Mewis
2mo ago
I don't really credit that it's psychologically much harder to stab someone than book them with a bat.
Mewis
2mo ago
Or he could just raise his leg and turn slightly, causing your underpowered hit to glance off the meatiest part of his body.
Mewis
2mo ago
The takeaway is that evil meddling anti-communist politicians drove out the brave, wonderful philosopher-scientists who just wanted to give peace a chance.
Mewis
2mo ago
I've always been reluctant to take an antidepressant. My mother took them once and she says they made her almost suicidal.
Exercise has never helped, personally. I'm pretty rigorous about exercise but even when I did physical labour job + regular lifting I still hated myself.
I think it's less about what I'm doing wrong and more about what don't have that's right. I don't have a relationship or a career or any real accomplishments.
Mewis
2mo ago
Accepting the things you cannot change is fine within certain limits. But in my case it feels like learned helplessness. Resigning myself to not getting anything I want just turned into an excuse not to try.
I do have low self esteem. I rationally understand that it's not rational. Other people compliment me on the way I look, particularly for my age. But I still find it difficult to internalize.
Mewis
2mo ago
The knife cuts both ways, however. Logically, there will be happy days in the future. But even on the happiest days, I think - none of this will help, or change me - I will be depressed and ashamed and worthless again. And then I feel further ashamed - for not appreciating my own fortune, for not being sufficiently grateful, for not being as positive and upbeat as I should be.
All this is well and good, but besides the point. As your Bible says, man does not live on bread alone. I am capable, sometimes, of enjoying myself. I can masturbate or drink alcohol or play a video game or watch an entertaining video. I can take a walk through nature or something more traditionally considered to be pleasurable. I can engage others in pleasant, polite conversation. None of these things make me feel less cold or inhuman on the inside, though they might distract me.
I have been depressed on and off for about 2.5 years. I don't think there's some biological mechanism. My moods don't seem to be correlated with sunshine days, diet, or supplementation. My testosterone is quite low but that's about it.
For for a moral inventory, I honestly don't feel that anyone has ever had a negative impact on my life (except myself).
The question, I think, is about desire and happiness. Is the route to happiness followed by putting aside or ignoring your idiosyncratic desires. And if so how do you separate your own desire from that of society.
Mewis
2mo ago
Depression, again
The question was posed in the last SSQ Sunday - what gets you out of bed in the morning? What gives you motivation or purpose? If unhappiness is not getting what you want, depression is not wanting. It is hard and embarrassing to write down the things I want. Embarrassing because they are shallow and venal, and because I am so far away from realising them. And yet by pretending otherwise, by telling myself I don't deserve these things and can't have these things, I am torturing myself and squandering my time.
I want to have a relationship. A loving relationship in which I can both receive and give love. Ideally a romantic relationship with a man, but at this point I would settle for a non romantic one with a biological child or a cute animal like a dog. For the most part, society tells people who are lonely or have depression that they should give up on love, that they don't deserve it. I don't really want to accept that. This is something pretty hard for me. I don't really enjoy sex and am generally pretty shy. I also find gay culture unappealing, on top of my neuroses and horrible self esteem.
The other thing I want is a great body. Despite going to the gym for some years I still feel very dissatisfied with my body and the way that I look, and it makes me feel like I'm lazy or undisciplined that I don't look as good as others. I guess it's pretty shallow and vain of me to express a value like this. But it's the proximate source of a lot of my negative thoughts.
Right now, I feel unbearably neurotic and negative. I'm not beyond pleasure or joy. But it feels ephemeral. I am currently standing in one of the most beautiful places in the world on a lovely warm sunny autumn day. I have no responsibility, no problems. But it leaves me cold. Sometimes I feel like I'm walking around like an idiot zombie, or about to burst into tears. I see the pleasure of others and feel vile and worthless. And I drift aimlessly around without really seeking out the things that might change my state of affairs.
Anyway, thoughts/opinions/perspectives welcome
Mewis
2mo ago
Berman Trek gets embarrassing about this when Sisko/Picard are drawn into helping vaguely pro democracy dissidents from the Romans and Cardassians or dealing with terrorists. Cold War never changes, I guess.
And Mass Effect is very, very early 2000s America
Mewis
2mo ago
I don't know about famine. I knew the autarky years were very rough for Spain, especially coming after years of civil war.
Mewis
2mo ago
That's nothing to do with IQ, though, and more to do with being pragmatic versus being imaginative. Like, I could imagine having morbillion dollars, but what would be the point? Is there value in daydreaming about something so unlikely? Or is it just a distraction?
Like, "what Twilight character would you be" is a thought exercise. It's also a game for children who don't have anything better to think about.
