Charger

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I've noticed since focusing on maximizing a high dopamine, low serotonin, low cortisol state that I've become much more passive regarding topics that I was much more fired up about a few years ago. I've spoken of having much more (far) right leaning views during the most stressful periods of my life, I suppose stress can promote a 'misery loves company' mentality where you're likely to be in favor of politics that may result in others being put in a more difficult situation or being inflicted with whatever perceived pain or stress you're currently under or have experienced.

Basically, I'm aware that we live in a world that is imperfect with many problems. But I notice when observing the behaviors of my peers, that they will get fired up over seemingly minute issues, and in some cases, issues that don't even exist, fired up over pure speculation in some cases.

A few examples:

- “The president is going to get us in a war.” that I hear almost every time a new president is elected.

- Acting as if their paychecks are now going to be funneled directly to minorities now that a Democrat is in office.

- Blowing out of proportion sensationalist headlines of how offended our society has supposedly become as if the average person walking around really cares what's in a Dr. Seuss book.

It's as though people get caught up in the sensationalism of things, as if they're taking positions they don't really believe in because they see others reacting similarly. It's hard to empathize because I either perceive these problems as non-existent, easily solved, not intrusive to most people's day-to-day lives, or simply something that can't be realistically influenced and therefore isn't worth stressing over.

I'm not sure if this passivity is a direct result of low-stress hormones and thus empathy, or simply a subconscious way to avoid extra stress, as I've noticed I also do not seek out media that would previously put me in a stressed state of mind. Sometimes, I wonder if these are genuine issues and I'm in a state of delusion because I can't relate to the reactions of those around me.

At one point, I almost took these feelings (or lack thereof) as a sign that I was low in androgens. I think men get conditioned to think that running on adrenaline or being high-strung over petty issues is a direct expression of testosterone, it's been the opposite in my experience.

How has Peating influenced your own perceptions of politics or social issues?
Have your positions changed or are they the same regardless?
Do you find it takes more effort to 'care' about political issues in a low-stress state?
Do you consider passivity a bad thing and what problems in particular do you think deserve your energy, attention, and empathy?
 
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Elie

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Self awareness, becoming the observer, these are signs of inner growth.
As peat teaches, calmness requires good bioenergetic state.
 

grithin

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When people have issues they don't have a perceivable path to resolve (health issues, family problems they don't want to deal with), they start trying to fix systems that are mildly related. This can translate to people with health problems desiring to "fix" political or social systems. It could be expected that as someone resolves their health issues, they abandon the notion of fixing the system and revert to original selfish desires (aspirations, family, etc).
 

PxD

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I don’t think health improvements have affected my worldview and political views. If anything I’ve gained more conviction in them. I do agree though that as my health has improved I worry less about things in general and my mental and emotional resilience is stronger. I don’t get “triggered” nearly as often.

Re: the cancel culture/woke stuff, it’s all distant and unrelatable until it touches you personally. For example I work with, and have friends and family members who work for, large corporations and many of these places are now rainbow flags and BLM all day, every day...or at a minimum, in the months of February and June ;)
 
OP
Charger

Charger

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I don’t think health improvements have affected my worldview and political views. If anything I’ve gained more conviction in them. I do agree though that as my health has improved I worry less about things in general and my mental and emotional resilience is stronger. I don’t get “triggered” nearly as often.

Re: the cancel culture/woke stuff, it’s all distant and unrelatable until it touches you personally. For example I work with, and have friends and family members who work for, large corporations and many of these places are now rainbow flags and BLM all day, every day...or at a minimum, in the months of February and June ;)

It's something I've given thought to, that the far-left/woke irritants are probably more prevalent in a white collar workspace or in retail. I currently work in the polar opposite environment to that, so I'm exposed to the opposite extreme more regularly. I'm not a fan of the antagonism from either side, though.

Again, years ago in a more stressful time, I did notice and have much more of a stress reaction to kinds of things you mention. Personally, as far as BLM or left-leaning propaganda goes, it doesn't bother me as I haven't had any individuals actually push any of the stuff in my face or bring it up, so I don't really perceive it as a major issue. I just look at it for what it is, a way for companies to present themselves in a certain light that they think is beneficial.

