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 would like to, but I already felt uneasy about the potential dox, and Dase has specifically edited his post to ask me not to share further, albeit not because he seems concerned about doxxing. I'm sorry about that.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
14hr ago
P.S. (given the length of the ban, btw thanks for FINALLY dropping this blat and treating me like a normal user as I've been requesting, I feel the need to say this in an edit:) I would very much prefer it if @self_made_human did not disseminate my contacts on any external platforms, for many simple reasons, not least being fed up with condescension here, and also not having any valuable thoughts to share with mottizens. I'd rather you treated me as braindead
Noted. It was just one person over DMs, but my apologies nonetheless.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
22hr ago
The primary saving grace about experiencing emotional shocks is that they seem to have a half-life. Not in a dismissive sense - the underlying facts don't become less real, and the things that warranted careful thought still warrant it - but the brain's alarm systems appear calibrated for novelty, and novelty is, almost definitionally, temporary. By yesterday I had gone most of a day without the intrusive guilt-spiraling I'd described before, which I'm counting as a positive update. I genuinely do not think it's taken me very long to come to terms with what by all rights is a rather earth-shattering revelation about my near and dear ones.
I want to be clear, again, that my distress was never about any moral objection. I have approximately no moral intuitions against homosexuality that survive five seconds of reflection. The worry was more diffuse than that - a kind of anticipatory anguish about social repercussions, about what I should have done differently, about whether my brother had been suffering in ways I'd failed to notice. The answer to the last question is probably yes, and there's not much to do with that except file it away. Eventually, my subconscious will tug at that drawer and will discover that we've lost the keys.
Then my brother came home and introduced a complication I hadn't fully anticipated: his boyfriend was upset. Not at me, exactly - at the disclosure itself, at having been, in some meaningful sense, outed without consent as a side effect of an unplanned coming-out. This seems to me like a legitimate grievance. These things happen, but the fact that something was inevitable doesn't mean the person affected has to be cheerful about it.
I offered to intervene, partly because I'm on reasonably good terms with the boyfriend, and partly because I suspected - maybe correctly, maybe not - that absorbing some of the relational friction myself would make it easier for my brother to have the subsequent conversation. That's the benefit of being a third party in someone else's relationship conflict: you have less skin in the game, which makes certain kinds of reassurance easier to deliver credibly.
I called him. He was eating, so he called me back. I tried to strike a tone that was somewhere between warm and matter-of-fact - acknowledging that his frustration made sense, explaining the psychological weight my brother had been carrying, reiterating that my knowledge of all this wasn't going anywhere (you lot don't count). I told him nothing had changed between us, that I didn't intend to handle him differently, that he'd been a good friend and a good boyfriend. He sounded somewhat annoyed, but I had the (possibly self-serving) impression that the directness was landing okay. People often respond better to being treated as if their distress is ordinary and manageable rather than as if it requires elaborate delicacy.
They're going to talk it out themselves, which is correct. My most substantive tactical suggestion was that my brother bring sweets and perhaps a flower. I'm moderately aware that this advice is imported wholesale from the tactics I've developed for apologizing to women, and may not transfer perfectly. I'm not sure how much of romantic repair-making is universal and how much is culturally specific to particular relationship configurations. I'll update based on evidence, maybe angry gay/bi men would, like me, prefer a beer.
(My brother is pretty good at calming things down when I've argued with my girlfriends, even if he takes their side at a distressingly high frequency. I lack the same experience when it comes to him, because as far as I was concerned, he'd spent his life in celibacy. Oh well, I'll learn. The skills transfer.)
I didn't expect the response to my previous post to be as generous as it was. The rationalist-adjacent internet, and the Motte in particular, has a well-earned reputation for a certain kind of adversarial argumentation, which I participate in as much as anyone. But people gave real, considered advice when it mattered, and I'm genuinely grateful. That's worth saying plainly. Thank you guys.
It's not really a new thing, IMO. Even back on the subreddit, you can see a lot of once very popular names and faces either vanish into dust or go out in flames. When I go back to the very earliest CWR threads - the ones that predate my entry altogether - I often found out that many of them were later casualties of suicide-by-mod.
Eh, I would have always said that Dase was at high risk of this happening. While he disagrees with my armchair psychoanalysis, I stand by it. He's always been crotchety, and he's struggled to keep himself in check.
Once upon a time, an informal warning got him to rein it in. Then it started taking formal warnings. Then short bans, then more short bans where we had to explicitly acknowledge that we treat valued contributors with more leniency. Some of the things he said would have gotten him banned for months if he had been a new poster, or even perms-banned.
He said that he didn't want special treatment. Fair enough, that's his prerogative, and we took it seriously. So 3 months it is, and I would say it's 50:50 if he ends up permabanned in a year, or if he even bothers to come back when the ban expires.
I would say the decline coincided with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, when he had to flee to Argentina (and perhaps Turkey along the way can't remember). That's an understandable stressor. I wouldn't blame the current war in particular, he was already this... bitter last year. Oh well, good luck to him nonetheless. I've done everything I can to help, and he doesn't see himself as being in need of help. That's the Russian way.
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