Emerald

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Everything posted by Emerald

  1. There was a video that I watched years ago of a family that had just been kicked out of their home and they were standing on the street outside of it with the mother and children crying as it was being bulldozed. The suffering in that video really struck me. But there are tons of videos of Palestinian being kicked out of their homes and their homes being demolished. Then, there were the some images that I ran across about 10 years ago of dead and badly maimed Palestinian children after an Israeli air strike. The vast majority of the dead from that airstrike were children. So, that was probably the most disturbing. And as an American, I always found it just as disturbing that the American government is supplying these weapons and turning a blind eye to the suffering. And now there are videos circulating around of parents grieving their recently killed children and basically carrying around their children's dead and bloody bodies as they attempt to evacuate the rest of their family. But the power imbalance comes from Israel being a colonial project. That's where a group comes in and marginalizes the population that already lives in the area and basically takes over. At the time Israel was founded, colonialism wasn't really seen as a bad thing in the general populace. So, they clearly stated it was a colonial project and sought the advice of other colonial powers in the establishment of Israel. The idea back then was that colonialism was good because it was framed as a more civilized people bringing civilization to a less civilized people. But right now, most people realize that colonialism is harmful. So, currently there's a lot of propaganda to frame Israel as a decolonization project to oust Palestinian colonizers. But it was always intended as a colonial project. And that's always going to give the colonizers significantly more power than the colonized.
  2. They ordered over a million people to evacuate them to evacuate on a very short notice with almost no resources to evacuate with. They cut off the vast majority of supplies from coming in. Occam's Razor here is that Israel has to at least make it look like they're complying with international law and trying to avoid killing civilians and just going after Hamas. Here's an article from Human Rights Watch about the evacuation... https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/16/why-israels-gaza-evacuation-order-so-alarming
  3. That is the nature of an ethnostate to create a zero sum game between the group in power and groups labelled as other. Whichever group shares the ethnic identity that's tied to the national identity will always do its best to remove anyone from the ethnostate that doesn't share the ethno-nationalist identity. That's why I disagree with the existence of ethnostates because it always leads to things like oppression and genocide. And people who become highly identified with the collective identity of being from (fill in the blank) nationality and (fill in the blank) ethnicity will not be able to see the problems with their government because the individual ego gets wrapped into the collective ego. So, someone who identifies strongly with being a member of an ethnostate is not going to recognize the problems because someone criticizing the state will feel similar to someone criticizing themselves as an individual. They get too close to see the problems. Sometimes it's better to see things from afar and with beginner's eyes... like in the story of the Emporer's new clothes. From what you said above, you seem to take for granted that the land cannot be shared by people who happen to share two different ethnic backgrounds. But other places that have both Arab and Jewish populations are not having the issues that are happening in Israel. Those issues are coming up because Israel was founded as a colonial ethnostate and began ousting the people that already lived there from their homes. Regarding Israel, I see 3 ways things can go down... Transform Israel from being an ethnostate to being a state that doesn't have a set collective ethnic identity where people from different backgrounds can live together in an integrated way (aka A one-state solution) Keep Israel as an ethnostate but establish Gaza as a separate sovereign state where Palestinians can be free from colonization (aka A two-state solution) Israel remains an ethnostate and the IDF removes the Palestinian population entirely from Israel through exile or genocide. And right now, it seems very clear to me that option 3 is the favored option of the powers that be.
  4. Obviously Hamas is committing war crimes. They're terrorists. And I'm not justifying anything Hamas has done. If anyone is doing that, they're very out of alignment with truth and love. But once again, this is another attempt to run away from the truth... The Israeli government is committing war crimes and enacting collective punishment against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip... most of whom are under that age of 15. Can you acknowledge that?
