InsurgentRat

we elected a socialist in the 70s. It ended in a constitutional crisis and his successor was groomed by the CIA. rhymes with certain things no?

we had a publicly owned transport system, telephony, healthcare system, a thriving public service. Then we started getting leaned on.

We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.

It goes on.

Even our slang is being replaced, people are pronouncing things your way, the media of the usa is replacing everything and that’s intentional government policy.

I (and billions of others) ignore almost all of this and eat with my hands, by the beach, dusting sand and swatting flies off chips that fall and guess what?

We’re almost all fine.

This stuff seems like paranoid germophobia to me.

While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:

• different trade interests
• different geopolitical interests
• different cultural interests

all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.

There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.

When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.

There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.

Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.

agree with all of these, although sadly liquid smoke is probably not a healthy thing to have a lot of.

That said I eat onions all the time and they make me ill. Everyone makes their own judgement on the blandness for longevity trade

Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.

For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.

A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.

Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)

our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.

How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?

I think a lot of people making jokes about stuff like this may struggle to understand what addiction feels like from the inside and how intensity of desire is not always a function of withdrawal severity.

The popular image of addiction is something like a twitchy looking person begging for the next hit. This is rare, even for extremely addictive drugs with severe withdrawal.

Often addiction manifests internally as a fascination with something. When I smoked it was rare to not be on some level thinking about the logistics of when I would next light up. I also over emphasised the positive effects (many of which in hindsight were merely alleviating withdrawal which is hilarious) and diminished the negative ones.

As someone with a sweet tooth it’s not so different to how I feel about treats. It’s difficult not to think of grabbing one when shopping, I typically feel a desire after dinner, I often “cave” if something is around or eat it without much intention.

Contrast this with antidepressants, which can cause debilitating months long withdrawal. Yet when stopping SNRIs I had no powerful desires to consume them, despite knowing that doing so would make it stop feeling like my soul was being sucked out the back of my head.

There are reasons to be cautious about lots of research like this, pharma companies would love to sell a solution for example, but it’s not outlandish. Nicotine is addictive because it makes your brain light up in certain ways, there is nothing special about the molecule except it does that thing (well and crosses the BBB). If there are other ways to make brains light up in similar ways without a specific chemical receptor it stands to reason that under certain circumstances addiction may manifest.

It sounds like you are basing how fine it is to hurt someone for pleasure (and that is all it is at this point) on how similar they look to you rather than any principled understanding of behaviour and neurology.

This is called speciesism and is just another manifestation of the cognitive failures that lead to most evil in the world.

It is absurd to equate grass releasing hormones that cause the production of bitter compounds with electrocuting a chicken. That is like saying steel feels pain because because it emits sparks when ground or that an amputated foot feels pain because nerves send signals for a while. Pain requires perception, we obviously have no test for an inner listener but we can compare behaviour.

This is after all why you believe I am a real person and not a sophisticated automaton.

The only real behavioural difference we can find between us and birds for example is possibly language. Parrots and corvids there is some evidence they can do language, rather than communication. Even so it’s absurd to use this as a line for acceptable suffering as you would essentially be arguing that human infants and humans with certain cognitive differences were acceptable to kill for meat.

The problem with isms is that you can’t draw meaningful lines around the world if you start from a conclusion and work backwards (in this case, animals other than humans are sometimes ok to eat). The moment you start trying to defend it you are forced to confront that the position isn’t reasonable but rationalised.

I suspect you know this, because you feel some degree of guilt and are throwing out statements like “plants feel pain” which have the objective of winning an argument rather than finding truth.

I take it you eat plant based to minimise suffering then, as well as cry when a lawn is being mowed?