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WhiningCoil
1d ago
"Emotional Labor" is just a buzzword people with "Emotional Intelligence" use to abuse you. I'm increasingly certain that "Emotional Intelligence" is just a measure of how good you are at emotionally terrorizing, gaslighting and lying. It's a measure of your capacity for toxicity in relationships. And somehow the same type of person who complains at having to be their spouse's "therapist" will also launch into a 3 hour free roaming tirade leaping between islands of seething negativity triggered by their salad not having adequate cranberries on it. She isn't paying $25 for a salad with only, what, 12 cranberries on it? And another thing...
And after not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, she walks away from the interaction confident in all the "emotional labor" she did for you.
The punch line to all this? The author, Farha Khalidi, is an Onlyfans star!
I feel like Aella unleashed a sort of Rule 34 for gimmicks: there is no niche so stupid that some e-thot won't try to exploit it.
So it begs the question: what, exactly, is she advocating for?
She's advocating for money, from men, who will be charmed by her pretensions of intellectualism and pay to see her tits.
WhiningCoil
1d ago
That's wild. I knew the youth (and increasingly young adults) had been brain poisoned, but I never connected it to some unfounded faith in "randomness". My parents, teachers, scout masters, basically every adult in my life in the 90's and early 00's rode my ass that "If I don't X, Y won't happen" or inversely "If you don't X, terrible Z will happen". At time it felt overly deterministic, and the example my mother always used must have been a warning passed down through the generations. "If you don't get good grades you'll grow up to be a ditch digger!" It was an anachronism in the 90's, I can scarcely imagine how it sounds now.
While I rebelled at the time as a kid, never the less I grew up and stuck to the golden path as an adult. Funny how those things happen. Life is pretty good on the path, prudently considering action and consequence, delaying gratification. A story comes up with my wife constantly where I was in this gifted program as a kid, and they had these work-study units you could do. It was a bit free form, with different levels you could advance through. But I had lost interest in about a dozen of them halfway through, and the teachers told me I couldn't start any new units until I finished the ones I had already began. I didn't want to, so I told my mom I wanted to drop out of the gifted program. She read me the riot act about finishing things I've started. So off I went, knocking out all the units I'd begun, and turns out by the end of the year I'd finished more than anyone else and got some meaningless attaboy for it.
My wife on the other hand, her parents always told her if something was hard just give up.
To this day, a difference between my wife and I is that I finish things and she doesn't. She has a stack of a dozen books she's started next to her bed, I refuse to start one book until I've finished the one I'm on. She has a half dozen hobby projects in various states of completion, I've been laboring away on a set of chairs, refusing to begin some floating bookshelves she wants until they are finished. She started refinishing the kitchen... I had to finish it so we had usable kitchen.
Sometimes I do feel like a person out of sync with my generation. You do read about a transitional or micro generation between Gen X and Millennials.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
Rules are the peace treaty after the war was fought, and are only binding as long as all parties agree to be bound by them. If the parties agreed tomorrow that the laws against slavery would no longer be enforced, you’d have slavery. The law against it still exists in the constitution, but if no one will enforce it, it’s a dead letter.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
In contact? Yes, I've got a message from her waiting for a reply right now.
Unfortunately, things soured somewhat. She stood me up/flaked on me multiple dates in a row, initially with valid explanations, and then nothing even approximating one. I was understandably pissed, but I was going to fly back to the UK in a few days, so I told myself not to bother. It was a much needed dousing with cold water, I have a disconcerting tendency to fall for people very quickly when the stars align.
I didn't think much of it later, but a few weeks down the road, she reached out to me and apologized for her behavior. I got the strong impression that things hadn't been going great for her, and there was something she wasn't telling me (not in, I'm sleeping with other people sense, just some kind of difficulty in life, I suspect she's depressed).
