that officers or departments are doing that's shady, abusive, corrupt, or (perhaps more often than not) merely cast in that light when framed a certain way, with certain information omitted, and with the author guiding the reader (who lacks domain-specific knowledge and context) to squint a certain way to see the optical illusion pop out? And, most importantly, would you not agree that the fact that there are perpetually frequent examples should mean virtually nothing for the layman who just wants a general impression of police as an institution or wants to know what to think of his home city's department and its officers?
To put it another way: Wouldn't it be astonishing if there weren't such frequent articles of alleged police misdeeds in these publications, given the trove available to reporters to sift through, the evil and imperfections inherent in any group of a million people, and given the reporters' ideological biases and the eagerness to click on those articles by their readers who share those biases?
Now, it would be very fair for you to point out in response to the above that my reasoning would seem to preclude ever finding widespread fault in any institution. I wouldn't take my reasoning that far, though. Let me use an analogy to help explain how I think about this.
Consider academia. As someone who's been in The Motte for years, I hope my memory is not mistaken when I identify you as someone who, like myself and many people on The Motte, believe that academia is ridden with systemic progressive bias. How do we know that academia is actually systemically biased towards progressives, and that it's not just a bunch of conservatives scouring the thousands of universities in the Western world for isolated examples of bias like I claim that Reason et al are doing with police departments? While there's no slam-dunk proof, I think one major difference comes down to just how blatant, widespread, all-encompassing, top-down, and officially sanctioned the examples are from the firehose we have to draw from. We can see the universities' curriculum, hiring/tenure process (e.g., DEI loyalty oaths), official policies, statements by leadership, actions by strongly adjacent institutions like major academic journals, political donation records, etc., and it all points in the same direction and has a very strong magnitude. If you were parachuted into a few random social science classes for a few hours, you could expect to be positively nauseated by the intensity of the leftist bias.
By contrast, if you watched a random few hours of body cam footage, it seems you agree that you would not be similarly steeped in a display of corruption, abuse, and other malfeasance. And if police misdeeds were higher up the chain than mere body cam footage could reveal, we should expect a putatively widespread problem to be in evidence in vast quantities of large departments, with extensive networks of mutual corruption at the top levels, not these frankly pennyante, chickenshit, and/or extremely isolated examples that Reason et al restock the shelves with every so often. But you know where we can find that? In Latin America and other corrupt countries in the present, and in American departments generations ago when organized crime was a much bigger deal. So we know what to look for. We know how rancid is smells when it's a problem. It's just not there anymore, thank goodness. (Of course, that's not to say that isolated examples of misdeeds shouldn't be remedied, and they usually absolutely are. It's just that those examples should be be given approximately zero weight to someone trying to form an understanding of what a given police officer or department is like.)
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Because it's ubiquitous. In many cases they've literally seen it, because it was done in their presence. And yes, cops talk -- look at the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore, every cop in the department knew what a "rough ride" was and that it happened.
There might be isolated instances of small departments which don't have brutal cops, or only have one who keeps his mouth shut about it. But any sizable department has significant brutality and essentially all the cops know about it.
I strongly dispute that. I don't know a ton about the Freddie Gray incident or the Baltimore department, but my understanding is that neither state nor federal prosecutors allege what you have about Freddie Gray.
More importantly, while I think isolated examples of brutality like you're alleging do occur, given the tens of millions of annual police encounters, I would fully expect that even an America full of the most perfect police forces our fallible world could ever muster would nonetheless still present an endless number of examples of egregious misdeeds across the country.
The point is that it's not a systemic problem (I argue). The conduct of these abusive officers is not tolerated by their fellow officers and superiors (why would it be? It makes their job that much harder and opens them up to criminal/civil liability). Further, these abusive officers are are regularly fired, as well charged and convicted, with the obvious caveat that it's not always easy to pass the bar of guilty-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt (just look at non-cop criminals!)
However, I don't expect the vast gulf between our intuitions and experiences about this problem/nonproblem is going to be bridged within the limits of the intersection of our patience and free time in this already waning comment thread, I think you'll agree.
Most of it is humiliating, because what makes you look non-dangerous to police is an abject display of submission.
Can you elaborate on this? Generally, police just want you to:
- Keep your hands visible. Is keeping your hands casually at your sides humiliating?
- Don't, without being instructed, reach for anything or walk to an enclosed location (e.g., into your car or home, within which might be a weapon).
- I guess, uh, don't say that you're going to kill them? I don't know, I'm having trouble finding a #3, honestly.
Is standing/sitting there with your hands casually at your sides (or on your steering wheel) until the conclusion of the interaction so humiliating?
For the very small proportion of encounters with police that involve the officers' guns drawn, they may ask you to walk backwards and get down on your knees or get flat on the ground with your hands out to the sides. Do you consider that humiliating? This is done to minimize the subjects' ability to put up effective resistance. It's to decrease the likelihood that they have to fucking shoot you! I'm terribly sorry if you feel like you're playing the hokey-pokey for that brief moment that the vast majority of the population will never even encounter in their entire lifetime.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Much of the problem in academia has to do with things that people say, things that people are told not to say, and firings and hirings. These are inherently hard to hide from the public, so there's a lot of evidence that academia is doing them.
Other kinds of institutional problems are much easier to hide, so you should expect correspondingly less evidence.
The police literally have body cameras! Much of their activity is also observed out in public, and their records are often public or released on request. It's hard to imagine an institution/occupation whose activities are harder to conceal than policing in the 21st Century.
