BANNED USER: Repetitive one-note posting about his suicide trip
SkookumTree
No bio...
User ID: 2117
Banned by: @Amadan
SkookumTree
7mo ago
It also didn't help that COVID was compared to the 1918 flu; while it was worse than a typical flu season, it's more comparable to the 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics than 1918, which took out a lot of healthy young people. Our public health institutions and memes are in a very real way coasting and riding on the mind-boggling gains we got from the discovery of germ theory to the advent of cheap and readily available antibiotics. COVID's bad, but smallpox it is not.
SkookumTree
5mo ago
Jesus. If I survive the Hock and then get a girlfriend, and manosphere types then pile onto the Hock...
Andrew Tate 2.0 in the Alaskan wilderness as a kind of Bear Grylls-esque manosphere grifter is going to be dangerous. That'd get a lot of few young dudes killed. I'd probably be collateral damage as the first jackass to do this, too.
SkookumTree
8mo ago
A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
You can get prison-style furniture and toilets and whatever that are relatively resistant to trashing. Not trashing-proof, some asshole might try and burn through your rock-solid prison toilet with homemade thermite or something. However, one of the issues that comes to mind is flooding, either deliberately or through drug-fueled incompetence or just idiocy. How do you deal with assholes blocking the drains in your units and getting the water running? Maybe you can have some kind of shutoff meter or something, but those can be defeated and even IDK 10 gallons of water just sitting in a unit is a lot and can cause mold and other damage.
Prisons have guards that walk by and see if an inmate is flooding his cell with toilet water or some shit like that, and they put a stop to it reasonably quickly - within hours, I think, but I'm no corrections officer.
SkookumTree
5mo ago
portrayal of its inhabitants as people who killed, looted, and enslaved without a second thought
I don't know; you can find plenty of primary source material from individuals and groups of people that were out killing, looting, and enslaving. They justified themselves in lots of different ways - but pillaging and looting and killing, especially in war, wasn't exactly uncommon in the past.
You have people with privacy and tools. If they have a grudge against you, they could very well remove the grates and seal the drain with contractor bags stuffed full of rags or something. You also have toilets and plumbing. Flushing a bunch of old T-shirts down the toilet and chasing it with something like rancid fat or concrete can block pipes pretty badly. Any halfway determined asshole with access to the entire contents of a goddamn hardware store can create a pretty damn bad clog with $20 worth of goods from the local hardware store plus or minus commonly available scavenged or stolen items like trash bags, old fryer oil, paint/glue/adhesives, or something else.
I suppose that you could just use a Singapore-style solution where you beat or flog people for damaging the hell out of the apartment and then maybe boot them out, and the hobos that can live in apartments without royally fucking it up get to live there.
Also how do you deal with these guys deciding to cook meth or something in the apartments? IDK - maybe you just do the same thing as you do to the guy that floods the place.
If you let angry prisoners get $20 worth of goods from the local Home Depot and a whole week unsupervised, they could probably burn down the prison.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
Prison cells are also supported by guards, unlike apartments. Can't bring a sledgehammer into a prison cell.
SkookumTree
5mo ago
I spoke to a friend earlier today. She could tell I was on the spectrum but found it hard to describe exactly what made it apparent to her. After talking a while, she said that I always paused before I said something, or before I smiled. It was probably that deliberateness that was a tell. She did make it clear that there was nothing I had done (or failed to do) that was offensive in any way, although I'm reasonably sure that there's proto-offensive shit that doesn't rise to the level of conscious thought and is difficult, but not impossible, to put into words. Ekman and his team might be able to do it.
I also don't think all that many people can put into words the things that I do or say that make people think I'm autistic, or that offend people. If I had to guess, maybe ten percent of psychiatrists or psychologists, and maybe one average person in a few hundred.
I still think that a true UMC gentleman - like aristocracy in ages past - has things that they are fundamentally willing to die over. Like, a lot of duels were fought over things like "honor". I'm well aware that there were plenty of off-ramps in the dueling process that allowed both participants to be satisfied gentlemen. In the case of pistol duels the duelists didn't always shoot straight, and dueling pistols weren't usually that accurate. Even so, quite a few promising young gentlemen met a premature end on the dueling ground.
