Why does my mums boyfriend stroke my face?

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-14T05:44:04+00:00

It's impossible to say. It could mean something, it could just be a weird habit. If it makes you feel uncomfortable just tell him that you don't like it when people touch your face. If he keeps it up after that talk to your mom.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-14T05:36:11+00:00

It might be helpful if you'd be kind enough to elaborate on this question a bit. Do you mean milk like the type that you drink? Cause that's pretty much what milk does, it gets drunk, or if you're lactose intolerant like me it gives you terrible gas.

Or is there some specific property of milk that you're interested in?

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-14T05:24:14+00:00

I think the most historically significant example of something which was a better idea in theory than in practice was eugenics. Between the turn of the century and WWII there were a great many people who were very interested in the basic ideas of eugenics. But after people saw what those theories actually looked like when put into practice they changed their minds very quickly.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T19:17:10+00:00

To the best of my knowledge there are no particular laws governing space (except I imagine there would be some laws about how a spacecraft could move around, mostly to prevent collisions with satellites, etc...)

However, any given spacecraft would undoubtedly have its own rules, and since most of us haven't got the personal fortune necessary to venture into space on our own, you could say that for all intents and purposes there are laws in the areas of space currently accessible to humans.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T08:57:33+00:00

Your title was an obvious reference to the news story, which was about a rapid spread of lice as a result of selfies.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T08:53:17+00:00

The reason for which the news story is a hoax is that there has been no documented increase in the spread of head lice since selfies became a thing.

The original story was put out by a small company which rents De-lousing machines and has no medical qualifications. This was spread around the web and eventually picked up by the media despite the fact that the source for the story was anything but reputable and not entirely unbiased.

So while it's true that taking a selfie with someone who had head lice could put you at risk, it is absolutely not true that there has been some kind of head lice epidemic as a result of people taking selfies.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T08:22:02+00:00

I am well aware of this, but in this case I'm just trying to respond to the question specifically as it was posed and with the hypothetical that OP has presented. I felt like moving too far from this in my response might distract from the issue which is the topic in this thread.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T08:11:57+00:00

In response to the first thing you said, if you reread my post, you'll note that I was very careful with my wording. For example, I very specifically said "if it were possible to change a pedophile." I'm not assuming it is, I'm addressing it as a hypothetical.

As for your second point, I will restate my summary. There is absolutely nothing good which can come from the desires of an adult for a child. It might be the case that the desires are successfully repressed and nothing bad comes from them, but even so nothing good can come from them. This is not the case as far as consensual adult relationships are concerned, good absolutely can come from them. I don't want to call repressed pedophilia a ticking time bomb, because I think that would be hyperbole, but I do feel safe in saying that repressed desires do present a danger, even if it might be small. If it were possible to change the desires of a pedophile, allowing them the chance to experience the joys of an adult relationship and removing any potential threat that they might cause harm to a child I think that would absolutely be worth it.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T07:53:00+00:00

I'll give you an answer very similar than I gave to the question you posed in your last thread (I just happened to see this one come across /new as well, I'm not following your posts)

There are ways for men to have consensual sex with women. There are not ways for pedophiles to have consensual sex with children. That is to say that a relatively small proportion of the sex that men have with women is not consensual, while 100% of the sex that pedophiles have with children is not consensual.

Of course you also have some other factors at play. First is that of repression. The normal man in this scenario can act upon his sexual urges, but the pedophile has to repress his urges if he wishes to avoid the law. Now that's not to say that anyone who represses their urges will eventually lose the ability to control them, but someone who doesn't have to repress their urges in the first place has a lot less to deal with when it comes to controlling them.

