self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14hr ago
I'm not one for New Year's resolutions, though I think they probably serve a useful function in terms of signaling (but not costly enough) and as a form of pre-commitment.
The important things I have to do? Those are already on a schedule. Can't afford to fuck those up. Everything else? Buddy, I'm drowning, the last thing I need is a regimented swimming lesson plan.
There's something about people from warm climates and their relationship with cold weather. My dad lives somewhere where winter means 25°C. I live somewhere where 14°C counts as reasonable t-shirt weather. On our October video calls, he'd be bundled up in a wooly hat and scarf, looking at me like I was insane for wearing shorts.
This extends to dogs, apparently.
When my German Shepherd was born in the middle of winter, my parents insisted he needed a coat. He was maybe two weeks old and had barely figured out walking. With the coat on, he could manage about two steps before toppling over. It was devastatingly cute and completely unnecessary.
I showed them pictures of other German Shepherds the same age playing in actual snow. They had a theory ready: "He was born in India, he isn't built for this climate."
-_-
I want to emphasize that we are talking about a German Shepherd here. Germany, famously, gets cold. The breed standard does not include a clause about thermal sensitivity based on birthplace. And yet.
One of our current dogs is a Golden Retriever who's undersized for his breed, over a year old but unlikely to get bigger. He was born without testicles, which might be related. In winter, at 14°C, he shivers. So he wears a coat now.
The coat used to belong to our first dog, a rescue who was the mother of that German Shepherd puppy. She's been gone for over a decade. The coat is still here, still doing its job, just on a different dog with different-colored fur that it happens to complement nicely.
I started writing this as a joke about my parents' temperature anxiety, but I'm not sure where I ended up. Maybe something about how we take care of things we love even when it's slightly ridiculous, or how objects persist and find new purposes, or just that dogs are great even when they eat your shoes.
The German Shepherd did eventually learn to walk in the coat. We never threw it out. I guess that says something.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Partnered relationships with expectations of sexual exclusivity? What, I can't use my right hand by myself in a relationship?
It is hypocrisy, or at least gross overreach. Most of the women I've known IRL have been neutral to positive towards porn, but the ones who found it objectionable would find it even more objectionable if their boyfriends demanded they stop using their vibrators and reading smut in their spare time. Often they go as far as to claim that smut isn't the same as a porno, since one is coarse and visual, and the other is in the rarefied realms of imagination.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
That's just true of any kind of showbiz?
How many musicians make real money? How many starlets make it big in Hollywood? Are you going to bite the bullet and call those industries exploitative too? So exploitative that they deserve to be shut down? What is the competition ratio and Gini-coefficient worthy of concern?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Availability bias is a hell of a drug. When we say all child stars go crazy, we are ignoring the vast majority who did not. Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan come to mind because their wreckage was photogenic ("leave Britney alone!!"). We tend to ignore the thousands of former child actors who are now working as unremarkable real estate agents or middle-managers in the suburbs. If we look at the high-tier cohort from that era, we find people like Natalie Portman, Kenan Thompson, or Joseph Gordon-Levitt. They seem, by most accounts, to be functioning adults. They didn't have public meltdowns, and they didn't undergo a sudden, jarring pivot into hyper-sexualized branding.
This suggests that the "going crazy" outcome is not a universal law of child stardom, but rather a specific subset of outcomes driven by two things: the personality traits of the children (and parents) who seek high-level fame, and the specific economic demands of the transition from "adorable child" to "adult artist."
Consider the Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez examples. It might be very tempting to view their transition into hyper-sexualized imagery as a psychological rebellion against a father figure or a Disney-enforced childhood. But looking at this through a lens of market signaling, a different picture emerges.
If you are a child star, your brand is built on a specific type of innocence. This brand has a hard expiration date. By the time you are twenty, the Disney Girl persona is a depreciating asset. To survive in the industry, you have to execute a rebranding that is loud enough to signal to the market that you are no longer a child. If you do this subtly, nobody notices, and you simply fade away. If you do it loudly, you successfully kill the old brand and create space for a new one.
