Comments by "DefaultFlame" (@DefaultFlame) on "The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters"
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Porn might be like gambling, alcohol, or other addictive substances or habits. Some people are capable of moderating their own use, many clearly aren't from how it's ruined their lives.
I like gambling, it's great fun, but I spend maybe the equivalent of $30 a year on it. I've been watching porn or flipping through contraband magazines since I was a wee lad in the ravages of puberty.
I still do, but at 35 I've got no performance issues and I find the ordinary, non-porn star women around me as enticing as they've ever been. More so honestly as I find that porn just doesn't hold quite the same appeal as it did a decade ago. Staring at a screen and listening to speakers just doesn't hold a candle to the real thing.
It might be individual differences or cultural ones, perhaps. I am swedish and while we don't have the stigma or shame connected to sex that anglophone countries have and our views and attitudes on sex can largely be summed up as "not in public spaces, it's illegal *winkwinknudgenudge*," we have a heavy cultural emphasis on moderation in everyday life and a "right time, right place" approach to excess.
It's also considered mildly uncouth to talk about sex and related subjects in mixed company outside private spaces/conversations. Unless alcohol is involved, no one without a giant stick up their ass complains about people being raunchy while intoxicated.
Mind you, this is less the case with most of my generation, more with the preceeding and succeeding generations. From talking with them, I actually have plenty of hope for our zoomers. They're very, very cynical though. I have basically zero hope for our millennials, IE my generation. I can't wait for zoomers to seriously get into the workforce to start replacing incompetent, whiny, lazy, entitled, shallow . . . I could go on, people of my generation.
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People suck. Anything that that makes them uncomfortable, requires mental effort, that will affect them negatively, or that might annoy them will often just be avoided rather than confronted by most people, if they can get away with it. "Why make a big thing of it?" and things of that nature. Cowardice, fear, laziness, and a conditioning to obey authority and not "make trouble."
Now we have that plus the current year politics, where speaking against the narrative in even a small part can ruin your life. Extra incentive for people to keep their heads down, like any totalitarial state or authoritarian ideology wants.
Hell, some of the manipulation tactics used are the same as those used by cults, domestic abusers, and child groomers, but on an ideological scale. Because they work on most people.
Of course, that does not excuse people for being complete failure as police, parents, and people. People need to be raised to be better people, that's the only way to stop shit like this, unfortunetly people have to be raise by the parents they have, not the parents they deserve.
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@ErikDeMann
[CUT, turns out there's a max comment length. I didn't know that.]
A stranger lying to me about a subject I know nothing about can fool me, because I don't know how they sound normally. People change the way they talk for a million reasons, lying is only one even if it is easier to tell than some other reasons. Once I have spoken to someone for a few minutes or hours, depending on how good they are at lying, seen how their emotions affects their speech, how they talk when talking about subjects near and dear to them, how they talk when trying to convince someone, etc, I can usually tell when they try.
However, no matter how clear people's emotions and immediate intent were, I could not understand what the goals and motivations were for a large fraction of their choices, whether in what they said, what they did, how they acted, or their opinions. Not even close family, not a single person I knew growing up.
My first eureka moment was when I figured out that people will sometimes say things that they know aren't true, even when they aren't being ruled by their emotions and have no clear reason I could see for doing so, for example to assert social dominance (winning an argument for example) or to seem better than they are.
Another was figuring out that I had reactions to things, like emotions or opinions, that when I actually thought about it I felt nothing about the absolute majority of subjects. Including things like "what do I like," I just found nothing when I looked inside, no actual opinion, just conditioned reactions with no reason or justification in my mind. These things were just sitting in my mind, making me do things that I didn't agree with, think things I didn't agree with, hold opinons that didn't conform to reality, and feel emotions that were lies based on opinion based in their turn on nothing and evaporate like mist as soon as I actually think about whatever made me feel that way. I felt insane, my mind had mines placed in it and I had no way to tell where they were. I still step on one every now and then, even today.
My wake up call that started this entire ball rolling was when I walked around the corner of a school building and saw a kid next to a teacher and some adults that were probably their parents. I instantly felt dislike for the kid. The dislike got blasted to smithereen by the complete and utter shock and confusion of why I felt like that toward a kid I had never met in my life and that COULD never have done anything to me. It took me long minutes to figure out what it was that evoked the dislike, especially since it was more like a vague twinge at that point, but I isolated exactly what it was. It was their skin color. They weren't black, btw, I'm not from the US. They were a Middle Eastern immigrant family.
I was even more confused at that point. That seemed utterly insane to me, even at 7. Why did I dislike someone for a freaking COLOR? I firmly decided that it was dumb, and I didn't want to be dumb. And so I started thinking about things, especially about my mind and eventually how it seemed to compare to others', and the ball started rolling.
And then there's the vulcanic emotions, where you feel the emotion, the emotion causes you to focus on and think about what caused the emotion, the thought makes you feel more of the emotion, which makes you focus even harder on the thought, and on and on until KABOOM!
