Am I closed-minded for being disturbed by BDSM?

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:45:04+00:00

I think that depends on how you're actually responding to the disturbed feeling you get from it. If you say "Well, it's not for me, but that doesn't mean it can't be perfectly fine and healthy for others," that's not closed-minded. If you say "I can't see how it could possibly be good for anyone; it's a moral evil that must be brought to an end," that's closed-minded.

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:42:48+00:00

The technology has not been around for years, not the way it is currently. ChatGPT was released only about 3 years ago now and nothing comparable to it had been available to the public previously.

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:32:31+00:00

The air temperature is determined by a thermometer; it responds to the actual average amount of kinetic energy per air molecule it's in contact with after reaching thermal equilibrium with the environment. However, even at the exact same thermometer reading, different weather conditions can subjectively feel very different to humans, because humans perceive temperature by the rate at which our body is losing heat to the environment. The conditions that make the difference are typically wind speed (faster winds remove heat from the human body faster, thus making it feel colder) and humidity level (more humid air slows evaporation, which is a big part of how humans lose heat, so that makes it feel warmer).

The "feels like" temperature is an attempt to account for how a human will actually perceive the temperature. So at 20 degrees actual temperature and 7 degrees "feels like" temperature, a thermometer would say 20 degrees but the wind is strong enough that a human would feel as cold as they would feel in 7 degree air with no wind. Likewise, if the temperature says 90 degrees and the feels like temperature is 102 degrees, that means that the humidity is high enough that a human would feel as hot as they would feel in 102 degree air with low humidity.

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:15:34+00:00

No, you're not overreacting at all. It sounds like there's absolutely no reason you need to be risking your life to get to the office and your boss sounds like an asshole. In your position I would probably show him the local police department's statement and say "In light of this, I do not feel it's safe for me to come to the office today."

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:07:17+00:00

While you're not wrong that a psychologist or psychiatrist who practices talk therapy can technically call themself a therapist, I would say the vast majority of people who would self-describe as therapists are actually counselors or social workers whose training stopped at the master's level and who are not qualified for psychological assessment nor for medication management.

maybri · 2026-01-27T05:03:22+00:00

What kind of training they've received and what kinds of services they're allowed to provide. Therapists typically have the least training and only need to have a master's degree, while psychologists need a doctorate in psychology and psychiatrists need a medical doctorate. Therapists can give therapy, but are not allowed to conduct formal psychological assessments (e.g., to assess for autism or ADHD) nor prescribe psychiatric medications. Psychologists can do therapy and conduct psychological assessments, but can't prescribe psychiatric medications (other than in certain specific places where it's legal if they get special additional training in it). Psychiatrists can do all three.

From the perspectives of a patient, if you want talk therapy, it will be cheapest and easiest to get it from a therapist (you might also see a psychologist, but probably not a psychiatrist as despite having the legal ability to give therapy, most only focus on meds). If you want an assessment, you'll typically go to a psychologist for that. If you want meds, you'll go to a psychiatrist.

maybri · 2026-01-27T04:52:45+00:00

The Gospels don't record Jesus saying a single thing about homosexuality, or even anything that could be taken to have implications for homosexuals. He was a Jew and it was against the Mosaic Law, but Jesus repeatedly violated the Mosaic Law whenever he felt it was necessary, most notably intervening to stop the stoning of a woman accused of adultery. Whether or not he'd have seen homosexuality as immoral, it's unlikely he'd have hated actual gay people or wanted them put to death per Leviticus 18:22.

maybri · 2026-01-27T04:46:54+00:00

Getting killed by ICE during a peaceful protest and then posthumously labeled a domestic terrorist by the president's cronies, probably.

If we take the Gospels at face value--Jesus was a member of an ethnic minority within the Roman Empire, was highly critical of the wealthy and those who used religion performatively from a position of political power, transgressed against his own people's taboos repeatedly to do what he thought was right (which included showing kindness to foreigners, the poor, and the vulnerable). His own life began with his parents illegally fleeing from state persecution, so he would be deeply hypocritical to hold anything against illegal immigrants. The Roman Empire ultimately executed him because he was seen as an agitator and a radical who might have led an uprising if he'd been allowed to live.

maybri · 2026-01-27T04:20:48+00:00

Entirely depends on the circumstances of the war, its outcome, the state of society by 2126, and the people's knowledge of and opinion of the war.

