SkookumTree
1yr ago
willingly suffering in a way which benefits no one is meaningless.
I understand. The meaninglessness of the Hock is a feature, not a bug: I'd be asking my girlfriend to make a huge and fundamentally meaningless sacrifice by being with me, given my subpar-but-not-Quasimodo physical appearance and autism.
I didn't mention very much the 'suffer so that your girlfriend benefits' thing; I had taken this as more or less given that I'd do my best and make unusually large sacrifices in order to keep my girlfriend happy. The Hock may be - but hopefully isn't - a prologue for the kind of determination, conscientiousness, and self-sacrifice I'll need to display in order to maintain a relationship with someone that isn't morbidly obese, has a job, isn't a hard drug user or danger to herself or others, and can manage her own affairs.
Further: I don't know how much I'll talk about the Hock after I complete it, assuming that I survive. I think that the Hock is going to alter my character and personality. I've read accounts of martial artists being able to recognize other martial artists from how they carried themselves, and combat veterans have talked about being able to recognize other people that have been in life-or-death struggles against other people. I know that if I told people about the Hock - even if I called it a "solo backpacking trip" people would either think I was a liar or crazy. That too - the stupidity of the Hock - is a feature, not a bug. Because it's pretty dumb to be in a relationship with some dude that disgusts you just 'cause he's into you.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I don't recall him ever saying that he's disgusting for wanting a relationship, only that he's hypocritical for wanting a relationship while being disgusting (because ugly, awkward, etc.).
From the horse's mouth: I think that it is very likely that my partner is going to be disgusted by me. If I'm not willing to endure a similar level of misery as my partner, I'm a hypocrite: I'm asking someone to do something I'm unwilling or unable to do myself. In this case, I personally find this form of hypocrisy at least mildly disgusting - like a 400lb doctor eating a shitload of McDonald's and telling their patients to lose weight and eat healthier, Big Gulp in hand.
I'll add on an addendum to this, which is that many have criticized the Hock by calling it pointless and therefore stupid. The pointlessness of the Hock is a feature, not a bug; there isn't exactly a whole hell of a lot of point or meaning in a woman (or anyone) suffering in a relationship with someone they find disgusting. As such, a meaningful and even nobler, certainly a more valuable struggle/sacrifice (such as service in Doctors Without Borders, or the Ukrainian armed forces as an MD minus his residency) isn't as good at freezing off the hypocrisy. For that to be true, you'd need to believe that a relationship with your disgusting ass would be meaningful or that it would benefit some kind of greater good; I do not believe this.
Furthermore:
All that said, I'd still prefer he doesn't do his suicidal stunt in the state I live in, because it doesn't matter how much he repeats "don't look for me," if he goes missing, the state will send out people to find him (or his corpse)
Yeah. It would kind of suck to have guys braving 50 below and flying choppers and shit around in some godforsaken mountain range in the middle of absolutely nowhere to look for the frozen-solid carcass of some poor benighted fool who thought that an extended wilderness sojourn would solve his problems. Of course, Alaska probably serves as a magnet for such fools and the Alaskan wilderness has got to have a fair number of dead fools in it already.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. You do have things more akin to a consensual fistfight duel than one asshole attacking another guy who might just have been a bit less of an asshole that day. In that case I think a much more minor sentence is appropriate...two guys deciding to take it outside and one of them dying from what's basically a shitty bare knuckle boxing match might mean a year or two in prison basically as punishment for fucking up a duel that wasn't supposed to kill anyone.
Life imprisonment is a bit excessive here, and 8 to 10 years sounds like what you'd expect for manslaughter.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
There's also some probably-subclinical things that might make someone's handwriting mediocre or average instead of excellent. Hypermobility is one of them, and trans people are disproportionately hypermobile. Same for autism and the sensory bullshit and weirdness that goes with that. Including, say, mild dyspraxia or clumsiness.
TL;DR trans, a bit more likely to be loose-jointed and a bit clumsy.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
He was only 5'7".
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I think both sides overrate morality as a factor in sexual success.
