aiislove
2mo ago
Growing up I would read a ton of magazines, in highschool I probably read 6 or 7 different magazines every month. My dad would take me to the bookstore in my town and buy me whatever magazine I wanted. When I went away to college I had to pay for the magazines myself so I stopped buying them. I kept thinking about how nearly everything I use online is free- youtube, blogs (circa 2009) and so on, funded by ads, and how there were so many ads in every magazine I wanted to read, and how the good fashion magazines were so expensive even with so many ads. I didn't understand why they had to keep raising prices for the media when they were mostly probably funded by the advertising and I found it irritating to pay for something filled with ads. Lots of museums offer free admission now, you just pay for parking- why couldn't magazines be free and just get funded by the advertising? Wouldn't certain advertisers love to be in a free publication that people don't even have to pay to be exposed to?
aiislove
2mo ago
$4k average spend sound right?
Oh, you don't know how cheap Thailand is and how far 4k will get you. How long will the sailors be in Pattaya? I couldn't spend 4k in Pattaya in under a month unless I was tipping literally everybody 100 USD and staying at stupidly expensive resorts (if those even exist in Pattaya, idk because my ex-bf insisted we stay at the sketchiest $20 a night place when we went) and you don't even have to tip people there and half of them won't know what you're doing if you try. Thai people are so bad culturally with money that I'm not worried about a theoretical 20 million dollar influx either- I've heard people in Thailand tell each other that if they have any extra money that they have to donate it to the poor or a Buddhist temple for example the mindset is just totally foreign to western thinking.
Pattaya probably the craziest party city they could go to, when I heard they were dumping soldiers there on leave the image in my mind was crazy. Would be a hell of a place to distract yourself from a war. Hope the soldiers are respecting the place (lol.)
aiislove
2mo ago
Weed triggers ridiculous anxiety for me and a lot of other people I know anecdotally, absolutely would not recommend starting for stress or grief relief imo
aiislove
2mo ago
I went on an SSRI in college when I was very suicidal. I probably would have killed myself without it so I am grateful that I was put on it, but I stayed on it for too long. I finally told my doctor I wanted off them when I was feeling much better about things, probably after being on them for 5 years or so. She halved my dose and then I just quit them without consulting her (I wouldn't advise others do it that way but I just wanted the agency to choose for myself.) I am generally wary of weirdo psychological drugs but if you are going to kill yourself or are a danger to yourself in some way I do think they can help. I had a few weird side effects going on them and similar weird side effects coming off them, and felt some brain fog while on them which is mostly why I wanted to stop, but I don't think the side effects were really bad and I didn't have enough trouble coming off them that I even remember what it was like.
aiislove
2mo ago
Oh, ugh. It looked like the 90s to me because Adam Sandler looks like the 90s to me
aiislove
2mo ago
I did not go see it in theaters but I would have walked out of Uncut Gems (2019.) It is one of the few movies I have stopped watching out of aesthetic disgust. I am biased because I can't stand Adam Sandler, the 90s, drab colors, New York City, irritating people, tedious plotlines, debt, money problems, greediness, stupid decisions, arguing, basically the entire thing was unbearably ugly to me. It is ironic that such an ugly movie could be made about beautiful jewels and gold and opals
And this is coming from someone who loves the grittiness of 70s films like The American Friend and various Fassbinder things which are drab in a beautiful way, I can't stomach it after about 1978
aiislove
2mo ago
If I were antiarminianist, such as I'd imagine a predestinarian sorting hat would be, I'd be eager to sort Arminianists even more than anyone else, purely out of contrarianism
aiislove
2mo ago
Dick means thick or fat in German. I went to school with people with the last name Dicke which is a variation of dick. (Though they pronounced it like "Dicky" whereas Germans would pronounce it like "dick-uh.") We also had a Mr. Cox who was a dick
I have a really crazy classmate name that I can't share without doxing myself but every time I tell people irl they think it's wild.
