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Paragone @lemmy.ml
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33 Powerful Books That Might Change Your Life
  • Read Paul Fussell's books on the North American Class system:

    the difference between Middle-Class & Working-Class is cultural, not income, and it's rather indellible, too.

    I'd now have Upper-Middle-Class, Financial-Class, Middle-Class, as distinct groups/cultures.

    Middle-class judge you by your job-position.

    Working-class judge you by your money.

    The cultural-difference is profound.

    Try getting an Upper-Middle-Class person to honestly accept you as valid, when you're a homeless person ( despicable/inherently-nonvalid, human-garbage ) and they're addicted to clawing all the Upper-Middle-Class status they can..

    That can be quite educating.

    Class-identity is as ancient as hierarchy in our society, so at least as old as agriculture, but I'd say it's as old as village-chief, so .. perhaps 0.5 million years, min.


    Books that I find profounder, importanter, include Kegan & Lahey's "Immunity to Change", on our unconscious-mind's automatic-fighting-off of growing-up, protecting entrenched-dysfunction, and how to correct/dismantle that sabotage.

    Halvorson's little, and important, "The 8 Motivational Challenges".

    Logan, King, & Fischer-Wright's book condensing their research into something readable for us, "Tribal Leadership", on the 5 cultural-process levels ( they wrongly identify them as "stages", but stages, like Kegan-3, Kegan-4, etc, are irreversible ).

    Moneyarchy has been crushing more & more & more lives into level-1 & level-2 culture, and there are consequences of that.

    Level-1 is where mass-shootings arise from, and in 2023 the US had over 600 of them.

    Level-2 is where conspiracism grows.

    Not understanding that book should be considered criminal-negligence, for government-authority, nowadays.

    Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar", and then Hofstede's "Exploring Culture" show how the climate, the civilization, the culture, that we are born into, fundamentally-alter our "personality" in predictable ways.

    John Truby's "The Anatomy of Genres" and "The Anatomy of Story" should be considred required-reading for anybody who unconsciously uses story to form the story of their own meaning ( which is all of us ).

    He's got a couple of mistakes, as many profound books do, his concept of Village is insane, being Wild West Village, instead of the dozens-of-millenia old Tribal Mother Village, and his concept of humor is wrong, too, being based on "the drop", which is a US thing, and not the core of humor, at all. The real core of humor, is being surprised by the improbable. Creative-misinterpretation humor shows this.

    Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid" is the core competence in all of Western Philosophy. All the Western Philosophers who reject, ignore, or don't-understand, the core points in that book, are not competent in philosophy, period.

    These books all outclass many of the books he's recommending.

  • Is there a community for Android games without dollar signs in-game?
  • Zillions of other things crowded-it-out from your awareness, is all..

    I defy you to count all the things you've had to remember, or think-on, since you created that community, Hoomin..

    As one gets older, it happens more: more things-in-the-bin, harder-to-find-a-particular-thing.

    Consider, though, that now your community has got other people interested, and it wasn't done through shilling, but through accidental-forgetfulness.

    Karma provides lessons, we only have to be honest-enough to earn their essence, you know?

    _ /\ _

  • What I should do about auditory "hallucinations"
  • If it's changing, you might want to get a brain-scan, immediately.

    No, it isn't normal ( not for me, anyhow ), to the guy who said it is normal.

    It's not an ear thing, it is an auditory-processing thing, so it's your brain that's doing it.

    The question is why it is doing it.

    Perhaps it's just fuzzy wiring, as most such cases likely are.

    ( synaesthesia is a case of weird wiring, and I've got that, but not in the normal way, not senses blurring into each-other, but rather my non-visual cognition being a kind of "blur" to those senses, so they mesh oddly )

    But if it begins changing in either intensity or character, get a scan.

    ( I'm a braindamage survivor, and it takes decades to adapt to braindamage: prevention/avoidance is better than hating one's life for decades, while being bullied by all who reject that it could still validly be a problem, and hold that one ought either force oneself into being an "acceptable" drugged psychiatric-zombie, and not "pretend" to be getting better, or one ought be able to be acceptable-pretence, just like Valid People(TM) are. )

    _ /\ _

  • dds
  • Spend a half-month considering, deeply, which path you would most-value having taken at the end of your life.