The majority of Miley Cyrus's fans today barely remember her cutesy Hannah Montana shtick. She quite successful pivoted, and has done pretty well for herself after the transition. Either way, she couldn't continue as HM indefinitely.
This is not necessarily a sign of "daddy issues" or clinical mental illness. It's a pretty rational response to a career-threatening bottleneck. It is the "I am an adult now" signal amplified to a level where the signal-to-noise ratio overcomes the public's lingering memory of you as a twelve-year-old. The fact that this rebranding often takes the form of hyper-sexuality is less about individual pathology and more about the fact that sexual maturity is the most legible, universal signal of adulthood available in our culture.
There is also a selection effect at play regarding who becomes a top-tier child star in the first place. High-level fame requires a specific type of drive (or perhaps a specific type of parental obsession, itself probably heritable) that may be correlated with higher-than-average rates of neuroticism or cluster B traits. We might be looking at a population that was already at higher risk for mental health struggles, which the industry then amplifies. This is different from saying fame causes the illness. It might just be that the people most likely to seek the spotlight are also the people most likely to struggle when the spotlight gets too hot.
I would also push back on the idea that these performers are just "doing what they’re told" by sleazy managers. While that certainly happens, it ignores the agency of the performers themselves. Many of these women are highly intelligent businesspeople who understand exactly what sells. They are navigating a landscape where the "male gaze" is both a source of revenue and a target for performative feminist critique. They are playing a complex game of triangulation. They provide the sexual imagery that the market demands, but they frame it as "empowerment" to satisfy the cultural gatekeepers of the prestige media.
(Case in point, Taylor Swift)
This isn't necessarily madness on the part of the performer. It is a highly sophisticated, if somewhat cynical, way of maximizing market share across two demographics: the "dudebros" who want the fanservice and the "woke" commentators who want the girlboss narrative. In other words, you get the horny gents, and you let their girlfriends convince themselves that this is somehow empowering.
Looking at this broadly, we've created a world where the most valuable currency is attention, and the most efficient way to get attention is to play in the space of sexual signaling while simultaneously denouncing the very people who are paying attention. It is a system that optimizes for friction. (Though I suppose if I were making their kind of money, I might be willing to trade a little bit of my own sanity for the privilege).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Someone had "fun" too close to the sun.
That being said, it would be nice if the NSFW tag worked properly, as an alternative.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I think he's imagining white people cooking like prawns south of the tropics. Or simply dying of melanoma of the melanoma.
Needless to say, it's not that bad. Sure, it's remarkably unpleasant, but covering up and staying indoors during the worst of the glare goes a long way. Melanin or modern sunscreen goes even further. It was malaria that was the real bottleneck in a lot of places.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
"Intercontinental" is overselling it a bit when we're talking trade that is mostly Mediterranean+.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Do I "believe" in therapists?
I'm being honest. No. I don't go to therapy, anymore, and haven't in a long time. When I did go, the first two therapists were useless, and the third, who happened to be young, pretty and sensible, had me falling in love with counter-transference so hard it probably counts as remittance.
But therapy? I believe in that, in the sense that it works.
Empirically, on objective based metrics? It works! Works well! Or well enough, since some form of therapy often beats drugs as the first line intervention. CBT for depression, DBT for BPD (which I was disdainful of, until I saw the objective metrics), the list goes on.
I'm in the slightly awkward position of not wanting to go to therapists while being quite solid at it myself. Learning shit like CBT and IPT is a core part of the psychiatry curriculum here. I've been told I'm good at the job.
My distaste for it is slightly irrational. I simply prefer drugs in most circumstances, far less finicky. Not as many soft-factors. You pop something and you get better. Hopefully.
Whereas finding a good therapist is far harder. They don't come with individual RCTs or dose effect curves. Many of them are useless. Some of them are outright counter-productive. Some of these criticisms are also fairly leveled against the medication.
In general, I think men should go to male therapists. They're usually more no-nonsense, less touchy-feely. Men seem to prefer something closer to a life coach than an auntie who'll sip tea with you while you sob.
