site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2147 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 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).

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

He has apparently booked a flight to Fairbanks on 10 February.

Huh?

One of the other members of this forum (I can't remember his name right now, stupid brain) is utterly convinced that he is so ugly that he can never have any success with women unless he settles for a literal meth head or someone so obese that he would be her caregiver more than her boyfriend/husband. He has further convinced himself that the way to solve this is to undertake a somewhat dangerous trek through the Alaskan wilderness ("the hock"), because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain it (other ways are being a soldier and living through war, shit like that).

This dude has had basically everyone (myself included) tell him that he's full of shit, that he has perfectly reasonable prospects with women as it is, that even if he didn't this won't fix them because women don't actually value men risking their lives, etc. He does not ever listen to anyone, but continued to post about his ideas every single week in the wellness Wed threads without a word of our advice getting through to him. He eventually got banned for this, because it was really obnoxious (though he was a good enough poster outside of this single topic, it came up a lot).

Anyways, as I recall dude is planning to do the hock in February, so this is basically @benjaminikuta giving us a "he seems to be really going through with it you guys" sort of update.

Thanks for the backstory. That's pretty wacky, but it sure beats sitting inside doompoasting all day.

Edit: read through some archives and man, that was kind of a bs ban. I hope he makes it and tells us all about it.

a somewhat dangerous

No, it's a very dangerous trek.

Does anyone actually know any details at all about what he's trying to do?

One might even say suicidal.

because apparently women will be able to subconsciously sense that he is the kind of man who risked his life and lived to tell the tale. He believes that this is a quality women value, and that this is the best way for him to attain its

From what I remember, his justification was slightly different from this. I think that his argument was something like “Any woman who is dating me is going to be making a huge sacrifice, as her quality of life will drastically be lowered by having to date someone as unattractive as me. Therefore, because it is morally wrong to expect something of my partner that I would not expect of myself, I ought to embark on a life-threatening, grueling journey, so that I may suffer to the same extent that my girlfriend will be suffering by dating me.”

There are a ton of problems with this argument (that I’m way too tired to even begin addressing), but it at least seems more consistent to me than “the best way for me to get laid is by impressing chicks with a tale of the Hock”, which is just utterly and obviously incorrect. If he ever said the latter, then I’m even more baffled.

If he is that physically repulsive (which I don't believe, most people can look better than average simply by putting in effort because most people don't put in effort) he could just have plastic surgery. Women use makeup all the time to look better, I don't see why men can't use similar measures if all else fails.

I never got a response though, probably because he was banned soon after but I'm 90% sure he just downvoted without responding. It's as if his looks aren't the root of his problem.

One of the other members of this forum (I can't remember his name right now, stupid brain) is utterly convinced that he is so ugly that he can never have any success with women unless he settles for a literal meth head or someone so obese that he would be her caregiver more than her boyfriend/husband.

I recall it began with "Skookum," but there was a 2nd half of the word.

To rudely psychoanalyze someone online, there's something about his constant coming back to the phrase "Choose where to park the ambulances" (or something of that sort) that strikes me as something in his brain that has him caught in a loop obsessing over the fear of the domestic harm caused by people with low impulse control (more specifically women whose low impulse control have made them sufficiently unattractive as to have to settle for him). I wonder if there's some trauma beyond the anecdotes he told about seeing some shit as a med student.

SkookumTree

Skookum: a Chinook jargon word meaning something like "strong", "big", "brave", or "monsterous". See "Skookum House", slang for jail.

Is he from the Pacific Northwest? That's the main place the world would be used in conversation, though the word did get somewhat popularized through the selling of "Skookum Dolls" : these were dolls of Indian characters that sold fairly widely in the first half of the 20th century. They stopped making them in the 60s.

He definitely had some kind of fixation. I think maybe it was one of his friends that got stabbed badly by his girlfriend or something that he kept bringing up.

I recall it began with "Skookum," but there was a 2nd half of the word.

Tree. It's SkookumTree.

Ah, thank you, that jogged my memory. Dude's name is SkookumTree.

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