And the anti-police sentiment you see here on themotte is a lot more nuanced than the political slogans on the news. It's more "the police have serious problems". Pretty much nobody here really thinks that all cops are bastards, regardless of how many do in the activist left.
I'm not claiming that the sentiment here on The Motte and in similar places is anything like the hysterical, lowest common denominator, activism-soaked ACAB stuff. My problem is that I think the more nuanced takes are egregiously false, too.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
(holy shit, when will autocorrect stop correcting its to it's?)
Oh is that why it seems hardly anyone knows to use "its"? I've always assumed people are just terrible at knowing this, but now I'm wondering how much of it is the use of phone autocorrect these days.
Still doesn't explain people's insistence on using "eg"/"ie" without the proper punctuation and "cf" to mean "see"/"for example". Even Scott is so bad about this; it drives me nuts. Sigh. I'm on a one-man crusade on these, it seems.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
The second type [...] will become overweight or obese in almost any environment, short of famine.
As always, the question is: why not prior to the last ~50 years? Unless all the newly obese people of the last 50 years are the first type you mention, the lack of a significant number of obese people in past generations cries out for an explanation.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Yeah, I'm with you on this. Multiple examples helps the reader triangulate around the idea the author is trying to convey, and it provides redundancy (in the engineer's sense) in case one or two examples fails to click with a reader for idiosyncratic reasons.
There have been a few books I've read that I got almost nothing out of because some core idea, premise, or explanation within it just didn't make sense to me and I couldn't follow the author's reasoning from there on out. If they had only belabored their point with another couple more examples and "to put it another way . . .", it might have salvaged it for me.
I'm not sure I follow your point about Great Books like Aristotle. It's always seemed so obvious to me that these books are rather pointless except as a historical interest. The people who wrote them were so primitive by comparison, so limited in their empirical knowledge, so deprived of the progress in thought that we've made as a species, I can't fathom why someone would think that they have anything interesting to say on its own merits. And that's not to mention how impenetrable the prose is (apparently translators always think their job is robotically faithful reproduction instead of their best guess about what a modern writer would have written if attempting to express the same thought.)
You say they "speak to" people in some deep way. I'm not really sure what that means, but if their ideas are that impressive and timeless then surely someone more modern has has said the same thing but without the handicap of an ancient person's understanding of the world and our place in it?
Are you sure "read the classics" is an imperative containing much more than signaling about the speaker's supposed learnedness and sophistication? Because it's always been extremely hard for me to shake that impression, and I'm afraid I'm definitely not disabused of it from reading your response to Hanania. I see no good defense of the merits of reading those works.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Just to scratch the surface, an understanding of evolution, neuroscience, and atomic theory puts the learned modern person's understanding of human nature leaps and bounds above the ancients. Like, have you read some of the things they believed? It's embarrassing, but obviously they didn't know any better. That's my point. I truly struggle to think of something I'm more baffled by than the seemingly widespread idea that we ought to entertain these ancient people's ideas any more than we'd entertain a toddler's.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
Empirical facts about evolution provide us insight into why our minds and bodies are the way they are. They explain our emotions (including love), desires, perceptions, and so on. Everything that makes us what we are is the product of evolution. Atomic theory and neuroscience explain consciousness (although, of course, much mystery remains), personality, and provides good grounds to believe that no soul exists that can persist after death. All of this information informs our understanding of human nature.
Here are a few concrete examples just off the top of my head:
Modern neuroscience allows us to understand (and treat) mental disorders to a significant degree. These would have been mysterious to the ancients. But we understand, to some extent, how things like neurotransmitters affect depression, addiction, anxiety, etc., and that helps us come up with better ways to deal with it and also to sympathize with people who suffer from it.
Our knowledge of the cosmos, limited as it still is, allows us to better understand our place in it (or, perhaps most pertinently, our lack of importance within it).
Likewise, our understanding of evolution rather humbles our perception of our species' place in the world. It also provides insight into human universals such as sexual jealousy, coalitional warfare, the primacy of family, and probably a hundred other such examples. As an example of where a lack of this understanding goes awry, you're probably familiar with the Kibbutz - a feeble attempt by the Israelis to, among other lunacies, raise children communally. Evolutionary insight would immediately reveal the folly of that. But without an understanding of evolution, or at least trial and error, how do you suppose an ancient person would know that this project would be unlikely to succeed? Even if they could figure it out (probably by trial and error!) it seems obvious to me that an evolutionary insight into this aspect of human nature is a superior way to nip that sort of thing in the bud.
Also, even aside from advances in empirical knowledge, we have the advantage of two thousand years of history to draw from. For example, the US founding fathers took ample advantage of the history books to learn from prior empires' mistakes when designing the US system of government. All else being equal, people with more history to draw from will simply be better able to find enduring answers to timeless questions relating to how to organize society (politically, legally, etc.) and minimize common failure modes.
Like, honestly, the case you're making appears tantamount to claiming that superior empirical knowledge and a much longer "civilization bug report log" provides approximately zero advantage in understanding and improving people and society. And if so, like, why do you even bother to learn anything? I honestly don't understand.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
Why?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).
I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.
I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
8mo ago
The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.
Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.
So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.
That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.
Was this always the case, though? I wonder if generational differences are inextricably part of the answer in our current time. These two graphs [1][2] seem to indicate that young women post-Great Awokening are just so much more Left than women were at that age in past generations. And surely religiosity explains some of the remaining conservative/Republican young women. I wouldn't be surprised if perhaps as few as 10-15% of non-evangelical women under 30 identify as conservative or Republican.
I don't understand what happened.
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