As a Hockist: perhaps a decent ideal to strive for is better to die than do your utmost to be graceful. It seems fitting and proper for an awkward person to adopt this as an ideal...at least until he is no longer awkward. The Hock is an idiotic and meaningless way to prove that I've got a high level of grit and determination.
I'm also guessing that many of you would think that my view of the 'UMC gentleman' - or the 'petty aristocracy' he described of people with two college educated parents - is out of whack and some fever-dream cross between Japanese bushido and what we think Victorian-era gentlemanly conduct was. And that if pressed, maybe a couple of awkward UMC dudes in a hundred would go on the Hock even if they were guaranteed to not be awkward after.
What's your take?
SkookumTree
5mo ago
Not only the medical records themselves. Yes, 25 years ago, it was pretty likely that the records of Private Scuffedup's ADHD treatment only existed in a single doctor's office in Peoria instead of a nationwide system. Yes, the system was designed to weed out the very unhealthy when most of the concerns were about weeding out malnourished and literally retarded recruits. You also have more medical treatment for things like ADHD and autism. I wouldn't have been diagnosed if I'd been born 20 years earlier; the guy on Ritalin now might've just been called "rowdy" and either grown out of it or not. At some point they'll figure out something that works. If there's a real war, God help us, we'll be handing out waivers like candy.
SkookumTree
8mo ago
Large mammals, such as polo ponies and police dogs, can be cloned. Not only do these animals not have health problems, but they are able to perform their role very well. It's not difficult to extrapolate from that and conclude that human cloning is technically possible. Wouldn't be surprised to find out that some large, powerful nation-state has a human-cloning black project going...those super-soldier Navy SEALs might be in elementary school now, being raised by their SEAL fathers or CIA agents or something like that.
SkookumTree
5mo 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
8mo ago
Religion. So far, that's the only real thing that we've found that keeps "ideal communities" - like monasteries, nunneries, and kibbutzim - going for more than a few generations. The Catholic Church seems like the likeliest candidate for something like this, although Mormonism and maybe Islam might be able to pull it off. Or maybe some new, modern religion...it would be nice if we had a religion that had been born in and adapted for modern, industrial society rather than something that worked very well for agrarian societies and was ultimately adapted to industrial ones.
SkookumTree
5mo ago
For every Chris McCandless, there are probably a hundred dead fools that aren't made famous like this and don't have pilgrimages.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
Yeah. You've got Daniel Shaver's death; he pointed something that looked like a real rifle out of a hotel window, then got shot by a trigger-happy incompetent asshole cop. Same thing's true for police harassment. Maybe in our fathers' or grandfathers' time there were drop guns and people being shot in the back for running from cops. It might still happen now, but not all that often and if it does the police departments are at least competent in covering this up. Asshole cops can definitely make people very clumsy indeed because they "look like criminals" or something like that. Sometimes the cops are beating up people they really think are criminals but can't prove anything.
SkookumTree
11mo ago
I hope this isn't just the tip of the iceberg: if this is a significant, sustained problem (upstanding citizens being menaced by psychotic homeless people, with police unable or unwilling to stop it) it seems reasonably likely that these individuals will be taken care of. At best, they would be strongly encouraged to leave town. This sort of thing is how you get mafias and an erosion of the legitimacy of the rule of law.
SkookumTree
5mo ago
It's Skookum the Hock guy himself - I don't find it distasteful. It's rather amusing to me, to be honest. The market has the Hock guy at 7 to 4 against...
SkookumTree
8mo ago
I have a new proposal.
I think there should be an additional way to get into an elite college. You can still get in because you're an Olympic swimmer, or won an international math competition for high schoolers four years in a row, or because you're the daughter of a sitting U.S. President. But for mere mortals willing to put everything on the line...
I was thinking about an idea for Ivy League admissions reform: the ruling class and those that wind up hanging around them don't have to take much personal risk to get there. In ages past, until a few months into WWI, aristocrats were expected to take personal risk by going to war; many of the sons of aristocrats pulled strings to get sent to the trenches. War is more dangerous now than it was in 1900, and warmongering isn't exactly a good or necessary thing for the United States.
Therefore, I propose Admission of the Hock. Those with SATs over 1300 or ACTs over 27 who are in the top 15 percent of their high school class are eligible for the Hock. In early March, participants are parachuted onto a frozen lake in a boreal forest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They're allowed anything they can carry on their back except for firearms, maps, and communication devices. No rescue beacons, either. If they survive by making it back to civilization under their own power, they receive admission to an Ivy League school.