More speculatively, you need a therapist who is at least roughly as smart as you. Ideally smarter. Part of the job is analyzing your psyche, figuring out what makes you tick. There are a lot of midwits out there. They're more likely to regurgitate the same lines, offer the same old canned saws.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I've seen enough Dagoth Ur companion mod footage to know that it's going to be a must have for any future replays.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Women have stronger immune systems. Testosterone has immunosuppressant effects. The difference isn't massive, at least in humans, but it's there.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
I don't think I can even see them, or at least that was the case last time I was curious. Nara handles them, and the rest of us can't interfere even if we wanted to. Or at least I can't.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
The second one is hardly revolutionary, but it respects the audience's time and intelligence quite a bit more than the third flick. And yes, the RDA coming back into town is a must-watch, but also means the movie peaks early. You could probably watch that bit on YouTube and not miss too much.
That being said, I came out of the theater thinking that my money was well spent on Avatar 2, but I definitely regretted 3, mostly because it was a naked rehash of the previous movie. All of the cool stuff and the action scenes were pretty much repeated blow by blow!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
It was an incredibly packed theater. In India. While with family. Otherwise I would have gone for it. I made sure to start bringing nicotine gum with me from that movie onwards.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
Please don't let Quaritch succumb. Do you know how many Humanity Fuck Yeah memes would go down the drain if he became a traitor?
General Hairbun was depicted as competent in the last movie, but it would have been so easy to flanderize that into a version that can do no wrong. I will be grateful for small mercies.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
The movie severely compromised my wellness, and I couldn't be arsed to wait till Friday before kvetching about it.
Avatar 3: The Way of Fascism
Alternate titles:
The Way of Water 2
Can A White Boy (with dreads) Get Some Action?
WARNING: HERE BE SPOILERS
The movie was so unfathomably long and boring that my primary emotion during it was a nicotine craving. Once I was able to exit the cinema and get a puff on my vape, I was left with the lingering taste of strawberry, raspberry and regret on my tongue.
For more moments than I could count, I was genuinely confused if whole-ass minutes of the second movie had been mixed in on the cutting-room floor. Entire sequences of choreography, shots and events seemed to have been nabbed from earlier movies. The only thing that keeps me coming back to Avatar, namely the progressively cooler hard scifi military toys, proved to be stagnant. I couldn't spot a single hell yeah moment the whole movie. When the previous film opens with a hard montage of ISVs irradiating half a continent with the exhaust plumes of antimatter engines, anything less is lacking. It's not like the movie lacks spectacle, but like a secondhand eyeglass shop, nothing is new. Kudos to Cameron, or his overworked VFX team: they've clearly found a way to amortize their previous effort and expenditure over a longer time frame.
The plot, such as it is, concerns itself with Spider (the aforementioned white boy with dreads), who has apparently become such an insufferable presence that even his adoptive blue alien family wants him gone. After the Sully family's eldest son died in the previous film during what was essentially James Cameron directing Titanic again but with whales, Neytiri has decided that Spider is the problem. This is somewhat understandable given that he's a human teenager being raised by aliens, which is already a recipe for awkwardness without adding "your presence reminds me of my dead son" to the mix.
So the Sullys decide to exile Spider to live with distant Na'vi relations, which in any reasonable movie would be the inciting incident for a coming-of-age story about finding your place in the world. Instead, it's the inciting incident for 197 minutes of explosions and unconvincing family drama. I'd happily have traded all of the drama for more explosions.
Enter Varang, leader of the Ash People (the Mangkwan clan, for those keeping track of Cameron's increasingly convoluted Na'vi taxonomy). Varang leads a group who have rejected the deity Eywa after a volcano destroyed their homeland, which has apparently turned them into nihilistic fire-worshipping warriors. This is probably meant to be some deepity on how trauma can corrupt spirituality, but mostly it's an excuse for Cameron to film things catching on fire in high frame rate. While Eywa is definitely depicted as rather powerful, I feel like it's a bit much to expect it to deal with plate tectonics too.
