Paragone

There are costs beyond the physical.

I agree with you that intimacy shouldn't be for money.

The sexually-transmitted infections ( I cannot understand how the modern population isn't 50+% infected with life-damaging infections, nowadays, and maybe it is, given how disinformation & "marketing" have completely replaced the value of correct-information that journalism used to have ) seem likely to rule the lives of both porn-industry participants & those who use porn as their frame-of-reference for deciding their own lives.

Getting the torquie out from the sex-work industry, however, de-criminalizing it, getting the pimps & organized-crime out of it, to make it safer for those who ( for whatever reason ) work in it, would require some serious restructuring of our cultures.

You've read that in other apes sex is traded by females for nutrition?

Male hoarding of rights/food/power/safety, making female trading of their intimacy for a portion of what the males had possessed as their "rightful exclusive possession", extends well beyond humans.

The thing is, we're supposed to be upright, not rationalizing pack-behavior, but instead dismantling it from us, making us all we can be.

That didn't happen, in the last few millenia.

It's possible that humankind will earn it, now ( The Great Filter, if survived, will produce this result, in about a century ).

but the prejudice is sooo deep..

You know that there is a story in the Abrahamic religions' Book of Genesis, about woman eating of "the fruit of the Knowledge of Good & Evil", which means MORALITY?

& sharing this eating with man?

Wasp-researchers in Panama ( from Exeter & Bristol universities ) discovered that altruism is generalized-mothering, among wasps.

Buddha Gautama stated that this is the case, 25 consecutive centuries ago: altruism is generalized mothering. The Buddhist phrase "all our kind mothers", in referring to ALL other continuums/souls, is rooted in this.

That the Abrahamic-religion men twisted a statement in their own scripture, in order to change it from meaning that women/mothers ate of morality, & shared it with men,

TO women committed the "original sin", & it cannot ever be revoked, & punishing/abusing women is now inherently-valid..

& holding that gaslighting for millenia..

Do you have any idea how fundamental the sex-racism is, in our religions & laws?

What culture/country holds that raising children is real economically-required-and-valid work?

Here in North America, that's a sick joke: raising children is .. treated as parasitism.

The male apes who hoard wealth, forcing female apes into prostitution for sustinance..

There's waaay too much of that, in our cultures.

Remove the need,.

That must come 1st.

Letting people do that if they want to, but cut criminality out from it, completely: criminalize pimping, human-trafficking, certainly, hard-line, but decriminalize sex-work that doesn't harm anybody.

( no protection against infections is harming people: protection ought be legislated, same as in any hazardous work )

do everything one can to prevent people younger than 21yo from doing it ( because brains aren't fully-developed until about then, which is the same reason that setting the legal-drinking-age to 21yo so significantly reduces deaths on the roads: younger people don't consider "no" to be as meaningful as people with older brains do ).

Put care in place for people who've been "turned into commodities" through abusive relationships, to get them out from that devaluation, instead of just letting the industry use their lives, & pretend that that's OK..

etc..

Really, living-wage legislation would cut into the "need" for sex-work, significantly.

Oh, & I've read that when sex-work is suppressed, rapes & domestic-violence both go up, so there's some displacement going on, between the categories, that way..

It isn't a simple thing, & I wish "commerce" & intimacy were so completely distinct that nobody would ever consider a Venn diagram showing intersection of the 2 categories, but .. the actual world doesn't work right..

_ /\ _

I lament Nova's demise, too..

I think the reason that the tech companies won't allow us to have our devices our own way ( Microsoft was doing this decades ago ), is "religious"/ideological, not practical:

I think they "need" to keep everybody permanently in a headlock, with our heads all twisted, because only if we are all in permanent learned-helplessness, only then can they automatically get away with everything they intend to be getting away with, in our world.

IOW, our autonomy violates their totalitarian religion, see?

It's the same as how ANY spirituality grates on Dawkins' blood: he wants it all gutted/butchered/destroyed, & suicides of ones he destroyed are no problem for him, & no alternative ever can have any validity to him.

Totalitarianism, whether traditionally "religious", or in any other ideology/prejudice/religion, is the same: it HATES violation of its homogenous dominion.

( comically: homophobic-religions want a homogenous het humankind, with no violation of that homogeneity. The existence of homosexuals is too heterogenous for them )

Autonomy is something that totalitarian supremacism ideology "needs" to obliterate from the whole world.

