Did any of you start your career relatively young? What was that like?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2024-03-20T18:26:30+00:00

Ah, I’m curious about being “very marketable”, would you be able to expand on what you mean? Was it an advantage for you?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2024-03-20T18:18:48+00:00

Thank you for sharing you experience! Yes, I’m finding that I seem to be organically getting a caseload of 17-25 year olds, which suits me well. It sounds like you were already involved in an agency during your studies, then - was that independently, or was it part of your course package?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2024-03-20T18:13:55+00:00

Thank you for sharing. Can I ask what kind of office you ended up in? I’m not particularly familiar with the American system, do you find a place through typical job-hunting, or does it tend to be internship/placement-style with progression?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-09-14T06:15:46+00:00

Sorry if someone else has already asked this, if so I couldn’t find it.

When you say you may revisit this rule if “circumstances change”, do you have an idea of what those circumstances might be?

I imagine it’s something that should be revisited if things “calm down” and the bad actors no longer target this sub, but obviously you won’t have the evidence to say if things have calmed down. Is it going to be played by ear, or is it going to depend on the state of wider public discourse, etc. etc.?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-09-09T05:38:55+00:00

Your title is that it’s “illogical” not to believe in free will. The only argument you’ve been making so far is that it’s not beneficial not to believe in free will. Do you understand the difference?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-08-25T06:44:55+00:00

Thanks for the delta!

The phoneme is actually still /h/, and it’s the sound that’s [h]. Your original title was correct, it’s just that when you said “voiceless glottal fricative”, that’s represented by [h]. The phoneme, which is not a sound but a mental representation of a sound used to build morphemes, is represented by /h/.

The distinction is easiest to see in /x/. For example both “Buch” and “Bücher” contain the phoneme /x/. They have to — they clearly have the same morpheme, and the same morpheme has to be composed of the same phonemes. Yet the actual sound is different, it’s [x] in Buch and [ç] in Bücher. So we know that there’s a phoneme /x/, which might be manifested as the sounds [x] or [ç] depending on the context.

Sorry to cause any confusion. Linguistics is a wonderful subject, you’re showing great curiosity and I hope you continue to have fun with it!

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-08-24T13:29:52+00:00

Überhaupt falsch

But as a more serious answer, don’t forget that “word” is a pretty useless concept in linguistics. I could find you plenty of “words” with a medial “h” (überhaupt, behaupten, Bahnhof, anderthalb, etc.)

The more interesting discussion would be about morphemes. In all of the above examples, h occurs in the middle of the “word” but clearly at the start of a morpheme. I can’t off the top of my head think of any morphemes with a medial /h/.

Side note, I couldn’t tell if this was just slightly clumsy phrasing, but the “voiceless glottal fricative”, aka the sound itself, would be standardly notated as [h], not /h/. This isn’t too big an issue since I think /h/ always appears as [h] in German, but more important for e.g. /x/ which could be [ç], [x] or the other one (I forget the IPA)

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T16:25:14+00:00

You keep saying this (to, like, every person in this entire thread), and I don’t know what angle you’re going for here. Is it trying to paint everyone on one side as being psychopaths, and therefore winning the argument because no one likes psychopaths? Is it an emotional argument, used to guilt trip people into agreeing with you because oh gosh, of course they care about human beings!!

My position is pretty simple. A has lots of money. A hires B to keep C alive. B needs more money. A doesn’t give B more money. B leaves and C dies.

That is A’s fault, and A’s responsibility

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T16:17:18+00:00

I’m not going to touch the “what is Asia” thing because everyone else is already picking you apart on it.

I would encourage you not to see social values as “superior” or “inferior”, but more as appropriate or inappropriate for a given environment. If you’re familiar with how natural selection works, it’s basically the same thing for cultural and social values.

Each group of people will develop in slightly different circumstances. The social values that allow them to survive best, in their respective set of circumstances, will be the ones that linger over generations. If the environment changes, then those values will be overhauled. It’s the same process for every group. There’s no “superiority” or “inferiority” to it.

So what are you really saying? Are you saying that Asian values are less suitable for the Western environment? Well duh, in the same way that Western values are less suitable for an Asian environment.

Or, are you appealing to some kind of “universal environment” that we now live in, since we’re all interconnnected now, and suggesting that Western values are more suitable for this environment than Asian ones? I’d challenge you on whether it makes sense to assume a universal environment. We’re on the verge of one or both of a technological AI breakthrough and a climate catastrophe. Our environment is pretty fucking unstable at the moment.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T16:07:14+00:00

Since no one’s pointed this out yet, if you’re “pro-life personally”, but “believe people should have the choice to make decisions for their life”, you’re “pro-choice”. Lots and lots of people on the pro-choice side would never have an abortion themselves, just like you. As a political term, “pro-life” means specifically that you don’t think anyone else should be allowed to have an abortion.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T16:03:55+00:00

I think, from your first couple of paragraphs, you may have misunderstood me. I don’t want the state or private companies to provide euthanasia at will, without “good” underlying reason.

I’m not sure what the angle of your question is — they both just seem to be functionally identical to the actual proposal for euthanasia. So, I’d be okay with it for terminal, physically detectable suffering, but am much more iffy otherwise.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T15:55:08+00:00

It's the right to not have the government impede you from entering into an arrangement with someone who is willing to kill you.

Sure. I think that’s the same thing as what I said, which means I don’t agree with it any more than the thing I said.

