SkookumTree
2yr ago
Who else other than someone sexually attracted to minors is going to want to fuck a dying 13 year old who may well be too sick or too weak to participate in the activity as an equal partner, never mind if they are able in the first place to have sex with an adult?
Someone who would have sex in spite of feeling neutral, even disgusted, due to a personal conviction. It could be something as simple as "I'm doing this because I want my client to have this experience before they die; my disgust and feelings be damned".
SkookumTree
2yr ago
why not rape
It's against the child's wishes. It's also bad for the rapist and bad for the people enabling it. Sure, if there was a fixed quantity of rapists and each rapist only completed X offenses per year or lifetime...maybe this wouldn't be terrible but why can't it wait 'till our hapless hero or heroine is in a coma?
Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good.
I do wonder whether prolonged exposure to tragedy, suffering, and death helps people (Westerners? First Worlders?) decouple things better. There's a stereotype that soldiers, nurses, and adrenaline junkies get around a lot; I can't speak to the first two but the third has been true enough in my experience. I'd like to ask the Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. [EDIT: "have you become a better decoupler, or less averse to the idea of casual sex because of your experiences"] While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.
The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax".
I'll agree with you there. A lot of this stuff - like those bespoke queer poly communes - is a lot like 'building your own airplane out of a lawnmower or motorcycle engine and a bunch of stuff from the local Home Depot'. If you're a skilled enough airplane designer, woodworker, and amateur engineer...you can pull it off and build something airworthy. However, you had better be very, very careful and know that you're venturing off the beaten path and might just fall out of the goddamn sky.
if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).
Fair enough - FAFO. For what it's worth, I think that the accredited-investor bar should be quite a bit lower. IIRC there are ways to get around this, companies offering special shares to ordinary investors through some relatively nontrivial method. People trying this know damn well that this is "go big or go home" territory and that they might lose everything. These are high risk, potentially high reward lottery tickets. It's like backcountry skiing signs. Ideally we'd mark things a bit more clearly...
SkookumTree
2yr ago
In a society run in a way I would like it my answer would be an absolute, immediate no because sex is sacred and powerful, and you shouldn't let them have sex for the same reason you wouldn't hand a 5 year old a loaded revolver.
Generally speaking, handing a 5-year-old a loaded revolver is a terrible idea. However, if that child is terminally ill and has "shoot a revolver" as his dying wish...it might not be a terrible thing for him to go to a gun range with an adult and be allowed to fire a few rounds from a .22 revolver. Hell, there's probably ways for him to just be handed that revolver and allowed to shoot at a target or something in the woods. A remote-controlled intramuscular benzodiazepine injector would allow first responders to safely get to him if he happens to shoot himself; I'm assuming that he's comfort care only.
That would probably be legit kinder to him than keeping him half alive on heroic measures and ventilators and all that stuff.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I don't really have much of a position on that. Having seen some shit working in the healthcare industry, and seen a few children dying from cancer, I am willing to say that this isn't terribly bad, given the child's circumstances. Reasonable people can be on either side of this issue. Cancer is a nasty, nasty disease: this guy is looking down the barrel of Who By Very Slow Decay, pediatric edition. Mercifully that is a bit faster than the geriatric version.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
As a guy with most of a medical degree: falling and hitting your head on concrete can be a motherfucker. Results are a crapshoot and can be anything from a mild concussion to death. I saw a young, fit teenager that very nearly died and will be crippled for life with brain injury...because he fainted and fell off a step that was a foot and a half high. Plenty of manslaughter cases come from fistfights that take place in parking lots; one man knocks the other out and the loser falls, hits his head on the pavement, and dies. I think that this guy was KO'd by the thrown megaphone, hit his head on the concrete, and was mortally injured.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
YouTube my left foot: there's a boatload of local cyclists that can hand me my ass on any given hill without even trying all that hard.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
That is a very strong "maybe". As something that happens once in a long while and secretly, it might not be terrible, might even be the least bad thing. However, I'm strongly against this becoming normalized and accepted. It's nasty, even if there might be some value to it.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Deontologists might also argue that the pursuit of personal excellence is the highest goal; who cares if that sometimes passes through (nominally consensual) prostitution of teenagers? Virtue ethicists might talk about individual freedom or some shit like that. I'm not voting "yes" here - it might be good for the teenage girl, and for the woman she becomes...but probably not good for her parents or society. I guess you could go full consequentialist and say that a human life's worth about $10 million...kind of like what I understand Ancient China to be like. There, you could buy your way out of most crimes with the exception of high treason; murder cost you 200 times a laborer's salary. In US dollars, a modern day laborer construction worker earns $50k/year on average. And the economists have figured a human life's worth around ten million, give or take.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Were they using the hard R, or not?
yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way
Agreed. Class brings...refinement. That's a very different thing from moral virtue; for a fairly harsh example, consider the polite and refined antebellum Southern gentleman.
Pretty damn ironic that black actors ostensibly performing an aspect of low-class black culture wind up getting roasted. It'd be a little bit like redneck actors portraying rednecks getting roasted for being "too hillbilly".