I was rather cool on the whole notion afterwards, but I've kept in touch. Even when I was head over heels, I knew on an intellectual level that it couldn't go anywhere right now, so we'll see how this pans out.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I think it’s just maturing. Randomness and luck and “it won’t happen to me” thinking work until reality bites you on the nose. When you’re 16 and you don’t study for the test because you’re convinced that the results are influenced by randomness “some people get A’s without even reading the book,” it’s pretty low stakes and you likely don’t have much experience of the consequences of making that poor decision. Once you’re a senior in college, you have stakes (you have to pay to retake the class you failed, lose scholarships, lose internships) and so saying “it’s all luck, I don’t have to study” loses appeal. At the same time, once you have things to lose, the sort of childish attitude of “just randomly try things” loses appeal. Having a bad dating experience at 15 is cute. When you’re 30, you often have responsibilities and therefore need to find someone who fits into the life you already have built for yourself. You aren’t just going to randomly find someone like that in a bar or night club.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1d ago
I found a much simpler way of explaining it.
Say you're in a large crowd of strangers, you don't know anybody. You scan the crowd and every individual person looks largely the same to you, they just melt into a sea of anonymity. But then you notice your best friend somewhere in the crowd; suddenly this person "lights up" in a way that none of the others did, to you this person looks quite different, even though to anyone else they would look like just another stranger. Importantly, this isn't a conceptual/discursive thing: you don't have to consciously think to yourself "oh there's my friend, we had plans to meet up today, I should go talk to them now". It's baked into the immediate visual perception itself that they just "glow" in a way that the strangers don't, pre-discursively, even though from an "objective" point of view there's nothing really to distinguish the raw visual image of your friend from the raw visual image of any other person.
People who are higher in "meaningfulness of experience" have these experiences more often and from a wider range of stimuli, people who are lower in meaningfulness have them less often.
We can hypothesize that the mechanism of action in full blown schizophrenia is that this meaningfulness becomes so excessive that the person has to adopt delusional beliefs just so they can build a coherent internal model of their own sensory experience (e.g. that signpost on the side of the road looks so salient because it must be a coded message just for me that was planted there by the CIA).
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1d ago
What's wrong with using fresh chili?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
well, assuming he survives; I don't imagine corpses get into many fights
Oh Trump will absolutely get into fights after he is dead. Dozens of different Trump confidantes will claim to have received, in private, his political testament in the days before he dies. It will come out that he called Hegseth "Faggot Boy" over his makeup studio, that he had doubts about Vance's "bad genes" in the oval office, the he always hated Marco Rubio.
but if these people are all dead
Sure, there's a chance of that, but that would seem to be more to my point (none of the people we are worried about today will be relevant) than in favor of my interlocutor (these specific people will be relevant).
SigurdsSilverSword
1d ago
On a only-barely-related note, I may have missed it but are you still in contact with the woman back in India? It seemed like things were going well
HereAndGone
1d ago
That is a good point!
HereAndGone
1d ago
It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.
There is the claim about being sapiosexual, and its opposite: being unbearably attracted to someone stupid, the dumber the better. At least I thought the latter (being morosexual) was primarily a joke, but turns out some people possibly do claim to be that in reality.
Good Lord, I just cannot keep up with the modern world!
Corvos
1d ago
We use Greek for diseases a lot. 'Homophobic' is used because it connotes a diseased mind, as did 'homosexual', which is why nobody willingly uses those terms to describe themselves. Gay people don't call themselves 'homophiliacs'.
HereAndGone
1d ago
The answer is always yes.
Oh yeah. "Can it be possible that someone would find X a turn-on?" Yes, and it doesn't matter what X is or how disgusting/repulsive/but surely that's physically impossible you think X is.
Grant_us_eyes
1d ago
Nerds/Geeks used to have the term 'Queen Bee' to describe a woman whom would intrude on a social setting typically outside her venue with the intent of socially dominating it because it was safe for her to do so(no social competition, so men could exclusively focus on her).
As the gate has been lowered, and the activists intruded, said term was actively shamed and harassed - 'Girls can be gamers to!' they cried, refusing to engage with the idea that woman could be socially manipulative in such a manner.
So it's not exactly something unique to the Rationalist social sphere. Aella just has an advantage in that she's honestly, well, nuerodivergent? on top of being hypersexual due to her childhood abuse. But I think the social dynamics are similar.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Oh God, therapy-speak neologisms. I should have guessed!
