How not to impress the ladies on OkCupid

I’ve been thinking about it and I disagree with this:

I don’t think this is the right argument. It’s like when anti-abortionists say that abortion is wrong because if their mum had had an abortion they wouldn’t have been born. As David pointed out in a discussion on abortion, there are countless of things that could have happened that would have resulted in you not getting born, like your parents simply deciding not to have sex on that particular night, or your parents never getting together in the first place but hooking up with other people instead.

The problem with the anti-abortion argument is that abortion could prevent a potential anyone. Any abortion might prevent an Einstein or a Hitler (yep, I went there), a Nice Guy (TM) or an Asshole (TM), me or you, or nobody at all. Every change from miscarriage to delayed conception prevents a relatively random offspring from coming into the world. Some of these are “replaced” by other relatively random people and some are not. So the “You wouldn’t have been born” can just be responded to with both the argument that there are tons if ways that could happen and also that there are literally billions of people not being born all the time. It is all basically randomly chance and human decisions about potential random people.

In the case of eugenics, we aren’t talking about random people, girl or boy or neither, Einstein or Hitler, etc., we are talking about types of people and so examples of those types carry a weight that they don’t when the outcomes are random. Eugenics targets non-random populations. It isn’t just “there wouldn’t have been me if my mother aborted or miscarried or went to bed early,” it is “there couldn’t have been a me with eugenics,” it is “with eugenics, there will never be anyone like me in non-negligible ways.” I think the non-randomness matters.

It is the difference between “I could die at any time” and “If I’d been there, I would have died.” We think there is something wrong with people who have trouble coping with the former, but expect people to have trouble with the latter. The non-randomness matters.

And, I think obviously, the more randomness still involved, the more we edge back into the “If your mom had an abortion” realm. It doesn’t make much sense to say that I wouldn’t have been born under an anti-female eugenics policy. It makes a lot more sense to say that I wouldn’t have been born under an anti-disability or anti-mental illness or anti-both eugenics policy. There is less randomness, more commonality among the targeted population.

To me, diversity is a good thing and we want different ways of seeing and experiencing the world. However, there are types of diversity that we do rightly seek to eliminate or reduce. We try to reduce poverty and illiteracy, for example, even though both do increase diversity. That is obviously fundamentally different from eugenics. I think comparing “If your mother had an abortion” to “I would be targeted, there would be no one like me” is like comparing trying to eliminate poverty through social change to trying to eliminate poverty through sterilization. The first targets a circumstance that could happen to anyone and the second inevitably will target types of people.

Examples of the specific type matter. Any person is any person, but a eugenics- selected person is not.

Seeing some phrases have been used a lot on this thread without explanation; what does “Fuck off” and “Fuck you ” really mean? I couldn’t find it the FAQ and neither on the feminist 101 FAQ.

By the way , is this a feminist space? The Headline says just “misogyny, I mock it”. Do you have to be a feminsit to mock misogyny?. I think I’ve seen quite few MRAs doing a quite good job of mocking themselves.

I think I’ve seen quite few MRAs doing a quite good job of mocking themselves.

If you mean “produce such surreal misogyny that they bypass the need for additional mockery” then yeah, they do mock themselves quite frequently.

Fuck off is an invitation to stop spewing shit, turn off the computer, go find a craft kit, and build a scale model of a biplane.

And yeah, it’s a feminist space, people who mock misogyny tend to be feminists and people who don’t find misogyny mockable are often all right with the gender status quo.

@Creative Writing Student

When contending with the blockquote monster, checking for correct formatting is not itself practical. 🙂

@moreorlessdan, I hope you do get some help and that your friends can provide some extra support. I haven’t seen signs of anything other than depression, but it would be nice if he would talk to an expert. Thanks to Viscaria too for the advice. I will offer to pick him up and take him to one of his favorite brunch places and then drive him home. And if he won’t do it tomorrow, I’ll ask again next week. I’m unstoppable!

Increasing discussion clarity, questioning words, and basic concepts of sociology, psychology, reality &c( I don’t like the idea of past behaviour as a predictor of future behaviour)( I also dislike when people say things like ” What has happened has happened and cannot be undone” or “Either you are X or not X” and other statements. People are also using too many hidden implications in their statements, like when they are saying “Listen! Do you hear what I am saying, when they really meant that I should act upon what they are saying.

I’m right that talacaris has trolled here before, right? This seems like continuing troll-behavior, but I don’t want to start in on someone who is just a clueless newbie.

Did you previously believe that “Fuck Off” implied you should leave and then never do anything again ever? Of course it implies that you should go do something else.

Do you mean wish you were high, or wish you were being stoned to death?

Because both are probably true.

@katz

I think it depends on how much he wants to pretend that metaphorical speech and the connotations of words are some sort if secret code. If he keeps it shallow, I may just wished for the drugs. If he starts to go deeper into what is wrong with “the basic concepts of sociology, psychology, reality,” I may start to wish for some stones.

I had a very enjoyably stereotypical stoned experience when a friend decided to explain all about how the Illuminati control the world.* talacaris is heading into that realm of stereotypical pot-smoking, imo.

* My best friend got bored and starting mining magazines for fun ads to hang on her dormroom door. That is why I love her.

@talacaris

W will still be performing Z, but it will have different (Q) social significance. Glad we cleared that up and thanks for the laugh.

acid is better, I once believed I had been trappedin a TV channel in the eighties ( which could be seen by the colours) for over 20 years, also later when I was more awake, I felt the gaps in the time flow.

I’ve never experienced severe changes in reality on any drug. Personally, I think it is my years of practice dealing with severe emotional changes. I think it acts like a guard rail, I am just used to talking myself down from craziness and I don’t stop doing that just because the craziness is inspired by a chemical I injested rather than one I created. Weird thoughts are par for the course most of the time and when I do drugs, I mainly ride the sensations while keeping myself pretty grounded.

(Possibly disturbing bit of info, proceed at your own risk: this is true event when I had what I think of as a near-death experience – I shrunk and went to live on a tire, no heaven or anything, but all the sensations, thoughts, and “plot” were what is described in near-death experiences – when I overdosed and hallucinated. I still knew where I was and what was really happening to me off and on.)