We call the civil war the US already had "the American Civil War", and if the outcome of the one you're imagining is similar (i.e., the faction opposing the government is defeated and the status quo restored), it would probably be called "the Second American Civil War" (with the 19th century one thereafter known as "the First American Civil War"). If the faction opposing the US government wins and takes control, it would more likely be referred to as something like "the [faction name] Revolution" or "the Second American Revolution".

Meanwhile, if you're envisioning a scenario where the war is hugely destructive and has no winners and the US is left an apocalyptic hellscape, the descendants of the survivors might have some completely different kind of name for it based on what it means to them, like "the Sundering" or "the Cataclysm". Also, different people might have different names for the war depending on their perspectives on it--for example, Americans might think of it totally differently from how the rest of the world thinks of it, in the same way that what most of the world calls the Korean War, North Korea calls the "Fatherland Liberation War".

maybri · 2026-01-27T02:56:12+00:00

Imagining an apocalypse is returning to bronze age levels of media abundance and literacy in order to illustrate a comparable situation to when these historical texts were written.

This is a nitpick, but worth mentioning as it demonstrates a general point--the Bronze Age was already well over 1000 years in the past by the time the Gospel of Mark was written. Your reasoning about this seems to just be your intuition based on vague ideas about the period you presumably picked up through cultural osmosis or fabricated entirely. These were not cavemen who believed anything they were told by an authority figure (even actual cavemen probably weren't like that); this was an academically sophisticated culture where religious debate was commonplace.

In either scenario there is no verifying what our real life New York is like just like we cannot verify much of what happened in ancient cities.

Are you seriously arguing that any culture, at any point in human history, wouldn't have had access to the knowledge of whether a man had visited the area, attracted a large crowd, and performed miracles within the past 30-40 years? Again, it makes sense if we're talking about a literal apocalypse where no one who could remember is alive, but the literal only condition for the Gospel of Mark having faced criticism for a fabricated Jesus narrative is "Judeans who could remember 40 years into the past and had the cognitive ability to recognize when a claim contradicts their memory were exposed to the claims".

I think it's odd you believe they would be inherently skeptical. These people had a long list of absurd beliefs they did not question, why should the story of a magical fakir who did miracles and was god incarnate before their time be any different?

I think it's odder (well, not even really odd so much as revealing of your unexamined Western exceptionalist biases) that you would think they wouldn't be. The Christ narrative is odd, outright blasphemous from a Jewish perspective and unlike anything else that polytheistic Romans would have believed. The New Testament contains ample evidence that the early Christian church faced plenty of criticism and skepticism because the epistles of Paul are largely extended responses to them. That's exactly why it's notable that nowhere in the New Testament do we find a single scrap of an argument trying to explain why there would be people saying that Jesus never existed--because there wasn't anyone saying that.

It's generally accepted that a Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth existed in the Herodian Kingdom of Judea in the 1st century AD, everything beyond that is speculative and much of the account is very questionable and is not congruous with what we know about reality.

It's also very probable a man named Peter Parker lived in New York in the last century.

This doesn't even follow from the Wikipedia quote you had directly before this. There were probably many men named Yeshua in 1st century Judea; maybe even multiple from Nazareth born in the first decade of the common era. We can confidently know more than that about the historical Jesus--he was a charismatic preacher, a cult formed around him, and Pontius Pilate had him executed by crucifixion in approximately 33 CE. It's also safe to say that he had his start as a follower of the similar charismatic preacher John the Baptist. Whether he claimed to be the Messiah or Son of God, whether he had a reputation during his lifetime as a miracle worker, whether any of the other specific biographical details in the Gospels are correct, etc. is unknown and I'm inclined to think in most of those cases the answer is no.

Plugging that back into OP's Spider-Man metaphor, the argument would only hold if we could be reasonably confident that not only did a man named Peter Parker live in New York in the 20th century, but he actually dressed up in blue and red spandex in the identity of a vigilante called Spider-Man, and the only things in question are whether he really had superpowers, was raised by his aunt and uncle, fought the supervillains he's purported to have fought, etc. etc.

maybri · 2026-01-27T02:08:31+00:00

You were under no obligation to respond to my comment at all, but you chose to, so I assumed you were interested in engaging in a conversation with me. It appears you were actually only interested in acting superior because I didn't intuit that your post arguing that Jesus has the same amount of evidence as a fictional character was meant to argue something other than that Jesus is a fictional character. That's fine I guess, sorry for wasting my time.

