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Phanerothyme

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About Phanerothyme

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    Psychenaut

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    The Here And Now
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  1. The family is grown up @Sierra and thriving thank you, I hope you and yours are well! Delighted you looked in and saw this. Back in 2005 the internet was a smaller, quieter place, and the forum was tiny. You were always a great ambassador for the USA, and changed my views more than once in our conversations. Can't go back, but I can remember, and a little ritual like this is a good way of helping that memory stay put! So best wishes to you and yours, stay safe and well. P
  2. Wishing all our members from the USA a happy Independence Day and throwing off your colonial overlords. I hope your day goes with a bang!
  3. I think we probably went over the climate tipping point some time in the 80s, and the future of warfare, and subsequently armed insurgency, crime etc, will be robotized. The final liberation of "energy too cheap to meter" will unleash an exploitation of the earths resources at a rate unrivalled in history. In some ironic act of self-destruction, we've created possibilities - through technology - we're ill-equipped to deal with (evolutionarily speaking). So while the future may well hold mass-migration, a chaotic high-energy climate, famine, assassin drones and ecology collapses, some humans will survive. They're very resourceful. But we've sent biological matter out to deep space. The planet has successfully sporulated. Everything else is just an epitaph.
  4. Yeah - it's not exactly the exoneration it appears to be. Kolomoisky has form. Ukrainian politics aren't a million miles from Russian politics, unsurprisingly, and they're just as murky. But Putin made Ukraine choose a sphere of influence on Feb 24, and banked on Ukraine choosing Russia. I think Ukraine has made its decision pretty clear.
  5. No, not really. A cursory google search reveals that his parents naturalised as Israeli citizens with the help of the president, and are guests in Israel of Igor Kolomoisky, living in his house that's worth "£8m" - because they became something of a target in late February. They take security very seriously in Israel.
  6. Yep, they're definitely the victims of the piece, this should all be about them.
  7. I know how I choose to understand it, but I wouldn't want to insist it's the correct definition, or even that a correct definition exists tbh. Where people and their minds are concerned, I think its helpful to think of traits and characteristics (behavioural and physical, mental and apparent) are continua rather than categories.
  8. You say that as if it's a rhetorical device. It's not a rhetorical device, it's my honestly held opinion - see what you can learn, you might be surprised at what you find. But if the furthest you're willing to go in understanding a complex and difficult topic about people and how they feel is to skim read google results, then any discussion we're likely to have here is going to be unedifying and futile. I'm no expert, or scholar - I don't have a radical or extremist view either IMO, but I have tried to get my head around the terminology and gain some insight into how trans people (in particular) experience the world, because it's important to me to understand - rather than take an immovable, extreme position and defend it. Read around. It's sounds to me like you've been dwelling on the gender critical side of the debate, with a side order of manufactured culture war, and you've made up your mind - that's fine - it's not my job, nor an inviting prospect, to try and convince you any different. I would only remind everyone that so-called normal common sense beliefs, as expressed in society today, do make other, different, people quite miserable. And if they say that this is what's happening to them, it's not up to us to disbelieve them, but to see if its reasonable to change or even just tweak our 'common sense beliefs' so they are less miserable, and maybe even a bit happy. That's where I'm starting from.
  9. Jesus wept. "No one can tell me what a 'gender' actually is". It's really not up to people to tell you. If it concerns you, find out about it. It's no-one else's responsibility but your own to educate yourself about gender, sex, attraction etc. There's reputable science and good, well balanced writing on the subject and a long history of sexuality and gender too if you're willing to look. That's a choice you can make.
  10. FWIW It strikes me that, on a intuitive level, our genetics, environment, endocrine system, brain chemistry &c. contrive to shape our sex, secondary sexual characterstics, gender, and romantic and sexual desire into a gaussian distribution across five [and more!] axes. A great big weird Hilbert-ish Space of possibilities. Women with beards, men with soft full lips and large breasts. People who appear to be men but feel like women, who love women; who appear to be women, but feel like men who don't experience sexual desire. Quentin Crisp (The Naked Civil Servant) considered himself a 'queer man' and only very late in life conceded that he was probably a trans woman, but that option simply wasn't available to him at the time. A majority of people (me included) fall into a fuzzy five+ dimensional blob in the middle - what a 52 year old man might call "mostly straight men and women" - but all of human history is peppered with people who experience the world quite differently, from the famous music hall cross-dressers of the 19th century in London, to classical era androgyny, Grayson Perry & European Song Contest winners. We used to put people into one of two boxes - Boys and Girls. Expectations, upbringing, toys and stories were strongly gendered, girls who got dirty and fought with the boy were tomboys, and the boys who played dress-up with the girls were sissies, but they stayed in their boxes because there was nowhere else to go, apart from the Royal Navy or the theatre. We have historically always tried to repress people outside the norm (and this goes for "mental health" too) through ridicule, verbal assault, stigmatisation, violence, punitive law and endorsement of discrimination. For generations our social 'norms' have made people desperately miserable by the simple dint of denying them the validity of their own personal existence. (see also neurodiversity). Over the last 50 years it has, for example, gradually become more acceptable to be openly gay as a man or a woman, thanks to tireless fighting and campaigning for recognition and rights. We've opened up a few more boxes. But as the abbreviation LGTBTQ+ might suggest there's a lot of variety among the remaining minority sex/gender/desire combos. If they express their true selves in public as many of us do without even thinking about it, they risk ridicule, verbal abuse and even physical assault. Of course gay couples still experience this all the time, so let's not pretend that problem has been solved in any way. Yet we're not talking about the perpetrators here - those visiting abuse and direct violence, or those creating the atmosphere of stigmatisation and ridicule that enables them. And we need to get rid of all these boxes. Just my €0.02c
  11. Great to hear from you Sierra! I had hoped you'd see this And chuffed to hear you enjoyed your 4th of July celebrations. Modesto is dear to my heart as the HQ of the Universal Life Church, which ordained me into the priesthood in 1996 on the early internet (they also sell PhDs!) . And yay for babies in the family that's lovely news. I look in here now and again, delighted that you still do too! One day I will make it to your amazing country, and I will look you up! Kids are 21 and 16 now, so counting the days, and the grey hairs. Yeah - people have lost their everlovin' minds over here too, but all things must pass. Have yourselves a fantastic year - until next time
  12. To our diminishing number of American members, and all you British Expats - Happy Independence Day! Testing times, to be sure, but USA, you've got this.
  13. The effects on the UK will be mostly financial, and they will be felt by most countries as an overinflated market either deflates or pops. Russia may be excluded from the SWIFT payment clearing system. London property market may feel considerable impact if Russian money takes flight as a result of UK instransigence over Donbas. Tories will be struggling to raise funds, hopefully. Big currency devaluations outside Euro/Dollar zones as QE comes home to roost more quickly than anticipated? China will veto all measures attempted against Russia at the UN, regardless of outcomes in Ukraine, and toughest sanctions will naturally push these two giants closer together.
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