Golem

https://rentmen.eu/Jay_Dymel I have recent feedback on Jay as well -- both plusses and minuses. Feel free to PM for the details. (He is not going to a universal hit but there are definitely people for whom he will be a home run.) To answer @BabyBoomer 's query ... his pics are 100% accurate. Yes, all of them. Yes, even that one. Yes, it's insane. Also, on another recent subject... he was raving about how great Boston has been for him as a provider. After hearing so much of that other thread I was actually a little surprised... I think it has to do with expectations and also with his ability to stick out here. In particular, for whatever reason, Boston doesn't have many (1) light-haired providers, or (2) young providers who are athletic rather than skinny. Also, though, he wasn't trying to get in NYC numbers of clients per day, but was charging slightly high rates for his time, handling fewer clients per day, and quite happily ubering unusually long distances (IMO) between outcalls in the burbs.

No, I'm not saying you're committing a fallacy at all (and certainly not an etymological one). I'm just saying you are using the words in a different (more restricted) way than most people use them today. You bring up some heavy topics here. Working on the words involved: Nobody in the U.S. thinks that blacks can't be biased. But there has indeed been a big shift in how "racist" and "racism" are used in one chunk of the population. And while, you are right, it is a large part of the left, it is also a large part of young people. In other words, there is a real generational element to this particular shift in meaning. I don't think these ideas about structural racism are crazy at all (though a lot of the people who talk about them on the internet do not understand them and are bad at explaining what they do understand). What I do think is crazy -- and you may agree with me here -- is just starting to use the word in a new way, when half the population doesn't use it that way. It leads to all sorts of communication problems. Young people on the left, and old people on the right, have a hard time talking about any issues related to race for exactly this reason. However, the motivation behind the shift in usage is exactly what you cited earlier as your motivation for wanting to restrict the use of "racist" -- to keep the focus on what they see as the most crucial applications of the concept. (Anyway, I think you went way overboard in the last bit you wrote -- whether or not you see the value in the contextual, structural conception of racism, it is obviously a lot more closely connected to the more traditional concept of racism than any opinions about the solar system are.)

Excuse me, you are deliberately cutting off the sentence that immediately followed it, and which I quoted above: "(NB Whether or not the comments about Romanians in this thread were overgeneralized is a different question, one that I have no desire to touch.)" I did not say your comments were racist. I said, explicitly, that I had no desire to touch the question of whether or not they were racist. You're now deliberately misquoting me in order to suggest that I have been negative towards you, when you were the one calling other posters "pricks." That's troll territory, and I am proceeding to the nearest exit and ignoring you. Enjoy your rabbit.

@Tarte Gogo I appreciate the explanation. I think you're right that if you get past the words, we are not looking at things very differently. I still maintain that your restricted use of the words is nuts -- simply because they have always been used to encompass a much broader scope of things, and that is how the world at large still uses them. It seems that we have had different experiences of the way people use them. Not sure what else there is to say here; I guess I'll have to be content with having Wikipedia agree with me

Tasso, I didn't call you anything, not at any point in this thread. We appear to have a different idea of what the word "race" can refer to (and, by extension, what the word "racism" might refer to). That's it. Nor did I attempt to "censor." I entered this part of the conversation in response to Tarte saying that people should only the word "racist" in the situations he finds appropriate for it. I am really lost as to where your accusations are coming from, but I don't appreciate them.

What gives anybody the right to say something, and expect that people who disagree with them will not criticize it? I'd tell you what flavor of government does things like that, but I'm pretty sure you'd get mad at me just for saying so

Tasso, what the heck man? I don't understand how you got from the one statement I actually made about the Romanian bar issue (above) to "projecting American experiences to condemn gay men in other cultures"...

Going back to this: how do you define "race"? How many races do you think there are and where do you draw the line between them? You seem to think this is quite obvious, so I hope you won't mind sharing it. You're wrong. Full stop. This isn't just about using a word one way or another -- your facts are wrong. Let's look at history. For most of human history, geographic limits meant that contact between people of significantly different skin colors -- or for that matter, dramatically different cultural backgrounds -- was quite rare. Did enslavement and genocide still happen? Yup! Now, turning to the modern era, it's pretty hard to ignore the Holocaust. Racially motivated extermination? Yes, definitely. Was it based on skin color? Nope. Were parts also based purely on culture rather than ethnicity? Yes -- as I imagine everyone on this forum is painfully aware of.

