Grrl Power #933 – Ding psychology
This feels like a jarring transition to me, but the alternative was to stick with Maxima as she does a ton of paperwork , hands out tickets (or whatever the procedure is for arresting space mercenaries) and debriefs the team up in NYC. That was definitely the only other option.
The answer to the question, “Why didn’t the orbs give Sydney her level up sooner?” is because it amused me more to do it this way. Besides, now that Sydney seems to know how to pull up the skill web, maybe the orbs are content to wait to be prompted now.
I wanted Frost to call the guy a psychopath or even a sociopath, (instead of a “person with an extreme personality disorder”) but apparently those aren’t terms psychologists use a lot? “Antisocial Personality Disorder” utterly lacks the gravitas that “Psychopath” carries, so it’s no wonder popular media sticks with the latter. I have to imagine when psychologists are off the clock if they let fly with more colorful descriptions to describe people, like a pressure valve.
Sydney does have mandated time with Frost, but this visit was by request, not her normally scheduled session, which is why she can pimpwalk out early.
Holy crap. I definitely should have changed the “Gender” select on the prior page to “Sex” select. Although then, I don’t know what I would do about the symbols. Like, are the male and female symbols for sex or gender? I think when they were codified, the words sex and gender didn’t have separate definitions. (I’m talking about like, ancient Greece, although I myself wasn’t aware of the need to differentiate the terms prior to about ten years ago. I’d say my awareness of a thing is a pretty low bar, but I suspect I’ve also just described at least half of all Americans as well in this case.) Which leads me to my conundrum. If sex and gender don’t mean the same thing, shouldn’t we have different symbols for male sex and male gender? Really, the solution would have been to design about 30 different totally alien symbols, but since I was translating the text on the screens, it made sense to translate the gender icons. Also since I was running a little behind on the vote incentive, I had trouble justifying spending like two hours designing alien sex icons, which, now that I think about it would have probably been a lot of fun.
The new vote incentive is up! I tried something different this month – instead of doing one well painted picture with a bunch of dress variants, I wanted to tell a bit of a story. Hopefully it makes sense without any dialog or sound effects. So, instead of one picture, you guys are getting nine. I was going to do a tenth one, but I kind of ran out of time. Patreon has the whole series of pics, naturally. I might add it if I find the time, or I could work on the next Tamer: Enhancer book. Time management is not my strongest skill, so we’ll see.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
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Antisocial personality disorder is recognized as an official diagnosis and defined by the American Psychiatric Association (AMA). The terms sociopath and psychopath are not terms that have official definitions by the AMA and can have different meanings to different people. Medical doctors are very insistent on using terms have been defined by consensus in the medical community. Extreme personality disorder is not a diagnosis but a group (whose membership may vary) of disorders that greatly impair a person’s ability to behave normally in society. She isn’t claiming that the individual had a specific diagnosis, but merely that people involved in violent and unlawful activities frequently have disorders that make dealing with them very dangerous.
https://www.rn.org/courses/coursematerial-246.pdf
“Psychopath(y)” was in earlier versions of the DSM, with a specific set of diagnostic criteria, like “hebephrenia” and a host of other conditions that have been defined into and out of existence over the last century, as the supposed “consensus” is changed either by actual science or by political machinations of various constituencies.
Not sure why you jumped from the APA (the highly political organization of a large subset of American Psychologists) to the AMA (the formal association of Medical Doctors.) Perhaps because the latter has stronger credibility?
The DSM-IV wasn’t exactly the best book in the land but at least it set some kind of standard for healthcare.
The DSM-V is a joke. A really bad one. I personally was almost killed by a doctor using the DSM-V. Let’s just say 2 cups of coffee a day can get you diagnosed with ADHD under the DSM-V. That wasn’t possible with the DSM-IV. Not even close. I spent 7 years in physical therapy thanks to this work of fiction.
So, before trotting out the APA and its standards as some sort of medical dictionary, you had best know the quality of their work. Spoiler: zero.
The DSM-V merged Asperger’s and Autism into one “spectrum” disorder even though the ICD-10, the European counterpart, still lists them separately. This was unfortunate because MRIs revealed that Asperger’s involves a severely underveloped Amygdala while Autism involves a severely underdeveloped Hippocampus.
As someone who was at first diagnosed with Aspergers and then under DSM-V it was changed to High Functioning Autism (not sure the technical term off hand), that is both interesting and scary. And the bit about the MRI, back when I was a kid, they actually DID see some kind of problem in my brain. Not sure if it was an MRI or something before it as this was like 40+ years ago. I wasn’t properly diagnosed until I was a malfunctioning adult.
Having seen some of the crazy BS they’re shoving into DSM-V, all for political reasons, I fear for the next generation.
Funny. I had a similar thing happen. My eye just stopped working when I was 14 and no one knew why. I had a lot of tests done. MRI, CAT Scan, EEG, all the usual things. They didn’t show anything. Add erratic AD/HD to that and it was a recipe for disaster.
But hey, it was all good. The docs had their techno-jargon. The school system had someone to blame and the bullies had a convenient target. It took me nearly killing one of the idiots for me to finally understand. I have to admit, that in a life of bad, beating that moron down and seeing him beg me for his life felt good. I was very tempted to kill him. I did not. Of course, I would have gone to jail because he had the right to pull a knife on me, to scare me and try to hurt me. I was nuts. His mistake was doing OFF school grounds.
He had the right to do that. The school said he had the right to hurt me on school grounds and I did not have the right to protest about it out loud because that BOTHERED people. I was loud, I was visible and no one liked that. I stopped being loud in my senior year of high school and started carrying a gun. Never used, it, but I was always ready to. Because no one cared if a crazy person got hurt or killed except said crazy person.
Now people say things like Asperers or Autism or AD/HD and to many, it is OUR fault for being that way.
Funny how history is repeating.
“He had the right to do that. ” No he did not, only if you attacked, him first.
‘he had a right to do that’ that’s a useful phrase for the phenomenon. If a child is inconvenient to the administration, it is utterly amazing what the administration can ignore. and the kids are very good at figuring out who they can target, so legally no he didn’t have a right to do that. functionally? absolutely he did.
This is ZT in a nutshell. Zero Tolerance in USA schools is basically a scam to make parents think their kids are safe or there will be punishment for actions. I could go into detail on this… but I really shouldn’t.
If it’s against law enforcement and depending on local BS, it doesn’t matter if they shot first or use excessive force. A citizen defending themself can still be legally shot dead sadly. Selfdefense against a cop (which Syd is basically a budding badge flasher) is Ill advised. Sometimes people get away with it though.
Against a bully though? Nah, they gave up those “rights” as soon as they first started. Beat them into the wall, floor, or curb as much as you want. They’ll try and turn it around that it was your fault. Just make sure to have witnesses.
Or don’t leave a body.
I’m sorry your adults did not stand up for you. If the other kid had a right to attack you, then you had a symmetric right to attack him. Therefore, no such right can exist.
The school should have received a cease-and-desist letter from an attorney, for putting you in danger.
Good decision, not killing him. I had a friend in high school who made the same correct decision.
It was, actually. I met my first sword teacher just after that. He saw it happen and decided to teach me martial arts to keep me at least reasonably sane. He is probably the only reason I survived the next ten years of my life.
Now? Anyone who comes at me with a knife is going to die. I don’t need a gun. I know what to do, how and when. I will likely get hurt but they will die. I don’t NEED to be loud, rude, violent or racist to be able to defend myself. I know what honor is and what it is not.
And knowing that you can means that the situation isn’t likely to come up. People with that tendency will generally sense that they should target elsewhere, if they are sober.
I had a friend whose hands were registered as lethal weapons, back when they did that. Small guy, very solid. One time in a bar, several drunken bullies decided to attack him. I don’t believe he killed anyone, but some of them were permanently crippled. I think he picked up some bruises, but it wasn’t a near thing at all.
Interviewed afterward in the hospital, one of them said, “We just wanted to F- someone up.”
I went searching and couldn’t find any jurisdiction other than Guam where that has ever been a thing. If you’ve got a time and place where it was a thing (and it still is in Guam), please share, because I can’t find any others.
In the U.K. and U.S., a martial artist can be considered a “deadly weapon” if so decided by a court. It’s obviously not common, nor is this sort of legal mangling sensible, but it has happened.
https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/the-human-body-a-deadly-weapon.htm
For anyone who wonders why I say “nor is this sort of legal mangling sensible” it’s because a person without any serious martial arts training can choke out another quite easily. Moreover, an untrained individual’s kicks, punches, and so on, are equally as deadly; they just don’t hit as often.
If being accurate is a measure of deadliness, then by the same logic, guns should not be considered a deadly weapon in the hands of the untrained. This is prima facie absurd. A person should be tried for the crimes they committed – battery, mugging, attempted murder, whatever – without the jail sentence being upped simply because they took martial arts classes.
I’ll check back with my brother and get details and accurate language for the thing. It’s been decades since I originally heard about it, so I’m sure the story has wandered. The event was in California, and the friend was a highly skilled Filipino martial artist back in the late 70s iirc and under some kind of legal constraint where getting in a fist fight with a normal guy would put him in jail.
That’s the thing: sober people generally don’t go around looking for fights
I term this action schoolyard politics. Respond with overwhelming and unreasonable violence. After a few instances the bullies will stop bothering you because you are more trouble than you are worth. My response to getting attacked was to launch myself at them, hands on neck, knees on chest and ride them to the ground. Yes, after choking the 3rd guy (for some reason cutting off airflow scares people) I ended up in detention, but I stopped getting ‘picked on’. I don’t know how far I would have gone with the choking because I was always separated from my attackers quickly. Boys will be boys and all that. Don’t think this would fly in this day and age though. The teachers may fear to intervene now and I don’t know that I would have stopped if they would have reached unconciousness.
AS is considered high functioning autism yes. Though services and help may differ when you list your condition as “AS” or “high functioning autism” it’s usually best to just list it as HFA instead of AS. An MRI is basically a table to lay on and they roll you into it. It makes A LOT of noise (I do not like them and I physically flinch from the beeping and buzzing because it’s so damn loud. A CT scan is a similar machine, but significantly quieter. You mostly hear it whooshing and whirling as it spins around. May also involve a contrast dye injection for either which makes you feel like you wet your pants when the warmth of it spreads. An EEG is a brain scan. You get to wear an interesting looking “bald-cap” with a bunch if wires attached and wonder if you’re about to get the shocky chair.
Except that, as noted, HFA and AS are two different diseases with different medical presentations but a similar outward appearance. It’s like listing someone with “flu-like symptoms.” Well, that describes half the diseases on the planet, so are you going to get proper medical treatment? No.
Simplification only applies when two things are similar enough. Similar in fact; not in appearance. There’s a damn good reason for the saying “Never judge a book by its cover.”
ICD10 is now worldwide, the USA just took longer than everyone else to adopt it. Yes, we also have [at least in the USA] DSM5 and there are more than a hand full of variations between them. Insurance reimburses BH bases on DSM5 and PH on ICD10.
Having done more reading on this I’m not confident that things are as simple as “Asperger’s is amygdala, Autism is hippocampus.” There’s stuff about whether it’s activation of the amygdala, whether it’s growth trajectory rather than size, whether age matters, whether MRI scans are a better sign than brain autopsies, etc. This is sufficiently in the understudied areas of psychology and biology that nobody really knows for sure.
“almost killed by a doctor”; that’ was a bad doctor.
its why they call it practice. because they screw it up regularly. here in the US at least, they also bankrupt the patient, because its our fault we are sick.
Or a tired doctor.
Or a distracted doctor.
Or a doctor who was on call and not a specialist in whatever needs to be seen.
I have seen bad things happen because of all the above. (and also because the doctor had no idea what the hell she was doing and didn’t want to admit it!)
There is a REASON malpractice insurance costs so much.
There is another side of that as well, though. MY brother in law is an ER doc.
A woman came in experiencing toxic shock due to a cut-rate liposuction. The ER doc diagnosed it correctly, administered correct prompt treatment and saved her life. She sued the cheap lipo doctor, and also sued the hospital and doctor who saved her life. His insurance paid.
Yes, there is a REASON that malpractice insurance costs so much, and it isn’t (solely) doctor incompetence. If that were the reason, then doctors who didn’t do anything wrong would not be paying out and having their rates hiked.
The fact the “insurance paid” is the problem. They’d rather settle than fight it in court due to the wildly spiraling costs of court battles. That’s a problem because paying off a criminal encourages more crime. When was the last time you saw a mafia leave because all the businesses in the city paid up?
By abusing the system that way, yes, that litigant was a criminal. It’s still extortion.
Somebody who’s on my checkin call list has used the term “schizoid” about herself in a way that’s something between matter-of-fact and joking. If she doesn’t take her meds, she develops symptoms within a few days; Pariedolia, Hallucination, and Apophenia. None of which is the name of an actual disorder, they are only symptoms.
But “schizoid” is no longer a term used in diagnosis. And a few days ago I was prompted by some other people who consider “schizoid” an abusive epithet, to ask her if there is some other way to talk about people with her condition.
And she said, petulantly, that her actual diagnosis these days is “schizotypal personality disorder” but she uses “schizoid” because that’s more familiar and less threatening to people. But when “schizoid” was an actual diagnostic term, it was actually the name of a disorder more severe than she has, with additional symptoms including what she called “generally being a nasty person.” Lacking empathy, disconnected from others, hostile, unable to trust, etc.
So, she uses the word “schizoid” to describe herself, even though it’s the name of something worse than she actually has, and even though it’s no longer used as a diagnosis because people consider it abusive when directed at someone, because people find it more familiar and therefore less threatening.
This is…. a peculiar symptom of how the language treats the clinical names of disorders.
It’s more like snowflakes using (attempting in this case) to control people by controlling the language.
There is something VERY deeply wrong with people who demand that someone stop using a term to describe themselves.
Hey Dave – who does Sydney sound like? Pick any hollywood actress or any other living mammal that I could go do a search for.
I’m envisioning Alvin the Chipmunk half the time, and Shirly Temple the other half.
I don’t remember their names off the top of my head, but the English dub voices of Ayeka from Tenchi Muyo, and Lina Inverse or Amelia from Slayers pop into my head when she talks
something a little high pitched, but mostly when talking faster that goes down a little when talking slower and calmer.
imagine when dosed with the truth serum she almost went to chipmunk ear bleeding levels.
Actually, she sounds like Lina Inverse herself, to me. ^_^’
I wouldn’t say she’s quite as bad as the English VA for Amelia. Now, I’m not knocking the dub. The voice was actually, IMHO, spot on. That was the problem. Even in Japanese, I wanted to throttle her for her stupidity on a regular basis. Hearing her voice in English only reinforced that desire.