When people have issues they don't have a perceivable path to resolve (health issues, family problems they don't want to deal with), they start trying to fix systems that are mildly related. This can translate to people with health problems desiring to "fix" political or social systems. It could be expected that as someone resolves their health issues, they abandon the notion of fixing the system and revert to original selfish desires (aspirations, family, etc).

Never thought about it that way, but that makes a lot of sense.
 

akgrrrl

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Anyone who reduces what is going on in the world today as politics or health qualities might at least notice that the presentation of Covid is planet wide along with financial turmoil and personal freedoms. Never in the history of planet earth has every continent been on the same page, for the same issues.
 

gaze

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when i'm really feeling good, i understand where everyone's coming from. presidents, corrupt politicians, the woke mob, whoever it may be, i understand why they think the way they do and i can imagine myself in their shoes. i really don't judge anyone for anything despite disagreeing. however when i feel crappy, i start to get really angry at at different people. i start to criticize everything and anything despite me personally doing a lot of the same things i critique others for (such as being greedy and hateful at times). when i'm in this mood, i try to remind myself to snap out of it, by reading things like this speech i really like called the man in the arena:
 

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tankasnowgod

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A few examples:

- “The president is going to get us in a war.” that I hear almost every time a new president is elected.

To be fair, almost every recent President has. I don't think Trump started a new war, but he did inherent three, so it's not like he was a "peacetime" President.

There have been non-stop wars that the US has been fighting since 2001. You can actually make the argument that the US never stopped fighting any war since WWII. THE UNITED STATES still has troops stationed in about 80% of countries around the world.
 

PxD

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It's something I've given thought to, that the far-left/woke irritants are probably more prevalent in a white collar workspace or in retail. I currently work in the polar opposite environment to that, so I'm exposed to the opposite extreme more regularly. I'm not a fan of the antagonism from either side, though.

Again, years ago in a more stressful time, I did notice and have much more of a stress reaction to kinds of things you mention. Personally, as far as BLM or left-leaning propaganda goes, it doesn't bother me as I haven't had any individuals actually push any of the stuff in my face or bring it up, so I don't really perceive it as a major issue. I just look at it for what it is, a way for companies to present themselves in a certain light that they think is beneficial.



Never thought about it that way, but that makes a lot of sense.

Meant to respond to you this weekend, just getting to it now.

I do agree that corporations are pandering to Leftism, and there are reasons for it. One that I've seen in person at a former company was that a lot of these policies are adopted by management/HR on the advice of outside consultants, usually some brand-name McKinsey or Bain-type outfit. These places only hire from "elite" universities, which are ground zero for cultural Marxism. Consultant X comes to your Senior VP of HR and tells her that "our research shows that the culture is changing and five years from now the whole country will be woke and intersectionalist. You'd better get on the bandwagon now!" This is a lie, but clueless VP doesn't do any thinking or research and doesn't want to have an opinion because that means being accountable, so the consultancy's recommendations are instituted as "best business practice", and next thing you know you're attending anti-racist training (only the white employees, of course) where you are told be "be less white". Corporate management are mostly cowardly herd animals and this stuff is already starting to face backlash and will quietly be pulled in a few years, but for now we are stuck with it.

Another reason is that the Left has done a spectacular job of engaging with, influencing, and infiltrating (getting board seats) large corporations over the past 20-30 years. Corporations have thus adopted the Marxist social justice agenda as their corporate agenda. Again, I think this will be disastrous in the long run. Conservative activists, on the other hand, are almost non-existent, because the Right's agenda mostly consists of "leave me alone" and "free marketplace of ideas/I respect your right to your opinions", which has really worked against them when faced with Leftist idealists who aggressively push to remake society in their image.

