Big Big Question

Sure, the US financial market is kind of collapsing, but let’s talk about more human debt. Who do you owe, and why? Did someone do you a solid? Is there any IOU in your life that you particularly value?

Take spammer Stephen Sanchez, iProfile shill, who (round of applause here) is the first person to try sockpuppet spam on the Big Big Question.

Steve-o posted a (bizarrely practical!) question about resumes and then thoughtfully answered it himself under a different account, couched in a fictional happy discovery of a great new resource blah blah blah etc.

So, here’s the dilemma: Stephen had to have (a) found the site, (b) discerned that it was, indeed, a question-and-answer resource of some sort, and (c) had the wherewithal to bother with a two-account sockpuppet show — all of which are arguments toward having some notion of what you’re on about, at least — and yet the end result was so baldly, embarrassingly obvious that any credit lent above is revoked with prejudice.

While this sort of spam may be new to the BBQ, it’s old hat at mefi and has been running wild on the net for a good long time. So there’s a culture for it to fester in — one of naivety or indifference or even encouragement in some places. In that case, rather than raw stupidity being to blame, is it that this unchallenging environment has made otherwise bright, attentitive stars of the die-in-a-fire spam-and-shill sector lazy?

I’m also willing to accept “all of the above” as an answer.

As the world changes around us, we tend to get used to the “new”; this is especially true of those who are younger, and never really knew the “old”. Over time, this leads to a situation where it may be difficult to imagine having to live in a world without the things we today take for granted.

With that in mind, the question I pose is a simple one: what recent advancement has “spoiled” you, to the point where you simply cannot imagine having to live in a world where it did not exist?

This does not have to be limited to tech toys and gadgets; it could be social, political, or really anything you could imagine. If pressed for a definition of “recent”, I would say “within 10 years of your date of birth”; so, within your own lifetime, or close to it.

So what is it for you?

How do you handle panhandlers? Do you give cash? Do you feel guilty about it, either way? Are you actually helping, or just enabling, and is that a bad thing?

I’ve noticed a big difference between people: some people (most people?) think of themselves and others as part of a team; others don’t. For me, it’s been very tough to bridge this difference. The two frameworks seem incompatible.

By teams, I mean categories like male, female, black, white, American and so on.

I don’t identify with any of them. Of course, I know I’m male, white and American. But I don’t in any way feel part of a team that includes other’s “like me.”

I know it’s easier to feel like a member if you’ve been persecuted, and people-like-me tend to be privileged. Yet I was horribly persecuted as a child. Why? Because I was a geek. I was a geek (nerd, whatever) in the 70s, before it had any cache. I had few friends, I was picked on, I was bullied, etc. This went on for about ten years of my life. I’m also Jewish, and I come from a family rife with Holocaust stories. I lived with deep feelings of unworthiness, shame and anger every day.

But I don’t consider myself part of the geek team; nor the Jew team. And traveling abroad didn’t make me feel part of the American team.

Yet I’m not disconnected from other people. I care deeply about friends and family. I care about people I’ve forged relationships with. I feel a part of that specific group. But not part of some larger group that includes tons of people I’ve never met. (Which doesn’t mean I never help strangers. It’s perfectly easy to help people who aren’t part of your team.)

Okay. That’s me. I don’t feel superior to people who feel otherwise. I’m sure it’s better to belong than not to. So if anything, I’m a little jealous.

Putting that aside, my main question is about teamists and non-teamists relating. Recently, I was part of a discussion about sexism. I made a point (that I’ve made here, in another thread), that many men I know are ashamed by their sexuality.

A woman remarked, “How is that my problem? Why should women be responsible for men’s sexual problems?” Now, I can understand why a woman might feel this way. And I worked hard to explain that I certainly didn’t think men’s sexual problems were an excuse for mistreating women. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was dividing the world up into two teams, men and women, and that she was essentially saying something like, “If there’s a problem in Chicago, why should the New York Mayor’s Office try to fix it?”

At one point, she even suggested that men should talk to other men about their problems — not to women.

Now, if I’m having a problem, it would never occur to me to seek out “men.” I would simply seek out a friend, male or female.

But I’ve had many conversations like this. They tend to get stuck. I can’t get inside the team mindset. The other person can’t get outside it.

Has anyone here ever had any luck bridging that gap?

If you’re a teamist, how does it feel when you come across someone like me? Do you think I’m weird? Damaged? Lying? Eccentric? What? Is it possible for you to see me as a person, and not as part of some team?

