Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
How often do you get to perform a notable good deed? Not just putting back a shopping cart, but something worthy of being a least a story about your day? Examples for scale:
A few months ago, I was hiking and happened upon a damsel in distress. A woman had fallen over and couldn't get up. She didn't seem seriously injured, more ungraceful and bruised, but she was struggling to get back up. I helped her to her feet and then escorted her back to the entrance to the park.
A few weeks ago, I was in a Walmart when I was stopped by a very short Hispanic man. He pointed up towards the top shelf and said, in an oddly Italian-sounding accent, "Can you please reach for me? I am too eh-small." I helped him, exchanged a quick pleasantry, and went on my day.
A few days ago, coming home from the same Walmart on an unlit back road, I nearly ruined my month. A tree had fallen across my half of the road. It was long dead and trimmed, leaving it like a telephone-pole sized spiked club. It was partially hidden by poor lighting, a curve, and a hill, and I came within a few feet of doing thousands of dollars of damage to my car. I managed to spot it in time, went around, and then I parked just past it, got out of the car, and hauled the tree out of the road.
With that act, it feels quite possible that I saved some nameless stranger from large expenses and hours of stress. I'll never know who, or if. But doing that felt good. Prosocial. Made me feel strong and competent.
But the real reward was getting to tell the story to my dad. I wound him up with expectations before revealing that I did not fuck up my car. And I got to see, when I mentioned picking up a tree and moving it, a flash of pride on his face at his son's casual might.
A flash of pride that I am reliving by telling the story now. And it occurs to me that this perk is probably a critical mechanism for inspiring people to do random, notable good deeds. And as a man who usually prefers his social invisibility, having one of these stories to tell is one of the rare times I'm happy to draw attention to myself. So.
What was your most recent good deed? Your greatest? And how does your willingness to preform them vary with how much social accolades you expect from people around you?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
I'm not saying it isn't true, or at least very common. I'm saying that as a man who is usually invisible, it's not something I can easily relate to.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
I picked it up from my son, and it really feels like a perfect term to describe the thing in a lot of progression fantasy where the MC does something impressive, and then the focus swaps out to random other characters just to show how jaw-dropped impressed they are at how that was IMPOSSIBLE!
It hits a sweet spot as a specific term for unsightly over-praise.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.
A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.
If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?
As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?
There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.
But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.
Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
The tiger is an active threat. The deer is not. Hate walls off the vile spark that spares the foe. And if you were at risk of starving, I bet you'd muster up the courage to hate that deer - for your family's sake.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
The tiger, like a political opponent and unlike gravity, is a problem that you can at least theoretically end. And once you've made that decision to seek it's end, it is an adaptive simplification to just psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to hate the tiger.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?
This is "wet streets cause rain" thinking. Unapologetic racism was always there, it was just some people weren't allowed to participate. Consider the recent blowup over Doreen St. Felix, a writer at the New Yorker who published an insipid bit of Sydney Sweeny commentary. She was discovered to have a decade+ long history of meme Nation of Islam tier racism against white people, and that was considered perfectly socially acceptable.
Have you ever actually looked at black twitter? Indian twitter? The stuff you're complaining about is still tame in comparison.
What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace.
Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire? American culture has had the stereotype of the soullness, number-pushing striver for centuries. Are they STRONG contributors in a way that, say, Ayn Rand would recognize? Offering high value for high value? As opposed to ethics-free system-gaming? From the country famous for scamming and fake degrees?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Seems a little extreme to jump straight to talk therapy and medication. Have you tried heavy metal and a personal trainer?
But yes, you have correctly identified an issue. His emotions are an inconvenience to virtually every woman on the earth (which includes most of his teachers, administrators, therapists, and IEP-professionals). The call for him to express himself is somewhere between solipsistic ignorance and a cruel, Mean Girls lie.
This is unfair. There is no systematic solution. The closest you can get is to stop asking other women to fix him (be wary of feminine men here, too). My own teen son is very well-adjusted, and I still have frequent issues where his grandmother freaks out over his being "moody". Whereas I can tell that she's just utterly incapable of reading his moods and either working around them or overriding them. He needs male role models, male peers, and acceptably pro-social outlets. Sports would cover all three, but if he's not that kid, then at least try a gym membership with a trainer and a Dream Theater concert.
Feel free to reread my prior posts, and the other ones people are posting in response to you.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
No. As I just said, the point is irrespective of if they should be punished. The point is that regardless of whether or not they should be punished, they have no right to object on principle.
If you willingly join an army that refuses to take prisoners, and just executes all surrendering enemy forces, then you don't get to cry when you get summarily executed instead of taken prisoner - regardless of the moral positions of the enemy forces.
