Whatever you like, or whatever you think might be useful. Fix something broken, make something new, kick a ball around, play cards or boules or dominoes. Something low stakes and easy access is going to get more takers than something that requires commitment and/or investment. Even if all you do is drink beer and eat pizza you can reframe it as a tasting session.
The trouble with climbing and that kind of activity is that it combines needing special arrangements with lacking a concrete purpose. Special arrangements make sense if you're trying to achieve a concrete objective like mending a car or remodelling your kitchen, it's a challenge you can look back on and see the result. It's not bounded by when you lose interest. And something that lacks a concrete purpose like playing cards is fine because it's so low stakes that it doesn't matter what the outcome is, you put the cards back in the packet and say see you next time. Or say fuck cards and throw them in the bin, who cares, it's less than the price of a beer.
The point is that you've got something to chew on conversationally beyond "So, how about those headlines? And did I tell you about my wellbeing lately?" Those will still come up but if the conversation lags there's a convenient external focus to return to that doesn't actually require talking. You can drift between talking and doing and talking about what you're doing without either one demanding precedence.
5434a
1yr ago
Read the non-zero days post on Reddit. Acknowledge that x isn't going to do itself. Work out what the barest of bare minimums is that you could do, do that, and notice that you've given yourself some impetus to overcome the inertia.
5434a
1yr ago
In practical terms it wouldn't matter. In philosophical terms there will remain a meaningful and distinguishing difference from the fact that they haven't always been women. They would enjoy full licence to roam the bailey, but the motte of womanhood will remain inviolate. Even with a "blank" body grown from the embryo up from their own stem cells the implanted brain-mind-self would remain trans in the definitive sense of the prefix. Only a man could undergo such a process whereby he became a woman.
5434a
1yr ago
it’s a complete fucking riddle to me if someone discloses that they “identify as a woman” or whatever.[...] what I’ve repeatedly experienced is a marked reluctance to offer up anything more than the vaguest of details.
As I said a few days ago, the transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be. Applying it to uses outside that scope throws up unanswered questions and contradictions because it wasn't made for more general uses and so it fails in other applications. It was constructed to serve their immediate ends and no more.
Looking at it like this brings the matter into focus. It's a medical condition only as long as it needs to be to access medical resources. In scenarios where access to medical resources isn't required, guess what? It's no longer a medical condition. When it suits to be a psychological condition, or a linguistic label, or a particular aesthetic, those are the things transgenderism will be - until it no longer suits. The details aren't vague so much as they're ephemeral. The consistent quality is the self-servingness and self-justification.
You're a defence lawyer, you must be familiar with this tactic. I assume the difference is that in the legal realm you don't tie yourself in knots puzzling how to make sense of these competing claims. "I was at home that night... What I mean is that I had at some point been home that night... I mean, I didn't say whose home I was at that night... What I mean is I was batting in a baseball game... ... So, uh, can I go home now?"
They're not the other sex. They want to be the other sex. The entirity of transgenderism is the struggle to resist the unfortunate and persistent reality that they cannot be the other sex. And if in a biopunk future they somehow could, they'd still have not-been and be relegated to arriviste status. In the absence of full transexualism the very best a transgender can achieve is to be transgender. This could have been tolerable, but the more rhetoric they deployed the more holes were revealed until there's more hole than there is doughnut. There are male men and female women, and there is masculinity and femininity. Outside of the truly rare edge case congenital medical conditions I don't see which complex meanings can't be rendered legible with these simple terms. The transgender philosophy and lexicon renders these meanings less legible, and I suspect it's by design to construct a means to an otherwise impossible end.
If I want entertaining reading material then usually something like /r/hobbydrama or /r/bestofupdates / /r/bestoflegalupdates, as they tend to be fairly longform, varied in subject matter and end at a conclusion. Theonion is still funny, and there's McSweeny's if you like your humour dry and literary and sympathetic to the blue tribe, but it's easy to burn through a month's worth of new posts on both of those sites in less than an hour.
5434a
1yr ago
Lately it's been the robin because it's sociable and likes to join in with the gardening.
5434a
1yr ago
If nothing is excluded from being a woman then it renders the concept of transitioning null because any proposed exclusion will apply to transwomen, as it must because if they were already women they'd have no need nor potential to transition. If there are qualities that exclude a person from being a woman then they must and always will apply to transwomen.
Let me switch from the general to the specific.
