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No bio...
User ID: 2225
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2d ago
Roti Prata is delicious. Go to a hawker center get some.
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1mo ago
Thank you for the kind words and the mention (I wouldn't have seen this otherwise). I'm sorry you are going through such a tough time. Feel free to PM me again if you ever want to talk.
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7mo ago
Is this about divorce (the relevant difference here is not actually moral but ontological; the official Catholic line being that divorce is impossible)? About economia in general? Something else? I don't think there are any major differences in moral teaching, so this has got to be about how the teaching is applied, but that comparison doesn't seem to come out with Catholicism-as-actually-practiced (as opposed to in theory) being notably stricter.
So I am kind of confused by this and would like you to elaborate.
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8mo ago
LOL. I regret that I have but one upvote to give for this comment.
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9mo ago
I recommend staying off of social media and away from any other places where people argue about things you care about in ways that you have a bad reaction to. Change your passwords, log out, delete your browser history if you have to. Yes, there are ways to try to deal with it (I think dark is giving good advice) but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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1yr ago
Lawrence's book has a "terminology and definitions" section
You are absolutely right and I should have referred to that first. My bad.
May I ask why not?
Because many of these people are doing things (cross-dressing, usually) which are already seen as shameful, with no pretense of being forced to; plus, doing feminine things is only socially shameful for men, but the desire in question is to be/become a woman. But I've gotten some firsthand pushback on this so probably I was typical-minding here.
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1yr ago
I don't understand this. In my mind, the entire point of the forced feminization fantasy is avoiding the shame in wanting it rather than it being itself shameful, while you seem to be claiming the opposite?
I am either slightly confused or expressed myself confusingly (or both). I'll get back to you if I think of a better way of explaining what I meant.
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1mo ago
This was a great recommendation -- I'm enjoying it very much. It's like the game show version of a puzzle hunt.
Why aren't any American game shows even close to this good?
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1mo ago
I ordered an l-theanine supplement (green tea also has caffeine, I don't want to mix that in and I'm not a huge fan of the flavor anyway) on your advice; the palpitations and insomnia [edit: I think some of the insomnia is secondary to palpitations continuing way past the other effects] sucked (at least the serious jitters were only with the first dose). Would you recommend taking it with the Adderall or in the evening?
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5mo ago
Right, what I was also gesturing at above is that there is probably an additional selection effect, in the form of needing to work the system, for female attracted / AGP people, since their motivations are thought to be more "disreputable" (not sure the right word here).
However, on further reflection, 122 is an astounding mean, even for a combination of selection effects and real differences, and makes me wonder if there is something wrong here. That's a mean substantially larger than what you get pulling only from the population of 4-year college graduates. At this point I think I'll reserve any judgment about the explanation of these numbers.
To be fair, the notions of simplicity at play here are two different ones, so Divine Simplicity is, while not entirely irrelevant, a bit beside the point.
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6mo ago
I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.
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6mo ago
Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.
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6mo ago
Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.
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7mo ago
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
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8mo ago
If you like self-reference and logic (and who doesn't, really?) Gödel, Escher, Bach is a lot of fun.
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9mo ago
Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.
Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.
Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)
On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.
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1yr ago
Yep, I just saw @urquan's post with the same thing, and I think you are right that they are copying that icon. It seems that interpretations of the symbolism differ, which possibly accounts for the difference in red-over-blue (the majority of Orthodox icons) vs blue-over-red (the majority of Catholic icons (?), plus a handful of Orthodox ones).
I have no idea what the artist was thinking.
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1yr ago
Nope, not that one. I was thinking of this one which was posted on /r/rational some years back.
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1yr ago
Not that I can recall. I got a little of the usual crap from peers about being a nerd instead of a masculine/athletic type, but that's not at all the same thing, and they didn't know about any of my more feminine interests (I only had a few -- overall I was within normal "nerd" range). My family didn't care, but then I never did anything like cross-dressing, it was all stuff like "interested in cooking and sewing and likes pretty colors" which hardly counts when there's also "interested in math and computers and likes video games" going on even more prominently.
I just don't get forced feminization fantasies, so maybe the reason I don't find plausible is actually correct but I just don't understand other people's psychology. My fantasy was always either undergoing a magical transformation willingly, or having been female all along (i.e. including imagining a different childhood/puberty). I didn't think the thing I wanted was shameful (although wanting it was, hence why I didn't share it), just impossible. And why would I imagine something unpleasant if there was a pleasant version?
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1yr ago
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1yr ago
Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.
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6mo ago
For what it's worth, I don't disagree that there are other options that don't deny consciousness -- my "I'm a Christian because of the Hard Problem" line is certainly a simplification, and my reasons for being Christian in particular are not a clear-cut, single line of reasoning but a bunch of reasons, intuitions, and experiences, many of which could easily be criticized individually and some of which are not really communicable, that together point me in that direction. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (together with a deep-seated conviction that solipsism, the elephant in the room here, is false) is just the biggest piece.
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7mo ago
Software, actually.
And yeah, the things that are usually written as initialisms are even worse for this.
I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:
as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.
For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.
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