Are People Too Insecure About Themselves? - Discussion

No, no deletion is going to happen. It isn't something this forum does, anyway. I'm not into removing people's opinions, even if they differ from my own. I'll only do that if they breach the guidelines, not because I'm seeing an opinion that personally offends me.

This needs to be moved, and moved into its own thread. This is an interesting topic, and you have raised a lot of interesting points. Now to try and work out a proper title for the new thread...  

Well, there are lots of reasons, some better than others. Sometimes, it is because they want to remember something, or someone. I can think of a few people who have tattoos that remember passed relatives or friends. I can remember one friend who got a crucifix to signify the end of her long term relationship. Some people get them when drunk, and regret it later. I remember meeting an older man who had a tattoo on his forehead, because he had been drunk, his friends as well, and they all went to the parlour to have something about an advert tattooed on his forehead. He had a habit of hiding it with a fringe. They can have gang affiliation meanings, and pimp have a habit of using tattoos to "mark" or "brand" the girl in question, and that can be an issue, if the girl tries to escape. Sometimes, they get the brand (in this case tends to be a barcode,) because they did try to escape.

Another thing to consider is that this is a way to display true artistic talent. Over on the Tattoo Thread, there are some truly amazing images on there. I can easily start another thread, where we have picture after picture of terrible tattoos. There are a nubr out there that just make you shake your head, and wonder if there was a brain involved in the decision making. Not to mention the fact that there are some tattoo artists that are just rubbish. They may be able to use the tattoo gun, and not harm or make a mess, but they have no artistic talent. I can remember one local tattooist, who produced a tattoo of three playing cards, like it was a hand being revealed. The lines were not quite straight, and there were two Aces from the same suit. The whole affair liiked like a really bad drawing - and the person had paid for that to be on their skin.

I would like to mention at this point semi-permanent tattoos. In theory, they fade over time, but there seems to be a lot of debate and doubt over that fact.

Also, tattoos and piercings are rather benign these days: you have subdermal implants, branding and also people sometimes do things like cut pieces of skin off in a pattern. There is a lot of extreme stuff out there, where people just seem to have lost the plot, in a sense. I think some get addicted to is, and just carry on and on, until you get quite bizarre and alien outcomes:



Don't ask me, I don't know what they have in mind... other than they have managed to either be read for a role in the next Star Wars film, or are a living personification of the Tzimisce Clan from Vampire: The Masquerade. They have this ability (or is it disease?) that allows them to alter their bodies - and others. The example reminds me of them.



Ugh, you annoy me. I'm mildly Goth, so that would be a really nice thing to have. I've got a genetic mix of a few European countries, and tan very easily. I don't remember getting sunburn, but I know that if I cycle long distances in the sun, I'll be very red and painful afterwards, if it is several hours with the sun beating down on me for for the journeys.

Of course, I sound like I am hating my skin type, and that isn't the case - I can move about without thinking about suntan lotion or the likes. That would differ if I went more southern, no doubt, but in Britain? I'm not worried.

[image]I would never want to sully it with a design that I may not even like any more in a few years, and in any case degrades as you age and your skin loses elasticity. Tattoos may also be carcinogenic, and even if they aren't, the application process is very risky if not done absolutely perfectly. [/quote]

Oh, I fully agree there. The best tattoos are those that will stand the test of time, and are correctly placed. Some designs are in the wrong place, and they shrivel or warp over time. Or are the wrong scale for that body part... you really have to think about what you do. Also, you need to check into who you are doing it with. Like I say, there are some truly amazing, talented people out there, and what they do is art. I would want them working on my body, even if I have to pay more.

As for carcinogenic... well, it depends on the ink, I believe. Today, you will have the inks being non-toxic and safe, though I can't verify that off-hand. I also believe it is possible to use the inks for modelling for tattooing as well. These inks are used to go into recesses and areas, to bring out detail in the model. And you can use biro ink... seriously, in prisons, you will have people use pen ink for their tattoos. Because it is what they can get. I think it is Canada that has done schemes to try and have inmates use proper equipment and inks, and provide an area, to stop illegal tattooing, and thus gaining all manner of infections.