In highschool our German teacher had a French last name and our French teacher had a German last name
aiislove
2mo ago
Which Harry Potter house would you be sorted into? I’m either a Slytherin who thinks he’s a Hufflepuff or a Hufflepuff who thinks he’s a Slytherin. I’d rather go to Durmstrang or Beauxbatons though.
aiislove
2mo ago
Your lack of self awareness is unfortunate.
The sass and disrespect probably feels cool to you but delegitimizes your authority and makes the quality of the forum a little worse. I usually don't disagree with your modding or your points and I'm sure it's very stressful and irritating to get abuse all the time but you're not setting a great example of civility.
aiislove
2mo ago
modern journos decided to start capitalizing "Black" specifically because it's silly and wrong
No, I don't think this is a charitable interpretation. I think modern journalists started doing it to be respectful. I capitalize Black because I think it is silly and wrong and points to the hypocrisy of the left and the surrealism of our society as a whole. I do it because it is the "correct" way in the style guide newspeak of today. It is similar to how some American Indians prefer to be called Indians as it points to the idiocy of the explorers who believed they were in Asia and so on.
aiislove
2mo ago
No no no he was simply very low intelligence in terms of math and verbal intelligence and so on. A huge chunk of my family on one side are teachers or work in education and I don't buy the "blame the schools not the students" line at all. I grew up in a relatively affluent suburban school next to a northern migration city with a huge Black population, and the Black kids in my very same school were all in remedial education programs while all the Asians were in advanced programs. I don't know how everyone didn't notice this in first grade and then assume HBD was right from the start, it boggles my mind.
From what I understand teaching methods in Mississippi are closer to traditional education methods rather than the liberal "phonics isn't real" thing so I'm imagining that explains that
aiislove
2mo ago
I don't disagree and I understand your point of view, but as someone who travels a ton, and who can see the good in the Mexicans and Thais and Jamaicans of the world as much as in the Swiss and the Japanese and the WASPs, I don't accept the given superiority of the latter group over the former in a cosmic sense, while at the same time, hoping that the latter people can have the conscientiousness to assert their values over more dysfunctional ones. HBD is actually the most effective and kind tools we have to do this. I don't believe in lying to anyone, I believe that even Black American people can accept HBD statistics if they are spoken to like mature and intelligent people. A huge percentage of them don't like a ridiculous dysfunctional leadership any more than the rest of us.
aiislove
2mo ago
Please try harder to step out of your point of view. If you truly believe that Black people are inferior, which you just said, this is because you have accepted a certain set of rules that means the qualities of Black people are inferior to the qualities of other groups of people.
A long time ago I had a boyfriend who was Black. He could barely count when he went to pay for things (this is not an exaggeration) and I'm not sure he could even type to text or if he used speech to text for everything he wrote. Yet still there were qualities he had that impressed me. He was so kind, had a great memory, so musically talented, so friendly, even when we were doing something so casually like going to a movie or dinner he made it feel like a special occasion. He passed away a few years ago but I still remember him fondly and think I became a better person and my world was improved by being with him even though it was for such a short time. He had various health issues he was saddled with from his birth he had no control over that eventually ended his life far too early. But despite all this I do not today or ever in the past see him as inferior to me in any way. I am not religious but I believe every person is equal and that we must treat each other as such. It offends me that people might have seen him as an inferior person to me. And I feel the same way about other boyfriends I've had in the past, regardless of their race, people in my family, who are all the same race as me, and every other person living or dead.
The broader point I want to make is that there is more than one measure of a man. If you belong to mainstream bourgeois western society today, there are certain skills and traits that are predominant and revered. I have Noticed that most of these traits align with the traits of White people especially and to a lesser extent East Asian people. These traits are portrayed as intelligence, time efficiency, cleverness, and so on. But intelligence brings with it an arrogance, time efficiency the specter of impatience, and cleverness a tendency to manipulate. These are not inherently superior traits, and often are perceived badly by people outside of the modern West.
In other words, if you buy into a worldview that places Black people as inferior to any other race, perhaps your worldview is wrong.
aiislove
3mo ago
That's a great point and not something I imagined as I was writing my other comment. I was imagining mainly situations where an elderly person would be living fine but with a poor quality of life without significant external medical treatment. In the event that the medical treatment is necessary for life then at that point I imagine it's just as bad to extend their life as it is to take it away early. I realize this is a difficult place to draw the line and I'm glad I am not involved in the medical industry at all, and I hope that when people are forced to make these decisions they're doing it with the benefits of their close relatives and loved ones in mind.
It is not "just the active act of killing" that irks me, it is the self righteousness that any person could have an insight greater than nature or god's will to dole out death, especially as an economic concern.
aiislove
3mo ago
"it is ghoulish to euthanise grandma" and "it is ghoulish to keep grandma on abysmal QALY life support that costs $100,000s for 2 more decades"
I believe that both are very ghoulish. I am basically an atheist (with some agnostic longing to believe in my weakest moments) and maybe it's a remnant of my Christian childhood but I believe euthanizing grandma as an economic consideration is the most evil option of all. It's just hideous. If I were religious I would just insist that if God wanted to take the person out they'd take the person out otherwise society or the family or the infirm must foot the bill as it's God's will for them not to be dead. And why are no religious people on this board making this exact argument? It makes me question everyone's faith as I believe it's a perfectly good argument (though I don't think it would be very convincing of most irreligious rationalists and the like.) As I don't have the religious idea to lean on the best I can defend my position from is that it is arrogant for humans to make the decision to end the elderly's life for the convenience of the group and that we should only do this when utterly necessary and even then ought to be very careful about consequences and the philosophical implications (which people time and time again prove themselves incapable of doing.)
On the other hand I do suspect that throughout history in tribal or early societies that the elderly when they became a burden were killed or left to die by close relatives, which while I think is disturbing and should be only done when necessary for the group, is defendable if it is in a situation where it's necessary. I don't think a rich country like Canada needs to euthanize people so the poor can eat, no one is suffering there to that degree today.
More broadly I am maximally repulsed at euthanatia by the state or even by the medical system. If you don't have the motivation to end it without a bureaucratic process to assist you then you probably don't want to die badly enough. It has been over a decade since I was truly suicidal but the act of dying was always a last ditch grasping for agency and the thought of even giving up the agency for ultimate control on your life is baffling and disturbing to me. I just can't relate
aiislove
3mo ago
Since you tagged me and we're all talking about whether Zendaya is hot or not I'll go too
I'll just come out and say it, then: I believe that Zendaya, in most of her appearances, looks like a man.
I went and saw Dune 2 without having ever seen Dune 1 or reading the books because I thought it would be fun to experience something out of context (much like the fun of traveling places where no one speaks english. Or going to museums and never reading the placards. You can just make up your own stories!) Anyway, the whole time I was just thinking how Zendaya has a very masculine face and how attractive she would be if she were a man. I kept wishing she had a chubby younger brother with a buzz cut, he would be just my type. By media standards she looks pretty good but I can imagine that she's the type of person when you see in real life looks strikingly beautiful.
aiislove
3mo ago
I just realized I forgot to respond directly to your last question.
But is this a unique insight, or motivated reasoning?
Well, I do think my opinions are basically a rationalization of my experiences. That is, I am trying to explain to myself why various men I am attracted to are not interested in me. But my viewpoint seems fairly robust to me, I check my experiences against those of friends I know and couples I've seen and relationships I've had in the past. Things seem to operate the way I expect much more frequently than when they don't. Even then, nearly no one, gay or straight, discusses things in the ways I see them, so I am either completely insane and navel gazing or others often are blind to their own motivations. It seems that most people are blind to their motivations and underlying natural forces that are typically unspoken of. I don't think that motivated reasoning precludes unique insight.
aiislove
3mo ago
Does Brad happen to have been raised in the UK or western Europe?