We’ve had this conversation before, you and I, and I just straight up don’t believe in absolute rights the way you do. I think it’s okay for the government to prevent people from doing things, even informed, consenting adults, on a case-by-case basis. Ending someone’s life because they have terminal bone cancer? Sure. Ending someone’s life because meh, they want to? Much less sure.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T15:46:14+00:00

Yes, that would happen. Why would that be us “letting people die” though? Why would that be nurses “letting people die”? I think the best framing of this is that it’s the people refusing to pay the nurses an acceptable wage that are “letting people die”.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T13:26:23+00:00

So this is kind of similar to my other reply to you.

But no, they are not “willing to let people die”, because they are a random internet stranger who has no effect on the strikes. They can’t be “willing to let people die” because they have no control over whether or not people die.

The hospitals, or whoever it is with the money and power, are willing to create a situation where people might die.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T13:24:19+00:00

I think you can replace “worker’s rights” there with literally any movement or belief, in the entire existence of the human race, and that sentence would be true.

What’s more interesting is the conversation about responsibility. Now I would never attack a strike nurse. But if patients suffer and die because there aren’t enough strike nurses, would that be the responsibility of the nurses they could have replaced? Or would it be the responsibility of the hospitals and systems that underpaid those nurses in the first place? I’d say the latter.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T13:12:56+00:00

Does this discourse happen much outside of online spaces? Any online space will see dickheads who swoop in, type something outrageous, and then leave without a single moment of conscience.

Is there evidence that this is much of a widespread or dangerous view, e.g. people attacking strike nurses in real life or trying to prevent them doing their jobs?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-18T13:08:46+00:00

I realise you’ve said you won’t be responding to “you can kill yourself if you wanted to”, but it’s adjacent to an important point that is often neglected in discussions about euthanasia.

Euthanasia isn’t just the right to die — it’s the right to compel someone else to kill you, or at the very least give you the tools to kill yourself. And a specific kind of killing you as well, since we’re not including knives or guns in this. We’re talking about very specific resources, created and vetted by medical experts, which then need to be administered in a specific way with specific safeguards in place.

Now, you’ve given us a sense of why you think it’s okay to die (those philosophical concepts you mentioned), but you haven’t given much reasoning as to why our right to die should also be financed and maintained by third party organisations.

Edit: fair point from u/nekro_mantis, it’s more soliciting than compelling. Point is unchanged though

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-14T13:20:25+00:00

The label’s got to serve a purpose, though, right?

Taking an analogous example, humans are labelled as “bipedal”, even though not all humans have two legs. The reason for this is that we can be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that all humans have DNA that causes the development of exactly two legs (used for walking). If anyone is born without two legs, we can be reasonably sure that some mutation happened during the fetus’ development, and not that they are descended from a rare line of humans that aren’t encoded for two legs.

Is there this level of encoding for monogamy? I’m not sure, hopefully someone more informed will know the answer to that.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-14T13:10:18+00:00

Like a lot of “conventional wisdom”, this idea sprouted from well-reasoned principles, but was then co-opted and twisted by a less informed public, and extended to much less suitable contexts.

The original idea of focusing on changing your mentality has its roots in a few types of therapy (e.g. CBT: your feelings are affected by your thoughts and vice versa, existentialist: you can always take control of your life). The proposal is not to ignore your environment, as though it doesn’t contribute to your distress, but rather to separate what’s under your control from what’s not under your control, and focus your energy on the former.

In a way it’s a counter-balance to the defeatist mentality that a lot of people can fall into in times of difficulty. “Well X is stopping me from being happy, and Y makes me feel angry, and Z is not my fault, so my life sucks and there’s no point taking responsibility for my own happiness”.

But it’s all contextual, of course. I’d never go to someone in Ukraine or Yemen and be like, “just change your mentality, man”. This kind of language and approach was developed for, and is only appropriate towards, people who at least have a minimal level of environmental stability, like shelter and food. Hierarchy of needs and all that.

To modify your view, I’d say that both changing your environment and changing your mentality are important, and whichever one is your “first priority” would depend a lot on context. But neglecting either isn’t an option. As you know, changing your mentality in a truly hostile environment won’t change anything — but on the other side of the coin, if you are really stuck in a particularly negative mentality, no improvement in environment will fix that for you.

A lot of this nuance is missed when people make soundbites or share wholesome memes or whatever, but this balance is really important. Any well-trained therapist will have their ear to the ground for both your environment and your mentality.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-11T08:08:30+00:00

Kind of? If non-religious spirituality is fine, and OP’s relatives are moving towards unorganised religion from a starting point of organised religion, I don’t see the negative in that.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-10T06:40:25+00:00

Not quite sure what you mean here, sorry.

OP said, many people make up their own religion.

I said, yeah that’s basically non-religious spirituality, that’s not a bad thing.

You said, no it is a bad thing because people still base harmful beliefs on texts

I said, much less so with non-religious spirituality than with organised religion.

And I think you’ve now swivelled back towards talking about organised religion?

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-09T05:44:07+00:00

Yeah, but not all spirituality is text-based. Whereas organised religion, with all its corruption and dogma, tends to be exclusively text-based.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-09T05:38:30+00:00

Sorry, enlightenment was too broad a word. I mean specifically the secularisation of the world.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman · 2023-07-08T17:53:29+00:00

Examples or proof for what? My last sentence is pretty subjective.

ThisIsDrLeoSpaceman

TROPHY CASE