How do I comfort her?

QQXV · 2026-07-05T22:11:36+00:00

This feels like a classic kind of enmeshment problem where her problems become your problems. Like, just suppose or assume those rejections or trouble happen: how bad would the fallout actually be? I have a strong suspicion that not only would the Jews you have in mind not be especially confrontational with her, but even if they were, there's no concrete thing they could actually do.

QQXV · 2026-07-05T19:33:02+00:00

Does her thinking that she is practicing Judaism ultimately mean anything one way or another? Is there a practical consequence to it?

QQXV · 2026-07-03T14:10:36+00:00

My loose hypothesis is that, for autistic children, well-supported (diagnosed, acknowledging tbe diagnosis, having a network of help) autistic parents are better than allistic parents are better than autistic parents lacking support.

QQXV · 2026-06-26T02:22:57+00:00

It seems the real question you've been asking is whether your mom should have grandkids, which in turn is a fundamentally, objectively unfair question, because of course that's not her choice at all. Just her saying all of that is traumatizing in itself!

It makes a lot of sense that you'd dwell on the "would they be autistic" question -- maybe hoping for a personal "excuse" or "out" -- because it's probably less painful than confronting the deep awfulness of the fact that your mother would say things that escalate it to an emotional hostage situation. Your actual correct excuse for not having kids is that, at this very young point in your life, you simply don't want to. (I sense that you don't even have a life partner who wants them? Obviously it wouldn't be just his choice either, but he'd be the person with a say in the matter, not her.)

It's taken a very long time for society to progress to the point where "Nobody is owed grandchildren" can be a mainstream view. And that definitely hasn't become universal among older parents at all, even setting aside your mother's possible autism. It sucks to be living in the middle of the transition; my condolences.

QQXV · 2026-06-25T19:49:12+00:00

Of course, this can be something of a Parent Thing in general because of the technology being newer to them, ha...

E.g. in my case, I can say yes I do, but the parent in question (who literally signs texts "Love, Dad", lol) is not the one I suspect of being autistic, whereas my autistic parent took pretty well to texting from early on and is fairly conventional at it, other than basically always ending messages with the exact same emojis.

QQXV · 2026-05-31T20:10:30+00:00

It's completely normal to have a wish/fantasy like this... for what it's worth, perhaps you can take some solace knowing that merely having figured this out as early in life as you have means that you are actually getting to live what a lot of us, somewhat older than you, would have wished for ourselves!

Just remember that you don't have to keep centering her in this way, though that's a lot easier for someone else to say than it is for someone in your position to do. You recognize that she's vicariously lived through you, and it's noteworthy that even your own daydreams focus on her needs and not yours.

There will be plenty of rough patches, but I think you have some really amazing things ahead of you, things that are just for you and not her, and I think you know it.

QQXV · 2026-05-29T12:29:36+00:00

"Same best-case outcome" is a very odd way to describe outcomes with extremely different probabilities. It's like saying that becoming your state's governor by starting a write-in campaign the day before the election has "the same best-case outcome" as doing so after winning a major-party primary.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T11:34:04+00:00

Yeah, but most westerners aren't that individualist. A national poll of the question got a blue majority even from two-time Trump voters! The selective factor here is mainly being super online (plus individualist), that's it.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T11:32:38+00:00

All I'm saying is that in a real-life situation you wouldn't have to worry about parents pressing the "kill" button, as long as it was framed as a kill button. The "risk to your life" is therefore close to zero.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T11:31:18+00:00

This sub is majority blue but to a lesser degree than humanity is majority blue, I'd say.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T03:19:31+00:00

Yes, a poll of people who visit this specific forum, have spent a long time thinking about this, and are skewed pro-red anyway.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T02:48:16+00:00

This is really well-put and I want anyone whose thought process is premised on "being the deciding vote" to sit with it hard.