Maybe Mr. Rogers was an asshole. However, he also sucked at being an asshole. Before the murders, he had managed to engage in some low-level assholery, spraying orange juice at passing couples and trying to throw someone off a balcony before being beaten and thrown off himself. He was unable to recruit allies and was a less effective asshole than your local drunken brawler.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
People are going to run amok; when they do so they're going to pick up whatever's floating around in their society. Centuries ago, it might've been motivated and couched in religious or supernatural terms; in other times and places, it might be due to real or imagined grievances against other individuals or groups.
Our toothpick-built distance runner was deadlifting a good deal more than his body weight and was doing pretty well for someone who doesn't lift much if at all. If he was trying and failing with 185 for a single rep that would be different.
Also, he most definitely would have been able to rack pull 225, given that his deadlift form was shitty and he nonetheless got 2 good reps at 225. Starting as a stick-thin non-lifting dude built like a gazelle.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Thanks - I made it myself, with a little bit of assistance from @SomeoneElse on Discord (who respects the Hock, but thinks it's stupid and doesn't recommend it). He suggested changing the position of some of the text.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
It's Skookum the Hock guy himself - I don't find it distasteful. It's rather amusing to me, to be honest. The market has the Hock guy at 7 to 4 against...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I’m not sure a closeted gay biological parent in a sham straight marriage is preferable long-term to a stable gay marriage either.
In a modern, Western society...especially with gayness being heritable...I agree with you, here. You had a lot more support for the gay, closeted man or woman and a lot more pressure to be closeted fifty years ago, let alone a hundred years ago.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. There's probably at least a few people here on the Motte who would sleep with a close friend that they were sexually disgusted by...if it was that close friend's dying wish. I'd do it, as long as they knew that I was grossed out and didn't really want to do it, but would do it in the same spirit as working as a septic tank pumper's assistant for a day. A nasty job, but for a good, dying friend who knows what they're getting? Worse things to do.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
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.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I would support a rule that for people permanently incapable of lawful consent (which would include Aella's case but also people ruled generally incompetent), actual consent plus the approval of a legal guardian (or family court or whatever) can substitute for legal consent.
I think that could work OK-ish for terminally ill kids; in a hospital for something like this you have a teenager who is more or less of sound mind, not intellectually disabled, and terminally ill. So maybe they're not at full adult capacity for consent but maybe like 75% and usually 75% isn't truly up to snuff...but if they're terminally ill, and their parents agree, and they've had a couple psychologists and maybe a pastor or something talk to them about it, it's good enough. On the other hand, someone who is profoundly intellectually disabled isn't terminally ill and might only be at 10% on a good day, and the +30% isn't enough to boost it over the edge.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah, fair enough - or at least, it's a hell of a lot less wrong. I think that there should be a lot of deliberation and consultation with psychologists and/or religious leaders or something before this...but if a terminally ill 14-year-old wants to go BASE jumping and he and his parents agree on comfort care only if it goes wrong, I'd let him have at it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
The case for "yes", in my opinion - as someone who's been in the healthcare field for a few years - is in my mind strengthened by their terminal illness. Part of the reason why children are restricted from making certain decisions is in order to increase the chance that they will grow up into healthy adults. We wouldn't allow ordinary, healthy 13-year-olds to hire adult prostitutes partly because we believe this to be harmful to the 18-year-old, the 25-year-old, the 40-year-old that they will almost certainly become.
With terminal illness, this isn't a consideration any longer. As such, a dying child's autonomy vs. security interests are tilted much more heavily in the direction of "autonomy". As such: I'm slightly in favor, in this case, but it is a nasty question to deal with and there is probably no good solution here.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Would you let this terminally ill child get drunk instead?
yes
Get high on LSD?
yes
Dive to see the wreck of Titanic in a flimsy submersible?
perhaps, if they and their parents were well aware of the risks and understood
Euthanize themselves?
yes, if it was determined that they wanted euthanasia, weren't depressed, etc; probably would want the parents to agree but if the child is repeatedly and unwaveringly insistent that they don't want to live with this terminal illness anymore, I wouldn't necessarily want to require this. I don't really have much certainty here but am leaning towards "let terminally ill teenagers choose euthanasia, even without parental consent". My rationale is that as much as that kind of thing sucks, it also sucks to have a 13-year-old who's adamant about preferring death to spending a couple of weeks or months struggling to breathe, doped up on morphine, with altered mental status...forced to endure this, and then die afterwards. Of course, I'll concede that there are reasonable counterarguments here.
