You mean all the xianxia novels aren't going to help my understanding of Marxist theory? 
IncorrigibleDirigible
joined 1 week ago
Sadly believable.
And it's by design. An Underground History of Education in America is an interesting book on the historical players involved. And guess who the main ones are (hint: it's capitalists).
I disagree. Actions are regulated by the areas of the brain directly responsible for just that. I may have had a different opinion when my understanding of how our decision making actually functions was less informed, but it definitely IS an impulse not being controlled. There is no other mystical moral ingredient that you can shoehorn into the equation. Free will is nonsense and attempting to discourage people through threats of punishment doesn't work. My own half brother was a repeat offending criminal and NO amount of consequences ever stopped him and now he's dead from his own lack of impulse control. I think it's exactly accurate to describe any behavior in functional terms.
They did allude to capital punishment though. I'm not one for revenge based "justice" personally so murdering people doesn't sit well with me. I'm probably in the minority though since seeing perceived wrongdoers suffer is a huge dopamine release for primates. I believe in a non punitive rehab/reeducation/quarantine approach to deviant/nonconforming behaviors (the things we currently label as "crime"). Neurobiology calls into question some deeply ingrained societal modes and the info is relatively new and not commonly known. I'm also not too keen on the meritocratic approach to conforming behaviors. It's pretty crap to punish people for poor impulse control and it's pretty crap to reward people for having been born into circumstances that allow them to exercise impulse control, since those factors are mediated by genetics and environmental interaction. Prenatal and early childhood mostly in fact. I like the analogy of taking away a child's toys because they caught a cold. Just doesn't seem reasonable. Creating material conditions to ensure that people don't experience high levels of prenatal and childhood stress seems like the only real actual solution.
It's really the main issue with the internet, lack of transparency. Anyone can easily make multiple accounts and also there's no way to verify anything about any of it really. At least when I do direct aid locally I can tell that the person is in a bad way pretty quickly. No one on the streets here is faking it and it's just not the case on the internet. I'd love to direct my resources to leftists where possible but I haven't got a lot to spare so I'm probably going to focus on local direct aid.
Well I'd be willing to invest everything I have, though by myself it wouldn't cover much beyond some land and I already have tools and skills for building but it would require a couple other people with some amount of money, a few able bodies obviously as well. The construction would have to be mostly reclaimed building materials/harvested from the land. Rammed earth is literally dirt cheap, and a few trees from the land would go a long way. Most of the people I know claim to be socialists or MLs or some form of leftists and have some accumulated wealth but so far no one seems willing to actually do anything in real concrete terms. Also zoning laws and building codes are a nightmare to navigate when you are using alternative construction methods beyond something like straw bales around here. Logistics can be overcome, but without a few other people it's hard to form a collective, hence my disappointment. I'm partially disabled and my window of opportunity is closing with age but that just means I work slower which only matters to capitalist exploiters who want economic output. Anyhow it's been a thing I've been working on, I still haven't given up. I guess it's just sheer obstinance.
My experiences with paganism and pagans over the decades has been that mostly gods and goddesses are not usually taken literally but as ways to connect with various aspects of nature or representative of internal psychological states and chosen by people for reasons of personal affinity. The deities may come from actual religions that existed in the past and were worshipped in particular ways but the majority of pagans I have interacted with take a much more abstract syncretic approach. Individual deities that share the same or similar functions are taken as different names for the same thing (more or less). The basic idea of syncretism is also quite old and the modern monotheistic approach of "my god is the only right one/one that is real" is relatively rare in the ancient world; first making an appearance in 18th dynasty Egypt under Akhenaten if I'm remembering correctly. The Romans for example never really tried to obliterate native religions of the places they conquered and often imported foreign deities. Notable exceptions for those religions that practiced human sacrifice, which were persecuted quite heavily (side discussion on their own hypocrisy isn't really relevant to your question though). Obviously there are bound to be those in the modern pagan movement that "believe", but I honestly haven't met many literalist pagans. BeamBrain's friend's take is the closest thing I've seen to that with any frequency.
My copy of Pink Flamingos, C.H.U.D. or Troll2, etc. will definitely h4x0r ur b0x3n. Also Shakma needs to be on my Jellyfin.
An academy award followeth an death untimely, methinks.
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I am grateful for any good news these days.