Basman

I read a story once of a witch in Africa going for a walk and as she walked past a football pitch a boy accidentally farted on here. She got pissed of and cast a spell on him which caused him to bloat like balloon. After some time they had to go and apologize to the witch to undo the spell and unbloat the boy.

I've seen the threat of witchcraft, voodoo, black magic, etc. being used to control and manipulate people in a bunch of documentaries. Like sex traffickers will take a lock of hair of their victims and tell them that they'll cast black magic on them if they go to the police. Very obvious control mechanism but superstitious and scared people will feel shaken by that.

Japan has a bunch of nifty little self-improvement/health terms and concepts baked into their culture. Like "kaizen", meaning cumulative gradual improvement, or "hara hachi bu" which means to only eat till your about 80% full.

People have different values. If understanding isn't your top value it'll probably be less than worth it. You have to know what is important to you first.

You have to be convinced that you are not missing out when not engaging in an addiction in order to move on from it. Build a strong emotionally activating case for yourself for why you are not missing out when eating junk food. Imagine how gross and stuffed you feel after pigging out on junk food. How your body will feel now and long-term compared to if you ate healthy. How you'll feel at 50 on junk vs healthy. Become hyper aware of what exactly you are doing to your body when you are pigging out. Also check what it does for you as an emotional crutch. What are you getting emotionally from junk food and can you get that elsewhere in a more conscious manner? Do you even need this crutch, really? On a side note, if you eat a lot of junk food because you love specific foods like pizzas or hamburgers then I think you can still eat those but you just have to make them yourself so that they are at least relatively healthy and rich foods. Half the appeal of junk food is the convenience and 9 times out of 10 you can cook something better yourself for less cost, unless you really like the greasy taste of a fry kitchen

I'm not gay I'm integrating my feminine.

Why is that? Is sex inherently unconscious?

If the first time you hear about WW3 having started and it is from YT, it's clickbait.

They are convinced that it is more masculine to abstain, so when they "relapse" they see it as a personal and moral failure, like they are emasculating themselves. Plus religious/conservative attitudes, where they see masturbation and porn as inherently immoral and gross. Like how religious dudes look at gay men holding hands.

Political polarization is now as American as apple pie. Walking out of a dinner because of politics is both hilarious and sad. Social media has been awful for the two party system. assuming they are not too ideological, you can at at least soften their views if you can present well grounded arguments. At the root of authoritarian populism is a distrust of institutions and a sense that the technocracy doesn't have the interest of the people in mind. These are valid concerns and Trump has a willingness to say how it is and leans on economic populism at times. He however doesn't actually back any of that up with meaningful action, which is the crux of the argument against him. The issue with Trump and authoritarianism is that they are not for the people but to self-serve. Trump doesn't have a plan and his need for drama is creating chaos around the world. You can like Trump on a personal level but you can also agree that he shouldn't be anywhere near power on a factual level. It is important that you yourself are grounded in reality politically or you will just be arguing for your own polarized camp. The whole problem is that the information environment is so polluted that the discourse is effectively a dreamland of falsehoods and misrepresentations. You need to elevate yourself above the miasma of left VS right and focus on having concrete political aims. These are some of my political aims very generally as an example: Maintain checks and balances of power Effective economic regulation Effective immigration control Effective military and security Effective climate change policy Regulation of the information environment

Just don't assume context. If you are on this forum you should be able to tell. I don't see what the issue is here?

Who gives a shit about the ugly ducklings? Learn from Hitler if you can.

I remember a metaphor by Teal Swan that went something like "you entered a room to paint and now that you are sitting in front of the canvas you are working so hard to escape it." Not an exact quote.

You could volunteer for the fire department, emergency services, the military, etc. Or joining a sports/martial arts club. Organizations with regular weekly exercises will instantly add some concrete structure to your life. Writing a to-do list in the morning is a powerful but soft way to structure your day. You have the important and hard tasks earlier in the day and the easier ones later. Just writing a to-do list in of itself will help structure your mind.

