A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
-
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
-
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
-
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
Obsidian
2yr ago
Not only should you not get it, but strictly from a health outcomes perspective the effort you've spent asking the question was not worth it.
Obsidian
3yr ago
learn sheet music notation or just play songs until it sounds right
These are just variants on "whole word instruction for music". Take the Gary Karpinski pill, start with takadimi and scale degree syllables/movable-do solmization. Absolute cheat code for music, much in the way that phonics is the cheat code for the written word.
Obsidian
3yr ago
Ring Fit did something interesting from a game design perspective, but it's not at all worth it. It gets old really fast, and it's more preoccupied with preventing you from hurting yourself than with actually being fun or challenging.
Down Dog isn't a game in that it doesn't have interactivity but it's great.
Obsidian
3yr ago
I have no answer for you but I feel like plugging that Unsong has such a scene.
Great book, edited wrong. It evens out.
Obsidian
3yr ago
This is 1000% dependent on your social context. As a francophone in Montreal I don't expect to have to abide by any peer-requested COVID restriction measures for the rest of my life, that's just not where the meta is. So it means nothing if I say that I would decline any and all requests, since anyone who made that request would just be marking themselves as not worth dealing with.
Obsidian
3yr ago
Definitely one of the most important posts to have come out of old Motte.
Obsidian
3yr ago
It's funny because this is OCD spectrum behaviour but there's no telling whether there's a hidden sixth point that goes "also, OCD is ruining my life" or if this is the full extent of your quirkiness
Obsidian
3yr ago
"Articulated and defended clearly" is much easier when working from a shared base of facts, OR when outsiderness is evident.
Obsidian
3yr ago
I think something important is lost when someone picks up the signifiers but not the signified. Signals get muddled. I'm just advocating for high-context culture.
Obsidian
3yr ago
There isn't some Platonic ideal of a Mottian which one can possess or not.
I think as a community we should refuse to welcome anyone who hasn't read 100,000 words on SSC, but that's just me. It's not about seniority, it's about (in venerable internet lingo) LURKING MOAR.
Obsidian
3yr ago
I'm not worried about enabling trolls, I'm worried about enabling larpers. There are a number of them on the site already, but as of right now they're not too hard to pick out from the crowd.
Obsidian
3yr ago
Secular choir but mostly Christian songs, including one eastern orthodox (because Ukraine).
Obsidian
3yr ago
I went to choir for the first time last night. Seriously one of the most elevating experiences I've had in the past ten years.
It compares favorably to psychedelics: same category of experience, but lower commitment and more materially meaningful.
Obsidian
3yr ago
Something's missing. From the stuff you tried, it sounds like maybe it is that you don't spend enough quality time with quality people.
As for myself, I try to keep a stable representation of who I want to be and what I deserve, and then I pay homage to that by getting up, going out, connecting with people, working out, etc.
Obsidian
3yr ago
You're probably missing some important machinery around time preference and tradeoffs.
Obsidian
3yr ago
I'm strongly against this kind of artificial legibility. It can enable newcomers to perform acquaintance of the community far beyond where they're at.
Keep things hidden in plain sight lest you scrap the pipeline.
Obsidian
3yr ago
Yes, the concept of passing is contradictory with many other trans related concepts but it's often not seen because the whole of the trans movement is half dozen totally incompatible frameworks glued together while every tries their best to ignore the seams.
Either this is self-evident, in which case why post it? Or it's not, and you ought to unfold.
Obsidian
3yr ago
But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice.
Nope, it was very intentional. Reddit political echo chamber dynamics are well-understood, and we doubled down time after time on the megathread format because it introduced friction in those dynamics the way you describe.
Meditation helps. Participating to a men's group helps. Doing cool shit with people irl helps.
More options
Context Copy link