Leo Gura

You know my view is much more nuanced than that.

There are so many possible tests and they are so expensive that you really need to be in search of a health problem when picking tests. The more common wellness tests would be: Vitamin D3 Male or female hormones Thyroid: TSH, free T3, free T4 LipoProfile cholesterol Anemia, blood iron levels Vitamin B, folate Liver panel In the US you can order all these tests online at websites like WalkInLabs. Not sure how it works in Canada.

Sounds like you are the one fixated on age here.

The mind defends what it identifies with. Simple.

It wasn't so much Communism as industrialization. All these Communist countries were pre-industrial when they made the leap into Communism, and its that industrialization which really raised their standard of living and brought them into modernity. But that industrialization could have been done without the Communism and probably would have gone better. Of course Russian culture as some great stuff in it, as every culture does.

Yes, however there is an interesting counter-point: the facial recogniton of your mother and father are hardcoded into special regions of your brain. If these regions are damged then they will start to feel like stragners to you. So while what you say is true at the existential level, there is a sense in which your brain/mind actually treats family differently than strangers at the hardware level. So in practice it will be very hard for you to regard them equally. It's sorta like sex. Obviously your sexual preferences are arbitrary at the existential level, but you get very turned on by certain images over others, and that's not something you're gonna change. Sex is hard-coded into you.

Part of the challenge here in how you define "core". Sorta by definition, if you are able to change some part of yourself then it wasn't core to you. Core would be the stuff that refuses to change even after much effort. Obviously there are part of yourself and your life which you can change. But human minds are not infinitely flexible. There is a core to your personality which ties in with your brain chemistry, genetics, childhood conditioning, baseline state of consciousness, physical health, and so on. In a certain sense you must learn to live with yourself. What makes it tricky is that you don't always know what is core to you and what is not, what you can change and what you cannot. So you have to be careful not to create limiting beliefs. But you also have to be careful not to brainwash yourself with fantasies. In the end you're just gonna have to put in a lot of effort and see what sticks and what doesn't. Some change will come naturally and some change will be like iceskating uphill.

Well, this conversation was just me testing out what this AI is capable of. I would certainly make refinements to my process in the future, telling the AI to be less agreeable. Using AI well is a skill. Yes, it can turn into an echo-chamber if not used carefully. It's important to explicitly ask for counter-examples. I did some of that, but I could have done more.

@Yimpa That you would actually try it is somewhat disturbing.

Maybe it's more to do with aging. As you get older junk food starts to hit your more. Your health can just naturally worsen.

It's a very uneven, distorted picture of the world. Good news is rarely reported. If you consume too much news it will seem like the world is going to hell. But if you walk outside and touch grass you will see that things are mostly fine and even improving. Most of the news is just petty drama and clickbait. It doesn't capture the big picture of how civilization is advancing.

That is fair. Yes, leftist policies can be harmful.

Stalin wasn't much of a lib. But he sure made use of a liberal zeitgeist to grab power. The problem is that modern day conservatives like JP want to claim that modern day leftists are Stalinesque and Maoist. Which is a gross error. It is in this context that I say that Stalin and Mao were not libs. I'm not really interested in comparing Stalin and Mao to Tsarist monarchy. Anyway, this conversation has become tiresome. You come to your own conclusions. The issue is clear for me.

The problem was that the liberalism was too radical and utopian. What matters is that the society is pushed towards liberalism but not too much to the point of forcing it on people.

Just no.

We compared Soviet Russia to Tsarist Russia and said it was more liberal. So this point was understood by us. Yes, Soviet Russia was more liberal than Nazi Germany if you look at just their ideology. Nazi ideology is very closedminded. Yes, there were liberal aspects to the Soviet ideology because it came from progressive Marxist philosophy.

Yes, there is very good reason behind slavery, oppression, war, theft, and genocide. It's all very useful and wonderful stuff when you are on the benefiting side of it.

@Novac08 I use the term liberal is a very broad sense, not its narrow use in political science. All progressives are liberal. Even though they consider liberals as something centrist. Because my aim is a bigger picture.

But you can. And I did. And it leads to valuable insights. The liberals are the ones in their era who were forward-thinking and openminded. Relative to those who were stuck in traditional ways.

Doesn't have to mean that.

Some of you are too thick-skulled for words

Ask it yourself and see what it says.

I asked it.

No. It isn't. That's the trick.

Time to cut the shit. Women get horny for guys.