The Alvin / Shirley Temple mixture, yeah, I could see that.
Nonetheless, we love Amelia. X’D
The show wouldn’t be nearly as fun w/o her.
I just wish we could have had more time with her and her older sister together on the show. Some weird legal issue between different animation studios doing the movies vs the show as I recall. It has been over ten years since the last Slayers anime and got close to it but sadly her older sister had convenient amnesia, going by a slightly different name, and was possessing a suit of armor.
and no the video games don’t count as they were never released outside of Japan. Just Lina finding out who her old rival was a Princess the whole time is a scene I crave to see *which by the way helps explain a lot of odd scenes in the movies where she doesn’t give a crap people are royalty*.
When I saw this, I thought you were talking about Amelia Watson (Hololive EN / Holomyth) and the idea of her voicing Sydney is entirely amusing… and appropriate! Get Kiara to voice Dabbler and Calli to voice Maxima… maybe Gura to voice Anvil and Ina to voice Harem.
In my head, she’s always sounded like Tara Strong.
I’m going with the original voice actress for Excell from Excell Saga.
That
Rikku? Really? O.o;;;
I always imagined her having a deeper voice. Say: Hedy Burress perhaps. I never imagined her having a hyper ‘girly’ voice…
I keep trying to put a younger Demi Moore’s voice on her but it never sticks.
Nobody ever realized she’s voiced by Morgan Freeman at 3x speed.
I do tend to read her lines in a more Nerdy version of Tanya the Evil voice at times. Mainly when she’s on one of her hyper rants.
Can I vote for Kate Micucci? I want to vote for Kate Micucci. Also I am totally sure that Sydney would love to say “Micucci” over and over again while giggling.
I rarely have specific voices in mind for my characters when I write them. Unless they have an accent or are Ray Cosmos and definitely sound like Frank Nelson.
I remember a sci-fi novel from like the early 80s where well before current debates regarding sex and gender the entire novel has a confusing array of pronoun flipflops regarding the characters making it just about impossible to tell who was being discussed at the time and what their actual sex was. I think I maybe got through 2 chapters before I had to give up on it (and it was one of those very thick, small print books). I’d never thought what looked like a ridiculously absurd extreme sci-fi premise to me would actually end up in reality.
Samuel R. Delany’s ‘Dhalgren?’
It used to be a touchstone for me when I saw it on someone’s book shelve.
If you want to see a third gender/sex done well, then go to Olivia Butler’s Imago.
Seems like that might be it. It was so confusing with pronouns changing inside a paragraph the only example I can think of to match it is machine translations of Chinese Light Novels as the pronouns used to reference a character can change inside the same sentence so if you don’t know things like which names are male and which are female you’ll be confused for quite some time with many characters as to whether or not they’re male or female. Which gets even worse when the occasional crossdresser (most common with women as it’s often dangerous for a female to be running around the rape-friendly social mores common to the novels so they will dress and pretend to be men for safety’s sake) shows up.
How have you, personally, ever been negatively impacted by a specific person asking you to use their preferred pronouns, or chosen name?
Have you ever not projected your issues onto someone else so that they didn’t have to tell you that they’re not interested in wasting time dealing with it?
Damn near all the time.
In fact, about the only time I ever feel a need to say anything, is when some asshat decides to deliberately start a conflict over it. 9.99 times out often, people either correctly read my very obvious clothing, appearance, and behavior, or, when the get it wrong, immediately correct themselves after I say, “she/her/miss, please,” and then don’t do it again.
AND, best of all, that’s pretty much how it goes all the time, now, everywhere I go, in the trucking industry.
So, maybe, and just walk the dog with me on this one, the “Trans people making huge stinking legal cases & outrage spectacles that impose on everybody else” narrative is pure fucking bullshit.
The fact that you are not one of those cases in no way changes the fact that those cases exist and that, in the UK for instance, they can go against common sense and can result in severe penalties, and trans activists among others are pushing for that kind of system to be the standard everywhere.
The fact that Jessica Yaniv was able to bring the various cases she brought show that it is not an idle concern. The other side is fighting the trans activists because they must, to preserve freedom of thought, and there’s nothing wrong with them pointing to the egregious violations on the trans activist side when that side constantly tries to conflate mere expression and disapproval with murder, and adds to the list murders that had nothing to do with the trans identity of the decedent.
“Common sense?”
Common Sense, oh, there’s a fun little dog whistle.
Tell me, what exactly is it that “trans activists” are pursuing that flies in the face of “common sense?” And what, exactly & explicitly, is the “kind of system,” that “they” are “pushing for?” Also, what, again, exactly & explicitly, are these “egregious violations” that we transes are perpetrating to, somehow, rob you of your freedom of thought?
I mean…if the means to control your thoughts were something we could lay our hands on, don’t you think that You’d already be supporting “the trans agenda?” (I know y’all love that boogie man)
Look, hon…you like to think that you are just “expressing your disapproval.” Okay, fine.
Let’s try a little thought experiment, hmm?
Is it acceptable to disapprove of other elements of identity? Do you get to disapprove of someone’s ethnicity? Their income bracket? Their religion? Do you think “I’m just expressing my disapproval of white women,” is somehow alright?
What if it were Asian women?
What about Jewish men?
Here’s the thing…you don’t get to “disapprove” of other people’s identities, any more than that you get to “approve” them. That is such a staggering presumption of authority, it ought to be counted as a sin against “god.”
But let’s return to your post, hmm? Specifically about that dingbat, Yaniv.
Abuses of systems exist, no argument. Yaniv’s a tnuc clearly trying to game the system for a few different, equally shitty reasons. That does not change the fact legal protections for the trans community are absolutely necessary. Consider the fact that “gender panic” is still entertained as a legal defense against murder charges.
At a minimum, if you’re going to insist that the existing, very limited, protections we have be stripped away, you’re obliged to provide solutions for the problems they are intended to address. Otherwise, the only thing you’re advocating for is the vulnerability & dehumanization of trans men & women.
In Canada, you can now get sued for not using the pronouns that someone wants to use (it didn’t happen often, but it’s a possibility).
People answering to citizens in the government (call centres and desk people) are not officially allowed to say “sir/ma’am/miss” anymore when talking to others until they’re told how to interact with the person in their face by that person, even when it’s obvious (most don’t think about it and just do as before, but if they’re caught they could have sanctions).
The problem is, in the absolute majority of cases, you look at someone and you know how to call them (99.76% of the cases…).
I mean, if someone wants to be called [insert whatever] and politely ask it, and the other is an asshole and harass the trans, fine it’s somewhat justified to sue the harasser.
But having to ask each time for about two people in a thousand is just absolute bullshit, and being liable to be sued because you called a 200lb dude with a beard “dude/sir” instead of “ma’am” because the dude decided to think he’s a woman or whatever is also bullshit.
You mean Bill c-16? No. No it does not. All it does is extend protections to gender identity that other categories like age and race get. So, if someone fires you for being trans, you have a recourse. If someone at work is actively harassing you being trans, you have a recourse.
That’s a lie by omission. You only targeted the first prong of the law; there are three.
https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/canadas-gender-identity-rights-bill-c-16-explained
Indeed, such insidiousness:
Bill C-16 added the words “gender identity or expression” to three places.
First: It was added to the Canadian Human Rights Act, joining a list of identifiable groups that are protected from discrimination. These groups include age, race, sex, religion and disability, among others.
Second: It was added to a section of the Criminal Code that targets hate speech — defined as advocating genocide and the public incitement of hatred — where it joins other identifiable groups.
Third: It was added to a section of the Criminal Code dealing with sentencing for hate crimes. If there’s evidence that an offence is motivated by bias, prejudice or hate, it can be taken into account by the courts during sentencing.
Clearly a plot, right NazBol?
A plot to misconstrue the law for your personal benefit, yes. That’s called “corruption.”
The law itself is not a plot. It’s just a law.
Those goal posts look heavy.
Need help, NazBol?
No? Why would I help you move the goalposts?
Really? “I know you are but what am I?”
You must be the cleverest kid at recess.
Drew lied. You decided to defend a liar. I decided the latter wasn’t worth any mental effort.
Sure, Jan.
You engaging in corruption and him blithely lying has nothing to do with this “Jan.”
Quick question, Bharda;
What’s your take on MAPs, pedos and pederasts?
I’m not familiar with the acronym “MAP,” and my general take on mixing the act of sex & children – which is not the same thing as providing puberty blockers & respecting a transgender child’s exploration of their identity, but top marks for trying – is that children cannot give consent for purposes of engaging in sexual activity.
Any other silly questions?
Actually, it’s not a silly question.
A MAP is a Minor Attracted Person. A pederast is someone who actively engages in pedophilia.
It matters because there is currently a push to condemn anyone who identifies as any of those terms and I was wondering your opinion; do they all need to be jailed? Given therapy? Accepted but kept away from children?
I think they should be accepted but kept away from children. See, freedom of speech works because it allows people to learn. Not just learn about new ideas – it also allows for learning people’s personal views. And so, when an already-identified pedo decides to consume actual child porn, or however else they cross that fine line into harming real children, they’re far more likely to be caught and subjected to the judicial process. It’s why we have lists of convicted pedophiles; but those only help catch second-time offenders.
One of the more recent pushes from the right has been to ban illustrated porn depicting “violence” which of course includes illustrated child porn. Except, no living being was necessarily harmed in the production of illustrated works. By banning everything objectionable all that actually accomplishes is pushing this part of society into secretive & festering corners where they cannot be easily detected and caught.
More importantly, making legal acquisition of harmless alternatives difficult can dramatically increase the violent crimes rate. As the modern U.S. prohibition on marijuana and the 1920 prohibition on alcohol so clearly illustrate.
We already have a word for that, we don’t need an acronym.
As for my position, as long as they keep their hands to themselves and do not engage in inappropriate behavior/communication with or involving an actual human minor, I do not give a fuck what happens inside their heads, or in private.
The instant a real child is involved, in any way, at all, I revert to type, and they get sent to the gulag.
Hey, something that @Bharda and @Wzaerreazw agree on!
@wolfling I’m not a proponent of gulags.
“and trans activists among others are pushing for that kind of system to be the standard everywhere. ” It’s about equality!
Just so you know YOU are the asshat deliberately starting a conflict here, because nothing I said would lead anyone rational to the response you’ve had. So do keep your irrational issues to yourself.
tl;dr
“I’m the real victim.”
Again, asshat projecting their issues where they don’t belong and when called on it resort to strawman arguments to replace what was actually said with the fantasies filling up your head so YOU can pretend to be a victim. You aren’t, so take your asshattery and martyr complex elsewhere.
I mean, dude, girl, whatever you are, I don’t want to presume… You started out kinda confrontational, declaring most of the gender identity politics of recent history to be “absurd”, which is kinda declaring your opinion on it. When someone took the time to explain media bias and how that harms people, and gives a detailed and thorough explanation. You aren’t wasting your time dealing with it, same way you aren’t wasting your time holding doors open for people, or making people coffee, or looking both ways before you cross the road… You don’t HAVE to do any of these things. But you probably should.
Now, maybe, as a Furry yourself, You do understand that personal identity is up to oneself, and shouldn’t be a cause of strife between people… and this was all a misunderstanding. However I feel you’d have expressed you were an Ally if you didn’t explicitely mean to come across as a bigot.
You are the one who brought up trans, Nightmask was talking about a book they tried to read in the 80’s
+1
Specifically to resume complaining about pronouns, so no, I’m really not the one who “brought it up.”
They were talking about a book, where the author kept changing the pronouns making it difficult to keep track, you decided to make it about trans
Sure, Jan.
It’s not Bullshit, they are making legal cases and they are playing to the media about the situation… and maybe they should. Of course, it also means when the media run such stories that it is a slow news day… so really it’s a win all round if the biggest issue of the day is whether someone was misgendered.
Has happened to me on occasion and I identify a straight/non-trans and I thought I dressed according to my birth gender… (still doesn’t stop people apparently).
*sigh*
You’re not wrong. Obviously there are a few “very special individuals” who do attempt various sorts of fuckery.
The problem, from where I sit, is that these dingbats get held up as if they reflect/define all trans people, in order to justify shitheel fashy talking points.
As I keep saying, the realities of gender & society are feckin’ complicated…but we are constantly forced into these stupid fights, because if we don’t make every single case a ruddy Shilo, we’re going to be right back where we were before. Murdered with total impunity, literally tortured into conformity, locked up in mental wards or prisons, with zero autonomy.
Fuck that.
I’ll die first, and I won’t be going quietly, or alone.
Well said. And what MOST trans-exclusionary regressive false-feminist (TERF) cultists (and YES they are members of personality cults… anyone who doesn’t agree, look it up) and other anti-transgender zealots don’t want the general public to know is that transgender people are just that: people. Just like cisgender poeple, some of us are try to do good (I work for one of the oldest Humane Societies in the US, and I love helping find pets new homes), but some, like Yaniv and Jenner, decide to be steaming piles of toxic waste… and of course, the hate-mongering zealots love Yaniv because they can claim that all transgender people are like that sick f*ck. Just like the majority of cisgender folks, we just want to be able to live our lives, and not be constantly under threat of loosing our jobs/homes/etc, at best, and not being at risk of being murdered, all because we are seen as “different”. Sorry for the rant, but I, like you, am sick of the persecution and bullsh*t we have to endure. And like you, I’m not going quietly, and being that I practice krav maga, I likely won’t go alone.
Take care and stay safe *huggs*
Pro Tip: When anyone pulls out the term “TERF”, they are a charter member of an opposing cult.
Veteran Pro Tip: When someone bitches about the term “TERF,” they they are specifically an anti-trans bigot.
Pro tip – pointing out virulent prejudice is not “bitching”.
tl;dr
“Calling out transphobia is the real transphobia.”
Preferably? Don’t die. Society tends to paints those who go out wildly as the “crazy loner mad man/woman.” They don’t get an ounce of sympathy; even if it’s in any way deserved.
Take for example the man who shot Gabrielle Giffords. Before he did that, he asked her, “what is your purpose if words have no meaning?” It’s a more philosophical version of “what use are you if all you do is talk?” She ignored his question entirely; in effect throwing his question back onto himself. Asking him, what is your worth if all YOU do is talk? Well, in response, he stopped talking. He shot her.
The news treated that exchange as the worthless ramblings of a deeply disturbed individual. He was disturbed, of that there’s little doubt. But Ms. Giffords also chose to ask him to act through her utter lack of consideration – possibly thinking her non-reply was clever and apt. It was the last time she’d be so clever. But it was also the last time this man would be free to live his life as he chose.