  5. I'm sure that the situation altogether is very complex because any shifts in the power structures is going to be chaotic. And if you have a group of people that lacks a sovereign state and the ability to have a state military... you're going to get Shadow forms of the government and Shadow forms of the military cropping up. That's likely why Hamas took power in the power vacuum that Israel created in 2005. That's why 'giving the keys' to a non-sovereign people only works if either integrate them fully or you grant them their own sovereign state. Otherwise it just creates a power vacuum where they still have no military defense. I haven't seen this video. But I've heard tell of a video from years ago of Benjamin Netanyahu saying he wanted Hamas to get stronger so that he can use their terrorism to justify using military force against Palestinians. Again, I haven't seen this video. But if that is true, then it's a possibility that the situation in 2005 was meant to sew some chaos. Also I'm not saying that Jewish people don't belong in Jerusalem or anywhere else for that matter. What I'm saying is that the Israeli government ousting people from the place they've lived in for their whole lives is not okay. And the power imbalance and injustices that are happening to the Palestinian people are not okay.
  6. But there is an objective truth here. And you're going into looking from these different angles to avoid looking squarely at that truth. The truth is that the Israeli government is oppressing the Palestinian people and committing war crimes against innocent civilians (mostly children). Focusing on any other angle than that angle is just an attempt to look away from the ugly truth of it.
  7. Number one, Israel still isn't supposed to commit war crimes against innocent civilians... regardless of what Hamas is doing. Number two, it isn't "being lenient" to avoid killing innocent civilians. It's just following international law. Israel doesn't have to kill thousands of children to prove to Hamas how tough they are. And the IDF killing thousands of children isn't going to stop Hamas from doing acts of terrorism. If the IDF really wanted to go after Hamas, they could be laser focused in their approach to taking out Hamas combatants. But instead, they are bombing entire city blocks. It's the equivalent of if a murderer was in a house down the street from you. And the police comes in and bombs everyone within a 5 block radius. Number three, Palestinians don't have the option to set healthy boundaries as country. It is not a sovereign country and it doesn't have any means to defend itself... because of the Israeli government. And Israel holds all the power in this equation... and it isn't making any moves towards a one-state or two-state solution. Its goal is to just get rid of the Palestinian people altogether. That's what ethnostates do. Also... consider how you would respond. Let's say for example that Canadians came to where you live and they began displacing you and your family and all of your community... and pushing you into the worst places to live. And you grew up in a territory that was occupied by Canadians... and Canadian soldiers were on your block with machine guns. And then, some of your siblings and cousins were killed in a bombing done by the Canadians. And your whole life was just non-stop strife because of the Canadian occupation. Do you really think that you wouldn't feel any feelings of anger or hatred towards Canadians at all? I honestly think you'd have to be a saint if you didn't feel those feelings at all. Of course, I'm never pro-hatred in any context as it leads to terrible outcomes in any case. But I recognize the feelings of hatred of the oppressed towards the oppressor as coming from a very vulnerable place. And it's unrealistic to expect that an oppressed people would bear no anger or hatred towards the oppressing group. And I feel like you're choosing to see the Palestinian's anger solely through the lens of Muslim religious extremism and antisemitism when the Palestinians have every reason to be angry about what's been done to them and is being done to them. So, I feel like focusing on this angle is another way to create cognitive dissonance to avoid seeing the wrongs that the Israeli government has levied against the Palestinian people. Do you see that you're finding rationalizations to keep yourself from facing squarely with these realities?
  8. Well... Israel is the one that's causing the conflict. That's why people are looking to Israel to solve the conflict... because it's the Israeli government that's enacting the oppression. So, it's not really fair to lay the blame at the feet of surrounding nations. Certainly the surrounding nations should help. But they're not to blame for the state of Israel's oppression of Palestinians... Israel is. You might be thinking something along the lines of 'Muslim nations should help an oppressed Muslim populace.' or something like that. But focusing on religious collective identity just creates a smoke screen of cognitive dissonance to those who don't want to criticize the Israeli government... and obfuscates the responsibility for the Palestinian oppression onto nations that aren't actually doing the oppression. It would be like if a bully was beating up a smaller kid. Then, when the parents of the bully were confronted about their kid's behavior, they would say something like "Well, why didn't the other kids come in and defend the smaller kid? Why is my son getting all the blame for bullying the smaller kid when the other kids aren't even doing anything to help?"