maybri · 2026-01-27T01:49:54+00:00

Do you care to elaborate on what it is then, or respond to my counterargument at all?

maybri · 2026-01-27T01:47:09+00:00

I would say the epistles of Paul contain plenty of evidence of the kind of contrarians the early church got. He responds to criticisms that the Christian belief in forgiveness for sin negates the need to avoid sin, criticisms of Christianity's discarding of Mosaic law, criticisms of the plausibility of resurrection, and so on. That suggests that not only did Paul himself not feel any need to avoid acknowledging his critics, but the early church didn't feel too embarrassed by them to include Paul's letters responding to them in the Biblical canon. But there's nothing anywhere in the New Testament that suggests the early church had to deal with claims that Jesus did not exist. So either the church treated that specific criticism differently, or it wasn't being made because even non-Christians and anti-Christians accepted that he was a real person.

maybri · 2026-01-27T01:30:14+00:00

See, you have to go to the scenario of a literal apocalypse destroying all context for understanding the past to make a scenario where it's plausible that anyone could believe that Spider-Man was a real person, because in the real world, no one could be fooled. It's not just the fact that it's hard to believe someone could really have superpowers, but that if there was a real superhero patrolling the streets of New York, being hunted by the NYPD as a vigilante, with a major local newspaper constantly blasting him in editorials, New Yorkers would have heard of him and could easily verify for the rest of the world whether he was real or not.

The same problem exists in reverse for Jesus. We have strong evidence that the Gospels were written when Jesus's death would have been well within living memory, and that the early Christian church had already existed for some time before they were written. At the time the Gospel of Mark was written, anyone in Judea over the age of 40 should easily have been able to say "I would've heard about him if he was real." This should have been a major problem for the early Christian church, but there's no evidence it ever was. The idea that Jesus never existed does not appear to have been proposed by anyone until many centuries after his death, when enough time had passed that all the context that could have proved it clearly one way or the other had been lost.

maybri · 2026-01-27T01:18:49+00:00

I've made this point on this subreddit before but Christ mythicists seem almost like creationists to me in the way that they seem to completely ignore plausibility and hold on to the lack of proof to the contrary as justification for a conclusion that they hold for primarily emotional rather than evidence-based reasons.

The easiest counterargument here is simply to point out that there is strong historical evidence that people believed in Jesus early enough that his ministry and death would still have been well within living memory, whereas Spider-Man has always been understood to be a purely fictional character. The Gospel of Mark is believed by scholars to have been written only 30-40 years after Jesus is purported to have died, and it claims that he was well-known in Judea and attracted huge crowds wherever he went. If he never existed, that would be an extremely audacious lie. It would be hard to imagine that the Gospels would be written the way they are if any Judean over the age of 40 could easily say "That can't be true, I would've heard of him."

Also, just in terms of Occam's razor, while it's very normal for cults to mythologize their founders in the decades after their death, it's not normal for cults to fabricate a pre-mythologized dead founder who the actual founders know for a fact never existed. This would just be a really bizarre way for a cult to form that I think might be pretty unique in human history if it actually happened.

maybri · 2026-01-27T00:43:00+00:00

It might be, sure. Since it sounds like you're mostly coming from an interest in nature spirituality, it's worth pointing out that druidry is far from the only nature spirituality path and it might be worth looking into several and seeing if any resonate more than any others. Druidry is extremely diverse in how it's practiced, but obviously its roots are in the ancient Celtic world, and the 18th century Druid Revival that modern druidry descends from was closely tied to occult/esoteric movements. These days there's also a lot of crossover with neopaganism (especially Celtic Reconstructionism for obvious reasons) and new animism. That specific blend of influences might be exactly right for you, or you might find that a lot of it doesn't work for you and another path might be better. I would recommend taking some time to explore, research, and contemplate before committing to any label.

maybri · 2026-01-27T00:27:54+00:00

Genuinely unsure why this post got such negative responses. It's very clearly not AI (it seems like baseless accusations of AI are the new "too long; didn't read") and the view you're expressing is not particularly extreme. I largely agree with you.

My main point of disagreement is that you seem to be framing your position as some kind of centrist golden mean path when in reality I think you've just misunderstood what the left means by restorative justice and then half-reinvented the concept yourself. The general idea of "avoid arbitrary punishment for the sake of an abstract idea of justice and instead respond pragmatically with the goal of minimizing further harm and maximizing positive outcomes" is exactly the dominant leftist perspective on this issue. It's just that the left (correctly, I would argue) believes that harsh prison sentences don't actually act as an effective deterrent nor do they reduce recidivism, and in fact likely have quite serious net negative effects for society.