Consistently.

It seems to be a damn-good diagnostic for it, even!

_ /\ _

Beginning of Part 2..

Here's an example, which is different-enougn in context, that it becomes culturally easier to see the forest & the trees:

IF the U.N. had enforced that in Palestine NO political/ideological warping/deforming of ANY civil service, of ANY social service, of ANY regulatory-process or rule, of ANY judging, enforcing, education, of ANYthing,

essentially force-suffocating ideological ( Kahneman1 mind, mere-animal mind, read "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman & see that the whole world is forcing itself into an ocean-of-tantrum/pogrom, as ClimatePunctuation begins ramping-up through the next few decades )..

force-suffocating ideological-highjacking & ideological-undermining, & holding that force-suffocating in-place for a hard minimum of 2 generations, possibly 4..

( any "leaks" that accommodate ideological warping to displace considered-reason/Kahneman2 mind massively compromise/undermine the force-suffocation of that unconscious-mind-current which wants total-dominion of our lives/world .. and we let it have that dominion!

Foolish idiocy, which costs lives.. )

So, after hard-disallowing of Kahneman1/imprint->reaction/mere-animal mind's rule for enough generations, then the ideology/prejudice ( 2 sides of the same "coin" ) .. is force retired from authority, & the objective-generations have filled-in the roles, & .. then, eventually, a tipping-point is crossed, where it becomes self-sustaining/robust, see?

Anyways, Israel AND Hamas both wouldn't allow that, in Palestine.

As I've said before, what Hamas did in their assault of Israel was very DarkHexad: they sociopathically sacrificed all Palestinians for sake of the inevitable genociding-reaction from Israel, which, of course, will enforce that the Muslim world will focus until its reaction to Isreal's genociding becomes absolute, & then .. & then the prophecy in the Christian bible, that Israel gets annihilated comes true. Sometime before 2036 it'll happen, probably in the 2028-2036 period..

Here's a window into that particular bit:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matt+24%3A11-21&version=AMP

The "standing in the holy place" of Daniel .. that was his inner place, his place of Faithing on what he knew as G-D, what I'd call OceanOfAllAwakeSouls, since my whole cosmology is different, but that particular infinity is itself..

Anyone who stands in earned holiness within their meaning ( a hormonic of meditation, or, to phrase the same suchness from a different "angle", a lower-harmonic of G-D: it's itself, differnet cultures label things differently.

It doesn't matter that Daniel was Jewish, or Atisha was definitely not, culturally: each earned some remarkable truths, by "standing in the holy 'place' within their deeper meaning" and it's the same for all: earn it, & it's one's own meaning.

Fail to bother, & it isn't, see? : )

So, Hamas sacrificed all Palestinians' world, for sake of a genociding that would happen later, in reaction against Israel's genociding of Palestine & Palestinians..

Which is more-machiavellian? Isreal of Hamas?

Both, sadly.

Which is more sociopathic/psychopathic?

Both, sadly..

you get the picture.

There's a "little" ebb/flow, which makes it look like the herd-beast ( our unconscious-ignorance nature ) sometimes is stronger, sometimes is weaker,

but it's actually that our underlying limbic/herdbeast nature is ebbing & flowing in seeming present, or seeming dominant, but it's just the appearance that's changing, not the underlying substance.

Steven Pinker foolishly bet on the appearance, in "The Better Angels of our Nature", it looks like.

He holds that violent-aggression just diminished sooo fundamentally, that that trend must continue!

No, he was looking at the slope of a "wave", & falsely-extrapolating that the wave wouldn't "return".

Until the tantrum/pogrom is finished, whether any survivors live, or not, our unconscious-mind's ignorance is committed to BREAKING all our world/lives/everything to its dominion/lordhood..

Same as any toddler.

The fact that our ignorance can outright-kill the entire biosphere, now, isn't sufficient to cause upright/maturity/transformation-in-our-unconscious-substance: only experience-induced-understanding can,

& the only experience which can induce/enforce understanding of our ignorance-nature is.. action->reaction.. being beaten to near-death by it, until its force forces our unconscious-mind-substance to transform from impenetrable-ignorance to .. among the few survivors of The Great Filter, if there are any .. transforms into a kind of "sublimation", changing humankind's survivors into people who ARE fundamentally different from our generation..

