Degenerate Cymae

cymae doesn't want her irl friends seeing everything

[galois-groupie]

why don't they just build more housing? are they stupid?

[hollowistheworld]

I really can and will blame the 9-5 for everything. "We're in a loneliness epidemic" well, we have to spend a third of our day interacting with people in a professional way that makes forming real friendships difficult and then we're peopled out by the time we're done. "People are eating more and more unhealthily" people have to spend more than a third of their day doing work related tasks and they don't want to spend their tiny amount of free time making food. "People aren't involved in their local communities" after spending more than a third of their day doing work related things people are tired and also all those community events take place during normal working hours. "People need to get more hobbies" after spending more than a third of their day working, people are TIRED and don't want to do anything that takes yet more energy. "Literacy is dying" to maintain your critical thinking skills you need to read/watch things that make you think and after spending more than a third of your day doing work related stuff you are TIRED and don't want to expend even more brainnpower. "People need to get outside more" People. Are. TIRED. Because they have to spend all of their time working or preparing for work or recovering from work or doing all the chores they couldn't stay on top of because of work. I can blame fucking anything on having to work, it is truly the root of all fucking evil.

[gcu-sovereign]

The 9-5 is a huge improvement over the 12 millenia of backbreaking mendacity of farming or the 288 millenia of desperate, sometimes acutely dangerous hunting and foraging.

I know there are people who deeply self-identify as landed gentry, but this just reads like a Hedgehog's axe grinding made without any reference to material facts about the world.

[shamebats]

If anyone needs further evidence that you can't self-optimize your way out of or prevent disability: apparently Bryan Johnson, who spends millions on his health, has developed an incurable automimmune disease:

Bryan Johnson Spent Tens of Millions Trying Not to Die, Gets Diagnosed With Incurable Disease

Immortality obsessed tech investor Bryan Johnson reveals he was recently diagnosed with an incurable disease.

Last week, the longevity-obsessed tech investor revealed that he had been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease in which his “stomach is eating itself.” But, true to his mission, Johnson believes he can biohack his way out of this gut-punch, too. “I’m going to try and solve it,” he wrote on X. “Will share all.” The disease Johnson says he was diagnosed with is autoimmune gastritis, a condition in which the immune system’s antibodies go rogue and start attacking stomach cells. It often manifests without noticeable symptoms, and can lead to cancer.

[shamebats]

This is what internalized ableism does to people. You spend all your life believing that you can't become disabled because you spend so much money & time on your health, trying every possible treatment, supplement, product you can get your hands on — and in the end, the stress from living like that is likely to actually contribute to you developing a disabling illness, and it will have all been for worse than nothing.

[str-ngeloop]

I don't think we should be taking this as a sign we shouldn't be trying to prevent illness. That doesn't seem reasonable to me. clown on bryan johnson all you want, he's rich. but you're gonna be hard pressed to convince me this is some sort of cosmic justice. preventing suffering = good

[zoobus]

I've been really confused by the response to this. By his own admission, it seems like he's been chronically ill his entire life? The article states he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism at 21, which automatically put him at a higher risk of autoimmune diseases, possibly already having one depending on what kind of hypothyroidism it is. He even says

“​​This is a diagnosis of a condition that started in my body over 20 years ago. Had I not taken care of my body during the past few years, it would be a lot worse,” he wrote in response to one critic. “Health issues will always pop up, no matter how healthy one is.”

[centrally-unplanned]

"Guy who spends his fortune on medical research to try to cure diseases & promote longevity gets dunked on for having a disease and needing medical assistance" just incredible the hoops people jump through to justify hating a target.

The actual valid criticisms of Johnson is that he hasn't spent his money all that well; this "hypermicro" approach to a macro, structural problem in human biology probably isn't gonna work. But we don't know what is gonna work before it does - props to him for trying, and we would be way better off if the average rich person spent their money on this than the median flashy consumer goods or ruthlessly ineffective nonprofit cause that is much more typical for the group.

[charlesoberonn]

Interviewer: Mr. President. During your campaign, you have put a large emphasis on improving American relations with the tiny island nation of Rukuruku.

President: I have.

Interviewer: Why Rukuruku?

President: Three reasons. One, Rukuruku is an important strategic ally in protecting American interests in the South Pacific.

President: Two. Rukuruku is the only democracy in the region.

Interviewer: It's the only dry land for thousands of miles in all directions.

President: Exactly. And lastly, and most importantly, Rukuruku lies a mere 10 miles from the Sunken City of R'lyeh where the Great Old One Cthulhu slumbers.

Interviewer: That's the most important reason?

President: Of course. The Necronomicon says that when Cthulhu wakes from his eons of sleep, his rage could only be slaked with a blood sacrifice.

President: It's imperative that Rukuruku be there to serve that purpose when the day finally comes.

Interviewer: So you're supporting Rukuruku out of the belief that it should be destroyed in an apocalyptic future?

President: No, of course not. But 50% of my base are Cthulhu cultists.

[degenerate-cymae]

Any law or policy (stated or unstated, under any regulator, with any regulatory motive) which (directly or indirectly) criminalizes two (or more) people (from any demographic, cultural, or political categories) willingly communicating (on any subject, by any means, in any context, for any reason, including secretly) with eachother (or facilitating them doing so) is categorically illiberal and immoral.

There are no exceptions. Fraud is an excellent part of civil law, it should result in damages paid to the victim. Conspiracy is just a hack for lowering the standard of criminal evidence, the moral offense is being a willing participant in and planning a crime, not talking about it. Harassment and similar laws are obviously reasonable to the extent they actually check that communication was unwanted by the person it was sent to, rather than this just being assumed because the content was offensive.

I know this point of view is unreasonable and extreme and unserious. It's also correct.

[phaeton-flier]

basically most of the problems of modernity are either long-standing problems of the human condition (death and suffering) or problems of not doing modernity enough (not enough welfare you can permanently burn bridges with your family)

[degenerate-cymae]

Some of them are the same small minded censorious instincts that we've always had finally coupled with enough state capacity to actually enforce them.

People have wanted to make it illegal for whores to use money forever, but now they actually can.

[degenerate-cymae]

So sometimes I scroll the incest smut peddlers because I'm a pervert. And like it is hot kinky smut don't get me wrong, but sometimes I ... notice how real most of it is?

Like ... yes obviously this is extremely edgy fucked up abuse ... but the thing that makes it edgy and fucked up and abusive isn't the fact they're fucking, it's the fact they're doing fully-within-the-overton-window parenting. Like, I read a lot of horrific abuse fics and then think "if you did all of that but kept it in your pants then it'd be exactly as evil but you'd be an upstanding pillar of the community whose abuses would be actively enforced by state power and social pressure".

And like yeah obviously I'm an evil pervert so that does make it hotter. But the post nut clarity is really sad.

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

maybe the problem is that people care about other people too much. so if you say, here's a political agenda that'll make you rich, they'll be like, wait, won't this also make other people rich? i don't want that. i'd rather have the other people be poor. i'm very sensitive to the condition of other people, you understand, such as people i read about in the newspaper, and people i hear about on tiktok – and i want them to be poor! ideally i'd be put in charge of making sure that the other people are poor, but someone's got to do it. whereas if you don't care about other people you're like, shit, i want to be rich! sign me up! what's the next thing that's as useful as the refrigerator, i want that. why isn't energy too cheap to meter, i want energy too cheap to meter. i want every disease to be cured because otherwise i might get one, et cetera. and the most politically viable way for me to get what i want is for the political order to make everyone else rich also, which i don't care about

[shituationist]

I understand that for many of us, social media was a haven where we could escape our families, schools, what have you. I do not think, on the net, that it has been a good thing for us, or that any liberatory potential of packet-switched networks depends on untrammeled access to instagram, facebook, tiktok, or whatever. What liberatory potential social media has had has been a byproduct of the people who use it, who will not disappear if teenagers, for example, are barred from using them.

Let's remember what social media is these days: an advertising and surveillance system, and a system for compiling data sets that feed into neural networks which are intended to replace you at work and in life. In what world is it even ethical to use these things at all? The fact that social media has become so central to our collective life at all is a travesty.

The latest trend of social media, becoming algorithmic purveyors of short-form video, has wreaked havoc on our attention spans, subjected us to more and more advertising, and has the potential to be used as a propaganda vector just like TV, which (in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into) serves nearly exclusively as a propaganda dissemination machine.

The old web is dead. The new web is bot-ridden and subject to the vagaries of the capitalists who control it. Future revolutionaries will not be born online.

[weiszklee]

This seems like a rather tone-deaf post to make in the face of government attempts to cut young people off from information online and from communicating with each other away from supervision. You are worrying about propaganda while at te same time belittling the most popular medium for dissemination of alternative viewpoints.

What liberatory potential social media has had has been a byproduct of the people who use it, who will not disappear if teenagers, for example, are barred from using them.

And how are teenagers supposed to find these people when they are barred from accessing their content? Or without social media, how are these people supposed to reach anything close to their current audiences?

(in comparison to radio and newspapers, which are relatively less capital intensive to get into)

How can you say that and then shit on social media? Do you think running a newspaper is less capital intensive than running an instagram account?

There are a lot of legitimate grievances to have with social media, but you seem to prefer to focus on your aesthetic irritations. Well, you did mention the one:

subject to the vagaries of the capitalists who control it

That is indeed a problem. Now, will a set of laws that raise the bars of compliance and make the market entry of competitors that much harder alleviate or exacerbate this problem? Likewise, will surveillance become less or more of a problem when people are being asked to provide their IDs online? These are some tough questions, but I'm sure if we put our heads together we can figure this out.

[official-kircheis]

objecting to AC installations on the grounds that the compressor unit is an eyesore is fundamentally unserious and impossible to respect. what’s more important, that the home is comfortable for its occupants who live there every day or the aesthetic sense of some passer-by on the street? shut the fuck up.

[tsarina-anadyomene]

it really is quite bad for your military to have an image of itself as a warrior class. what you really want is for your soldiers to think of themselves as boring professionals who will fill out a report form if someone gets a little too warrior ethos out there

[shieldfoss]

A problem here is that "boring professionals" are pretty good at pressing the button that makes the drone fire bomb an orphanage. "Just doing my job" type shit.

[degenerate-cymae]

The advantage of professionals is that while you can write a spreadsheet that spits out "fire bomb the orphanage", it's not the thing that happens by default when you're making a military spreadsheet.

Whereas it's absolutely the default thing that happens when you consult your warrior ethos on "hard choices we must make to prove our resolve".

[hellischange]

if you want to actually materially address child abuse, the single most important thing you can do to start is give children the legally enforceable right to leave any situation they no longer want to be in.

church, extracurriculars, summer camps, school classes, their biological family's houses. notably, these are the places that child abuse is enabled by the child's inability to just fucking leave if they need to. they can't walk out of church if their youth pastor touches them inappropriately; they'll get punished for leaving. if they walk out of their house because their dad hits them, the cops pick them up and give them right back to their dad.

children need the legal autonomy to leave abusive situations in order to even begin to usefully materially address child abuse.

original post by qweerhet because it's unrebloggable but very important

[queeranarchism]

& that should include foster care, psychiatric care, facilities for homeless youth, etc. Going from one abusive situation to the next is a known pattern. If the 'rescue' you're being offered isn't actually safe, you should be able to leave and you should have other options.

[fipindustries]

i sympathize with the message but the second part confuses me, what does it mean to have a "legal right" to leave homeless shelters, foster care and psychiatric institutions? Like where do they go then? The streets?

Like, ok, police wont force them to go back to abusive situations, im with you there, what is step two?

Surely a more actionable course of action is "fix institutional failures that allow abuse in foster care, shelters, and medical institutions"

[phaeton-flier]

You still need the right to leave those places as a stopgap against abuse; we can fix a lot of the causes of abusive relationships but cannot prevent all them, and so we have as a final stopgap the ability to leave your partner at any time.

Similarly, if someone is leaving behind 3 hots and a cot for the street, it's probably because something is gone wrong enough that sleeping on the street looks like a better deal.

[fipindustries]

"children should have the right to choose homelessnes"?

Im not being sarcastic or trying to gotcha, if this is the genuine position i can respect that

[phaeton-flier]

Yes, that is the bullet I'm biting here; I really do think there are situations where a child is better off running away from home, and they should not be brought back by police.

Theoretically, it would be nicer if we had e.g. a children's shelter in every city where any minor could go and have a very small private room they could stay in and not have to go home and eat shitty oatmeal, all no-questions-asked, until and unless they were willing to go home or get put into foster care or whatever.

But even without that, yeah, I think the alternative is de facto locking up people with their abusers with no escape.

[ceausescue]

this is often where my sorta anarchisty/libertarian intuitions come from. a lot of the time when you point out that some practice or institution is horrible or abusive and propose literally the most obvious measure- making it optional- people will go "oh but then [thing institution ostensibly prevents]! shouldn't we focus on fixing it?". and every time it's like sure! but im not gonna hold my breath! why should the people subjected to this thing have to? if people willingly choose to brave the thing you're trying to prevent in order to avoid your "help" then that's that. revealed preference. if you do actually manage to fix anything then people will choose to avail themselves of your services. not everything is 10d decision theory chess, it's actually pretty rare that more choice can make a person worse off

[javert]

[official-kircheis]

meanwhile on tumblr dot com

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[shieldfoss]

"Europe has free speech" believers hardest hit

[ambidisastrous]

every major structural social problem right now is basically "we don't have enough skilled workers on the ground" and the reason is always "well we've been intentionally underpaying and understaffng them for decades to increase corporate profits" and somehow the news always just mentions the "shortage" without digging into the cause

air travel is a mess? shortage of air traffic controllers - for some mysterious reason

logistics a mess? shortage of truck drivers - for some mysterious reason

public transit can't meet demand? shortage of bus drivers - for some mysterious reason

We even mysteriously have shortages of doctors, nurses, teachers... FOR SOME MYSTERIOUS REASON

FUCKING PAY PEOPLE AND HIRE ENOUGH STAFF

[brazenautomaton]

you know those aren't "corporate profits" right it's very important you know that those things you mentioned are not "corporate profits."

the shortage of air traffic controllers is due to the federal aviation administration intentionally training fewer ATC operators so that a higher percentage of them could be black (this was a major scandal, not something some culture warrior made up). the FAA is not a corporation and has nothing to do with "corporate profits."

there is no shortage of truck drivers and logistics being "a mess" has literally nothing to do with truck drivers it is entirely about international boat travel lanes.

there is no shortage of bus drivers, there is a shortage of public transport routes that actually exist and are actually created with the money that is spent to create them and there is no "corporate profit" from public transportation bus routes. privately owned corporate bus travel is stuff like Greyhound and they do not have a driver shortage either.

the american medical association, which is a union and not a corporation, limits the number of doctors that can be trained, for the explicit purpose of driving up demand so that doctors will be paid more.

public school teachers are not paid by corporations and have nothing to do with "corporate profits." privately owned schools, which are sometimes at least close to "corporate profits," do not have a teacher shortage and in fact teachers are very willing to work for them even though they pay less than public school because the conditions they work in are not miserable.

none of these things have anything to do with "corporate profits." you cannot just identify any problem in the world and blame it on "corporate profits."

[argumate]

gotta admit that is pretty funny

[isaacsapphire]

Is there scientific consensus that heredity is real? That is, in organisms that reproduce sexually, offspring resemble, behave, and perform more like their ancestors more than other organisms of the same species but with different ancestors?

Because there’s a lot of economic behavior seems to be based on the assumption that eg. A particularly productive and healthy dairy cow is more likely to have daughters who are themselves partially productive and healthy dairy cows.

[fruityyamenrunner]

"yes"

[isaacsapphire]

Why the quotation marks?

[fruityyamenrunner]

because the consensus is so obvious that it is like asking if there is a consensus whether cells are real

[isaacsapphire]

Lamarckism/Lysenkoism still has shooters, so it seems like a question worth asking.

Also there’s stuff that has “scientific consensus” but not social consensus, like cancer treatments, vaccines, the utility of apple cider vinegar, and the historical ranges of various peoples, animals, and diseases.

[fruityyamenrunner]

i mean

yes there are morphic resonance theory enjoyers and Jacob-did-nothing-wrong creationists, but those people are wizards

the history of modern biology has been "so how does heredity work to explain everything?": darwinian evolution, the disproof of spontaneous generation, mendelian punnet square genetics, visible fruit fly chromosomal genetics, mutation tracing, genetic transformation, finding out the molecular shape of DNA is "here's where the heredity is stored and you can just read it off", reading it off and reconstructing phylogenetic trees...

[isaacsapphire]

Certainly, and Dolly the Sheep was somehow extremely important. I think part of what I am getting at is, “is not believing in heredity instead 2026 inside the overton window and not inherently crazy, like how seriously believing in Satanic Ritual Abuse or UFO abduction was weird but not in itself evidence that a person was nuts in the 90s, or is it like, something that would get a person not hired if they mentioned it in a professional context because it indicates that they are nuts?”

