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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 3641553" data-attributes="member: 9254">I felt it was rather weak, based on a very minor anecdotal reference.  Individuals who become addicted to tattoos a) don't become psychotic killers and b) are not the norm.  It may be typical for people who get tattoos to get more tattoos but that's like saying people who eat chocolate cake are likely to eat more than one chocolate cake.  The big question is: what percentage of people who get tatoos get addicted to body modification?  The number is darned low b/c there are a LOT of people out there with tattoos (there are dozens of tattooists in my city) but not a whole lot that are whole-hog tattooed (and I go to goth and punk shows where they wouldn't be concealed).  Isn't it more likely that the people who become addicted to tattoos, to the point of having a Samson-like complex that ties their self image to their tats, were mentally damaged (Empathy 2) prior to the tattoo?  By the same token, there are buttloads of people getting one or two cosmetic procedures but the number of people who go overboard is still sufficiently low that it's a worthwhile topic for daytime TV.  The commonplace becomes banal and daytime TV doesn't want banal.  In CP2020 you can get non-combat implants and still go mad-dog crazy.  Yeah, it takes a lot, but is it rational for it to happen at all?  I say, yeah, there's some rationality that at a certain point the knowledge of being 92% synthetic will cause a problem but that it makes more sense to have a generic sanity system that measures all traumas rather than specifically treating cyber as traumatic.  Using an extreme case, a full quadraplegic is likely to be less traumatized as a result of being implanted in a "man who bites his tongue" cybernetic body.  How about Steven Hawking?  Would he go stark raving mad in a full body prosthesis or would he socialize even more normally?By the same token, wouldn't a disease that causes a steady, inexorable degradation of all motor skills not cause mental stress to the possible point of psychosis?</blockquote>

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