BANNED USER: Repetitive one-note posting about his suicide trip
SkookumTree
No bio...
User ID: 2117
Banned by: @Amadan
SkookumTree
1yr ago
If the cartel's coming after me, my choices are presumably between dying a slow and miserable death at the hands of the cartel...or dying a swifter death in a shootout with said cartel, hopefully after taking some of the bastards to Hell with me.
In a modern environment with firearms available to most and effective poison and high explosives available to those with the technical knowledge or connections, this just results in a bunch of people blowing themselves up or shooting it out with whoever is trying to catch them.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
This is...at least adjacent to autoimmune diseases if not outright autoimmune. Autoimmune disease is fairly poorly understood by medicine, and often gets lumped in with people that are faking or malingering plus people who have something like conversion disorder. And to complicate matters further, there's shit like complex regional pain syndrome...it's a fucking mess, and there is not usually a very good way of telling genuine assholes from people that really need a specific diet.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Can you imagine being invited to a thanksgiving diner, and an upside down whole-roasted-dog is served to you on a platter
I would be shocked, depending on where I was and who was inviting me. I might partake, depending on how I felt about my friends...and the origin of that dog. Dogs aren't any more intelligent than pigs, and we eat them all the time; I don't see much of an ethical problem with dog consumption. I just find it culturally icky as an American. I suppose if it would've been killed anyway by a kill shelter or something I'd be OK with it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Maybe slightly, just because a lot of leftist I know are a bit neurotic and hypochondriac. Food "sensitivities" are very trendy among them, and they obsess over their state of the mind and body after ingesting seemingly random ingredients that have been brought to their attention, like gluten, soy or nightshades. Then they draw all sorts of spurious conclusions between a food item and some vague, probably psychosomatic phenomena like "brain fog", "bloating" or "gas".
Consider MCCX theory as an explanation for this. I find it plausible as a theory, but wouldn't bet the farm on it being true. Basically, hypermobility, autism, ADHD, autoimmune disorders, and allergies are a "cluster". Because of this cluster, you've got flexible, autistic, often androgynous, intelligent people moving to big cities. Why? Because hypermobility and manual-labor careers don't mix well.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
We all need like one of that person in our friend group. It's a niche...the kind but very blunt person.
"Dude, you've only done, fucking, 225, and you're going for fucking 315? Shit, man, that's dumb as fuck...OK, I'll spot you, but again. This is dumb as hell. Mike, could you get over here, get on this end of the bar?"
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It applies less: I knew short guys that were competing in physique bodybuilding competitions. It didn't help them much with women; their partners were invariably morbidly obese.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. I suppose that the risk of a shootout might be prevented through stringent security measures or something, but there is also the risk of deliberate sabotage by desperate and highly stressed workers. Overall doesn't seem like a great idea, best to leave it at life imprisonment. Maybe the firing squad or something, if the proof is strong enough.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
This is why 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.
What do you think?
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.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Sure, I understand imprisoning or even executing people for this kind of negligence. Even expecting people to literally fall on their sword. But the torture shit goes a bit too far. Why allow yourself to be taken alive? Why cooperate? How do you get people to cooperate?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
African countries are piss-poor at tracking COVID deaths. Their death rates from disease are an order of magnitude higher than ours, so excess mortality statistics are going to be very noisy. Yes, a lot of the deaths were in people that were already vulnerable as hell from old age or diabetes or smoking or something. Let's call that 90 percent of 'em. We still have 10 percent of the dead that would have lived for at least a decade or so in the absence of COVID.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I mean. Sometimes that might be acceptable. But at the end of the day, it basically boils down to this: an irreversible surgical intervention for chronic and otherwise intractable pain.
A 14-year-old or hell a 20-year-old who herniates a disc and wants surgery gets a lot of scrutiny and there is a bit of gatekeeping going on there. This for an operation that is essentially a crapshoot in terms of outcomes and has no politics associated with it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I mean. It might be good or valuable to occasionally roast the living shit out of guys for what are essentially minor awkwardnesses in courtship. It serves as a warning to the ugly, or the unpopular, or the awkward: If you try to have a relationship, you are playing by different rules. It can extend as far as expecting an individual to be celibate for life and never express interest in sex or relationships, if you're disabled. This doesn't just go for guys...women that are very unattractive or disabled get this treatment as well.