Personally, I try to reject clique mentality entirely. Not just my opponents’ cliques but also my own favored cliques. I use the space I get from the calm and quietude to learn and plan my comeback. The loudest people in society are typically nothing more than a fad pawn for some larger purpose. One needs to express themselves with patience but calm force to actually be heard beyond the next minute. That is my aim.
If you really want to help the Trans cause, I recommend you do the same… I found a study correction, yesterday, which showed that gender reassignment surgery doesn’t help Trans outcomes in terms of mental health, either. We already know it sterilizes and kills Trans folks at much higher rates from the previous study I cited.
I’m sorry to have to say this, but… they’re just putting the death mill behind closed doors. Don’t partake in that by getting so angry that you, too, are silenced.
https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.1778correction
Wow, what a load of crap in the first half of that. Not answering a rhetorical question is asking to be murdered? Geeze.
Trying to make a delusional maniac into a sympathetic character is obscene.
Then the second half… which is not crazy… but suffers from proximity to the first half.
Wzaerreazw is deranged, and voiced their conclusion that not much was left for them but to go on a killing spree in these forums just a few comics ago. It would be best to ignore them and let them hopefully seek counseling for their various issues.
I said, after much internal debate, that my intellect, skill, and social competency are less than that of America’s Founding Fathers. Yet, the Founding Fathers were forced to fight and kill for their freedom. How arrogant would it be if I believed that I could achieve through voice and reason what they could only achieve through violence?
And so, I concluded that someone like yourself, who wantonly struck against every freedom while working as a member of the government, is deserving of a proper death should it come to that. Which is not a threat, nor a provocation, nor an intent to kill anyone in a “killing spree.” It is an admission of my own insufficiency and a realization that War exists and that I may not avoid it by simply choosing to be ignorant.
I am not god. I can only work with the tools of men.
NazBol worshipping at the Altar of The Fathers. So surprise. Much shock.
tl;dr
“I’m not saying I want to kill you, I’m just saying that I think it would be appropriate if you were killed.”
Seriously starting to wonder how many watch lists you’re on, Wz.
I’m not worshiping anybody. I’m comparing myself to the people who FOUNDED A NATION. How many nations have I founded recently? Oh, that’s right, zero.
Aside from the insults, yes, your tl;dr is correct (for once). If we lived in a peaceful utopia I’d never consider saying such a thing. But the world isn’t gumdrops and candycanes.
It surprises me you’d be so anti-war after earlier having claimed to have been in the military. I suppose you justified your military service by telling yourself you were “just following orders?”
No, you ignorant fuck. You lost to me in a debate and got so twisted around the axle that you said what can only be taken as an intent to murder one or more people.
If you were capable of understanding the difference between the government and a corporation, or if you were capable of understanding the US Constitution, you might have fared better. But you are not, and so you just kept on embarrassing yourself with your factless rants.
And no, you didn’t say what you’re claiming to have said now at this later date. Not that what you’re claiming now is much better. Here, allow me to assist you in your understanding yet one more time:
Wzaerreazw muttered to himself, whilst wearing a tin foil cap and prepping for the Communist Dentist Socialist Fascist Obamaist takeover of America:
What part of “some people must die” are you trying to claim isn’t a threat or a statement of your intent to kill?
This utterly unhinged rant promising violence, and all because you are incapable of comprehending that the right to free speech is not at all the right to enter someone else’s home and say whatever you will. That a company kicking you off of their platform is not the same as the government violating your rights. That a company not being able to be sued for your speech or actions isn’t some kind of tyranny.
Seek counseling. It is the only thing that can save you, because you cannot save yourself without help.
I lost in the debate, yes. Do you know why? Because you repeatedly lied, made confounding statements, and skewed the context. Just like you’re doing right now.
“It’s your fault I lost the debate.”
You gonna take your NazBol and go home now? Please?
Just to add; Oberon is talking about a company kicking people off platforms… in defense of the government regulation called “section 230.”
There, I defeated your argument properly this time around.
No, Bharda, I cannot take you home nor would I be inclined to do so.
Wz:
I hesitated at first, but after a bit more consideration, I’ve decided to respond to your comment about my military service. Pay careful attention, because I’m only going to tell you this _once_.
Until you have heard shots fired in anger, until you have carried a comrade, covered in their blood, urine, tears, and feces, until you have become numb to the mortars landing outside your camp, until you have seen children torn in half, until you have had to shoot a child, until you have had to explain shooting that child to their mother, until you have been ordered to burn crops and kill livestock, until you have had to confront the sad, silent, lonely graves of people you have killed, until you have had your sleep haunted, every night, by these things, reliving them, over, and over, until you see them playing out like ghosts when you are awake…
Shut. the. fuck. up.
If society would agree that people should not be silenced, imprisoned, tortured, and killed for merely thinking the wrong ideas, I would gladly shut the fuck up. But the problem is, some of those wrong ideas are precisely what cause the aforementioned silencing, imprisonment, torture, and killing. You haven’t bothered to actually solve any of that yourself. You just want everyone else to be quiet so you can have things your way.
However, while I adamantly disagree with your political views, I still thank you for your service, and I wholeheartedly believe you can overcome the pain it has caused with support.
I know from a different experience that such severe wounds cannot be forgotten. They do not lessen with time. But one can choose to learn from them and allow them to strengthen one’s convictions, or one can hide from their past and bark at everyone who isn’t calling them a perfect flower. Not my choice to decide for you; but I have lived as the latter, and I couldn’t bear it.
You are an ignorant child who knows nothing about war or service, and who presumes too much.
I do not give a single damn about your “thoughts” or ”opinions.” They collapse under the lightest scrutiny.
What has me, genuinely, pissed at you, NazBol, is your implication that military service and an “anti-war” stance are, somehow, incompatible. This, more than anything, demonstrates your character.
You are not a victim, nobody is silencing you, or policing your thoughts, or any of the other myriad fantasies you imagine, when you paint yourself in the role of martyred patriot. Your life is not a Mythic Journey, you are not The Hero, the powers that be do not either know, or care, who you, or your other Turner Diaries cosplay buddies are. You are a small, bitter, selfish, immature, frightened little boy desperately seeking some group of people to look down on, in order to alleviate the hollow impotence of your own unremarkable and entirely mundane existence as a cog in the neoliberal capitalist machine, as you limp daily towards your fate as a nameless hole in the inevitably paved-over ground.
Nobody is special, there is no justification for your shitty lack of regard for your fellow human beings, there is no schadenfreude moment where you will get feel smug & self-satisfied.
Shitty things happen to everyone; it doesn’t make you special, set you apart, or great you any special wisdom. Neither does it justify you being asshole towards others, pathologizing their identities, or otherwise looking for excuses to demonize them for merely existing, and just be clear, other people calling you out for being a bigot doesn’t make you a victim, it makes you someone who needs to reevaluate their view of the world, especially if your go-to reaction is to blame some nebulous, ill-defined conspiracy instead of engaging in a little honest introspection about what you do & say that causes people to call out your shit.
In short, “grow the fuck up.”
The U.S. has had conscientious objection as part of its military law since World War I.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objection_in_the_United_States
The fact you go around whining about your military service despite having chosen to participate says more about you, fascist. As a reminder: I spent time gathering evidence of your fascism. That’s not an insult. You, on the other hand, have been calling me a “NazBol” ever since I rejected mass-castration being incorporated into U.S. national healthcare law.
You didn’t defeat anything. You simply stated a fact. We were indeed discussing section 230 of the CDA.
Ah, yes, the government regulation that says that you do not have the right to walk into someone else’s house, spout whatever you choose to spout, and then claim that it is free speech. Oh, and that others are not allowed to sue the person whose house you voiced your non-free speech in.
Nothing you have said contradicts this. You simply are incapable of understanding that Constitutionally protected free speech starts and stops with the government, and even there it has a metric crapton of restrictions and limitations.
Seek counseling! You have most likely engaged in criminal activity with your various threats of harm or murder. Quit while you’re behind.
The First Amendment and its surrounding legal framework already long established the right you speak of. So, why pass another law?
Section 230 gives corporations the right to edit or delete comments. I.E. they can make their speech the only allowed speech, or even edit what you said to support a specific view. Deleting one side of an argument is the same as publishing an article intended to support a specific cause. Editing one side of the argument is the same as writing an article intended to support a specific cause.
It’s nothing more than a legal loophole that was closed centuries ago by defamation laws. You are defending a law intended to legalize defamation. I am informing you that you are actively supporting and seeking to further enable criminal activity.
You admit to working in the government, too! Guess BLM was right about that. Do you hate African Americans, too? Is that why you want to stifle free speech? Just wondering.
Wzaerreazw:
Ok, this is getting ridiculous. Section 230 is not particularly long, and 230(c) is the only part people are really arguing about. It’s not hard to read it and learn that it isn’t at all what people are claiming. Here it is:
Section 230 does not give corporations the right to edit or delete comments. They already had it, because they have the right to edit or remove any files on servers that they own, barring legal obligations to the contrary. What section 230 does is shield them from liability for not preemptively censoring the information submitted to them. Without section 230, companies would have the choice to:
1) manually pre-screen every piece of user-submitted content, which would be an expensive proposition, probably killing many platforms.
2) Accept no user-submitted content, leading to a far less interactive internet.
3) Risk expensive lawsuits, because they would be on the hook as publishers for user-submitted content.
I imagine it’s the encouragement of proactive censorship in 230(c)(2) that upsets people. And I think it’s clear from 230(a) and 230(b) that it was not intended to be used to censor political discussion — that its primary purpose was to encourage the censorship of porn, in a “think of the children!” fashion. They were worried that absent the legal liability of being considered a publisher, companies would fail in their moral obligation to protect the children, because the money’s either in not spending the money on censorship, or in making money on content other people would like censored.
So sure, I’ll agree that section 230 could do with some changes. But removing it entirely? That would destroy the internet as we know it, including this comment section.
Torabi, you are correct on all counts. Yet… That’s not how the law is implemented.
I want to ask you a question. The internet existed prior to Section 230. Forums existed prior to Section 230. So, why didn’t a lack of Section 230 destroy the internet? Suing a business for what someone said within its premises is already ipso facto abuse of the legal system. That’s why.
However, the Citizens United and McCutcheon SCOTUS rulings found that money is a speech amplifier and is therefore protected by the First Amendment. Which means “amplifying speech” is now subject to defamation laws.
Section 230 protects tech platforms from this ruling but nobody else. Every single other business owner, homeowner, random empty lot owner; anyone and everyone, is still liable. Such challenges would of course be rare outside of the internet. Therefore Section 230 exists to keep those two SCOTUS rulings unchallenged.
I’m going to go through some legal history, so stay with me.
In 1986 a law was passed called the “Firearm Owners Protection Act.” Within this law was a short amendment which added the following subsection:
Now, you may notice something about this law. It says
This is an exception which allows possession of the restricted item if authorized. Well, what’s wrong about that? Authorization is normal. Everyone who gets a gun must also get a license. Why should machineguns be any different?
Oh, no, no, no. That’s not what this law does. In 1934 the National Firearms Act was passed. It put a legal requirement on all machinegun owners to register their firearm and imposed a hefty tax. Which is fine; congress’ power to tax is bestowed to them under the U.S. constitution. However, this law was then amended by the 1968 National Firearms Act. Let’s take a look:
So, you can’t transfer a machinegun without registration. But the only people who are authorized to register are manufacturers, importers, and makers. They can also register new owners, but they can’t authorize new owners, since having authorization to register is a requirement. (circular logic) So how do you sell to a civilian? Ha ha, you don’t.
This is how Section 230 actually works. First, a restriction is put in place by some other law or legal ruling. Then, that restriction is excepted for only a narrow band of people who fall under some extreme circumstance. The two laws combined create what’s called a “defacto ban.” Defacto means “in effect, though not formally recognized.”
By simply speaking we now risk liability for those businesses and property owners who would otherwise support us. In order to speak publicly we must register a permit; as the registrant, our money served as a speech amplifier, making us liable for others’ defamation.
We no longer have “Free Speech” in America. That’s gone; unless we talk on a tech platform. Tech platforms? They’re allowed to censor with absolute impunity.
The First Amendment is dead.
Dal. You can’t dehumanize people like that. The man had his own logic even if it’s not something you want to accept. And that logic cost him everything, as it should. But Ms. Giffords’ own logic cost her quite a bit, as it should also. Perhaps not physical harm – but being a blithe ingrate to the weakest within your society is a proper recipe for disaster.
Historically, this DID bring physical harm to politicians and other leaders, with alarming regularity. We live within a time that is abnormally peaceful. We should be grateful for that but instead we eschew others simply because they don’t fit our definition of “normal.” Then wonder why they go on a rampage. It’s quite silly if nothing else.
Holy shnikes….NazBol is over 9000!
Can’t you come up with anything new? It’s not even annoying anymore, just boring.
Corncob, also.
Well, at least that’s less hateful.
NazBol intensifies, I see. Holy shnikes…
tl;dr
“She was asking for it.”
“Stop advocating for your rights.”
“I’m claiming a study that was later found to have a null conclusion is actually concluding the opposite thing.”
Uhh, the study you’re referring to having a null conclusion is exactly why I posted it. The author tried to find that Trans surgery was emotionally helpful. Their original conclusion was that it was helpful. However, they mangled their statistics to achieve this and were caught upon peer review.
The thing is, NazBol, you’re trying to use a flawed study to assert your own position.
In essence, you’re making a false dichotomy fallacy (IF NOT A, THEN B). Worse, you’re relying on only one fucked up study, and asserting that it proves a pattern.
Well, you’re not even using a study to make your claims, so whose data is more reliable?
Hint: it’s not yours.
I’m not the one making a claim.
Birder of proof lies with you, NazBol.
Yes, which is why I’ve repeatedly supplied peer-reviewed studies.
Hint: When you resort to name calling, you are demonstraighting that you have exhausted your logical arguments, assuming you had any in the first place.
You’re the threat you claim to see.
Sure, Jan.
“biggest issue of the day”; haqve you ever been misgendered?If not, your opinion, is Bovine Excrement!
From experience, I can tell you that anyone who went to grammar school, grade school, or high school in the 1960s through 1980s was misgendered multiple times. So, yes.
My preferred Pronoun is “Imperial Majesty” – You May Curtsy.
And mine is Supreme Overlord of the 13 Universes. You may now prostrate yourself and slam your head into the floor before me.
OBJECTION!
That is a title, your Imperial Majesty, not a pronoun.
*curtseys*
It is if Supreme Overlord of the 13 Universes says it is. That’s apparently how it works. To claim otherwise is apparently a terrible thing to do.
No, actually, that is very much not “how it works.”
Your “apparently” is doing a lot of work there. More accurately, it should be, “that is how I assume it works based on my gut reaction to superficial exposure.”
Good job turning even a joke into a political debate.
“iT wAs JuSt A jOkE.”