  9. To be more general... think of an oppressive state as a Petri dish... and a terrorist group is like the bacteria that grows from that Petri dish. Most terrorists groups crop up and gain power in these types of conditions. If you observe it from a distance you'll recognize that this pattern crops up all over the place. These are general human patterns that can be noticed. Now Hamas is the bacteria that has grown from the Petri dish of the oppressive state of Israel. And Hamas definitely wouldn't have power that it currently has if it wasn't for the Israeli government oppressing the Palestinian people. Now, since Hamas already exists... if Israel suddenly stopped oppressing the Palestinian people, it wouldn't go away per se... but it would begin to slowly lose power once Palestinians were granted human rights. And after several decades of Palestinian equality, Hamas would likely dissipate or grow impotent. Terrorist groups don't gain power out of nowhere. They gain power from the collective pain and trauma of a people or a nation. That's how these groups recruit people and stir up a fervor for violence. Take a teenage boy living his whole life under occupation in the Gaza Strip who witnessed his entire family get blown up by the IDF. Then, with the pain and bitterness associated with that experience, that teenage boy is very susceptible to recruitment from Hamas. And he's not the only one. The more trauma and terror the Israeli government levies against the Palestinian people... the more recruits that Hamas will be able to find. So, what the IDF is doing now is most certainly going to strengthen the power of Hamas over time. But if there is no substantial oppression and collective trauma, a group like Hamas isn't going to be able to recruit very many people at all. Pain and trauma is the glue that keeps a terrorist group together and in power. Of course, pre-terrorist hate groups exist in every region (i.e. the KKK, Neo-Nazis, etc.). But they aren't able to recruit much and gain much power unless the population experiences a trauma or upheaval strong enough to push those who exist in the center to the extremes. Only then do these groups begin to amass power. They still exist, of course... but they exist on the fringes with minimal power.
  10. Don't let your allegiance to a government get in the way of your ability to recognize human rights abuses and injustices. Palestinians have been displaced, marginalized, and oppressed by the Israeli government for decades. And the Israeli government is using the Hamas terror attack to justify killing civilians and framing it as a defense, when it is actually collective punishment and genocide. They bombed an entire refugee camp a few days ago to go after just one Hamas official. And that killed hundreds of innocent civilians. And the Israeli government has already killed over 3x as many Palestinian civilians as Hamas has killed Israeli civilians... and Israel is a country, so it should be held to higher standards regarding the rules of military engagement than a terrorist group. But right now it's not being held to the international rules for military engagement. They're being given carte blanch to indiscriminately carpet bomb the Gaza Strip. And while Hamas's terrorism is absolutely despicable, it's important not to conflate Hamas with the Palestinian people. Over half of the people in the Gaza Strip are children. So when the Israeli government is carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, they are killing MOSTLY children. And make no mistake... these are war crimes. Try to imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.... Let's imagine that there was a Jewish majority country. And then a handful of decades ago, Muslims who were fleeing oppression wanted to set up a Muslim homeland based off of some of the scriptures in the Quran. Then, they went to that Jewish majority country and began ousting Jewish families from their homes and pushing them into smaller and smaller areas of land to live in abject poverty and oppression, so that they could set up a Muslim ethnostate. And the Jewish people in this ethnostate would be ruled by a totally different set of laws than the Muslim citizens. Then, as typically happens in these situations where one people oppresses another people and a country is denied its sovereignty from another nation... a terrorist group takes power. And they become a shadow version of a military force in lieu of being able to protect themselves with a sovereign state military. Then, this Jewish terrorist group (that represents a very small minority of Jewish people living in the region) commits a terrorist atrocity against the Muslim civilians living in the ethnostate. And the Muslim ethnostate's government uses this atrocity as an opportunity to bomb all of the Jewish civilians by claiming that they're just going after the terrorists... they just so happen to kill 99.99% civilians. And in statements from the state's officials they even claim that there are no true Jewish civilians. If the shoe were on the other foot... would you find that situation to be just?