The Ash People attack the Sully family's floating transport because, well, someone has to or we wouldn't have a movie. This leads to Sigourney Weaver (still bizarrely playing a teenager named Kiri, a casting choice that grows more inexplicable with each film) calling upon the goddess Eywa to save Spider's life. Watching a woman in her seventies perform motion capture as a Na'vi adolescent having a spiritual awakening is one of those experiences that makes you question the entire trajectory of cinema as an art form. Is the character supposed to be awkward and ungainly in universe, or is it all a consequence of asking an arthritic old lady to do somersaults? The people (me) wish to know.
Meanwhile, Colonel Quaritch, just as blue, just as mean. He's still hunting Jake, and also helping out with the general RDA pivot from unobtainium to hunting down the Tulkun whales for their anti-aging juice called Amrita, which is the kind of on-the-nose metaphor that would make a first-year film student wince. Humans harvesting alien whales for eternal youth. Get it? Do you get it? Cameron will spend another forty minutes making sure you get IT. After spending an entire movie on the same plot point last time. Is it that hard to find new macguffins?
The film briefly introduces yet another Na'vi clan called the Wind Traders, an airborne group led by a character named Peylak, who show up just long enough to establish that yes, there will be more Avatar movies, and yes, you will be expected to remember these people. They shelter the Sullys before everyone gets attacked again, because this is a James Cameron movie and if forty-five minutes pass without something exploding, his producer's contract requires him to forfeit his yacht.
I was somewhat concerned that the story would continue with a character assassination of Quaritch, but was pleasantly relieved at not being that disappointed. Sure, he goes off the reservation chasing blue poon, but is he the first Marine to do so? Not even in this franchise. Marines have needs, you know, and if the RDA doesn't offer Mustangs at ridiculous APRs... can you blame him for falling for a hot, murderous woman with the Na'vi equivalent of BPD (or CPTSD, if we're being generous)? I get the appeal.
No. Quaritch becomes increasingly unreliable, but remains loyal to humanity. It is unclear if that will persist to the next movie, since Cameron spends plenty of screen time (he's got that to spare) having Jake wax eloquent to him about the benefits of going native, and opening his third eye. He also wins dad of the year for being incredibly patient and understanding with his bitch-ass son, Spider, even after the latter shoots him with a crossbow. Another place where Cameron met my low expectations was not framing the hard-ass female general as a girlboss who can do no wrong. She makes several clearly correct decisions, and also demonstrates fallibility when Quaritch ungrounds himself and bails out her ass. Shame she dies in a magnetic fire tornado.
We've got the obligatory sequence of Jake reuniting the tribes and embracing the title of Turoq Makto, though I must admit that explicitly using a bundle of arrows to represent strength through unity was a bit much. In a movie that was less explicitly leftist to the point of tears, it might be interpreted as some kind of dogwhistle. I'm left scratching my head as to whether nobody in the production team noticed, or whether the screenwriters were having a giggle at Cameron's expense.
The climax involves Jake and Quaritch fighting in a magnetic vortex while rocks hurtle through the air, which sounds exciting but mostly makes you wonder about the physics of Pandora and whether Cameron actually listened to his consultants. They briefly team up to save Spider from falling to his death, have a moment of understanding, and then Quaritch throws himself into a fire pit rather than... continuing to live? Hope that the Na'vi signed up to the Geneva convention? It's unclear. We don't see him actually die, so presumably he'll be back for Avatar 4: This Time It's Even More Identical To The Last One.
Kate Winslet's character dies while giving birth during the final battle, which allows Cameron to recycle the emotional beats of Titanic one more time. Neytiri promises to raise the baby as her own, which is touching until you remember that this family already has approximately seventeen children and has proven spectacularly bad at keeping them alive. Someone also named Rotxo dies, but I couldn't tell you who that was even if you held a gun to my head. The movie has so many characters that deaths occur with all the emotional impact of someone announcing they're switching to a different cellular provider.
Cameron has been explicit that the runtime is longer than The Way of Water's already-punishing 3 hours and 12 minutes because modern audiences "long for a moment of focus." This is a man who has apparently never encountered the human attention span, or who believes that "focus" and "watching blue aliens have the same argument for the eighty-seventh time" are synonymous concepts.
