I LOVE DANGER ZONE

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

Most “masked” autistics still show obvious, visible signs of autism that are either just slightly muted or channelled into a less obvious and more socially acceptable form. I could be accurately described as a high-masking autistic, but anyone who knows what autism looks like will immediately clock me.

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.

To repeat, "Why do men think gender roles are important?"

For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.

"Why do men specifically care so much about gender roles?"

I mean... the first half of that sentence is answering the second half.

For example... The fact that you talk about positive masculinity as being about guys wanting a version of being a good person that's not for girls.

And man, I am just fascinated by the sheer number of cults that float around a movement called "rationalism".

Quick critical thinking lesson:

Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?

Anybody who says something like this is trying to recruit you to a cult, sell you snake oil, or both, 100% of the time no exceptions.

"If I keep proving that I can guess which card you picked out of the deck, why would you ever bother to examine the deck?"

It's paywalled now, so I don't know if it was previewed for a while, or if I accidentally pressed the button that gave me my one free article, or what, but I did read the whole thing.

The executive summary is that, like a truly surprising number of people the George Floyd riots broke her brain, and she gravitated towards a neoreactionary discord because they were actually willing to listen about her feelings of stress about living in the St Paul Minneapolis region and not really knowing how to deal with the riots without calling her a racist.

I don't really care about that part, riots are scary, I've often found that, especially back then left-wingers had a tendency to psychoanalyze you and explain why you were making an argument from internalized racism or whatever and right-wingers were often more able to argue directly which is, honestly, easier to deal with. "You're wrong" is a more respectful and less disorienting way to argue than, "I bet so-and-so only thinks this way because he's secretly a conservative."

The real question, which she not only never addresses and in fact seems totally unaware of, is what the fuck Curtis Yarvin was even doing there.

According to Laurensen, both now and at the time she was obsessed with the fear that increasing polarization would lead to a civil war and the final collapse of the American government, and she is intensely patriotic.

So when Yarvin sent a message to the group saying he was looking for a new fiancee (???) she thought, in her words, "What's the worst that could happen?"

So, like... Your mental health is suffering because you're afraid that increasing polarization will lead to the collapse of the government, and you're wondering what is the worst thing that could happen if you get engaged to a man who is funded by billionaires with the explicit project of increasing political polarization until the US government collapses and is replaced by an authoritarian government?

I mean... like, just off the top of my head...

It's so weird, she even brings up the leopards eating faces cliche, and like, she seems put out by it and thinks it's unfair, but she also wrote this whole article where in the middle she says, essentially, "I was having nightmares about face eating leopards, and the danger they posed to the country, so when the head of the Face Eating Leopards Party asked for a fiancee, I thought, hey, why not?"

She's a really overly wordy writer, but she is so accidentally revealing that it almost comes off as a bit.

We need some sort of "Horseshoe but rotated 90 degrees theory" for this kind of thing, where you continuously talk about your centrism and then read Yarvin and go, "Sure, can't see anything wrong with this!"

In these kind of narratives, it's always hard for me to tell what's genuine naivetee and what's self-aggrandizing lies.

One thing I noticed very early on as a child was the way that Christians who claimed to have converted from militant atheism often seemed to have pretty much no grasp of the most common atheist arguments or skeptical culture.

And man, I am just fascinated by the sheer number of cults that float around a movement called "rationalism".

Quick critical thinking lesson:

Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?

Anybody who says something like this is trying to recruit you to a cult, sell you snake oil, or both, 100% of the time no exceptions.

"If I keep proving that I can guess which card you picked out of the deck, why would you ever bother to examine the deck?"

It's paywalled now, so I don't know if it was previewed for a while, or if I accidentally pressed the button that gave me my one free article, or what, but I did read the whole thing.

The executive summary is that, like a truly surprising number of people the George Floyd riots broke her brain, and she gravitated towards a neoreactionary discord because they were actually willing to listen about her feelings of stress about living in the St Paul Minneapolis region and not really knowing how to deal with the riots without calling her a racist.

I don't really care about that part, riots are scary, I've often found that, especially back then left-wingers had a tendency to psychoanalyze you and explain why you were making an argument from internalized racism or whatever and right-wingers were often more able to argue directly which is, honestly, easier to deal with. "You're wrong" is a more respectful and less disorienting way to argue than, "I bet so-and-so only thinks this way because he's secretly a conservative."