Let me be really clear and state that I absolutely notice race and gender. I’m not claiming that I see a woman and just think “person.” I’m not claiming I see a black guy and just think “guy” or “human being.”

I’m claiming that to me, there’s a huge difference between female and Member Of The Woman Club; and a black man, to me, is definitely black skinned (or brown or whatever). He’s just not necessarily a member of the Black Team.

I am often guilty of minimizing the role of “culture” in the people around me.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in my 40s, and there are tons of ways I wish my life were different: I wish I was richer for one thing, and if I’d taken a different career path in my 20s, I probably would be. But that doesn’t make me feel like I wasted my youth. Truth is, I don’t think about my youth much. I’m too caught up in the good and the bad of right now.

This week,. two twenty-somethings asked AskMe-relationship questions which took the form of, “I love my partner, but the relationship is dull, sexually. If I say with her, will I wind up regretting that I wasted my youth?”

I’m tempted to write, “It doesn’t work that way. When you’re 30, 40 and 50, you don’t look back and lament all the things you never did. You’re too busy being 45, fighting with your boss, kissing your kids, watching DVDs… whatever. You’re more worried about where you’ll be five years from now than where you were you were ten years ago.

“I would like to travel around the world, and I’ll probably never get to do it. I’m married, I have a job, etc. It makes me sad, but I think about it as ‘I’ll probably never get to do it.’ Which is upsetting. But I don’t think of it as ‘I squandered my chance,’ even if that is somehow true. The past is the past.

“And even things I did do in the past don’t thrill me all that much now. Yes, I drove across the country; yes, I went to Europe… So? That was fun at the time. What am I supposed to do about it now? Bask in the memories? They’re fading. They’re like chapters in a book that I’ve already read. They’re way less potent than stuff I’m doing now and stuff I’m worried about — or looking forward to — in the future.”

But I don’t write that, because maybe I’m just quirky this way. Maybe I just happen to dwell on the present (and the future). Maybe that’s just my temperament. Maybe other people are more nostalgic.

What do you think? What makes someone a past person, a present person, or a future person?

Say you were spending one night in a haunted inn that is located at the center of an ancient English stone circle. Supposing that ghosts, spirits, and so on exist, what would you do, say, or bring to provoke an encounter?

I’m sure there are some people out there who are confused about whether they’re attractive or not. But I bet most of us have a gut-level feeling about our looks.

It doesn’t matter (to this question) whether our feelings are based in reality or not (whether there’s such a thing as objective beauty is a subject for another question). I’m just interested in hearing from people who consider themselves — who feel themselves to be — attractive.

It may be hard for such people to fess up, because doing so sounds conceited. But I’m hoping that at least some people will get over this. I’d really love to hear thoughtful answers.

As for me, I’ve never felt attractive. Let me clarify that a little. I’ve certainly felt that specific people have liked the way I look. And that felt good. And it might have even briefly made me feel attractive. But still, at my core, I never felt that their assessment was correct. I’ve never been able to sustain the feeling that I’m attractive.

At worst I feel ugly. At best, I feel average. I’m a little ashamed to admit this (though I doubt my confession will surprise anyone), but my self-assessment has had a huge impact on my life. Not a day goes by when I don’t, at least once, think about my (lack of) looks. I compare myself with other people (and usually come off the worst); I covet other people’s beauty; etc.

Even unrelated traits tie into my body image. Instead of thinking, “I’m smart,” I think, “Well, at least I’m smart.”

I’m not trying to garner pity. Truth is, in my 40s, all this stuff bothers me much less than it did when I was younger. But I can’t deny that it had a significant role in shaping who I am, how I relate to others, and how I feel about myself.

There’s tons of literature about people like me. But I never hear the other side. I’m really curious about what it’s like to have a general feeling that you’re attractive. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I wonder how it would impact a person’s life.

Please note that I’m not talking about “how good it feels when my boyfriend tells me I’m good looking” or “how charged I get when the ladies look my way.” I can understand that. I’m talking about a general, every-day feeling: what you think about yourself when no one’s there and you look in the mirror. And how that affects you.

Women, what things do you wish men widely or more commonly knew about womankind? Men, what things do you wish women widely or more commonly knew about mankind? What misperceptions do you think the opposite gender has about your own that you’d wish would be corrected?

I recently read a book which included an argument that the story of human history was our desire to impose power and control structures over each other - men over women, the rich over the poor, etc. Since my Master’s work focused on this type of topic (the nature of power structures that society uses, and how they are changed), this argument really resonated with me.