If having a penis is irrelevant then we're all women. If being cute and girly is irrelevant then we're all women. If uttering the words "I am a woman" is sufficient then four words is all it takes to be a woman, which is effectively no barrier and could happen by accident while reading this post out loud. If having one, or the other, or neither of the possible gamete production capabilities is irrelevant then we're all women. If having someone call you a woman is sufficient then a trivial variation on four words is all it takes: "you are a woman". If putting on a dress is sufficient then all women cease to be women the moment they take their dress off.
Trans rhetoric is glaringly motivated by their central requirement to construct and alter a set of categories that serve only to justify their ends of becoming what they categorically and self-admittedly are not. That's why it's so inconsistent and contradictory. You can't be something and not be something and become something that you already are that you'll never be. It's desparate backpedalling and feigned ignorance all the way down. Their claims on sex and gender strictly start where they are and end wherever they can reach. That is by necessity the full extent of their epistemology, because any extension beyond that entails defeating the conscious objective of their claims.
[Hitting post now, I have an addendum brewing that is both more conciliatory and more condemning]
5434a
1yr ago
Does your argument apply to money? If it looks close enough it will do, and try not to look too closely?
5434a
1yr ago
Thanks, that was pretty much my reasoning too. "I suppose
Your English Vocabulary Size is: 30100 ★★★ Top 0.01%
Bit annoying that it doesn't say which ones you missed. Most of it was very easy but one or two were educated guesses for words I'd never seen before. I can't remember the word (something like "avular"?) but I chose "
5434a
1yr ago
5000 dollars to a person of your choice
This will rapidly result in effectively paying the meanest prisoner $5000 a head to bring the life of weak prisoners to an end and making it look like suicide. It's a death penalty by proxy with cash rewards for the most ruthless serial murderer. You could try and close that loophole but they'll remain incentivised to the tune of $5000 to find new exploits, and each $5000 will give them additional capacity to find them. It's a persecution racket.
if you want prisoners to die you should assume the responsibility for killing them.
5434a
1yr ago
Hexstatic - Rewind. Ticks the simple, fun and danceable box, ticks the audio-visual video synchronisation box. Might be a bit too retro in its references to Speak'n'Spells, Space Invaders and Kung Fu films that were already explicitly retro when it came out in 2000.
5434a
1yr ago
It's not Arnold tier but as I understand it his Dynamic Tension program was unique in being largely about what he called non-apparatus methods. I've just had a flick through a copy on archive.org and it's not much more than a few basic bodyweight exercises (dips, leg raises), some stretches, some weird self-resistance exercises (climbing an imaginary rope, punching yourself in the abdomen), and plenty of fresh air, a balanced diet without sugar and caffeine, and a cold cloth on the genitals each morning.
I assume a diligent follower could achieve a basic otter mode and no longer be a weakling who gets sand kicked in their face but Atlas claims he had a 47" chest. Taking a quick skim through an image search that looks more like a juiced up underwear model who lifts weights than the dad bod + clean diet physique of Atlas who supposedly didn't touch apparatus and had no access to steroids. Apparently Arnold was 58" at his biggest and he used every means available.
5434a
1yr ago
1.) Yes.
2.) No. I currently only wear a suit for weddings and funerals only, but I'm not anti formalwear either.
Hawaiian shirt
?
5434a
1yr ago
Purely idle curiosity: Could someone following the Charles Atlas exercise program achieve Charles Atlas's physique?
5434a
1yr ago
If you have ever seen anyone who was charismatic enough to inspire people to willingly endure disgust, or misery, or chronic pain simply to make THEM happy, how did they do it?
Slavoj Zizek travels the world speaking to paying audiences of intellectuals, has been married four times and he has two children. According to wikipedia his third wife was an Argentinian model. His current wife is thirty years younger than him. The precondition for how he did it was in not dismissing it as impossible or insurmountable. He achieved those outcomes despite being a flabby book-nerd who can't get six words into a sentence without twitching, stimming and flecking his t-shirt with spittle.
Stephen Hawking had three children and his wife married him despite his being diagnosed with a condition that would condemn him to life in a motorised wheelchair. Later he divorced his wife in order to marry one of his full-time carers. He spoke through a computer and his most graceful gesture would look like a mild spasm if anyone else did it.
I'm not saying you'll get married to a model if you ""just be yourself"". All I'm saying is that there are normal average women out there who don't need you to be an impeccably dressed millionaire bodybuilder before they'll give you a chance.
Things are going slightly better
That's all you need. Achieve the same outcome enough times and eventually things begin to go well.