I can give you a few examples just off the top of my head from the past 12 months of experiences I or people I know have had:

1. My sister works for a large well-known Canadian bank. The bank is woke AF and after the BLM protests/riots last year they held closed "listening sessions" for black employees only, directly with upper management, where any and all complaints about fellow employees or management were handled with velvet gloves. Come the end of the year, she finds out the promotion she was promised was withheld and given to a "visible minority" instead (someone who isn't white), on that basis. They actually told this to her, to her face. Better luck next year! She's currently interviewing to leave the bank. They also aggressively promote gay pride month every June, and encourage employees to wear pink as much as possible. My sister didn't and was questioned by her boss as to why not. This is borderline a hostile work environment.

2. My wife works for a very large energy company that has adopted all the woke stuff (renewables, BLM, and LGBT). They actively support such policies inside of the company, including for example running "education sessions" employees can attend where they can be lectured by transgender advocates who are pushing their agenda.

3. Same company...looking to place an ex-pat in a managerial position for a role in Egypt. A colleague of my wife's who had 30+ years experience and was outstandingly qualified for the job applied and was the likely frontrunner based on competence. However, the company has a policy of requiring at least one female applicant for every manager-level job posting, and in this case, there were only 3 men who applied for the job. Result: they closed the posting, cancelled the position, and my wife's colleague ended up resigning/retiring shortly after because he saw no future for himself at the company. He popped up some months later at a competitor.

4. In my line of work I get a lot of research reports from the big Wall St banks of various topics of economics and finance. Right around August last year, one of them, Citi, a trillion-dollar bank, decided to let an executive in their capital markets division (he is black) write a cover letter on the topic of race, that was emailed out with one of their regular reports, to a client list of probably hundred if not thousands of clients. The only way to describe this letter is that it was about 1,000 words of delusional crazy. It was a millionaire writing about how oppressed he is, how the white patriarchy oppresses the black community, the "LatinX" community, etc. and how we need to do more to uplift these oppressed identities, and that (he literally wrote this) he and his wife fear for the lives of their two small children every time they step out for a walk in their neighborhood, so the implication being that murderous whites will kill his kids. It's like he has no clue what crime statistics by race actually look like. Keep in mind again that this guy works in an industry that's heavily white and male, was hired and promoted by white men, takes home probably 7 figures a year, and I have no doubt lives in a white neighborhood...yet this is how he views the world...and thinks it's a great idea to send out a letter like this to the client base which is probably 80% white and male.
 

LucyL

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4. In my line of work I get a lot of research reports from the big Wall St banks of various topics of economics and finance. Right around August last year, one of them, Citi, a trillion-dollar bank, decided to let an executive in their capital markets division (he is black) write a cover letter on the topic of race, that was emailed out with one of their regular reports, to a client list of probably hundred if not thousands of clients. The only way to describe this letter is that it was about 1,000 words of delusional crazy. It was a millionaire writing about how oppressed he is, how the white patriarchy oppresses the black community, the "LatinX" community, etc. and how we need to do more to uplift these oppressed identities, and that (he literally wrote this) he and his wife fear for the lives of their two small children every time they step out for a walk in their neighborhood, so the implication being that murderous whites will kill his kids. It's like he has no clue what crime statistics by race actually look like. Keep in mind again that this guy works in an industry that's heavily white and male, was hired and promoted by white men, takes home probably 7 figures a year, and I have no doubt lives in a white neighborhood...yet this is how he views the world...and thinks it's a great idea to send out a letter like this to the client base which is probably 80% white and male.

Several years ago my daughter brought home a flier from her Catholic Kindergarten full of statistics on the abuse of women, from some global org, including highlighting that 1 in 3 women were the victims of abuse. I wrote to the principal, asking (among other things) if he had thought through those little kids looking at their friends, wondering whose mother was a victim of abuse. He replied that they would be more careful about vetting literature appropriately in the future. My point is, kindergarteners don't think critically, and when you dump garbage on them, they may not shake the impression it left when they grow up. We've been training commies in this country for a very long time. And now they are in places of power.