#drink
Yeah, surely you don’t get triggered by gender. Hah. Can’t even stand a joke about “chosen pronouns.” Keep demonstrating your fascism.
There are two genders in the English language, male (he) and female (she). If folks are able to make up new pseudo-genders willy-nilly, things that include all matter of their personal conceptualizations, and can then demand use of new pronouns, then there is no principled claim that any other kind of identity is not a gender.
“I was speaking to His Honor yesterday…”
Titles have the equivalent of pronouns, and have social statuses and conventions attached, so they are FAR closer to an actual gender than “genderfluid” and such terms are.
IKR? Like the training at Google, referenced in the Damore suit, that gave gender examples of a “yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin” or an “expansive ornate building”.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/01/10/damore-lawsuit-claims-google-let-employee-who-identifies-as-yellow-scaled-wingless-dragonkin-give-presentation/
This is what they want us to be required to say under penalty of law. I can’t understand it.
That said, there’s no reason for the website to double down on the bull by contrasting this insanity against “traditional gender roles.” Doesn’t anyone understand basic logic anymore? It’s BETTER to have women as equals because then the more effective parent can raise the kids and the more effective worker can bring home the bread. You’d think we’d want that.
No just cut everyone a check, use the proper pronoun, then blow up some middle east country for cash. What happened to everyone’s rationality?
I see NazBol is still NazBol’ing.
It’s called “reason” and “well-balanced consideration;” neither of which are a political affiliation.
On the contrary: political affiliation is typically anti-reason.
Those sure are words.
Your comment contains two non-words. They’re a portmanteau of two insulting epithets.
Accurate, tho, NazBol.
Not really, fascist.
See? That’s a real word.
Okay, I explained the specific points re: why I call you NazBol, can you explain exactly what I do that makes me a fascist?
Well, you didn’t, but I guess we can let that slide.
From Wiki:
You seek to dictate what others can say and not say and by extension how they can think and not think. While this isn’t explicitly expressed as a desire to criminalize wrongthink, you have at least once defended a law that is intended to do exactly that, Canada’s C-16 bill. You have also at least once defended Oberon and his platform, which is that the government can legally dictate wrongthink via corporate puppets. In doing so, you defend the actions of these corporations, some of whose actual history involves supporting the real Nazi Party, a.k.a. NSDAP.
Okay, so there’s authoritarianism. How about ultranationalism?
You’ve numerous times claimed I was a NazBol in response to my scientifically-backed treatises against systematized sterilization, death, and torture. You’ve numerous times times claimed that “protected classes” – although not Aryans; protected all the same – should have the right to oppress other groups based on their arbitrary whims. And you have, at least once, dismissed the actual history of the United States in favor of your own racist and prejudiced interpretation that seeks to denigrate solely those of the white race.
You seek to regiment the economy and society to serve your pet whims and, in order to do so, appeal to the emotions of others to shut down any claims of victimization because you are the “only victim.”
About the only thing you haven’t textually argued in favor of is “forcible suppression,” which, because your ideas require force to be achievable, is a defacto claim regardless.
…
I imagine my explanation will still go ignored, but… If one does not speak, they cannot be heard.
You should get a gold medal for mental gymnastics.
1: You are now asserting a conspiracy wherein “the government” is controlling tech companies in order to, somehow, control people’s minds.
2: You are asserting that these tech companies, which are less than 30 years old, somehow have a history that stretches back to the 1920’s, and involves them in Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
3: You are asserting that laws that prohibit a very narrow form of abuse towards trans people are, somehow, an arbitrary oppression of other people.
…I suppose I could keep going, but the point is, you are completely divorced from reality at this point, and have barricaded yourself inside your little bubble. W/e.
1. It’s not a conspiracy. Conspiracies are illegal. Social engineering is legal.
2. That was actually a trap for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
The primary developer of the AI being used to manipulate the public via Section 230 is and was IBM. They licensed their technology to Google, Microsoft, Apple, et. al. Section 230 doesn’t just protect corporations from words spoken by individuals, it has allowed them to selectively remove or edit individuals’ comments to change public discourse in favor of specific ideas, such as the fascist ideas you support.
3. It IS. If it just prevented abuse toward Trans people that would be fine, but it criminalizes “being offended” as “hate speech.” Let’s put it this way; someone changes their gender daily. They inevitably get misgendered. Aha! Criminal penalties.
Maybe you didn’t notice but I was offering two routes: reconciliation via emotional support and understanding even if we don’t completely agree, OR, I correctly call you a fascist in response to your repeated insults. That’s why I waited to gather proper evidence. I do not fling rude monikers unless they are properly justified by your actual beliefs.
I’m genuinely bewildered that people are still talking about gender/sex stuff on this page when it doesnt even have anything remotely dealing with gender arguments.
Hence why I havent posted in these threads (except this one post).
I have no idea either, it seems people are still mentally stuck on that conversation.
Ah, I figured it out. DaveB mentioned the previous page’s debates in his comment. I don’t usually read DaveB’s remarks but I went looking for the cause this time.
It started with someone whining that a Sci-Fi book turned them off b/c “weird gender pronouns.”
Some folks are just gluttons for punishment.
No, dumbass, they were turned off, not because of ‘weird gender pronouns’, but because the author kept changing the pronouns, which made it difficult to follow who was speaking
Sure, Jan.
Not only that, but we’re supposed to telepathically determine what someone’s Pronouns are before speaking at all.
Was that Breitbart report before or after the bit about the alien sex slave orphanage pizza parlor, or w/e it was? X’D
Ah, yes, that spurious pretense that insulting the conduit somehow changes the underlying facts.
Okay, different news outlets:
National Review.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/01/james-damores-google-lawsuit-exposes-companys-intolerance/
Dallas Morning News
https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/01/11/google-s-discrimination-against-conservatives-is-just-the-beginning-for-corporate-america/
Huffington Post
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/james-damore-google-lawsuit_n_5a53c4f4e4b0efe47ebb9cc9
Still doesn’t change anything. The corporate certification of nonsense genders were alleged in the lawsuit, and Google didn’t even deny that it happened.
Omfg…are you seriously trying to defend the asshat who published a 3K word memo to say, “girls are dumb at computer?”
I am 100% done with you at this point.
It’s Bharda’s M.O. Every time I respond with a scientific paper or other solidly documented statement of fact, a well-considered matter of ethics or logic, or basically anything really, they repeatedly call me a “NazBol.”
Oddly enough, both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks had that down pat; the Nazis had “Juden,” “Kikes,” “Dogs,” etc. while the Bolsheviks had their “Bourgeois,” “Kulaks,” etc.
Which has made me seriously question whether they are actually a NazBol themselves while pretending to be Trans so they can get sympathy from the Trans community.
tl;dr
“I’m the real victim.”
You claim to be “more Left” than others, and simultaneously assert that trans people are sick, unstable, and otherwise less-than.
You’re a NazBol.
I never claimed any of those three things. In fact, I’ve never specifically said the word “sick” until this comment. If you want to winnow my earlier (factually correct) discussion on epigenetics down to “trans r sick,” fine, but it’s not true. Everyone has genetic and epigenetic flaws that can be either remedied or accounted for if science were better than now.
With proper – non political – research, you could be whatever gender you so choose and not suffer any downsides. In a world where changing genders is as easy as going to the doctor for a single DNA shot, it’s hard to imagine bigotry continuing to rule the day. Plus, being genetically your chosen gender – i.e. making it your sex – nobody would even KNOW to heckle you because you are actually what you claim down to the most basic building blocks of life. There would be no “adam’s apple” or “feminine jawline” or whatever else for some jerkwad to point out and bully you about.
Granted, some people are jerks regardless, as you have been toward me, but once again, the world isn’t a perfect utopia.
tl;dr
Corncob
I didn’t think so, but still, the tl;dr version is: “no, I didn’t say that.”
Wait, is this supposed to be more or less serious than the Apache attack helicopter example? I mean, they should at least be consistent.
When you post a nazi propoganda website, no matter how well researched this individual arguement might be, you taint yourself with the nazi paintbrush.
“Lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas.”
Apologies to all good boys, who are definitely not Nazis.
Odd how the good ol’ USA had more card carrying members of that organization than GERMANY did in 1940.
Then again? Thinking about it historically? No. Not odd at all.
Henry Ford WOULD have built death camps for Communists and/or anyone who he felt ‘undesirable’ if he had been allowed to and he wasn’t even close to the only one. Just one of the richest.
What organization, how does one establish firm ideological membership, and where, precisely, does one get a card? Membership cards still exist to get into Sam’s club, iirc…
You can google it and you CAN still join that organization to this day in the USA.
Funny how only in the USA is it legal to be one of those openly. To wear the uniforms and symbols and be PROTECTED while doing so. Then again, silly and stupid were kind of our things for the last several years, no?
Just um… don’t wear said uniforms around any veterans of WWII if you value your health. ANY side. Yes, they are old now, but any who survived to now won’t be stupid enough to face such evil without a weapon in hand.
The entire reason the U.S. was founded was to protect views that are considered “less acceptable” by society at large. Granted, during WWII the U.S. did not allow naziism under the Sedition Act, so one might consider that hypocritical. But when it involves wartime it’s a matter of practicality. Regardless, any Nazi who commits crime is put in jail like the criminal they are.
The U.S. doesn’t consider “wrongthink” to be criminal. That’s why we have the First Amendment. Well, at least, we did. Nowadays that’s becoming questionable.
The “entire reason,” the US was “forged,” was to preserve slavery, invade the native territories, and secure control of the land & it’s resources to the wealthy land owning white men exclusively, without paying their taxes to the British Empire.
All the patriotic narrative nonsense is exactly that. Nonsense.
Slavery wasn’t banned in the U.K. until 1833. The U.S. was founded in 1776.
You are correct about invading the native territories and also taxes. Though, one of the many contentions of the Revolutionary War was the obscene taxes levied by the English Empire. It wasn’t a founding cause, though, at least not as was officially declared within the Declaration of Independence. They instead focused on the procedural wrongs which prevented them from representing themselves against these taxes and other matters such as murder and theft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamp_Act_1765#Details_of_tax
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
Well, that is a fantastic misrepresentation of the fully contextualized facts about slavery through tThe Empire.
Oh look, a simple internet search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism_in_the_United_Kingdom
https://www.thoughtco.com/international-slave-trade-outlawed-1773975
Moreover, although U.S. law was weaker than that of the English Empire (though it did exist prior to England’s anti-slavery law, though again, a full ban wasn’t enacted until 1833) the U.S. Declaration of Independence also contained this tidbit:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_men_are_created_equal#Slavery_and_the_phrase
As for why the U.S. law was passed in 1808 specifically, it’s because there was a moratorium in place within the constitution; to avoid dissolution of the independence movement:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-1/section-9/clause-1/
What you’re actually criticizing is America’s inability to fight directly against the largest Empire that has ever existed in the entirety of human history. And yet, the U.S still succeeded in achieving the lengthy process of ratifying the 19th amendment 12 years before the U.K. passed the law allowing women to vote, so clearly the U.S. was more progressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representation_of_the_People_(Equal_Franchise)_Act_1928
Correction, 8 years, not 12.
English doesn’t have genders, never has and I don’t think it ever will. That’s really a European thing.
English does have personal pronouns: He, She, They, It (considered rude), You. Interestingly Chinese is very similar in this regards… though they use the same sound regardless.
It also had Thou. Still disagree with stopping to use it.
English is the exception to the rule for most languages – especially the ‘Romance’ and ‘Germanic’ languages.
English is actually a Germanic language but does get heavily influenced from Romance languages. English IS a gendered language, but far less so than other Germanic or romance languages, largely because ‘the’ and ‘a’ and ‘an’ are gender neutral in English.
Can someone please explain, though, why there are apparently multiple threads on this when it has nothing to do with the comic?
PS – Chinese is a ‘Sinitic’ language. Sinitic Languages tend to be largely gender-neutral and don’t have many linguistic gender markers. Sinitic languages are also number-neutral, time-neutral, and person-neutral, which is why it’s so complicated for speakers of romance and germanic languages to learn compared to other languages.
It’s mostly based on word order, although VERY recently, Chinese has started using some gendering in their language, for ‘he’ and ‘she’ – although both words still SOUND the same.
Chinese and other Sinitic languages, and the one Japonic language (Japanese) confuse the heck out of me. I wish I knew how to speak and read them though – I’d get so much high-paying, third-party legal work that requires almost no real effort because companies pay a lot of money for attorney who can read Chinese and Japanese.
English is an exception to language Itself, because it
borrowed fromstraight up mugged every other language (real, dead, or even made-up) indiscriminately that trying to enforce rules would be hypocritical (and down right confusing: do you apply the rules per word? or per sentence? and if it’s per sentence, which rule applies? is it based on the majority of the words used? or the intent)The reason there are so many threads about this when it has nothing to do with the comic, is because some people still have a personal agenda they won’t leave quiet (and call anyone who disagrees a Nazi)
That, and the fact that we morph things constantly for our convenience.
For instance, we use the simple past tense of “wend” (“went”) and attach it to the current tense of “go”, because the simple past tense of “go” (“goed”) would sound too much like another common verb (“goad”). English is full of those.
Semantic pedantry, so it least the contents match your label, I suppose.
Yes, some people object to accurate and factual usage. I see you are one of them, at least in this case.
Language is not static.
Get over it.
“, male (he) and female (she”; those are sex designations, not genders!
” : narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned a pedantic insistence that we follow the rules exactly Far worse, he was pedantic, persnickety, letting nothing inaccurate or of uncertain meaning go by—not an aphrodisiac quality.— Kingsley Amis “; Appropriate choice of name!
Objection overruled. Imperial Majesty has declared that “Imperial Majesty” is a pronoun. As Imperial Majesty clearly has as much right to invent pronouns as anyone else, “Imperial Majesty” is in fact a valid pronoun.
Unless you are now claiming that no one has the right to add pronouns to the language?
If that’s the criteria, then how have you, personally, ever been negatively impacted by being lynched?
Very nearly.
A dozen years ago at a TA Truck Stop in Texas, an old man tried to get people attack me for “blasphemy,” of all things. He even called the Sheriff to send out a deputy. Scary few minutes. No other driver would say a word for me. I only made it out because the cook let me hide out in the kitchen until he & the manager calmed things down.
I haven’t been back since.
However, the more important point is, people have been harmed by lynching, just as they have been harmed by verbal abuse, and that is why we apparently need laws for both. Because some people can’t be assed to show a basic level of respect for other human beings, without being threatened with consequences by the state.
Glad you’re ok and still with us.
Thank you, Caitlyn.
