u/RemoveMassive2492

Marxist and mental health expert Gabor Maté has said that capitalist ideology affects many different things in society, including medical ideology. He has also said that anthropological research shows that humans generally lived in highly egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands where compassion, equality, cooperation, sharing, and being friendly were the highest values, including with outsiders, and there was generally little violence.

However it seems like the field of anthropology strongly disagree between how much of this view is true and how much of a more pessimistic, violent, competitive view is true. Some like Steven Pinker seems to say the complete opposite, that hunter-gatherers show that human nature is extremely violent and barbaric. This seems strange when all anthroplogists presumably have access to the same evidence.

Do you think that anthropology is biased towards a pessimistic perspective because of capitalism?

I think humans are animals and that we are hardwired to value people depending on their social status. By status I don't mean economic, but everything that means that someone has good genetics, like intelligence, life success, charisma, good looks, being healthy, physically strong etc.

I've listened to evolutionary psychologists talk about what attracts us sexually and why and their reasoning makes a lot of sense. Also as far as I know it's supported by research too.

These things make us like and love someone and are what creates sexual and romantic love, because the purpose of sexual and romantic love is having children that are as healthy and have the highest genetic quality as possible. All animals choose mates based on these things, so it makes sense that humans wouldn't be an exception.

You might think "what about people in relationships who don't want children?" I'm not saying we consciously think of these things, but that it's what has created what we are attracted to through evolution.

For example, straight men who don't want kids are still attracted to women's wider hips, because wide hips means a woman is less likely to have problems giving birth, so evolution "knows" it's good for women in the population to have wider hips, so it steers men's attraction to make sure women's hips stay wide and maybe keep getting wider.

I'm sure few would deny that these status things matter at least initially, but would say that relationships usually develop into a more deeper connection with time and that they eventually don't matter, but that's hard for me to believe since as far as I know that's not true. Things like your appearance continue to be very important. Relationship therapists will often advice people that it's very important to take care of your appearance for relationships to work out.

I think people are so used to this that they don't think about it more deeply, but imagine a friendship where someone feels that they love their friend deeply, will always be there for them, etc, but also that if their friend becauses less enjoyable to look at they will not be interested in being their friend anymore. Wouldn't that be a shallow friendship? Then why aren't romantic relationships shallow then?

I really wish things weren't this way, just so that's clear. I'm not like a red piller who wants red pill to be true so they can hate women or whatever, but love being shallow just seems like the truth, at least for most people.

I imagine a massive, empty fantasy world, with pre-made biomes, races, monsters and animals, where players are free to fill it with content that they create themselves, but under the watch of moderators who makes sure the content is serious.

While players are should be free to do what they want, the game's design should encourage players to create the typical fantasy world themselves, and recruiting players to create countries, which are ruled by different political systems, roleplaying as evil, neutral, good etc, some countries being mono-ethnic, some mixed with many races, some people primitive, some advanced etc.

When a country grow larger they can take over more of the world and do as they wish with it, building cities, monuments, exploration etc. They also must organize this massive thing with thousands of players perhaps playing as characters allied to the country and choose how they organize themselves. So depending on what you do in the world, you might spend your time enjoying designing buildings and cities, coming up with a unique style that fits the race and their morality. Or maybe you're in the upper leadership of the country, so then you spend a lot of time making decisions, like a strategy game, and trying to create a country that can attract players to roleplay as being a part of it, whether that's security, being able to get resources to build buildings or tech, a fun race with a cool theme, controlling a beautiful or cool biome, being able to travel on ships or vehicles to explore the world, etc. Or maybe the country is at war and you're a soldier, so it's an action game. Or maybe you design weapons, ships, vehicles, war machines etc, so the game is like an engineering game, though it should be very simple, like building with technic lego. Maybe you just want to be alone or with a group of friends and not be a part of a country or any bigger goals, just explore or do moderator-created and player and country-created quests.

Regarding that, I'd like if no technology exists pre-made in the world, so no swords, ships, catapults etc that you can spawn- the players have to create that themselves, and design technology that works within the game's physics. So creating a catapult might be very tricky and take a lot of refinement before it works well. To save on the game's data, I imagine that once a catapult is designed (maybe in a game disconnected from the MMO to save on data) and is spawned in the world, only it's performance and movements are saved, not all the complex technology that had to be designed.

I imagine that technology's limit is steampunk stuff, to keep the fantasy theme. So tanks with steam engines, flying air ballon ships, steam trains etc. As you can imagine, having to build the engine, steering system, etc (with lego-like building system with parts) will be complicated and take time, as well as resources in the game to produce it all, so this level technology will be rare.

Then if you want to produce it in large numbers quickly you need many players or NPCs to do the work, and the more complicated the more man-hours is needed.

So if 2 countries want to conquer as much ground as possible, one might choose simple technology but have huge numbers of it, while another might choose a high-tech army with the trade-off of small numbers.

There should be NPCs in the world, which can grow in numbers in a country, who you must take care of and make sure they get all their needs met.

