As a libertarian I appreciate their government’s not razing all that shit, and just letting people do what they need to do.

A friend of mine is homeless in SF. His mental health has dropped significantly ever since the city forcibly moved him from the spot where he was camping to a shelter. He says he was doing much better in the tent than in the shelter.

Isn’t anything non-committal from your source of income a red flag?

Or start your own. I mean this entire thread is just reeking of obvious demand for a very easy to administer mutual fund

In other words, is an integral part of our society that we’ve all collectively invested a lot of money into, for a lot of benefit.

Almost as if the cars have value beyond a status symbol or signal of political allegiance.

Basically just defining addendums here

If society needs to all get along then it has already failed.

Depends on what’s outside my home.

Thus far in life I’ve only been able to afford living in cities, so the blinds stay closed 24/7

That’s why they calling “paying” attention. Like money, attention is a limited resource.

Which rights are being taken away?

I’m all for paternity leave, but there is a conflict between taking time off to take care of your newborn, and taking time off to breathe.

Newborns aren’t exactly a vacation.

I don’t feel rage when I watch the news, even when I see stories I don’t like.

Have an AI summarize it for you?

I guess that’s why they call them singers?

Ethics is more complicated than you think it is.

There is absolutely no reason that the set of rules you learned first would be the actual set of rules that governs people.

As you have learned, being non-aggressive is not sufficient strategy to avoid others’ aggression.

There’s no reason to think it would be, except that it was in kindergarten when large authority giants would easily overpower any aggressor, and would by policy do so on behalf of the nonagressive ones.

Don’t confuse kindergarten rules for global culture. Huge mistake.

Actual culture evolved from nature, and in nature in order to protect yourself you must retaliate when attacked. Every organism has weapons. Every organism.

Meditate on that. Why would every organism use some of its previous energy budget building weapons? Why would evolution select for that 100% of the time?

You’re being thick-skulled.

We are telling you what the problem is. Listen, or continue to have the problem. It’s your choice.

If you define winning as everybody always liking you and nobody ever having a bad opinion of you then yes, you can never win.

The trick is not to define “winning” as some impossible task like everyone always liking you.

Kinda like the word “delicacy”, which only ever refers to nasty indigenous food you must pretend to enjoy to avoid offending them.

You know you’re allowed to print off a new copy

But they don’t treat the depression by simply forcing consciousness upward through the emotional landscape. They facilitate a restructuring of conceptual maps and perceptions, and lots of this is in relation to the world and to others.

The fact that psychedelics can do this, but only tend to when they produce this big restructuring, means it’s the restructuring that does it.

And the happiness often is associated with an improved relationship with the world, an improved approach to life.

I know the relief comes before the new approach manifests, but that doesn’t mean the relief comes before the mental identification and exploration of that new approach.

The person’s karma changes before it manifests into their life. Like, even though you couldn’t measure it with a video camera, the new behavioral program’s been written. The new path has been seen.

So I think psychedelics just further indicate how non-arbitrary happiness is.

Like a person might be happier in their poverty and disease, but that doesn’t mean their life didn’t change. Their life changed because they changed — instead of snapping at their spouse they see it coming and stop to take a breath. That’s a little micro-change they got from seeing themselves and reorganizing their perceptions with psychedelics.

But when they go to family christmas they aren’t going to tell their father-in-law “I stopped snapping at her so much. I was doing it all the time and then I became conscious of it and I do it a lot less”.

That’s a change in the person’s life, which slips past our notice when we conceptualize “what were his circumstances? Did the mood change come from a change in circumstances or some chemical thing?”

If those are the only two categories, taking a heroic dose of shrooms to explore one’s depression and anxiety might seem like it falls under “some chemical thing” being the change that happened.

But if we allow more categories, it’s better to say he changed his karma. It may manifest later in a higher paying job or a new house, but for now it’s only manifest in a change of the amount of tension in the room between him and his wife.

Just because something doesn’t happen doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It’s like saying one can grow an orchid over six feet tall. One can get a PhD. One can bench their body weight.

Not that it happens all the time, but that it’s possible.

I’m only saying that it’s possible to resolve differences in “beliefs” using mutual presentation and examination of evidence.

Of course perception cannot be articulated, and can differ, and so may present unresplvable differences. But those differences can be reasoned about and recognized. A person is less touchy about their perceptions than about their values, so if you can prove to me something like “You tend to see 90 degree angles as acute”, I can (a) be thankful about that and (b) work around it.

It’s harder to do that with values. Values are built into a person like perceptions are, below articulated knowledge, but they’re also (by definition) too important to “work around” or “correct for”.