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So, in other Aella news, she's channelling the spirit of Hanania with this poll:
Options are (with their current percentages):
Of course Aella with her reach manages to get normies to see her posts and the replies are wild that such a person could even exist, some choice replies:
While the poll itself may be interesting, what I find most interesting of all are the responses from the normies (there are responses that look objectively at the situation and say stuff like "no, if anyone is going to hire prostitutes it should be the parents, not the make a wish foundation", but they all tend to have stuff like "e/acc" in their usernames so they aren't your average randos). These tend to be extremely negative, but not negative in a "I know what I hate and this is it" form but rather a "first encounter with a terrible eldrich abomination you want to see destroyed but are confused at how could it even exist" sort of way. It does not feel like pure hate, but rather a hate that is born of fear, true xenophobia in its original meaning of the word. Nevertheless it is still a form of hate and you can quite easily see the vitriol directed towards Aella, merely for posting this poll.
My worry here though is that as technology advances and a sliver of people with disproportionate cultural cachet adopt belief systems like those of Aella and decouple from the low sophistication ways of thinking common in most westerners along with completely different cultures entering the west and taking root the current indigenous westerners will find their belief and value systems squeezed on both sides, from above by the likes of people who think like Aella does (nothing wrong with how she thinks, in fact I support it) along with from below by the value systems of recent migrants (who still care about stuff like honour and shame etc.).
While this may be a difficult time for the squeezed westereners themselves (I have little sympathy though, these very same people expect migrants to deal with a far bigger and more rapid cultural shock and blame them if they migrants take steps to mitigate this impact), I am more concerned about potential increased societal scale strife as people lash out from being put in a world that they no longer understand (see the "what if you were executed at gitmo" response above, I for one am glad this person has no power and hope it stays this way).
Naturally I have no doubt that any reified violence by the disaffected would be put down with the same prejudice we use for terrorist attacks these days, but it would still not be a good time for social harmony and that has widespread social impacts beyond a small handful of people cracking and going on a rampage where they kill a few people before bring brought down themselves.
To be honest with you I also think this question is stupid and gross, because sex is meant to be sacred. In a society run in a way I would like it my answer would be an absolute, immediate no because sex is sacred and powerful, and you shouldn't let them have sex for the same reason you wouldn't hand a 5 year old a loaded revolver.
However westereners have made sex completely and utterly profane to the point of total ignominy. I want them to experience the logical consequences of their professed belief system, and I want them to expeirence these consequences good and hard.
Seems strange that you are siding with Aella in this, considering she is not the one experiencing the lesson learning for the sin she is committing worse than her audience.
Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good, unless she chooses to make it be something more for herself. For people like her the sacredness does not matter because she is capable of fashioning her own social reality and dealing with the consequences of her actions without them destroying her.
The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax". I believe that the vast majority of people don't have this protection so society as a whole should be based on a set of values that lead to decent outcomes for them as a whole, but if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).
It's like accreddited investors in finance, if you are accredited you are free to spend your life savings on private companies that probably will go bust but may give you an x100 return. If someone is fully qualified and understands the risks I support them being able to invest their money this way, but for ordinary people what will normally happen is that they put their children's college trust fund into a company that burns its capital and goes bust within the year, and then these very same people will complain about evil capitalism leaving them bankrupt. Of course if you legislate in a way to prevent ordinary people being able to invest in this way, those same people complain about evil capitalism preventing the ordinary man from getting a x100 return like "insert big investor here" did.
The best thing about the "accredited investor" status is if you get a solicitation targeted for accredited investors (whether you are or are not one), you know right up front it's a scam. It may as well start out "Dear Suckers with Money:"
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I do wonder whether prolonged exposure to tragedy, suffering, and death helps people (Westerners? First Worlders?) decouple things better. There's a stereotype that soldiers, nurses, and adrenaline junkies get around a lot; I can't speak to the first two but the third has been true enough in my experience. I'd like to ask the Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. [EDIT: "have you become a better decoupler, or less averse to the idea of casual sex because of your experiences"] While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.
I'll agree with you there. A lot of this stuff - like those bespoke queer poly communes - is a lot like 'building your own airplane out of a lawnmower or motorcycle engine and a bunch of stuff from the local Home Depot'. If you're a skilled enough airplane designer, woodworker, and amateur engineer...you can pull it off and build something airworthy. However, you had better be very, very careful and know that you're venturing off the beaten path and might just fall out of the goddamn sky.
