TheAlchemist

I don't support disturbing the toad. People argue that it's "higher vibration" because it isn't from a lab, but that just doesn't make much sense to me. These folks who argue for using the natural frog secretions often say so because they see the value of the natural world and see it as highly intelligent. That's all good but I can't imagine the frog spirit or mother gaia or whatever to be very happy about imprisoning and extracting the secretions of these frogs. So, just leave the toad in peace and use the synthetic, cleaner version if anything. Here's Hamilton Morris talking about this, I think he makes a solid argument in favor of the lab-made version.

A sincere thank you for all your contributions over the years. You have obviously done a lot of serious reading and have provided consistently high quality and nuanced views on these topics. You inspired me to read more and to see the depth of these issues. This should be a moment of serious reflection for any of us here. Ps. Maybe you could have a "blog" in the journal section with some of your reflections on political topics? I would be very interested to read something like that, and I'm sure there are others too who see the value in your approach. But I also understand completely if that isn't of interest at this time. Good luck 🙏

I think there's a realistic possibility for a scenario unfolding where Trump's regime starts using the threat of withdrawing from NATO to pressure European countries to dance to his tunes. During Trump's last term we got a small taste of this when he successfully pressured European NATO allies to increase their defense budgets with these threats. It would be naive to think he wouldn't push those demands further this time around as he is more organized and clearly willing to use threats and blackmail towards allies. Just like he demands total alligiance and praise from the people in his cabinet, so will he demand it from allies. And many will bend to his will, we can already see many progressive leaders in Europe stroking his ego and being careful about criticising Trump in any way in public statements. Pretty crazy to witness We in Europe need to get our shit together. This might sound crazy to some but basically we need a European military and a European Federation. The geopolitical environment has shifted significantly now from the post WW2 order.

Greetings and good luck from Northern Europe. We are woker than a crocodile on a meth binge

What does the devil need to make a deal with evangelical Christians? - Despise lgbtq+ people - Pretend to care about unborn babies That's really all that is needed for evangelicals to sign that deal with a passionate sense of duty. Similiar deals are easy to make with different voter bases. Just appeal to their central, heart issues and it wont really matter how much of devil you are outside of that.

This is a super fascinating topic to explore. First of all, I agree, all location is absolutely relative. This is the case with all objects that seem to be distinct and to have a distance from each other. This idea also stretches much further than relation between material objects. Here I wanna take the opportunity to explore the relation between the sense of identity and the sense of subjectivity, which is quite fascinating. This will sound obvious to some but I find its always to explore the fundamental questions of being conscious. Identity wants to locate itself in the symbolic realm in relation to other identities and the social structure. Example: Your name is a a concept that was imposed on you by your parents as a place to locate your identity (relative to other identities). Even if you choose a new name, you are still locating yourself in the symbolic social realm. Concepts like "man" "woman" "plumber" "muslim" "american" "human" "confident" etc. are all way to be distinct and distanced from other identities. This is the way identity aims to localize itself. So just like a pencil or a planet or a star doesn't have a location, neither does our sense of subjectivity. Identity is layered "on top of" subjectivity and provides a sense of location in relation to other identities and symbolic realms of language etc. This is why identity is in a sense important to navigate social reality. At the same time identity causes horrible problems when it is insisted on to relieve us from our subjectivity. In a sense, every object is alien to where it exists, nothing has its own "place". The same applies to us; whoever we think we are is alien to us. These relations between location and identity, subjectivity and space can be used to gain a ton of insight into all sorts of political and cultural situations too. For example, most ideologies appeal to the desire to "be located" in some way, appealing to (and creating) our desire to escape our subjectivity.

I think the lesson of Soviet Communism isn't that Marxism doesn't work, it is that any ideology with an absolute ideal that includes any utopistic idea of "salvation" of the individual from its struggle tends to lead to shit. So the critique of capitalism from Marx is extremely valuable. Yet we shouldn't try to "design" some better system. Even if we fully understand the limitations of capitalism, but then we channel that bubbling uncertainty and unknowing into designing some stupid capitalism 2.0, we will fall into the same traps. We gotta learn to sit with the discomfort of not knowing what we are supposed to do, without grasping for answers the moment we lose our ideological grounding. That's also why all those annoying people with humanities degrees who complain about the problems, present critiques, develop theories and philosophize, but provide no practical solutions are who we need to embrace and start listening to more.

That's not a surprising thing to hear from Leo. My understanding of his stance is that the same applies to money, a coffee table or your dad and so on to infinity. Jesus Christ being a social construct might be a shocking statement for a fundamentalist Christian to hear, but that's the kind of stuff you could expect to hear from Leo any day of the year, not just on Easter Sunday

The pills are known to be often significantly underdosed. Check out reddit r/2cb, there's a lot of important information like that there.

Poland has a large right-wing conservative Christian voter base that is targeted by a lot of populist politicians who can rile them up by stirring up their fears of other cultures. The refugee is the perfect scapegoat for people to blame for their problems and to shift attention away from internal issues. That is not to say there should be open borders or something though. There was also the unique case a couple years ago where immigrants were used as political tools by Belarus, pushing them around on the border. Of course there needs to be some kind of system in place to deal with that kind of situation. But also there is a solid reason for having these international refugee treaties. Who knows, maybe Poland could be in war one day, and they would probably really hope that other countries respect those treaties in that kind of situation. Imagine if ukrainian refugees were treated the way some of these frustrated guys fantasize about treating Syrians or Afghan refugees at the border.

I think none of my answers would be controversial to the average voter here in Finland. I think even some center and slightly right wing party supporters would get somewhat similiar results here. The average republican would basically be far right in my country.

One of my favorite countries to travel, but it's not for those who are looking for a sanitized comfortable experience. Go there to see all sides of humanity, the dark and the light. Talk to locals and be open, it can be very mind expanding. Many western people just like to make jokes about it and feed their prejudice to feel better about themselves, ignore them. You clearly have the curiosity and openness to be able to appreciate it. I can highly recommend it.

I agree, religion, especially in its fundamentalist forms often includes an absolute ideal that is seen as more important and valuable than even humanity itself. This provides the ground for justification for violence in the name of this absolute ideal. This is especially the case with forms of religious fundamentalism that are insecure about their status and act out of reactionary fear. Yet, if we just remove religion, we still have other forms of ideology, which present us with a lot of the same issues. We would just continue doing the same stuff, just in the name of a different absolute ideal. So the problem you raise is very very deep. It's a problem that is pretty much inseperable from the human condition and social reality itself. So that's why I'm inclined to believe that we need an ideology that both fully convinces us, yet fully confronts us with its own failure. The way it seems to me is that that's the only "way out" from this predicament. And even that is full of traps, and it can't really be done intentionally, since that would fail to be truly convincing. The ideology that both convinces us yet completely fails us would need to come about organically, which further complicates things.

Religion is not the problem, it is a symptom of the problem. And so are all forms of ideology, in which we are inescapably embedded, whether religious or not. Our modern ideologies just present themselves as being "post-ideological", which is of course just a facade that protects the ideology from failure and allows it to keep running. The question isn't even how to escape religion/ideology, but how to better understand how ideology functions. When we understand better how ideology functions, there is some possibility of failure. We are looking for the one successful ideology, when really we need the one that utterly convinces us, yet also utterly fails. Only total failure can bring something new. And we aren't there yet.

Now it all makes sense. Your new book will be "Das Kapital 2"