As you might be able to tell, I'm very much in favor of death-with-dignity and assisted suicide for the terminally ill. If I see the end coming, I'm going to die like a doctor.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
“would you rather fuck your dad or your mom”
For me: seems like both of us are more or less being raped; I'm assuming that we've got guns to our heads or something. In that case...whichever would be hurt least. Whole situation sucks rotting donkey balls and it's at best a choice between eating five pounds of rotted donkey balls and eating six pounds of rotted donkey balls.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Who else other than someone sexually attracted to minors is going to want to fuck a dying 13 year old who may well be too sick or too weak to participate in the activity as an equal partner, never mind if they are able in the first place to have sex with an adult?
Someone who would have sex in spite of feeling neutral, even disgusted, due to a personal conviction. It could be something as simple as "I'm doing this because I want my client to have this experience before they die; my disgust and feelings be damned".
SkookumTree
1yr ago
why not rape
It's against the child's wishes. It's also bad for the rapist and bad for the people enabling it. Sure, if there was a fixed quantity of rapists and each rapist only completed X offenses per year or lifetime...maybe this wouldn't be terrible but why can't it wait 'till our hapless hero or heroine is in a coma?
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.
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.
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'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.
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).
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...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
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.
Generally speaking, handing a 5-year-old a loaded revolver is a terrible idea. However, if that child is terminally ill and has "shoot a revolver" as his dying wish...it might not be a terrible thing for him to go to a gun range with an adult and be allowed to fire a few rounds from a .22 revolver. Hell, there's probably ways for him to just be handed that revolver and allowed to shoot at a target or something in the woods. A remote-controlled intramuscular benzodiazepine injector would allow first responders to safely get to him if he happens to shoot himself; I'm assuming that he's comfort care only.
That would probably be legit kinder to him than keeping him half alive on heroic measures and ventilators and all that stuff.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I don't really have much of a position on that. Having seen some shit working in the healthcare industry, and seen a few children dying from cancer, I am willing to say that this isn't terribly bad, given the child's circumstances. Reasonable people can be on either side of this issue. Cancer is a nasty, nasty disease: this guy is looking down the barrel of Who By Very Slow Decay, pediatric edition. Mercifully that is a bit faster than the geriatric version.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
As a guy with most of a medical degree: falling and hitting your head on concrete can be a motherfucker. Results are a crapshoot and can be anything from a mild concussion to death. I saw a young, fit teenager that very nearly died and will be crippled for life with brain injury...because he fainted and fell off a step that was a foot and a half high. Plenty of manslaughter cases come from fistfights that take place in parking lots; one man knocks the other out and the loser falls, hits his head on the pavement, and dies. I think that this guy was KO'd by the thrown megaphone, hit his head on the concrete, and was mortally injured.
Fixed that for you; a lack of gracefulness due to autism isn't physically unattractive, but is pretty deformity-adjacent. Two seconds of video footage, or a single still photo of an autistic person interacting, is enough for people to judge them as awkward.
I'm willing to entertain the at-best-counterintuitive position that a relationship with an awkward autist trying reasonably hard to be kind can be worse than a relationship with your typical, garden variety shithead that gambles money away, has a booze problem, or is physically abusive. Playing devil's advocate here, the autist is sincerely trying their damndest to be a decent person...but his attempts (and it's usually a he) suck donkey balls. Also his awkwardness contributes to their social isolation. And it's pretty difficult for her to get assistance in leaving the relationship: after all, he's a genuinely kind, caring man...so what if he's a little awkward?
The plan is to finish the Hock in two or three weeks; if I'm not out of the wilderness after seven weeks are up, I'm probably just a human popsicle for wolves or bears or something.
More options
Context Copy link