cae_jones
2yr ago
As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.
cae_jones
2yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
2yr ago
I kinda feel like "adulting" looks suspiciously like the genesis of such terminology. And if I'm being pedantic, my high school health textbook in 2002 divided age into things like chronological age and social age, but those feel more like "biological sex" and "gender roles" rather than "sex" Vs "gender", so IDK.
cae_jones
2yr ago
I'm told my grandmother gave me Dr. Pepper in a bottle long after I was otherwise done with bottles. This was blamed for the wretched state of my teeth when I started Kindergarten, though I've personally believed that the part where nobody told me that rensing your mouth with Dr. Pepper immediately after brushing your teeth is a bad idea had something to do with it.
(I feel obligated to defend myself by pointing out that I quit sodas when I was 13 and haven't looked back since. It's just that, when I was 5, I started school with no upper incisors and silver canines making me look like a sleepy robot vampire.)
cae_jones
2yr ago
You know who else under performs? Southern white proles. One might go so far as to invoke cultural contamination from the poorest, mostviolent subculture in the US. It's less black culture that's the problem, and low-class borderer culture, which black Americans had thrust upon them.
You could say, "of course Asians in California do well; they assimilated to the culture of California." And "Of course Jews do well; they assimilated to the cultures of New York and European intelligencia." And "Of course Black Americans do poorly; they assimilated to poor Southerner culture."
You'd think, being that it's acceptable to bash Southern culture, this would be an acceptable path. It sounds like blaming racism, but it's really blaming The South, which is even better to some. Jazz, Blues, Rap, Hiphop, etc are distinctly Black in origin, but drug-addled criminality, low test scores, under-aged polyamory, and parents in and out of prison are not.
cae_jones
2yr ago
My thou-obsessed pedantry is set off by all of those "thy <vowel>"s. It's "thine economics" and "thine international," thou genie-summoner.
/pedantry
cae_jones
2yr ago
I heard recently (I forget from where) that the Wicked Stepmother trope was invented well after the fairytales we associate it with became popular, and the original versions had the bio mothers being villainous. IIRC, it had to do with the change in inheritance traditions from Medieval Europe to Renaissance/early modern dramatically altering the incentives.
cae_jones
2yr ago
IIRC, Penpractice posted a lot of HBD stuff, in a way that eventually started to come across as hiding his power level sort of way. TP0 was sufficiently researched and eloquent as to not be suppressing much, power level wise, but had this bad habit of losing his cool after backs-and-forths with opponents, and after that got him banned he just kinda never came back.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Is it really larping when you've reached the point of blowing up major international infrastructure? I'd think the difference between larping a war-brazened saboteur and actually being one probably includes actual acts of destruction that require at least some skill and planning.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Yeah... is it [il], or [ij], or some other pronunciation that ignores French phonetics? Or maybe tries for some obscure argument in favor of pronuncing the final e... but again, [ilə] or [ijə]?
I want to expect [il], but that'd render it inaudible.
cae_jones
2yr ago
This feels accurate.
Personally, I've always (until somewhere around the mid 2010s) waffled on the question of whether or not I want to / should have children. In hindsight, I think it can be summed up as "Yes, but the more I think about it, the scarier it gets."
The problem is that there are some prerequisits I'm just ... not super interested in. In middle school, I had this tendency to fantasize about having children, but would handwave away where they came from. I think the book I published in high school could be interpreted as a self-insert parenting fantasy, that I suddenly realized was that halfway through and so the SI got uncomfortable about it in awkward infodummps because that's what was happening in my head. (In said book, the protags somehow wound up looking after not one, but two adorable space-orphans, withddout a shred of romance or sexuality to be found.)
This feels like the opposite of the rest of The West, where people have prioritized sex and romance over children, yet somehow it still feels like "we just kinda forgot for a couple generations" applies to me, too. Really deprioritized, in favor of the all-important Education.
cae_jones
2yr ago
McDonalds of sex
"Food, folks and fun" indeed...
Though, this begs the question of how places where prostitution is already legal are fairing. I haven't heard of any major differences between NZ, the Netherlands, Nevada, Denmark, and the rest of the world that are attributable to their approaches to sex work.
I always preferred dolls to cars, thought it was cool that one time someone gave me a hot pink t-shirt, and was amused when that first letter my parents received about disability benefits kept calling me "she" ... But none of that made me a girl. And if we're talking gendered stereotypes, I preferred action figures and rough-housing and swords most of all, and was conspicuously annoyed when people intentionally misgendered me (unintentionally was / is kinda neat).
When I was 8-9-ish, my grandpa tried to hide a doll I'd sleep with. This was quite upsetting. Were I 8-9-ish today, and anyone at school found out about these things, would I get the opposite treatment? ... And it's hard to imagine how I'd'veresponded. I think I was both aware enough of the absence of seriousgender identity concerns, and stubborn enough to say so bluntly, but I'm only, like, 75% ish confident in that. And that mostly because I haven't heard anyone who would be doing said hypothetical convincing sound like they'd have any idea how to be convincing to 8-9-ish me.
The especially frustrating part about this whole mess is that I've always wished I'd somehow dodged puberty ever since puberty. But I had to experience a good deal before I could really make that decision, after which it was far too late to do much about it. What's more, I get the sinking feeling that the neurological effects of puberty were relevant to my figuring this out, and to certain ... positive character development? things, and this was never just a physiological dysphoria. Negative character development throughout elementary school also hurt a lot when I became aware of it. As much as I deeply loath what has become of my body, I was at peak a-hole in the couple years before puberty. I like to think I could be reasoned into realizing this and trying to improve, even without getting mindflayed by hormones, but it doesn't seem at all likely that such would actually happen if all this were taking place today. Someone would say "Are you sure you're not a girl? Here: let's put off puberty while you think about it." And that would be it, and I'd probably be even more emotionally incontinent for lack of the trace amounts of prepubescent testosterone or whatever that enabled me to train resistance to crying over minor things.
This whole situation is just so frustrating! Even if I had a mental time-machine, it's not like I could go back to the 90s, chop off my testes, then hand them off to someone who could science up viable gametes just in case I found someone willing to be artificially insemenated by a permachild for some reason other than that I obviously brought the winning lotto numbers back with me. I can't Detective Conan myself smaller now and take advantage of The System™ without contributing to its misuse against children, the majority of whom I'd be quite shocked to discover are any better at resolving this stuff in time than I was. Oh, and the trans activists probably would hate me because it being age-related instead of gender-related pattern-matches to trolls who claim age dysphoria as an excuse for active paedophilia to tarnish trans people by association. (FWIW, I denounce said trolls.)
There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation. The information necessary to make a decision like that is not available to humans with our current level of knowledge and technology. As much as I might wish I'd accidentally sat on some dry ice when I was 10, I can't in good conscience support the policies that would have given me what I want when it would have been viable. When we get Medical Omega, maybe things could be different, but for now, I'm not sure there's anything to do for kids like me besides support after it's too late.
(Attempts to prove me wrong are very, very welcome.)
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