Russia/Ukraina, Israel/Palestine, Deep-South-white-supremacists-and-"christian"-supremacists/all-who-aren't-white-supremacists/"christian"-supremacists, Anglophones or Francophones against the other, Yugoslavia, if you're old enough to remember that, South Africa's apartheid, .. it's the same damn fundamental-script, just with little variations, for centuries & centuries & centuries of our history: WE HAVEN'T CHANGED yet.

And THAT is The Actual Problem(tm).

ClimatePunctuation's simply going to exponentially explode the intensity, the number-of-factors, the violent-reaction-to-food-insecurity, etc..

The Perfect Storm, iow.

See how the butchering of Russia by Putin is working? Civil-rights less & less..

same as in Israel..

same as in the Deep South..

same as in the polarization in Europe, with the far-right growing strength to re-create nazism's possession of it..

Asia's got its equivalents, Africa too ( did you know that Mussolini stole fascism from Marcus Garvey, a Black African nationalist? he had no problem with collaborating with the American white-supremacists: segregation was wanted by both, right? )

Until human-nature is force-changed, profoundly/fundamentally, then the cause of all this world's problems remains in control of the world, & the effects can appear "better" or "worse", but the unbroken-toddler's still driving our bus..

Force-growing-oneself up into fundamental uprightness, facing into karma, seems the only sane method, to me..

At least one can change one's own Eternity, then, right?

if everyone else among this world rejects self-transformation, because "the kingdom of god is without", as the materialists are certain, as the parable of "the prodigal son" symbolically-represented..

but it isn't without: it's within, & the only way to earn it is to conquer one's own unconscious..

and that is waht humankind's ignorance won't allow, or tolerate..

correcting/removing the cause of all our world's major problems..

So, Natural Selection is going to enforce the issue into significance in the rest of this century.

_ /\ _

Action->Reaction.

Reaction against Obama put Trump in, right?

Reaction against Trump put Biden in, right?

I hope Harris wins, but the world-economy is being flushed, with exponential-force, down the sewer, & NO incumbent survives that kind of thing ( backlash-vote ),

AND as the book "The Big Sort" apparently explains, the cultural-segregation that mass-media push so hard creates intolerance.

Which, of course, when escalated by mass media of various alignments, keeps amplifying ( feedback-loops ) until .. genociding.

The locking-Anglos-out in Quebec ( we no longer have any access to goverment phone-services in English ) is simply an earlier stage of divide-and-genocide than whan the US is in, but .. it'll get there.

Whether unconsciously or consciously, the heads of Quebec are committed to turning Canada into another Russia/Ukraina, Israel/Palestine, Deep-South racism kind of thing, in a generation or 2, for whatever they win/gain in accomplishing that.

IF Trump doesn't win 2024, then Civil War begins in 2028, +/- a very-few months, & continues until the US is butchered-carrion.

It's far too late to save the US: the real problem is that Animals-and-Tribes-Time mode of Kahneman1 mind ( imprint->reaction ) has already successfully highjacked the country.

As .. Glubb, was it? realized, empires die at about 2.5-centuries.

There's a book "How to Hide an Empire" on the American Empire, so anybody who wants to pretend that all the machiavellian interventions ( remember when Iraq's intervention backfired, because they didn't want to be a puppet-state, & wanted self-determination? That was noticed openly in some news item or other, back then.. I'd not have clued-in to it, on my own, buth then, through the years.. there are puppets of lobbies, aren't there? & these lobbies work to enforce that accountability never get near them.. .. whatever: if humankind isn't viable, & Natural Selection extinguishes humankind, then humankind's herdbeast games, bullying & majority-domination, & minority-beaten/broken, same as in herds anywhere .. we were supposed to be upright-human, you know? if we failed The Great Filter, well, then too bad: we earn what we earn.. )

So, the identity of the ruling-class has sooo completely mismatched the actuality of the empire, now, that it's incapable of surviving.

Same as Rome, Britain's empire, etc..

12-13 generations, & .. kaput.

The Big ( cultural ) Sort seems to be the mechanism, but DarkHexad { narcissism / machiavelianism / sociopathy-psychopathy / nihilism / sadism } is cultivated, if not directly-grown, by privilege-caste, & .. well, that's a feedback-loop too, isn't it?