What I found interesting was the statement in the book that we will not know our true nature as a species until we are free of these structures. Which lead me to wonder - is it not our nature as a species to create them? Can we ever be free of structures like these, or is it “hard-wired” into us, that we must create methods that give some group more power than others?

Is doing something repulsive well a valuable kind of art? What merit do you see (or not see) in refined, skillful ugliness in graphic art, music, writing? Does a mastery of something unpleasant make it more reprehensible, or subvert its reprehensibility, or both?

What piece of art (door wide open for what qualifies) has most struck you relevant to these questions? What has caught your eye, or makes your point?

If you could change the country where you were born and raised, would you? I’m not talkin’ about being born and moving to another country as a baby. If you could change your birth place and culture, would you? If so, where would you rather have been born and raised? And why would you change it?

Everybody’s got a mother, and everybody knows yo mama jokes. They’re classics but they’re also fight-starters — yeah, it’s just a joke, but you better not talk about my momma, etc.

Why are the reactions to these jokes so complicated? What makes yo mama jokes funny, and what makes them offensive, and how do those things overlap?

Humans seem to like to give advice. Some more than others (Mary Worth, we salute you), but at the base of it it seems more or less universal. It’s also free, in theory, and valued accordingly. But!

But sometimes advice isn’t just as good as you paid for it. Sometimes it’s bad. Really bad.

So what’s the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?

It’s a bad cliche and a weekly truth for folks working on a M-F schedule: nobody likes Monday. The weekend is over, the workweek recommences; things left dangling on Friday have to be caught back up with; next weekend could literally not be further away.

But is the notion of Monday’s badness — so celebrated (and is this a distinctly American thing? Distinctly Western?) in pop culture — something we collectively trump up and colloborate on just to have something to get together against? Is Monday made better for us by an unspoken agreement to see it as awful?

How would our world be different if mankind never developed a concept of clothing — and was, in other words, a naked world?

Not intended to be horndoggy, although I understand it comes across that way and I’m blushing a bit. A throwaway line in TNG: Beyond Honor, by Peter David, prompted the thought. As the author speaking in third person omniscient, David is not exactly subtle in his appreciations of Jeri Ryan’s, er, charms. References are scattered in many areas throughout the book, but one particularly funny reference to it is where he has Seven of Nine musing to a rogue starship pilot about how she doesn’t see a need for clothing, but that Janeway had explained to her how it was needed in non-Borg culture.

After chuckling, I found myself wondering: what if mankind never saw a need for clothing? Putting aside the problems with improbability, the titillation, and the ample opportunities for jokes, seriously, how might the world have evolved differently, given that it’s played such an integral part in our current culture?

(I understand it’s overwhelmingly probable that someone would be consistently finding a need for clothing and would want to create something to cover their body. Assume, I don’t know, that God (or aliens or a supercomputer or a talking black hole or whatever omniscient entity have you) somehow repeatedly removes the idea from the heads of anyone coming up with the concept, so no matter how probable the thought is, it never develops.)

Off the top of my head:

Developmentally, I think mankind would never have settled in parts of the world that, here, require clothing for protection from the elements. I imagine that a pseudohibernation — a la stocking up on foodstuffs and hiding in shelter with a fire — might enable cold weather survival in some areas, but more likely than not, most of mankind would be centered around temperate climes. I think as a result we’d have a greater problem with overpopulation (comparatively — smaller space) and/or a much smaller civilization. Given that less land would be “habitable,” I imagine there would’ve been many more territorial wars.

Evolutionarily, I don’t know enough about the speed of evolution to know if the lack of clothing would have affected our actual bodies. Were the concept of “survival of the fittest” to have worked its way, I imagine physiological traits that better protect people from the elements would have survived to be passed on to the next generation. I’m thinking body hair, for example, and probably thicker skin would be beneficial as well. (I have this old science fiction anthology that has a story by L. Sprague de Camp from the ’30s about the same idea, except it happens to modern-day culture — well, what modern-day culture was in the ’30s.)

Depending on how protective that thicker skin became, heavy industry, where clothing serves an essential protective function, might not have developed — or perhaps might’ve developed based on a more remote-manipulation kind of basis, to put the employee farther away from harm.

I don’t know if wearable storage would be considered “clothing.” With no pockets, things that offer easily luggable storage capacity such as backpacks, etc. would be very essential to most everyone.

Socially and morally, I imagine things would be significantly different, but I find my imagination fails a bit here. I’m not sure I know precisely in what avenues they’d have changed. There are certain lines of body privacy that, globally, are considered taboo in public. I imagine that some would remain intact, and some wouldn’t, but I’m not sure by what metric you’d even make a guess as to which ones would never have developed and which ones would be the same as “our world.” Same with how social structures might remain the same (I imagine that the concept of the family would be relatively unchanged) and how they might differ.