That's every emotion, anger, happiness, joy, sadness, excitement, and all the others.
Today I have nearly perfect control of my emotions because I had to, both for the simple issue of being able to live decently and because people are great at spotting certain types of pattern breaks, like social ones such as speech patterns or body language.
In animation and robotics this is called the uncanny valley. Yes, that is why visibly disabled people cause instinctive revulsion and fear in most people. It's an evolutionary adaption to shun individuals who appear or act too far outside the norm as that would often be the clearest noticable sign of disease or harmful genetic mutations.
As a side note, I think people should never, ever be shunned, disliked, hated, or punished for their emotions or instinctive/conditioned reactions. It is how and if they act on those emotions that should dictate your opinion and actions towards that person.
It would be insane of me to suggest people spend the ludicrous amount of time I have rooting out shit from their heads, but they should clean it up when they notice it rather than lie to themselves.
Oh GOD, the fucking lies I told myself. The parts of myself I'd rather have looked away from and pretend didn't exist rather facing and fixing them. Like my tendency, like many others, to the defend the hill I stood on even if I knew deep down that I was wrong, I just wanted to win.
When you finally stop lying to yourself it fucking hurts. Kids are egotistical, selfish little bastards, and I was no different.
Then there were the fucked up connections in my brain. I learned language before I suffered the injury and it messed up the associations between concepts, though the Aspberger's might have had a hand. My first reaction to almost everything was very often wrong, my first thought about something was very often incorrect, a lie, or completely insane. I learned to doubt everything. Every person, everything I heard people say, everything "everyone" knew (including me), and most of all anything inside my head. Verify, then trust and act as if it's true but keep some doubt in the back of your mind, you might have made a mistake in your reasoning or had bad information to base your conclusion on.
I also do not trust my ability to read emotions or tell lies. Always doubt your measuring equipment, it might be miscalibrated.
As a side note, the sensory oversensitivity is a bitch. It comes at fucking random, can amplify a weak light bulb to the equivalent of staring at the sun and a whisper to an air raid siren, your clothes to sand paper, every little ache and pain into agony, and there is not a single thing you can do but wait and suffer until it stops. Thankfully they have gotten more and more rare as time goes on, as well as a little shorter. They usually only last 10-30 seconds now, and I'm used enough to them that they aren't a problem.
I still absolutely fucking hate the sensation of cold. Even a slightly cold breeze on my skin feels like agony if I'm not seriously overheated, but living in Sweden, a rather cold country, I'm used to it and make sure to dress as appropriately as possible.
A lot of the functions of my mind that were supposed to be automatic are broken or seems completely missing from me. I had to build things like executive control from scratch, presumably adapting and repurposing less broken parts to fill in the gaps as is common in brain damage. I never knew what I was missing though, I didn't know what mental functions were common beyond what I could glean from the way other people seemed to work, so I have made a lot of mistakes in my half-blind fumbling about as I tried to fix what seemed broken and build what I seemed to need. I've done damage to my mind that I've realized years later and then had to work for months or years to correct my fuck up.
When you have to build a factory but know nothing about construction, architecture, or what machines the factory needs to run properly and efficiently, and everyone you ask acts like it's obvious, that you are an idiot, or brushes you off because they don't want to talk philosophy and theory of mind with a 10 year old (not that I knew what either was called at the time, I'd never even heard of racism until it came up in class years after I found it in myself and purged it), or a 35 year old for that matter since I don't know a single person in my life that has anything beyond the barest sliver of interest in subjects like neuro science, quantum mechanics, philosophy, psychology, or any other subject seen as difficult or for uber nerds by society. I'll note that I am absolutely not an expert in any matter, I just find them interesting.
Hell, quantum mechanics aren't even hard, it's just that the sort of person you need to be to understand the nitty gritty math and counter-intuitive feel of them compared to their emergent properties (aka classical physics) is usually utter garbage at teaching people. Different skillsets. If you ignore all the complicated math that is useless for teaching the subject and sift out how specific quanta and their fields interact it's actually pretty simple if you take it one step at a time, but you need an overarching understanding to really start seeing the picture.
For classical physics, or emergent physics as I prefer since they do not actually exist for the same reason that the color purple does not actually exist, your overarching view is macro scale reality that you interact with all the time. For quantum mechanics there isn't anything and that makes it much harder to understand, especially as we are very strongly biased toward the illusion we can touch at any moment of the day and tend to try to interpret quantum mechanics through that lens/filter. Which is like figuring out chemistry solely by tasting fruits. It might help you understand a concept but at the end of the day it's no more than a metaphor and falls apart like a metaphor if you look too closely at it.
And I just realized I've gone a bit off topic. And a bit long winded.
Consider it an example of me getting stuck on something and having no pressing reason not to, two hours or so writing a youtube comment.
Eh, I enjoyed myself, time well spent.
Cheers!
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