20 years ago, complaints about racist Dr. Seuss books would have been shrugged off by most people who don't care, but today, these kids that have been fed sensationalist propaganda without any critical context their whole lives and now are in a position to control what happens to other people. Not caring is not the same thing as not being allowed to buy or sell a book on a major retail site that caters to interaction between individuals.
 

PxD

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Several years ago my daughter brought home a flier from her Catholic Kindergarten full of statistics on the abuse of women, from some global org, including highlighting that 1 in 3 women were the victims of abuse. I wrote to the principal, asking (among other things) if he had thought through those little kids looking at their friends, wondering whose mother was a victim of abuse. He replied that they would be more careful about vetting literature appropriately in the future. My point is, kindergarteners don't think critically, and when you dump garbage on them, they may not shake the impression it left when they grow up. We've been training commies in this country for a very long time. And now they are in places of power.

20 years ago, complaints about racist Dr. Seuss books would have been shrugged off by most people who don't care, but today, these kids that have been fed sensationalist propaganda without any critical context their whole lives and now are in a position to control what happens to other people. Not caring is not the same thing as not being allowed to buy or sell a book on a major retail site that caters to interaction between individuals.

That's funny that you mention that story. I had a similar experience at my kids' Catholic kindergarten last year, where they were running a book drive. I decided to pitch in and at random clicked on one of the books in the wish list, which took me to the Amazon page for the book, where it became apparent that although it was very superficially child-friendly, the text and illustrations were packed with symbols/themes of feminism, homosexuality/transgenderism, multiculturalism, etc. I wrote the librarian who was running the book drive to voice a complaint about the book and she sent me a flustered/angry response that the book was only intended to teach the basic moral of the story and nothing else, and GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR! I didn't bother responding back.

What you say about context is spot on. The modern history of the country I grew up in is taught in a certain way in books and media to Americans but whenever I discuss my experience of that country and describe the background and context of why it was the way it was, and how it really is now, I can see peoples' eyes light up as the context falls into place and the whole story starts to make more sense, rather than being a "and then THIS happened, and there was peace and justice" narration of selected events.
 

akgrrrl

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Ah yes, and the wokism in an "environment friendly" office affects us how? Here:
I took my elder friend to a womens clinic as she needed an exam. The receptionist insisted she register herself online at a computer station provided, and thereafter receive all results, medication, and communications via the Patient Portal. After stating that the elder did not have a computer nor tech-savvy skills, with triumphant smile she exclaimed "we are a paperless office!".
It was wasted time trying to address the fundamental purpose of the Clinic and it's (alleged) services. She had no thoughts of how to include a person that did not fit the template she had been given.
 
OP
Charger

Charger

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Meant to respond to you this weekend, just getting to it now.

I do agree that corporations are pandering to Leftism, and there are reasons for it. One that I've seen in person at a former company was that a lot of these policies are adopted by management/HR on the advice of outside consultants, usually some brand-name McKinsey or Bain-type outfit. These places only hire from "elite" universities, which are ground zero for cultural Marxism. Consultant X comes to your Senior VP of HR and tells her that "our research shows that the culture is changing and five years from now the whole country will be woke and intersectionalist. You'd better get on the bandwagon now!" This is a lie, but clueless VP doesn't do any thinking or research and doesn't want to have an opinion because that means being accountable, so the consultancy's recommendations are instituted as "best business practice", and next thing you know you're attending anti-racist training (only the white employees, of course) where you are told be "be less white". Corporate management are mostly cowardly herd animals and this stuff is already starting to face backlash and will quietly be pulled in a few years, but for now we are stuck with it.

Another reason is that the Left has done a spectacular job of engaging with, influencing, and infiltrating (getting board seats) large corporations over the past 20-30 years. Corporations have thus adopted the Marxist social justice agenda as their corporate agenda. Again, I think this will be disastrous in the long run. Conservative activists, on the other hand, are almost non-existent, because the Right's agenda mostly consists of "leave me alone" and "free marketplace of ideas/I respect your right to your opinions", which has really worked against them when faced with Leftist idealists who aggressively push to remake society in their image.