Why do you think it's misusing the word, though? Using "race" and "racism" to include ethnicity actually came before they were ever used in a skin-color-only sense; they are still widely used that way in the real world today; and Wikipedia, as well as pretty much any other online reference you can point to, acknowledge all of this. I understand the desire to be specific. I don't understand how you think that prejudice based on skin color is "serious" while prejudice based on ethnicity is "just bigotry."

Heh, I just came to ask basically the same thing. Let us know if you go ahead (or if you hear back at all, I guess)...

Err, no, that's not always what "race" means. Sometimes, especially among white people in the US, it's used primarily about skin color. But it can encompass ethnic background just as easily as skin color. Making overgeneralized comments about Romanians definitely qualifies as racist. (NB Whether or not the comments about Romanians in this thread were overgeneralized is a different question, one that I have no desire to touch.)

How do you know this with such certainty? Not saying you're wrong it just seems like a pretty absolute statement...

Hmm... that's not bad at all. Guess I gotta pay more attention. Thanks j!

This is not quite true, especially not when you're comparing German and French. Yes, English is a Germanic language, due to its Anglo-Saxon roots over a millenia ago. But it diverged heavily, first because all that water cut it off from continental developments, and second because of the Norman Conquest. In particular, English grammar has way more in common with French than it does with German (or even with Frisian, our closest Germanic relative outside the British Isles), and similarities in vocabulary -- while they exist with both languages -- tend to be significantly more blatant with French. The other thing here is that, due to the way English grammar works, English is an unusually easy language for people who aren't native speakers to achieve basic communication in -- but it is unusually difficult to achieve fluency in English. Neither is true of German.

My experience is that Parisians are lovely people -- provided you aren't a tourist trying to talk to them in English. And I kinda don't blame them. Talk about a city overrun by tourists. Just saying "hello, how are you?" -- even if you're just using your guide-book French -- makes all the difference when interacting with merchants, waiters, cute guys you meet in the jardin, etc.

I don't understand the concept of being unexcited whilst in Paris According to Wikipedia, as of 2014, the HIV prevalence rate among all adults in the US is 0.6%. In most of Western Europe and Scandinavia it's lower (0.4% in France, 0.33% in the UK, 0.15% in Germany, 0.1% in Finland, to take a few data points). If you look for stats on men who have sex with men in particular, they are harder to find. I found some estimated numbers for NYC (1 in 6) and London (1 in 7). Who knows if those types of patterns hold across Europe in general -- or if the stats for other STDs are in the same ballpark or not. So statistically, are we more likely to have diseases? Maybe! Does that actually have any relevance to rational precautions against disease transmission when you're having sex with people whose STD status you aren't sure of (aka, people)? No! God Bless America! Or something.

Clearly all communication with this provider should be conducted in the passé simple.

yeah, "ne... pas" is "not". "ne" is the generic negative modifier, which sometimes gets dropped in casual speech or texting, "pas" is "not". if you want emphasis, you could try "guère" (ne guere) though that could be harder out of context "jamais" (ne jamais, never) should be easy, that has a pretty clear meaning in any context

For me, being authentic is a goal in itself. It isn't merely a step on the way to some other goal; it isn't a principle recognized only in service of some other principle. And when someone isn't super interested in loving themself -- for whatever reason -- the fact being authentic isn't subjugated to loving yourself is pretty important.

Totally respect everything @LivingnLA wrote above. I would like to offer a counterpoint: I don't think fatalism and hopelessness are foreclosing entire areas of your life, Gman. I think you have very reasonable reactions to what is, let's face it, shit happening. Happiness is a state of mind but it isn't just a state of mind. It's a state of mind that is connected to shit that happens in the real world (and also, of course, connected to shit that happens in our minds). Imposing happiness on yourself means cutting yourself off from reality. @OliverSaks hits that on the nose above. But you know, I don't think happiness is worth more than being true to yourself. Actually I think they're connected, so it's a tricky situation indeed when being true to yourself means doing the thing (or taking the attitude) that will result in being less happy. We get so worked up about making our conscious thoughts and experiences happy. But our minds are more than that. And if you feel like, somewhere deep inside, "deciding to be happy" is just not right for you -- then I'd consider listening to that inner voice. Our conscious thoughts mean well, but they don't always comprehend the whole picture of your mind.