If you want something - if you truly, honestly believe in something - that means being willing to risk your life for it and to suffer for it. There's very little of that nowadays in America outside of the combat arms. The likes of Harvard and Yale and by extension the American aristocracy would thus be leavened by large numbers of people willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to ascend the class ladder. These people would know suffering and want as they had not in their sheltered childhoods. They would understand the whims of Mother Nature; they would know viscerally for the rest of their lives that the universe will not bend to their will.
We could have special diversity-based scholarships to Hock-prep schools and Hock-prep classes for the determined but poor individuals that we want to have a better chance at the Hock. After all, that Supreme Court decision only applied to college admissions; the Matthew Henson Hock Prep Program can offer scholarships how it likes.
TL;DR If you can do the work at Fancy Elite College and graduate, but you're not a rockstar, you can get dumped into the Alaskan wilderness in winter. Make it out alive and you're in. If you add diversity, maybe there's going to be some organization focused on preparing you for the rigors and trials of the Hock. Or you could simply take your chances; good luck.
The survivors will be very fit, very determined people.
SkookumTree
8mo ago
Simpson's paradox.
I think it's Berkson's paradox in college: the unathletic without academic skill don't go to top schools!
SkookumTree
9mo ago
I believe that one of the reasons why so many people are single today is because too many people are unattractive.
Yeah. Also there is the fact that the things that men were/are traditionally good at (heavy labor and war) aren't nearly as important in the modern world, while the traditional male failure modes of essentially being a violent/drug addicted/game addicted jackass are still just as bad. It's pretty arguable that Joe Median isn't a good deal for Jane Median these days. I'm not at all saying that this is a bad thing; there's been plenty of arguments that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for unattractive dudes.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
Yeah. The big BLM organization - Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation - is probably grifting or at least enriching the pocketbooks of its members a good deal more than is customary for nonprofits. It's possible that they might simply be unsophisticated n00bs and thus not all that good at being corrupt and grifting successfully, and you never hear about the really good or even just decent grifter nonprofits. Grifting aside, I still think that BLM is unfortunately too divisive - it stokes racial tension. Of course, Martin Luther King did the same, as did Malcolm X; the difference here is that they managed to effect lasting societal change and had a clear endgame. They also referenced the shared humanity of Black people, rather than painting police brutality as an issue that only or mostly affects Black people...yes, there IS some disproportionate impact. Yes, there IS bias, it's very real, some of it is due to cops being pigs and some of it is due to the vicious cycles that stereotypes enable. On the other hand, I think that painting it as being just a "black problem" is the wrong tactic to take as it stokes racial and political tension in order to resolve a black issue rather than a human issue...I've heard that cops in redneck rural areas are just as much of assholes as cops in the 'hood. It'd be nice if BLM was able to join forces with rednecks against police brutality. Maybe they could find themselves some sympathetic white Boy Scout that got gunned down by asshole cops or something.
SkookumTree
8mo ago
I honestly don't know about that. Neither of us are probably going to be alive to witness the birth of a modern industrial religion. Hell, I'd argue that modernity is barely a hundred years old or so, for what it's worth. Before then there was a LOT of infant and youth mortality, and I think that that changed things quite a bit. Germ theory was a game changer: African peasants have better health outcomes than Roman emperors and their children.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
He is the world elite of the violent class. The modern equivalent of a knight, loaded down with many years' wages' worth of technology, weapons and armor.
The knights of yore were essentially ye olde officers, no? Leading troops in battle, managing a bunch of squires and militiamen and whatnot, stuff like that...like a cross between Green Berets and modern day officers or something. Granted, I'm a civilian, no military experience but have family that were officers.
Also, an arithmetic error - those 100k guys are not 3/10,000 of a percent, they're more like 3/100 of a percent of the US population of around 300m people.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, sterile individuals can provide a hell of a lot more care to their siblings and extended family than dead ones.
SkookumTree
9mo ago
That is not a way that anything can work.
Victorian-style purity standards applied to men, not women, certainly seems...interesting. Women are allowed to be sexual; men are expected to be chaste and virtuous. This would be an interesting thing indeed.
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.
More options
Context Copy link