  11. A deep connection doesn’t necessarily mean a compatible romantic relationship that serves both partners. A deep connection will arise simply from living life together like any other familial bond. As far as the separation goes, things are much better between him and I as friends and co-parents. I was really unhappy in the relationship. And I’ve opted for the past several years to still live together despite our separation so that we can see our kids every day and not miss out on the family dynamic. Now in terms of relationships in general… Once you get past the initial attraction stage… things get less exciting but they grow a lot deeper. “Still waters run deep” is a good quote for describing it. So, anything that requires a significant amount of “game” past the initial attraction stage will just get in the way of that deepening because game is about creating excitement and intrigue… but real relationship is markedly uneventful.
  12. Have you ever had a relationship with someone before? I feel like you’re going towards this notion that all human interactions are shallow because you’ve never had a real relationship before. And perhaps your friendships haven’t even been that deep. Relationships can actually go extremely deep. For example, my relationship to my husband is really quite deep because we’ve seen each other almost every day for the past 13 years. And we’ve been separated for 4 of them. But the relationship still deepens as we live and raise our kids together. And in my other romantic relationships, things have gotten deep fairly quickly as we shared more experiences, conversations, and personality facets with one another. My advice would be to seek out relationships and friendships that can give you deeper wisdom into what it means to relate.
  13. Lots of men like to romanticize the notion of what it means to be a man in order to get away from feeling disempowered. And one of the ways they do this is by cherry picking certain biological insights and weaving them together into a male empowerment fantasy narrative. And these narratives are usually about men holding power over women in the realm of sexuality, dating, and relationships. This is because men often feel disempowered in relation to women and their feelings about women. And they want to tell themselves a comforting story that puts the woman in the disempowered position relative to men. And so, they may cherry-pick some scientific truisms around men having biological urges to spread the seed wide… and they use these truisms to weave themselves a narrative like… “Women just need to embrace the “natural” female role because it’s in alignment with nature for men to cheat. And if she complains, then she’s going against nature and being too Masculine… because natural Feminine women are accepting when their men cheat. And women are only desirable when they’re Feminine, so they need to allow men to cheat or the man won’t be interested in them anymore because they’re not Feminine enough. I bet they’re not Feminine enough because of daddy issues and having too many trains run on them. So, women should definitely stick with one guy because lifelong monogamy is the only kind of sexual experience that doesn’t damage the woman. Also, think of lions! The alpha male gets to mate with all the females and the female lions are okay with it.So…” Etc. Etc. Etc. This is just one example of a male empowerment fantasy narrative. And they’re everywhere. And because of the internet… you have scads and scads of men wrapped up in the same male empowerment delusions. And it’s really annoying because they really believe it’s true. But the main function of men talking about this and creating this narrative is to make himself feel empowered simply for being part of the male identity group.
  14. I’m not entirely sure what you’re saying here. But am I correct in my understanding that you mean that you wouldn’t ask a woman how she’s doing because you already know she’s doing great. And you know she’s doing great because you’re at the center of the conversational experience… and so because she is speaking with you, you know that she’s having a good time. And you’re saying that all conversations between human beings are surface level. And then claiming that I’ve never met a guy that I have felt moved by. And that men connect to the deeper “make up” of the woman. But women are only connecting to the facade that men are putting on to attract the woman. Did I interpret this in the way that you meant it?
  15. If a guy doesn’t care how the woman is doing, she will probably pick up on that and not want much to do with the guy. Women are mostly looking for a human connection with a man.