5434a
1yr ago
Is/ought, plus game theory. Women will always have an unfair advantage in this arena because men will always gain an advantage by handing this advantage to women. The man who boycotts the ladies night at the bar, or any other low stakes garden variety simpery, out of offence to his high-minded egalitarian principles will lose out to the pragmatic man who accepts the phenomenon and potentially uses it as a pivot to open a conversation and flirt with those women. ("You women get half price drinks? Nice, that means you can buy me two! No? Ah, so you're a hashtag trad wife. Cool, I'm more of an equal rights feminist. A very thirsty equal rights feminist with an empty glass. Oh okay I get it, maybe those dodgy pick up guys were right about women after all. Hold on a second, are you a pick up artist girl? No? So where did you learn your undeniable skills? In that case I guess it must have come to you naturally. Naturally blessed with half price drinks. Imagine that." Or something significantly smoother and less terminally online, I don't know).
5434a
1yr ago
It's not over until they take down the perspex wagie cages in the supermarket. Even banks and the other traditionally physically secured service counters are back to being wide open in the way they were already becoming pre-pandemic.
5434a
1yr ago
The main thing to remember is the 30-45 minute delay between drinking a drink and feeling its full effect. The risk is that you get drunk, the drunkenness makes it feel like drinking more is a brilliant idea, so you do, and then all the previous drinks catch up and you get so drunk that you start pretending to be a stuntman, a street fighter (sometimes literally), a master orator and god's gift to womankind. The proper thing to do when you get that feeling is to stop drinking for at least an hour, but that's the total opposite of what it feels like you should do, so you probably won't and then wish that you had. It's a lot easier to avoid the myriad of bad consequences if you can avoid reaching the level where bad decisions seemed sensible in the first place.
Definitely don't text anyone who you're not out drinking with. You know who.
Set your phone up with a phone tracking app and test it works before you lose it.
5434a
1yr ago
I think so.
In short: Assuming I subscribe to this variety of gender theory, what am I looking at when I see a pregnant person decorating a cupcake?
5434a
1yr ago
Empirical reality is cool but the point is that putting it to one side and taking modern/woke/trans gender theory on its own merits can demonstrate that either their logic fails by its own standard or their logic doesn't have any standards to fail by.
Either there will always be some asymptotic essence of otherness that upholds the delineation between man and woman with their respective qualities and qualifiers and renders the idea of switching from one to the other impossible, or there's no difference to functionally separate the two meaning there's no other to contrast against and so no position to move away from or towards. At that point the only thing left is a subjectivity of aesthetics, which amounts to the label-claiming we observe where we might see a woman who feels like the kind of woman who has a penis and wants to have sex with women but doesn't feel like the kind of woman who might get pregnant by having sex with a man (pronouns: yak/sax).
This is without touching on the unwelcome and unintended implications of these theories, such as how they would account for people who over-identify with their gender (boob jobs and steroids, trans rights are cis rights), male/female neurotypology that would necessarily disqualify otherwise typical men and women from belonging to their pre-existing category, and the plain old basic feminist argument that women are capable of more than housekeeping and looking pretty.
Taking it seriously leads to the conclusion that it's unserious, and by extension that it shouldn't be taken seriously. The regressive absurdity of it would be tragic if it wasn't so funny [reverse according to personal taste].
So what do we call a masculine woman? Call her a masculine woman. There's nothing to be gained by doing otherwise, and much to be lost. Whether we redefine reality or redefine words it necessitates the loss of the prior definition.
5434a
1yr ago
No, because that obscures more than it reveals. Using a description of "a masculine woman" provides a more useful and accurate description than "man", especially if "man" also now includes masculine women.
Modern gender theory is inconsistent, contradictory and circular. Trying to reason with it is pointless. It by turns enforces then conflates distinctions between sex and gender and within sex and gender to suit its ends. Under this theory your question of whether it's appropriate to label a person a man can only be answered by whether that person wants to be labelled a man or not, which ignores that by advancing this theory the label has become an empty signifier that reduces to "is this person a person with person-like qualities". There is no there there.
5434a
1yr ago
It's entirely a pragmatic choice (in short piracy suits my self-interested ends better), but if I had to frame it as a matter of ethics I would say I have been presented with a choice of a) free as in speech plus as in beer, versus b) paying to conform and suffering artificial restrictions for the privilege.
The second order effect is that I have spent money on creative works that I absolutely would not have bought when I was buying other media. It could be argued that provides some justification for pirating but it's a hollow claim to virtue.
Beeps were made even worse when I bought a humidifier that has polyphonic beeps just from the knowledge that there's another way. Instead of the flat monotonic beeep it chimes a piiing with the decay and everything, like a digitised rendition of flicking a china bowl. At least our washing machine has a volume setting, the microwave is brutal though and doesn't have a "2" button to try out your suggestion.
I'm just thankful I don't work in a hospital.
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