If you think Marx is a “reductionist model” then you are cleanly, plainly, completely mistaken. Das Capital isn’t a pamphlet, its 4 unfinished volumes.

You know, an adequate Marxist (I’ve met such, believe it or not) would not argue that it is a reductionist model (every model is, my point was that Marxists apply it universally without feedbacks, for which no model is good) and of course wouldn’t use amount of text as a measure of quality or correctness.

Your anti intellectualism is a sad affair, but propaganda is a hell of a drug. I love being told by people who haven’t studied Marx what he is all about. Do you also have strong opinions on Augustine, Hegel, Kant or Descartes? Have you ever read them?

This text doesn’t make sense. I have a strong preference for Marcus Aurelius’ notes and Tao Te Ching over these, if you insist, but Descartes is fine too.

What power? The power of workers? You might have more Marxist ideas than you think.

In this case the power of people with interests weighing more on the employer’s side or the worker’s side. I wouldn’t say it’s power of workers, just like wind filling ship’s sails is not ship’s power.

I don’t think anything is strange in intersections.

Well, we’ll see a lot of things tried.

If you’ve heard of the “new Medieval” concept, we are approaching it.

I like Star Wars as a really prophetic piece of culture (before Disney of course).

So - there was the original trilogy, with the set of symbols that is normal for us today, but wasn’t when the first movie came out. In some sense it warned of what would happen for more than a decade after it.

And there was the prequel trilogy, which it seems to be a fashion of calling stupid and bad, and Attack of the Clones is often called the worst movie of the prequels. Well, in implementation it may be not too good, but just like the original trilogy’s second movie is the deepest, the prequel trilogy’s second movie is the deepest. AotC too was prophetic, and in that prophecy we live right now.

Now there’s that issue with chronology, where the order of events is different, but it can be anything. It’s symbolic art, not a chart. In real life events can happen in any order.

So - Lucas wanted to make three more movies (discarding Disney crap), after RotJ chronologically. I don’t know what these would be, but logically AotC’s philosophy is between ESB’s and something which would look like that “new Medieval” I’ve remembered. BTW, it’s not a nice thing. Just inevitable in opinions of some people.

LOL, a post out of nothing.

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I fully agree. So when you are against capitalism, what is your alternative that doesn’t devolve into state capitalism?

There are other things unmanageable.

Like a nuclear superpower with vast fertile southern lands fit for growing grapes, sea access with fishing fleet, and all such, which had a significant part of population under threat of scurvy. Because capitalism makes logistics work, it’s the reason European colonial empires could exist.

Or the same nuclear superpower, which boasted widespread literacy and all that, except that conveniently ignored Central Asian areas mostly busy with growing, collecting and processing cotton. Damn right, my dear. These were, ahem, not very developed even in 1991.

Or the same nuclear superpower, which had a powerful standardization apparatus, but when you look at its tank models or anything else, the components which could be interchangeable were just slightly incompatible. They were designed by people with the same kind of education and understanding and context, for the same purpose, but, first, every defense plant or research institute or something wanted to have their standard and they did get it, second, due to secrecy and vertical administrative structure there were little communication between them.

Or a system of logistics, that turned into shit the moment that superpower decided to leave the chat, leaving populations of whole countries foraging for wood to not freeze at winter.

Capitalism works differently, because it (any human actually, you included) tries to get more with less. Non-market instruments are supposed to constrain it to doing that only honestly.

Things I hate were present where I live through half of USSR and then till now, and replaced things even scarier present since the revolution.

Tell me it’s capitalism, mofo, I beg you.

It’s not about the rejection I’m facing, its about the fact that my mere approach is seen as an insult. It’s the audacity to ask to be included in something that is considered a normal part of life for others.

Perhaps you are approaching wrong people.

There’s one rule I’ve learned (but haven’t internalized, still a virgin and all that) from my aunts and just today had it reinforced by my therapist.

Do what you want. If you really like a girl you are talking to, offer her to do something. Start small, no “let’s have a date”, just offer something interesting to you that may be interesting to her. To have tea in some pleasant place. To walk in a park. Be honest, if she asks if it’s romantic. Apologize if she dislikes it. Might even be honest that you don’t know anything about relationships. I mean, what do you fear more, shame from saying it or to remain lonely till grave? And that conversation doesn’t define all your further life (most likely).