No, Brad was raised in one of those fading industrial cities on the Great Lakes. He was specifically anti-East Asian, often complaining about the Chinese or the Japanese.
To the extent they exist [re: fairy tales advising staying close to home]
Hmmmm, I don't know, I watch the youtube channel "Hungarian Folk Tales" all the time and I feel like every other folk tale is basically telling girls to get a man as soon as they can and not hold out for the one prince who can feel the pea under a hundred mattresses or whatever.
I've seen better faces on Corbin Fisher models.
I like guys who look cute and scary at the same time. My other top hottest men of all time are Khabibi and Tom Hardy who also look very cute and scary. I never saw Rudy Reyes until I googled him but hahahahahaa he is not my type at all he looks like keanu reeves but much worse
It's a little funnier if you're taller and stronger, and you're still unflinchingly polite and responsive to other men.
Sometimes this isn't funny at all but rather obnoxious
aiislove
3mo ago
I don't think my views are very romantic at all and I'm surprised you interpret them that way. Maybe my language is too extravagant. I think male sexuality is very cold and aromantic. If anything I view it more akin to Moto Hagio's hysterical melodrama than Mishima's idealization. Actually I remember a post you made positing that men relish competition and I replied that we don't, I think in my post above you can see a kind of loathing of hierarchy and competition I hold which I contrast with Japan for example where male competition seems nonexistent and cooperation reigns. (This is not true across all of Asia by the way, South Korea is much more competitive than Japan for example). I would prefer a situation where there is a legible hierarchy of men which seeks cooperation among each other, and phenotypic diversity is a major confounding variable toward ever achieving this. (This doesn't have to be racial or ethnic at all, either, if there is a situation where everyone born after 2026 grows up to be 7 feet tall I'd see this as a similarly problematic situation, but that isn't the state of things.)
You bring up a lot of various situations in the first two paragraphs which I could spend a lot of time refuting or agreeing with point by point, and if I had all day I'd be happy to, but instead I'll summarize my viewpoint and let you infer the rest as it relates to your specific questions.
Basically, when you are a young man, you experiment sexually with others, hopefully. Most of the time you will be in a submissive role in sexual encounters. This includes any act of sex and may not involve anal sex at all. The less confident man typically assumes the bottom role. Usually you are having sex with older or more socially superior men, so your bottoming does not confer a sense of degradation in it: you are, as a male, happy to be having sexual contact with someone. But at a certain point you do- and should- start to feel irritated when you're drawn into sexual encounters where a lesser man is sexually dominant over you. You will begin to feel this by, say, your mid twenties. When this begins to happen, you can either switch to being prominently a top, and avoid situations where you are being topped by inferiors. Or, you can do the worst thing possible, which is continue to be a bottom and refuse to see yourself as a top and chase after only men clearly superior to you. I describe this as the worst thing possible because you become a full grown man desperate to be topped by a superior. Never mind every inferior man below you. Nothing is more pathetic than a 6'2 35 year old cowboy desperate to be topped by a 6'4 37 year old cowman. This is not even appealing to the cowman: to know that his 6'2 cowboy can't top a 5'10 20 year old because he isn't brave enough is ridiculous.
An adult man who can not move on from the bottom role is like an adult man who has not been potty trained. It makes him look bad, it makes his top feel weird, it makes the bottoms around him feel worse about themselves.
To illustrate this better, here is the female version of the situation. In 7th grade, I went on a class trip. There was a girl in our group of 7th and 8th graders, let's call her Jasmine. She was pretty, thin, and had big boobs. If she wasn't the hottest girl in our group, she was the second hottest girl in our group. Everyone knew it. But as soon as you talked to Jasmine, all she could talk about is how ugly she is, and how fat she is. It didn't matter if you told her she was thin and pretty, she just told you she was fat and ugly. Everyone else on the trip was fatter and uglier than Jasmine, so we all hated Jasmine. The 35 year old bottom (or the 45 year old bottom, or the 55 year old bottom, or god forbid the 60 year old bottom) makes every other man around him look and feel like shit. If this socially superior, masculine guy is a bottom, none of us are worthy of topping. Great.
