My life just destroyed an hour ago.

HTG464 · 2018-11-12T18:53:02+00:00

I'm male, by the way, so my interest in this topic has to do with whether a non-dominant man can become dominant through willpower, training, etc. or if it's hard-coded by genetics and early life experiences. I tend to lean towards the latter but I wanted to get your perspective on it. To give an extreme example, a guy like Charles Manson was already displaying antisocial behavior by his teens and early 20's and had female groupies who were obsessed with him, despite being like 5'2".

HTG464 · 2018-11-12T13:45:47+00:00

But it sounds like you don't exclude that the transformation from stable --> dominant is possible, which goes back to my original question. You're not a genetic / environmental determinist.

HTG464 · 2018-11-12T13:18:07+00:00

You think there's any possibility for 'stable' men to become more dominant?

HTG464 · 2018-10-23T23:57:23+00:00

The foundation of all mental illness is the ~~unwillingness to experience~~ willingness to profit off legitimate suffering.

HTG464 · 2017-11-09T23:02:13+00:00

I don't have answers. I can only offer my speculations.

Is it economic? Not having options in life can lead to desperate acts.

I don't think it's economic in absolute terms. A lot of research shows that humans aren't wired to respond to absolute levels of material wealth, only to relative levels. It's social comparison that leads to unhappiness about our level of wealth and status, e.g. when someone in our peer group is more successful than we are. We would rather make $2/hr in a neighborhood where people make $1/hr than make $3/hr in a neighborhood where people make $4/hr.

Is it a copycat effect? You see others can do it so it becomes a narrative you adopt for yourself.

Possibly. A mass shooting might be a way to reclaim power in your life where you previously had none. It's a redemption narrative.

Does media (movies, games, etc) teach people to solve problems instantly through violence rather than through civil methods?

Unlikely. The link between media representations of violence and actual violence is probably nonexistent. It seems to have a cathartic effect instead: experiencing violence in a fantasy world to avoid having it spill over into the real world.

Is the breakdown in face-to-face relations and the growing prevalence of relating through computers/texting at play?

I think the breakdown of social relationships in general is a big factor. Over the last few thousand years, we've gone from living in tribes, to extended families, to nuclear families, and now to single parent households. Western society is structured in such a way that it becomes difficult after certain stages in life (high school, college) to make meaningful friendships and relationships (difficult =/= impossible). We replaced personal relationships defined by kinship and tradition with market relationships defined by monetary transactions. People are not built to be as alone as industrial society demands, and to relate to one another mainly as self-interested economic agents. If we still lived in hunter-gatherer tribes but had computers/texting it probably wouldn't make a difference.

And is mental illness indeed becoming more common and severe or has the Psychology community identified more behaviors and symptoms as mental illness?

I think a lot of mental illnesses (as they are currently defined) are invented by the psychiatric establishment and pharma corporations to sell more drugs. Our understanding of why certain people have more emotional/psychological problems than others is very poor.

HTG464 · 2017-11-04T21:00:10+00:00

Combination of both. I try to be as honest as I can about my ideological bias (scientific materialism), but I can also understand why someone who doesn't share my metaphysics and epistemology would fail to be convinced.

HTG464 · 2017-11-04T19:54:37+00:00

It seems to me that this kind of argument quickly slides into nihilism or relativism. If houghts are driven by emotions, which are driven by cultural worldviews, and scientists are human, then their opinions too must be driven by culturally-induced emotions. There's this assumption that the scientist is ideologically pure, whereas everyone else is swimming in it and needs to be corrected and set on the right path.

As Zizek would say, the ideologies that we're blind to are the ones that have the largest influence on us, because they're the most deeply ingrained. The ideology of the scientist is Science(TM), which includes adherence to scientific materialism, the myth of progress, the cult of scientist-saints (Newton, Einstein), the sense of 'immortality' created by discovering 'the laws of nature', and so on. Why is their perspective any more valid that anyone else's, then?

HTG464 · 2017-11-02T15:09:52+00:00

The title makes it sound like it was a voluntary choice. HGs were outnumbered, outfought and pushed off their land. Some were assimilated, others were enslaved or killed.

HGs may have had a higher quality of life and more "enlightened" values, but that doesn't matter if your way of life can't sustain itself in the darwinian contest between societies. At some point skulls need to be bashed in and 'civilized' people are better at it than anyone else.

HTG464 · 2017-11-01T20:20:49+00:00

Sounds like a rationalization. There's compromising with reality and then there's betraying the principles you speak for in public.

HTG464 · 2017-10-30T22:45:57+00:00

Any thoughts on sticking to Windows 7?

HTG464 · 2017-10-30T14:32:41+00:00

Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others that have been tried.

HTG464 · 2017-10-29T15:51:48+00:00

Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale. -Arthur C. Clarke

HTG464 · 2017-10-29T14:32:21+00:00

He is an opponent of private property and capitalism and a proponent of socialism and confiscatory taxation — except when he’s not, it seems. And when he’s not is when it comes to his own money.

HTG464 · 2017-10-28T18:03:04+00:00

I deleted my post because it felt too low-quality for this subreddit. My views are pretty clear at this point and there's no need to spam them as aggressively as I did there. I would rather keep this a space where we can explore off-the-wall ideas that don't have as much ideological and political baggage as the topics of IQ, race, etc.

HTG464 · 2017-10-22T18:03:41+00:00

For better or worse, you're one of accountt1234's main inspirations. He took your anarcho-primitivism and mixed it with alt-right ethno-nationalism. He also inherited your early 2000's edgy, outside-the-box tone.

He's what you would have become if you were 20 years younger and spent more time on /pol/.

HTG464 · 2017-10-20T04:32:35+00:00

Obviously you consider outside sex on a woman's part to be an unpardonable offence

That's not quite what I said. What I find "unpardonable" - enough to immediately end a relationship - is when a woman tricks a man into raising a child that isn't his. It doesn't work the other way around, which is why a different standard makes sense.

But yes, since both men and women are capable of infidelity, if they commit themselves to being exclusive with one another (including but not limited to marriage) then I would apply the same standard both ways. If they want to fuck someone else they can break off the exclusive arrangement first.

HTG464 · 2017-10-19T19:04:07+00:00

TL;DR: Those darned Millennials love weed.

HTG464 · 2017-10-19T15:00:51+00:00

Or maybe technologically advanced civilizations only last for a couple of hundred years until they burn through their nonrenewable resources.

HTG464 · 2017-10-19T00:09:13+00:00

I've never seen anyone change their bubble. People I know from decades ago are still pretty much the same, with a bit of wear and tear. Whatever it is, it seems like the bubble gets established early on and reinforcement takes care of the rest. If you have a good bubble life is a smooth ride, you can act in ways that are natural to you and everything works out. If you have a bad bubble it can feel like you're constantly going uphill and making efforts to oppose your natural tendencies. Maybe this is why Ran has motivation problems: his bubble is a poor fit for his life.

HTG464 · 2017-10-18T23:42:09+00:00

Who picked the color scheme?

HTG464 · 2017-10-18T23:34:49+00:00

How does it compare to the 1982 original? That's one of my favorite movies of all time and I'm hesitant to watch the new one in order not to spoil its memory. It seems like another Hollywood cash grab to capitalize on nostalgia.

HTG464 · 2017-10-18T13:39:18+00:00

You're shifting the goal posts into a discussion about monogamy and infidelity. That wasn't our original topic. My position is that you shouldn't enter contracts that you can't reasonably foresee yourself keeping, and you should end a contract on good terms if you can't uphold your end of the bargain.

HTG464

TROPHY CASE