At least that’s my plan the next time somebody tries to talk to me with a smile. Mostly happens at summer, so there’s time to find all fossilized sandwiches behind furniture and repair all broken closet doors. In theory, in fact some of these are broken for many years.

like there’s something about us that we are unaware of but everybody else picks up on that tells them to keep their distance

Are you sure you don’t have ASD?..

On the other side - I have ASD and, surprisingly, ASD is not the main thing preventing me.

I have found one funny thing - when I cut explicit materials a bit, say, less pr0n and such, and cut stimulants (sugar, caffeine) and eat more meat and dairy, people seem to like me more. But this is not a firm law.

It would make sense, though, that when you are healthier and have fewer outlets for certain kinds of energy, you are physically more attractive in ways hard to notice.

I’m just autistic\BAD and indecisive and had a romantic trauma at school and my environment (mom) is not mentally well at all (right now it’s not worse than hoarding and forgetting everything, but it was).

However, with my looks it’s somehow enough for me to just be kinda clean and shaved and in a public place for very pleasant young women (and I suppose much kinder than that girl from school) to try to talk to me with possible romantic perspective (which I usually realize after the conversation ends).

Except it just doesn’t work, either I don’t understand them, or I’m petrified and don’t know what to do or say, or I postpone interpreting the conversation to somewhere late, or I’m ashamed of the mess where I live and showing my life to that person if it goes somewhere.

So - sometimes it’s just about never having the courage to go forward. Not about other people discarding you.

EDIT: ah, also about BAD - in the mania phase one might slowly build up background dreams about some women one knows, and when trying to make a decision in regards to the woman they are really communicating with, to feel ashamed both before everyone touched by those dreams and before that woman ; I guess some people are fine with that, some even have open relationships, but this is not a common thing.

There are other variables the genie leaves wildcard.

Suppose I’m already very intelligent and attractive (and modest), except I’m also a wimp, myopic, have weird metabolism, autistic and with bipolar.

I got my diagnosis less than a week ago.

I’ve stumbled upon description of something called “Asperger’s syndrome” on a printed A4 sheet, being like 12 years old, but that description was somewhat enigmatic and I couldn’t tell how different it is from normalcy. I’ve also read about Carrie Fisher’s life after Star Wars and that she had BAD.

So since that time I suspected that I might be autistic and have bipolar, but thought that condition names are for doctors, while for laymen it’s better to say that people are different. So only when I reach a doctor and get a diagnosis, it’ll be certain. The approach itself is kinda autistic.

Then somewhere around year 2018 I’ve, eh, remembered\imagined a lot of things connected to emotional trauma, and came with these idiosyncrasies to a state medical institution (it’s Russia) where they just assumed it’s simple type schizophrenia (typical Russia again).

Now, being 28 years old, I finally have a normal diagnosis of ASD and BAD and no ADHD. I was certain I have ADHD, but paying attention to my own behavior - I see things architecturally wrong which I still have to work with, or meaningless things, and may seem like an ADHD person, but an ADHD person can’t focus, while I can’t start due to disgust of something.

Do the RAADS-R test. In case it’s more than 120 (I think that’s the number, but it has a description), you may want to read what autism is and whether you may have seen some of the traits in you, and then may visit a psychiatrist.

I say that because autistic people often imitate some style of speech in circumstances not quite fitting.

Well, these don’t surprise me, but trying something outside of the first world might yield different results.

Being healthy, of course, does contribute to one’s attractiveness.

But human beauty is really too subjective.

We may dislike people seeming familiar. We may like people seeming familiar more.

We may like people similar to us in appearance. We may particularly dislike people similar to us in appearance.

Also clothes affect people’s appearance quite a lot. If people in the area you do shopping for clothes are in average less like you in appearance and weight and everything, and people in some other area more, you might find them more attractive simply because the choice of clothes is a bit better, and the habit of wearing better fitting clothes.

And another very important component is what you expect to see. I mean, “how much cleaner they keep places” … which countries have you visited?

I’ve heard about Rammstein so many times that I just don’t want to. A bit like a few other very famous collectives.

Except Blind Guardian and Rivendell and Draconian. These one can just listen to indefinitely.

