Basman

Got fucked by a flesh eating virus one day and today I'm missing bits of my calf muscle, hamstring area and glutes (on my left leg). The back of my knee is hollow. I can walk and function fine but my left leg is obviously significantly weaker than my non-mutilated leg. As a result, I tend to experience a lot of tightness and fatigue in that leg that I don't experience with my healthy right leg. Any advice for dealing with this health wise? Workouts? stretching? massage? I don't know. Right now I'm healthy and young but I'm worried that when I get older that my weak leg will suffer from knee issues. Whenever I put weight on my weak leg in a squat position for instance, I can feel the muscle right above my knee compressing down on it in a way that feels uncomfortable. It doesn't feel right. If I walk or cycle a lot in a period I can feel my weak leg becoming tense and uncomfortable and it becomes painful to run. Thank god that I don't have a physical life purpose or that I'm a woman.

I don't think prostitution is inherently unethical assuming it is wholly consensual and safe. The government shouldn't stipulate how legal adults have sex between each other within the realm of consent and that extends to prostitution in my opinion. I do think prostitution is degrading however. You are selling something that is to many very intimate and personal, although I also think that can be subjective and that the degradation can be a feature in certain ways. However, I can see prostitution being unethical in the context of poverty when there is a lack of choice as being a prostitute is degrading and exposes you to risks of violence and coercion among other unlike regular jobs. There's a social cost to being a sex worker and when there is a lack of freedom to choose between prostitution and a regular decently paying job due to poverty, prostitution as a job is less than perfectly ethical (because of the risks and social costs). I guess you could argue how much of that degradation is cultural but prostitutes are either way apparently more exposed to violence, harassment and have unequal access to education opportunities, among various things (According to this survey: https://prostitutionresearch.com/quick-facts/). I believe that sex-work can have consequences for your life unlike regular jobs and it is therefor important to ensure that it at least happens ethically (wholly within the realm of consent with the agency to choose a different career independently from poverty). It is a high bar admittedly. I think the challenge of unethical prostitution is worth tackling but simply banning sex-work as a whole doesn't work. It just goes underground and results in sex workers then having no official channel for protection and recourse. And I don't believe many people in power are strangers to prostitution themselves when all is said and done.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt as I'm only in the first semester of a philosophy degree, but I don't think you need to go to university to learn philosophy. Uni teaches you western academic philosophy specifically, which is a particular style of philosophy. If you want to do philosophy, you don't have to adopt the academic style unless you want to work within academia. You'll probably find the material insightful but it is not strictly speaking necessary. None of our textbooks are unique to uni and can be bought regularly.

It is really just a minority that are these loud extremists that won't give an inch in a debate. It is in part a consequence of social media optimizing for emotionally engaging content. Because the environment has become so dominated by a minority of extremist opinions that no one wants to voice their own opinions that are outside of certain ideological camps. Nobody wants to deal with crazy. The current media environment is unsafe for open discussion in certain contexts.

I'm sorry if I came off as disrespectful. That was not my intent. But your opening statement was itself inflammatory in my opinion and comes of as condescending, generalizing and presumptive ("why men have this toxic attitude?") without really building your case. It is not a mistake that people disagree strongly with you.

Very first thing you should do is destroy your rope and note and any other suicide tools you have. Suicide is usually done on impulse, so get rid of the means first.

I'm starting see a pattern of people thinking that sex and feelings are separate. That you can love somebody and bang someone else without it destroying the relationship, but being a part of it. The idea that sex and feelings are separate is wrong because it doesn't consider other peoples boundaries and feelings. It doesn't matter what you think but what they think when it comes to boundaries, at least if you aim to be a mature and loving partner.

If sex is just about pleasure and context for when you have sex doesn't matter, then why is rape wrong? It is just sex, no? It feels good, no? We not only criminalize rape but are disgusted by it and demonize rapists as a society. Sex is a deeply personal thing to us, wrought with boundaries that cannot simple be transgressed willy-nilly. Also, what evidence is there that men are more jealous over their love interests?

The idea that women don't love "genuinely" is stupid. They do genuinely love because they are human and therefor have great capacity for love and admiration. But relationships aren't just purely about love but also about value. Relationships are an economy. This is true for both men and women, the prioritize are asymmetrical however and a lot of guys tend to take that for granted in my opinion. Guys tend to assume "hotness" is a given for both genders and assume they can't get a date because they are not "hot". The difference between men and women is that women rely more on resources gained socially in order to survive because they can't themselves sufficiently provide physical protection and physical goods produced through hard labor (in modern times, the state facilitates both of these things so we can enjoy "equality"). Women tend to prefer men who have it together because of this.

Personally, I consider New-Ageism merely a sub-culture.

oxymoron I guess, my bad.

I'm not a new-agey. I just like Tony Robbins style self-help and understanding. I don't consider myself a spiritual person. What do you consider new-age exactly?

It is interesting, because new-ageys are essentially proto-hippies. They are they ones who get the idea to dress in tie-dye and build communes. Then eventually those communes get co-opted by drug addicts and criminals.

In my experience, new-ageism is a sub-culture of spiritual pleasantries. It is riddled with confirmation bias and wishful interpreting of events. What Lila9 and Carl-Richard said in this thread is pretty much on point. I had a new-age phase in my early 20s. Very cringe when I look back and I'm glad I got over it. I had a near death experience that completely changed my life and all the new-ageism evaporated from my mind like the morning dew. Spiritual fantasies and pleasantries didn't make my life better and where essentially a waste of energy, though I didn't see it like that until then. As a result, I value practical action-based self-help a lot more now. I'm extremely shy of interpreting things in a spiritual way because its so easy to self-delusional. If self-help/spirituality isn't practical somehow then I discount it, and I'm right in doing that 9 times out of 10.

