Sarcasmancer's page

Maybe not, but people get over foot and joint problems by changing the way they walk.

Once again, I'm really not sure where you're trying to go with this argument.

My point, in replying to Kryzbyn, was that mental illnesses are still medical problems. Humanity may be better at treating diseases of the body than it is at treating diseases of the mind, but that doesn't make them less valid.

Your reply, apparently, was to say 'Well, we treat some mental problems differently.' That's, frankly, obvious. I didn't say 'all' or even 'the majority'. I said there exist multiple examples. Your statement does not undermine my point, nor the statement I made. Nor does it seem to be trying to agree, since it is a question. It is a non-sequitor disguised as a rhetorical question. If you HAD quoted my whole post (even if you removed Kryzbyn's post to avoid an ever-growing wall of replies), it would have been obviously nonsensical. This drives me to the conclusion that you chose what you did deliberately.

I wasn't trying to argue "validity" of it. It's entirely possible that I merely misunderstood you, for which I apologize. There's no need to cast aspersion at my motives.

@Hitdice I'm in the US. I'm thinking specifically about things like court-ordered AA / Rehab. Where basically the law is stepping in and pseudo-diagnosing people and prescribing treatment. Like as in "You got in an accident and had a certain level of alcohol in your bloodstream, therefore you are an addict and need addiction treatment." Which logic would not apply in the case of, e.g., food poisoning.

EDIT: But I am not speaking from personal experience. So I welcome the experiences of any who might be.

@Ross Byers I'm not trying to quote out of context I'm trying to avoid walls and walls of text and endless quotes of quotes of quotes. You said you don't understand how mental disease is different from regular old disease in this context, I attempted to explain. Nobody gets over emphysema by changing the way they think about breathing. Right?

The thing is, the classification of"addict" removes the possibility of a one time occurrence/accident definitionally, you see?

I understand that which is why it's problematic, if you're going to say everybody who comes in with drugs in their system is an addict and must be treated as such. I feel like the law, and often the "recovery" industry / establishment, lacks that distinction(not any individuals in this thread, who are all very sophisticated and nuanced in their thinking).

Lots of mental disorders are treated by drugs, surgeries, and other medical procedures.

There are some that are better treated by cognitive therapy because they are errors in cognition / mental processes rather than identifiable physical or chemical imbalances in the brain itself.

Of course in the end it's all chemicals, but you understand what I mean?

@Irontruth nobody said anything about "invisible skyman." Lots of people - motivation irrelevant - argue that a particular lifestyle results in unhappiness, legal consequences, health consequences, and sometimes activity of dubious morality or legality. If the lifestyle is being gay, society says, nothing wrong with that. If the lifestyle is using drugs, society says, there is something wrong with you, you're an addict and need medical treatment (or you're a criminal and need incarceration). And in fact, people who are anti-gay do indeed often make that argument, they find it persuasive, they would-if-they-could have it enshrined in law for the same reason that all these punitive measures against drug users are enshrined in law.

You can see how the same logic could apply in one situation as the other, yes? Even if it currently doesn't under the prevailing current social / cultural climate?

It shouldn't be necessary for me to advertise that my opinion is there's nothing wrong with being gay for you to be able to evaluate that statement.

And my apologies for violating my earlier orders to "shut up about homosexuality", I do so dislike disobeying orders from my superiors but in this case I had to explain myself to Irontruth.

Start a thread to complain about over-moderation in the thread complaining about over-moderation.

I've never found conversations where someone is playing Devil's Advocate, just to play Devil's Advocate, to be particularly fruitful. It's as useful as declaring "all of reality could just be a program fed to my brain, which is really in a jar some where". It doesn't really take the conversation any where interesting OR useful.

I disagree!

Seriously, you don't think there's any benefit in having your thinking challenged or critiqued?

@ Ross Byers I'm interested in people thinking out their conclusions thoroughly, I noted what I thought was an inconsistency / cognitive dissonance. As is typical of such inconsistencies, the dichotomy was (surprise!) one conclusion is socially acceptable to express ("nothing wrong with gay people!") and one conclusion less so ("using drugs doesn't mean you're an addict who needs treatment!").

And, not surprisingly, the social signaling has aligned in just such a way, with everybody helpfully telling me how wrong my opinions are, because even though I agree with them, I had the temerity to report the existence and opinions of people who do not.

@Irontruth and others - it's relevant what "people" argue / believe / think when you're talking about something with political dimensions. If you're going to start treating every trivial "addiction" as a disease, you have to consider the legal and political ramifications of that decision, i.e. involuntary commitment. As previously alluded. Actual objective reality is not decided by consensus, but political and legal reality can be, even (horrors!) in contravention to the truth.