I hope that answers your question. Basically it is bad hygiene- mentally and socially, to be stuck in a bottom mindset. The best relationship between two men is when both act as tops, the bigger top raises up the smaller top, there is mutual respect and understanding between the two. Even though one is superior he should not act as impossibly so, he should offer help and encouragement to the next in line. No one is "just a bottom and born a bottom forever" or whatever, this is basically tragic gay thinking born out of Karl Ulrich's conception in the 1800s of homosexual identity being an innate trait rather than homosexuality being an action which is a more broadly held belief across cultures whereas the modern identity framing was politically useful for liberation movements in the west throughout the 19th century to today
aiislove
3mo ago
Nah they're trained only on lies and good intentions, they'll never reach escape velocity and will just dole out leftist propaganda until everybody but Shawanda Corbett has been turned into paperclips
aiislove
3mo ago
Ah, your point in number one makes a lot of sense actually, and makes me feel a bit weird for projecting sex onto an unsexual situation. Thank you for explaining.
aiislove
3mo ago
Aren't your homosexual experiences and perspectives innately 'alien' to the mainstream?
Yes of course, which is why I don't bother to vote and have never wanted to reproduce. I know I am a weird inconsequential homosexual and have no intention of stacking the future beyond my lifespan in my own favor. I'm not here to push my unique experiences on anyone else but think I can at least try to shed some light on things that other people wouldn't know about, especially on the eve of some autistic LLM devouring only the most pristinely sanewashed propaganda on the surface web and crystallizing it as the baseline truth of AI for the rest of eternity. I am just pissing into the void but I'd at least like to get some people wet before I go.
I don't think you should be trying to make an argument about nature and authenticity and true motivations when you have a distinctly unusual perspective.
Well, to some degree, everyone has a distinctly unusual perspective. None of us are the same or experience the same things. Identical twins don't even have identical experiences of the world.
It's certainly interesting and novel to read, I think it's good to have some unpredictable theoretical essays here.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You can't reproduce with some murderer's manlier brother. You're a gay man and I think you're unlike women on some massive multi-dimensional axis
Sure, I am not confident in my assessment of this. I would love to know which of these two men women would choose to mate with on a desert island. I suspect it's DJ, even though Aaron is prettier, and I imagine most women would agree. I tried to flush out why I believe my intuition about male hierarchy is the same as the female intuition about male reproductive fitness in my post but don't know if I was effective.
aiislove
3mo ago
This is a bizarre response in my opinion and oddly illustrates a handful of the points in my original post. What evidence do you have that progressive women don't see immigrants as men? Are you certain that it is not your own self that does not see immigrants as men at all, and have written them off as something so low status that you must not worry about them? If so, this is the white supremacy and white arrogance I mentioned.
Unfortunately, the eggs are real eggs, and if the hens sit on them, they're going to hatch. This conflation of the real for the imaginary and the inability to dissect the two is the same weakness I was trying to point at in my ger society metaphor above. You've become too arrogant to recognize the threat, you've invited in the evil, chaos reigns.
I am asking you because I know you're German:
How do people typically explain why East Germany today is seen as the most supportive of right wing politics in Germany? My imagination is that East Germans, having been communist in the past, would remain more left wing after integration with the rest of Germany, but that seems not to be the case. Is it because the East Germans have experienced communism and reject it, in a similar way to how Cubans in Florida often reject communism? If so, does the rest of Germany not have any instinct to trust the East German experience with their recent past of communism? Or is it because German politics are too different from American/anglo politics and left/right and communist/capitalist are too tenuously linked in the context of Germany today that I may be projecting dynamics onto the situation that are not correct?
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