HereAndGone
1mo ago
The answer is always yes.
Oh yeah. "Can it be possible that someone would find X a turn-on?" Yes, and it doesn't matter what X is or how disgusting/repulsive/but surely that's physically impossible you think X is.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Oh God, therapy-speak neologisms. I should have guessed!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc.
True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".
This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.
That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.
Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The irony being that it was men who did much of the work on Tarot and other systems, such as de Gébelin (who is the one responsible for popularising the idea that the Tarot was mystic secret Egyptian wisdom).
As you say, then it got picked up as witchy-woo vibes and that is where the current interest is - women like astrology, divination and the likes.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I think that this "estrogen cures autism" analysis is false
Well for a start, there are women with autism.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I'm going to assume the word they are groping for here is "meaningfulness" and not "meaningness" but of course their new girly oestrogen brain can't word properly, tee-hee!
Seriously, if guys think this is what being a woman is like, there is no goddamn hope for any mutual understanding between the sexes. On the other hand, it does explain the 'dressing like an anime avatar my new name is Lilith Raven Andromeda see how I've coated my face in a thick layer of makeup so girly now' transformations.
Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people? I mean, I have some difficulties with how some strands of activism are playing out (particularly the rigid reinforcement of simplistic gender roles of the 'blue is for boys, pink is for girls' type) but I don't think I hate anyone.
And then I read shit like this and I want to get a gun and start shooting (in Minecraft).
"Ooh, I tried oestrogen and it made me so girly! I liked tarot and magical stuff and giggling and being all fuzzy brained!"
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
I have been on oestrogen all my life (up to menopause) and if it made me describe my sensations like this, I would have preferred to jump off a cliff. "Oh gee, the reason I can't maths is because my little girl brain so soaked in hormones, gosh!"
I think there's a lot of "I expect X to be the opposite of Y, and if taking A gives me the sensations of X, then I will behave differently to how I normally behave" going on here. I think there may well be some physical changes, but mucking around like this is just annoying as all hell.
"According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum"
Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground? "Hey, by our new model, everyone is some flavour of crazy and if you're not Stereotypically Male Brain Things oriented then you must be Stereotypically Female Brain People oriented".
Give me a break. Or a bottle of sherry. I feel the glittery pink girly need to get blind stinkin' drunk after being exposed to this.
EDIT: On a more serious note, why doesn't progesterone get any love? In cis females, oestrogen isn't there on its own. There's a balance between the two (and more). Do trans women/trans experimenters like our guy here ever dose themselves with progesterone as well to get the full female experience?
Oh, I see he did:
Additionally, at one point I tried taking a 300 mg progesterone suppository. This made me feel quite stupid the following day, so I did not try this again.
Passing a remark about "well duh you stuck a progesterone suppository up yourself all in the name of amateur hour endocrinology, I don't think it was the progesterone that made you stupid" would be too easy - oh darn, there I went and did it. But yeah: wanting the alleged results of oestrogen without figuring out the natural cycle of the cis female hormone levels does lead me to think that there's a lot of "I expect to feel like a, b and c, and I'm going to feel like that even if I have to imagine it!" going on here, I don't think there's a neutral/blind "let's see what happens" trial happening here.
EDIT EDIT: Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time. But I have to say, all the "it's like being on mild psychedelics" - I've never tried psychedelics so I can't say if being female is like being slightly stoned all the time, but the rest of it - cutting down sensory issues, helping with sleep, etc.
Oh how I wish. I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues. Oestrogen is not a magic cure for that, folks, so I strongly suspect some placebo effect going on, as well as the guy admitting he's doing/had been doing a lot of ketamine at the same time.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Because while it doesn't excuse everything, it does explain behaviour. I was angry about it because I thought he was just being an asshole, just pushing to get away with things because he thought he was that special and entitled. Finding out that his brain was busted helped explain "okay, sometimes he genuinely couldn't help it/didn't realise what he was doing".
Genuine mental illness, like physical illness, does have an effect on you that no amount of willpower or grit or 'just decide to do better' will shift. Of course some people will use that as an excuse. But if you have a problem, and don't realise it's a problem, and don't get treatment for it because you're not aware of treatment, then it gets as much latitude as "I never knew I was diabetic and that's why I was always fainting and lacking energy because I wasn't eating correctly" would get someone.
If it's okay to take insulin to treat the problem, it's okay to take antidepressants. It's not about 'the real you', it's about 'this is you when you are healthy and this is you when you are not'.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is.
I mean, yeah. He could be funny and charming. My late father, who knew nothing about the guy, saw some of those on the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it was the Sci-Fi Channel and not Syfy or whatever they're calling it today), and he too loved them. Thought they were funny, thought they were witty, they made him laugh, and he liked Ellison.