There's undeniably a social game at play behind the anti-porn movement that isn't grounded in facts but in identity validation. There just isn't the concrete evidence to prove that porn is defacto bad for you or bad everyone. The critique is a caricature of porn. That is my main problem. Even the term "porn addiction" isn't an actual real diagnosis grounded in science. It's much easier to blame porn for a lack of meaning and success than complex sociopolitical factors that socially and spiritually bankrupted your life (neoliberalism, atomization, etc.).

I found this ChatGPT response interesting:

Yes.

Access to porn is positively correlated with a decrease in rapes and an increase in emotional closeness. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-about-sex/201601/evidence-mounts-more-porn-less-sexual-assault

Porn is largely a sexual fantasy. It's hardly realistic depending on what you watch.

You want to bootstrap with losers, addicts, the mentally ill and the desperate. You want an MLM/ponzi scheme style of recruitment so you can outsource and up-size at the same time. Then as you amass wealth and influence you honey up some celebs and politicians and treat them like royalty so you can leech of their status and wealth for more even more influence and power. Your followers will be on the call to pamper, sleep with and in general be the slaves of these elites. Eventually you want to use your wealth and power to fuse your organization with the government/mega corporations as a provider of luxury mega parties for the ultra rich and legal slaves. That's when you will have made it. You'll have more money than you know what to do with, beautiful women will answer to your every beck and call and you live a life of lavish luxury and you can call in favors to change the world at the snap of a finger.

@Hojo I live close to a military training ground. I hear gun shots during the week days and when I go for walks during open hours I see large pathways carved by tank threads and spent casings everywhere jammed into the earth. There is no lie. Money is just a means of survival. If you undermine survival, for example security, then you'll see those aforementioned tanks come into use. Ukraine hungers more for artillery shells than money. Collective behavior is shaped by survival incentives. Morals are themselves are glorified rules for survival. There is no rule in the universe that says slavery is inherently bad for example. That is why morals and survival incentives intersect. Like women's rights and capitalism.

Society has a bigger problem with escapism in general, which porn falls under, which is to say that too much entertainment is wasting your time and potential long-term. All genuine criticism of porn is of it being escapist in my opinion. How many guys grew up gaming and severely neglected gaining social skills and milestone experiences? Escapism is everywhere on the one hand and on the other culture no longer mentors young people about how to engage with life. No teaching men how to be a man or giving meaningful advice. How many of you have thought that when you have kids you will make sure to properly mentor your child and regulate their internet use? Because you know from living it that having no guidance and unrestricted access to the internet makes your life worse in significant ways. Just think about it, if you have time to watch too much porn then you probably don't have much going on. That is way more concerning to me than the fact that your watching all of that porn in of itself. Gaming, porn and escapism are the natural conclusion of a lack of vision and a overly lax culture (and a massive entertainment industry).

If you remove the lower levels of a jenga tower it crumbles. Obviously. That doesn't make it fake. Development implies building on top of each in layers. You can't build a sky scraper without a first floor. For example, you can't have women's rights if you can't handle basic survival, which is why women's right doesn't truly appear till Stage Orange because only then there is an abundance of resources. The cultural structures of Blue dissipate as they are no longer necessary. But if for example a massive war breaks out you'll see the girl bosses quickly turn into house wives or leave the country outright like in Ukraine. It's funny, because I mostly see people from third world countries hating on Spiral Dynamics.

Development is relative. The West is Orange-Green while the rest of the world is Blue or Blue-Orange/red. Give the resources and technology the West has to Russia or some African country and they would immediately use it to conquer their neighbors and destabilize the region/world. Israel has nukes but doesn't use them but give nukes to Palestine and Israel is gone the next day. The kind of capitalistic exploitation you see is a more developed version of conquest and plunder (value extraction). It's a softer version of Mongol invaders burning down your town, slaughtering all the men, raping the women, hanging babies from trees like Christmas decoration and wearing the ripped out fetuses of pregnant women as necklaces. Europe geography created a boiler room for development and innovation as a bunch of countries that where very close to each had to compete for survival. That is one of the main reasons why the West is relatively more developed than the rest of the world.