Moderators also play in the world, as monsters, characters, gods etc. Roleplaying this way makes them able to balance the world while still roleplaying if it gets out of hand in a way that makes it less fun for other players. Say one country has grown huge and powerful and roleplays as an evil country, and it's gotten to the point where they keep killing and enslaving many players and there's not much they can do about it, those players can "pray" (call out) to a "god" (a moderator) for help, who then maybe give them special powers/creates a natural distaster/sends a monster etc to defeat or threaten the evil nation.

This game idea revolves around making massive castles collapse with realistic physics and being on top and inside these castles while they are collapsing, which I imaged could be fun.

The castles should be massive, like several kilometers/miles tall, and fall somewhat in slow motion to give you a chance to escape them falling, so if you're standing on a tower and it's falling, maybe you can parkour down as its falling or jumping on falling pieces in the air to survive the fall, or if you're inside a massive room that's collapsing, you can run away as it's falling. Basically I'd like to create the overwhelming sense of scale and epic battles that scenes in the Lord Of The Rings create, like seeing the catapults on Minas Tirith throw massive rocks down into a sea of orcs, and if you're on the ground you see these massive rocks fly towards you, almost in slow motion because they're so massive. Or the scene where Legolas and Frodo balance on the broken bridge in Moria.

I imagine a fantasy medieval theme and one team attacks the castle and another team defends it. The castle has huge benefits for the defenders, so for the attackers to capture more area they must destroy parts of the castle, using catapults, bombs, battering rams, etc, to knock them down. If they're smart they can try to knock down a part of the castle to make it fall over another part. Attackers can also play as giants and dragons who can tear down the castle and throw rocks on it.

The attackers can control NPC attackers too, which attacks like a massive swarm and can be controlled with simple orders, which would be fun to defend against and kill in huge numbers with arrows, catapults, traps, boiling oil, dropping rocks, etc. For the players who control these swarms the game is like a strategy game. If the NPCs become too scared or struggle too much, they lose morale and won't fight as hard or even flee, and lose trust in their commander and won't obey anymore, so you must be smart with how you direct them and cooperate with other players.

I thought maybe it could be fun for the defenders to design the castle before each match, if you could create castles ahead of time and load them into the match, so you could use your creativity and experience to design them to be as good as possible, with carefully constructed obstacles, traps, tricks with false doors and passaeways, water and trench obstacles, movable ramps, etc.

The main idea for the game is the massive castles and them collapsing with realistic physics, which I imagine could be exciting due to their massive size. Say if you're standing on a castle wall that is like 2 kilometers tall, and it's starting to collapse, so you have to try to desperately run along it as it's breaking apart. Or if you're an attacker and a 5 kilometers tall tower collapse towards you, and it's so big it moves rather slowly in this epic view, and all your soldiers and you fearfully try to run away, and if you can't, maybe you try to do the Aladdin idea, and stand on the ground exactly where on the towers windows will fall. Or you're inside a collapsing tower, trying to run down stairs as they are breaking apart, somewhat in slow motion.

The way I picture it in my head the idea of massive buildings that are falling apart would be a lot of fun, both to being inside them when they do it and to be the one who makes them collapse.

It would certainly be wonderful if there was one more SSOASS-like album, if it was as good...

Edit: I read this in a comment on Reddit, I believe someone said that Steve had said that when he heard a certain Queensryche album he felt that that was the kind of music Maiden should have done on the follow-up to SSOASS, since it showed that there was another level that they could have taken that sound, before being done with it.

In Mehdi Hasan's interview with Victor Gao he mentioned how everyone in the top of the party supports Xi as president, which he thinks is very hard to believe and that with previous presidents there was a lot of disagreement.

Is there any good evidence that Xi is purging people who don't support him to gain more power for himself?

Edit: I remembered that some people here said that they think the removal of term limits was because of the increasing aggression from USA against China, so the CPC probably thinks it's safer to keep XI, a proven competent leader, as it would be risky to change him for a new president that may not be as competent in the more difficult times. If this is true would it makes sense for everyone to support Xi?

This could be just because I'm always in a flashback and dissociation and can't think clearly and easily panic, but I wished his book was written with a clear guide for what to do for people who struggle with these symptoms. I've read the entire book twice and taken notes, yet it feels like I don't know how to begin or how to use the information. Also the 13 emotional flashback steps and inner critic techniques do not make any difference for me.

The story behind this is that more than 20 years ago this guy found this crocodile with a plastic bag stuck around its neck and removed it and fed it. It started to follow him and since then he's been feeding it regularly. It's grown much larger since, but even though this crocodile species is the most dangerous in the world and hunt humans, it has never hurt anyone. He can touch its face and jaws and get in the water with it

As far as I know, crocodile experts don't think they can bond with people and that relationships like this happens because they know that they will continue to be fed as long as they dont hurt people. The way it grabs the food even looks like its trying to be gentle I think, if you compare to how crocs usually grab food thrown in water, when they snap their jaws and water splash a lot. It's an impressive example of crocodile intelligence.