Concentration-of-privilege, concentration-of-wealth, which "says" "trickle-down economics", but is gaslighting..

which "says" "charity", but .. when you see that literally millions of DONATED $ are pocketed by the executives of the US's United Way .. that woke socialist feminist convicted-felon Yehoshua "Jesus" ( Iosa, in Roman/Latin, I've been told by an actual Roman-born person ) benJoseph already laced into fake-charity, 2 millenia ago..

---

Part of the problem is that it isn't a single problem: it's actually a fractal and chaotic anti-fragile/robust mesh of problems, which all mutually-reinforce..

Narcissism conserves "validity" & excludes all it can, to prove how "exclusive" its "validity" is, right? Anti-compassion. Sociopathy is .. exactly that, isn't it?

Feedback-loop..

How can "trickle-down economics", or "compassion for the privileged-caste/class's inferiors" ( note the contempt in their "charity".. I was born into the upper-middle-class, & it took 7+ years of accumulated homelessness for me to crack the identity-underlying-ego that that ideology/prejudice, as all "race", "class", & "gender" is, in social-process, enough for me to get to some kind of objective-honestly, more than a decade later.. )

The action->reaction cycle cannot be stopped, postponed, or prevented: US of A is finished.

I hope that Kamala Harris makes this last "calm before the storm" be as spiritually-thriving as she can, enforcing an increase in state-integrity, against lobbies' undermining of everything, but it doesn't change the pogrom/tantrum that'll destroy about 2/3 of the US's population in .. approximately 7y from when it begins ( that is just one of the natural human-cycles, because it's a cycle that our unconscious-mind "works" at: it's too "stuck" to work quicker.. )

You know how sometimes you have a grandparent or relative or friend or other-family, someone whom you really care about, & cancer/whatever's killing them?

& there's nothing you can do??

Objectively, that's what's happening with the US: it's fatal, it's implacable, only our relationship with its process, & outcome, & the way we make the process enact, can we change..

We can't prevent the death.

We can't prevent the reaping of the consequences of our previous-generations' "sowing" carelessness in education, or in accommodating the "surrender" ( technical-only, not honest/total ) of the KKK/Confederates, who've now done to much of the country exactly what McDonnell Douglass's beancounter-culture did to Boeing ( a "reverse takeover" )..

What has been sown, is going to be reaped, to use the Christian rendition of what the older religions call "karma".

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end of Part 1, as the Lemmy character-count blocked my commenting with the whole thing in a single entry..

( Horseshack voice: )

Oh! Oh! Oh! Mr Kotter!

YOU MEAN FILTER-BUBBLES DO THE SAME THING TO BOTH HUMANS AND AIs??

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How Very Incredibly Surprising(tm), Oh, My!

/s

_ /\ _

Isn't that interesting..

The anbility to prevent the getting-out of evidence of what the authorities do to the locals..

Just like the unconstitutional state-laws which criminalize capturing-of-video-evidene of police executing people..

"I wonder" if this would ever be abused by anti-accountability authorities..

( remember that the whole Christian religion is founded on a guy who was a kind of whistleblower, & had spikes hammered through his wrists, in his crucifixion, for his calling the legalists "hypocrites"..

I wonder how "Christian" he'd find them to be, if he returned, & saw what they're doing? )

Human nature & demon nature seem .. related?

or is that too harsh?

.. perhaps .. but wasn't the Inquisition demon-law in the name of benJoseph?

hmm...

_ /\ _

IF you are in accounting, especially if you are in regulatory compliance accounting, or going into it, you NEED to know about a book named "Financial Shenanigans".

I'm not intellectually-equal to it ( or to accounting, for that matter: psychology's much easier to crack, for me ), but it is THE most important book for forensic-accountants to know.

The bullshit that they've been pulling, where "Between 2017 and 2021, Amazon had more than $25 billion in losses from its devices business, according to the documents. The losses for the years before and after that period couldn’t be determined." didn't produce criminal consequences..

You've got to be kidding, right?

Individual human goes to jail or prison for $2k tax fraud, but .. big tech gets a free pass on that kind of "accounting"??

couldn't be determined??

Either run a tight-ship or don't be surprised when it sinks.

Economies are the "ships" that carry our countries, & have to be properly regulated, exactly as a tightly-regulated ship has to be, to keep it afloat longer.

It isn't the sloppy mechanic-racers who win NASCAR, it is the ones who control everything correctly, with total right-regulation.

