SexyIncél
🍭my lollipop brings the feminists to my candyshop
- Aug 16, 2022
- 1,482
Removing this conversation from a thread on male loneliness, to avoid derailing it. Please feel free to ignore; I doubt it's of interest to many
I mean, we're giving people our time & skill here. My job is to understand their situation & help them get wins. Nullify some mechanism(s) out there causing their suffering. Or hang out & mutually increase our pleasures
(Fancy terms for decreasing suffering vs increasing pleasure: "negative vs positive utilitarianism". I'd rather stick with increasing pleasure & thus be an artist. But suffering keeps people from enjoying pleasure)
You can prioritize amplifying those who amplify others — those who practice moral virtues. Improves society. Amplifying immoral people makes you complicit in their immorality
When people repeatedly do dumb shit that hurts them :P, you can shift into being more coldly truthful. I can do this by saying, "Ok, I gotta start talking with you in the blunt truthful way, as we do in the World of Men. Better to be hit by cold words, than by cold reality"
And they can come to you if they need help understanding a situation, accomplishing a concrete goal, or nullifying an enemy. Because that's the fun part. You might round up a posse to lighten the load. Keep efficiency in mind: best to discover big wins with minimal effort
They usually won't die if you don't help them. And even if they might... well, we've all been on the cusp of nonexistence & lost important friends. A sasu friend of mine chastised me for spending time here on sasu. She said "They're dying anyway"
And tbh, it can be hilariously scary to adore someone who's got sadomasochistic dynamics going on. If you look at Lynn Chancer's "Sadomaschism in Everyday Life", you may find sadomasochistic relations fundamental, because they're potentially there in any top-down hierarchical relation. Not just capitalism, but many other systems too. Big & small
Fortunately, there exist people who really do let you adore them back, without punishing you. They're the "high quality gals & guys" who Alexander Grace speaks of, people who can magically look upon your momentary weaknesses without disdain
Well, working on one's class snobbery says good things about you! fwiw, My understanding from ethnographers is that free people tend to act like aristocrats, not like the working class. (Walking through a forest, head up high, feeling like its theirs...)
I like how you say "People can analyze the external world much better than themselves." That's a cultural anthropology saying: making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Useful to become alienated from yourself, seeing yourself as a dance of particles that cohere into atoms, which cohere into cells, which ... into whatever the fuck we are
Some end up rebuilding themselves, starting with philosophy. (Hopefully good philosophies. I can send you my thoughts on that.) This allows one to have powerful end-to-end knowledge, in a chain from the most general notions to the details of a particular domain. People like that tend to be disturbingly accurate
I mean, you can hit them with Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality, which teaches relentless resourcefulness. Have they REALLY tried everything? Can we name 5 candidate solutions that might conceivably work out?
Also, cognitive scientist Lisa Barrett interesting things to say about how emotions work. (Which we can discuss, if you'd like.) Those emotional mechanisms can be hacked
It's hard to talk about this abstractly; are the problems more rooted in the physics level? Biological? Social? Psychological?
Take Andrew Tate. Why does mainstream media cover him, even though he correctly points out most people are slaves? (Such as wageslaves.) Because his solution is to free yourself by being a more effective slave. Not abolishing the slavery system
When listening to anyone, you gotta remove any ideological poisons. Charitably interpreting people is good practice in this
Furthermore, "your side" may have ideological blindspots — taboos — so they fail to offer improved theories. If feminists won't offer men compelling masculinities, then let's act *shocked* (gasp) if men get it from patriarchal men's movements. Enemies exploit weaknesses
The right actually pays attention to what leftists say. Few leftists do that to rightwingers. Chomsky & bell hooks are exceptions
Reminds me of Graeber/Wengrow:
"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don't count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."
Examples of goofiness: "Rubbing noses, silly licking, shock value. Can be like the surprise generating laughter in standup comedy, a total twisted mindfuck"
We could also hack social reality, if you'd like. I'll send you some writeups I made. It's kind of my hobby!Suicide by Emile Durkheim is a keystone I believe, and I think it'd be fitting if you'd want to read smth like that together? But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Apologies, I'm a bit excited to meet social scientists.
Yeah, it blows when people you help don't respect you. Or worse yet, disrespect someone you recruited to help them out! It's not just you — it's probably the most common scenario for me too. There's a number of things you can say in these situations:I have had much of the same experiences, but I become resentful when they become too attached to me. They love me, but I don't love them an ounce because I see them more as a patient than a friend. Doesn't it get lonely? Always being there for people, and them not being able to be there for you because they don't have the developed emotional maturity? How do you still consider them friends? Maybe our experiences with those people are different, but when I confide in the friends that I help, they often can't offer me any of the support in return, and I have to deal with everything myself. I've gotten so burnt out from all this that I've basically shut off my empathetic language and comfort at this point. Which means I'm not even helping anymore, even though they continue to seek it. I can't deal with people's rumination cycles anymore and have retreated myself into isolation and academia by choice.