Glad you got out. I have seen it many places, and while it only turned out violent once around me, It was always scary. Doesn’t matter the skin color, the region, whatever…
Most frightened I have ever been was with an utterly silent mob who surrounded me and two other paramedics as we tried to rescue a dying woman from a crushed SUV. She was black. The crowd was mixed races and when they saw she was dead, I really though they were going to string the black guy who ran a red light and hit her up from a lamppost. Then again, she was a week from delivering her second kid.
That was terrifying because I was the only white person there and if one of them had pointed at me, and said ‘HIS FAULT!’ how many would have argued? I might have shared a lamppost with the killer.
Of course, in this day and age? Who would care?
Were you able to save the baby?
No.
Interesting claim. So you’ve avoided the entire state, or that truck stop?
That specific location.
I go to and through Texas often enough. A few places & people I rather like there.
One side effect of the modern trend of having to remember individual people’s pronouns, is that we now have to know people well enough that we don’t even need pronouns for them. We can just use their names instead. And, honestly, that’s usually easier, at least for me. Just remembering names gets difficult outside of the 200-ish people I know best. And now that it’s down to choice/decorrelated from visual cues, I think I remember individual pronouns of only about 125 of them or so.
Another side effect of the trend is that we now have no way to talk about people whom we don’t know. Pronouns used to be good for that. Not so much anymore.
That’s not entirely true.
People are allowed to be in error or make honest mistakes.
If you start use, say, she/her, and get get told, it’s he/him, they/them, or w/e, just correct and keep going. It only turns into a row when someone decides to act like an ass about it.
And honestly, they/them has always been acceptable for parties unknown.
‘They’ and ‘them’ is typically used more for groups than individuals
Used to be. I’m sufficiently old that I remember being startled – and thinking I was looking at a typesetting error! When I first saw they/them, used in the singular, in print. It had been done before then, but only by hillbillies and foreigners who hadn’t learned English. It was the kind of thing you might see when Samuel Clemens was writing “eye dialect” to portray uneducated people in the deep south of the 1850s. And then it started to be used in formal contexts, like professionally printed non-fiction books, and that was absolutely bizarre. Another year or so, and I started hearing it on the air. TV announcers were doing it, and to people that the trend hadn’t caught up with yet they sounded effing stupid.
But… No. Not any more. They/them is now singular/plural, to everybody under 50 anyway, the same way ‘you’ is. And to us ‘olde pharts’ even we have pretty much gotten used to it by now.
Of all the ways English could have evolved, I never would have guessed it would be pronouns to be the thing that got the big makeover. They mean something different now. You pick very carefully because if you get it wrong people feel disrespected or even unsafe.
But, I’m still an olde phart. I remember when it was completely effortless and didn’t require the use of any individual knowledge or memory of linguistic niceties to talk about someone, and it still seems strange that it should.
You are fantastically off the Mark.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Not universal experience. There may have been communities and contexts where it was normal, and even where I was kids were using it where they didn’t think adults could hear them. But somebody elevating it to a formal context like print was truly startling.
So startling, in fact, that I still remember the day. It was in midsummer, and hot outside. I’m pretty sure the month was August. The year, I think, was probably 1976. Might have been anything between ’74 and ’78, I suppose, I’m gauging it by how old I was at the time.
I was at the local library and I had picked up a book on veterinary medicine. In it the author was using plural forms (they/them) for singular people and singular animals and that was bizarre. The author and publisher had even had a blurb in the intro material where the author explained that the use was done intentionally and not by mistake, and explained why.
It shook my confidence in the professionalism of the writer and the trustworthiness of the information in the book. It was a usage kids did when they were off by themselves but anyone who used it at school would be called out for it by a teacher. That book was the first time I had seen it in print, and that blurb at the front was the first time I had ever seen an argument in its favor.
Why is it a sign of being unprofessional?
Now, today? It’s not. It’s normal usage. But being the only person who’d ever stuck your neck out and gone to print with what was seen as an ungrammatical usage, on purpose…. didn’t have much to do with veterinary science, and in that context seemed to indicate that the author had issues so important to them that they might be suspected of ignoring their job.
Today’s pronouns are about choice and identity and respect and safety and a lot of other things. They seriously have a lot of implications and loading and require thought and care. The pronouns we had been using back then, although spelled and pronounced the same, were different words. They were nothing but grammar. My first exposure to these new differently-loaded pronouns was indistinguishable to me from getting grammar deliberately wrong.
I didn’t even think about it when I was writing the above reply, but it’s a good example. I’m using the modern versions of pronouns habitually now. Even though I know the author’s sex (and yes, sex was all the words denoted when they were only grammar) I used “they” and “their” in my reply instead of “she” and “her.”
After posting that load of twat, have been using ‘them’ and ‘they’ singularly as well :(
It is insidious, is it not?
But… it works, not so much in public (unless they are intentionally being misleading), but certainly on line or where you can’t see the person
You poor thing.
However will you survive?
There’s nothing wrong with that. They has been used in the singular context for a long time. Moreover, unlike some other words (“literally,” etc.) using this word does not provide confusing context. Rather, it leaves the subject’s sex/gender ambiguous and thus allows the subject themselves to specify.
I have a heck of a time remembering people’s “chosen pronouns” because of brain damage. Plus, I simply don’t like others telling me what I can and can’t say. So I use the term “they” and leave the onus on the individual to explain themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I can tell.
I feel a bit more awkward using “them” because that word is something I’d typically only use in a singular context for sentences which would’ve already contained “them” (i.e. without gender/sex). I don’t know, maybe I’ll figure out how to do that fluently at some point, but I feel like so long as I have ‘they’ it’s not really a big deal.
Wasn’t saying it was wrong, was just acknowledging personal usage of ‘them’ and ‘they’ as singular after making such a point about them being plural
Unlike some people, will acknowledge being wrong when actually wrong without having to be told (falsely)
Oh, okay. I took the frowny face differently. Sorry about that.
Again, didn’t bother to read what the topic was about, and instead launched into yet another trans-rant
The topic was, “I found these of gender pronouns, beyond my accustomed, traditional binary, so hard to understand, that I gave up reading a book.”
Contextually, we’ve been discussing pronouns & gender issues for a week or so, now.
Didn’t exactly deviate from the larger discussion, there.
No, dumbass, it was the flipfloppery of the pronouns that made it difficult for them to follow who was speaking or to whom
Sure, Jan.
You know that moment when you look out at the world and think: My god, what have I done?
That should be you right now…
I have enough trouble keeping track of characters in books in the first place, so a fluid application of pronouns in prose would definitely not help in that regard.
Even having a book where a shapeshifting character could change sexes (or… could change genders… I guess they wouldn’t even have to be a shapeshifter to do that… but I digress) the pronouns describing them would have to be handled very carefully in order to keep a reader like me up to speed.
Honestly I attribute that more to limitations in English though. During the natural evolution of English (and probably most languages), humans have never really considered the idea of more than two genders, (beyond the typical human when someone doesn’t dress or acting how society wants; i.e., beating them about the head and shoulders with rocks and/or setting them on fire) so now we’re hampered when it comes to this discussion, and also woefully underprepared for when we meet aliens with vaginas on the ends of their dongs.
I think the Japanese could manage.
That language has neither genders nor pronouns. X’D
I think it’s not only gender-neutral, it’s also time-neutral and number-neutral.
Wha…? Japanese has both. Where did you get such a peculiar idea?
From some of the linguistic websites I was reading up on about the Japonic Language System and Sinitic Language System.
But I might have confused sinitic and japonic. I’m not a linguist. :) I know that both Chinese and Japanese are gender neutral. I know one of them is also time neutral (tenses) and number-neutral (plurals from a single word).
“Gender neutral” is a bit abiguous when it comes to language, because there’s “gender” as a language feature, and then there’s all the human-gender terms in a language. I don’t think that Japanese is considered a gendered language in the same way that say, Spanish is, but it definitely has pronouns and language features that mark the speaker or audience as male or female. They also have a different set of temporal tenses, where they don’t clearly distinguish between some of the ones English does, and vice-versa. It is number-neutral, in that words don’t conjugate and grammar doesn’t change to distinguish between singular or plural, and you have to specify number if you want it to be clear.
some indigenous languages actually were constructed with the concept of more genders than a binary, it’s the ones that branched from latin that didn’t do a really good job with it… Portuguese, for instance, it’s heavily gendered, to the point of random gendered words for things without a gender, like dirt or door (both are feminine btw)
OK, I have several takes on today’s comic, plus I’m old so I get verbose.
I have both ADD and PTSD, having one does not make dealing with the other any easier. If anything, ADD makes dealing with PTSD harder because the distractability makes focusing on doing the work to deal with the continuing slow train wreck of PTSD harder than it would be without. I’m constantly dealing with “Squirrel!” incidents that take my mind away from the hard work of getting fixed, or at least patched up enough to be day-to-day functional. As an example as I was composing this comment I had to stop myself from preparing store game tokens for play (they need to have the ends torn off to open them for scanning with an app). It’s especially bad when you have two things to do of roughly the same importance (commenting on a web comic, and getting free food that you normally don’t buy).
But to make a long comment slightly shorter, having two disorders doesn’t mean one cancels the other out, it means you have one interfering with treating the other, both ways. ADD makes treating PTSD worse, and vice-versa.
Every life comes with it’s share of lemons. I’ll trade you your PTSD and ADD issues for my in 3 decades of Type 1 diabetes and 15 years of multiple sclerosis In a heartbeat. Making lemonade or cursing lemons really are the only options.
*whispers*
Lemon grenades…
they are called Lemonades.
This was a triumph…
I’m only responding with this to you instead of to Winterborn because it fits better with your ‘This was a triumph’ post. :)
“All right, I’ve been thinking, when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give CAVE JOHNSON lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the MAN WHOSE GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! With the lemons!”
*applause*
Plus it’s spoken by actor J.K Simmons! :)
Huge Success :D
Did you make a note?
i’ve never really understood this hatred of lemons implied in that saying; lemons are an excellent way to prevent scurvy, and lemonade is tasty, and lemon Jello cake with an orange zest glaze is my preferred birthday cake; so many tasty options for lemons
In my opinion, i don’t think it’s so much of a “hatred” of Lemons per se’ as it just a redirecting of the cumulative negative feelings of frustration surrounding your various situations into a more emphatic ?denial? (not sure that is the right word here) of said situation and that Cave is attempting to positively reinforce the opinion that even though it sucks “right NOW” that it is a temporary situation, and that eventually the blagh feelings will pass… if the saying were: if life gives you apples, make apple sauce… then I’m sure that Cave Johnson’s quote would have changed to use the word Apples instead…
thats essentially the situation for sydney here. It’s going to keep haunting her, the time on the doomed planet, actually being killed and reset, having a gun aimed at her by an uncaring psychopath.
This is true of those two particular things, however sometimes you can use one issue to deal with the other. For instance, my OCD which insists this thing must be in this place always always helps me deal with my ADD which makes me forget a thing exists the moment I let go of it. (sometimes while I am still holding it) Also when you have a problem that you can’t do anything about until a certain time, forgetting about it until the alert on your phone pops up can be helpful. I have never had a problem that was improved by worrying about it when there was no action I could take.
ALSO, Syd is not being cured of her PTSD by her ADHD, she is being distracted from it by a good thing so that she isn’t being actively traumatized by it right now. Her ADHD won’t help her to treat her PTSD, but it will allow her to function around it which is workable for the short term, but, as you said, problematic in the long term.
As of this posting there were 144 comments. That’s a gross amount of comments.
I have removed the grossness.
no you haven’t there’s still 144 comments. its just we have extra now. so its extra gross. when we get to 288 it will be double gross.
I propose a dozen of us form a task force and get to the root of this.
it will only take 24 posts apiece.
Well, that’s just Prime.
I dunno…feels derivative.
I see what you did there. :D
Got any proofs?
Okay now you’re just overdoing it and stepping into Ro Jaws territory chica. :)
Don’t be mean. On average, it’s never the right angle to come at it from. Sure, you might think it’s acute thing to do but in the end, too many puns, just cause a lot of division.
it cant be prime- the numbers are divisible by 2. that needs to be factored into the calculations.
I like pi
strawberry rhubarb 3.14(etc.)
Ew Rhubarb.
Chocolate peanut butter with a heap of cream on top.
I don’t know… that seems like you’re starting down a rocky road with that line of thought…
sometimes you feel like a nut. sometimes you are. someone has to keep the bolts in line.
Bureaucracy solves nothing. You will just end up with a dozen committees.
that’s because you don’t understand what its for- bureaucracy distributes the decision making process so that there is no one person responsible for that awful decision to deny that little kid life saving care. it also is a useful proxy for power in an environment where money is not the principal force inside the organization. if you think governments are the only places bureaucracy can form. think again.
Careful…that comment was a little too on the Marx. X’D
Insightful, though. +1 Internets
He was just stalin for time.
Ro Jaws, another person is trying to get your pun crown.
I’m happy to share the glory of puns. My corruption is spreading
It’s not even a crown… it’s an asshat.
my plan is working. soon you too will give into your love of language and pun.
making a pun is its own reword.
why thank you, its nice to see my cynicism and experience validated. sadly I am unable to continue the references so pander wins the round.
Yeah maybe if you are Lenin to the right.
and Judge says:
Indeed.
So… 100; comments then. (Anyone who gets this reference should get themselves a Nerd badge).
LOL
” 144 comments. That’s a gross amount of comments.”; Booo! :)
490 is the mark of the beast.
no its 6 to the 6th to the 6th. there was a translation error.
That tattoo on the Antichrist baby’s scalp is gonna hurt a lot.
HEINLEIN REFERENCE!
#Drink!
someone got it! now BOUNCE.
I secretly replaced Bharda’s drink with a gold brick with a lime twisted around it.
You’re on the wrong axis. It’s supposed to be lemon, here.
BOUNCE. BOUNCE. BOUNCE.
It wasn’t 666 it was 99.9 –they just read it upside down. It is a built in thermometer that reads out on the back of the hand that is required of everyone after 2021… When they test the measurement it shows the highest temp before invoking the shoot on sight.
Dr. Frost is a professional. She will not forget about this. Sydney has shown to the doctor – briefly – a vulnerability that she hides from most others, beneath a veneer of distractableness and ‘oooh, shiny!’. And then, having shown past that veneer, having lowered her defenses for just a moment in the hope that Dr. Frost could somehow magically just fix her – well, Dr. Frost knows that such fixing isn’t magic. It’s not quick. It’s not easy. Sydney has to deal with it the hard way, the long way, the difficult way.
And Sydney doesn’t like that. So, boom, up goes the veneer again; she hides that internal struggle once more, where nobody can see it except maybe herself.