That’s dense and clearly something you’ve thought about deeply.

Rather repeatedly with very big intervals. Deeply - nah.

Western beauty standards largely come from antiquity—Greek and Roman ideals (symmetry, proportion, harmony). This gets revived during the Renaissance, primarily by Italian and French artists, not German ones.

Standards of beauty are not very general.

Anyway, I meant human beauty in this particular case. Which is, first, different from many other things, second, basically some set of familiar appearances, plus health and physique conditions defined by culture of the specific society (say, when child mortality was high and hunger still common in Europe, almost overweight women were considered attractive ; BTW, demographics of developer countries can be a consequence of evolution mechanisms intended to avoid Malthusian traps, say, if there’s enough food for everyone for a short period of time, the population should grow as fast as possible, but if it is so for a long period of time, then you’d better stop, - seems counterintuitive, but in nature longer good times often precede longer bad times).

German musos, philosopers, and designs, their prominence peaked in different eras (e.g., Enlightenment, Romanticism, Bauhaus) but didn’t shape Western standards of beauty or culture.

I didn’t mean prominence really, I meant associations, and I meant specific kinds in specific contexts, not wildcard. Also by “shape” it depends which kind of influence makes the threshold. Most of the “pompous and official” European music of late XIX century seems to have been influenced quite heavily.

Also about music - well, it’s not nice to refer to authority, especially anonymous authority since I don’t remember where I’ve read it, but apparently Ralph Vaughan-Williams would disagree with you, and would consider typical European music of his youth very heavily German-influenced.

Visual design like Helvetica became iconic due to functionality and simplicity, not just cos they were German…

Obviously true, but my point was the other way around, that there’s a climate in which various approaches to aesthetic are born, and if some aesthetic becomes popular, some things general for the climate it comes from might become more accepted everywhere. A fuzzy thought really, but the closest I’ve come to rephrasing my original comment in this one.

I actually have had a theory since my teens (as an autistic kid with idiots for parents, disgusting school and so on, so some need to escape that), that German music and German visual design feel so clean and attractive in a very vanilla way, because that’s what was the prestigious kind of culture for the British Empire in its prime and till WWI, and that survived by inertia even a couple decades past Germans having their teeth kicked in during WWII.

What we feel to be most classical is German music, German philosophy, German perception of military history, German ideological approaches to politics (today’s left-wing movements are still mostly that or at least track their lineage to that, and today’s right-wing movements may have kinda diverged, but still like to fuzzily hint at one Austrian painter), and German visual design (what’s considered “neutral” today, fonts like Helvetica, the way accents are made, etc).

What I’m coming at - common perception of human beauty in the West may be kinda affected by typical German appearance, that specifically, more than by typical French or typical British or typical Italian appearance.

Except in every step things can develop the ways you haven’t thought about.

And courtroom shows are kinda common enough in movies and even in reality. People will have strong feelings, but this doesn’t seem a major thing for many.

So - too much copium. I hope you are right and I am wrong, of course.

Yes, they are. It’s like demolishing dangerous construction. Guns to extinguish lives on firm trajectory to extinguishing yours are part of just guns to extinguish lives. When you solve this human problem with some technology or philosophy smart thing, let me know.

Some people think that situations where they can rely on others’ strength are normal.

Thus they may agree with need for weapons and self-defense, because “it’s a dangerous time”, but not when everything is in order again. Not even thinking that said “dangerous time” somehow happened and will happen again.

Guns are similar to fire extinguishers and defibrillators in that most of time they are not needed.

Well, the PC isn’t used only as a DAW, so I might still need Linux as opposed to FreeBSD. I’ve been running some form of Linux for a long time, now.

If you’re of the “advanced user” kind, you might find it easier to use than Linux - cleaner, much better documentation, ports collection, ZFS without pain or any combination of GEOM classes with UFS (which has snapshots here btw). It’s a different OS, but a very pleasant one. Same X (or Wayland), same applications, etc.

One can also use Linux emulation with CentOS 7 or Rocky Linux 9 environment for Linux binaries.

Don’t even know what it is, actually.

It’s a descendant of BSD, and things like Ultrix and SunOS 4 were BSD, so one can say it’s the most commonly used thing of what feels like Unix today (after Linux).

OK, I think this reads like sales text.