Paragone

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.

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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.

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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.

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If it works for you, stick with it.

Works is a feature, not a bug.

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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!

( :

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Don't put-up with Israel's gaslighting.

I used to support Israel.

As an Englishman, whose identity I don't remember pointed-out, years ago:

IF the Jews of the region have a moral-right to their own homeland, THEN so do the Palestinians.

EITHER BOTH OR NEITHER-DO.

Once someone has proven they are only narcissistic-machiavellian-sociopath/psychopath, through their nihilistic obliteration of other's lives, and much more, and throught their sadism,

they have ZERO claim on God, on "scripture", or on "validity" or on Truth.

The old rabbis ( find some interviewed on youtube! ) who call-out Israel & I stand together in contempting their lies.

KNOW gaslighters for what they are, & deal-with-them as such.

Rabies is rabies.

IF the patient can be got sane/healthy, then help 'em do that, but if not...

then don't let 'em infect you with their rabies.

( & that goes also for Hamas's terror-strike, too: both sides have crossed the line into worshipping nihilism/mass-murder, while claiming God, sadly )

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Read Hofstede's "Exploring Culture", and consider that a person in a high-collectivity culture, which also is a high-power-distance culture, may well answer the survey with what "face" requires them to say, instead of answering with what they, themselves, feel.

If you aren't correcting for that, you're doing propaganda, not science.

Different cultures REQUIRE different subjectivities be taken-into-account.

I think it would be more valid to dig into specific dimensions of happiness, & make some of those objective ( cortisol-blood-levels, for measuring stress, e.g. )

WHEN you ask people in individualistic cultures a question, and THEN you ask people in collectivist cultures the SAME question, they are not answering the same question, they are answering the social-pressure question, instead.

It makes complete mincemeat of cross-cultural measuring of "objective" things.

Try reading Lanier's "Foreign to Familiar" book, & understand just HOW different warm-vs-nordic cultures are, in instinct/reactions,

then it should be more obvious how such surveys are disinformation, not information.

Then it ISNT a

"Global Happiness Index"

, rather it is a

"Global URBAN Happiness Index",

and such profound mislabeling of things is disinformation, not journalism.

Which, itself, is so systematic & profound, nowadays, that there isn't much hope for integrity to win, in our world, now, anyways.

I'm commenting only on a now-traditional disinformation about GMO's.

I don't consider mutations to be self-inherently toxic, whether natural or engineered: some are toxic, some aren't, in either case.

Consider that there are specific plant-materials which grab all the arsenic that they can...

Some ferns do it, rice-bran does it, there probably are others that do it.

It is sooo effective a specialized biology, that it is possible to just keep running water through a special greenhouse filled with such plants, and they'll concentrate the specific heavy-metals, so they, themselves, can be the HAZMAT containing the arsenic, after...

IOW, you can significantly reduce the amount of loose arsenic in your ecology with deliberate-use of such things.

They weren't engineered to do that, they just have the genetic machinery to do that.

I've read that rice-bran from some areas of Bangladesh, South China, etc, are sooo arsenic-rich, that they are HAZMAT, themselves, according to test/measurement/evidence.

Obviously, some lobbies want GMO to be a simple dog-whistle, they want everybody's System-1 ( read the important "Thinking Fast & Slow", by Daniel Kahneman: System-1 is the default-instinct system, it can be trained into conditioned-expertise, it is also the mechanism of both addiction & prejudice ) programmed into automatic, unthinking reaction against GMO.

Consider, though, what I'd enjoy: ZERO caffeine-family coffee.

And chocolate.

They're too toxic for me, as they are.

That would require genetic-engineering, to remove those methylxanthenes from those plant-parts.

I'm NOT saying that "Round-Up Ready"(tm) crops are healthy for either us or for our only planet's ecology, but I AM saying that GMO is a category, and it includes oceans more than just Monsanto's dependency-developing pseudocrops.

IS it bad when a crop is genetically altered to improve its resistance to some "rust" or blight?

It comes down to the actual case, is what I'm saying.

Same as "All Whites are bad" or "All Nonwhites are bad" is just prejudice, the same is true of surgeries, both at the body-scale & at the molecular scale.

WHICH genetic engineering??

For what?

Where & How, in the genome?

Why?

What are the side-effects of doing that, both for the organism & for the rest of the food-web that it lives-in??

I'm commenting against oversimplification, is all:

dumbed-down may be "easier", but it is mismanagement, inevitably.

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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?