Dr. Frost has seen it. She will not forget about it, and she will do her best to help Sydney work her way through it the long way, the hard way, the difficult way. It will take time. It’ll probably go a lot easier once Sydney starts working out that the hard way does work, and bottling it all up inside doesn’t, not in the long run…
No. It is not quick. It is not easy.
At lest Dr. Frosty seems to be honest and care about Sydney.
I once opened my would to a psychologist who told me everything was covered by client patient priviledge. She then turned around and spilled everything I told her to my parents. She tried to get me committed and nearly succeeded. Instead, I had to ‘talk’ to her every month and I just babbled BS in her sessions. It took me six months to find out that she had done it because a friend of HERS who was a cop had a son in the same school I went to and I ‘scared him’ (Then again, he HAD pulled a knife on me, so… Well, I guess the son of a police officer in 1989 had that right.) I told her that what she did was both dishonorable and unethical and she laughed in my face, told me to prove it. I told her that I didn’t need to, because ‘I’ had friends who knew who she was and where she lived. Funny that. The next day, I no longer had to go to ‘mandatory counseling sessions’ with her.
She wanted to prove me crazy. All she did was prove herself a liar and a coward. And it took 20 years and my mom dying before I trusted ANY mental health professionals enough to open up at all, so, she won. Does it matter?
*soul not *would
GAH! Spellcheck hates me!
nah… it’s not just you… spell check hates EVERYBODY!!!
my phone actually now has ‘autocorrupt’ set as the default spelling for autocorrect now., it will finish spelling it as autocorrupt if I start typing it.
Terms like “moron” and “idiot” used to be used by psychologists too. Terminology evolves. These days it evolves at breakneck speed.
Less the terminology evolved and more about people wrongly using it for insulting others turned the clinical terms into having only negative connotations. Just like ‘retarded’ which was a clinical reference to the reduced (i.e. retarded) development of someone being used to insult people’s intelligence generated too much negative association with it to safely use.
People are simply too emotional about pointless crap.
Like, when I was 7 years old (yeah, way back) this teacher waltzes into the gym where we’re practicing archery. I was in the middle of aiming at the target with the bow drawn. So what does she do? Wait for me to shoot? No, of course not. She SCREAMS my name at the top of her lungs. I turned around with the bow drawn, because fk, I was 7 years old. What do you expect? After a moment I realized, pointed the bow to the ground, turned back toward the target, and released tension from the bowstring.
About this time the absolute turd starts screaming about attempted murder and runs from the room screaming in the hallways like a banshee. Remember this is a grown adult.
Turns out she wanted to talk to me about the homework I’d missed a week ago. Yeah. Couldn’t be assed to talk about it at any point prior, she only got around to it when I was in the middle of aiming a bow. And her totally rational response is to SCREAM… At the guy aiming… a deadly weapon.
Long story short; the archery class was cancelled. Forever.
People in this country are utterly insane.
Was it the same country where it’s against constitution to not sell assault weapon to someone who giggles like mentally ill? Isn’t it sort of backwards?
It’s important to teach correct handling of weapons early. However, it’s naive to assume everyone gets it right on first try.
As an armed Socialist, I favor teaching responsible violence techniques & tools in public schools.
As an unarmed pragmatist, I too favor teaching responsible combat techniques & tools in public school.
Learning about things that are designed to injure and kill is the best way to keep people responsible and safe. One can’t plan for or defend against an event one has no idea is even possible.
Well, look at that.
I guess a broken clock really is right twice a day.
Right back at’cha.
I prefer ‘this is a weapon, this is not, here is how to use the first correctly, and how to use the second as a weapon if necessary’
It probably wasn’t one of those countries where people have given up their freedoms in exchange for a false safety in which the government regularly knocks on people’s doors to ‘check their thinking’, I can promise you that. ;)
I shall sum this up by using only three word, “People are people”.
So why should it be, you and I should get along so awfully?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzGnX-MbYE4
Personally, find it’s because people are strange
Strangers in the night exchanging glances
Wondering in the night
What were the chances we’d be sharing love
Before the night was through
“Peoples is peoples.”
That does seem pretty stupid, to say the least. Grown adult generates a problem due to an inability to figure out you don’t startle someone especially a kid in a situation like that and the kids all suffer due to the ravings of an adult nobody should be listening to. Reminds me of a web-comic (which was likely commenting on the idiocy of ‘no tolerance’ drug policies in schools) Sandra And Woo where the one diabetic character jokes after injecting herself about ‘the good stuff’ and a crazed teacher promptly rushing to complain to the principal about the terrible drug addict and he has ‘The Talk’ with her and is like ‘so you admit you can’t live without it?’ like she’s an addict when she’s like ‘Well of course I can’t I require it to survive!’ and an entire arc of dealing with the insanity to get it where she can safely use her insulin as needed.
No argument here about insanity.
It seems the only people TRYING to act sane are those of us with problems. No one else seems to care 3/4 of the time.
Other people’s problems are other people’s problem.
Until or unless their problems put ME in danger. Then it becomes my problem and if the authorities/supervisors/whoever won’t act, I WILL. They probably will not like HOW I solve the problem, but why should I care if THEY don’t?
Because they will make you into an example. I’ve had this happen to me over something that was decidedly not illegal but the authorities wanted to toss me in jail anyway. After several hours of berating where I repeatedly explained that I never once did what was claimed (even though, as I said, it wasn’t illegal) they ended the discussion by declaring I would be suspended from school “to set an example.” To who? Me? All I did was feel wronged. They obviously couldn’t care less.
I am wholly in favor of self-defense and self-autonomy – but – never forget to plan for the folks who may seek to wrong you simply because it’s convenient.
I don’t see what that story has to do with the comment you’re replying to.
And it’s not even a good example of your point; An adult throwing a fit?
That’s happened in every society since basically the advent of human society.
The point?
It is the KID’S fault that an adult is a fool. ALWAYS. Because we cannot hold the fool responsible for being a fool, now, can we?
I think moron and idiot used to be legitimately technical terms to denote IQ levels.
One sec looking this up.
Yep. You’re right! Idiot, Imbecile, and Moron were developed as psychological classifications, usually denoted by IQ. It’s also highly dependent on the society’s overall intelligence level, apparently.
Idiot – IQ of 0-25 – Those so defective that the mental development never exceeds that of a normal child of about two years. (One would think 0 would just be a vegetable but apparently no, there’s a 0 possible on an IQ test and that’s still an idiot)
Imbecile – IQ of 26-50 – Those whose development is higher htan that of an idiot, but whose intelligence does not exceed that of a normal child of about seven years.
Moron – IQ of 51-70 – Those whose mental development is above that of an imbecile, but does not exceed that of an ormal child of about twelve years.
O.o wait wut. This puts so many older works into perspective now. (Thanks).
or Redneck speed, depending
depending on what?… if they have a beer in hand that someone would need to hold for them?
that, or if their car horn beeps in a particular way :)
For anyone that missed it, Dr. Frost’s note in the last panel was not serious. Just an expression of frustration, maybe theroputic(sic) for the Doc.
Or is it? Where’s my chocolate milk?
Yep, it’s a disgruntled quip that Dr Frost wrote down rather than suppress entirely,
She is going to need a LOT of help, the doc that is.
I like the idea that the orbs are actually reacting to Sydney’s mental progress, rather than stuff she does physically. Her previous level ups were because she demonstrated skill improvement in using the orbs, and this one is because she’s sorted out some psychological issues.
I read it more like THIS is the first moment since the crisis Sydney really felt like the crisis is over, and THAT’s what the orbs reacted on.
On the sexes and genders thing, being these are bio-frames or “meat blanks” as this species calls them; it really should on a selection screen be less about biology or mind and more about various configurations.
Like you can have a hermaphrodite chassis, but there is a difference in preference between.
external phallus with vaginal slit that goes up the base of the phallus with clit on underside of phallus.
or
external phallus above vagina, two kept separate.
or
retractable phallus that unfolds from vaginal opening.
or
metamorphic property where the clitoris inflates into a phallus
ect…
That was the detail screen that was blurred out.
We are getting into Giger-esque territory here.
I just listed off a few seen in some hentai.
Cloaca.
a few posts down I went on about an alien of mine called the Sojora which all have cloaca but three sexes depending on the plumbing inside them; including a phallic ovipositor.
Has Dr. Frost tried using a laser pointer? Always seems to work with my cat when she’s in a grumpy mood.
I assumed that among the vast diversity of alien species, there were was some non binary sexual reproduction or aybe some species have ore than two variants that have nothing to do with reproduction, like ants.
P.S. yay for level up. Hope she get someting cool.
P.P.S. Pixel’s torso is kinda scary in the vote incentive.
non-reproducing drones, shouldn’t be too uncommon they are found in all eusocial species here on Earth, granted the one mammal version (naked mole rat) is due to sterilization caused by the queen’s hormones urinating in the drinking water (or something like that),
one idea I’ve played around with the parasitic species that out-evolved/out-lived its host species or had a non-lethal parasitic relationship or sexual symbiosis where a host species would carry the fertilized eggs.
In one idea I came up with the Cuckoo dragon, a humanoid succubus like dragon that would hypnotize humans and using a short ovipositor transfer its egg inside of the human, there the shell would soften and activate pregnancy hormones in the host with a slew of defenses, utilizing horizontal gene transfer the dragon embryo would take on phenotypical changes *for the series also very complex genetic ones with the dragon DNA buried in the genome to be triggered by specific hormonal changes*, in any case the resulting baby would look and act just like a human child until their early 20s when they’d undergo a metamorphosis *varied by type of cuckoo dragon* into their adult form.
on the other more symbiotic end a species which outlived its hosts and evolved a third (carrier) gender. As an example the Sojora, an shapeshifting amphibious alien race where the female has a phallus like ovipositor that injects the eggs deep inside a host’s reproductive or lower gastrointestinal tract where the eggs would embed into the walls via a strong cellular adhesive. The male would then follow up and fertilize these eggs in the host. Basically the host gets screwed by the female and filled with tiny frog like eggs that stick to the walls of the womb or lower large intestine, and then screwed by the male who fertilizes these eggs.
the third gender is one who has neither an ovipositor (and does not produce eggs), nor has a phallus (and does not produce sperm), they still have a cloaca however and nothing in the way inside it so they can safely carry the eggs until their dislodge period…I will stop there, Sojoran life cycle gets complicated with multiple larval stages and differences in culture between “tribes” regarding the treatment and raising of the larva.
Is it just me, or most of the time when Sydney has leveled up, there’s been emotional trauma associated with it?
Which isn’t so surprising, conflict seems to be quickest way to generate ‘experience’ to trigger an unlocking event and of course conflict is often traumatic especially when super-beings and aliens are involved.
Maybe the orbs are babysitters, and give her points not when Sydney earns them, but when she demonstrates they’d better give her more points or she’ll get killed.
The hardest won battles come with the hardest emotional turmoil.
this does lead back around to HOW the orbs determine when to award upgrade points. After all even if we go with the alien toy theory they are still self contained. Its like she’s in an Isekai fantasy world like (So I’m a Spider, So what) where the entire world is set for experience points and to award skills and evolution paths, I was going to compare the emotional trauma of Kumoko fighting Araba *and not spoiling the next arc for anime only watchers* even more trauma…so much trauma for everyone in this series.
but I thought, well that whole world is set up for that, these orbs are self contained. So how are they determining experience points, or emotional achievement awards, or whatever criteria they use. One part some function of them is either observing her, or she is subconsciously determining this via the link with them.
Here’s just hoping her next upgrade somehow includes a stronger “To me my hammer” that can accelerate instantly and break through concrete…still feel they really should have been able to do that anyway (assuming the Nth tech orbs are made of nearly indestructible material.
edit: its NOT like she’s in an Isekai fantasy world.
Thank you for not spoiling shit. ^_^
*hug*
I didn’t even read the manga, I just made the mistake of googling it and yeah, cover art alone can be huge spoilers. So anyone watching the anime who wants to avoid all spoilers, avoid even trying to look up artwork of the series, the manga/light novel is so far ahead of the anime’s current still early point.
oh I also did read the wiki after seeing some art because my curiosity is lack a hungry cat that won’t shut up after sniffing a morsal.
If being an Adventurer was easy, there’d be a heckova lot more of them.
If you ever consider transition strips as being jarring or out of place, like for this one. I’d have suggested a small label in the first one denoting ‘sometime later’ or ‘One day after Times Square’ or something to that effect. Would have helped.
As a counselor myself I’d professionally say that Frost sucks at her job. Her platitudes amount to “shit happens Ms Scoville” and Sidney would be better off talking to the average bartender.
Any advice, for laypeople, on how to support people who either can’t afford counselling, can’t get access to it yet (due to the current pandemic’s side effects) or refuse to undertake it (due to mental health issues or simple denial)?
For instance coping with childhood abuse, bereavement, PTSD from close association with people dying of disease (not just Covid but Ebola), stress, depression, history of attempted suicide and undiagnosed mental disorders (with symptoms such as low empathy, being highly distractible and panic attacks). Fortunately not all in a single individual, so just providing example issues for privacy sake, rather than a case history.
Obviously encouraging and helping to gain access to professional help is the key aspiration. But in the meanwhile they are still in crisis …
The baseline is “sit with them in a quiet place and listen.” The gains achieved by many branches of Psychology are not particularly distinguishable from the gains from that.
On the other hand, there are lots pf pharmaceuticals that can help lots of conditions, so a competent professional can help steer people through the available aids for their particular biochemical issue, if that’s what it is.
Thanks.
:-)
Denial needs a counselor. It’s really what counselors are specialized in solving. You may think you’re helping a person out of their shell but if they’re in denial about their malady it can backfire spectacularly.
Everything else is, as Dal said, mostly just sitting and listening, maybe giving a rational suggestion, and medicating if the problem is severe.
Though, be aware that some doctors prefer to be a drug dealer because that is easier. If the patient isn’t totally insane (suicidal, lock them up, etc.) but they want to medicate within the first few visits you can confidently say the doctor is incompetent. The good ones recognize that most illnesses just need someone to talk to and maybe a weak pick-me-up once the heavy stuff is dealt with.
The only exceptions to this rule are Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder. Even outwardly stable patients suffering from these may be actively accruing brain damage. When untreated for long periods the prognosis can be very grim. These patients are also some of the most difficult to convince they need help. That’s why these diseases typically require prompt decisions from the doctor.
Also, there is a distinction between Psychologists (who cannot prescribe medicines) and Psychiatrists (who rarely do anything else), so the actions of the therapist may be less straightforward than your statement.
When my wife, a Psychologist, suggests a client see a Psychiatrist to probably get meds, it is because that client has a specific condition that meds are known to help, and that the drugs will be a useful adjunct to therapy or life in general. (Anxiety disorders, stress disorders, Bipolar, and so on.)
