SkookumTree
1yr ago
Sure. It's like being extremely tall and trying your hand at basketball. You don't need to be seven feet tall to play basketball for Duke and there are probably seven footers who don't make the team.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
No. Did get ostracized in college for a couple years until I said I was dedicating my life to science and the practice of medicine though.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah, I like that as an idea. Also aristocratic tutoring in networking and social skill by the most graceful political motherfucker you can find. And life and death struggle, especially for the boys.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Unattractiveness isn't just physical. And it isn't always the case... it's just a good deal more likely that an incapable chump has a partner that is disgusted by them.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
So basically the Hock is an example of unusually refined stupidity. 99.99 percent pure reagent grade dumbass, not like the 80 percent pure stuff a peasant gets drunk on.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
There is failure (small, expected,cost of doing business) and then there is catastrophic and unexpected failure. It's the difference between a WallStreetBets ape losing a few hundred bucks on the stock market and that same ape being kidnapped, tortured, and ransomed for the contents of his bank account.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. I've also heard it said that war was to men what motherhood was to women. I agree with the sentiment but it's not Ancient Rome anymore and we can't really win glory and wealth by pillaging and looting fertile farmland and slaves. Thus each man chooses his own Hock.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
As I understand it people were quite enthusiastic about it for the most part. Draftees that were ambivalent or worse were just unfortunate people in a terrible situation. The Hock is best if done willingly and freely.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I've heard an American physician make this statement about his wife's experience of being a new mother. The man was a surgeon and no stranger to hard work and long hours.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It is meaningless. These men believed that what they were doing was glorious, but instead they got ground into paste in the trenches for a few inches of mud. I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. I am thinking 'net benefit for a smallish number of people, net loss for most, catastrophic for one person in a couple hundred'. Cigarette smoke IIRC fucks you up because you're inhaling a bunch of burning shit, and that's not good. We might have only been able to tease that out once people weren't breathing in tons of woodsmoke from open indoor fires and shit tier chimneys on a regular basis plus not dying as often to disease in adulthood.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Not terrible - simply "it could be worse, and occasionally is for some rather unlucky individuals". If you're a middle-class grown adult in a middle-class area and there's no bullshit going on that makes you a harassment magnet for local cops, it's pretty damn unlikely. They don't go to school or worse yet, work with him; the worst they could do is blow up his social circles and make it so he has to find new friends, and there would need to be a fair amount of motivation to do that. He'd have to transgress somehow - which he has clearly not done.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It does conflate the life of the average man with that of the unattractive one, and ignores the role of habituation to disgust that people experience.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
This is one of my favorite poems. I like and admire the aesthetic of these men, who sacrificed so much for so little. In the end it is one of the reasons why I like the Hock and believe in its transformative power: the Hock, freely and willingly chosen, purges weakness from the soul. Sometimes the body dies, too much weakness entrapped within it. Everyone chooses their own Hock - or not.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.
On the goths: those fuckers formed strong as hell bonds due to the shared intensity of their experiences - arguments with parents, occasional psych unit stays, running away from home to escape said psych unit stays. The bonds lasted a while after high school but five or so years later they frayed after they got the money for sleeve tattoos and decent therapy and grew apart.
But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Does this homebrew religion have a political slant? If it does, where is it on the political quadrant?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I meant to say basically:
"Congratulations! You aren't exceptionally unattractive or otherwise vulnerable[1]! Keep up the good work - and if you're afraid, have some perspective. It can be far worse for some people - but even then, risking that in order to be in a relationship may well be worth it."
I think that it may well be a feature, not a bug, if these things happen from time to time to awkward or disabled or very unattractive men - and it's valuable that they risk these things in hopes of having relationships, too.
[1] Vulnerable: could be disabled, deformed, something like a minority in a racist area hitting on girls that aren't his race/ethnicity/religious background.
For what it is worth: I know a couple of autistic guys that had their partners try to stab them. One was able to block the knife; another almost died to blood loss. The autistic women I knew...several have told me about at least attempted rape, physical abuse, crap like that. They're all in seemingly-healthy relationships, so it was worth it...but these people went through Hell; at least the guys can be said to have gone somewhat willingly. That he isn't experiencing this crap is valuable.
And yes - I'd think it would be reasonable to congratulate an autistic or perhaps simply very unattractive woman on "successfully completing a date without getting treated like a prostitute, roofied and raped, or murdered and dismembered".
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Not only that...it's a very nice way to do things. At no point does he recount being seen as transgressive or anything for his actions; nobody called the cops on him or tried to beat him up or anything like that. He's pretty lucky and should run with it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I am clueless about deep-sea fishing, but: why didn't you cut the line?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
relatively lucky
Maybe I'm just being autistic here, but I was thinking that most of these self-insuring fools actually make it out OK or even come out ahead, a few break even, and some get hauled to the cleaners and back.
What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all? Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship. Therefore, what good is a man, in a relationship, if he is not willing and able to endure a hardship or challenge of similar difficulty? Chad compensates for this by being very good-looking and very determined; there is a good chance he would do well in a war, too. But for us mere mortals? Our existence is legitimized and our desire for romantic relationships stops being completely base, disgusting, and hypocritical when we have proven ourselves worthy through being conscientious, dedicated, and determined enough to suffer greatly for no damn reason - even, perhaps, to die for no good reason. The poets of the First World War, and the soldiers there, died pointlessly but admirably for a few inches of mud; they embodied all that is admirable about masculinity and lost their lives in the mud of Passchendaele and Verdun and the Somme.
Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle. It's like Fight Club, except you expect and are prepared for - as much as anyone can be prepared for, which may not be much - entering what is essentially Hell on Earth and surviving it. Once you survive, you are now worthy: you have endured, you are willing to endure, therefore you now have business asking someone to endure a deep visceral biological disgust day after day to make you happy, and for the good of the next generation. And you, too, will suffer, or may suffer. Maybe it's a dangerous job, maybe it's your wife shooting you and putting you in the ICU, maybe it's figuring out how to deal with it when your wife becomes a raging alcoholic, maybe you really do get the life of domestic bliss. But probably not - you're not Chad, and as such you do not deserve domestic bliss, much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you and chooses this as her least-bad option, making peace with her inability or unwillingness to be Stacy.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Toyota, in my experience, is the king of reliability. The Long-Term Quality Index agrees with me. Honda is second; still very reliable WRT engine and powertrain but some of the craftsmanship on some of the components is not exactly bulletproof. Things like the AC system and door locks are only average in reliability. Door locks outright suck on like late 2000s Hondas.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Not just that. Nobody called the cops on you. Nobody tried to get you maimed or killed - or even beat up. Nobody tried to get you fired. In fact...I'd guess that the "really bad conversation" wasn't terrible - they didn't call you a rapist or something or make a scene. You're not unattractive, bro...keep up the good work.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
You have an inverse of Pascal's Wager going on as an individual. If MegaCorp runs its health insurance in house it at least in theory turns a profit from 99 mostly healthy employees paying for the 1 unlucky guy that gets into a terrible car accident or gets cancer. If it's Joe Schmoe trying to do that then he comes out ahead 99 percent of the time and gets fucking cleaned out 1 percent of the time. This isn't the same.
Fair enough; it's worse than cigarettes but not as bad as alcohol. Booze is legal; pot should also be legal.
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