  16. This is silly. Of course a guy should ask how the woman is doing. It’s a normal human conversation piece.
  17. Only one of my relationships began that way. Relationship #1 was when I was 16-20. We worked together at KFC for about a year. And he was a very social stoner guy. He threw a party at his house for New Years Eve and invited me. And I spent the next three months hanging out with him as friends, practically living at his house with him and his family. One night we were horsing around and we finally kissed after heavy flirting for months. It was mutual initiation. Relationship #2 was from 20-29. This is my relationship with my husband. I was out busking outside of a bar that he was drinking at. And he sparked up a conversation with me. We talked until dawn. The next night he tracked me down again in my usual busking spot and asked me to go to dinner with him. So, he initiated and it was similar to the scenario you gave. Relationship #3 was from 29-30. I met him through my channel. After several months of chatting about spiritual stuff and inner work, he got up the courage to confess his feelings for me just for the sake of honesty as a part of his inner work. And I was quite surprised because I felt the same. So, he kind of initiated. But I let him know my feelings later that day, and the relationship sprung up from there. Relationship #4 was from 31-32 and lasted exactly a year to the day. We had been chatting for a few months as friends because of mutual interests in spirituality and psychology. He had/has a lot of deep understandings about esoteric things, so we were always emailing each other back and forth, nerding out about psycho-spiritual stuff. And I developed feelings for him. So, I texted him and let him know how I felt. So, I initiated. He and I are still really good friends. Relationship #5 is my current relationship. I’ve known him for 4.5 years. We got together last year when we met up to do an Ayahuasca ceremony together which I suggested since I knew he was interested in doing one. And the initiation was mutual though I probably took a stronger role in the initiation because I knew he would worry that he’s stepping over boundaries. Four out of five of these relationships grew organically from a platonic relationship first that developed over the course of months or years.
  18. Why do you get to decide how many therapists a trans kid has to see before they can access treatment? Are you an expert that’s well-versed on the topic? Or are you a trans person who knows what gender dysphoria is like? Have you done any genuine research into this topic at all? If not, you’re coming up with these random perspectives from a place of ignorance… and purely from an emotional gut-reaction to something you don’t understand. And it’s wise to take stock of what it is that you don’t know… as opposed to assuming that you do know. Also, being “locked in a therapists office” isn’t going to help the kid at all.
  19. I do understand how people become attracted to one another and how relationships form… quite well, if I do say so myself. I’ve had several serious relationships that have all ranged from 1 year together to 9 years together. And I’ve learned a lot on the topic from a practical and archetypal perspective. And I’ve worked with over 400 male and female clients… with many of them exploring the topics of dating, relationships, and sexuality with my guidance. And I’ve also had direct experience of Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine in my plant medicine experiences. And from all of this, I can tell you that your internet bro-science understanding of male/female attraction dynamics is severely lacking in terms of the psychological and practical understanding of how people actually function. It seems to me that you’re just reading a bunch of stuff on the internet about women and believing that it’s true. But one thing I would ask you about your perspective on male/female dynamics is… how’s that working out for you?
  20. There is a constant ebb and flow between the Masculine and Feminine in all things… including human beings. But in the broad strokes sense, some things/people are more Masculine than they are Feminine. And vice versa. But if you zoom in, you will always find Masculine facets in the Feminine and Feminine facets within the Masculine. So, paradoxically… some people are more Masculine and some people are more Feminine… BUT simultaneously (if you get down to the granular level) everyone has infinite facets of both… BUT in the absolute paradigm all dichotomies are illusory and collapse. So… some people are more Masculine than they are Feminine and vice versa. And everyone is equally Masculine and Feminine. And no one is Masculine and Feminine. All three are true from different paradigmatic vantage points. But if you want to get practical with dating/relationship dynamics and you want to create a Masculine/Feminine polarity between two people, it’s good to know about the Lover and Believe archetype and how to apply it.
  21. Toxic masculinity is a term that was coined by Men’s Rights Activists that describe the toxic expectations that men and boys have put upon them by society. So, it’s things like the expectation to never cry or show emotions. Or the expectation to behave in unhealthy macho ways. Healthy Masculinity is the natural Masculinity that’s subtle and unpretended that comes from the inside. Toxic Masculinity comes from social pressures and is more like a mask of socially enforced “Masculine” traits that society expects men and boys to wear. And many of these expectations make a man callous, brutish, emotionally unintelligent, and womanizing if he “successfully” adheres to these expectations. There are toxic Feminine expectations too. Things like “be submissive and self-sacrificing” or “your only importance is your appearance”. Things like that. But most of those are self-deprecating. So, the toxicity happens inwardly… and sometimes toward other women.
  22. ????