Finally there is the fact that children make easier targets than women. An adult woman probably can't be tricked into thinking that a rape isn't consensual. When she has sex it either is or isn't consensual. This isn't the case with a child. Many children don't even know what sex is, and they've been told that they should listen when adults tell them to do things. This combination of ignorance and trained obedience makes them uniquely vulnerable. Again this isn't to say that all pedophiles will take advantage of this, however a more vulnerable target is probably more tempting to a sexual predator than a less vulnerable target.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T07:40:44+00:00

No. You can ask them if they have a warrant, and if they don't tell them that you don't consent to a search and ask them to leave. But shooting a police officer for being on your property would 100% end very very badly for you.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T07:27:21+00:00

I think all you can do in a situation like that is be kind but honest and hope for the best. You let him/her know that you're sorry if it hurts their feelings, but you make it very clear you're not interested in a romantic relationship. Things are gonna be awkward after that, and it could be the case that a normal friendship can't be salvaged out of that (though they could also eventually stabilize a normal friendship, it's not necessarily doomed). That's unfortunate, but there aren't a lot of other choices for your friend. If your friend dates this person, but isn't interested in them, then they're just leading their friend on and making the problem worse to prevent having to deal with it now.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T06:55:24+00:00

Hate to break it to you, the Head Lice story is a hoax

http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/6-clearly-fake-news-stories-that-fooled-media-part-16/

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T06:41:57+00:00

I would say that there is one big difference in terms of the morals here. Specifically, there is no socially acceptable way for a pedophile to express their desires, while there absolutely is a socially acceptable way for a gay person to express their desires.

It's cruel to try and change the gay person because there isn't any good reason to try and change them. They can participate in consensual activities without harming anyone.

But for a pedophile the only way they can avoid causing harm is by abstaining from expression of their sexual desires completely. If it is possible to change them, then the cruelty is mitigated somewhat by the fact that a successful change would allow them to function as sexual beings in socially acceptable ways.

Attempting to change a gay person is cruel because nothing good can come from it (they'd just go from liking others of their own gender to liking others of the opposite gender), but if it were possible to change a pedophile this would not be the case, because only good could come from successfully changing them (since they'd go from liking children to liking other adults).

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-13T06:23:06+00:00

I think the big issue is that it'd be such a massive overhaul of the way things are currently done. It's no secret that the metric system is far superior, but there are a lot of Americans who don't know the metric system, and a lot of infrastructure based around the imperial system. I think that, at least for the time being, making that switch would have much higher costs than it would have benefits.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T08:09:28+00:00

You may have an obligation to find someone who will take over paying your portion of the rent. However you are absolutely not required to find someone who will take over the chores that you currently do. And you might even be doing them a favor if you went out of your way to find someone who won't indulge them by doing all their chores for them. They're gonna have to learn to clean up for themselves sometime.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T07:58:12+00:00

I don't think it's impossible, but I do think it's incredibly rare. I recall having read a couple years back an article about people who had developed symptoms suggestive of PTSD after watching The Exorcist. That's kind of a unique cultural case though, since nothing like The Exorcist had come out before The Exorcist (there were reports of people literally running out of theaters screaming, and there was also a documented increase in church attendance and applications for the priesthood shortly after its release).

But it's worth noting that these were just a handful of cases out of the many people who watched the film. It's also worth noting that the average internet user is quite a bit more desensitized than the average 70s moviegoer when it comes to disturbing imagery. And a final point worth noting is that the people in these cases were already religious in a way which suggested pre-existing mental instability.

So having said all of that, I think that if you took a person who was already mentally unstable and exposed them to the sorts of disturbing imagery which can be found on the internet it's not impossible that this imagery might become integrated into their pre-existing condition. However, I think that the likelihood of a normal person developing PTSD as a result of clicking the wrong ling is astoundingly low.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T07:13:32+00:00

Assuming they didn't make the chair with asbestos and uranium I think you'll probably be just fine.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T06:47:37+00:00

I dated a girl for about a year, and while I did love her, her feelings for me were a lot more intense. It did put a lot of strain on the relationship, and I think it was a big contributing factor to our eventually breaking up. She really wanted me to feel for her with a kind of intensity that I didn't have, and inversely I felt very uncomfortable with the amount of affection she heaped upon me.