Fair enough - FAFO. For what it's worth, I think that the accredited-investor bar should be quite a bit lower. IIRC there are ways to get around this, companies offering special shares to ordinary investors through some relatively nontrivial method. People trying this know damn well that this is "go big or go home" territory and that they might lose everything. These are high risk, potentially high reward lottery tickets. It's like backcountry skiing signs. Ideally we'd mark things a bit more clearly...
There's certainly an element of truth to it, but speaking from my own experience I don't hink the mechanism is "decoupling" so much as just being hungrier, hornier, and having a shorter time-horizon than most. The old cliche about your first meal after a brush with death being the best meal of your life is a cliche for a reason. It's True. IME everything from food sex and alcohol to the morning commute just feels more immediate and "alive" when contrasted with the alternative. Be it @JTarrou's "violent class" or med students who find themselves attracted to Trauma Medicine and backcountry skiing I think that sort also tends to be sort who'll take the old saw about "live each day like it might be your last" and play it 100% straight.
Hmm. At my medschool...future surgeons and OB-GYN students seemed to be the wildest. Future pathologists and radiologists? We were sticks in the mud. I know a mountaineering neurologist, backcountry skier surgeon, and pilot anesthesiologist.
Future surgeon certainly fits the stereotype in my mind
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I would say the stereotype is broadly correct, though individuals vary wildly. I am a far less sexually adventurous person than most of my compadres, but my experience there both psychologically and training/observation of technique did vastly increase my success and dabbling in casual sexual encounters, but "vastly increase" is a nice way of saying "started from shit". Frankly, that period of my life wasn't particularly fulfilling sexually, I much prefer longer term relationships.
The question is more about your desire for casual sex and your attitude towards it - not how competent you were at getting it. If Johnny McHorndog enters nursing school or the Army hell-bent on casual encounters and piss-poor at achieving them, then spends a few years as a soldier or nurse, gets good at having casual sex, but desires it much less due to viewing sex as sacred or meaningful to him personally...Mr. McHorndog didn't become a higher decoupler from the experience. It's Mr. Prude (and maybe Mrs. Prude), very sociosexually restricted, little to no interest in casual sex...until they see some shit and aren't deeply disinterested in it.
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My experience as a front-line doctor in a 3rd World Country, an essay initially posted on the Motte subreddit as I was delirious from an ortho rotation tied with gyne for the worst months of my life. I'm still proud that the original prompted Scott himself to show up in the sub to respond with positive encouragement! (In the unlikely event he's reading this, I'm doing much better, it's a wonder what working in a service with a budget more than lost change behind the couch can do haha).
Was it fucking awful? If you're someone who doesn't particularly like reading (what are you doing here again?), then yes, it was fucking awful, and I struggle to imagine an American/Western doc will see anything this bad unless they volunteer for a mission to Haiti or some other hell-hole. Still better than working in the ER during a war, but all the worse for being a represenation of the status-quo for a billion people who can't afford better.
I'm not a soft person, but my heart is thoroughly sclerosed after the whole ordeal, not that I suffer from anything like PTSD or the like. Humans can get used to almost anything, and fast.
While I didn't see the kind of shit that you saw, I saw a different flavor of shit for a month as an Eaglelandian medical student. Terminally ill children, and kids in crisis from sickle cell anemia. Working conditions were good to excellent: 9 to 5, sometimes a four-hour weekend shift. Emotionally: I write about this a lot, but can't do it justice. It was ordinary dumbfucks in hell: most parents, even good ones, just fuck 'dealing with terminally ill child' up mildly to moderately bad. Only maybe five or ten percent of the parents weren't - as the doctors and nurses judged them - weren't some flavor or other of bush league dipshit or dumbass.
I will say that I did not have a traumatic or emotionally difficult or even unpleasant experience! If forced to rate it: 4/10, mildly unpleasant but I don't regret having done it, nor would I mind doing it again.
With war - although I've never been - I think that the thing at play is constant personal, physical danger, seeing your friends killed, and maybe a bit of moral injury from making mistakes in war that cost people their lives. In the cancer ward, there were a lot of eyes on things and relatively few (maybe 1x/week/attending at most) opportunities to make minor fuckups and kill patients.
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