The real question, which she not only never addresses and in fact seems totally unaware of, is what the fuck Curtis Yarvin was even doing there.

According to Laurensen, both now and at the time she was obsessed with the fear that increasing polarization would lead to a civil war and the final collapse of the American government, and she is intensely patriotic.

So when Yarvin sent a message to the group saying he was looking for a new fiancee (???) she thought, in her words, "What's the worst that could happen?"

So, like... Your mental health is suffering because you're afraid that increasing polarization will lead to the collapse of the government, and you're wondering what is the worst thing that could happen if you get engaged to a man who is funded by billionaires with the explicit project of increasing political polarization until the US government collapses and is replaced by an authoritarian government?

I mean... like, just off the top of my head...

It's so weird, she even brings up the leopards eating faces cliche, and like, she seems put out by it and thinks it's unfair, but she also wrote this whole article where in the middle she says, essentially, "I was having nightmares about face eating leopards, and the danger they posed to the country, so when the head of the Face Eating Leopards Party asked for a fiancee, I thought, hey, why not?"

She's a really overly wordy writer, but she is so accidentally revealing that it almost comes off as a bit.

We need some sort of "Horseshoe but rotated 90 degrees theory" for this kind of thing, where you continuously talk about your centrism and then read Yarvin and go, "Sure, can't see anything wrong with this!"

In these kind of narratives, it's always hard for me to tell what's genuine naivetee and what's self-aggrandizing lies.

One thing I noticed very early on as a child was the way that Christians who claimed to have converted from militant atheism often seemed to have pretty much no grasp of the most common atheist arguments or skeptical culture.

And man, I am just fascinated by the sheer number of cults that float around a movement called "rationalism".

Quick critical thinking lesson:

Then Geoff posed a thought experiment: What if Tyler took a pill, then started floating off the ground, and touched down five minutes later — then would Tyler feel that he needed to use a scientific tool in order to trust his own observations? What if Tyler took another pill from the same jar, and the second time he took the pill he floated off the ground, then touched down five minutes later? How long would it take for Tyler to conclude that each pill made him float for five minutes?

Anybody who says something like this is trying to recruit you to a cult, sell you snake oil, or both, 100% of the time no exceptions.

"If I keep proving that I can guess which card you picked out of the deck, why would you ever bother to examine the deck?"

It's paywalled now, so I don't know if it was previewed for a while, or if I accidentally pressed the button that gave me my one free article, or what, but I did read the whole thing.

The executive summary is that, like a truly surprising number of people the George Floyd riots broke her brain, and she gravitated towards a neoreactionary discord because they were actually willing to listen about her feelings of stress about living in the St Paul Minneapolis region and not really knowing how to deal with the riots without calling her a racist.

I don't really care about that part, riots are scary, I've often found that, especially back then left-wingers had a tendency to psychoanalyze you and explain why you were making an argument from internalized racism or whatever and right-wingers were often more able to argue directly which is, honestly, easier to deal with. "You're wrong" is a more respectful and less disorienting way to argue than, "I bet so-and-so only thinks this way because he's secretly a conservative."

The real question, which she not only never addresses and in fact seems totally unaware of, is what the fuck Curtis Yarvin was even doing there.

According to Laurensen, both now and at the time she was obsessed with the fear that increasing polarization would lead to a civil war and the final collapse of the American government, and she is intensely patriotic.

So when Yarvin sent a message to the group saying he was looking for a new fiancee (???) she thought, in her words, "What's the worst that could happen?"

So, like... Your mental health is suffering because you're afraid that increasing polarization will lead to the collapse of the government, and you're wondering what is the worst thing that could happen if you get engaged to a man who is funded by billionaires with the explicit project of increasing political polarization until the US government collapses and is replaced by an authoritarian government?

I mean... like, just off the top of my head...

It's so weird, she even brings up the leopards eating faces cliche, and like, she seems put out by it and thinks it's unfair, but she also wrote this whole article where in the middle she says, essentially, "I was having nightmares about face eating leopards, and the danger they posed to the country, so when the head of the Face Eating Leopards Party asked for a fiancee, I thought, hey, why not?"

