
Go Ahead and Change Bodies; Just Remember to Take Your Soma - exolymph
http://exolymph.com/2016/03/13/go-ahead-just-remember-to-take-your-soma/
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fixermark
Being able to choose one's outward gender and race appearance in public
reminds me distinctly of the Steiner adage "On the Internet, nobody knows if
you're a dog."

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__john
One of my friend's online acquaintances that was a Japanese girl living in
Canada. Then one day she forgot to turn her voice modulator on, turns out the
her was a him. My friend had known this person for several years.

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exolymph
That's really interesting -- how did it resolve? Did they stay friends?

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__john
Nope, the guy cut contact w/ my friend and all the mutual people with whom
they played. Most of those people were my friends real life friends.

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DannoHung
What a disjointed story. I am not sure what the things it wanted to tell me
were. It presented like4 or 5 unrelated high concept points but they didn't
tie together meaningfully.

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gpvos
I took the main meaning to be that societal problems were being solved from
the wrong end, by changing people (forcibly, even) instead of changing
society.

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Mz
I think the point of stories like this is not so much "what about the future?"
but what about NOW? We already have serious problems in the world. This story
basically exaggerates our current ills. It is a caricature of current issues.
The actual future is likely to be far different in important ways we cannot
yet imagine.

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mdip
Interesting read that strikes home for me a bit.

As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural
Michigan where we lived. My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a
suitable child-care provider. She didn't pick the place because it was close
to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was
the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non-
existent where we lived). When I started looking for a partner in life, one of
my "absolutes" was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home
with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay-
at-home Dad). As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my
current wife does the same).

The tables have turned in my adult-hood. It's unusual to have a parent stay
home. The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to
social pressures that make women feel badly for _not_ pursuing careers). As a
society (in the US anyway), we're setup for both parents to work full time.
When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our
friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back. As
parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for
teaching our children the ABCs/123s and were surprised at the reaction we
received even from families who didn't have two working parents. As a child,
preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment
was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.

Personally, I don't have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time
parents. I knew I didn't enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of
that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed
home. Our kids are school-age, now, but we're still a single-parent earning
family by choice. Having children is a _lot_ of work and I personally don't
think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities
outside of the home. Don't read that as me saying that it cannot be done --
I'm sure it can, as my parents remind me "you turned out just fine"[1] -- I
just don't know that _I_ could do it.

[1] People get _very_ touchy about parenting choices. When I told my family
that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working,
they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently. I
know the situation my family was in when I was young. They had little choice
but to both work in order to keep the lights on. And I'm not the least bit
upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children
and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken
care of while I'm working is worth the loss of income, especially since we
live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.

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LeifCarrotson
The article mentioned:

> “Now, we are free to pursue our goals. We contribute to society every waking
> moment...

It also seemed to assume a method of universal child care and education.

Given that we don't have either of these, and based on the experiences you
described, which method do you think is better for "society" and the child in
the long term: two-income households with childcare, or one-income households
with a stay at home parent?

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webjprgm
The stay at home parent _is_ childcare. You get personalized child care or you
can outsource it for economies of scale and have the second parent work so
long as that parent earns more than the cost of childcare.

But I think there's more than just taking care of children. There is research
into how important family units are, and those units are better strengthened
by greater time commitments of the parents than by less.

Plus there's the issue of parental choice in teaching values. If everyone in
the society agreed upon values than the preschool teacher's example would be
equivalent. But parents often have their own way of seeing things. Different
religions. Different economic and civic philosophies, etc. So there's another
reason to increase parental involvement, so that the parents spend more time
being role models and conveying values. This is especially true if the
childcare is provided as a universal service from the government, because then
you can't even choose childcare at your local church.

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epmatsw
The writing style in this article is really jarring for some reason I can't
quite put my finger on.

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fit2rule
Because you didn't take your soma, did you..

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thedaemon
This is based off the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I hope this helps
you understand the story better.

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dominotw
I thought article was about Soma from the Vedas[1] which vedic people took to
'change bodies' during sacrificial rituals.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma)

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hosh
Yep. I think that was a direct, literary reference in the story.

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dominotw
Are you sure? Article had nothing to do with SOMA from RigVeda. Maybe I am
missing something.

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JetSpiegel
You can also watch Surrogates, the same themes are explored in that film.