Well, cosmetic companies will not care; they are making lots of money. I can't verify this, but I suspect that decades of advertising has ensued that women are now deeply insecure; they have to have make-up to look "right." Also, these women will have been targeted at younger and younger ages, regardless if it is appropriate or even morally wrong. I think that marketing and advertising needs to be reviewed heavily, to stop influencing people unduly and unfairly.

Make-up being carcinogenic... that would be interesting to confirm, and leads to the question; are there safe, natural alternatives? I now use deodorant that is entirely natural ingredients, because everything else makes my armpits sore as anything these days.



Piercings can be quite impressive and enjoyable in my opinion... if done right. Again, it is the whole art aspect of things. And the whole addicted/getting carried away with it aspect as well. You can have too many very quickly, and it ends up masking and detracting from the face.





Some of us have hair longer than that... I have to trim off the ends, to help maintain the hair, and remove split ends and the sort. I also recently dyed it, because it was seriously lacking colour. I started going grey at the age of twenty, and finding that first hair caused a massive heart attack and nervous shock, I can tell you. It also means that I have to think about hair colour a bit more. I go silver, and that means that Raven Black (which is what I used,) becomes more like a deeply dark brown. Not what I wanted, but then I'd have gone for bright purple. Because I love that colour.



Agreed, this isn't a conspiracy forum However, I get what you are saying, and feel this is branching off into a whole other discussion in and of itself. What you are talking about reminds me of an interview with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn. I think it was from the nineties, maybe earlier. He was talking about beauty, and how it was all distorted. We ended up with unrealistic views of people, that the girl next door will look like a Page Three model, and the such. He then said they wouldn't be - they would be pimply, and average, basically.

There is a huge amount of of bombardment of images, and we have unrealistic views of beauty and perfection, thanks to the bombardment of people who are tweaked in so many ways, from surgical to photoshop. And the lines blur, and we end up with a situation where people can't tell the fantasy from the reality. Which is a shame in and of itself.



Um... wrong. It is China as well:



Angelababy, from China. There are thousands a year who go to South Korea, to get surgery. The slightly amusing part of this is the fact that they end up having trouble getting back into the country, because they look so radically different. They can look European enough to fool people, if they have the right surgeons. And this is - again an important detail. You have to go and have someone who is decent, or you will have some extreme problems.

I want to go on a tangent briefly, while I still remember: Sometimes, the surgery is important, even life-saving:



This is Cassidy Hooper, who was born with no nose or eyes. If you look up video of her on YouTube, you will find her so positive and nice. A truly amazing person. To me, this is what plastic surgery should be about, and not the whole Jordaneqsue mutilations sessions. She deserves to be able to fit in better, and people judge her, because of the differences she has. People are very geared up to appearance, and one look at her, and people will be wired to think disease, or something potentially harmful. In reality, she was born with missing bits.

But back to your point: it is alarming just how addicted South Koreans are to plastic surgery. I suspect we are looking at Cultural Marxism in action, and it isn't healthy for them.



Well, you have had Korean men divorce their wives for producing ugly babies. The meme is quite correct - you can't hide it forever. As for the whole part about epicanthic folds and flat noses, it is all to do with Natural Selection; these features work best in that particular environment. Move them to Britain, and they start to struggle. I happen to work with a large number of Nepalese, and they are impressively vulnerable to the cold. They even wrap up in May and June! Quite astounding, and if we were to plunge down in temperature, they would be in for a tough, tough time. People live in certain areas for a reason, and too much migration isn't the best thing in the world.



Well, now there is a whole new thread for the topic, Diverge away. I have no issue with people debating away on this, or any topic. As long as it is respectful, sticks to the guidelines, and is in the right place.

Feel free to put up thoughts or opinions, though I suspect that people might argue and disagree with some - or all - of your points. As long as we all discourse with respect for one another, I'm absolutely cool with it.

