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
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
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
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
11mo ago
both participants are on the same page about the stopping point
Yep. A lot of guys are going to tap as soon as they realize that they're blacking out or can't offer any more meaningful resistance against their opponent. That eliminates a lot of the danger right there.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
SkookumTree
6mo ago
Prison cells are also supported by guards, unlike apartments. Can't bring a sledgehammer into a prison cell.
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
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
11mo ago
The reason our society is so reflexively disgusted by Hitler is because we have mostly internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live, and the man with the tiny moustache represents the polar opposite of that.
He also more or less tore up an awful lot of the...gentleman's agreements, written in blood, that let people live in relative peace without slaughtering each other. He was brilliant: I will give him that. Without his intelligence he would have been unable to do so much evil.
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
10mo ago
And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status.
I am not sure how much this would matter. Imagine if winding up in the body you would have had if you'd been born the other sex, or just a lab-grown body indistinguishable from the real thing, cost you around three months' wages for the median worker. This wouldn't be a trivial expense by any means, but it would be within the reach of average, determined people. Now you've got Mike, who's always felt that he was a woman and ever since he was 13 he's been saving up for this. He finally plunks down close to twenty grand of his hard-earned cash age 21, and gets his lab-grown body. There's some adjusting to do, and some learning, but is Mary (formerly Mike) a "real woman"? He's lived twenty-one years of his life as a man...but now, Mary's body is indistinguishable from that of a natal female. Mary's brain might be a little bit different. But if this was possible in 2200, and we dumped Mary into a time machine to the present day, we would just think that Mary was a little weird and call it a day.
Is Mary's behavior likely to be so different that it'll make her stand out, and people would "clock" her as one of the Labgrown?
Also: why isn't the transgender movement pumping its fundraising efforts into this type of research? Yes, it might still be a century away, but still. Progress in this area could be incredibly valuable for lots of things, not just trans stuff.
SkookumTree
11mo ago
I know that this sounds barbaric, but perhaps we could use something like flogging for these kids. Yes, it would have an unfortunate resemblance to slavery. Yes, it might leave marks, but figuring out how to beat someone or cause them pain without scarring them isn’t a terribly hard thing to do.
It also sounds like it might be a good idea to do this to adults for a first-time misdemeanor offense, maybe some minor felonies. Maybe expunge the whole thing from the record after a few years of good conduct.
SkookumTree
11mo ago
I mean. I've only dabbled in martial arts as a teenager. I might've earned a stripe or two on my white belt; I'm no badass martial artist. I've been choked out a few times doing BJJ. I was 5'6" and 130, and most of the guys were bigger and stronger. But when you get choked out by someone who knows what they're doing, you black out and go limp. After that, the other guy lets you go.
This was a case of a wild dude against a guy who didn't really know what he was doing. Also, three guys is kind of too few to restrain a man like that without risking seriously injuring or killing the other guy...when I was on the psych ER we generally wanted the ratio to be more like six or eight to one.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
That is interesting. I suppose that it boils down to "can you essentially emancipate yourself" which is kind of admirable in practice. There are some that have extremely strong convictions that they're straight up willing to die over. I am not sure how many trans kids have that strong of convictions; if they do, that is to be respected.
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
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
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.
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.
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