HannahMR

God is the ultimate dictator.

Hierarchy is so baked into our culture that we can’t classify and conceptualize things without it!

Remember back when I was researching ancient civilizations and my clanker wasn’t including my favorite examples and it turned out that if it couldn’t find evidence of a hierarchy then it determined that it wasn’t a civilizations?!?!

Well today I was trying to research hierarchical and non-hierarchical religions and realized that it was doing the same thing. If a religion doesn’t have a ruler style God then it doesn’t count as a religion!

Wow do we have issues!

My twitter feed:

Women having rights is the downfall of society.

“Gay” as a pejorative.

Trans people should be rounded up and put in cages.

“Gay” as a pejorative.

Muslims are inherently violent.

“Gay” as a pejorative.

The only people capable of making reasonable decisions are straight white men.

“Gay” as a pejorative.

--

Friend: Why don’t you like Twitter?

Me: ...why the fuck do you like Twitter?!?! 🤨

Updated version:

Humans do sometimes instinctively form dominance hierarchies. We are primates and primates have hierarchical social structures.

We have many instincts. We also have instincts for murder, and mob rule, and cruelty, and envy, and aggression, on and on.

What should we do with these instincts? Throw our hands in the air, declare that it is what it is and lean into it? What kind of world would that lead to?

We also have instincts for fairness, co-operation, empathy, play, love, etc.

Which instincts you chose to indulge and lean into, and which you choose to manage and minimize is a vote on which direction humanity heads.

It’s important to note the difference between a dominance hierarchy and a decision tree. A dominance hierarchy is about who can control who. It’s about which person has more or less value than another. While a decision tree is about roles and structures and less about people. People can hold different roles in different decision trees.

Dominance hierarchy is animal behavior. What do you want the future of humanity to look like?

Human’s do sometimes instinctively form hierarchies. We are primates and primates have hierarchical social structures.

We have many instincts. We also have instincts for murder, and mob rule, and cruelty, and envy, and aggression, on and on.

What should we do with these instincts? Throw our hands in the air, declare that it is what it is and lean into it? What kind of world would that lead to?

We also have instincts for fairness, co-operation, empathy, play, love, etc.

Which instincts you chose to indulge and lean into, and which you chose to manage and minimize is a vote on which direction humanity heads.

Hierarchy is animal behavior. What do you want the future of humanity to look like?

You know how I know I'm old?

I can't stop listening to Sade.

My ongoing series of selfies where I try to convince my nervous system that airplane bathrooms are glamorous fun places and not hideous death traps.

We don’t have a knowledge issue in our world anymore. We have all the world’s knowledge at our finger tips. So now it’s all perspective and maturity issues.

I told Claude that Star Trek was my favorite Sci-Fi universe and it responded with... "A post-scarcity federation with no money feels like an interesting pick for someone who spends her days on payments infrastructure"

😑 You wouldn't understand Claude, you wouldn't understand!

My Facebook page as been so over run with execution blood lust and rape apologist bots that it's become nearly unusable.

“A person who views the world the same at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.” - Muhammad Ali

When people fail to add nuance to their statements/memes sometimes that is just laziness or ignorance, but more often I think it's intention. They want to make the subtle implications.

Example, when someone makes a meme about Israel and American politicians but says "jews" instead of Netanyahu. Sometimes I want to add that nuance for them, and other times I'm like nah, they meant that.

You could argue that until we evolve into something better than human, that there will always be some percentage of the population that will rape and murder, etc. and so we have to just accept that and adjust accordingly. And to some extent that is true, but also…

Did you ever hear the story of the neuroscientist who discovered that he was a psychopath? Ya he was conducting a study and scanned his own brain in the process and identified that scan as a psychopathic brain. And yet he was not a rapist or a murderer, he was a decent family guy. He had come from a good household where he was loved and taught well and he did not become a monster. The moral of the story being that even if a certain percentage of the population will have brains that allow them to be monsters, the quality of the civilization they are living in will play a huge role in determining if that potential is reached or not.

And second, what we allow in a culture determines what a predator can get away with. There is a meme going around stating that a woman could walk drunk and naked into a party and the only way she would be rapped is if a rapist is also at that party. True, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. Let’s assume that 100 people are at that party and 5 of them are rapists… just blending into the crowd like normal people. When that naked woman comes stumbling into that party those 5 rapists will never make it to her if the other 95 people at that party have decent values. The only way those 5 rapists manage to get her upstairs and alone is if all 95 of the rest just look the other way and let it happen.

