site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1970 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 7, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Any of y'all affected by the wildfire smoke: try making a Corsi-Rosenthal box. The name sounds fancy, but it's just a box fan duct-taped to some furnace filters.

Or just toughen the fuck up -- it won't kill you. Have a beer or something.

  • -15

This is not useful, and unnecessarily antagonistic.

I'll cop to the second part, but disagree that it's not useful. Not worrying about trivial crap that's pumped in the media as the literal apocalypse is in fact extremely useful -- particularly so in OPs case, he seems to worry too much and based on his posting here it's a much bigger negative for his QOL than any amount of smoke.

I'm from Western Canada and there's often quite a lot of smoke in the air even when there aren't wildfires -- and we have seasons as bad as what's happening out east (and last year in California) every 4-5 years. It's been like this forever -- just with somewhat lower frequency back when the fire services were better resourced and locals weren't kicked off their places evacuated at the drop of a hat, which cut down on the secondary fires (and structure losses) due to flying embers and such.

If you were really trying to be useful to the OP, you wouldn't put it to him as "toughen the fuck up." If you want to deliver some tough love, be less antagonistic and more sincerely helpful about it.

I've been gradually escalating the toughness of my love, as you will see if you are following his "the only women in my league are 400lb drug addicts, because I am 5'6" and autistic" threads -- if this is a little too tough for this venue that's fine and I will stop, but believe me when I say that more of this kind of thinking would be more helpful to this guy than any amount of sympathetic noises.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats