MantidSys

Ok, turtle makes way more sense. And it’s simpler. Occam’s Razor or something. Thx bb.

The B is Obunga. T is Koopa Troopa. Questionable, but better than what this was photoshopped from - one of those tacky Liberty, Guns, Beer, and Trump bumper stickers.

I’ve never seen it either. I’ve heard of it though, but only in wealthier areas. Working class people don’t have the luxury of deciding to pay extra to alleviate human suffering - it’s the same reason walmart consumes all other choices; the average person chooses the cheapest option because they’re already scraping by. A more relatable take would be to just opt out of eating at places that demand tips – I already do that, but only because I can’t afford to eat out anyway :)

Did you read their comment beyond the first two words?

They explicitly said to stop tipping by deciding to instead go to places that ban tipping, price goods higher, and pay their employees fairly. None of your argument about “you need to tip people who rely on tips” applies to what they said. You jumped to your “haha gotcha” moment a bit prematurely.

It’s times like these that I’m glad I am autistic. You neurotypicals really over-complicate things and make life difficult for yourselves.

How to flirt as an autistic person: make a friend over shared interests, spend time together sharing that interest, realize they’re enjoyable to be around, communicate clearly “I enjoy spending time with you, let’s do it more often”, slowly morph into a relationship out of convenience. Done.

I cannot understand NT mind-games and obsessive preening. Don’t you get frustrated with it? And to think - someone who puts that much effort into judging you upfront is likely to keep judging things about you all your life, with no end to playing games… Stressful, no thank you.

Is that… the luminous horror from Tales of Maj’Eyal…?

Awesome.

Claiming that being a femboy is necessarily partially kink is harmful. Would you say the same about other nonbinary people? Is being a tomboy driven by kink? Is being trans driven by kink?

I think you’re telling on your own views more than you’re explaining how the world works. Identity exists separate from sexuality, full stop. Unless you want to revoke all trans and nonbinary identities from aro/ace people too.

And just in case you’re just talking about how people view femboys - who cares? Some people view the LGBTQ as child-rapists, and we don’t care what they think. We tell them they’re wrong and to respect us. Same here.

Maybe. But multiplayer games exist. And people have a very high standard for what population a game must have for it to be worth playing. People will consolidate into singular pre-made titles, compromising on their desires like they do now, in order to have many other humans to play with.

Maybe AI can be convincing NPCs eventually, but people will want to play games with their friends. They’ll find out eventually if another character is an NPC or human, and they will care.

Even singleplayer games will be subject to this, to a degree. People enjoy playing what their friends play - they like having the same experiences, they like having something in common to discuss, they like the shared experience that brings a sense of community to the fans of a single title or series.

Sure, people could make any game they desire, but it will be isolating. You’re underselling the social desires and needs we all have. Maybe we’ll end up with something similar to Garry’s Mod and Roblox: connected gaming hubs where people can load up any number of experiences - but still being able to include their friends somehow. I think that is much more likely than the concept of a person sitting in the corner of a room with their VR headset, wilting away in a world of their own creation, having lost all connections that would otherwise surround them. Humans naturally fight against that. We’ll experience things we’re not familiar with, as long as we’re experiencing them with other people.

How is that different than now?
We claim we won’t force you into the military, but if there’s not enough people who want to go to war, we’ll draft you.
If you’re a woman or minority, we won’t kill you outright, but you’ll have reduced quality of life without a conformative man to vouch for you. Bad job selection, lowered wages, political/legal/policing discrimination, doctors assuming malingering and not giving healthcare, etc.
People are still slapped with mental illness diagnoses and denied personal agency too. We shut down asylums, but we created mass homelessness. If you’re a social rebel or outcast, you get a mental illness label that stops you from gainful employment, allows all authority figures to disregard you entirely, and if you make too much noise we’ll send you to a psychiatric ward, give you court-mandated anti-psychotic injections under threat of jail, and even remove your power of attorney or make you a ward of the state.
Oh, and involuntary shock therapy still exists, by the way.

Childhood neglect, abuse, autism, and enough money to rely on pre-made foods.

Source: my life

P.S.: Don’t be so dismissive of people whose struggles you’re unfamiliar with. And that’s assuming this image wasn’t staged.

I’m not sure that the labels themselves are the issue in either of these cases. It’s worth remembering that we’re talking about historical periods of mistreatment as well. From my experience, Psychiatry as a whole has historically had its favorite diagnosis for the ‘bad and unwanted’ people in society. Hysteria is the obvious reference, but that shifted towards labeling the ‘undesirables’ as schizophrenics (and later as borderlines). It wasn’t (and in the case of BPD, still isn’t) uncommon for people to receive these labels purely to communicate to other doctors “I don’t like this patient”/“They’re faking”/“They deserve mistreatment”.

Let’s not forget that the label of schizophrenia started as a combination of the idea of early-onset dementia and stigmatization of behaviors that do not fit into society. The latter half is covered up by history, but the initial ‘symptoms’ of a schizophrenia diagnosis included things like not making small talk and having strong beliefs about politics. The list of symptoms read half of what you’d expect in terms of psychosis, and half like it was copy-pasted from the ‘symptoms’ of Hysteria. That’s why these additional labels were harmful - some of them were associated more with not fitting into society than actual pathology.

It’s no coincidence that when this general issue of mistreatment and over-diagnosis was being fought against, Psychiatry was busy switching over to using Borderline as the new maligned diagnosis. The schizophrenia labels were removed during the wider push for humanizing treatment of schizophrenics, but I don’t think the labels themselves were a significant part of the issue - the bigger issue was the inherent power imbalances and patient abuse present within Psychiatry. After all, BPD was previously unnoteworthy, but now has become the new stigmatizing label, and all the mistreatments of schizophrenics are being shifted to borderlines. After all, there’s now a “quiet borderline” label - for people who clearly aren’t borderline, but psychiatrists want to give the ‘bad diagnosis’ to anyway.

Autism is adjacent to Psychiatry, but the story is the same. Autism is currently maligned by society, and the fact that people are so hostile towards autistic people is the real problem, not the labels they’ve made up to ‘justify’ their hostility. Getting rid of the labels doesn’t remove the hostility, because the hostility is just looking for an outlet. That’s why my only focus is making sure that labels are medically useful - because managing societal and medicalized hate of disabled people is another issue altogether.

Nuance is needed here… The terms high- and low-functioning are definitely problematic, because they’re too reductionist, and lead people to assume things. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that autism having “levels” is bad - the DSM-5 (as horribly flawed as it is) contains two sets of three levels each for determining level of support needed by an autistic person, with the two sets being related to socialization and life-skill functioning. Given that autism is a spectrum, and some autistic people aren’t disabled by it at all, being able to categorize people by their needs is useful - we just have to make sure that it’s qualitative, rather than arbitrary labels being picked by how the doctor is feeling that day. And it’s something to be kept in medical records, not used for self-identification.

It causes temporary and often permanent memory loss and brain fog. The goal of ECT is to, quite literally, make people detached from their illness or trauma by either forgetting it entirely or by damaging the pathways of learned stress responses, both of which are achieved through random damaging of soft tissue by routine ‘treatments’ until the right spots are hit, with every other damaged area being deemed acceptable losses.

It’s proven effective, sure. It’s more effective at causing improved mood than doing nothing. So is a heroin addiction. At least once you stop abusing heroin, you recover physically. ECT does permanent damage in most people who undergo it. Plus, ECT isn’t a single course of treatments - any benefit it gives eventually wears off, and additional treatment cycles are planned in perpetuity. This is because of neuroplasticity, where the brain will recreate some of those connections that were damaged by ECT, thus bringing back trauma memories/associations and symptoms of illness.

Is it really worth it to suffer bits of permanent damage every time you undergo what is essentially medicalized repression of memory? There are people who lose memory of their partner of several years, have zero emotion towards them, leave them and continue on in their life never remembering the love they had. Is that worth it, for something that just returns anyway?

“Proven effective” and “outperforms placebo” are statements that focus on a single variable and don’t mention how much damage something may cause elsewhere. Don’t take it at face-value.

You can’t get a lobotomy anymore, but doctors still prescribe ECT all the time. You just need to modernize your standards for physician-inflicted brain damage.

I used to think that. Then I realized I was dissociating all my memories away, and that my panic attacks were reality catching up to me. My life’s fairly empty, but things definitely happen, I just don’t remember them. It wasn’t until I started living with someone else that I had someone to remind me of all the things I forget.
But I figure, my brain’s doing it for a reason, right? Guess this is just how I deal with the stresses of life. It has its disadvantages, and I’m no stranger to hating myself for not remembering things, but any other way of getting through life would have its own downsides. Or so I tell myself.