This is pure "your rules, applied fairly".
If Tao objects to this, then perhaps dear Terry ought to evolve his moral universe beyond the level we expect from elementary schoolers. As far as complaints go, "He hit me just because I hit him first!" is the mark of a particularly dull and narcissistic child.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.
No, this is not quite correct. Everyone is acknowledging that even if the government were punishing Tao in particular (and they are not, they are targeting the university in general), then Tao has already voided his right to principled protest. In terms of defense in depth, Tao's motte was already invested with demolition charges, by his own rotten hand.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
What do you think of "gym muscles"? Referring here to the idea that musculature bought in the gym is less effective than muscles bought by manual labor.
I think there's some validity to it, but it's not in the muscles themselves.
Imagine you could run scans through my body to figure out exactly how muscled I am, down to the gram and square millimeter. A boxer with the "exact same" stats is still going to hit way harder because they have a massive advantage in more ephemeral elements, like muscle memory and training their body to work together in a certain way.
Just so with manual labor. I did it for years, and I can do the thing where I can heft up some enormous, heavy object and casually walk it a hundred yards. But the thing that lets me do that isn't exactly being strong. It's having an intuitive, pre-conceptual understanding of torque and leverage and balance and how they interact with my body.
I had an incident last week where a young, scrawny employee expressed some degree of being impressed at me raw carrying some large object. And I paused, holding it up with one arm, and explained that my arms really weren't doing much work. I was just holding it steady so that the center of mass was balanced over my shoulder and aligned with my core.
I think that's where the discrepancy comes from. It's not that one "type" of muscle is different from the other, but that you develop different suites of subconscious support skills from different activities.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
In Lieu Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie, American Just Watching News From England. I've been unironically doing this for a few weeks now.
Canada is even worse. It's time to start building a wall to the north, and thinking about how we're going to handle it when that expanse of desolate wasteland fully devolves into a third world shithole.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
That's a valid enough point. I checked for the governor, but didn't think to look at the legislature.
Regardless, there's no reason to think there's a connection to Trump and the OBBBA based on that article. This was decided at the state levels months before the bill passed, or was even finalized.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
The first article is about how all of this was locked in back in March by the Democrat governor. There's one off-hand reference to the OBBBA, and no effort made to connect anything.
Which makes sense, since, last I saw, the bill just decreased the rate of increase in spending. Remarkable how consistently people miss that. Some antimemetics shit, really.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Sure. I'm just noting that the more qualified people did run the numbers, and even with screening tests denying donations from MSM was a good call - at least 10 years ago. It's possible there are better tests, or better HIV suppression medicine these days that might change the math.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Even prisoners still produce toilet wine. Gaza seems to have been a total economic basketcase going back decades.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Screening tests can have false negatives. Perhaps there has been some large, recent improvement, but not that long ago the situation was so dire that blood from MSM that had been tested and found negative was still more likely to be contaminated with blood-born pathogens than non-MSM blood because the base rate was just that much higher.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
My dad used to tell me that when he worked as a roofer, he was told "If you fall, you're fired before you hit the ground."
When I worked with him, it wasn't roofing, but we occasionally had to go up on high places, and the things he would do absolutely horrified my acrophobic ass. I'm talking ladder propped up on top of a ladder on top of a slanted second story roof. Zero safety precautions.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
This presumes that "consensus" remains an unbreached scaffold. What do you do when consensus itself melts, and all that's left is a Will to Power knife fight?
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
That was partially poetic, partially literal. I don't know exactly what she thought of me. But I've never, not once, had another medical professional clearly uncomfortable with literally just touching a patient during an examination.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
The robot waifus are the sterilization. This is a problem that solves itself.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Maybe. The only tattoo covered WWE fan I know is a sysadmin with hilariously idiosyncratic views on politics.
Iconochasm
All post-temple whore technology is gay.
4mo ago
Have you ever had a conversation with a tattoo covered WWE fan, or a southern preacher?
Yeah, as a doctor your day job is often going to qualify as "helping someone", at least by the prompt. Out of work examples would fit the bill, or times you went above and beyond for a patient, enough that you would want to brag about it to coworkers.
When I was a teenager, I suffered a bizarre injury to my eye. I had to take some kind of medicine to keep the pressure down, but I got the flu at the same time, and couldn't keep the medicine down. And the optomitrist who was taking care of me made freaking house calls. In his Porche, in the snow to come check on me, every day for a week, until he decided I needed surgery, and then he did the surgery.
It's been 25 years and my family still talks about the lengths that man went to to save my eye.
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