I can give you a few examples just off the top of my head from the past 12 months of experiences I or people I know have had:

1. My sister works for a large well-known Canadian bank. The bank is woke AF and after the BLM protests/riots last year they held closed "listening sessions" for black employees only, directly with upper management, where any and all complaints about fellow employees or management were handled with velvet gloves. Come the end of the year, she finds out the promotion she was promised was withheld and given to a "visible minority" instead (someone who isn't white), on that basis. They actually told this to her, to her face. Better luck next year! She's currently interviewing to leave the bank. They also aggressively promote gay pride month every June, and encourage employees to wear pink as much as possible. My sister didn't and was questioned by her boss as to why not. This is borderline a hostile work environment.

2. My wife works for a very large energy company that has adopted all the woke stuff (renewables, BLM, and LGBT). They actively support such policies inside of the company, including for example running "education sessions" employees can attend where they can be lectured by transgender advocates who are pushing their agenda.

3. Same company...looking to place an ex-pat in a managerial position for a role in Egypt. A colleague of my wife's who had 30+ years experience and was outstandingly qualified for the job applied and was the likely frontrunner based on competence. However, the company has a policy of requiring at least one female applicant for every manager-level job posting, and in this case, there were only 3 men who applied for the job. Result: they closed the posting, cancelled the position, and my wife's colleague ended up resigning/retiring shortly after because he saw no future for himself at the company. He popped up some months later at a competitor.

4. In my line of work I get a lot of research reports from the big Wall St banks of various topics of economics and finance. Right around August last year, one of them, Citi, a trillion-dollar bank, decided to let an executive in their capital markets division (he is black) write a cover letter on the topic of race, that was emailed out with one of their regular reports, to a client list of probably hundred if not thousands of clients. The only way to describe this letter is that it was about 1,000 words of delusional crazy. It was a millionaire writing about how oppressed he is, how the white patriarchy oppresses the black community, the "LatinX" community, etc. and how we need to do more to uplift these oppressed identities, and that (he literally wrote this) he and his wife fear for the lives of their two small children every time they step out for a walk in their neighborhood, so the implication being that murderous whites will kill his kids. It's like he has no clue what crime statistics by race actually look like. Keep in mind again that this guy works in an industry that's heavily white and male, was hired and promoted by white men, takes home probably 7 figures a year, and I have no doubt lives in a white neighborhood...yet this is how he views the world...and thinks it's a great idea to send out a letter like this to the client base which is probably 80% white and male.
Do you consider these issues (the left/woke agenda) worth being stressed over in general? Do you feel it's conducive to a positive state of mind to worry about such an agenda?

Would you, through Peating or otherwise, choose not to stress or care about these perceived issues if it were an option or do you think they genuinely deserve attention, even if realistically we have no control over which way our society goes?

Just wanna take this back to my original point, when is stress necessary, and how much? Is a high dopamine/test, low serotonin/estro state a problem if you can't empathize or genuinely be moved on a personal level one way or another by these issues? Is it delusion to be optimistic and happy in modern times or is it all a matter of perspective at the end of the day where no one perspective is right?

Personally, if I take any position at all on social/racial issues these days, it's one of just being burnt out from both sides. These days, I find that I have no tolerance for bitching about what we have no control over and also complaining about the very things we DO have the power to control and change. (Ex. Hating your job, relationship, etc.)
 

LucyL

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Personally, if I take any position at all on social/racial issues these days, it's one of just being burnt out from both sides. These days, I find that I have no tolerance for bitching about what we have no control over and also complaining about the very things we DO have the power to control and change. (Ex. Hating your job, relationship, etc.)

When I consider the communist takeovers in other countries, and the ensuing "struggle sessions" and silencing of opposition from the populace, maybe even ongoing right now in China (see Uighurs etc) I don't see how we can afford to stop complaining. In the book "Red Sky Black Death" Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova tells how her own brother was hauled in by the authorities and sent to Siberia for complaining, and the next day she went down to the recruitment office and begged to be allowed to join the military and fight for her country. No thanks.