The film cost over $400 million to make, which works out to roughly $2 million per minute, or approximately $33,000 per second. I spent several stretches of the film calculating how much money was being spent to make me feel absolutely nothing, which was more engaging than anything happening onscreen.
The movie randomly switches between 24 and 48 frames per second, I will admit that I didn't really notice, but I wish he'd been less of a coward and just went high refresh rate. It's 2025, we can do better than 24 hz. Others hated the inconsistency; Cameron insists this was intentional, which is the kind of artistic decision that makes you wonder if perhaps success has insulated him from people willing to say "Jim, this looks bad."
In the end, Varang disappears, Quaritch maybe dies, the Sully family adopts another child, and we're left with the certain knowledge that there will be two more of these films, currently scheduled for 2029 and 2031. By the time Avatar 5 comes out, the youngest cast members will have aged out of their roles, Sigourney Weaver will be playing a kindergartener, and I'll presumably still be standing outside theaters desperately sucking on my vape, trying to forget the preceding ten hours of blue people having feelings about colonialism.
The worst part is that it's not even aggressively bad. It's gorgeously rendered mediocrity, the kind of competent, expensive blandness that makes you wonder if Cameron has reached the apotheosis of blockbuster filmmaking. It's aggressively boring, but it makes billions. Solve for revealed preference. Every frame is painstakingly crafted. Every motion-captured performance is technically impressive. And yet the overwhelming sensation is one of exhaustion, of having witnessed something that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of hours of human effort to produce an experience roughly as memorable as a particularly long elevator ride.
Cameron has created a franchise that makes enormous amounts of money while leaving almost no cultural footprint beyond "remember how those movies made a lot of money?" It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories: technically nourishing, massively consumed, and ultimately unsatisfying. All I ever saw of Avatar 2 after release were rather patriotic edits of ISVs scorching the Earth earth of Pandora. I don't think this movie can muster up even that much.
But hey, at least the vape was good. And the movie actually strengthens the case I made earlier, about Pandora being some kind of engineered high-tech-masquerading-as-low retirement home. The film explicitly confirms that Eywa maintains a high fidelity VR afterlife. It has the bioengineering chops to rewire a human to survive unaided on Pandora. It is described as having firewalls or "encryption". I enjoy being correct, or at least having takes more defensible than what the director intended.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14d ago
Thank you, again. I try my best to deserve her ❤️
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14d ago
Oh. I mean, passing the exam was definitely a sorely needed boost to my self-confidence. I needed that. It's always good to have objective markers of competence, so I know it's not all in my head. Perhaps it did give me the courage, to say fuck it and pursue someone a continent away, hoping I can put a ring on her.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
the sequence of two major events happening back-to-back appears like some sort of things falling into their respective places. maybe they are connected, maybe they aren't.
If you mean the story about the model, that was maybe a week before I reconnected with the new lady, one who can easily be described as a better model. No objectification intended, I treat my objects like women anyway.
I suppose the two are more related than I'm comfortable with. I was at maximum cynicism after encountering the former, but convinced myself that some of the women I had dated in the past weren't remotely as bad. Tentatively, some of them were good people! This turned to out to be more correct than I'd wagered for.
but it is really a good thing that instead of feeling completely cynical or apathy, you still are able to feel things intensely. keeps you human! with warts and all.
Burning out can feel pleasant, sometimes. The fire can't hurt you, if there are no pain receptors left to scream. But I'm not that far gone, it turns out my heart was only shriveled because it was waiting for rain. I hope the good times last.
those sound like more elaborate stories. with the kind of writing you do, definitely would be very very interesting. and you do have the next exam planned.
Thank you. But as I've said before, the Motte isn't treated to an indiscriminate catalog of my romantic trusts. Most of it doesn't strike me as particularly worth writing about! Guy meets girl, they think the other is nice, but can't quite make it work. You live and you learn, and look forward to something that is worth writing about, preferably the pleasant kind.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
There is no rule being broken. I think that's all I have left to say.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15d ago
Thank you for the information! I wasn't aware that Hainan had an SEZ before.