    Due to an unconscious psychological-limitation, imagine your funeral at 1.5x your current age ( we apparently have a kind of "horizon" in our ability to understand our meaning beyond that ),

    and imagine each significant variant, or compromise, and see how each makes you, in that future-condition/context feel.

    Your answer is within you, same as for everyone.

    _ /\ _

  • Do you believe in meritocracy? Why or why not?
  • SO LONG AS IT IS ACTUAL MERITOCRACY,

    and not just privilege's gaslighting about it ( via making-certain that the poorest have inferior-nutrition, inferior-air-quality, worse-pollution, inferior-education, inferior-healthcare, etc ),

    then yes, I hold it is The Proper Way.

    However, it REQUIRES a truly-level playing-field, and not a 2-tiered "level" playing-field.

    The Scandinavian system of ONLY public-schooling, so there is only 1 tier of education-quality, is a required component.

    Student nutrition needs to be guaranteed.

    Healthcare needs to work properly, for all.

    Livingwage needs to be for all full-time work, and companies that try to hire only part-time for the real-work, have to have the profit-benefit of such hamstringing-of-many-lives cut from them all, permanently.

    Fairness requries careful systematic, & openly-honest enforcement, because the DarkHexad: narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty ALWAYS seeks to enforce abusive-exploitation, and it is underhandedly aggressive, and natural in our human nature.

    Not mitigating it == accommodating it.

    Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

    _ /\ _

  • With the GOP primary basically over, what would happen if the supreme court were to bar Trump from candidacy?
  • They are going to ignore all laws that are inconvenient to them:

    IF Trump isn't permitted to run, maybe they'll run with a placeholder, then have Trump be shoehorned-in somehow, perhaps by Republican-electorate decree...

    Legalists, same today as in Yehoshua "Jesus" benJoseph's day, pick & choose which pieces of the letter-of-the-law that they acknowledge.

    That has always been their fundamental tactic, along with gaslighting.


    Notice how the West held-to Natural Law ( morally-based Law ) in prosecuting Nazis, but .. as soon as that was done .. the West decided that Legal Posit-ivism ( legalism ) is the West's right, and nobody has any right to be threatening any privilege through moral-law, as legalism prohibited that sort of behaviour.

    Nothing's changed: human-nature is the same, now, as it was back in the Christian bible's times.

    _ /\ _

  • When do I actually need a firewall?
  • A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I'm remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.

    It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.

    The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.

    I've had linux desktops pwned from me.

    the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: "maybe" your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things(tm) are going to happen, sooner-or-later.


    I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours...

    haven't done it in years: they'll not pay-for good anti-virus, they'll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.

    Let 'em rot.

    I've got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.


    "but I don't need antivirus: i never get infected!!"

    then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??

    "but I don't need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!"

    get AIDS, then, & don't use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how "healthy" you are, 2 years in.

    Same argument, different context-mapping.


    Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux's netfilter/iptables, years ago: don't help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in...


    Anyways, just random thoughts from an old geek...


    EDIT: "when do I need to wear a seatbelt?"

    is essentially the same category of question.

    _ /\ _

  • Russia accuses Ukraine of killing 65 of its own POWs by shooting down plane
  • it's war, not a meeting:

    IF Ukraine hadn't any idea that their POWs were in that transport,

    AND Russian transports are a significant-means of Russia's genociding Ukraine,

    THEN automatically targetting Russian transports is right to be doing, in that context.

    End. Of. Story.

    Shit happens.

    Especially in war.

    Adding an extra checklist-point to see IF it is possible to discover what's in an enemy transport, while you've got a second-or-2 to shoot it down, .. obliterates scarce opportunity to dent enemy capability.

    At least they died quickly, unlike those who died in the Russian torture-chambers, in Russian custody.

    _ /\ _

  • Thinking about making the big switch – recommend me a distro!
  • IF you want Steam, THEN please consider every variant in the official Ubuntu family.

    Steam-support told me in their system, iirc in early 2023, that they ONLY support the Ubuntu family ( directly ).

    As Linus Torvalds noted, it isn't possible to release software that is going to work on all distros.