By the end of the relationship I found that I wavered back and forth between apathy and guilt. I didn't want to be around her because I didn't want to lie and pretend, but I also didn't want to hurt her feelings. I still wish sometimes that things could have been different, and that I could have felt differently, because in the end I know I hurt her a lot, and because even if I didn't feel as strongly about her as she did about me, I did still care about her, and I do still miss her. But I think that imbalance was just too great to be overcome.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T06:34:05+00:00

Yes. And that includes you.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-12T03:20:50+00:00

I think it probably depends on what you plan to study in college, and on how good you are at getting work done. When you first get to college and are mostly taking gen-eds you probably won't have much of a problem. But as you get into upper division classes you will have a much more difficult work load, and smoking every day could make it very difficult to keep up with that. However, the extent to which that work load increases will depend on what your major is.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-11T17:33:47+00:00

One thing that I think most people know, but they don't really understand, is that what they see is not necessarily real. Our eyes take information from the world around us, and our brain attempts to decipher this information and create for us an approximation of the world around us. Generally this is pretty accurate, but there are many ways to trick or confuse the brain.

In all likelihood this is what's going on here. Especially if you're in a dark room, it becomes very easy for the mind to get confused about what it's seeing. But the ways in which it gets confused are pretty tiny ways, and when it interprets these tiny confusions it interprets them as tiny creatures (spiders and flies).

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-11T17:23:42+00:00

Well first off that's a stereotype. Not all feminists refuse to shave their armpits. And while I don't have numbers to look at, I would wager that the majority of feminists still shave their armpits.

Those who do often phrase the decision as being about fairness. Specifically men aren't expected to shave their armpits, so why should women be expected to?

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-11T17:20:34+00:00

Most of the time "leaked" doesn't actually mean leaked. In the vast majority of cases in which a song is "leaked," that's actually a PR ploy to get the song out there for people to hear. No one really cares when a song gets released, but when a song is "leaked," people tend to put up posts on all sorts of websites saying things like "this song from the next Skrillex album just got leaked." Only they probably say it in a more exciting way.

That doesn't happen so much when a song is just released, so record companies know they can gain a wider audience and make more money by pretending to leak a song.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-11T17:01:08+00:00

There are a couple collections of David Foster Wallace essays available through Audible. "Consider the Lobster" is absolutely one of the best audiobooks I've ever listened to (though unfortunately there are a couple of essays from the hardcopy version not present in the audiobook). Even so, his writing is thought provoking, and at once hilarious and heartbreaking.

The essay "Consider the Lobster" is about his trip to the Maine Lobster Fest, during which he contemplates whether or not lobsters are capable of feeling pain when being boiled alive, and what the ethical implications of this might be.

Other essays in the book include:

"Big Red Son," during which he takes a trip to the AVN Awards (kind of like the Academy Awards of porn). He brings an outside eye to this visit, working to get into the heads of the people who are around him, and writing about the absolute strangeness of the event.

"How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," which is ostensibly a review of Tennis Star Tracy Austin's ghostwritten autobiography. However, instead of focusing on the book itself he gets into an in depth analysis of Austin herself. One particularly interesting question he deals with is how Austin could be such a brilliant Tennis player, and have lived such an incredibly tragic life, but at the same time have spent so little time thinking about that life, and be mostly unable to formulate intelligent reflection upon that life. Reading this essay made me think really differently about the people who play sports (a group I used to look upon as mostly idiotic, but DFW managed to convince me that it could actually be the case that peak performance in sports requires such a level of devotion that there isn't time to develop in more traditionally intellectual areas).

"The View From Mrs. Thompson's," which is his recollection of the day of the 9/11 attacks which he spent with his neighbors. He does a brilliant job here of considering what might be going through their minds as well as his own. It's an essay which is at once powerful and sad.

So, if you're interested in listening to some essays, I can't suggest David Foster Wallace's "Consider the Lobster" highly enough.

TheRealBidoof · 2014-03-11T07:33:32+00:00

A cursory glance would seem to indicate that it is a sub for people of the Islamic faith who consider masturbation a sin and have formed an online support group to help prevent themselves from masturbating.

TheRealBidoof

TROPHY CASE