HereAndGone
1d ago
Normally irrelevant details like colors, landscape features, or the particular spatial arrangement of objects triggering strong emotional associations, taking on "narrative weight", etc.
True, but that's also known as the pathetic fallacy. It works better as a literary device, because in the real world yes sometimes the sky is cloudy and it starts to rain just when you're feeling sad or angry, but sometimes it's just a cloudy sky and a rain shower.
FtttG
1d ago
So much of this reminds me of Jugaad Ethics.
HereAndGone
1d ago
But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".
This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.
That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":
- Increased predisposition towards associative thinking. Activities like tarot are more appealing.
- Increased predisposition towards magical thinking, leading to some idiosyncratic worldviews. This can probably be gauged by the nonsense I post on Twitter.
- Increased experience of meaningness in day-to-day life. This felt really good.
- Increased mentalising of other people's internal states, resulting in a mixture of higher empathy and higher social anxiety. I'm somewhat more neurotic about potential threats.
- Decreased sensory sensitivity.
- Decreased attentional diffusion, contrary to what the paper predicts.
- Decreased systematising and attention to detail, for instance with tedious matters like finances.
"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The cost of obesity is enormously high economically, medically and aesthetically. Investing in shaming might well pay great dividends. Japan has quite strong shaming of the fat and the country is very thin. Diet also plays a part in this but the shaming likely has a strong effect.
FtttG
1d ago
Gazan civilians are being killed at close to a 30:1 ratio
Do you mean that for every Hamas combatant killed in the current conflict, the IDF also kills thirty civilians? No estimate of the death toll I've seen has been that pessimistic, not even those literally published by the Gaza Ministry of Health.
HereAndGone
1d ago
No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.
Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".
HereAndGone
1d ago
I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁
(This is a long tangent, please forgive me.)
There are different versions of that theory, some of which are obviously nonsense. You can find more of Yuan Zhiming's version here. (His whole book is here if you can read Chinese.) Much of it is nonsense and some of it is just obviously falsehood. For instance, dào does not actually mean the same thing as Greek logos. It's true that logos in John 1:1 is translated as dào in some translations, but this is a somewhat free translation. In their more natural senses, dào means 'path' and logos means 'word'. Translating "in the beginning the dào was with God and the dào was God" is not being terribly literal with the words, but is an attempt to convey some of the same meaning in a different cultural context.
However, there are some attempts to inculturate Christianity in Asian cultures by looking for pre-Christian or proto-Christian resonances that I'm much more sympathetic to. Arguably the same thing happened in Europe - they found points of connection or resonance with pre-Christian philosophy, in order to reconcile Christianity with existing cultural and intellectual heritages. Plato or Aristotle or Homer didn't get thrown out entirely, and where there were commonalities, as with Greek conceptions of virtue, or philosophers verging on quasi-monotheistic ideas, they emphasised those.
One example I'm a little fond of is from Inazo Nitobe's infamous Bushido: The Soul of Japan. While this book is often disliked for being the source of a lot of romanticised, historically inaccurate information about samurai, I think it's fascinating because Nitobe himself was a convert to Christianity who was educated in the West, and indeed the book shows an erudite understanding of the Western canon. What Nitobe wanted to do was find some way to reconcile his Christian faith with a strong affirmation of Japanese tradition and nationhood. He does this by asserting, if not quite a proto-Christianity, at least ways in which God made himself known to the ancient Japanese, which would prepare them for the fullness of revelation later. Thus he writes:
To Nitobe's credit, he does not present some nonsensical theory of historical origins - rather, he thinks that God has, in each culture prepared the ground in certain ways, and that the gospel must be planted in that native soil.
We may not want to go the full way with him, and we may not want to automatically or thoughtlessly proclaim every culture a repository of divine revelation, but in broad strokes, I have a lot of sympathy for this approach. Start by looking for whatever elements of grace or truth are found in the pre-Christian culture, because God is very unlikely to have left that culture with nothing - and then look to the gospel to redeem and perfect the rest, rather than obliterate it.
(I'm fond of of "logic-choppers with half a soul" as a criticism of utilitarians. Ha! Forgive my pettiness.)
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