    Even glibc has been broken by one, in that talk of his, and it wasn't a niche distro, either, iirc.


    Pick which subset you CAN afford to support, and do not add to that subset until you're rolling in money, from your linux-customerbase.

    ( slight sarcasm on the last line, but business is business: destroying-resources costs, and if there is no benefit, it isn't sane to continue doing it. )


    Decide which capabilities/functions/apps you NEED, and then don't even consider distros that break your required-set on you.

    _ /\ _

  • I'm dying soon. What's a good way to share my heart and mind with my family and the world? I want them to know that life was fucking incredible.
  • I'm a braindamage survivor.

    You need to communicate your values, and why they are your values.

    You need to communicate who you are, via the most-significant-moments/events you experienced: the most-significant-for-you meanings, see?

    As for you disappearing, the Soul/CellOfGod/ChildOfGod/Continuum ( whatever you want to call it ) that causes the molecules in your body to continue-living ( yes, there is a physics-level cause for the anti-entropy behaviour expressed as living-organisms, and it isn't there, when those same molecules are doing the disintegrating-corpse thing, obviously )

    That cause is unkillable.

    It keeps getting caught in conceptions/lives, through endless-stream-of-Universes's perpetual recycling/churning of ALL energies ( including meaning! ) contained within it.

    It isn't the-individual-life that is the center,

    it is the Soul/CellOfGod/ParticleOfBrahman that is.

    IT experienced some of ITs growing-up, in/through your-life.

    With you, your Soul got a gift, fersure.

    My life's been hell, & I'm glad:

    nothing like aversion-therapy to force a Soul/CellOfGod to grow-up, eh?

    The Soul that had "me"-personality won't ever make that mistake, again.

    : )

    If you've still got any ability to read, or to have someone read to you, please have someone get Elisabeth Haich's "Initiation" into you:

    it is likely that only part of the book will be important for you, but that part will likely be IMPORTANT.

    The world her Soul 1st inhabited was something like 10,000y ago ( it hasn't rained much there, since then ).

    My Soul's spent most of its time inhabiting insect-lives, or particularly-stupid-fish-with-bad-eyesight.

    It's been centuries since it had been in a human-category life ( the Catholicism I was pressed into, by mom, got nuked when I discovered those strange-memories were memories of my Soul's having lived in other kinds of lives.

    Not only did it nuke all the Abrahamic religions, but it forced me to accept that ALL lives are lives because they have a Soul underlying them, and there isn't anything "special" about the life of a human, except for our Potential & our Opportunity, which most take for granted, including me, in my younger days ).

    Anyways, you can't unexist, from Eternity.

    You'll always have-been, see?

    The Soul/CellOfGod who had you has YOU in it, indestructibly.

    I'm earning removal of me-personality now ( should be days ), so the nervous-system currently having "me" can get that "me" ripped-out & can replace it with a better personality ( it's a Buddhist technique, apparently nobody remembers it, in the modern version of Buddhism, for some reason ), so you can stack multiple personalities/someones into a single incarnation, to get-through multiple-lives of lessons/growing-up crammed into a single incarnation/life.

    It works, but it takes work to force one's own identity-death, or removal of the instance-of-ego underlying one's personality...

    There are 3 kinds of mind that death-itself has difficulty "gripping" on:

    • Wisdom-realizing-that-all-phenomena-are-empty-of-self-inherent-existence

    • immeasurable-compassion for all sentiences ( but tempered by wisdom )

    • Faithing, which is the simultaneous surrendering-to higher-power, relying-on higher-power, and gratitude-to higher-power.

    Faithing on one's own CellOfGod/Soul is perfectly find/workable.

    It has BuddhaNature/GodNature, so all you have to do is orient to that aspect of its nature, and then faithing is powerful/valid, see?

    Guru-yoga, is faithing.

    "a faith", ie noun, .. isn't what the original texts said, btw.

    Anyways, I hope something in this helps, gives you leverage.

    Either way, our Souls will meet again, after "us", sooner-or-later...

    Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, Hoomin!

    ( :

    _ /\ _

  • China-India trade tensions may continue in 2024, but Beijing doesn’t want to rock the boat
  • China doesn't want to rock the boat .. yet!

