Deviation from social expectations can be attractive as can novelty. Fetishization of a group is often associated with the group being perceived as exotic and possibly even taboo. And there are a lot of people who when they feel shame about their desires lash out against those they desire. The sort of guy who feels the need to tell everyone he’s not into fat chicks? Yeah he’s getting rejected by them in secret.

Your example is someone you personally hate because Gary fucking sucks. But if there were a group of Garys who were just a bit different that you were always told not to interact with because they’re bad despite the fact that they all seem perfectly nice if a bit odd. Well a certain portion of your community would find themselves torn between the excitement of the exotic (hell you don’t see a Gary every day, and you usually have to go to a certain part of town to see one) and the expectations of not interacting with them, and this would lead to shame and anger, because to an unexamined and immature person these Garys are seducing them, tempting them away from what they know to be the rightful separation of good normal people and Garys. This is even worse if anyone could turn out to have always been a Gary. Maybe some of those people are afraid they might be a Gary but are afraid to even think about it enough to discount it. So they may start calling to ensure there’s no chance of them accidentally running into a Gary and making sure nobody becomes a Gary hoping that that will keep them safe and maybe even punish the Garys who did this to them.

Yeah it’s wild to me that the ban wasn’t a blanket “no product may be sold containing both nicotine in psychoactive doses and pleasant flavorings other than menthol or those found naturally in tobacco or intended to recreate the flavor of tobacco may be sold”. Like they could’ve killed those gross flavored swishers that exist solely for making blunts while they were at it.

Like, I don’t mind a “buy a flavor bottle and it has room for you to mix in a bottle of one of the various concentrations of unflavored nicotine sold right next to it” situation, but that level of inconvenience is good. It always forces you to choose your dose and means that when kids get ahold of the stuff it’s easier for them to get ahold of the nonaddictive version. What we have now is a bunch of e waste that also ensures that there’s a lot of access to nicotine for children.

Yeah, that’s so unbelievably not fucking surprising. A weird amount of harassment I’ve gotten for being trans has been kinda (or occasionally extremely) sexual. Also the redder the area the more I get street harassment.

ETA: Oh upon reading the article, the city I’m thinking of (Lexington, KY, I basically couldn’t take a walk without being catcalled there) is in the top 10 cities.

And yeah, anti trans bigotry is interesting because it seems to be an alliance of exterminationist bigotry (“x people should not exist or should be hidden and we should work towards that goal”, examples of targeted groups include disabled people, Jewish people, and gay people) and supremacist bigotry (“x people are our lessers and must be forced into their place beneath us”, anti black racism is the classic example). You have plenty of transphobes who just want us gone no matter what, but you also have quite a few who think our place is as discreet sex workers and are mad that we are insisting we deserve to live in society as equals and do whatever work we want. They were fine with us as prostitutes, but not as mechanics, as shameful side pieces but how dare we say we deserve to be spouses.

That perspective of us is deeply entwined in the insistence that anything pertaining to us is sexual. They look at us and reduce us solely to the lens of sex then condemn us for it. Then when some of us internalize that our only value as people is as sex objects they point and say “see look, we told you”.

Not having sex doesn’t make incels believe what they believe, believing/acting like that makes them not have sex. A lot of them don’t just feel they’re owed sex, they feel they’re owed devotion. The fact that the prostitute doesn’t actually like them and will only spend time with them the amount they’re being paid will become a problem in their eyes.

And beyond that, the reason the hug helped this man is that it was genuine human connection. It was an act of free sharing in a way that Graeber would describe as an interaction of communism rather than exchange. Giving from one who has to one who needs simply because it’s needed and easy to give. A prostitute is sex as an exchange, which includes both parties able to walk away as though nothing happened (indeed, the old saying goes that you pay the prostitute to walk away just as much as for the sex). Hell, many incels scoff at therapy because of its nature as an exchange. What they seem to lack is genuine constructive community, and often also the ability to actually partake in one appropriately.

Also I feel like it might result in a prostitute doing a mass shooting, but I can’t defend that suspicion

He needs what psych wards should be, not necessarily what they are. At the moment he would’ve benefited from one though. Psych wards are currently often a traumatic experience designed to keep you alive and not hurting anyone and to ideally set you up with resources at the end.