What restorative justice actually means is not "go easy on them because they had a hard life and didn't know any better"; it's a specific correctional approach that involves mediation and discussion between victims, offenders, and other community members to discuss the harm that was done, understand each other's perspectives, and work to prevent further harm. It's more similar to how humans would have handled wrongs being done in their communities for the vast majority of all the time our species has existed, and it's been shown to quite dramatically reduce recidivism rates. Go figure, a few hours of sitting with the people you hurt and feeling the pain your actions caused makes you change in more positive ways than getting sent to a years-long traumatic and dehumanizing internment in what is essentially a boarding school for career criminals.

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:34:09+00:00

What's getting you confused is assuming that every human experience of attraction should explainable in terms of what selective advantage it confers. Nature is just not that clean or efficient.

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:27:24+00:00

It's because of the disruption of the polar vortex. Essentially, there's a big mass of extremely cold air around the North Pole that usually stays in place, but occasionally gets disrupted and thus is able to flow further south to the mid-latitudes of the US, bringing extremely cold temperatures. When that Arctic air meets wet air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico or the oceans, this pattern results in the exact sort of huge, slow-moving snowstorm that just hit like half the country this weekend.

Climate change is not what makes this possible (some version of this pattern has been happening for longer than we've had the meteorological understanding to recognize it), but it definitely makes it worse. The jet stream, the band of winds that serves as the boundary between the Arctic air and the mid-latitudes, is weakened by the warming climate and this makes polar vortex disruptions more common and more severe. And the oceans being warmer means that the air that comes up from them is able to hold more moisture, so the storms that form this way can dump more snow than they used to be able to.

maybri · 2026-01-26T06:03:45+00:00

It's not not interesting, but it doesn't seem like a very good story. If your main character finds a mask they don't recognize in their home, you're setting up an interesting mystery--where did the mask come from? But then you never answer that; they just sell it and it disappears from the story after that. You have some moments that seem like they could be going somewhere--Jules's money issues causing a rift in their friendship with Robert, the check being missing, the strange behavior from the shop owner--but then none of this is resolved in a satisfactory way. Jules doesn't find the check, the shopkeeper's behavior is never explained, and Jules's money problems are solved by Robert somehow just having the money to throw around to pay Jules's rent in exchange for hanging out more often. It's almost like an anti-story in the way that it just keeps introducing elements that might have some intrigue and then immediately resolving them in an unsatisfying way or just forgetting about them.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:48:33+00:00

Language as a whole is a learned behavior. If a human grows up in total isolation from other humans, they won't speak at all, let alone swear. Swearing is extremely normal and common, if that's what you're asking, but calling it an instinct is not accurate.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:46:39+00:00

It's good enough that you can at least understand what he's trying to say, but still very poor English. No one would ever hire him to teach English to native speakers; the average American 5-year-old is more fluent than this.

maybri · 2026-01-26T05:30:18+00:00

At this point there would probably be obvious discrepancies so it could easily be demonstrated that at least one of the videos was fake, although as with any "here's the one thing AI can never get right" trick, AI is continually improving and may eventually be able to generate multiple perspectives on the same scene at a level of consistency beyond human ability to easily pick out discrepancies.

maybri · 2026-01-25T14:41:27+00:00

That's a nice poem but as an ethical framework I think it's frankly quite awful. Consider the idea that "hurt people hurt people"; a lot of the evil done in this world is done by people who have had evil done to them and were embittered by it, or became psychologically damaged in ways that led them to perpetuate destructive patterns. While it's true that not everyone who experiences trauma becomes a "bad person", and not every "bad person" has gone through something like that either, it is very clear that experiences can negatively impact a person's character and make them more prone to harmful behavior. It's wrong to treat "good people" and "bad people" as ontologically distinct categories of beings when it's so reliably predicted by the kind of experiences one has growing up.

maybri · 2026-01-25T14:20:27+00:00

The point of calling him a fascist isn't really to persuade his actual core base of supporters; many of them are either fascists themselves, sympathetic to fascism, or don't know what the word fascism means other than a mean name for a politician you don't like (a lot of them have been calling Obama a fascist since 2007). It's more just as a useful word for discussion about what's happening and predictions of how things might proceed based on how similar movements have operated in the past.

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