Didn't someone take him aside when he was 19 and tell him that he can't do things like other men can? That it was basically understood that he would never have a partner, and that people would be grossed out at him for wanting one?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It is also necessary to do things like this to encourage the others...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I mean, the disability theorists have been talking about the special case where you are literally Quasimodo for at least what, 20 years? Quasimodo and his equally-ugly sister don't get to openly want sex or relationships. Otherwise, they're gross and transgressive and at least Quasimodo is creepy. Usually this is dealt with by discreetly taking young Quasimodo aside and explaining what is going on, if he's not socially apt enough to figure things out for himself.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I mean, these guys are essentially clueless spergs. The Human Resources meme depicts a guy doing something that is, at best, crossing the line a bit. Hot guy gets away with it, fat ugly guy is busted. Fat ugly guy should have known long before he got to the workplace that he can't do the shit that Adonis gets away with. We see it in lots of aspects of life...the rich guy gets off because he can afford a great lawyer, the poor guy gets railroaded.
It would probably be a lot easier and simpler if we just were more explicit about expecting unattractive people to be celibate for life and take some kind of prosocial job that didn't mesh well with family life, like truck driving or travel nursing.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
The exact mechanism here is that they are offended that (they think) a low-status male believes he has a chance with them.
Yes, and there's a broader generalization in that other men may be uncomfortable or find it gross that this man even has a sexuality in the first place; for unattractive people, the only really socially safe thing to do is to work hard at repressing your sexuality and making people believe that you want nothing more than to dedicate your life to something noble and that you are not in a relationship because you are too busy doing that. This is a fig leaf and a polite fiction, but most people will buy that.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I think people really miss how dehumanizing that is, the idea that you can't do something that other people around you can do.
I mean...women and minorities get The Talk - yep, the one - as teenagers. Why not ugly men, from older guys that they trust? Fathers, uncles, older male friends. Nothing wrong with that.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Not trolling or sarcastic; I've seen things like this happen IRL. Hell, something like that happened to me around that age.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Is there a point at which friends/society will roast a guy worse for having a fat girlfriend than no girlfriend at all?
Yeah, probably - if she is 600 pounds and you are washing her fat folds every day and wiping her butt you're probably past that point.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I don't know. I'd think that artists were pretty libertine and unconventional at least since the Renaissance. No idea what, say, the Indian or Ancient Greek version of Michelangelo was like...or what artists were like in, say, Tang Dynasty China.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
And what about those who draw terrible hands all night long - and choose to leave the game? The 5'4" doctor will wind up at best in a relationship with someone who is only using him for his money; at worst he will be a nurse and caretaker to a wife who is in and out of some kind of institution or other. Hospital, jail, rehab - he takes his pick, but if he wants a partner, the only real question is whether he will be treated as a walking ATM, or a nurse and caretaker.
Is it any wonder, then, that the short men I've known are all - with one exception, and he's a neurosurgery resident with enough charisma for a career in politics - have chosen to "focus on their career" or are "too busy to date"?
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. But I guess...I think that a lot of middle class schools have gone too soft. Take stuff like zero-tolerance. It'd be a good idea to have at least a cursory attempt to find out who started it...if Bully punches Victim and Victim grows a pair and decides to fight back they both eat a suspension. Incentives are all fucked up.
So too: we've got stuff like...1) people crapping on someone that doesn't shower, calling them Stinky or some shit like that. They can probably fix that problem, and if they can't there are larger issues at play. Then you've got shit like 2) assholes bullying a kid on crutches by repeatedly kicking his crutches out from under him and causing him to fall. These are not the same.
I've heard stories of things that are closer to 2)...Tonya Harding tier shit where a bunch of jealous guys ganged up on a star football player, punching him when no one was looking and eventually pushing him down a flight of stairs. Guy broke his leg, but returned to football the next year.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I suspect that these things follow a power law...for both bullies and victims. There are some bullies who are really good at being bullies and bully a lot; there are some poor motherfuckers who are simply bait for said assholes. You've got some mix of voluntary bad conduct AND immutable characteristics in there. That mixture varies. On one end you've got the guy that genuinely is an asshole, on the other you've got the guy who's IDK black in an all-white school in the middle of nowhere. Admittedly - that is becoming dated, but 40 years ago that was very much a thing that happened.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Was anyone killed or maimed? I've known people that went to schools where bodies were being hauled out once or twice a year. Perhaps that is a bit high of a price to put on social gracefulness, but there might be a point in some of it. I've heard stories of people who had their classmates attempt to light them on fire when they were seventh-graders because they were gay in Texas in the 70s; I don't know how the attempt turned out.
The kicker: his teacher egged them on.
In practice: they would make sure to have a supply of cyanide capsules or something in the lab: they wouldn't let themselves be taken alive. I suppose this is an interesting idea. Think you might get busted for a lab leak and tortured? Open up the locked cabinet in the lab, find a sword, and fall on it.
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