So it goes, as another SF author said.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man.
Yes. And no. I loved the writing of Harlan Ellison, and he was responsible for one of the best ever Star Trek stories in all the series, "The City on the Edge of Forever", as well as some classic Outer Limits episodes.
But towards the end of his life, he beclowned himself, notably at the 2006 Hugos where he groped Connie Willis.
All through his career, he had (and cultivated) a reputation of being a grade-A pain in the ass, someone awkward to work with, someone who was a troublemaker - but who was worth it because he was just that damn good. And indeed, if you take the title of the Dangerous Visions anthologies, that's exactly what he thought science fiction could and should do, shake up the conventional pieties, show a different version of reality. He really, truly believed in the 60s and the counter-culture as "this is going to change everything". Of course, in the end, a lot of things stayed exactly the same despite it all. (And the delays, delays, and yet more delays and problems with the Dangerous Visions anthologies were also an example of classic Ellison).
On the other hand... we have to separate the artist and the art. This is a guy who could be a total dick, and yet then he writes a story that smacks you in the chops with its humanity. Sometimes he's screaming in justified outrage, in righteous anger, about a real wrong that should be redressed.
a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want
Yeah. And then he goes and writes a story like Croatoan which does not go where you expect it to go (he should be writing a slam-dunk pro-choice fable here, shouldn't he? but it's not. It's very differently not).
Ellison was someone who suffered in life, and who took advantage of that as an excuse for being an asshole. I was very angry with him in his later years. And then a while back I read a very sympathetic piece (possibly the foreword to the final Dangerous Visions that he edited after Ellison's death) by J.M. Straczynski about his friendship with Ellison and how he (probably, likely, definitely) had undiagnosed/untreated mental illness for a long time, and how he was declining physically and mentally in his later years and that explained a lot about Ellison for me and won back some of the sympathy he'd lost. This comes from an article about Straczynski and Ellison:
Unknown to most of his fans and critics, Ellison was suffering from an undiagnosed mental condition. What had once been an unusually prolific career as a writer of books and TV scripts slowed to a crawl by the ’90s. The missing Dangerous Visions book was only one example of that. There was also some erratic, alarming behavior, including an incident at the 2006 Hugo Awards where Ellison groped the breast of writer Connie Willis onstage and on-camera.
At Straczynski’s urging, Ellison finally went to a doctor and found out he was bipolar and suffering from clinical depression — a diagnosis that remained little known outside his inner circle.
“Once you know he was bipolar, a lot of things that don’t make sense suddenly make sense,” Straczynski says. With treatment, Ellison began to improve mentally and physically. Getting back to work was a real possibility. “One thing we talked about was maybe he could do The Last Dangerous Visions. The mountain didn’t seem so high anymore. And just as he was gearing up to do all that, he got nailed by a stroke. There was a part of him that just said, ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’”
HereAndGone
2mo ago
And maybe it’ll wind up being suitably specious cannon fodder in this or that culture war, as a treat.
That's the problem at this particular moment; the latest nutjob is not just agreed to be a nutjob, he has to have a secret agenda which will demonstrate that he is One Of Them and that naturally it is Their Fault for encouraging such people with their inflammatory rhetoric. We got it with Sarah Palin and a target map, we got it with the Pulse nightclub shooter, we're getting it with every shooting since (of course that person was influenced by party A or party B to do this, there is a direct political line so we can make hay by blaming our political rivals!) That's why Walz was straight out of the gate with "this is a politically motivated assassination" instead of shutting up until there was more information, or just saying something about mentally ill individuals having access to guns.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at.
So, in your view, is the current advice about "if you don't want to be laid off in the next round of IT job cuts, make sure you're promoted into a management role" since that seems to indicate "just programming on its own, no matter how good you are, is not job security"?
I do take your point about specific knowledge, but the problem there too is that if you know all about how to keep the janky, tricky systems of Company X running, little of that transfers over to Company Y which has a totally different tricky, janky system.
I'm not saying he was a Dem agent, but that is something that he himself stated and it is something which should be investigated with transparency and honesty which is something I do not see forthcoming from the establishment or the media.
I think he probably started off basic Democratic voter, then whatever happened to crack his sanity he went off into his own little land of 'this all ties together in the Grand Unified Plan'. I don't think he had any ties to Walz apart from the kind of "nominated to a public board that is one of the business community tie-in things", but that doesn't mean that in his mind (and in his mind alone) he wasn't working on behalf of Walz.