I don't think you need to feel responsible for your politics. We live in a representative democracy after all. You don't need to know the nitty gritty or have an answer to every political issue. Just make sure you vote for what you feel is right. Don't bother discussing politics with friends or family either unless you mutually enjoy the topic. Most people have a surface level appreciation for politics and simply lack the curiosity to have their views challenged.

Politics is necessarily polarizing because it is essentially how you survive as a group collective. People almost always advocate for politics that benefits them and disapprove of politics that is detrimental to them. Your family are probably reacting negatively to your ideas because it doesn't benefit their socioeconomic position and group identity. Its incredibly relative. I find politics interesting because its the challenge of understanding multi-perspectival life situations. Politics is as multi-faceted as it gets in this world. Its so complicated because we have to figure out how to survive as a collective while everyone involved live in completely different realities.

Mission to test out new Boeing starliner fails due to mechanical errors with the shuttle, rendering two astronauts stranded on the ISS. Boeing's reputation continues to plummet with their dangerous incompetence.

The worlds problems are created as a result of finitude. Saying men cause all the worlds problems is sexist and reductive. I believe that patriarchal societies tend rise because they are better equipped to deal with inter-species competition where resources are more scarce. The disparity between chimpanzees and bonobos illustrate this well, both being patriarchal/matriarchal respectively. The bonobos only manage to survive in so far that they are isolated from chimps, who will otherwise easily overrun bonobos. I'd rather be a bonobo but chimps are better at raw survival. Pre-colonial native American tribes where no hippie communes. They where warlike and even genocidal towards each other. Practicing human sacrifice, scalping, cannibalism and other barbaric acts depending on the tribes culture and environmental pressures. Just look at the Aztecs or the plains tribes like the Comanche. The Black Hills which the Lakota tribe say was stolen from them by colonizers they themselves stole after kicking out the tribes that where there prior. Hippie communes themselves tend to eventually be overrun by drug addicts and criminals, like Christiania in Copenhagen. Don't romanticize tribal cultures. The underlying assumption here is that it is possible to survive without engaging in any from of violence. It is not and it has never been. People have a twisted sense of what living in harmony with nature means. Living in harmony with nature means you don't have direct control over the resources you need to survive and that you live at the mercy of the elements more or less. It means you have to give your all to meet the bare minimum of survival, where only the most well adapted live, pushing the genetically weak to die. Survival is a brutal and limiting affair. Most animals only live in harmony with nature because they will die if they don't. Then they still die in gruesome ways in natures "web". Most animals die by being eaten alive. Don't romanticize nature. Humans breaking harmony with nature is them acing survival relatively speaking. And as a result you live in the most prosperous age in human history. Think about what that takes. You zoomers love to complain.

I like how you ask what the meaning of life is then immediately dismiss any meaning making as untenable. That said, it can be whatever you want it to be in my opinion. The base message behind self-help is that you can accomplish whatever you put your mind to. It is a trap to think of life as only having a singular purpose however. It is an experience, not a destination.

It is normal for people to be relatively moderate, having both conservative and progressive perspectives. Moderates are the sandwich filling that the left and right are competing for. And it is a Dutch sandwich so it is cheese with bread instead of bread with cheese. It is why a far-left party has never won an election as far as I'm aware of (correct me if I'm wrong). When a left-wing party gets elected, it is always more or less a left-of-center party.

Because left-wing policies tend to benefit common people more with wealth redistribution policies and proactively finding solution to societal problems. "Free healthcare"? why not, right? The reason why people vote right-wing anyway is because policy doesn't matter when it comes to voting. People vote largely emotionally, based on their culture and values. Who your friends are going to vote for is probably the best predictor of who you are going to vote for. And to be fair, it is very difficult to be well read on politics. It is why we have a representative democracy as opposed to a direct democracy in most cases. Most people just don't have the time or interest. The right also has an advantage when it comes to messaging as they can shamelessly appeal to fear, insecurity and cultural norms whereas the left tends to offer changes to society and culture, which require more legwork to sell. It is easy for the right to demonize left-wing policy as destroying the country, etc. And to be fair, there is often an essential destruction. Immigration for example changes culture, destroying the culture of the past. The right tends to exaggerate and discount advantages however. Whenever the left makes mistakes, its like pouring oil on a fire for the right. But most of the mistakes the left makes in my opinion are not messaging well enough and lacking a coherent vision. Certain things the right are right on however, like mass immigration of people from less developed countries being problematic, but that is a different topic.

It is this spineless attitude that makes you unsuccessful. You want it to be easy because your weak as a person. Have some self-respect. One YT video for clicks is hardly hard evidence of anything. Even then, you are essentially taking advantage of women in non-lucid state assuming you can pull this stuff of. And all because you can't handle not being popular with the chicks. Rat behavior.

I've heard once that it is much easier to hypnotize highly driven people because they are better at focusing on their imagination and imagine vividly. Don't know how true that is.

Awaken the Giant Within by Thony Robbins is pretty good. Equips you to deal with life. as inane as that sounds.

It is not really productive to think like that. I don't think it really matters how "fucked you are" financially as long as you have the means to make it, which you probably do. You just need to get on with it. LucasPX64's advice is pretty good. You speak decent English and your smart enough to operate a computer.