    WHEN they've got the imbalance in-their-favor enough, they will gut & smash India: that is their plan.

    Modi's relying on Russia, China's economic-vassal-state, for protection against China, hands India to China, strategically.

    Make-believe never saved any country's life, nor will it, in the coming decade.

    See it for what it is: now is only a "location in time", during the slippery-slope ( low steepness, after 1 or 2 more world-process Punctuations, the slope will be STEEP! ) time before global-TANTRUM/POGROM that #ClimatePunctuation, combined with political-tantrum, including "populist" dictatorships, combined with religious-tantrum, combined with food-web collapse, combined with an increasing-fraction-of-humankind becoming refugee...

    etc.

    The Great Filter's unfolding, but still in its Yin stage.

    China doesn't want to rock the boat yet.

    When opportunity is ripe, however, they are going to.

    _ /\ _

  • What is a sought-after resource that everyone covets because of the riches it promises?
  • I'm Buddhist, so I'm answering this question from my real-life standpoint:

    Authentic Realization of one's Ultimate ( original awareness ) Nature.

    What could be more precious?

    Given that ALL of one's unconscious-mind's mechanisms exist to block that from happening, to protect unconsciousness's Eternal unbroken dominion, what could be more difficult to earn/obtain?

    All the distractions in the world, "helping" one to NOT earn one's deepest profoundest Truth...

    All the profits that cease, should one get anywhere in self-realization...

    You simply don't need any external resource, for there to be a most-precious-resource, you know?

  • Speakers of non-English languages, what common mistakes do native speakers make that drive you crazy?
  • I've been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female...

    : P

    The book "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women's-rights simply don't progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages...

    So, Anglo cultures pushed women's-rights, whereas Latin cultures .. won't, don't, drag their heels, etc...

    That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

    It's still true.

    Conditioning an entire population's System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place...

    Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas...

    ... digging ...

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

    ( that isn't a quick read... may come back to it some day... )

    Bingo!

    "The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic."

    from

    https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

    So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people's System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

    What about Hebrew?

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

    No wonder women can't get equal-validity in Jewish culture...

    ( I read a Jewess's writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ .. which explains the damage in the stereotypical "Jewish mother", a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature... )

    So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is .. baseless, in some/many cultures...

    Interesting, but depressing.

    : \

  • It’s Time to End Magical Thinking About Russia’s Defeat
  • I haven't read the article, but yes, wars do have time-limits:

    Once a war becomes domestically impossible to participate in, Vietnam as 1 proof, then the-course-of-war changes.

    Economic-collapse means that Biden's hosed in 2024, and the Republicans are Russian allies, not NATO allies.

    Yes wars have time-limits.

    Simply wait & see: by the end of 2025, NATO will be gutted, Trump will have been crowned GEOTUS ( a term they already use for him ), and Trump will ( passively, at least ) back Russia.

    Sickening, but it looks like that's the fact of the unfolding global/geopolitical near-future.

  • CIA - Mars Exploration
  • Go read McMoneagle's book of predictions: it is awefully wrong.

    Remote Viewing is a modified kind of dreaming:

    Remote Viewers are in dreams, and their ( very primitive brain, it seems ) ESP is patching-in pieces of what it perceives, but .. it is patching those things into a dream, so the result is .. rather groundless, with fragments of truth in it.

    I trust the hard photos from NASA & ESA more than I trust McMoneable's dreams..

    Yes, the youtube vid of him being interviewed about his helping Japan find sites that archaeology says did have to do with an early royal of theirs ( an Empress? ) is convincing, but I've not fact-checked it.

    It may well be spot-on: ancient Japanese history isn't my interest.

    https://youtu.be/2PxK6M9GbZE

    If he was predicting people living on Mars, the same Mars that sometimes comes up to warm-enough to melt water, but has dry-ice on the ground, in the winters at the poles, and planet-scale dust-storms, and CO2 lasering in its atmosphere, and an atmosphere that is 1/1000th as thick ( from the aviation perspective ) as ours, with nearly-no oxygen loose in it...

    I'm sticking with the machines that map & photograph the things.