Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3491 to 3495 (29 May to 2 June 2017)

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oddtail:
I really like the comic. And it goes well with my previous post on going back-and-forth on Brun.

What I find amusing and even somewhat insightful about the comic is that Clinton offers Brun lunch - purely because he's being friendly, of course! - but Brun's mention of buying someone else lunch immediately makes him mildly jealous. This speaks to both how social conventions work AND to the fact that no, Clinton's offer is not rooted in him trying to be a friend, not strictly.

Oh, I fully believe he fully intends the lunch to be about being friends, on the conscious level. But in reality, it's a kind of a socially acceptable... OK, that's a terrible word, but "investment" in a person he might be romantically interested in. Otherwise, he would not wonder what kind of "friend" a person that Brun intends to buy lunch is.

And I guess it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable with his offer. He certainly means well, and he obviously has no ill intentions. But it looks like in interpersonal stuff, just like in economics, there is no such thing as a free lunch. There's always strings attached, even if they are super-flimsy strings.

JimC:

--- Quote from: Case on 31 May 2017, 21:54 ---But he was just a self-obsessed twat, not autistic.
--- End quote ---
Can't help thinking that in the same way there is an autistic spectrum rather than a rigid boundary, there is probably also a self-obsessed twat spectrum, not a rigid boundary, and its not utterly inconceivable there could be some overlap.

But that gets us into the whole messy area of to what extent behaviour is a choice, and to what extent it is dominated by inherited factors and environmental factors. An area that's particularly messy since it seems to be as much informed by political beliefs and prejudices as by rational evaluation. For sure we're not going to find any answers here.

oddtail:

--- Quote from: JimC on 01 Jun 2017, 02:39 ---
--- Quote from: Case on 31 May 2017, 21:54 ---But he was just a self-obsessed twat, not autistic.
--- End quote ---
An area that's particularly messy since it seems to be as much informed by political beliefs and prejudices as by rational evaluation.

--- End quote ---

I'd go a step further and say it's fundamentally impossible to answer this question, even approaching it from a rational standpoint. It's essentially the question of free will, whether it exists and what that means. And we as a species have been grappling with the notion of free will for thousands of years, moreso since our knowledge of biology and psychology developed in the last few centuries.

It's a philosophical matter rather than a scientific one. No matter how well we know the human nature from the "facts" standpoint, the meaning of those facts is subjective. We *know* we have some sort of agency, but the very concept of agency is a subjective, self-assigned factor, not a hard and objective fact.

Kugai:
I think both of the are socially awkward in certain situations.   Brun may have a good excuse with her inability to garner certain social clues if, as some suspect, she is a High Functioning Autistic individual.

Clinton's just awkward,

shanejayell:
Poor poor Clinton. I do not see this ending well.  :-P

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