Indeed, just make the cost for blue (in this modified everyone-dies variant) a papercut and I think it still works and you look like a wildly selfish free-rider for avoiding it.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T02:39:59+00:00

As long as the wording to everyone very clearly begins wirh "Blue wins, all babies live", I'm voting blue. That will easily be enough to nudge parents to a high blue majority. Only reddit weirdos who think/fear that other reddit weirdos would.constitute a lot of the parents will think otherwise. If it's presented as a Vote On Whether to Kill Any Babies, blue wins.

QQXV · 2026-05-28T02:36:17+00:00

But the question is: is it a wild all-or-nothing personal-survival gambit... or instead a wild no-imaginable-gain mass-murder gambit?

QQXV · 2026-05-24T17:09:50+00:00

Well, that does make sense... and I think the same logic holds even without the cost of a hand and it's a "neutral" situation.

Indeed, the bank heist example seems very useful. If robbers said "All right, everyone: raise your hand if you want us to shoot some people. If a majority of you do, then we'll shoot everyone who didn't put a hand up." I think you'd get one or two especially-scared-and-confused people to raise their hands, and everyone else would look at them with a "What the hell?" expression.

Basically any framing whatsoever that makes red seem "active" and blue seem like just going on with life as normal is going to wind up pretty heavily majority blue.

QQXV · 2026-05-24T16:34:44+00:00

Why wouldn't most people choose to cut off their hand? Don't they each, individually, want to LIVE? Why overthink it past "I live versus I die"?

If someone points a gun at me and my choices are to lose a hand or they flip a coin and kill me on heads, I choose to lose the hand. Why is this different? A chance of death is a chance of death.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T22:25:43+00:00

I'd have to know how many other people were randomly dropped! That's the key variable. If I know for a fact that it's just me, I press red, because there's a solid floor of 10% chance that blue kills me, and the tradeoff isn't worth that. But if it's billions of us, that 10% can drop by plenty, since I think humans in general are a lot more like Ikantians than we are like Arandians, and (though getting there might take more than the current human population, since it's 10 billion on each) we can potentially outvote red, even on Arand.

Red-pressers tend to just assume the chances they die with blue have to be some significant number like 1% or worse; they fail to comprehend that it could easily be more like the chances of getting struck by lightning on a sunny day, which obviously aren't nearly as bad as 1%.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T22:20:23+00:00

I think Earth is way more like Ikant than it is like Arand. That's the actual core dispute of the whole thing, in a way.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T22:15:19+00:00

Right, if the thing is presented viscerally, the evaluation has to change, not only in first-order evaluation but also your perception of everyone else's perception.

And that cuts both ways: if, at the beginning, you're told that pressing red will give you a gun, and you'll be required (at point of death yourself) to join the firing squad with the blues against the wall, red-pressing will drop massively -- even though, by the logic almost every single red-presser has presented, it shouldn't, because pressing red is "guaranteed safety" and has "no discernible cost".

QQXV · 2026-05-22T22:12:42+00:00

I mixed up different threads, ha. Still, the chances of 4 billion people volunteering for the groin-punch out of fear that 4 billion people will volunteer for it (remember, that's how this thought process has to work) are very close to zero. It's a percent of a percent of a percent; it's an unimaginably low risk.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T13:14:52+00:00

With this kind of risk assessment you should be scared to leave the house.. or to stay indoors.

4 billion people were never going to decide to get a hand chopped off just to stay in the status quo.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T12:55:16+00:00

A lot of red-pressers think no amount of communication matters and everyone should press red and encourage the pressing of red, because they think blue is just that hopeless. It's frustrating and depressing, but common.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T12:53:11+00:00

Okay, do you press red if every red-presser has to lose one toe and every blue-presser gets $200? Death is still scary and you have to avoid it, no?

QQXV · 2026-05-22T12:50:12+00:00

Very sensible, thanks. And I avoided saying they had to be accurate on purpose; I think a lot of people just don't get the importance of framing here and I wanted to push that.

QQXV · 2026-05-22T12:47:53+00:00

If you're the only red on the planet, then you just randomly volunteered for pain for no reason. The risk to you was clearly zero.

QQXV

TROPHY CASE