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You grew up in Communist China, bro. Ah yes. One of those rich traditions, where children who are born with serious medical conditions are denied treatment because the monkey gods would get angry that way.

You do realize that you just said that modern societies lack wonder and imagination, then as examples of what those two qualities would be like you cited three contemporary writers, two of them distinctly "Western"-- right? Apparently a sense of mystery and wonder are not completely "lost" to us...

Thank you! Exactly. Lydia Makhubu comes to mind.

For fuck's sake, the Catholic Church still owns a whole city over there that's the wealthiest nation in the world. Superstition is alive and well in the West. If there's anything to be "afraid" of, we've got it in our own backyard. You make no sense. You are not making a coherent argument.

Since when is it an "insult" to suggest or admit that things from the past affect us? I'm nothing but forthright about my own "issues", for fuck's sake. It's stuff like this that's just...oh dear: Huh? Fear of what? Your cheesy insistence that dressing up in costumes is going to enrich our...

I know what you're saying, I was just sorta making a rhetorical point about how the solutions to curbing emissions aren't actually as simple as most people think they are (i.e. recycle, use those lightbulbs that work longer). One thing that reeeally, really annoys me, and always has since even...

Interpret this! I had a dream after reading this really great queer theory book with a chapter about necrophilia that I was in this part of a lab in the zinc mine where my father used to work, but as soon as you got underground, it blended into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There were mummies...

Trick question. Nobody, because nobody really knows what's the best way to head off CO2 emissions yet.

I think this is basically correct but also somewhat of an oversimplification. I don't think we lack "culture" or a coherent one that binds people together. I just think we lack indigenous culture(s) plural as we move more towards a global culture. There are bad things about this but there are...

Well, there's a difference between "unconscious" and "subconscious" in psychoanalysis. But I'd be wary of dismissing the whole psychoanalytical discourse as overly "rational", especially if you don't have any experience with it. If anything, most "scientist" types (if there are indeed "types"...

Amazingly, not yet, although the Rhinebeck/Hyde Park area (closer to the Catskills) did, I heard.

Yup, I'll PM them to you in a sec.

Yes, exactly, this is why a couple of years ago on here a few of us were trying to explain why, rhetorically, the left needs to move to the biological model of populations, where race doesn't exist. That basically blows the BNP and other racists out of the water and leaves them no leg to stand...

That stuff is fascinating even if you don't believe in spirits. Why does it have to be a binary opposition, us/them, this/that, either/or. The point is that you don't have to believe in "spirits" to have a rich culture. There are plenty of rich cultural traditions and memes and such in...

I think I'm reaching for another word that sounds similar...

There are all sorts of homophobic cultures pre-Europe. Judaism, for one.

Yeah, there's a word for this...syncretism? Can't remember. Basically, it's a term for when colonialists come in and make the indigenous situation far worse than it was before. Happened in Thailand with the prostitution situation, in Australia when the Brits came storming back in and declared...

Padraig's example was good, I thought--sex with virgins cures AIDS. I'd add to it the other common practice, though: "sex with" (actually, rape of) infants to cure men with AIDS in sub-saharan Africa.

A medical "paper" that cites Erowid?

I think it's EXTREMELY condescending to call these ways "irrational". The medicine men of indigenous American tribes use "rational" treatments, including herbal ones that are still in some respects or to some extent used today. The things these people believe MAKE SENSE TO THEM. They are...