So, I just had a weird turn at work, that's made it obvious that I can't stay here.

And when I ask myself, "what does Protagonist Brent do?", I immediately imagine powering through my flu, putting my most valuable possessions in my car, pointing West, and driving until I reach Berkeley - then finding an apartment and walking into start-ups and big companies and saying "I can code. I just moved here from Idaho. I need a job. What have you got?"

And then I don't do that, because I'm too dizzy to get out of bed, let alone drive 10 hours to Berkeley, and I have no idea where I'd stay, and I only have $3,000 to my name.

Because my imagination does NOT conserve detail, it just builds a narrative.

How do you work around that?

There's no "should" or "should not" when it comes to having feelings. They're part of who we are and their origins are beyond our control. When we can believe that, we may find it easier to make constructive choices about what to do with those feelings.

— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember

I was halfway through an excessively heated response to you when I took a shower and came back to realize that it was a stupid idea. So I wrote this instead.

I have a genetic inability to gain pleasure from tickling and experimentation with Martians. In fact, to me, blue Martians sting almost as much as green ones. I was told for most of my life that even if I didn't like it that I was morally required to put up with a Martian because at least /they/ got pleasure out of the deal. Which meant that if it was going to hurt anyway I may as well make a green Martian happy, even if I hated every minute of it.

Then I read about some humans who, like me, simply don't have the receptors for the blue Martians' chemicals. The people who told me this was possible told me, by analogy, that I didn't have to give a damn about any Martians if I didn't want to. That I could just tell all of them that I had that genetic defect and that this was a completely valid reason to make Martians not tickle me, regardless of color. Most of them understand. The ones that don't, I try to keep to only seeing in public.

Then there are the ones that try to convince me that I'm making my genetic defect up. Those people are not always green Martians - they may even be humans - but they're the kind of people who, as far as I am concerned, did a pretty good job of convincing me that I should shut up and get with the program. I don't want that for myself anymore. I can do better.

I carry scars from this experience, though they are not even close to the majority of my total scarring. I am prone to interpreting remarks that humans should give green Martians a chance as remarks that I need to get with the program, climb into the mothership with the first Martian that will take me, and lie back and think of England. Which is probably not what you intend or what you want.

(In case it wasn't clear, the genetic defect I refer to is asexuality, specifically aromantic asexuality. There are also closely related conditions where people get pleasure from tentacle tickling but not from experimentation, and vice versa.)

Where does this process lead?

Under your assumptions being a "regular" Green is an unstable state. Greens will be forced to evolve either into Blues or into superGreens with superstingy extra-long tentacles.

By “absolute” you seem to mean ‘relative to the should-universe’.

Foragers were probably equivalent to baboons, and farming made it much worse.

In a forager tribe, when the abuse became too horrible, there was an option to leave. Farming allowed this abuse to grow astronomically. A forager alpha male couldn't make his tribe build him a pyramid.

i'm only going to consider the first one. The obvious thing to do is to pick the bees and hope for the bees, and it's an incredibly clear illustration of a situation where you might interpet the necessary unpleasant consequences of a good decision, as negative feedback about that decision, in the form of regretting the possibility of hornets. It pinpoints that feeling and it should help to push it away any other time you might be in abject pain or experiencing other lesser discomfort, e.g. after you, say, go to the gym for the first time. it really pinpoints that false temptation.

There is an argument for box 1 though: with a billion dollars and the perfect proof of your own credibility to yourself, and bearing in mind that any impairing trauma caused by the torture would be erased, it's possible that you could do more direct good than a thousand years torture is bad, and that the indirect good you could do (in bringing about positive sum games and opposing negative sum ones, being a part of establishing a better pattern for all of society, by gaining power and using it to influence society away from negative sum interactions, would be bigger again.) And of course I'd love to discover that I was that crazy, that altruistic, that idealistic, that strong. There's a part of me that wants to just say fuck it. In fact, bearing in mind the possibility of immortality or at least great expansion before I die/cryonics runs out or fails to work, do I want to be the guy who chose the bliss or the resources? Fuck it, I want to be the second guy. Throw me in the box before I change my mind.

It appears we have the same goals. Just a few remarks to make:

• It's always tricky to draw examples from the primate family. Chimpanzees are macho-ruled bullies; bonobos are female-ruled hippies. We are more malleable than we give ourselves credit for.

• Feminism is not a single, monolithic block. There are several schools and subschools, and male-hating is the practice of just a few of them.

• I'm not sure what you mean by "my side." For the record, I'm a guy.

I would very much like to come do this with you, but I currently work for the IT staff of a community college, so taking vacation time in the month of August is highly frowned upon.

EDIT: OH COME ON. Why was this downvoted? Why was this the ONLY POST IN THE THREAD THAT GOT DOWNVOTED?

Why am I terrible? Someone please tell me, why am I terrible?

Fuck it, I don't care about karma anymore. Downvote me to oblivion. Run me off the site. I don't care.

But please, please, tell me why I'm terrible. Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I could change. Please.

Not owed any of the paths? No, I didn't say that, and I wouldn't go that far. I sensed aggrieved entitlement because of historical realities: because, yes, men have been the oppressors of women for thousands of years, and we've only recently started to abandon a paradigm where women's availability for men was taken for granted and adopt a paradigm where women's autonomy as agents with their own preferences and desires is acknowledged. Of course it's going to be difficult for heterosexual men to control the Neolithic patriarch that still lives inside them, and one of the great mistakes of PUA ideology is that it draws from our ancestral past to foster outdated male behaviors of dominance and competition that do not fit anymore in modern society. That those behaviors do get some men laid is not evidence that they are acceptable behaviors; it's evidence that not all women are the same. Gender equality is an embarrasingly late advance in human history, too recent to be part of our innate assumptions, and for the moment we have to patiently teach it to each generation. It's going to take time for it to sink in and become another of our gut-level impulses. Until then, some men are still going to be clumsy, and of course that's sad, because many of those socially inexpert men could make excellent partners, but when we speak of the suffering of lonely men, we need to remember that precisely the old male structures of dominance and competition are to blame for that. Sexism has hurt ethical men, but damaged all women: we can't pretend they haven't been owned, ignored, silenced, taken for granted, trespassed on, dehumanized, and neglected, both historically and still today, both openly and insidiously. With that in mind, you can't seriously tell me that lonely men are the disadvantaged party here. Women already have enough on their plates trying to simply get an education, and go through their daily lives without being assaulted, and build professional careers where they'll be paid fairly and taken seriously, and push governments everywhere to earn the basic right of controlling their own reproduction, and a myriad other things that need to be corrected in this society; and the last thing they need on top of all of that is being told that they're being mean for having a set of preferences. Helping lonely men achieve emotional and sexual satisfaction is going to take much more than socialization workshops; we need to dismantle the entire alpha-male paradigm and make all forms of masculinity visible and acceptable, and we also need to acknowledge that even socially inexpert men enjoy the privilege of being expected to initiate and set the course of romantic interaction. The entire PUA ideology is built on that flawed expectation. That is the opposite of helping.