Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
No bio...
User ID: 1350
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
5mo ago
We're at the point where reporting in the msm assumes that Trump will just suspend elections somehow. This report from PBS Newshour is about Trump using the word 'vermin' in a recent speech. In this report the words 'Dangerous Rhetoric' were overlaid over an image of Trump, and the meat of the report was an interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor from NYU. Right off the bat her comparison was with You Know Who, and she then argues that rhetoric is symptomatic of sections of the Republican party wanting to move to authoritarianism and suspending elections. The mechanism for this happening is up to the viewer's speculation.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
9d ago
In the US public schools I attended, we were restricted to eating lunch in the cafeteria. We were only granted liberty to leave the campus for lunch during our senior year. In suburban/rural districts most students are bussed and walking home and back within a 45 minute period isn't practicable (and at many schools, walking isn't an option at all).
As someone who has taken his share of heroic doses, as well as microdosed for years on end, I have mixed feelings about the whole experience. I went into the experience of psychedelic use as an atheist, and came out having a suspicion that there may be a karmic cycle of birth and rebirth; also that there may be a transcendent cosmic consciousness from which we all come and all return to. There is a horror in having this suspicion that I may be reborn again, that all of my attachments to my family, friends and self will be ripped from my consciousness and I will be left alone, with nothing before going through the whole cycle again. There is also a horror in suspecting that since the cosmic consciousness that we all may stem from is indistinguishable from ourselves that I may eventually experience all the suffering in the universe. There were times while using when I had an awareness of the Earth as an organic entity and felt a sense of terror at all the suffering and destruction that occurred within this entity. The shift in perspective that I experienced when having used also made me more aware of the transience of all things and sorrowful in their passing. Psychedelics can amplify horrors that you scarcely knew to exist and then you cannot un-forget them.
All that being said, they have improved my life considerably. They (paired with therapy) helped me overcome substance abuse. They helped me overcome self-alienation and self-hatred and develop self-compassion. But the experience isn't without its downsides, and shouldn't be entered into lightly.
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EDIT: One more thing, I know that the Myers-Briggs is just astrology for boys, but before the whole psychedelics/therapy thing I was invariably an INTP, and the years since I always test as an INFP.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
6mo ago
If I'm Iran, I take this gambit. Make the Americans spend blood and treasure openly defending Israel, actively alienate them from their Arab allies and force the US government into yet another unpopular war in the Middle East.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
9mo ago
I watched the bulk of this hearing and two things stuck out to me. The first was when Rep. Burchett entered this document into the record: Advanced Space Propulsion Based оп Vacuum (Spacetime Metric) Engineering. I found this interesting as it implies that the Congressman was lead to believe for whatever reason that energy for propulsion can be gathered from the vacuum of space. So either he has more info and this is relevant or he is buying a line of malarkey, but at least this document gives something to work off of to determine if it is malarkey.
The second was when Rep. Gaetz remarked after he had been informed of a UAP sighting from a source at Elgin AFB:
We were not afforded access to all of the flight crew, and initially, we were not afforded access to images and to radar. Thereafter, we had bit of a discussion about how authorities flow in the United States of America, and we did see the image, and we did meet with one member of the flight crew who took the image. The image was of something that I am not able to attach to any human capability, either from the United States or from any of our adversaries.
This indicates that (as long as one believes that Congress isn't in on a psyop), at minimum, powers within the DOD are trying to keep Congress out of the loop as much as possible when it comes to the UAP stuff.
I'll also note that members of the committee made it seem that they wanted to clear a path for commercial pilots to be able to report these phenomena without fear of any negative consequences; after hearing this I couldn't help but scour PPRuNe.org to see if any pilots had anonymously reported such phenomena, and didn't find much of anything before the past year (and the stuff from the past year appears to be sightings of flares from Starlink constellations).
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
8mo ago
Very much so. A precocious interest during my teen years, a few courses in undergrad, and continued curiosity afterward. However, after I started using psychedelics I had a appreciation of how the Dharmic religions and Taoism may all be reactions to the same transcendent experience.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
8mo ago
The reality of age segregation becomes blatant if you spend any time in a nursing home and see the residents living in an eternal present punctuated by episodes of The Price is Right, feuds with other residents, and rounds of meds. Those residents with families who visited them regularly had something to look forward to and experiences with people who weren't just acquaintances who lived on the same floor. I volunteered in one for a while in my 30s and the residents would often go out of their way to get my attention, chatting and having the attention of someone younger made them happier. The perspectives that the young and the old can give each other are invigorating to both cohorts. Keeping the old away from the young makes aging an unknown to the young, and thence something to be feared.
I will note that I truly felt sad for those in the home without any family to visit them. Volunteers would be assigned to specific patients, but many people had no one and it just looked to be a lonely existence.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
8d ago
In my primary school a minority of students walked to school. None were permitted to leave school during the day and all ate in the cafeteria during lunch. In senior high it was a similar situation to primary and only 12th Graders were permitted to leave. At my middle school no one was permitted to walk as the school was only accessible via a road with heavy traffic traveling at 45mph+.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
5mo ago
Being a Metafilter exile, from my experience a lack of downvotes serves to push would-be downvotes to become upvotes for the nearest antagonistic reply. This has the effect of giving upvotes to whoever can write an opposing comment the quickest, regardless of the logic of the response.
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Discogs to find other works and collaborations by producers, musicians and labels that I like.
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Collecting entire discographies has allowed me to find hidden gems and collaborations with artists that I didn't know previously.
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Shazam.
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Maroofy has assisted me in finding songs that are sonically similar to ones I already like. It's a gem for finding stuff with <100 YouTube views.