But that said, I do think it is important to be able to complain, publicly, to push back, but not to let that become an obsession or even a defining activity. (For now at least), but keep it in the realm of Civic Duty, and put most energies to shoring up your own health, metabolism and environment and your families'.
 

LucyL

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That's funny that you mention that story. I had a similar experience at my kids' Catholic kindergarten last year, where they were running a book drive. I decided to pitch in and at random clicked on one of the books in the wish list, which took me to the Amazon page for the book, where it became apparent that although it was very superficially child-friendly, the text and illustrations were packed with symbols/themes of feminism, homosexuality/transgenderism, multiculturalism, etc. I wrote the librarian who was running the book drive to voice a complaint about the book and she sent me a flustered/angry response that the book was only intended to teach the basic moral of the story and nothing else, and GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR! I didn't bother responding back.

What you say about context is spot on. The modern history of the country I grew up in is taught in a certain way in books and media to Americans but whenever I discuss my experience of that country and describe the background and context of why it was the way it was, and how it really is now, I can see peoples' eyes light up as the context falls into place and the whole story starts to make more sense, rather than being a "and then THIS happened, and there was peace and justice" narration of selected events.

Yup. Another time we were notified that they were bringing in a secular anti-bullying campaign, which of course was just a cover for diversity indoctrination. I wanted to go after that one too, but instead I settled for homeschooling :cool: .

Curious what country you grew up in? One thing I love about homeschooling, is you can take all the time you want to explore context for anything.
 

PxD

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When I consider the communist takeovers in other countries, and the ensuing "struggle sessions" and silencing of opposition from the populace, maybe even ongoing right now in China (see Uighurs etc) I don't see how we can afford to stop complaining. In the book "Red Sky Black Death" Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova tells how her own brother was hauled in by the authorities and sent to Siberia for complaining, and the next day she went down to the recruitment office and begged to be allowed to join the military and fight for her country. No thanks.

But that said, I do think it is important to be able to complain, publicly, to push back, but not to let that become an obsession or even a defining activity. (For now at least), but keep it in the realm of Civic Duty, and put most energies to shoring up your own health, metabolism and environment and your families'.

I second this approach - I don’t feel like I’m burning the candle from both ends and if anything I’ve got more piss and vinegar in me than I did several years ago. I do agree with Charger though that the limit should be where this stuff starts to raise stress levels too high and starts impinging on one’s health.
 

PxD

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Yup. Another time we were notified that they were bringing in a secular anti-bullying campaign, which of course was just a cover for diversity indoctrination. I wanted to go after that one too, but instead I settled for homeschooling :cool: .

Curious what country you grew up in? One thing I love about homeschooling, is you can take all the time you want to explore context for anything.

I’m a big fan of homeschooling but I do think there is productive value in engaging and pushing back. keep in mind if the center and right keep retreating into their safe zones from the left, eventually there won’t be anywhere left to retreat to. The left will swallow it al - education, media, arts, entertainment, big business, small business, government, the military, religion, etc - and then with full spectrum control of society political correctness will dictate what people think and say, in the original sense that Trotsky envisioned it: there is no Truth, only the politics, and things are either correct according to the politics or incorrect and if they are incorrect they can not be allowed to exist.

I grew up in South Africa.
 

LucyL

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I’m a big fan of homeschooling but I do think there is productive value in engaging and pushing back. keep in mind if the center and right keep retreating into their safe zones from the left, eventually there won’t be anywhere left to retreat to. The left will swallow it al - education, media, arts, entertainment, big business, small business, government, the military, religion, etc - and then with full spectrum control of society political correctness will dictate what people think and say, in the original sense that Trotsky envisioned it: there is no Truth, only the politics, and things are either correct according to the politics or incorrect and if they are incorrect they can not be allowed to exist.

I grew up in South Africa.
Glad you made it out. Kate Hopkins bit on the white slums in SA opened my eyes considerably and has influenced my priorities in what I teach my kids.
 

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