I think this may be more fall-out from the last presidential campaign. If he was already cracking, and if he was a Democratic voter from Minnesota proud that their governor was the potential next VP of the USA, and he believed all the stuff about Trump and MAGA and the GOP are fundamental threats to democracy, Project 2025, tyranny, fascist nazi etc., then the defeat would only have convinced him even more that drastic action on behalf of the nation needed to be taken, and that Walz was the man they needed to put into a position of power where he could influence events (e.g. get him elected to the national Senate). It makes it even more unintentionally embarrassing that Walz came out with "this is politically motivated assassination" instead of keeping his mouth shut and just releasing an anodyne statement about "we have to wait until further information as to this tragedy comes out". Yeah Tim, politically motivated on your behalf, even though you didn't know or intend anything of the kind. Probably he was working off the same assumption that "this is a Republican guy and this will embarrass them and Trump in particular politically, which is good for our side".
If anyone can figure out how to turn the temperature down under the stockpot, please let us all know, because this boiling over of extremism is the biggest threat of all.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I mean, I was looking at his Linkedin early on after someone provided a link online, and it went from "working in food production and large-scale retail" to this Red Lion Group very fast, as in "last job working for Walmart" then "now I am CEO of my own company in the Congo". (May not have been Walmart, but that kind of thing).
So with the benefit of hindsight, we can see the guy getting delusions of grandeur and going off the deep end. But that still would give us no clue as to whether he was left, right, centre, or upside-down pineapple cake, politically.
Do you believe that Tim Waltz actually directed this man to kill state politicians to clear up seats for him to run for the Senate?
No, of course not. But you were pretty dang sure you had his motivations taped, and it seems you were wrong, so maybe a little silence from all parties to digest and consider this new information is in order:
I'm going to bet that the motivations for this assassination end up red-coded. Per CNN, the shooter is apparently a devout Christian, with him being caught on video "pointedly questioned American morals on sexual orientation". I've seen reports that he had a target list of pro-choice politicians and abortion providers. And not to put too fine a point on it, but he just shot two democrats.
You do acknowledge you were wrong about this, so I appreciate that. But I do think everyone was a bit too quick off the mark making definite pronouncements before we knew anything solidly, and I mean both left and right in this instance. We seem to have had a rash of nutjob shooters, and whatever sense their motivations make in their own heads as to how it all ties together, trying to label "definitely a right-winger because this, that, the other" or "definitely a left-winger because hither, thither and yonder" in the ten seconds after it goes public is too fast and too over-confident in "we know this must have been done by Our Enemies".
HereAndGone
2mo ago
That's good, and that is the way it has to be for the world to work. So if our friend becomes the ultimate immortal, he can make sure there are no other wannabe ultimate immortals to challenge him, which leaves him as the sole dominant power. I do think he'd find it rather boring after a few centuries/millennia, unless he does have some master plan in mind for what he's going to do (and he might well decide he's going to remake the world or something equally catastrophic for everyone else).
HereAndGone
2mo ago
If this latest information is accurate, then (1) the guy was a nutjob (2) he was a Dem (3) contra other comments on here he wasn't motivated by right-wing anti-abortion sentiment (if he was going to knock off Democratic politicians, then they're mainly going to be pro-choice as well, so looks like once more correlation is not causation).
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Being the one single strongest person might well content him, or he might find it boring after all that now he's achieved ultimate power and there's no place higher to go.
Were the Venerables vulnerable to one another, or was there only one at a time? If he proves that it is possible to become immortal, then that is a strong incentive for others who reach the highest ranks to keep on trying to reach that rank as well, and if there are two Immortals, can they co-exist? Will they be able to damage each other, or would that be impossible?
But that would be a whole other novel, I imagine.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
I had no idea who Natalie Winters was, so the parody/whatever flew right over my head. Now it turns out she's some White House correspondent or something and she did something dumb? Well I'm sure no journalist or media pundit ever has done anything dumb before, so naturally that makes it newsworthy.
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Guy writes fun short story.
We seem to have different definitions of what counts as "fun". I couldn't get past the opening paragraphs as it was just so bad - as bad as a John Oliver piece about "Drumpf bad! Him orange! Orange bad! Geddit? GEDDIT???"
HereAndGone
2mo ago
Nah, this is not Impassionata. The Passionate One has a very distinctive style and a different set of bees in the bonnet. While they might well be able to switch to a different voice, the things that make them twitch are unique to them and would show up sooner or later.
There is the claim about being sapiosexual, and its opposite: being unbearably attracted to someone stupid, the dumber the better. At least I thought the latter (being morosexual) was primarily a joke, but turns out some people possibly do claim to be that in reality.
Good Lord, I just cannot keep up with the modern world!
More options
Context Copy link