And I would think it was obvious from my example re: drinking bleach is - when someone drinks bleach, you don't say "this person is a bleach drinker", as though it were a pathology, you say, "this is a person who has drunk bleach," as though it was a one-time occurrence/accident.

Standard Disclaimers: I hope this clears it up, I know I'm inarticulate at times, don't bear anyone any malice.

Sarcasmancy!

& Jerry Lee Lewis. What august company!

@Man in Black you don't seem especially receptive to people who disagree with you even when they do so only rhetorically. My guess is you're looking for a fight (or a chance to signal) more than an actual discussion. Or "debate" as implied in the title of the thread. And so, as Paul Harvey would say... good day.

...come to your house and burn one of your favorite things and make you eat the ashes.

le mot juste

The difference between homosexuality and drug addiction is that homosexuality won't kill you stone dead, through physiological causes or self-destructive behavior.

Couple relevant Google searches will show that plenty of people use drugs without being killed by them and plenty of people willing to argue that homosexuality is a lifestyle that results in poor health or death. I don't agree with the argument but it's been made and really it's a matter of degree. Everybody eventually dies from something.

At least part of the "self-destructive behavior" in both cases is a result of societal and legal factors inhibiting and stigmatizing the person who engages in the original behavior.

Misleading a person or taking advantage of known cognitive biases and missteps =/= reprogramming their brain like a robot. Give me a break.

There's such a thing as involuntary commitment, especially if a person is ruled to be a threat to others or to refuse treatment that's in their own best interest. Of course that relies on a third party to neutrally arbitrate to a person what's in their own best interest.

I agree with your comparisons between homosexuality and addiction (though I disagree that wanting to cure/brainwash somebody out of homosexuality makes them your "willing slave") and hopefully you can see where I'm coming from when I say that I see it as problematic that law/society can (more or less arbitrarily) dictate that some partially genetic/partially behavioral "problems" are "illnesses" that require "treatment" and others are socially acceptable.

It's in the eye of the beholder. In our culture we (rightly, I think) do not regard homosexuality as a dangerous aberrant addiction that needs to be cured but the same is not true of certain other lifestyle choices and I think that's something that can be fruitfully questioned and examined. As happens in this thread ;)

@Man in Black I didn't specify they did it intentionally. Nobody ever accidentally drank poison? (Maybe I shouldn't have used bleach as the example).

Re: "cockamamie definition" If I'm reading you correctly (correct me please if I am) part of your argument is that addiction ought to be defined, for treatment purposes, as a disease when that is not necessarily the case?

@Hitdice not saying it shouldn't be treated as medically, what Man in Black seems to be saying (correct me if I'm misreading) is that, maybe addiction isn't an illness, but we should treat it as if it is because there are positive add-on effects of doing so.

Which seems to be problematic. Why not treat poverty as an illness and have all the poor rounded up to be "treated"? More effective than letting them rot in the streets, right? What other social ills could we dispense of by reclassifying them as illnesses?

@Man in Black why I prefaced with "devil's advocate". The condition is (a) congenital (b) natural (c) unlikely to be cured and (d) might have negative effects. Yes? Why is it intrinsically wrong for a parent to offer money if somebody can cure the child of this condition?

@Man in Black just trying to understand your argument

@Hitdice obviously but you don't treat a problem as a disease when it's not. If a person drinks bleach you don't treat that as a disease in the sense that you treat someone with throat cancer as having a disease.

@Shouting Off Mountain - devil's advocate: How is that any different from offering 120 million to somebody to cure your daughter of a congenital illness? Especially if it's one with no known cure?

I don't know that you can treat all "addiction" as one phenomenon

EDIT: Sorry I'm coming into this thread late, this may have already been addressed and you might have made it clear you're only talking about certain addictions

@Man in Black If addiction is treated as a disease because it's the "only practical way to improve the lives of people who are addicted and the only way to do anything about drug problems long-term" why not treat poverty as a disease too?

My understanding is that, under the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution of the United States, contracts entered into legally under the laws of one state are enforceable even in state jurisdictions where the contract would not otherwise be legal.

That is not, strictly speaking, true (cf. gay marriage) but it is mostly true in the case of marrying people who would be underage in your state of residence, or marrying your cousin where that would be prohibited in your state of residence.

Possibly relevant link. I have noticed that a lot of Australians seem fond of harping on how much better they are than the US. Not noticed as much in the Irish though.

There's some kind of pun to be made somewhere in there, maybe with the word "harping" or the expression "getting your Irish up". Help yourself.

@Mattastrophic Actually reading this thread I did wonder if it was on the mind of the developer(s).

But how are people supposed to register their unrelenting irrational hatred of a person they've never met?