She's a really overly wordy writer, but she is so accidentally revealing that it almost comes off as a bit.

We need some sort of "Horseshoe but rotated 90 degrees theory" for this kind of thing, where you continuously talk about your centrism and then read Yarvin and go, "Sure, can't see anything wrong with this!"

In these kind of narratives, it's always hard for me to tell what's genuine naivetee and what's self-aggrandizing lies.

One thing I noticed very early on as a child was the way that Christians who claimed to have converted from militant atheism often seemed to have pretty much no grasp of the most common atheist arguments or skeptical culture.

2. When the demons speak to each other, they are acting

And sure, it has uncomfortable and direct links to real life fascist thought, but at least it's done in a way that will make most of the conflicts of the show incredibly boring and pointless and that make you think the writers don't pay attention to their own characters.

Like, if people had reacted to it like they react to Goblin Slayer that's one thing, but people acted like it was a good show for so long!

Fundamentally, I disagree with the idea that "How do the characters react to the fact that nits really do make lice" is interesting. I think it's actually quite dull.

I do find it a little frustrating to talk about because people keep fitting it into some kind of generic left-wing objection about "evil races" when my actual problem is that this specific instance is bad.

The other thing is that, I had the same experience @thahxa had, which is that after like a decade of super woke people picking apart every TV show imaginable Frieren just straight-up copies plot points from The Iron Dream and people mostly didn't even bring it up!

I found it deeply disorienting when something that was been sold as a pastoral show about contemplation and relationships suddenly turned into Lord of the fucking Swastika.

The reason the Demons come off as fascist is not because they are inherently evil, or whatever, it's that...

Okay, the first demon we see is kind of just a guy. The next demons are:

An abandoned child which is taken into a village and treated like one of the villagers until its Demon nature inevitably emerges and it starts killing people and has to be put down like the dog it is, like they should have done in the first place.

A demon diplomatic envoy, who trick the humans by pretending that the war caused them grief and loss, when in reality the demon doesn't put the same high price on life as the westerner

They pretend to be moral patients in order to trick others into thinking that they can be integrated into society, when in reality they are always only looking out for their own kind and will betray any society that they are part of the first chance they get. The bleeding hearts who try to act like they are people are simply putting society in danger, so we need people with the strength of character to do what must be done to them regardless of what they say or do.

And, like, sorry, I know that this isn't strictly limited to fascist thought but it sure is at least fascist-adjacent.

2. When the demons speak to each other, they are acting

And sure, it has uncomfortable and direct links to real life fascist thought, but at least it's done in a way that will make most of the conflicts of the show incredibly boring and pointless and that make you think the writers don't pay attention to their own characters.

Like, if people had reacted to it like they react to Goblin Slayer that's one thing, but people acted like it was a good show for so long!

Fundamentally, I disagree with the idea that "How do the characters react to the fact that nits really do make lice" is interesting. I think it's actually quite dull.

I do find it a little frustrating to talk about because people keep fitting it into some kind of generic left-wing objection about "evil races" when my actual problem is that this specific instance is bad.

The other thing is that, I had the same experience @thahxa had, which is that after like a decade of super woke people picking apart every TV show imaginable Frieren just straight-up copies plot points from The Iron Dream and people mostly didn't even bring it up!

I found it deeply disorienting when something that was been sold as a pastoral show about contemplation and relationships suddenly turned into Lord of the fucking Swastika.

The reason the Demons come off as fascist is not because they are inherently evil, or whatever, it's that...

Okay, the first demon we see is kind of just a guy. The next demons are:

An abandoned child which is taken into a village and treated like one of the villagers until its Demon nature inevitably emerges and it starts killing people and has to be put down like the dog it is, like they should have done in the first place.

A demon diplomatic envoy, who trick the humans by pretending that the war caused them grief and loss, when in reality the demon doesn't put the same high price on life as the westerner

They pretend to be moral patients in order to trick others into thinking that they can be integrated into society, when in reality they are always only looking out for their own kind and will betray any society that they are part of the first chance they get. The bleeding hearts who try to act like they are people are simply putting society in danger, so we need people with the strength of character to do what must be done to them regardless of what they say or do.