As they currently stand, a person who is isolated, struggling, and feeling suicidal or homicidal in that mental space going to a psych ward is likely to go in, spend a few days calming down in an isolating and uncomfortable experience, and be returned to the life that led them there. Situations like these are ultimately different from mental health crises that can be solved or have their start pharmaceutically or with medical intervention, which is where modern psych wards excel. This needs to be seen as much more similar to a suicide attempt in nature in order to stop situations like it before they happen

It sounds more like the guy just needed care. State run brothels might make the situation worse.

I ain’t in favor of vice policing. You want to vape, go for it. You’d find a way regardless. But we can make the more environmentally destructive ways to do it the hardest and most expensive.

Geordi’s blindness is a plot point at least once in an episode that’s basically exactly what people act like episodes involving queerness are. Where he has to hold a eugenicist’s hand through accepting that he doesn’t mind that he was born blind and that he even has some advantages thanks to his visor. Don’t get me wrong, it was a very good episode, and people did need it laid out like that, but it’s very much not the “we’ve moved beyond such concerns” in a way that say having a ranking officer use a wheelchair would be.

I will say something they did right was that his visor gives him headaches. It’s very in line with what folks with cochlear implants or very strong eyeglass prescriptions describe.

It is impressive that they managed to be a worse approach for mental health than trying to drink your problems away

Refillable these days have become the vaping equivalent of the self roll and pipe smoking. It didn’t used to be like that. That said these days I mostly just see people smoking a cig or a joint if they’re smoking in public

Yeah, I’m not one for banning things willy nilly, but disposable vapes need banned. I’d much rather people vape a liquid refilled repairable vape like the kids used when I was young, but even pod type vapes are better. This is just reprehensibly avoidable e waste.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think the best way for Trek to handle queer issues is to just put queer people on the bridge. A gay Riker equivalent or a trans woman who talks about her past with the same discomfort but honesty as how Picard talks about his is what I want. And in that vein I’m still on my first watch of TNG and it’ll be a while before I get to nutrek.

But I’m not going to pretend that to a certain portion of the population TOS wasn’t seen as being overly preachy on race. But seeing as I haven’t gotten to TOS yet either, I will say that in modern day I do think TNG was a bit preachy about disability and I’m glad they were.

Reasonable pair of laws, just as I’d expect from them

I wouldn’t call it pathetic. Firstly because it’s an unempathetic and unhelpful response. I’m in my early 30s and it’s unlikely I’ll ever be not experiencing negative aspects of my parental situation. I was forced to learn to cope with it, I’ve done a lot of work on it, and I’ll likely continue to do work on it. The fact is that parents are one of the strongest, longest, and most culturally enforced bonds we have. They can be enduring and deep sources of new issues that can crop up through life. Furthermore they’re a relationship that we are supposed to reevaluate and reinterpret at every stage of life. I haven’t had parents in a long time and I’m still doing that as part of my continual growth and maturity.

Like yeah, at times it can feel weird and immature for me to see people my age beating themselves up for parental approval, but then I think about what it took for me not to, and how long after that I wanted nothing more. Who am I to judge their path?

So long as we include Hokkaido in North America that’s good by me

If India is a continent then so is Somalia! And Arabia, but for some reason Arabia being it’s own continent feels kinda right considering it really feels like neither Eurasia nor Africa, just a large mass between them

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That definition however does some weird things like saying that Tokyo and parts of Siberia are in North America, but Panama and Los Angeles aren’t.

A continent is mostly just a social convention for a bigass geographic and geological structure that is above sea level and largely geologically and culturally separated. North and South America are connected by a land bridge, but that’s really recent in evolutionary time and it’s a real pain in the ass to cross. Europe and Asia are historically separated by the Ural mountains, but it’s hard to look at them in modern day and say “these are two distinct landmasses” especially if you’re saying India isn’t, but historically getting from Europe to what’s worth going to in Asia has involved crossing the Mediterranean much like getting to Africa or sailing around Africa in the early modern period. Australia is a giant landmass with not much else around as is Antarctica.

If the ice weren’t there a lot of the other continents would also be below sea level

Yeah, therapy sometimes is about rehashing things, usually because you either took bad lessons from it, never really moved on from it, or something similar, but the goal is to move to a point where the bad things that happened to you are no longer destructively impacting your life.

I think a lot of people think therapy is more about telling you how it’s not your fault and how horrible it is that things happened to you, and yeah that happens, but so much more often it’s stuff like being given homework to practice setting and holding boundaries, and evaluating why you feel the way you feel about things.