Yes, the examples you provided are monstrosities. A terrible shame, really, because I bet they were quite pretty girls before brutalising themselves with that abominable 'art'. They have ruined their lives; few people will want to be friends with people who look like that, even fewer will want to ever date or marry them, and they have precious little hope of ever getting a job.

Tattoos and "body modifications" like that are quite clearly the physical manifestations of a damaged mind. Honestly, don't those girls look like demons? I feel very sorry for them, as I can only imagine the trauma and dysfunction in their backgrounds that compelled them to do that to their bodies.

I'd just like to clarify, though, that I am not disputing that there are some incredibly talented, imaginative and careful tattooists out there; I'm sure there are. I'm just saying that I don't understand the appeal of tattoos in the first place.


I do not tan. I burn. I turn a violent shade of beetroot, and stay very red, sore and have a high temperature for days afterwards. It doesn't take much, either: I've burned after just ten minutes before. I've even burned when it's overcast, cloudy and lukewarm - seriously!

I used to go through obscene amounts of the highest factor sun cream, but it was ineffective, makes you sweat a lot (and I sweat a lot anyway), and I realised that the cream is probably worse for your health than sunburn. Now, I try and avoid the sun wherever possible, but if I can't, then I cover up completely: long-sleeved shirt, trousers, wide-brimmed hat.

I can't adequately describe how much I loathe the heat and sunlight. I feel like an oddity, because all my friends are happy because it's summer, and I'm dreading it. Also, they're dressing down for summer, whilst I have to reach for the long sleeves; we have our years the opposite way around, I happily walk around in winter in just a t-shirt and jeans.

I'm certain that I live too far south of where someone with my pigmentation - or lack of - should be living. I'm not going to broadcast my precise location, but I live in the Wessex region; that is, south-central/southwestern England. I'm not native to this region, I'm native to Ireland, where the weather is totally different to Wessex. Ireland has "worse" (better, in my opinion) weather than Britain - it rains more, has less sunshine, and is colder and foggier - and I could live anywhere on the island quite comfortably. But in Britain, I probably shouldn't be living any further south than Manchester. But I do...

There are, however, advantages to having ultra-white skin. You have a high tolerance, and even love, of the cold. You love what others call "bad" weather, which is handy when living in Britain, you thrive in the winter, and save on heating bills!

I am very proud of my skin tone. It's not common, and distinguishes me from other people, and is, in my opinion, aesthetically superior (but I realise that's just a matter of personal taste, and also that we prefer people with traits similar to - compatible with - our own).


Decades of aggressive marketing, yes, but also social and family breakdown resulting in girls seeking validation and affirmation in how "hot" men find them, rather than having a healthy sense of self-worth and true inner confidence and self-esteem. As well as people - of both sexes, but particularly females - being taught to view their "average" bodies as inadequate and to strive to attain the "perfection" that celebrities have.

If we compare our physical appearances to the people who are held up as aesthetic perfection, then yes, we're going to feel inadequate. But the truth is that the airbrushed, Photoshopped celebrities caked in make-up, having plastic surgery, taking steroids and going on gruelling, unrealistic diets to achieve the "perfect body", whose images are volleyed at us all the time, are NOT REAL. They are not normal, healthy human beings, they are rich people who can afford to distort their appearances via unnatural means, but it's all a facade.

Sadly, however, the constant barrage of these images from birth, means that people take them for reality, and thus view themselves and regular members of the opposite sex as woefully inadequate. You paraphrase the very astute words of Alan Ayckbourn, that we have been implanted with unrealistic, implausible views of what people ought to look like. How can a teenage boy who is confronted with a constant avalanche of fake women - via TV, films, magazines, advertisements, pornography etc - get excited over the prospect of his first kiss with Debbie next door (who is, like ALL real people, not perfect)? He can't.