And, like, sorry, I know that this isn't strictly limited to fascist thought but it sure is at least fascist-adjacent.

#but i think the most interesting thing about freien is how polarizing it is#people are either having this ^ experience#or rolling their eyes at “elf grandma cleanses the undesirables”

Seriously, what show were all of you guys watching.

This is gonna sound weird, but I think that show has its head up its own ass the same way Rick and Morty does.

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

is a perfect encapsulation of my beef with R&M. As much as the show nominally shows Rick suffering in various ways, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s written by and for the kind of 2013 redditor who thinks “asshole genius” is the most aspirational archetype ever

As far as Frieren goes, I’m not gonna touch the demon stuff. That’s a discourse that’s been beaten to death many times over by people more eloquent than I am.

Anyway, I don’t think Frieren is about “oh, woe is me, I’m so special and superior that I’m lonely” I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle. Many of us drift apart from the loved ones of our youth, but they aren’t literally dead forever, just missing from our lives.

I could see how people feel that it’s about thinking you’re superior and ending up lonely, but I think it’s more about just being checked out from your life and failing to notice time passing. Whether that’s depression, preoccupation with a hobby, or whatever other reason.

That idea of aging and realizing the world has moved around you while you failed to maintain connections with others really hits me hard. And the wish fulfillment fantasy is “what if you could have a second try at adventures with a new social circle, and the chance to hang on to those connections this time”.

Like, a lot of us go to college, have adventures with our little squad, and sometimes various things happen and suddenly you’re 30, your friends have moved on with their lives and you’ve got nothing to show for it. Just a 21 year old in an aging body.

I reached out to a close friend from college recently, and she was happy to hear from me, but it feels weird. She’s a year older than I am, and she got married eight years ago, I think. She and her husband have a little place together, and a growing toddler daughter, and are getting their careers solidified.

I moved back in with my parents and work a variety of freelance jobs, lots of manual labor. I haven’t been on a date in years because I’m still shy like when I was 22, but now I’m also self conscious about my visible signs of aging and I’m no longer hot enough for drunk women at bars to shoot the first shot my way. And there’s still a voice in my head like “lock-in on the gym now, and you’ll be able to rock it out at the festivals this summer/fall”. Like, embarrassing levels of millennial/Z cusp Peter Pan shit

As much as I love reconnecting with one of my best friends, it feels weird to say “yeah, I’m still just trying to get things started, but this’ll be my year” for yet another year in a row.

The idea of being able to go back and do my youth over again, but actually keep in touch with people and not allowing myself to float away from the world is very compelling.

On a level that isn’t about me and my specific hang ups, I think a lot of people are just connecting to the way Frieren explores the passage of time. Things like the demons and the elves moving through the world at very different speeds than the humans do, or the ultimately powerful techniques of the old world being simply commonplace attack magic in the modern era.

I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle.

In order to say something real, or meaningful about this kind of thing, even in the way sitcoms and shonen anime address real topics, as a writer you'd have to understand that in some way the solution to this is reaching outside yourself.

But not only is Frieren more wise, potent and powerful than the people around her, many of the people around her are literally NPCs, and part of what makes her smarter than everyone else is that the dummies think there is something to be gained by treating the demons as moral patients and attempting to extend some understanding to them, Frieren herself understands that this is a mistake, and the actual proper attitude is to only consider what danger and inconvenience they pose to you, to start treating them instrumentally rather than as moral patients.

Which, you know, just kills dead your ability to say anything at all about that sort of solipsism and withdrawal from the world, because now you're saying that those impulses are actually good most of the time.

2. When the demons speak to each other, they are acting

And sure, it has uncomfortable and direct links to real life fascist thought, but at least it's done in a way that will make most of the conflicts of the show incredibly boring and pointless and that make you think the writers don't pay attention to their own characters.

Like, if people had reacted to it like they react to Goblin Slayer that's one thing, but people acted like it was a good show for so long!

Fundamentally, I disagree with the idea that "How do the characters react to the fact that nits really do make lice" is interesting. I think it's actually quite dull.

I do find it a little frustrating to talk about because people keep fitting it into some kind of generic left-wing objection about "evil races" when my actual problem is that this specific instance is bad.