Mewis
2mo ago
This sort of romantic neo-nazi image is ridiculous. The Nazis were not high trust. In fact they were the total opposite, a heap of the most venal, odious, dishonourable bandits to ever come out of Germany (which is saying something). They had no concerns for honour or trust or mercy, no respect for the traditional religion of Europe, no respect for the ancient peoples of Europe. They started vast wars over money and land, lied habitually, ran a horribly corrupt state built on exploitation and outright slavery, and slaughtered millions.
Nor was their state really ever intended to be self sufficient. From the start, the intention was to loot, conquer and subjugate their neighbours. Indeed, the German nationalist project was mostly complete by 1938 with the annexations of Austria and the Germanized regions of Czechoslovakia, and scarcely a peep from the Allies. But the Nazis dreamed of imperial domination and glory, not self sufficiency. Instead of rallying the nations of Europe against Bolshevism ( an easy task), Hitler squandered his credibility. By the end of WWII even anti communists like Churchill were drinking with Stalin, and it was left to the US to establish an anti communist front in Europe - well, the half of it that was left.
It's interesting because we have a much better example of reactionary "we don't do globalism here"autarky from the 1940s - Franco, who carefully avoided entanglement in either WWII or the postwar international order. That didn't work either, but he failed with more grace and less bloodshed than Hitler.
Mewis
2mo ago
The referendum didn't fail because of some ultra catholic silent majority - it comes on the heels of large wins for abortion and gay marriage in referenda. Most people are still good liberals. The fact is that these amendments were half baked from the start.
Mewis
2mo ago
The US looks fine to me. Obviously not perfect, but then China is hardly building utopia either. I couldn't say who would win in a war.
As for Jack Barsky, it's not clear what, if anything, his case proves. This very ideologically committed spy did not manage a decade before he became a bigamist, and just ten years in America, he refused his order to return to the USSR. So I don't expect that second generation Chinese born and raised in the US will possess any loyalty to China. The spy's contradiction is that he must maintain total loyalty to a faraway entity while not also cultivating any loyalty to the people he actually lives with.
And as well, it's not obvious that it's that easy to just walk into the corridors of power. Barsky ended up as a programmer, not in the State Department.
Mewis
2mo ago
Sure, but we're not talking about millions here. Many people get caught selling secrets for paltry amounts - a few thousand, even. You could make that much money in a week selling commissions to suspiciously wealthy furries and nobody is going to look too hard at it.
Mewis
2mo ago
I think it's just a lot more mundane than that - the US just over classifies everything as a habit.
Also if a UAP turns out to be some PLA wunderwaffen or technical gremlin, then that's something you really shouldn't publicise. The thing about unexplained phenomena is that you don't know what they are, so better not take the risk.
Mewis
2mo ago
Race is both a social construct and a biological category with real consequences independent of how society chooses to treat it. Consider for a parallel example, tallness. Different cultures have different standards of tallness and might treat people they consider tall or short differently. 'Tallness' here is basically how society decides to treat or respond to the very real feature of height.
Mewis
2mo ago
Why not? People get guidance by taking LSD, consulting horoscopes and talking to God.
Mewis
2mo ago
Christian Bale, Tom Holland, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, John Boyega, Colin Firth, Ewan McGregor, Tom Hiddleston, Henry Cavill, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Nicholas Hoult, Orlando Bloom, Charlie Hunnam...
Note that all these people came to prominence in Hollywood, though. Beautiful Brits go where the money is - we're left with the remainder.
Mewis
2mo ago
Genocide is just the magic word that gets Westerners all excited and interventiony. Hey, it worked in Libya.
Mewis
2mo ago
You might have that fear of God in you, but that doesn't cause you to start lying your butt off in ways that are totally feeble.
Think about it. You're sat across from an expert that has power over you. You want them on your side. And your choice is to tell extremely weak lies. 'Never touched a cigarette in my life', you say through browned teeth. 'It weren't me, it was Mr Dick Bum, my identical twin.'
People that lie habitually like this aren't scared. They have bad judgment, no respect for others, no respect for rules. And, if they're pulling the same crummy trick again for the fifth time, no ability to learn from their mistakes.
Mewis
2mo ago
If anything, it sounds like potentially a good thing. Someone who tried whoring but didn't like it seems less likely to try it again than someone who never tried it and might think it's what they want.
Moreover, it doesn't seem like cucking. If anything, it's the hundreds of men who came (lol) before him who are being cucked, because in the end, she chose Bob. They might have came, but he conquered.
Gay marriage didn't help any disabled kids, either, but people voted for that.
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