SkookumTree
2yr ago
No, I do not. As far as I know, something like 40 percent of people with gender dysphoria attempt suicide, but that's just attempts, not deaths by suicide. For mental illnesses other than schizophrenia...borderline personality disorder has a 10 percent death-by-suicide rate, anorexia a 10 percent mortality rate. Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches probably have those beat. There are of course the degenerative diseases like ALS and Huntington's, but that's not exactly what we're talking about. There death by suicide might be a kind of self-euthanasia...certainly not a central example.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
The French tried that in the 70s; it didn't work great for 'em. (Some) Westerners have been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard
Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches, perhaps. Controversially, gender dysphoria. Although you've got to differentiate "attempted suicide" versus "died by suicide" here.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Is your plan still to parachute in the middle of alaska with just a knife?
No, it's to attempt a cross country trip across the Brooks Range with a shit ton of gear.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Just find boots that are designed for the weather. They exist.
There do not exist ski mountaineering boots that are designed for extreme cold, as far as I know. If my search missed something, let me know.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Yeah. Especially if the penalty for getting caught is life in Azkaban...if that's the case, I would expect a lot more big-league criminals in this world to fight to the death to avoid being captured by law enforcement. A big league drug lord or something can do OK in prison; a big league Death Eater is just going to spend the rest of his life being tortured by Dementors.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Your other problem is that you have a completely distorted view of your chances
Too optimistic about my survival chances, or too pessimistic? I think that my chances of being in a relationship with an average American woman are roughly equal to those of surviving the Hock.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I know several guys putting out half again that much power IRL. Not hard to find - just find your local cycling group; the strongest riders will be at that level. Just like finding a guy that can deadlift 500 pounds isn't terribly hard - just hang out at your nearest commercial gym for a month or two. Six hundred...now that's getting up there.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
The ski mountaineering boots in question are these, three sizes too large. I've added a beefy liner plus homemade sheepskin insoles scavenged from a thrift-store coat. I'll be knitting some...outer liner linings? to take up even more of the volume. I should be left with a boot that is much warmer than stock, slightly sloppy (I know, not great for ski performance, but many explorers use cross country skiing gear and this should be burlier and safer than XC gear) and theoretically usable for my Alaskan adventure. People climb and ski on Denali with setups like this or lighter; the 'using oversize boots and stuffing them' is a not terribly recommended technique that should be at least theoretically usable. The Scarpa Nero liners I bought for $50 on eBay are around 5mm thicker than the stock liners. Size 9 shoes are 25mm shorter than size 12 ones; with this beefy liner I've already eaten up 10mm and so have 15mm to go. I'm a decent knitter and should be able to fashion a decent outer liner for my existing boot liners that'll eat up the rest of the space and keep my feet warm enough. Over the top of the boot are going to go homemade sheepskin overboots; Forty Below has some good overboots but at $250/pair they're almost as expensive as my ski boots. I think I should be able to make something serviceable.
As far as the snowshoes and Sorels: I considered it, but snowshoes are slower, I have significant downhill skiing experience as a former high school racer, and Northern peoples have been using skis for millennia.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
The pontification is an ad Hock commentary for posterity if I don't make it. Could just be the writings of a dumb jackass, but whatever. Am probably going to write a blog about this whole hock crap. I have been training and preparing in good faith for this journey.
Congratulations on your epic roast making the Quality Contributions list, though.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
The plan is to arrive in Fairbanks on the 11th and then reach the jumping off point for the Hock on the 12th or 13th.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I was fundamentally unsupported by anyone, including my colleagues or seniors
Medicine in America seems to work a little differently; when tough shit goes down people are at least a little supportive. This goes double triple quadruple on the pediatric oncology unit.
SkookumTree
2yr ago
Base building for my Alaskan journey is going...okay. Still disappointingly unfit; my 5-minute power is a puny 200 watts at a body weight of 70 kilos. I can deadlift 275 and squat 245, though, so I have that going for me. Plan to get a used bike trainer and a rear wheel for it so I can do 1-2 hour steady distance rides. Hiking up mountains, too, on weekends...that should help build base fitness as well. Shit is boring and requires discipline. Valuable life lessons here. Seems like any badass shit runs off of a long-ass logistics tail to support the teeth. Lots of unglamorous prep work and grinding away at either low intensity stuff like 45 minute slow runs at a turtle-like 15 minute mile pace or figuring out how to line ski mountaineering boots that are three sizes too large with insulation both inside and out so I don't get frostbite. I could be deluding myself here, but I feel like I'm becoming a better or at least more capable person as a result of this training process. It at least seems cool. This whole Alaska crap might be dumb as all hell, but at least I'll be a fit dumbass...
SkookumTree
2yr ago
I suppose it's a matter of degree, but at least in the 'hood you're not being treated like literal livestock. Tyrone is free to walk out of the hood and go where he likes; if he wants to go to a new city, nobody will be hunting him down with bloodhounds and mutilating or killing him if they catch him.
For me: seems like both of us are more or less being raped; I'm assuming that we've got guns to our heads or something. In that case...whichever would be hurt least. Whole situation sucks rotting donkey balls and it's at best a choice between eating five pounds of rotted donkey balls and eating six pounds of rotted donkey balls.
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