Agreed 100%. (Also, this makes it pretty clear why you didn't like CBT. Although it's branched out in many different ways, the core idea it has blossomed from is the idea that people should identify and change the "irrational beliefs" that make them unhappy. The problem is, rational beliefs can make you unhappy too. Seriously, every time I ever think "maybe I should just change the way I think about this to be happier" I picture this man, one of the originators of CBT, saying "INsane sentence! INsane sentence!" and I shiver and snap out of it.) YouTube link

If that was how they presented it, I'd be much less alarmed. But their website says "TPT has proven effective for a wide range of people, from seasoned war veterans and survivors of accidents, assault, abuse and neglect - to individuals, couples and families searching for a new way to handle the ever-increasing stress of day-to-day life and problematic situations." Now let's look at that paper. I'm in the second paragraph and I'm already wondering how the heck this passed peer review. So I look up at its publication information. This paper was never peer reviewed, because it wasn't published in a scientific journal at all! It was published in a festschrift for Philip Zimbardo, the guy who came up with the idea behind TPT. So, back to paragraph 2, where we see correlation casually transformed into causation in the context of interpreting neurological pathways! ("Neurological research has shown that when recalling past events, the same regions in the brain are activated as when thinking about this future. This provides strong evidence that one's future is highly influenced by his or her past" -- my emphasis.) Unfortunately, the PDF cuts off before we get to the part where they describe the "4 year pilot study which evaluated the effectiveness of TPT by following 29 veterans clinically diagnosed with chronic and severe PTSD" and which purportedly demonstrated "longlasting decreases of selfreported depression, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms," so we can't assess their experimental methodology. After that crazy correlation/causation issue, and given all the other red flags, I think I'm happy to assume the methodology is flawed and biased unless I see otherwise. To paraphrase the Wikipedia article on Deepak Chopra, he is a super-rich man who made his fortune off the alternative health movement by charismaticly describing snake-oil cancer cures and fountains of youth. I mean, that's not wrong, but if you're paying for a psychotherapist to say it to you, you might be paying too much money for what you're getting. Sorry to be so negative, I just hate seeing bad, for-profit pseudoscience get passed off as the real thing. It's especially frustrating in a field like psychology where people are skeptical enough about the real thing, without getting confused by this sort of made-up pop psychology.

Not an expert on Time Perspective Therapy, but FWIW, looking at the description on its own site, it looks far more similar to CBT than to evocative therapies. Given Gman's experience with CBT, this is not the direction I would look in next. (Also -- again, not an expert on TPT -- but looking at the website, I am... really not convinced there's any substance here. The message I get from several of their pages boils down to "you just need to be more positive and not let yourself get stuck in negative thinking" plus "your therapist isn't positive enough!" They have a quote in support of TPT from Dr. Phil, a partnership with happify.com, a TED Talk, a book, and a trademarked and commercially sold testing instrument (aka, big bucks) that they launched within several years of the conception of the therapy, when it still hadn't been implemented on a large scale. Shockingly fast. I could be way off here, but something smells rotten in Vienna.)

Also, this may be an obvious question (if so, my bad) -- but did you tell her these things? That it felt like a waste of time and that she was saying all the same things as your past therapists? Because at that point, any therapist worth their socks is going to take a step back and say, 'OK, let's talk about that. What would you like to get out of this time, and what are the things that we've all said that you especially didn't find helpful? Maybe my style is simply a bad fit, and I can suggest another approach that you might like better. Or maybe we are getting stuck on decoy issues, instead of addressing the stuff that really matters to you.'

Very true! But the flip side, @Gar1eth -- and I'm working purely off what I see of your personality here -- is that 3-4 sessions could also be giving too much time to a therapist who's not a good fit, and burning you out. Maybe not; but it can be very easy to feel like "well, this could be better than the last one, I should see how it goes"... In my experience, if someone is feeling burnt out on therapy and therapists, that's actually when it's most important for them to shop around and find someone they feel connected to after one meeting. One meeting obviously isn't enough time to really let a therapeutic relationship unfold itself -- but it is enough to have an instinctual response to their style. Do you wish they said more (or said less)? Were they too tentative (or too direct)? Do their own idiosyncratic facial expressions put you at ease, or do they make you feel awkward? Do the tchotchkes they choose for their office give you good vibes, or do they make you wonder WTF? While you could absolutely have a great connection, eventually, with someone who didn't toot your horns on day one -- you don't have to wait and find out, especially if you are not feeling very patient with the concept of therapy itself.