TitaniumButterfly
No bio...
User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
21m ago
Do you ever talk to AI? I have this unaccountable sense that you'd probably enjoy it.
TitaniumButterfly
23m ago
Such a squandered character. Idk, Firefly used to be the best thing ever to me but at some point in the last couple of years I seem to have gotten over it.
TitaniumButterfly
26m ago
Zadok from the Old Testament? Is this one of those "move all the Bibles into the fiction section of the bookstore" things?
Admittedly at first I got him mixed up with Zardoz and was like man I guess I should have finished watching that movie.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
The older I get, the more I've come to believe that humans are only mostly monogamous, or rather "serially monogamous".
We don't need to paint all of humanity with the same brush. In fact there's lots of room for individual and group-level variation here, even speaking on a purely instinctual level before nurture comes into it.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
I used to have fun asking people if they could think of a few examples of evil priests in fiction. No problem of course; there are many. Then I'd ask if they could think of any non-evil priests in fiction. Crickets.
Over the years a couple of examples have come up, of course, but mainly it's a landslide in the other direction. Particularly for anyone who mainly consumes contemporary media as opposed to reading Chesterton or something.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
No, I'm afraid not. I'm unlikely to see it either because I'm just not in the habit of watching TV. I like the idea of watching more TV and have several series I've been meaning to finish, but who has the time?
But thanks, that does sound interesting.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Yeah no, I have a lot of kids and another on the way and no plans to stop for a while yet. I get that part. I'm just hung up on the bit about society, yeah.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Yeah, I'm in a much better area for that sort of thing. Quite the mix of rich and poor. California, really.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Sold it, I hope. Exercise equipment drifts in and out of my home for various reasons but I'm usually able to recoup about as much as I paid for it initially.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Turning the dial converts some of the mass to energy. Warranty void if attempted. User assumes all personal and planetary existential risk.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
To show off to guests, of course. Or to cool off on hot days. Knew a guy out in the desert who'd jump into his pool several times a day over the summer months.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
Wait! I want to comment on the cartoon too!
While basically sympathetic to the artist's point, what mainly occurs to me here is that in the first three panels people were living a lifestyle that let them be home with their kids a lot.
Both parents out of the house working, and especially if it's for low wages, is indeed hard. Also lack of family or community around to help with that. Also can't let them play alone outside. Also you're gonna need a bigger car if you want more than two, and those things don't grow on trees. Also also also...
So it's like a system where the handle goes down into some kind of arrangement of plates, you dial in what you want, and those ones engage and become attached? So basically just a convenient way to load and unload plates?
Does it use magnets? :3
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
This seems to suppose that the society in which I find myself -- and perhaps more importantly its leadership -- has incentives which are nearly-aligned with my own, which seems pretty debatable both presently and historically.
TitaniumButterfly
1d ago
you wouldn't be able to run your electoral hydra scheme without the cooperation of the city/county
So you're saying there's a chance!
I'm having a real fun time trying to figure out how the mass of a dumbbell can be adjusted by turning a dial!
Edit: best I can come up with is some kind of onboard air compressor and storage tank.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Coordinating that and managing the people involved, who would then have standing for adventures like minority shareholder lawsuits, would be much more troublesome.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
Thanks, that's mostly what I wanted to know. Still curious though about tradeoffs and where our personal obligations to sacrifice for the society begin and end.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
The avoidance of pain is the central tenet of our societies.
Not sure I'd phrase it quite like this but agreed that it's a major factor. In practice it looks a lot to me like a desire for what amounts to palliative care until death.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
I think it was pretty smart of me to not have sex in high school.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
This seems like a fully-general argument against, uh, laws? I can't think of any that don't come down to what amounts to values. Murder has been legal and even encouraged in plenty of societies, for example, though with certain (values-based) restrictions.
I think that [the modern notion of] consent is a troublesome concept for any number of reasons. Actually more than troublesome; unworkable, even.
The way things actually work in my experience is that sex is something that happens within marriage and marriage must, by its nature, be approved by the community or at least the priest, which is a pretty excellent filtering mechanism.
All the handwringing about consent occurs to me as people having shattered a priceless vase and hurriedly trying to work out hacks for handling the shards without nicking any arteries. But one has only to take a glance at the sheer amount of blood on the floor to realize it's not going well.
TitaniumButterfly
2d ago
I don't think there's a viable societally-general solution, but my local solution of being part of a religious community where motherhood is high-status seems to be working out fine. Good luck to everyone else, I guess, and hopefully we'll still be here when you're ready to try something other than whatever it is you're doing now.
I was talking about this with a woman a while back (it came up organically) but put my foot in my mouth when I mentioned that female fertility drops off precipitously at about age 35. She was a career woman who was very much hitting her "Oh no I've made a huge mistake" phase and I supposed it would be helpful to give her a nudge in the right direction. Except it turned out she was already 35, which I had totally failed to consider because she was East Asian and looked 28 at the oldest.
Would you rather be alone in the woods with a herd of American bison or an educated professional white woman?
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