- "I learned to rotate friends, to lean on each only lightly. To avoid burning them out"
- "Unfortunately, there's people I must support, who'll suffer if I don't"
- "Drowning people flail wildly & can drag you down with them"
I mean, we're giving people our time & skill here. My job is to understand their situation & help them get wins. Nullify some mechanism(s) out there causing their suffering. Or hang out & mutually increase our pleasures
(Fancy terms for decreasing suffering vs increasing pleasure: "negative vs positive utilitarianism". I'd rather stick with increasing pleasure & thus be an artist. But suffering keeps people from enjoying pleasure)
You can prioritize amplifying those who amplify others — those who practice moral virtues. Improves society. Amplifying immoral people makes you complicit in their immorality
When people repeatedly do dumb shit that hurts them :P, you can shift into being more coldly truthful. I can do this by saying, "Ok, I gotta start talking with you in the blunt truthful way, as we do in the World of Men. Better to be hit by cold words, than by cold reality"
And they can come to you if they need help understanding a situation, accomplishing a concrete goal, or nullifying an enemy. Because that's the fun part. You might round up a posse to lighten the load. Keep efficiency in mind: best to discover big wins with minimal effort
They usually won't die if you don't help them. And even if they might... well, we've all been on the cusp of nonexistence & lost important friends. A sasu friend of mine chastised me for spending time here on sasu. She said "They're dying anyway"
Yeah, adoring someone gives you the more fun emotions. Redpillers suggest that in general, guys should accept the adored position, even if it eventually becomes a bit boring. Because boring your gal is a fatal relationship mistakeI don't want to be loved anymore, I want to be able to love someone again.
And tbh, it can be hilariously scary to adore someone who's got sadomasochistic dynamics going on. If you look at Lynn Chancer's "Sadomaschism in Everyday Life", you may find sadomasochistic relations fundamental, because they're potentially there in any top-down hierarchical relation. Not just capitalism, but many other systems too. Big & small
Fortunately, there exist people who really do let you adore them back, without punishing you. They're the "high quality gals & guys" who Alexander Grace speaks of, people who can magically look upon your momentary weaknesses without disdain
Sorry to hear that! I can fully understanding wanting to die with such a person. They exist, but uncommonI don't want to be loved anymore, I want to be able to love someone again. And I love none of the people I one-sidedly help. It's barely even help anymore, because I don't give them emotional support anymore, as a subconscious way to create distance. I miss him, my most valued friend. He would help me a lot, and I would try to be there for him the same, even though I couldn't solve the problem that made him ctb. That was the only time I could experience mutuality in that type of friendship. It was the ultimate emotional intimacy, helped by the fact that ctb was a key issue in my life back then, which I could only confide in with him. I chose wrong not to die with him.
Sigh, yeah fuck'em. Can't let just any mental mechanic monkey with your mind. Most people aren't conscientious. Not taught how to actively listen. Typically socialized not to be particularly moral entities, grossly obsessed with themselvesWhen he died, I felt so empty, but my friends weren't helpful, and it wasn't like they didn't try. But they were awfully bad at it, save for one. I can't even express that their support wasn't helping, because if I do so they'll get fucking insecure and then they'll have another issue that I'll have to reassure them about. Which means negative progress for them.
Ah I just meant that effective problem solvers are kinda rare. ("Good help's hard to find")That last sentence... are you soliciting people for pay? LOL. How do you do that? I'm only asking because I'm curious.
Yeah, I think we agree. I've never known a great relationship with a shitty person. I just threw that in for completeness's sakeI do like your points overall, but I disagree with the last point. A shitty person that has a great relationship with you, again only from my experience, causes extreme burnout. Call me out if you think my view of those people are wrong though, sometimes I can get really pretentious and stuck up as a result of bourgeois, classist upbringing. I'm trying to work on it, but identifying it when it happens is the hard part.
Well, working on one's class snobbery says good things about you! fwiw, My understanding from ethnographers is that free people tend to act like aristocrats, not like the working class. (Walking through a forest, head up high, feeling like its theirs...)
Hrmm, I don't understand what you mean here...I don't understand how you can see it as something shared. I love seeing how they behave, because I can crossreference it with my biological and sociological knowledge and find fascination in how those things I've read from books occur in real life. But I don't see their problems as relatable, and therefore they're not shared. It's difficult for me to apply my textbook knowledge to me efficiently too. People can analyze the external world much better than themselves. It's so easy to understand the way Friend A thinks of human relations as reflective of Graeber's theory of "the moral grounds of economic relations" for example, but I personally don't have never shared the view, as an anti-capitalist.
