Today my professor told me every cell in our entire body is destroyed and replaced every seven years. How comforting it is to know that one day I will have a body that you will have never touched.
This just made me feel so warm.
thank you.
Important especially for victims of abuse, remember your body is yours and it heals in more ways than you realize.
Okay, so I just want to say that this isn’t necessarily true. Most of your cells have died and regrown several times in seven years, but some haven’t, and some have died and won’t return. The seven year cell renewal is a myth perpetuated by popsci in magazines everywhere.
That being said, anywhere they may have touched you, your skin, your hair, your nails and so on, was changing the moment they departed your life, even before that. Your skin became skin they’ve never touched within 27 days. Your hair grows (on average) six inches per year, so depending on how long yours is, you were rid of their touch there within a few years tops. Your nails will completely regrow within six months tops. You were a body they never touched within three or four years. You will be a body they never touched within three or four years.
You have been rewriting your body, you are your own, you are constantly changing, and you are the only one who owns your body 100% of the time.
it continues to be weird and kindof scary for me that people i love will be charitable and compassionate towards all sorts of people with whom they fundamentally disagree, they can be good friends with people who they think are wrong about extremely important moral or ethical concerns… except communists
i have heard at least half the people i’m dating make impassioned, disgusted pronouncements about how awful communists are and how they could never be friends with a communist and how communists believe in an awful ideology that history has proven immensely harmful and communists want to steal things and kill people and are all idiots or evil or both
and just. like.
i still consider myself a communist?
have they ever actually spoken to a communist with openness and curiosity and tried to understand their fundamental motivations?
they could have, except that they’re so virulently hostile. they could have spoken to me, except that i’m afraid to bring it up
why is it that “oh, be patient with pro-lifers, they sincerely believe a fetus is a person and abortion is murder and of course it makes sense that they have to prioritize that above any other political concern”, or “yeah i mean they’re kindof a TERF but it’s just because of their own experiences with gender dysphoria and like patriarchal bullshit, it’s honestly pretty understandable given where they’re coming from”, or “yeah they eat meat but they have some conditions such that it would be really difficult for them to stop, it’s not really fair to blame them personally”, or “oh haha yeah, they’re one of my neoreactionary friends; they basically don’t believe in democracy and think a lot of modern liberalism is degeneracy”, or whatever
why is it that with this one thing in particular, they can’t look past the label and their preconception of what it means, and muster any genuine curiosity for why someone might believe it and identify with it?
This is a really bad dynamic that I massively dislike as well. I have my own disagreements with the modern left, but I do have friends who identify as communists and whose views I consider to be mostly reasonable, and I think that most of the knee-jerk booing at communists from American libertarians is also misguided and massively annoying at the very least.
My personal object-level political position is roughly along the lines of “currently, broadly capitalist welfare state with wealth redistribution is probably the best we can do now, but in a couple decades we’re gonna have not just trucking being automated away, but even programming, and market-based solutions are *really* not gonna work in the world where almost no human can produce enough value to compete with AI and feed themselves”. But I’m not super married to this position, and could be convinced otherwise with evidence.
You’re right that overall, rattumb (and the rationalist community more broadly) is decidedly not the best environment to talk about any leftist views – which is why I’m only now learning about you having them – but I would be *really* curious to learn more about what you believe. Also, kudos for having the guts to say it. Also, you’re a super cool and interesting person in general, and I’d love to know you better!
There were two professors like this in my department and I was one of like 20 people who was taught by both of them so there was a very small gang of us who knew that Professor Brick Wall and Professor Overshare were married with two kids.
Iron in the Sand 