No that's what the SEZ's were this is something new.
Huh. It must have fallen out at some point in editing, but I did have a like going something like "Previous SEZs have allergen-tested the mainland, making the risk of rejection moderate"
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16d ago
Kind of? You are getting quite a lot of feedback right now that this particular writing is worse than your less-LLM-inflected (infected?) pieces, and are continuing to bluster on about how great it is.
I disagree with this feedback, to some extent. That is a matter of taste as well as principle. I am usually quite more corrigible.
So why are you doing it? Is there some shortage of actual journalism about China that needs addressing so badly that boring prooompted longposts on the Motte are required?
Because this essay is less boring than the original Reuters article? Being less boring is not the same as being exciting. This one has greater than zero jokes in it.
It is, for what it's worth, not a prompted post in the standard sense. I also wanted to hear what the better informed have to say, and providing a basis for discussion makes me feel the mission is accomplished. George W. Bush approves.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16d ago
I don't think the draft would have been too exciting either, on top of lacking polish. It's a dry topic. China opened a new free trade zone. Nobody has been shot, yet. Even the Taiwan connection is tenuous.
I'm sure someone could make it exciting, that someone might not be me. I settled for accurate journalism with Chinese characteristics. Any more "spice" would have been the less palatable kind of Yellow Journalism.
In any case, given that you consider a boring end product undesirable to at least a certain degree, maybe consider the extent to which the LLM's "help" with your writing was actually having the effect of making it more boring to read before "writing" any more of these pieces?
Of course. Have I ever struck you as being not into introspection or lacking self-awareness? I have a lot of things written that I haven't shared because I think my own output or with LLM support didn't make it worthwhile.
I have seriously spent time considering that. My takeaway is that the answer is no. LLMs aren't the best at making things exciting or novel (not that they can't do it at all), so what I mostly rely on them for is to take something I think I've done well, then re-arrange, proofread and edit. Most of their suggestions go in the waste bin. Sometimes they do actually say things that make me sit up and go huh, not bad, and those are worth stealing.
You've raised a valid point, speaking generally, so I can only beg the benefit of doubt that I thought of it too.
There's a specific type of news story that works like a Rorschach test for whether you believe in the official version of reality that institutions present, or the messy, underground reality of actual human beings. The recent case of Dr. Samuel Stefan, a colorectal surgeon at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, is a perfect example. The headlines are all about a "doctor struck off after stripping naked in a toilet and propositioning a colleague." It's framed as a story about a predatory surgeon and a bunch of shocked, innocent victims.
But if you actually read the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) report with any kind of awareness of how the modern world works, you'll spot a massive hole in the story where a very popular yellow-and-orange smartphone app should be.
The tribunal tells us that Dr. Stefan had been "chatting to a colleague online" even though they were "unknown to each other." They arranged to meet in a toilet. The colleague, we're told, thought this was a "mutually convenient place" and "did not plan to have sex" with Dr. Stefan. When the cubicle door opened to reveal a naked surgeon beckoning him over, the colleague was "shocked, numb, and scared."
Let me just pause here to appreciate the absolutely wild level of benefit-of-the-doubt the MPTS is giving this situation. We're apparently living in a world where the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service believes that two men who've never met, after chatting on some unnamed internet platform, regularly arrange to meet in a hospital toilet cubicle to do... what, exactly? Exchange sourdough starters? Talk about the finer points of laparoscopic mesenteric excision? Compare notes on the hospital's pension scheme?
If you follow the link to the actual MPTS ruling, you'll come across gems such as:
Sounds silly?
Sorry, Mr. A, it sounds retarded. But I'm impressed at the chutzpah. Maybe he wanted to apply mouthwash to your cock too, to be extra safe. You "get to know each other" in public toilets in much the same way that "Netflix and chill" involves ardent attention to the best of the Silver Age of television.
