Tollund_Man4
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User ID: 501
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.
What's nebulous and philosophical about it? I could call it common sensical and immediately intuitive: you're becoming absorbed in cheap pleasures at the cost of living up to your potential.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Bringing the most powerful people in society slightly more in line with the level of safety the rest of us make do with? I'll bite that bullet.
Tollund_Man4
7mo ago
How quickly did you think that the story is entirely made up?
Does it matter if it is? It being real just means something unlikely happened to someone who is nobody to you.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
If you're only doing that because you want people to find you more attractive and not because the progress justifies itself I think there would be a problem. Would this stuff be worthwhile even if it didn't get you attention from women? It should be, and you're not going to surpass any heavy lifters if you're relying on a steady increase in female attention for motivation i.e. onlymenaremiring.png.
Another point the book makes, which I mentioned before, is that no strategy really seems to pay clear and great dividends
Surely the dividends of self-improvement are just that, self-improvement? If someone is only improving themselves in shallow ways to get girls then perhaps this would be better categorised as fraud. This point is more than a quibble about definitions, as women find the moral qualities (or lack thereof) which motivate men to be attractive or repulsive in themselves.
Lately I’ve greatly improved both my wealth and general status, and yet success has been sorely lacking
Wealth and social status certainly play a part in attraction but perhaps there are certain personality traits people fail to display which makes this all for naught, wealth and social status alone don't make it pleasant to spend hours with someone after all. Tattoo artists don't have much wealth or (outside of being the best of the best) social status, but they get laid a lot as spending hours distracting someone from physical pain while they talk about their life is great empathy training.
Tollund_Man4
6mo ago
and saying rich men won’t enter heaven
I'm not that well read on the Bible but isn't the point of that verse to say that even the rich (seen as the most blessed) can't get into heaven without the grace of God? If the point is to say that material well-being wins you no points with God, placing so much weight on a materialist philosophy like Marxism seems to be making the same mistake in reverse.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.
Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I don't think it would be an absurdity to assert that the mass of people may be wrong.
Tollund_Man4
11mo ago
Causes like communism, that moved hundreds of millions and turned the Earth asunder, are now just forgotten or reduced to cosplay attire.
Communism wasn't that big in the US in the first place, it seems like it being forgotten in the US isn't much evidence in favour of it being forgotten in the places where those hundreds of millions were moved.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.
It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I haven't paid much attention to Peterson in a few years, but is he really that popular?
He's certainly up there.
But more to the point, when I did used to pay attention him, he never advocated the carnivore diet for others but just talked about it as something he and his daughter found useful.
"Advocate the diet for others" seems like an unnecessary qualification. Vegans excepted, the dietary lefties OP complain's about don't usually do that either. The annoyance is more sparked by their expectation to be accommodated than their trying to convince you to their diet.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
If they have access to guns, then they could form militias and wage an insurgency against the government if they wanted
And if they don't have access to guns, they import them, just as the IRA did (much easier now in the era of sophisticated drug trafficking networks). A legal right to guns seems helpful, but not necessary.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
I don't know about you but in my school we were watching porn before anyone was having sex. I really doubt that men are exhausting other avenues of achieving sexual satisfaction before going to porn. It's another case of the easier if poorer substitute outcompeting the real thing, and the substitute gets quite a head start.
I get it, pursuing women is hard. It is expensive in terms of money and opportunity cost, it opens you up to embarrassment, it requires a lot of self-development if you've got poor social skills, and it's worse these days if you don't have the right look for Tinder, but whenever I start making excuses, or hear someone else doing it, I have to ask 'how did your last 10 attempts go? Oh you didn't even make 10 attempts? Well there you go.'
I won't post a selfie, but I've been likened to both Ricky Hatton and Triple H, and still rarely has it not worked out for me when I've actually been trying.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
I really think this is a bad/unproductive framing. How exactly is it fraud if the quality of the good is raised, and not just the marketing of it?
There's no distinction being made between quality of a person (which has inherent value) and marketing is my point. If we judge things solely by the metric of getting women building bigger muscles is just a more effortful alternative to peacocking or practicing pickup lines, marketing and quality are just different strategies geared towards the same end.
Maybe I'm just being a poor decoupler, but in the same way that a Christian would be offended at someone saying that going to Church paid no dividends in their dating life I want to shout 'you're missing the point!'.
Tollund_Man4
10mo ago
The other thing to contemplate is the question of why misdeeds/debts should be carried forward to be paid back later by one's descendants, whilst positive achievements/credits aren't?
Positive achievements usually benefit the achiever's group primarily, and other groups only incidentally. Do we all still owe the British for sparking off the industrial revolution? Maybe we do, but then again history's largest empire is a fairly decent reward too. Misdeeds on the other hand are felt directly, they motivate people to demand redress far more than an Italian would be motivated to ask for compensation for his people's contributions to architecture.
There are cases where the credits of one group are carried over across generations, the memory of the Choctaw Indians donating money to Irish famine relief in the 1847 was the basis for a GoFundMe campaign to solicit a fairly successful fundraising campaign for COVID relief in 2020.
Other justifications not mentioned above include retribution and rehabilitation
Arguably retribution is just another form of deterrence, except this time the state is deterring the victims' friends and relatives from taking revenge on criminals (likely to get out of hand when it's a personal beef) by carrying out a more measured form of revenge.
Niether the friends of the victim nor the friends of the perpetrator are happy with the state's decision, but in both cases just enough punishment and just enough fairness has been shown that no one is going to risk jail to fill the gap in justice which the state has left.
Tollund_Man4
4mo ago
I haven’t played Victoria 3 but my experience with other Paradox games is that you have to read a few guides and ask questions on the related subreddits to actually understand how to play. You could be 100 hours in and still not be certain about the workings of certain mechanics.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.
Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.
Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.
Tollund_Man4
9mo ago
Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.
This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Are you talking about it not being feasible in America or it not being feasible at all? All of these policies have been succesfully implemented in other countries at one point in another.
Contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 until 1980, most Western countries outside of the US have strict controls on guns and there's no desire to reverse this, drugs are much harder to get in Singapore and far less people are addicted to them in East Asia than in North America and Western Europe, alcohol use is much less prevelant in Islamic countries.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
There is no analogue, because generally men describe ugly women as having good friendly open personalities, and thin women as having relatively arrogant personalities.
What makes you say this? Sounds more like a media trope than anything else, especially when attractive women benefit from the halo effect.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
As for 2, doesn't that logic apply to any act and not just the decision to go vegan?
This seems more a reason to deem utilitarianism a useless framework for guiding one's actions than anything else.
Tollund_Man4
1yr ago
Hotkeys for formatting in comments would be nice. Right now I have to click the icon or type in the markdown to get italics, it would be nice to be able to just hit ctrl + i and summon **.
Tollund_Man4
8mo ago
Right, maybe that discomfort is also the feedback by which people are motivated to stay in shape. If I go for a cycle and feel terrible, the cycling itself won't have done much for me but it will be a wake up call for me to cut down on smoking/drinking/gaining weight (or if I'm feeling lazy, a wake up call to quite cycling).
I'm not a vegan myself but I don't think citing the hedonistic aspect of a morally questionable act as justification would fly anywhere else, why let it settle the argument here?
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