I remember when I'd read that Cisco switched to closing their books out daily, so as to always know the exact position of the company..

what an incredible degree of financial-operations integrity that was..

Anyways, "Financial Shenanigans" is THE book to dig into, if you want to know if the business you're considering investing in is cooking the books.. and you're capable of understanding that stuff at the level it's speaking..

_ /\ _

Conflict-of-interest is the root of all corruption.

This escalation will continue,

until big-tech forces the governments to kneel to the surveillance-capitalism biggest:

They will simply say something like:

"Either your government removes laws, regulations, accountability, etc, from us,

XOR we are hamstringing your country: we OWN you, we POSSESS you, & you will obey OUR rule."

I guarantee this will be happening between now & 2036.

Remember how they can ratchet-up a genocide, anywhere??

They've already done so, in some places..

( Facebook & .. was it Myanmar? as 1 example )

_ /\ _

This is inevitable:

Once the people in China can only see the CCP's version of everything,

& ALL stuff has been adulterated, either by AI or by some agency-or-other,

THEN dissent should die-down in the Chinese population:

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Read Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" to understand how Tropical-Culture vs Nordic-Culture shapes people, & how old-cultures vs new-cultures shape people,

then read Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" to understand the dimensions of culture that his Cultural Dimensions Theory digs into ( power-distance, uncertainty-avoidance, "success"-orientation, & other dimensions )..

& when you understand how we're kind of "template" people, before being born into culture,

but once born into it, our entire meaning gets framed within whatever culture we were born into..

therefore, the CCP can simply remove most diversity-of-meaning from their completely-possessed-population, through a generation or 2 of that.

Tibetan, Uyghur, Hongkonger, Taiwanese, Indian, South-Korean, Japanese, the intent is consistent: "the destruction of " .. others .. "is the midwife of Chinese supremacy".

---

I expect a similar kind of program to exist in all right-possessed countries, as the right is doing in the US, right now, with burning or banning books, eradicating proper education, suppressing libraries, etc, they're just doing the same thing as what the CCP's doing, only less-skillfully, is all.

No real difference in their deeper heart/motivation/intent, though: supremacism, crushing/destroying all "other" kinds.

Russia's big on it, too, isn't it?

Islamism..

The "Crusades" were good examples of this kind of idiocy?

The "Inquisition"?

The "Buddhist" genociding of Tamils?

So long as the "home" story is .. "coherent", & "justifies" all, then .. kids grow up .. believing, right?

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There's a book, & a Big Think yt video, on "Collective Illusions", which is important!

Please invest in seeing that video, & see how it's actually a delusion-mechanism in our minds..

..used by political-forces, yes, but they couldn't use it if it didn't exist, could they?

_ /\ _

Physical Abloy-style lock, not a "smart" lock.

Go see some cybersecurity type people, & see that they put physical security in place where they value real security.

ITIS ( Information Technology Information Systems ) has many vulnerability & attack-surfaces that "dumb" metal doesn't.

If you look, you will discover that there is a news-story about a company which did the hotel-locks for zillions of hotels in our world, that had a fundamental compromise in their design, & now everybody has to replace all those locks, but .. that isn't going to happen, is it?

IOW, criminality-industry was helped by all that "convenient" ITIS.

Please consider going with an Abloy Protec style physical-lock.

The Lockpicking Lawyer could get in, as could some of his equals, in mere minutes, but for the opportunistic-jackassery of normal robberies?

You can't EMP a non-digital-lock to kill it, can you?

There isn't a backdoor in the thing ( unless you multi-key it, but even then, with 21 iirc discs in the thing.. it's still locked )

etc.

Float-tanks are this:

Imagine a bigger-than-normal bathtub, so you can sprawl-out ( arms & lega akimbo ) without hitting the sides..

the water-density is upped with brine, instead of plain water ( the float-tanks place I used to go to used sacks of "bitter salts" & the texture of the brine was damn-near oily, and DO NOT EVER shave shortly before going into a brine-soak, or you're going to discover what stinging really means )

also it is brought up to a person's body-temperature, or close to it.

When there's no temperature-difference, & you're floating sooo high that drowning is much less likely ( the Dead Sea is probably the prototype for all float-tanks, btw ), & you aren't bumping into the walls, then you're in blissful sensory-deprivation ( total dark, too, obviously, probably use a timer, limit it to 2h max ), & meditation can be awesome in these conditions.

_ /\ _