Would our “standards” for what’s attractive have swung one way or the other? Would bodies be so unstigmatized that attraction would then be based on something different? Or would the constant exposure to them make societal standards for what’s pretty even more demanding?

I’m sure it’d affect about four million other fields. Fun little mental experiment …

Why is being a pop music artist so rife with occupational hazards?

Setting aside entirely the question of murder or wrongful death as a food source, why is cannibalism per se so reviled? Are there known human cultures where it was not so? Are there animal species that don’t follow this intraculinary taboo?

The legality of smoking cigarettes various already by state and local context: whether you can smoke inside a place of business, or in a bar, or in a public park, is a matter of either statute or at least public debate.

But let’s go all the way. Presume that cigarettes have just fallen under a blanket, unconditional ban: a national prohibition on smoking, in public or private. What happens?

Growing up, I was taken with the way adults around me — parents, grandparents, teachers — would talk about their memories of where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot; that Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed. It fascinated me that there were these moments of shared context, of having experienced, separately, some revelation profound enough that it later brought people together in their memories of it having happened.

Years after the September 11th, 2001 attack on the WTC in New York, it’s clear to me that that’s my own moment, or at least the first so far.

What are yours? What other events have occupied this psychosocial slot for you? And what are your stories?

In various contexts, where is line drawn between unconstrained discussion of death and the (recently) dead — including criticism of the deceased and metacriticism of the discussion — and a social expectation of respect for the dead, for the gravity of death as a shared experience?

Where do you think the line should be drawn? Why does the line shift from context to context — what defines the social mores of those different contexts that causes (or permits) the line to shift?

(Inspired by the latest in a long historical string of Metatalk conversations about obitutary thread etiquette.)

It’s a running joke — a metajoke, even, jabbing at hack comics using tired bits — but it’s also an interesting question:

Why is airline food bad? Or meh? Or good, even? Why does it vary? Who gets it right? How has any of that changed in the last ten years? The last thirty, or fifty?

And, to step back a level, what’s the deal with ‘what’s the deal with airline food’, anyway? What’s the history of this bit of cultural self-reflection? When, if ever, was it a fresh and funny standup bit, and who was doing it?

1. What’s your take on government welfare versus personal charity? Should it be the role of government to help the poor and needy or should individuals do it?

2. If you think individuals should care for the poor, do you think such a system is practical in today’s society?

3. Should people be forced to help the poor at all?

4. Is the government really wasteful? Would charities be more efficient? Would businesses?

Blatant ripoff: FMF

Could the state institutions that we currently have (in the form of government, e.g.) exist without some form of written language?

From Mind Hacks, would you vaccinate someone against an illegal drug, or take one yourself? Should such a vaccine be widely administered to the public? If further progress is made on vaccinations for other illicit substances, could this end the decades long war on drugs, and what would be the likelihood that the general American populace would be vaccinated, voluntarily or otherwise?

Would you marry someone for money? Someone who’s average-looking, no hideous deformities. Let’s also assume you generally like the person; they’re not a total knee-biter.

Hat tip: Free Money Finance

There are hundreds of scenarios, but here are two to get the discussion started:

- you simultaneously fall in deep, indescribable love with two people, and begin relationships with both. Could you/would you lie and attempt to work around a schedule so that you performed your relationship-building duties for both (with or without their, or one of their, knowledge)?

- you are hired by a super-secret agency, knowing full well that they are extremely vital for the security and well-being of thousands or hundreds of thousands. The thing is, as far as your friends and family know, you work as a traveling salesperson, not an agent of an agency they don’t even know exists. Could you lead that double life, knowing that you’d have to carry secrets to your grave and more-than-occasionally lie to protect that?

As social creatures, we have some control over how we are thought of by the people we interact with: through our actions and our words and the choices that we make, we give those around us a sense of who we are, and thus shape (however directly or indirectly) how they feel about us.

Presume that you have absolute control over how others perceive you, though: when forced to choose, would you rather be loved, or respected? And how would your hypothetical self behave, in this What If, and how would it differ (or resemble) your day-to-day actions in real life?

What would the expected gain need to be for it to be worth it to you to agree to take a job that separated you completely from friends and family for an extended period of time?

(example: a 24 month posting at an arctic research facility with no outside contact)

If not expressly disavowed, is sexism assumed?