She also can tell when a patient’s meds are wrong for the presentation, or when they just don’t happen to be working for that patient, and helps the patient advocate for corrected meds or none at all if that’s the right decision.
Your wife would make a good M.D. Better than 95% of the ones I’ve met – that’s for sure.
You might think “advocating for no medication if the situation demands it” is a low bar for medical competency, but I assure you it is not.
I had one guy advocate for a vaccination against female cancer. I’m male, not sexually active. I was seeing him because I was too ill to walk. (Surely, I can bang women in that condition, yes?) Every wall was plastered with adverts for this medication. I kid you not; this guy was a legit M.D.
If your wife has the means, intellect, and drive to go further in her career, you can tell her even some random internet guy was supportive. We all know the internet doesn’t do that, but… Here I am. :p
Nope. She’s not a doctor, she’s a competent psychologist. Which means, she can tell when a Psychiatrist – an adjacent field – is “phoning it in” or not paying attention to the actual situation.
Sometimes, the reason is obvious. The doctor-patient relationship may be long-existing, and the psych may not have looked at the patient *freshly* in a long time. If my wife picks up a new client and reviews their history, she can pick up patterns that in day-to-day living, the doctor may not have put the dots together because they were spaced too far apart.
So, she might talk to the doc and say, “Have you considered testing for *this*?” or “Has [the patient] ever tried [this class of drugs]?” Usually, if it’s a competent doctor, they take her hints VERY promptly. I think I’ve heard of one or two in 20 years that didn’t.
I’ve been thinking about this; I don’t really get it, so. I was just trying to say “she has what it takes if she wants to advance in her career.” Like, she has the responsibility and sensibility to take the next step, and likely the intellect too, at least based on the situations you gave. That’s it. I don’t know what advancement is in her career, obviously, although I thought I did.
Hmm. HPV vaccine, I assume. Yeah, doctors are likely to push vaccines of various kinds. It’s up to you to research and decide on the appropriateness for your situation.
It got creepy when I realized even the windows and part of the ceiling were covered with ads. When I say “every wall was plastered” – I mean it. The cabinets and trash can, too.
Whether it’s my choice or not, imo, some people simply shouldn’t be doctors…
With that said, the fact your wife has so little pushback is impressive. I must’ve seen every bad doctor in my state. Or maybe that state has bad healthcare. I don’t know; I moved away.
And how long had she been in this session. From the looks it just started. It takes time to get into the details and real help/advice.
True, and I thought as much myself.
However the start is a delicate time. If the patient looses confidence, before the real help is forthcoming, there may not be a second session. Worse still if the patient walks out!
I’m sure there are way better approaches, to let the patient realise that their issues are being recognised and that they are not being dismissed out of paw.
Can confirm…but there are other problems, at times.
Case in point, when I first began transitioning, I started to confront a LOT of childhood baggage. One thing that was pointed out to me by the initial psych, was that I always, always, ALWAYS took a jab at myself whenever talking about anything positive about me. Our second session, she challenged me.
“Say something good about yourself, no qualifiers, no put downs, no self deprecating jokes, insults…just tell me something about you that is unambiguously and totally good.”
…I sat there hopping like a fish for ten minutes.
Literally could not make words come out. Got a migraine, and I started crying.
She got upset and told me to stop wasting her time.
I…I still can’t process it. I started bawling. I hadn’t felt so utterly useless and rejected since my parents divorced when I was ten. Practically ran out of the building. Never went back.
She never even tried to follow up.
And I still, to this day, cannot do what she asked. It’s like programming, you know?
…anyway, I guess I really just want to say I like the character of Dr. Frost & these session bits we get to see w/ Syd.
Silly as they can be.
Pavlovian conditioning. My mother did that to the extent that I could not talk at all, never mind be positive. Once she had me where she wanted… Then began the actual torture. I can confidently say that I will never again experience greater pain. Because if I did, it would be shortly followed by a heart attack.
Bharda, you don’t need to start by saying something positive about yourself. Start with something… Creative. “I try my best even if I fail. I do what I can. The people around me won’t hurt me, because I will get through this.
The goal is to say things to yourself. Anything. It doesn’t have to be positive. Just, acknowledge that you are a person worth speaking about. You have attributes. And, even if you can’t list positive attributes right this moment, the time will come when you can. It may be very far in the future. It takes more than 20 minutes to heal from a broken bone after all, and your injuries have lasted a lifetime. What was that psych professional thinking, right? Give yourself the time of day and you will find, eventually, something to admire and speak vocally about. About you.
If you still can’t? That’s fine.
Do something worth admiring. Help an old woman put her cart back at the grocery store. Smile at someone having a bad day. Tell someone you love how much they mean to you. Those are things you can compliment yourself for, too. They’re positive, too. If you can’t come up with anything good then make good things happen. Give yourself something to talk about. It will happen so long as you keep trying.
And I want you to remember. It’ll take more than 20 minutes. So just keep trying.
Long enough to curl up on the big chair. Given that it’s Sydney, she bounced in, mentally flailed, then eventually settled down and started debriefing the scenario. Then we pick up.
The first word bubble is … just wrong. Dr Frost took a tangent on Sydney’s statement, rather than dealing with the emotional content. And calling her “Miss Scoville” is bizarre in that context. It’s almost like she’s trying to throw Sydney out of the therapeutic relationship.
If they are in a Doctor-Patient relationship, the Doctor is the professional with the altitude, so Sydney should be “Sydney”. If they are in a more intimate therapeutic relationship, and talking like friends, then Sydney should be “Sydney”. Who calls a 20-something “Miss (lastname) any more?”
Well…I dunno what it looks like now, but back when I was still in uniform (twenty years ago) if we saw a psych, they always addressed us by rank/last name.
It may be a DoD culture thing? No se.
Then “Cadet Scoville” or whatever. Not Miss. She’s not in the Navy.
Archon is its own thing. The culture is still evolving.
You know… You might have something there.
I saw an Army shrink once, because I was on a base at the time and- Well, VERY long story.
He called me by my last name, but he helped. No other mental health professional I have seen called me by my last name. Thing was, even calling me by my last name, he put me at ease. We had an EXCELLENT session and my only true regret about that is that I never got the chance to follow up with him. (Another VERY long story)
I BET it is the regulation manual somewhere.
Personally feel, using the first name, in a professional situation like with a shrink, is not the right thing to do, because the shrink needs to be, well, professional and that usually means using the surname (first name is more ‘intimate’, friendly)
Most will say that using the first name puts the patient ‘at ease’, which then makes both sides forget that they are a patient
Depends on how many sessions there have been. If as I suspect this is the 2nd or 3rd, she is still trying to build a repour With Sydney. Also she is trying to get a handle on her mental workings. So the “formality” is most likely her way of doing both. Calling her Sydney will come when trust and respect is established on both side.
NFN, Brod3, but to a certain extant, yeah. That’s what it is. As a Veteran, even with support, there’s a point where you have to face the reality that “I can get horribly killed,” is just part of the billet description.
And that’s not a dig! It does suck, and it utterly fucks up a lot of previously lovely people on many, many occasions…there is nothing quite like being face to face with another human being determined to switch you off, to completely disarrange one’s personality & mental composition…or discomposition, ASTCMB.
It right up there with realizing that another part of that billet description is, “I can be required to kill a human being.”
One of the first questions my family asks, when talking to someone thinking about enlisting, is, “Can you kill a child?”
Because thanks to the wonders of suicide-murder, that has become an increasingly common problem. >_<‘
…unsurprisingly, we’ve dissuaded more than a few young people from signing up. Nobody is better at stopping a recruitment than a Veteran.
Indeed. They see the movies, they see TV, they see video games and they think it is reality.
They don’t see the sweeping The mopping. The picking up ‘every last bit’ of trash. The sheer boredom that is 90% of the life of a common soldier/sailor/airman/Marine. That doesn’t make good stories.
My father was went to Vietnam in 1971. He was there when I was born. He saw things that he never talked about. He had funny stories, lots of them, because you try to forget the bad, but I remember him looking at pictures and nearly crying on occasion. Even growing up in Texas, on a ranch no less, he hadn’t had ANY idea what he was getting into. He did well, for my family and for me, but it marked him until the day he passed.
Daddy always said ‘Civilians do not understand. They CANNOT.’ He was right. Even the most violent, in the worst places cannot truly understand the military mindset. ‘I’ cannot understand, because of nerve blindness in one eye I was unable to enlist. I dd not take that well, so after I recovered, I talked to my father and my Mother’s father. Granddad had served in WWII and won the DSC twice at a little place called Monte Cassino. Those talks opened my eyes, but still, I cannot KNOW.
Some days, I am very happy not knowing. I have enough problems.
In conclusion? @Bharda Thank you for your service.
It might be just me, but I really liked the ‘toonish early strip drawing of faces (notably Sydney’s) better than the 3D-ish current one. No offense intended at all, it’s just sometimes the distortions become “ooky” as Heatwave would put it.
That said, what are the chances of Sydney beelining to Krona, Dabbler, Maxima or other savvy staff members to figure out what’s next for her skill tree?
Speaking of which… There are interconnections between the orbs, but hardly any of them are unlocked. Perhaps those interconnections would allow using more than two orbs at once? Or maybe they’re there to provide/enhance synergies of some kind between the capabilities of each orbs in the interconnected pairs? So much is left to imagination…
I think the latter option is more likely than the former. By far the most frequently raised suggestion is ways that the two hand limit can be overcome. Which I always indicate is unlikely as the author inserted that limit to make the character more interesting. If Sydney could easily use more orbs she would have practically no limit on her powers and would easily become really boring. All dramatic tension would be lost amongst other negatives.
Whereas synergies, especially ones which are only situationally useful (such as being able to use an extra mode on the PPO, but only when flying), can add to interest, as readers would be encouraged to speculate on how Halo could change the dynamics of a situation. For instance ‘If only she could lure them out into the open, then she could fly and …”
Sydney has been known to consult for advice, so there is a good chance of doing that now, with any of those you mentioned, and maybe others too.
As for the artistic preference, others have expressed the same, so you are certainly not alone. It took a while to win me over, and even now I agree with you about occasional “ookiness”. Equally though there were sometimes issues in the 2D art, and the more Dave uses the 3D style, the less often I find issue myself.
Partly because I know that extreme or unexpected expressions/images can enhance emotional responses (especially the comedic ones) and so am not too fussed if some of them can look a bit odd at first glance. So long as the emotion is still conveyed well, and the uncanny valley feeling is not overwhelming, I am more than happy to enjoy going with the flow of Dave’s artistic innovation.
That said I do provide feedback at times when I find it counterproductive. Dave does listen to feedback, and it helps him to gage audience reaction.
Me too!
I’m not sure if it’s the drawing or the coloring. I think Dave should revisit his older style.
Unlock the Ship’s Counsellor orb and pick the PTSD cure-all option.
Being able to fly faster or blow up things better does not compare to maintaining good mental health.
Especially if you go postal and start shooting up your own side.
maybe if she can unlock a multi-brain skill like Kumoko she can delegate her PTSD.
This had me chuckling all the way to work this morning.
I really want to see a debrief about the New Your clusterfuck incident. But I also want to see Korona get a good look at the “deep code” behind the orbs. And Sydney still needs to visit her parents, and spend time at the comic store, and train………..
Biggest downside to a one author/twice per week series, I want to see more but there are just so many hours in a day for one person to work on a project.
Time for a debriefing / training montage!
DaveB, about the custom sex icons thing…
By using recognizable icons (the “Mars” for “male” and “Venus” for “female”) you provided a visual image that your readers could understand. Then there are all the other, crazy ones, and it becomes a joke that we can get without explanation. If you made up brand-new symbols, you would have had to explain what they were, losing much of the impact of the joke.
One of my favorite stories from the history of Star Trek: in the very first episode of the original series, there was a creature that needed to eat salt, and it could shapeshift to disguise itself. There was a scene in the script where it was next to someone who had a food tray with a salt shaker on it, and the disguised creature was looking at the salt shaker. So they said “what does a salt shaker look like in the 23rd Century?” And they sent someone to a five-and-dime store to buy futuristic looking salt shakers. And it was the 60’s so they got some groovy ones. They liked the salt shakers, but they realized they had a problem: using any of them would require adding dialog, someone to say “hey that is totally a salt shaker there” and it would be clunky and lame. So in the end they just grabbed an actual salt shaker from the studio commissary. Then Gene Roddenberry announced that the futuristic salt shakers were going to be Dr. McCoy’s medical instruments. So when McCoy waved a thing around, or handled things during surgery scenes… those were salt shakers.
So, I think your sex selection screen is fine the way it is. However we should understand that some kind of fourth-wall Universal Translator is showing it to us in a way we can understand, just as the dialog in that scene was likely not actually 21st Century English as spoken in North America.
very good point, and the example is a prime one for science fiction especially.
‘
why for realism we want future stuff and alien stuff to look like comparing 2021 to 1921 or 1821 ect..for references on changes or trying to make up a new alien aesthetic, can present that problem. You still have to consider the audience, the culture of the audience, your demographic, and what they’d recognize because anything too different will require explanation so they know what it is, adding extra scenes and dialogue which may feel clunky and take up time needed for more important things.
One thing I am always reminded of for this is Ghost in the Shell, the creator of the manga was asked about why this cyberpunk world had so many wires on everything, and they replied it was so the audience when the manga was first made would know what it was. They had imagined things like skin surface electrical data transfer, or beams of light going into the eyes, or just regular wireless; but for the average reader to avoid having to explain what everything was used wire jacks and keyboards so it would be instantly recognizable so the more complex and detailed stuff was saved for being explained.
In short, that delicate balance between new elements in world building, and keeping things recognizable for the audience.
The whole section seemed redundant to me, since they were blanks to be inhabited and there was already a genital configuration section…
How “blank” are the bodies, though? IRL, there are neorological differences between typical ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains. If this is also the case for these bodies, it only makes sense that a possessing entity would prefer to wear a body that “fits” neurologically as well as genitally.
Selecting a gender (or more accurate a sex) for the blank could help filter the options on the genital configuration section. There are after all many settings that would only apply to some sex but not another.
Is it because she was effectively powerless? Because the staged bank robbery, the super rumble, and kaiju battles should all have been scarier.
Apparently there’s nothing like looking down the barrel of a gun. Yes, she did that once before, when Maxima was making a point, but Sydney knew she wouldn’t shoot. Deceased Dirtbag would have and she KNEW that!
I can say from experience being pinned down with some crazed person ready to kill you is far scarier than most situations. Just being able to move and fight back like all those other examples makes them less scary. Even against the demon hunter Sydney was able to get her orbs to her hands to fight back. This time she was helpless and drugged with a sociopath trying to kill her, an execution style.
the only comparable situation would be when Sciona was about to stab her with a blood draining hose. Something scary enough it registered as life and death threat and triggered Krona’s save point.
wow. this was hilarious. jangle keys. lol…genius.