Like, I literally was in a workplace training at a company that the computer touchers here have all probably heard of in 2020 where we were all told that Black people are actually indigenous to the Americas. I have seen some other positions that seem obviously insane presented as fact by people who had authority, from church pulpits (“the Haitian revolution succeeded because Tousant Louvitur sold the people of Haiti to the devil for a hundred years”) and college lecterns (“Nobody ever starved to death under communism”). My sense of how obviously fucking bonkers cuckoo bananas vs literally the enforced party line within an institution an idea is has been calibrated by being hit with large rocks by powerful crazy people from every corner of the political compass.

I am seriously asking, is heredity being true currently uncontroversial? References to Lysenkoism are here to illustrate that no claiming to not believe in heredity would really fuck up people’s lives within living memory.

[fruityyamenrunner]

yes. please don't let Christians and Communists lie to you.

[isaacsapphire]

My point is that if the Christians and the communists don’t believe in heredity etc, heredity etc doesn’t have uncontroversial social consensus and publicly saying that you support it will get you in trouble with the people who don’t believe it, some of whom have power and might have power over you. Lots of people who are wrong about stuff can have power, from shift leads to deacons to professors (adjunct or tenured) to heads of state! Also it means that I cannot build an argument for general consumption that rests on heredity being uncontroversially accepted.

Like, I can roll out an argument based on “dinosaurs existed” and expect it to go better than an argument based on “Darwin was right” because Answers in Genesis and the Creation Research Institute got “dinosaurs existed” to be uncontroversial among people who still don’t believe in evolution.

[brazenautomaton]

I think the answer you're looking for is "the scientific consensus is heredity is real, but people are allowed and morally obligated to make unprincipled exceptions in the case of humans."

Progressives think that if they acknowledge humans can inherit traits, then they will have to kill black people for eugenics. So it's a socially mandated inconsistency, much like how very few people were actually for open borders but were only socially allowed to make arguments requiring open borders.

[theresponseblog]

They think "they will have to kill black people for eugenics" because that actually fucking happened. Black women were subject to undeclared forcible sterilization, black men were used as medical test subjects, there were whole books written about how the only moral international policy was population control of black populations specifically and "well we don't do that anymore" yeah sure but the reason people did was that they thought black people were provably and inherently of lesser intelligence and therefor of lesser value as humans.

[brazenautomaton]

Right. This is exactly what I was referring to.

Because people used science to justify their prejudices that they already had, you -- and progressivism as a whole -- have convinced yourself that if you say one of a bunch of obviously and objectively true things, then you will have to kill black people for eugenics. Even though these statements are obviously and objectively true and have bo political valence to them, you cannot allow yourself to see any daylight between "humans can inherit traits from their parents" and "we have to kill black people for eugenics."

The rest of us can notice "it is obviously and objectively true that humans can inherit traits from their parents" and yet not think this means we need to kill black people for eugenics, but progressives can't, and thus they make it everyone's problem. When you are not allowed to notice obviously and objectively true things, this prevents you from being able to take effective actions.

It's fitting, I guess, since historically progressives were the most gung-ho about killing black people for eugenics. Those programs you mention were not put into place by Nazis, after all. Instead of saying "maybe progressives were wrong to think the obvious and objectively true fact that humans inherit traits from their parents means that we should kill black people for eugenics," progressives decided "the only way we can stop ourselves from killing black people for eugenics is not letting anyone notice humans inherit traits from their parents."

I feel like there had to be better ways to stop yourselves from doing that.

[theresponseblog]

"People used science to justify their prejudices"

Well, according to you, saying that black people are congenitally retarded isn't prejudice, it's a rational assessment of honest fact, it's an obvious and objectively true statement.

So. Why not sterilize the stupid oafs, the useless eaters, the Lessers who lack the intellectual capacity to keep up with the world's demands? Why not do that? What's your case for it? What "effective action" do you propose?

[brazenautomaton]

You could not be a more perfect demonstration!

I said "humans inherit traits from their parents." This is obviously and objectively true, because humans have DNA and that is how DNA works.

You heard this obviously and objectively true scientific fact and jumped immediately to "this person must be saying black people are retarded and should be sterilized."

I did not say that. I do not believe that. That is a laughably wrong statement, and your claim I said it is also a laughably wrong statement. There is a gap that is a fucking light-year wide between "humans inherit traits from their parents" and "black people are retarded and should be sterilized." You have to make a bunch of other assumptions, you have to hold a lot of other beliefs, and you have to make a bunch of different decisions to come to that conclusion.

Someone who is not a progressive does not think that "humans inherit traits" means "black people are retarded." This information does not mean what you think. You are jumping to wild, unsupportable, laughable conclusions without noticing it.

[shieldfoss]