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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • When your parents say, “did you talk to any of them,” they mean did you strike up a conversation with a woman with no presumption of potential romantic outcome.

    When you say it, it seems like you’re assuming there’s a potential for a romantic outcome in every conversation between heterosexual men and women.

    Your goal should be to strike up a conversation with a woman about random topics of interest, including very shallow ones, with no expectation that you’re evaluating her as a potential mate, and she’s not evaluating you.

    Yes, we’re all subject to intrusive thoughts so from time to time, you’ll fail at this goal and start thinking about a romantic path. That’s fine. Just acknowledge it to yourself and endeavor to do better.

    It will probably take time and practice. Give yourself grace to try and fail and learn. You’ll know you’re succeeding when you realize you had a conversation with a woman without her gender being a consequential thought in your mind.













  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoAnarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comDavid Graeber birthday
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    5 months ago

    every example of “monkey considering monkey stranger” was “bad monkey.” That is the forest of this article: we’re good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.

    but that’s not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.

    again I agree that we don’t think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don’t give them the level of consideration we should. we don’t live up to the golden rule all the time.

    but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.


  • my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.

    For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

    I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.


  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoAnarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comDavid Graeber birthday
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    5 months ago

    it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of “people i know well enough to fully humanize” and “all other humans.”

    I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we’ve built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.

    The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author’s premise.

    Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.

    AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are “defectors” (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.