Push the button already

[Doktor Howl]

The great thing is people can opt out whenever they feel like it.  They have 6 diving boards on every bridge, no waiting.

I wrote an angrier reply to this, then deleted it. Sorry, bad day. Here's a calmer expression of the same thing. I know you're old and I'm new and it's your rules, but I can't not say it.

I don't think it's OK to write stuff like that in a thread with a participant who has been expressing suicidal ideation today.

This is Or Kill Me.  We specialize in unvarnished answers here.

I have one person feeling suicidal, and that's awful.  Altered is great people.  Vex isn't bad either, but I rather suspect Vex complaining about how unfair the world is because people live too long and have too much stuff is more upsetting than me suggesting that anyone who feels that they are living too long by not being reduced to trying to find carrion or roots to dig up can check out any time they please.

I mean, I have one person saying that people shouldn't have what Altered is trying to get.  Which is to say, food & shelter security.

ETA:  Altered is not a 2-dimensional, cardboard cutout.  She is perfectly capable of making these distinctions.  Altered also wants to live, but she is having to decide if that is possible, and this is everyone's fault.

[Doktor Howl]

As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.

I am honestly sitting here trying to puzzle out what you were saying, then.

I am in Western civilization.  I have stuff.  So do people in Thailand and Japan and Africa.  Some of them don't have as much stuff, but they are feverishly trying to get that stuff.  Not because they have been brainwashed by mean old Western Civilization™, but because they are human and humans want stuff.

I imagine I should feel guilty for having stuff and wanting more stuff.  I find that to be absurd, considering that my job literally requires me to find ways to kill every living human as efficiently as possible, and I don't feel guilty about that.  Fuck the humans.  They aren't my goddamn people, and they can all SHUT UP and maybe DIE.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.

I am honestly sitting here trying to puzzle out what you were saying, then.

I am in Western civilization.  I have stuff.  So do people in Thailand and Japan and Africa.  Some of them don't have as much stuff, but they are feverishly trying to get that stuff.  Not because they have been brainwashed by mean old Western Civilization™, but because they are human and humans want stuff.

I imagine I should feel guilty for having stuff and wanting more stuff.  I find that to be absurd, considering that my job literally requires me to find ways to kill every living human as efficiently as possible, and I don't feel guilty about that.  Fuck the humans.  They aren't my goddamn people, and they can all SHUT UP and maybe DIE.

I am not quite as cynical as that. For 20,000+ years, people who were every bit as anatomically modern and cognitively able as we are lived a whole different way in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Obviously it wasn't some idyllic Eden where everyone was happy and nobody wept and there were no problems - there were wars, andd famines, and diseases, and assholes and murders (probably). But they operated under a whole different set of basic assumptions and didn't engage in the same sort of resource hoarding and environmentally catastrophic exploitation that we take as a given today. They lacked access to anything we would recognize as basic modern amenities and infrastructure, but they had no concept of those things so they were no less satisfied with their lives than we are with ours.

I'm /not/ painting some bullshit picture about how we should give up on civilization and return to that. Im just saying that human beings are not actually hardwired to destroy themselves and their environment, and that what we think of as civilization is neither inevitable nor "superior", or even "more advanced," except by our own standards that only apply subjectively to us. And the reason I bring it up isn't to say we ought to mimick hunter gatherers, but only to be aware of our prior when we think about what is and isn't human nature and whether we are either doomed to blown ourselves up or destined to overcome: neither of those outcomes is assured merely by virtue of our human DNA.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I should say North America because the Aztecs were pretty horrible. I also think societies develop around the availability of resources: jungles aren't particularly hospitable to large Human populations, but the Great Plains are. People in Kansas 5 000 years ago didn't build fortresses and strip mine tge countryside because there was generally no reason to worry about whether or not everyone would get dinner. The most violent and top-heavy cultures evolved in areas where resources are scarce and there are lots of different tribes competing for them in a relatively confined area.

As we develop technology capable of expanding access to basic necessities, then, we shouod reconsider the reasons we have for accumulating resources. That is, we are biologically able to build a world where we have both the convenience and productivity of modern industry AND the ethical community-mindedness of hunter-gatherer societies. Such a world is neither preordained by benevolent destiny nor impossible because of some innate inability to achieve it. So my point is that we each have an obligation to contribute what we can in whatever measure we can toward that - it isn't futile and it isn't going to happen without us.

[Doktor Howl]

As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.

I am honestly sitting here trying to puzzle out what you were saying, then.

I am in Western civilization.  I have stuff.  So do people in Thailand and Japan and Africa.  Some of them don't have as much stuff, but they are feverishly trying to get that stuff.  Not because they have been brainwashed by mean old Western Civilization™, but because they are human and humans want stuff.