As for make-up being carcinogenic, there's a lot more information here: conserpiracy.boards.net/thread/518

There are natural alternatives, and I know that ancient Celtic women used to use the juice of crushed berries, and Roman women used to use beeswax. But I'd argue that even natural cosmetics aren't necessary, at least not on a day-to-day basis. I wouldn't have a problem with females using a tasteful, appropriate amount of safe, natural, healthy make-up on special occasions, but I would have a problem when it becomes a kind of addiction, and women start to fear their own faces and feel inadequate without their make-up.

I still use the toxic, synthetic, commercial anti-perspirants, I'm afraid. I find the natural ones are almost entirely roll-ons, and I don't find roll-on anti-perspirants work for very long.


Save yourself the trouble and just go for 4 on the top and back, and 3 on the sides - you won't regret it.

I also lift weights regularly, but not for vanity reasons, so I can have a six-pack to show off whilst wearing a skin-tight t-shirt. Six-packs are basically a waste of time, and completely unnecessary. Leg, arm, shoulder and back muscles are where one should focus. I lift weights primarily because a) I'm naturally muscular and stocky anyway, b) I like to be able to defend myself and c) I work outdoors anyway so need to keep my strength up.

But I don't go on near-starvation, protein-overloaded diets of nothing but eggs, boiled chicken and broccoli, or take steroids or muscle powders. Natural strength and a naturally good physique are very different things to the ideal male body presented to us by the media. I think those extreme bodybuilder types look like freaks, they're often nasty, arrogant personalities (I despise gym-obsessed people), and they throw one punch and they're out of breath!

I'm 5'10" and 16 stone 5lbs (229 lbs). That might seem heavy, but I'm not fat. I think the ideal physique in terms of health, strength performance and aesthetics is something similar to what Daniel Bryan, WWE wrestler, has in this photograph:



He looks great. He looks strong, healthy and well-toned, without looking freakish like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That kind of look is realistic, healthy and relatively easy to achieve with the right diet and a relatively easy training schedule. It's what I aim for, anyway.


Yes, I think I've seen her before. I don't have a problem with people with disfigurements having plastic surgery. I do have a problem with perfectly 'normal' people doing it for vanity reasons, though, because their nose is slightly too big, or their lips aren't quite as plump as they'd like, or - even worse - breast/phallus enlargement surgery.


Yes, one theory I'd heard for the epicanthic fold is that it keeps sand blowing from the desert out of their eyes. Another is that it keeps snow from blowing into their eyes. But yes, I totally agree. Australia has one of the highest melanoma rates in the world. Why? An almost entirely European population, in an extremely hot part of the world, where they are not designed to live; their skin cooks in the heat. On the other side of the coin, black people in Europe are at a much higer risk of skin cancer than the indigenous people, due to not obtaining enough vitamin D from the European sun, which is far weaker than the tropical sun they were designed to live in.

I've also got an embryonic theory that tropical fruits are too sweet and loaded with sugars for Europeans, and that we shouldn't really be eating them, but I'll save that for another time.

However, some people deny all of this, whilst simultaneously holding the (correct) belief that animals have adaptations to their environments! So, animals adapt to their different environments, but humans are all the same and don't!? Politically-motivated, reality-denying garbage. The cold, hard fact of the matter is that the different human races are not designed to live together; if we were, we'd have the same features. No one can reasonably argue that the African is designed for the same environment as the European, or that they are not hugely different, for example. But they still attempt to!

Just popping in, to try and start answering this before I go out, get stuff, and then do repairs to the bike. So, on to part one...



Well, you have a lot of weird stuff out there. And yes, I will say that there is something not quite right, when you go to that extreme. The pictures are of the same person, by the way; xronnix, a Polish Transexual who is living in London, last I heard. Works in a tattoo parlour, if memory serves. Like I say, don't ask me what is going on there, I've no clue. I'm not going to give myself a headache to work it out, either. I think I encountered this person, when looking at extreme body modifications for inspiration for monsters and demons. This isn't a recent phenomena, it has been happening for decades. You have the Lizard Man, and the Cat Lady as good examples. However, it has become more frequent, and more prominent, in more recent times. I've no real idea why this is exactly, though thre are probably factors like an increase in Cultural Marxism in play, I suspect.