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The YouTube algo, which is worse than it was in 2015 or 2016 but still delivers gems on occasion. Finding full DJ sets on YouTube also has introduced me to tracks and artists that I'd never would have gotten into otherwise.
I discovered the band that I've listened to the most in the past 10 years by just by hitting the random article link on Wikipedia. Also, I spent a substantial amount of time on /mu/ during the pandemic, and wasn't introduced to a single artist that I liked through the wisdom of that community.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
10d ago
I've gone solo hiking in brown bear country and have come across solo women doing the same thing. They were motivated by a sense of adventure and wanting to see beautiful parts of nature and were willing to travel very far to do it. That being said, when these women came across me, a lone solo guy in his 30s, they were quite willing to join with me and hike out together.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
5mo ago
I believe Obama said that the UK would go to the 'back of the queue' for any trade deals, not taking a trade deal off of the table, but making it clear that the promises of some Brexiteers that the UK could just seamlessly move from the EU into a free trade agreement with the US were unrealistic.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
8mo ago
Were you able to achieve those experiences via meditation?
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
8mo ago
I returned to my regular group yoga practice after being absent for 10 months. I was a regular practitioner for 7 years, and the practice came to a halt in the lead-up to the birth of my son. Aside from the expected improvements in my flexibility and relief from minor aches, the most notable effect is a greater ability to focus.
I found that I was rather scatterbrained and overwhelmed with the tasks that I faced while doing WFH and taking care of my home and an infant at the same time. However, the practice of mindfulness and the 'moving meditation' that I engage in during my yoga sessions has made it easier for me to organize my thoughts.
During the months after the birth of my son, I didn't bother to engage in solo mindfulness/fitness practices (aside from walking) because the temptation to do work/housework became overwhelming. It's nice having returned to the community that I've practiced with for so long; just a few casual daily conversations with others (who aren't coworkers) outside of the home does wonders for my mood.
Finally, I want to note that having a kid has done more to strengthen my legs than all my prior yoga practices combined; chair pose is no longer a pose I dread.
As is pointed out by others here, it's all about framing. I frame this as:
-Blue pill: You join a death cult that will commit suicide unless half of all people join them.
-Red pill: You don't join this death cult.
Those blue-pillers are going to live or die in circumstances outside of my control, but the one thing I can control is my ability to save my own life. Perhaps another reframing is that instead of making the choice for myself, I am making it for another person. By selecting blue for this other person, I am willing to wager their life on an unknown outcome, and by selecting red I am guaranteed to save one life that would not be saved otherwise. I suspect that the calculus of this decision changes when the life of someone else is being wagered instead of one's own, but the difference is between having compassion for others and having compassion for one's self.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
9mo ago
There's a difference between your average civilian and one of the 59 people who are a sitting member of the House Armed Services Committee. Personally, I'm agnostic on the aliens explanation, but when parts of the military feel free to deny access to individuals responsible for its oversight, then something is not as it appears. Maybe civilian control of the military isn't as clear cut as it seems.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
9mo ago
Motte: In my opinion the compassionate thing to do is to mitigate any suffering and withhold the truth in regard to any interpersonal interactions. Bailey: I would even take this to a grander level and say that certain Big Lies can be ethical as they allow humans to cope with almost unbearable sorrow.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
1yr ago
How do I deal with my AI-driven existential crisis?
The best I can do for you is plant seeds of doubt with a list of questions.
What is the similarity between Yudkowsky and his milieu and a new religious movement or a millenarian movement? What is the propensity for new religious movements to predict a near- to medium-term apocalypse? Is there something in special about the rationalist community that makes rationalists immune to the sociological dynamics that have popped up in other human groups throughout history, and for this group to be so different as to the the first group that is correct about predicting the apocalypse? Is there something about Yudkowsky that makes him more effective at prediction than the cassandras that proceeded him? Is Yudkowsky better at marketing himself than other cassandras? If Yudkowsky is so convinced of an AI apocalypse, then why would he bother inflicting memetic despair on much of humanity during its final moments? Is Yudkowsky more of a sci-fi writer or a domain expert of AGI? Even granting Yudkowsky the title of domain expert in AGI, how frequently do domain experts make inaccurate predicitons in their areas of expertise (think of Malthusian predictions among economists and ecologists, or of sovietologists prior to 1991)?
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
5d ago
The sentiment you describe reminds me of the Talleyrand quote:
He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
6d ago
Wikipedia says their black population is 10%, i.e. a smaller percentage than what the US has.
Going deeper into this, the Wikipedia article on the Demographics of Brazil makes it seem as though only those with almost entirely African ancestry are counted as black (at 7.6% of the population) and then indicates that 42% are classified as Pardos (with a mixture of white, indigenous, and black ancestry). The article on Pardo Brazilians includes some genomic analysis that indicates between 10 and 30% African genomic ancestry for Pardos in most areas, and that in many areas, those classified as black have at least 40% European genomic ancestry.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
6d ago
No, it is in the middle of what used to be a cow pasture (and was still surrounded by it when I went there). The school (built on a 60+ acre property in the '70s) is centralized to serve a group of exurban communities to ensure kids don't have a long commute time.
Moofy
Chacrinha of Cold Brazil
9d ago
Thank you for sharing. I have a jaded view of arts magnet schools because my wife attended one where she experienced bullying and a generally poisonous atmosphere. It seemed like each student wanted to undermine the others. It's reassuring to know that this isn't always the case.
Can anyone here who had an overall happy experience during their primary and secondary schooling comment as to what your experience was like? What type of schools did you attend? How were your relationships with your teachers and peers? How involved were your parents in your schooling?
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