I imagine I should feel guilty for having stuff and wanting more stuff.  I find that to be absurd, considering that my job literally requires me to find ways to kill every living human as efficiently as possible, and I don't feel guilty about that.  Fuck the humans.  They aren't my goddamn people, and they can all SHUT UP and maybe DIE.

I am not quite as cynical as that. For 20,000+ years, people who were every bit as anatomically modern and cognitively able as we are lived a whole different way in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Obviously it wasn't some idyllic Eden where everyone was happy and nobody wept and there were no problems - there were wars, andd famines, and diseases, and assholes and murders (probably). But they operated under a whole different set of basic assumptions and didn't engage in the same sort of resource hoarding and environmentally catastrophic exploitation that we take as a given today. They lacked access to anything we would recognize as basic modern amenities and infrastructure, but they had no concept of those things so they were no less satisfied with their lives than we are with ours.

I'm /not/ painting some bullshit picture about how we should give up on civilization and return to that. Im just saying that human beings are not actually hardwired to destroy themselves and their environment, and that what we think of as civilization is neither inevitable nor "superior", or even "more advanced," except by our own standards that only apply subjectively to us. And the reason I bring it up isn't to say we ought to mimick hunter gatherers, but only to be aware of our prior when we think about what is and isn't human nature and whether we are either doomed to blown ourselves up or destined to overcome: neither of those outcomes is assured merely by virtue of our human DNA.

People were actually *smarter* than we are.  Low tech environments select for intelligence.  Urban populations select for disease resistance.

And resource hording began the moment we engaged in agriculture.  Sumer and Ur - not to mention Egypt, India, and China - all had kings and full-blown nobility 10 seconds after they figured out how seeds worked.

This isn't an environmental or societal/cultural issue.  It's a human issue.  Everyone gives "Western civilization" shit about it because they got there first with the most, but every single agricultural society does this, and it was WAY worse back in the day.

[Doktor Howl]

I should say North America because the Aztecs were pretty horrible.

Again, it goes back to agriculture.

Hell, nomadic people do the same shit, but each regime only lasts until the local warlord gets old.

[Bu🤠ns]

One of the most insidious ...

Or perhaps paint the occasional fly fisher.


{eta: didn't read through the thread before posting this so maybe this came across as tone deaf or w/e but FTR i didn't intend that}

[altered]

I wrote a whole thing for Vex here, but on re-reading it about half of the things I was referencing didn’t make sense and I realized I had gotten the order of events all wrong. I also made myself even more fucking angry in the process of checking this shit out to try and figure out what my brain was doing, so let me just say:

MY ANGER IS JUSTIFIED AND I WAS ADDRESSING A SPECIFIC SERIES OF SHITTY POINTS VEX MADE THAT HAVE FUCK ALL TO DO WITH THE CRITIQUE OF A NARRATIVE ARC OF HISTORY. THAT CRITIQUE IS RIDICULOUSLY UNCONTROVERSIAL AND I FIND HIS CLAIMS THAT I AM MISINTERPRETING HIM TO BE PATENTLY FUCKING OFFENSIVE.

The shit below this post was technically written before it. Coherence may vary, I’m not cut out to human any fucking more and I’ve only spent an hour typing today. Fuck this.

[altered]

Nyborj, you don’t know my story so I forgive this transgression.

For the future, understand that I have been on the streets without a proper safety net for ten years, seen shit I won’t tell my best fucking friends about under pain of death, and have such a survival instinct that I am literally confounded by the concept of suicide: I do not know how to go about it.

I am not a tender snowflake. I can deal you grievous psychic damage in text alone if you have any “nope spots”, without making shit up or telling lies. The centipede nest in the abandoned house, the black mattress in the prison, that fucking thing in my second childhood apartment building, there is a long list of stuff to draw upon, and I’m still here.

Someone mentioning that we have options for opting out of civilization is not going to hurt my feelings. It is a fact I remind myself of often, because we all need a backup plan, and I don’t have many left.

I understand you may come from different places, where sensitivity is an important part of the community culture. Not here. But it’s important to note: We don’t hurt feelings for lulz, this isn’t some “lol PC culture gone too far lol” shit. No, we do it to tear the socially acceptable mask and the rote call-response rehearsed conversational script away and see each other, monkey to monkey, and have a REAL, HONEST chat. It’s adversarial, its vulnerability in the face of hostility, it’s not for everyone, but it’s our thing.

Don’t protect me from what isn’t a threat.