The other thing is that, I had the same experience @thahxa had, which is that after like a decade of super woke people picking apart every TV show imaginable Frieren just straight-up copies plot points from The Iron Dream and people mostly didn't even bring it up!

I found it deeply disorienting when something that was been sold as a pastoral show about contemplation and relationships suddenly turned into Lord of the fucking Swastika.

#but i think the most interesting thing about freien is how polarizing it is#people are either having this ^ experience#or rolling their eyes at “elf grandma cleanses the undesirables”

Seriously, what show were all of you guys watching.

This is gonna sound weird, but I think that show has its head up its own ass the same way Rick and Morty does.

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

"Oh gosh, isn't it so very hard to be objectively way better and more important than all the other people around me? I'm so very tortured by the way my absolute superiority to all other people has isolated me from the common man, woe is me, truly there is great pathos here!"

is a perfect encapsulation of my beef with R&M. As much as the show nominally shows Rick suffering in various ways, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s written by and for the kind of 2013 redditor who thinks “asshole genius” is the most aspirational archetype ever

As far as Frieren goes, I’m not gonna touch the demon stuff. That’s a discourse that’s been beaten to death many times over by people more eloquent than I am.

Anyway, I don’t think Frieren is about “oh, woe is me, I’m so special and superior that I’m lonely” I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle. Many of us drift apart from the loved ones of our youth, but they aren’t literally dead forever, just missing from our lives.

I could see how people feel that it’s about thinking you’re superior and ending up lonely, but I think it’s more about just being checked out from your life and failing to notice time passing. Whether that’s depression, preoccupation with a hobby, or whatever other reason.

That idea of aging and realizing the world has moved around you while you failed to maintain connections with others really hits me hard. And the wish fulfillment fantasy is “what if you could have a second try at adventures with a new social circle, and the chance to hang on to those connections this time”.

Like, a lot of us go to college, have adventures with our little squad, and sometimes various things happen and suddenly you’re 30, your friends have moved on with their lives and you’ve got nothing to show for it. Just a 21 year old in an aging body.

I reached out to a close friend from college recently, and she was happy to hear from me, but it feels weird. She’s a year older than I am, and she got married eight years ago, I think. She and her husband have a little place together, and a growing toddler daughter, and are getting their careers solidified.

I moved back in with my parents and work a variety of freelance jobs, lots of manual labor. I haven’t been on a date in years because I’m still shy like when I was 22, but now I’m also self conscious about my visible signs of aging and I’m no longer hot enough for drunk women at bars to shoot the first shot my way. And there’s still a voice in my head like “lock-in on the gym now, and you’ll be able to rock it out at the festivals this summer/fall”. Like, embarrassing levels of millennial/Z cusp Peter Pan shit

As much as I love reconnecting with one of my best friends, it feels weird to say “yeah, I’m still just trying to get things started, but this’ll be my year” for yet another year in a row.

The idea of being able to go back and do my youth over again, but actually keep in touch with people and not allowing myself to float away from the world is very compelling.

On a level that isn’t about me and my specific hang ups, I think a lot of people are just connecting to the way Frieren explores the passage of time. Things like the demons and the elves moving through the world at very different speeds than the humans do, or the ultimately powerful techniques of the old world being simply commonplace attack magic in the modern era.

I think it’s about the idea of making mistakes and ending up drifting apart from your friends, filtered through the metaphor of a quasi-immortal elf to make the point more broadly unsubtle.

In order to say something real, or meaningful about this kind of thing, even in the way sitcoms and shonen anime address real topics, as a writer you'd have to understand that in some way the solution to this is reaching outside yourself.

But not only is Frieren more wise, potent and powerful than the people around her, many of the people around her are literally NPCs, and part of what makes her smarter than everyone else is that the dummies think there is something to be gained by treating the demons as moral patients and attempting to extend some understanding to them, Frieren herself understands that this is a mistake, and the actual proper attitude is to only consider what danger and inconvenience they pose to you, to start treating them instrumentally rather than as moral patients.

Which, you know, just kills dead your ability to say anything at all about that sort of solipsism and withdrawal from the world, because now you're saying that those impulses are actually good most of the time.