I don’t get it. Really, someone explain please?
The jingly keys bit is a reference to ascend in a particular episode of Family Guy.
In the scene, Quagmire jingles his keys in front of Stewie, in an attempt to distract & amuse him…buts actually Chris who suddenly drops to play with them, oblivious to everything else.
…and now that I explained it, it’s not funny anymore.
it predates Family Guy.
It is a really old joke that jingling keys distracts babies, idiots, and people with no attention spans. Why it is sometimes used as an insult for shut your brain off shows and movies, “its the equivalent of jingling your keys at the audience”.
I regularly jangle my keys to distract my cat AND my baby cousin.
BTW @DaveB, the vote invective. Holy flexispine! The left one, I don’t think spines can do that without causing paralysis. That woman’s shoulder blades is only 20 degrees from her hip alignment. I don’t think even life long contortionists can do that!
I’m pretty sure humans can’t do that, but maybe werepanters can? Cats have more flexible spines than humans …
The current gender/sex icons all consist of a circle with something attached to it. We can use that.
1. If the circle is filled, we can define it to represent gender
2. We can also place such a “gender icon” inside of the circle of a larger icon. Now the outer one represents biological sex. The outer one represents what you may see (if naked), but the inner one shows what a person really is.
3. If, as in this case, only biological sex is important, the inner icon may be replaced with a simple dot – or left empty, according to taste.
4. There are already variations for bigender, third gender, genderqueer etc, which can also be used in this framework. In addition to all the other planetary symbols.
5. This still does not say anything about sexual or romantic orientation, but that’s its own can of worms.
Your concept is interesting. Dot to represent “we are only talking about biology”, and possibly another basic symbol (or lack thereof) to simplify cis presentation. It’s redundant to say “a biological male who conceives of self as male and is attracted to females”, so you leave that symbol as the simple Mars sign meaning what it always did.
Perhaps a left-right interior orientation, where one is the self-conception and the other the attraction target. This has the advantage that the romantic target can be represented by a similar symbol or by a completely different class of symbols.
“I’m attracted to Scorpios” “I’m attracted to Democrats” “I’m attracted to llamas”.
Hmm. Maybe a helix rather than a dot, for biology?
The problem with defining the non-modified symbol as a representation of cis-dom is that it is cis-normative by definition. Better to have even a simple symbol in there to represent “classical” cis-dom. Maybe a small “c”? That still has the benefit of being easier to draw than the whole outer symbol etc. And people who think everything non-cis is an abomination can make a point of it by putting a republican elephant in the middle. ;) Or an attack helicopter, if they watch certain youtube channels. That should tell everyone who they really are.
Now about orientation… what about the difference between sexual and romantic attraction? What if I’m romantically attracted to bisexual female-gendered people of any biological sex, but sexually attracted to classically “male” cis hunks? What about people who only feel sexual attraction after establishing a romantic one? What about asexuality/aromaniticism, or “gray-a’s”, who are almost asexual, but not quite? Where to I put my nose fetish? And speaking of fetishes, what if I’m sexually attracted to Asian women, although on a different level my Über-Ich realizes that that’s a harmful racist fetish I should work against? All are valid in their own way.
That’s why I said it’s a can of worms. Maybe something like a chakra-inspired “stack” of interconnected symbols could be enough to represent the vast majority of cases, but imagining what this would look like also shows that there’s a limit to how sensible this type of symbolic representation would be. If you need a book to interpret a diagram, better to use words directly instead.
“If sex and gender don’t mean the same thing, shouldn’t we have different symbols for male sex and male gender?”
Perhaps borrow from alphabets that use diacritics, and have particular marks near or inside the symbol to indicate that it refers to sex or gender (or both)? Or perhaps use subscripts, e.g. ‘s’ or ‘g’ or ‘sg’?
what the hell do you think the priide flags are for?
Not a bad suggestion. I.M.’s suggestion of a dot inside the symbol to say “only meaning biological sex” is a similar usage.
“Besides, now that Sydney seems to know how to pull up the skill web”
When did this happen? I missed something somewhere. Last I saw, Dabbler was drawing it from memory so She & Pixel could brainstorm where she should put her points.
Alari prime, she had to try and force it closed and figured out when she was hidden to manually open it.
On Alari Prime, she figured out how to ‘coax’ the orbs into forming the skill tree by spinning them around a bit until they started spinning on their own.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-671-level-duhp/
Although this time apparently she just started spinning it with her finger, idly.
Soooo possibly she can now call up the skill tree at will by spinning it, although that doesnt necessarily means she’ll have points to spend each time.
even without points it means they can study it directly now instead of by Dabbler and Sydney’s memory and try to guess based on existing patterns of spent points what certain ones might do. Although the fact the speed when branched off to portal jumped over all their conventional portals *super powers and alien tech types* to what they consider the most advanced portal there is; yet has more points spendable above it says a lot about the beings that made those orbs when the Aetherium causeway everyone covets so much is just the basic beginner portal.
“Possibly [Sydney] can now call up the skill tree at will by spinning it” – Pander
Possible but not yet proven, if memory serves. She’s now done it twice that I can remember, on Alar and here, and in both cases there was a point to spend. “At will” would imply that the trick works even when there isn’t a point available; so far we haven’t seen any attempts to do so, so we can’t say whether it works or not.
Okay, thanks for the replies (and the link). I had forgotten that she kick-started the skill tree spin once before. But as Scott’s Folly pointed out, both times it’s worked is when she had points to spend. So maybe she still can’t call it up whenever she wants to.
While she’s got it open now would be a good time to show Dabbler before she uses the point, so Dabs can complete the drawing of the skill menu.
“Possible but not yet proven, if memory serves.”
That’s why I used the qualifier word ‘possibly.’ So far, she moved it once with her mind to ‘jump start’ it. And this time she used her finger to ‘flick’ it – which I initially didnt realize until someone else had pointed it out in panels 2 and 3 (look at Sydney’s finger and the ‘flick’ onomatopoeia in panel 3).
What they REALLY need to do is get Krona here, so Krona can draw out a diagram of the ‘Deeper’ code of the skill tree, which Dabbler apparently was not able to see (nor could Sydney).
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-506-square-root-access/
1 not even a little bit professional she has been trained on dealing with patients with ADHD (or if not she needs to consult for Sydney) 2 WHAT THE HELL IS HER POWER?
Nothing like a level up to cure Sydney’s blues.
Some people are not psychopaths – they’re simply EVIL.
(The Joker to a helpless victim) “Me? Crazy? Psychotic? Insane? No, no, no no nononono… You’re implying that I have a – ‘disconnect’ with reality. That I call black white, or bitter sweet… Oh, no. No, I’m nothing like such psychopaths who imagine reality is what they imagine it to be… that I would never OWN what I do… (leans closer, victim gags on fetid foul breath) (whispering) “TRY to wrap your tiny little lizard brain around this simple concept – there IS such a thing as EVIL, and some people – like me!! (now shouting) REVEL IN IT!!!” (bursts into insane laughter, victim tries to scream through gag, tears streaming)
that would be a sociopath.
definition:
A mental condition where a person shows no regard for the rights or feelings of others.
You can call yourself whatever you want, that doesn’t mean the institutions haven’t labeled it. And yes know what you are doing is wrong doesn’t change that, as its the complete lack of empathy that defines it there.
Yups: a psychopath has trouble telling fiction from reality, a sociopath can, they just don’t give a shit (they are able to ‘blend in’ with society if they want, like the Joker and Blatman, and then thumb their arses at it when they get bored)
Yeah I don’t think Professor Spacklesworth the Fourth was a psychopath or a sociopath. I think he was just an evil person. He seemed to know full well that what he was doing was a bad thing. So did his cohorts (one of whom WAS trying to stop him because of the possible consequences of killing a member of Archon, for self-preservation reasons mostly).
A good point. All too often people try to psychoanalyze criminal behavior while forgetting that some people simply have different values. I mean, if you took a cannibal and dropped them into modern day society, their next attempt to hunt a human doesn’t mean they have a pathology, or that they intend to be a serial killer. It means they’ve been raised with dramatically different values. That’s always worth considering.
I wonder if the orbs may eventually make physical changes to Sydney.
doubtful, but I could see Sydney transform into some giant mecha-space ship girl.
something like, and I picture her still saying, “This isn’t even my final form”
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/839076974306410637/
being Sydney a form like these might be more appropriate.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/nKgZaw4G4MU/maxresdefault.jpg
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/611fzz6J4WL._AC_SL1080_.jpg
Super Sydney Sayan Form Level 4!
that would be Sydney with All-Might hair
maybe if she stuffs two down her shirt :}
Lost the screen shot for it, but had a psychiatrist talk about the difference between Psychopath and Sociopath, since a lot of people totally mess that up.
A Psychopath is someone who’s charismatic, sociable, and capable of manipulating others. A Sociopath is what that one person was. A violent, dangerous individual. In her words. A psychopath is like a well fed tiger. They can kill you in an instant, without any qualms, but just choose not too at that moment.
A Sociopath is like a tiger that’s been starved, and mistreated all of it’s life. Both are scary, and dangerous, it’s just that one’s more likely to kill you faster. People usually get that term wrong though because Sociopath has the word socio in it.
Still that said, yeah, that robed guy was messed up in the head, and definitely deserved to be turned into lasagna. Just not all over Sydney.
Neither sociopath nor psychopath are primarily characterized by murder. Really, they are primarily characterized by violation of social rules, mores and appropriate behavior.
The main difference is that sociopaths can form attachments, even fixations, whereas psychopaths can’t empathize at all. Also that sociopaths tend to be impulsive and disordered, whereas psychopaths tend to be able to mimic emotions and plan long term, thus hiding what they are.
Boss Tartare clearly didn’t give a crap what anyone thought, and was willing to kill, so he was one or the other. He apparently was completely without conscience, so it seems likely that he was a psychopath rather than a sociopath. He held a position of authority that must have been developed over time, and his decisions, while callous, were not the result of sudden impulse.
Why do people make it so complicated? Sex is something you do. Gender is something you have. There are four genders: male, female, neuter and attentionwhore.
And fifty dozen subsets of ‘attentionwhore’ because they each insist they are unique and there is no one else like them or can understand them
Unfortunately, human biology is problematic and filled with special cases.
That being said, the international symbol for attentionwhore is a circle with four arrows pointing inward at it.
TBF, it’s a very human thing to do. We like to sort things into boxes and we love to subcategorize ad nauseum. Look at music or book genres or basically anything technical. If it doesn’t quite fit, or the existing category doesn’t quite capture the nuance, we identify the distinguishing trait(s) and make a new slot. It is quite literally how our brains work, actually… and the new fangled “machine learning”. Identify differences and sort. Given that, it’s not surprisingly we like making labels and sorting things *shrug*
Because it’s a pretty complicated subject.
The word “sex” has referred to an attribute (“male” or “female”) for far longer than it has been used to refer to “sexual intercourse”.
“I definitely should have changed the “Gender” select on the prior page to “Sex” select.”
A more precise label might be “genitalia”.
That’s panel 8.
I have a theory about Sydney’s power-ups, and it fits to all the occasions where she has popped open the web so far:
You know in Risk, when you have 3 cards at the beginning of your turn, if they make a set you can trade them in, or you can wait for more card to make a set that you like better, but when you have 5 cards at the beginning of your turn you MUST cash in a set? I think Syd gets to a point where she has enough XP to upgrade, that’s when spinning the orbs causes the skill web to open, but she can get to the point that she cannot gain any more XP until she spends a point, and that is when the skill web opens by itself without her input. “You cannot proceed until you spend your skill point”
It’s also possible that one of the options will make spinning the orbs will allow her to view the skill web without having a point to spend, or that there’s something she could do all along that it just hasn’t occurred to her to try with them that allows the web to appear without a point to spend.
Could be. Or perhaps they opened by themselves the first few times until she proved she knew how to do it, and now they wait for her to decide. She had two at one point, and it didn’t force the web open.
yeah it has that game tutorial feel, the “press this to open inventory” which in a well made game may remind you the first few times when it is important, but as the game progresses won’t remind you anymore expecting the player to have figured it out.
not sure off the top of my head of any games that programmed this to stop after the player has done it themselves a few times outside the tutorial.
I do know games where features like this just don’t ever stop though and it gets annoying as it spoon feeds the game to you.
I remember her getting two in short order by killing giant squids, but I don’t remember having 2 at the same time. when was that?
She got one the first time, but two the second.
One solution to the gender/sex symbols could be to apply a “depth of field” sort of effect. You lay out a bunch of generic symbols and then the female one, then apply a blurring over the other symbols while female is in a circle of sharpness with a slight highlight effect. Then you don’t need to design new symbols, worry about misusing existing ones, but also convey a “my God, it’s full of [choices]” effect. The blurring/sharpness contrast gives you a feeling of “this is where her attention is”, and blurring can even give a bit of “this is a dizzying number of choices” feel, too. Just my $0.02
a similar idea came up earlier regarding Henchwench’s contract, just blur the text so nit pickers don’t try to actually read what is there, fill in with your imagination.
No, it is “how it works” by virtue of Imperial fiat :P
I’d hope the aliens are intelligent enough not to have issues with sex/gender. I doubt “It’s ma’am” has ever had to be angrily said in Klingon.
Intelligence doesn’t really have anything to do with it. Sex and gender expectations are tied up in every culture, and any changes/analysis of them is an uphill battle almost by default.
Being generically smart or intelligent doesn’t change that.
Her finger was on the forcefield orb and she was contemplating infinifear and the orb managenent system thought that was an apropriate time to give a point to spend. Did it assume she needed it?
It’s a pity this comments column doesn’t have the option to block selected user names. I don’t recall it being so thoroughly trolled before.
Usually people don’t get so focused on the political stuff here, unless the current strip is actively focused on RL politics (which DaveB rarely does, fortunately) I think the last time before this gender/sex stuff was when Dabbler made an off handed insult against people who watch Fox News (which was admittedly totally unnecessary and just served to split an audience of the comic). Hopefully by tomorrow it’ll go back to arguments directly relating to the current strip instead, since we’re probably going to be focusing on Sydney’s power mechanics, which is a really enjoyable element of the comic (seeing how powers WORK).
Maybe we’ll even soon get another Dabbler’s Science Corner.
I so hope you are right.
This shit gets exhausting.
Then don’t.
I also hope it goes back to actual discussions about the comic. I got fed up with ragebait being placed under every other comment. Though, because I’m countering the troll narrative, they all become a long thread.
So – I’m sorry, Ben! The sheer amount of posts is partly my fault.