[altered]

Finally, seeing as that was a good point to jump into this from...

If you really think that my response or seeing someone talking about how maybe we are more focused on long life than happiness and maybe that’s dumb when I am seeing an acquaintance in tears about her massively shortened lifespan due to racist inequality, while I’m seeing my OWN lifespan roll up toward my face at frightening speed, if you think my response to that should be civil? Get bent. I’m fucking broken. I’m lucky to be standing here, there’s hundreds of able bodied, neurotypical cishet people who would have brained themselves by now. And I fought this hard and this long, apparently, to have someone tell me that maybe massively shortened lifespans are a good trade off for happiness when it’s well the fuck known that lifespan and happiness are literally DIRECTLY correlated.

I will not be nice about it. Discordia is not nice at all to begin with, and words like that in the state I’m in are just a hair short of saying I need to suck it up and lay down and submit to irrelevance. The “hair short” part is only because I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the INTENDED reading.

If the general preference is for me to be nice and pleasant in the face of a DEEP FUCKING INSULT, at a time that any person in my situation would be losing their goddamn mind about that exact damn point being made, then you can keep it, I’ll stay the hell out of threads I don’t make in the future, because it’s all downhill from here.

[altered]

And for the record, no fucking one was disagreeing with the Lo5ing required to believe there’s a universal narrative. Of course the fuck there isn’t. BUT REALITY HAS FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGED. Denying this is IDIOCY.

I fucking KNEW I addressed this. It’s just that it’s goddamned incoherent. Quick rephrase, hopefully in English:

“No one here is saying there is an arc to history, that idea is Lo5 and literally nothing else, we are critiquing all the stupid things being said around that point”

[minuspace]

Time changes, at our scale, the drop-off rate for retaining or projected prediction is negligible over the frame we have access to. I do not read vex as denying past or present improvement to life expectation particularly when dealing quantity. There is however a (ka)rate of quality in doing tao with the world that does not cotton well to technology.[size=78%] [/size]

[Nibor the Priest]

Nyborj, you don’t know my story so I forgive this transgression.

Noted, sorry.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Finally, seeing as that was a good point to jump into this from...

If you really think that my response or seeing someone talking about how maybe we are more focused on long life than happiness and maybe that’s dumb when I am seeing an acquaintance in tears about her massively shortened lifespan due to racist inequality, while I’m seeing my OWN lifespan roll up toward my face at frightening speed, if you think my response to that should be civil? Get bent. I’m fucking broken. I’m lucky to be standing here, there’s hundreds of able bodied, neurotypical cishet people who would have brained themselves by now. And I fought this hard and this long, apparently, to have someone tell me that maybe massively shortened lifespans are a good trade off for happiness when it’s well the fuck known that lifespan and happiness are literally DIRECTLY correlated.

Alternatively you could realize you're not the target audience and move on as if, wonder of wonders, not everything is meant to be taken or applied by you personally or even aimed in your general direction. At no point did I include you in the title or in an address at the header of this stupid spiel. You will note a conspicuous lack of a sentence that goes anything like "Here's what I think Altered should do", or, in fact, any sort "here's what I think we or literally anyone 'should do'", for that matter.

At no point did I present primitivism as a viable or preferable alternative to anything. Literally all I did was note that so-called "primitive" cultures are no less valid and no less human than ours, and that ours isn't an inevitable evolution of theirs and there's no reason to extrapolate from our present condition into assumptions that we will necessarily be better off in the future. There's nothing revolutionary here, and there's nothing about telling you personally to do absolutely anything.

I will not be nice about it. Discordia is not nice at all to begin with, and words like that in the state I’m in are just a hair short of saying I need to suck it up and lay down and submit to irrelevance. The “hair short” part is only because I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the INTENDED reading.

If the general preference is for me to be nice and pleasant in the face of a DEEP FUCKING INSULT, at a time that any person in my situation would be losing their goddamn mind about that exact damn point being made, then you can keep it, I’ll stay the hell out of threads I don’t make in the future, because it’s all downhill from here.

I'm sorry you're in the state you're in, I'm sorry you've experienced horrors and misery beyond what I myself may have been able to endure in your position. I'm not being facetious or sarcastic here. I'm genuinely angry that we live in a world where people can be so casually abused, neglected, and discarded. I'm sorry you lack the vital community and social infrastructure that we all need in order to thrive and be healthy. And I don't expect you to be "nice" about anything you perceive as an insult.

But, yeah, when you take something that is really just a run of the mill reminder that Modernism is bullshit and decide that means I am somehow telling you to give up what few lifelines you may have, you're the one who decided I said that.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

V3x you're being an ass