EDITED thanks for the catch, Kryzbyn

@OP if it wasn't intended to be pointless nationalistic pissing contest, why bother to identify the athletes by their nationality at all?

It annoys me because that isn't the point of the Olympics...

There's a point to the Olympics?

Old Cults eh?

Is it appropriate to start a thread to mock one particular poster?

RE: usage of "queer" and whether it is or is not derogatory- that's the problem with the heckler's veto, different people have different values and different standards, and it would be unfair to hold everyone to the strictest possible standards because of the one person who purports to hold them. It shouldn't be possible to shut down a reasonable discussion just on the basis of concern trolling.

I don't envy Paizo moderators for having to wade through a sea of posts trying to find a reasonable compromise for what's unnecessarily rude and what isn't.

The grapes are probably sour, anyway.

I hope you guys that object to tips don't find out about sales tax...

That is why I specifically requested not to hear from people in other countries. I know tipping customs are different elsewhere. For instance: I don't know how accurate this is, but I've heard that in Soviet Russia, the server tips you.

I think this probably has less to do with the job involving tips, and more to do with the fact that serving is generally seen as unskilled work that can be quickly trained up and for which the demand remains fairly steady, all of which contribute to low job security.

...which is going to be true of most jobs that are tipped, yes? I wasn't a high-priced gigolo, I was a delivery driver.

Oh brother, Werebat, if you want to learn more about religion you can take a course or read a book. This is a forum for Pathfinder; the fact that some people obsessively bring up politics or religion in every conversation, on every subject, is their damage.

I didn't realize this was going to be so volatile but in retrospect I probably should have known better.

Also, I got fired from the job where I was getting tipped. So that's the other great thing about being a tipped worker, no job security ;)

I got fired from one of my jobs.

/hula dance

It's like saying you don't think people should be allowed to charge for food so you just steal.

I LOL'd. They just dine-n-dash. Then hop on internet messageboards to tell everybody how they justify it to themselves because the farmers are underpaid. They're stickin' it to the man!

@ Orthos me either, I'm glad I didn't because it would be an embarrassing situation to have somebody confront me about my illegal activities and also depriving them of a tip!

EDIT: That still doesn't make much sense to me. So if you're getting 10.00 in gas you would tip ten cents??? If you give em a whole quarter do they bite the coin to make sure it's real? "Thanks, mister!"

@ ShiningFool, NobodysHome - this is exactly what I would have expected. Unless you're Paris Hilton or something, you don't very often interact with concierges and bellhops. So it's natural you would be unaccustomed to the tipping etiquette. So my guess would have been that if you spent your childhood not eating out in restaurants or whatever, you might be ignorant of tipping (or maybe not, you might see it on TV or something). But evidently this is not the case.

@Orthos my understanding is that in some states it is illegal to pump your own gas.

See here I had suspected there would be more people who were simply unaware of etiquette, but apparently of all the responses I'm getting from people who don't tip, they're all doing it for some ideological reason (either to punish the server for poor service or to punish the restaurant for exploiting the server, or whatever) rather than out of simple ignorance.

Not what I expected but very interesting nonetheless.

@Eirikrautha I think all that is irrelevant in a fantasy world where there are several objectively real gods which have objectively differing viewpoints, but any of them seems as valid an object of worship as any other. The Riddle of Epicurus doesn't have much meaning when it's never been claimed that the god in question is neither all-powerful nor all-good.

@Shining Fool I think a person's true character is revealed in crisis. As you say it is indeed easy for everyone to sit around parroting the sentiments that they know are socially acceptable, it's different entirely what goes on when nobody is watching and there is actual personal risk involved.

You don't deserve a pat on the back for being good when society in general rewards good and punishes evil. All this stuff about good being more difficult or having no reward except for its own sake, is nonsense.

@Buri "voting with your wallet" in this case would be not going to restaurants, rather than going and paying for the food but refusing to pay the gratuity. The only person that hurts is not the person in charge of the perceived injustice.

@Orthos I don't think it's religious people per se but rather the after-church Sunday crowd. My theory is that because (a) it's a regular, weekly thing and (b) they just "gave at the office", so to speak, at church - these people may be less inclined to tip, or to tip on the low end of the scale if they do.

As far as Dev intent goes, while I have never gamed with them personally, I get the impression they don't play in the hyper-optimized games that seem to be the standard here on the Internet. I think they leave options like this in the game so people can choose what style of game they prefer.

This is a good point. I feel that there are -certain games- that ended up the way they are because they reflect too much the idiosyncratic playstyles of people who sit around playing the same game, with the same group of people and the same "culture", all the time.

@Buri I'm sure they appreciate that they are being stiffed because of political ideology and not out of mere rudeness or cheapness.