In any case, I've managed to find a good enough picture of a Tzimisce Clan vampire:



To me, there is very little difference.

Your last part, about not understanding the appeal of tattoos, makes me wonder if there could be a separate thread, looking into culture, attitudes to tattoos around the world. I think it might prove an interesting topic.

I don't have to waste time at the hairdressers, I can cut the tip off myself. I I don't even use shampoo on it any more. Turns out you don't need the stuff. In fact, I suspect my hair is a bit healthier as a result.

In any case, I like having long hair. I've had it for so long, I'd look weird without. In any case, it hasn't prevented me getting jobs or any of that, so I don't care. More than that, I find it interesting just how many people have, over the years, told me I need a haircut. Still hasn't happened... and in any case, I might as well enjoy it while I have still got it. Doesn't last forever, you know...



I have thought about going to the gym, but not for strength... I have enough of that. It is more about joint flexibility, my agility... things that have suffered as a result of the job I have. Some of the damage was from when I had vegetable oil in my diet, though I've not had that now for a good two and a half years now. But it would be nice to heal all of that damage, mind.

As for self defense, I've learned ways to diffuse a situation, and if nothing else, I can radiate scariness quite, quite easily. Which is useful. But I'm not worried about going out at night or anything. If you know the area, you know what to expect.



I know... they are quite weird. I remember years ago, when I still had television, watching this documentary about weightlifting, and steroids. And one guy had these oversized muscles... and hid bicep went. He ended up using a syringe to get this fluid out... filming the entire process. It was getting lots of fluid out... It was filling up a bucket. He bent the needle, and in the end had to go to hospital. His muscles were basically wrecked, and were never really the same again. All because of steroids. Steroids are nasty things, unless produced by the body itself.

It would be interesting to see if these extreme body builders could cycle from one side of my town to the other, then do a day of work where I am at. I have a feeling they would crash in no time. Basically, my day gives me a lot more useful exercise than they must get... All they are doing is training their bodies to excel at undertaking certain directions and actions, nothing more.



I'm decidedly heavy, but it will be far more bone density and muscle than it will be fat. I have some, but I'm not in a panic over it. It more important to be healthy than thin. And yes, your example is okay, though he is WWE... so he has that against him. In the end, it is all about understanding, and appreciating your body, and making it work as best you can, for as long as you can.



That is all interesting information, and I agree with it; it makes sense. Skin pigmentation is a natural way to factor in the amount of sun you need. And if you don't get enough, or too much, then yes, trouble will ensue. I certainly don't want to move to Australia, Or Africa... The heat would be deeply punishing to me. I'm better designed to be in Europe. And I think I'll stay there, than you.

And what you say about epicanthic folds makes sense as well. I suspect that it is both sand and snow, the particles acting in similar enough ways. It would explain the Nepalese, for example.



Um... Tom Naughton has beaten you to the punch there. He has been saying that we need to eat the foods our ancestors ate, because we are genetically tuned to those food types. So, what you say makes sense to me. And feel free to expand on it, as and when you feel like.



Well, you don't get that argument from me. It is quite clear that there are differences, and that they exist for a reason. Only the Culturally Marxist addled would believe such a thing. And it doesn't matter how much they deny reality, Reality will still come for them, regardless...

That's okay... I know life can get interesting. I'm trying to see if I can get the upcoming Camp NaNo to go better than last time, now I have a better idea as to what the pitfalls are. I also know (because they told me ) that Sigarda and @frenchinuk are also somewhat tied up this week, for various reasons.

I'm not planning to make the forum vanish any time soon, so don' fret. Besides, this has been a rather interesting topic, and I'm hoping it will continue at some point, maybe in five - for example - months time, when new members are here, and want to add their thoughts. Which I am all up for.

ere, can't wait to read it!