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Steven Furlong's avatar

What's that you say? Follow the money? Surely the truth cannot be as tawdry as that!

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Bill Quick's avatar

I have great faith in the explicative power of tawdry.

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Jorg's avatar

Probably one reason Musk is trying to stand up an app. Even for him it had better be different enough to attract users.

I'm on MeWe and think it's dying the slow death. Lately they've been 'tweaking' by removing all the tuff I originally liked. So it goes.

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Tsubion's avatar

Is anyone still on MySpace?

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Jorg's avatar

I hear so, but I never was.

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Bill Quick's avatar

I just checked. MySpace is apparently still a going concern. They make reference to "migrating" your account from "Classic MySpace," so I imagine there was an interregnum of sorts at some point.

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Tsubion's avatar

I don't know if it's all nonsense, but something similar happened when Telegram popped into view and became a superb rival to Whatsapp (superior IMO).

I remember the anti-Telegram campaign claiming it was Putin-run Russian spyware with the CEO of Telegram (a free-speech advocate) only pretending to be a Russian refugee in the Middle East to boost his cred.

I'm actually beyond caring who's spying on me at this point. I just assume that this info can be shared with the highest bidder including non western nation states. There must be so much of this info by now! I have no idea how they store it all. Well... maybe a bit. At least some of it goes through the filters at the NSA data farms in Utah among many others. Maybe they're making clones of us or some sheet. Maybe they'll round us up for stepping over some line online. That would be a huge waste of time and resources but maybe that's where the fear thing does its job and keeps most people behaving.

I'm sure X will implode at some point after Elon has had his fun and he's carted off taking dreams of the everything app with him.

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Bill Quick's avatar

I've assumed for forty years that there is no privacy in America or any other first world nation with robust data processing capabilities.

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Tsubion's avatar

Your assumptions are most likely spot on!

I just saw something about a EU law to prevent biometric tracking of facial emotions and whatnot. Not sure how any of this can be applied since the cat is out of the bag and most youngish people don't seem to mind at all.

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Bill Quick's avatar

I think they are like me - they assume everything they do or say is, or can be, observed. It's just the water we fish swim in.

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Aria Veritas's avatar

My dad was the scary one growing up. When I overcame the fear of death/fear of my dad (super-strict) I told him about Machiavelli's 'Prince' and he thought it sounded brilliant. The father should be approached with intellect, because that is what he is supposed to represent, even in theological circles (which generally bore me).

So from this one could say the intellect is responsible for the fear of death in that it 'doesn't know', but in understanding death (Eastern doctrines make sense of this) the lesser fears fall by the wayside too.

To bring TikTok in to it, the fear of Chicom seems like smoke and mirrors, but 'TikTok' clearly refers to time, and suggests time is running out.

I propose time'll be 'run out' by 2030-2033, and the cloak&daggers are bog-standard theatre to distract folks. Maybe there'll be a war, but it could also refer to the war in ones head ("meta" the word itself can be interpreted this way) and the shadow of fear in every soul that needs to be resolved.

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Tsubion's avatar

We may not even need a war at this point... more of a whimper than a bang as the old world goes through its inevitable demise (according to the laws of physics) and something else rises up in its place.

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Bill Quick's avatar

I'd question whether Eastern doctrines "understand death" any better than any other intellectual or ideological framework. As far as I know, they haven't produced any believable dead people to report on the phenomenon either.

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Aria Veritas's avatar

Lol... They still contain the ancient wisdom of the world, even though their cultures have corrupted beyond recognition too. The question in recognising their veracity would probably be 'Who does the telling?' because if it's some schlomo online it'll probably come across as faffy nonsense.

If one goes via serious metaphysics laid out by René Guénon in books like 'Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta' the nature of death is described so seriously, esoterically and meticulously that it's hard to disbelieve. But this still isn't enough. One must have the experience and *then* turn to those doctrines because one realises that they are quite literally describing that experience. (This is how I realised they were true.) (Plus Eastern metaphysics corresponds to the electrical nature of the universe as laid out by the Thunderbolts Project guys. This is partly what I write about.)

And then, once that is clear, so become the doctrines as a valid truth source. It's not for everyone, atheists will scoff and christians will baulk, that's fine.

It's a mean trick of the modern world that 'God' had to be killed back in Nietzsche's time, but it's really just the end of a vast cycle and the beginning of a new one.

Pretty sure that TikTok meme (one of many, like Elon Musk or Climate Change etc.) is simply a means to keep everyone (who orchestrates all the theatre) on the same page.

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Steven Furlong's avatar

Western culture also "contain[s] the ancient wisdom of the world", in our case the cultures of the Fertile Crescent. At a guess, as much as the Eastern cultures do. It's just that it's familiar to us, so it doesn't seem interesting or revelatory to us.

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Aria Veritas's avatar

Agree 100%, the huge problem being ours was *only ever esoteric* (or 'mystic') whereas theirs (Islam and the Tao for example) had their EXOteric doctrines for the regular man to follow.

The west had general competition in place of a daily ritual, because we were charged (as creators) with building the modern world.

For everyone else in the west our bible appears to be a significant text of faith to some people, but also a jumbled pigsty of madness with talking snakes and every animal on the planet, both sexes on a boat for 40 days and nights. Scientifically this is preposterous, so we abandon it in droves.

It's not literal and can only be made sense of esoterically like Confucianism's Tao and Islam's Sufism.

But yes, they all come from the same original source. I recently traced it back to Mesopotamia (as so many have done before me) but it goes back to India.

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Tsubion's avatar

I guess we all find out in the end... or not... if our brain just switches off and that's that.

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Aria Veritas's avatar

It depends on the level of consciousness. We accrue consciousness in the physical body. Memories are forgotten at death (mythically drinking from "The River of Lethe") but our level of consciousness remains and accrues. Folks happy to sit on the sofa their whole lives don't accrue experience. Those who live a fuller life collect experience, thus consciousness.

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Bill Quick's avatar

Well, try to remember to report back, okay? Inquiring minds want to know. ;^)

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Tsubion's avatar

I'll send a TikTok when I get there.

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Bill Quick's avatar

Be sure to do a little TikTok dance step or two!

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Tsubion's avatar

Fine... but no twerking. I have to draw a line somewhere.

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Jorg's avatar

Houdini was supposed to try. I don't think he succeeded.

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