Of course, there was catfishing involved:
Unless the "online platform" was LinkedIn and the "chat" was about a job opening in the proctology department, there's exactly one reason why two men who don't know each other arrange a meeting in a toilet stall. That reason is Grindr. And the main purpose of a Grindr meeting in a toilet stall is definitely not a "mutually convenient" chat.
The tribunal's choice to just accept the colleague's claim of shock at face value suggests one of two things. Either the MPTS members are literally the last three people in the UK who don't know what a hookup app is, or they're putting on some kind of elaborate legal performance where everyone pretends the "victim" was just an innocent bystander who stumbled into the world of public sex by accident.
If you're a man and you arrange to meet another man in a toilet stall after an anonymous internet chat, the "naked" part of the reveal is usually what "meeting" means. The idea that this was some kind of ambush on an unsuspecting guy requires us to believe in a level of innocence that would make a Victorian governess look like a hardened cynic.
And yet, this is the story the tribunal went with. Why?
Maybe it's because the legal system just doesn't have the right words for "misunderstood sexual subcultures." In the official world of the General Medical Council, there are only Doctors and Patients, or Harassers and Victims. There's no category for "Two guys who tried to have a quick hookup during a shift, but one of them got cold feet or thought the other was being way too weird and decided to blow the whistle to save his own ass."
To be totally clear, Dr. Stefan sounds like a nightmare. The report lists other incidents where he tried to kiss colleagues or repeatedly touched the genitals of junior doctors on the wards. Groping people while they're trying to do their rounds isn't a "misunderstanding of subculture." That's just being a sexual harasser. If the tribunal wanted to strike him off for the ward-groping alone, they would've had an open and shut case that didn't require them to pretend a toilet meeting was some kind of platonic coincidence.
But the toilet incident is the one in all the headlines. It's the "deplorable behavior" that the public finds most shocking. And because it's the main charge, the tribunal has to treat the colleague's story as the gospel truth. They have to believe that a grown man walked into a toilet to meet an internet stranger expecting a perfectly normal, non-sexual encounter.
This creates a really weird set of incentives. If you're a junior doctor and you get involved in some risky, slightly unprofessional behavior (like meeting a senior colleague for a hookup in the hospital)*, and it goes badly, your best move is to claim you had no idea what was happening. You have to play the "shocked and numb" innocent to avoid getting caught in the fallout from the other person's misconduct. The tribunal, meanwhile, has to go along with this performance because admitting otherwise would mean acknowledging that NHS hospitals are places where people have complicated, messy, and sometimes illicit sex lives.
The MPTS is obsessed with "public confidence." They mention it specifically: "The Tribunal was of the view that public confidence would be undermined if Dr. Stefan was permitted to practise."
Public confidence is a weird thing. It's rarely based on actual truth, it's based on keeping up a certain appearance. The appearance here is "The Medical Register is a Sacred List of Saints." If the tribunal admitted that Dr. Stefan and his colleague were probably engaging in a common, if risky, gay subcultural practice, it would mess up the appearance. It's way better for "public confidence" to pretend that Dr. Stefan is a lone predator lurking in toilets, jumping out at innocent men who were just looking for a "mutually convenient" place to stand around.
Why did such a murky outcome where neither the primary accuser or the defendant come out smelling of roses collapse into such a binary outcome? We might prefer thinking about it as legibility, in the same sense as Seeing Like A State. The state and its institutions (like the GMC) need the world to make sense in a certain way. A "predatory doctor" makes sense. A "messy situation involving two men, a hookup app, and a complete disaster of professional boundaries on both sides" doesn't make sense. It's too complicated. It raises too many questions about what else is going on in those toilets. It suggests that the hospital isn't just some sterile place of healing, but somewhere humans with hormones and smartphones actually exist.
(And absolutely don't ask about what happens on the beanbags, the ones in the mess)
Watch what happens when you try to tell the truth:
"Dr. Stefan and Mr. A met on Grindr for a bathroom hookup. When Dr. Stefan turned out to be older and a different race than his profile pictures, Mr. A got uncomfortable and left. Later, when Dr. Stefan was under investigation, Mr. A decided to protect himself by claiming he never intended a sexual encounter."
Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?
This is all rather inconvenient. Messy.
So the tribunal goes with the version of reality that makes the most sense in their framework, even if it's the version that makes the least sense to anyone who's lived in a city in the last twenty years. They treat the colleague's "shock" as a medical fact rather than a legal move.
We should also think about the "timeline concern" the panel mentioned. Dr. Stefan was already under investigation for the toilet incident when he allegedly went on to grope people on the wards. This is where my sympathy for the "he was just a guy on Grindr" defense completely disappears.
If you're a surgeon and you've just been caught in a toilet cubicle with your pants down, and the GMC is breathing down your neck, the rational response is to become the most celibate, professional, and invisible person in the history of medicine. You should be the guy who won't even look at a colleague's thigh, much less touch it.
The fact that Dr. Stefan apparently kept making unwanted advances while actively under investigation suggests a level of impulsiveness or lack of reality-testing that's genuinely incompatible with being a surgeon. Surgery is all about extreme impulse control. It's the ability to stand still for six hours and make movements measured in millimeters. If you can't stop yourself from grabbing a junior doctor's genitals while the medical board is literally in the middle of deciding whether to end your career, you probably shouldn't be holding a scalpel inside someone's abdomen.
So yeah, the guy had to go. Getting erased from the register was the only possible outcome. Even if there's no evidence that he was a threat to the general public (or an incompetent surgeon), he certainly was a menace to any nearby twinks, and not a great colleague.
(This is dry British understatement, before someone gets their knickers in a twist)
But I still can't get over the toilet thing.
I keep imagining the tribunal members sitting around a mahogany table, reading the transcript. One of them says, "So, he met a man he didn't know in a toilet stall. Why would he do that?" And another one says, "The witness says it was a mutually convenient place. Maybe the library was full?" And they all nod seriously, recording in the official judgment that this was a believable and logical chain of events.
There's a real cost to this kind of institutional blindness. When we force people to lie about the context of their lives to fit into the "victim/predator" binary, we lose the ability to actually regulate professional behavior effectively. If the NHS wants to stop people from having sex in the toilets, they have to admit that people want to have sex in the toilets. They have to deal with the reality of workplace culture, the stress of the job, and the way technology has changed how colleagues interact.
Instead, we get this whole show. We get a "Digital Reporter" (are there any analog ones left?) writing about "deplorable behavior" like we're still living in 1955. We get a tribunal that pretends Grindr doesn't exist. And we get a medical register that's "protected" from a man who was clearly falling apart, but for reasons the tribunal is too "proper" to actually spell out.
Dr. Stefan didn't show up to the hearing. He offered no remorse and no attempt to fix things. He's basically vanished from the profession, likely on a one way flight to Romania. Maybe he figured there was no point in showing up to a trial where the fundamental premise of the "crime", the toilet meeting, was being discussed in language that had nothing to do with the reality of what actually happened.
In the end, the system worked. A surgeon who didn't have the basic judgment to function in a professional environment was removed. The "public confidence" has been "maintained." But as I read the article, I can't shake the feeling that the only person who's truly "shocked, numb, and scared" is anyone who expects our public institutions to have even a basic understanding of how modern humans actually live.
Queen Alexandra Hospital will keep on functioning. The toilets will stay "mutually convenient" for all sorts of activities. The GMC will keep striking people off using the moral language of the mid-20th century. And the rest of us will keep reading these articles, squinting at the space between the lines where the real world, messy, sexual, and mediated by technology, is hiding in plain sight.
It's a comfortable fiction. It's a world where doctors are either saints or monsters, where toilets are just places for quiet reflection, and where online chatting between strangers is always leading up to a polite conversation about the weather. It's a world that doesn't exist, likely never has, but it's the only one the MPTS knows how to deal with.
*It's worth noting that Stefan was a SHO/Senior House Officer. That's an antiquated but commonly used term, and it absolutely doesn't mean a doctor very high up the totem pole. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't senior to many people, but they'd have to be interns of one flavor or another.
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