I like how you say "People can analyze the external world much better than themselves." That's a cultural anthropology saying: making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange. Useful to become alienated from yourself, seeing yourself as a dance of particles that cohere into atoms, which cohere into cells, which ... into whatever the fuck we are
Some end up rebuilding themselves, starting with philosophy. (Hopefully good philosophies. I can send you my thoughts on that.) This allows one to have powerful end-to-end knowledge, in a chain from the most general notions to the details of a particular domain. People like that tend to be disturbingly accurate
Then they're fucked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Next!What do you say when people said that they're tried everything, but it hasn't helped? And that now they just want emotional support? I'm not built for doing that a lot, really. I was just thrusted into the role of giving people emotional labor because of my gender.
I mean, you can hit them with Harry Potter & the Methods of Rationality, which teaches relentless resourcefulness. Have they REALLY tried everything? Can we name 5 candidate solutions that might conceivably work out?
Also, cognitive scientist Lisa Barrett interesting things to say about how emotions work. (Which we can discuss, if you'd like.) Those emotional mechanisms can be hacked
It's hard to talk about this abstractly; are the problems more rooted in the physics level? Biological? Social? Psychological?
You can have a positive impact, just existing. They can ask "What would penguinl0v3s think?" Even just internalizing a mental model of you can help themIn my experience, I've been that person before, where I just wanted support and no improvement because it didn't work. And that's true. It didn't work. So I had given up. And I was just using others as a crutch to feel less miserable until my death date. Like a leech. I'm better now, but seeing how that was my thought process back when I did have that line of thinking, I'm really wary of people who tell me that they want emotional support AND that they've tried everything.
Yeah, "Disciplined Minds" is required reading for anyone who wants to undermine professionals' halo effectIf you're curious about how I got out of that, I met my almost-ctb partner (the one I said was my most-valued friend), and he told me that he wished that he could live, if he even had the chance. He didn't, because he had tried every treatment from every professional out there--back then I also thought he had nothing left, but after his death my view had changed and I no longer believe professional treatment is the only way and that we had both valued it too much as the only path to get better.
Well, you have strong metacognition. Yeah, tbh I think the Partners Megathread can be low-key the most important part of the site, for some peopleHe was just an internet stranger, but he changed my life irrevocably because I was supposed to be dead by now (I did seek him as a ctb partner after all) and now I'm alive. Something about the connection was just instant, and I can't describe why his words and recovery advice awakened something in me that nobody else did, but it did nonetheless. I don't think I will ever be able to love someone as much as I loved him, because a would-be ctb partner that saves your life is kind of a once in a lifetime thing. That's also another part of why I'm so impatient with people who are struggling like that, because for me to stop being depressed, all I had to do was to stop paying attention to my negative thoughts and pain. My experience tells me that to stop being depressed it's really just that easy, even though I know logically that my experience is very atypical.
Why not? Their trick is to come up with theories with some resemblance to reality, enough to be useful. BUT in a framework that subtly supports dominance structures & resistance to social changeWow, I didn't know my opinion could be close to any right wing community, that's funny haha.
Take Andrew Tate. Why does mainstream media cover him, even though he correctly points out most people are slaves? (Such as wageslaves.) Because his solution is to free yourself by being a more effective slave. Not abolishing the slavery system
When listening to anyone, you gotta remove any ideological poisons. Charitably interpreting people is good practice in this
Furthermore, "your side" may have ideological blindspots — taboos — so they fail to offer improved theories. If feminists won't offer men compelling masculinities, then let's act *shocked* (gasp) if men get it from patriarchal men's movements. Enemies exploit weaknesses
The right actually pays attention to what leftists say. Few leftists do that to rightwingers. Chomsky & bell hooks are exceptions
Yeah, I think we should set up multiple utopias — zones of experimentation. (As opposed to One Big Utopia, which can fall into a rut & become dystopian.) One vision I like is Participatory EconomicsI'd say it's more accurate that most women want all three at once. They won't just settle for status without the other two with it. I thought that status was preferred, but optional though. But again, maybe that's just me, as a bougie asshole who doesn't perceive many people as higher status than me. I haven't read any reputable books about this, so I can't say what the average woman is actually like and am just pulling from opinion. I actually hate people who are interested in gaining more 'status' though because I don't believe a better society should have hierarchy, and have embraced some Marxist beliefs. Even though I don't identify as a Marxist because of some other beliefs. It's hard for us to imagine since we grew up in societies with hierarchy, but many societies have existed without hierarchy just fine.
Reminds me of Graeber/Wengrow:
"Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don't count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."
Certainly, there's benefits to using other people's debugged ideas, than our own janky ones... It's unclear to what extent "my" ideas are solely mine; maybe I'll have some idea because of this conversationI admittedly am terrible at coming up with my own ideas, which is why I read so many books.
Yeah, I think "Different people desire different mix of goofiness, elegance, and brutishness"Yep, I'm on the asexual spectrum so perhaps I can't speak for sexuality. Sex makes me act and feel silly and laugh more than anything pleasurable, and I do mean silly in a good way.
Examples of goofiness: "Rubbing noses, silly licking, shock value. Can be like the surprise generating laughter in standup comedy, a total twisted mindfuck"
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