So, ya human’s evolve slowly. We will have this issue for a long time. But we could eliminate SO, SO many of these incidences if we just had a better culture. A culture where people were kind to others, and actively looked out for others, a culture where we didn’t accept rape etc. as just a part of life.

Things grow and change slowly, bit by bit, and often at the edges. This applies to all sorts of things, to neighborhoods, to fungus, and to cultural shifts.

I’m obsessed with the egregore or the Jungian collective unconscious. Are you familiar with these concepts? This is essentially the concept of a shared culture, a shared set of values that are so ingrained that they are unconscious and that combines together to nearly have a life of it’s own. It’s an incredibly powerful force.

But these powerful forces do change and evolve. And it changes bit by bit every day it the tiny things that you and I do. The jokes we laugh at, and the ones we scoff at. The subtle assumptions in the phrases we use. The graphic tee that we did or didn’t wear.

As a collective unconscious is just a shared set of beliefs and assumptions about the world, it changes when the people in that community change. When you or I change our minds and behavior the egregore is slightly altered, and a change can build and build and then tip dramatically.

We like to think that we are going to change the world dramatically by creating some new invention, or starting some new business, or electing some new politician, but we really don’t have much control at all on a large scale. And nearly always, the most effective thing we can do to improve the world is just to make sure our little corner of it has a healthy and moral culture.

And back to my theories on exclusion panic...

You know what else releases stress hormones and lights up the same physical pain brain regions? Social exclusion.

Humans are a social species.

Did ya know that “heartache” is actually physically painful and measurable? It’s true.

FMRI studies show that heartache activates many of the same brain regions involved in physical pain.

Heartache also produces measurable stress effects, elevated cortisol, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and higher inflammatory markers.

And of course, the heart is effected. Heartache can flood the body with stress hormones that actually weaken the heart muscle to such an extent that it’s measurable on EKG’s, via blood tests, and can even mimic a heart attack.

And just cuz I think It’s hilarious, I’m showing you a glamorous photo of me while I tell you a very unglamorous story. I’ve had a bit of a cold and yesterday I sneezed so hard I peed myself. Like I had to go change my pants.

Cuz you know life is all about balance. Dancing in a former palace in Portugal and peeing yourself while sitting on your bed scrolling Instagram. ☯️⚖️✌️😝

The internet is overrun with bots, bots designed to trigger fears, cause anger, and sway public opinion.

If you are on here passionately posting away about the latest political hot topic, you have been taken in by this scam.

These bot farms intentionally create division, between men and women, between trans and cis, between Christian and Muslim, on and on.

Don’t get suckered. Do better.

Someone who suffers a traumatic event does not behave ‘rationally’ in the aftermath of that event.

Trauma, although quite tragic, is fascinating. Here is how it works…

Anything that overwhelms your brain is “trauma”. So that’s going to be a bit different for every person and every situation but let’s go with a classic, war.

Memories are stored in different parts of your brain. So the timeline of an event is stored in a different part of your brain than the memory of the physical sensations of that event, etc. In normal functioning these different parts of the brain are communicating with each other just fine and the memory is stored in such a way that it can be recalled with some wholeness.

When a traumatic event occurs, such as running for cover as you are being bombed, this causes such a surge in stress hormones, etc. that it interferes with communication between parts of the brain. The whole memory might be stored in the brain, but unlinked, in fragments.

This is what causes the classic PTSD “flash backs”. The memory of the sounds of the bombs exploding is in your brain but unmoored from the time and place of that event. Because of this, something that sounds similar, such as fire works, can trigger that unmoored memory and associated neural pathways such as the sensation of fear.

First, a traumatic event floods a person with stress hormones which takes a real physical toll, and it often takes time for the body to rebalance itself. Also, because trauma essentially warps how the memory is stored, that memory can get pushed away, or be too scrambled to be fully recalled or understood.

A lot of therapies for managing PTSD focus on ‘reintegrating’ memories. For example this is likely why EMDR therapy works. Wow is EMDR fascinating! But that rant is for another day.

There are many great books on this topic, but I highly recommend Trauma and Recovery by Dr Judith Herman.

A victim of rape does not act ‘rationally’ in the aftermath of rape, because rape is trauma.

A traumatic incident alters your brain and warps how the memory is stored. It takes time to let your body calm down and to properly understand what happened.

Hierarchy is social conformity.

Or more accurately put, the instinct for social acceptance, exclusion panic, etc. these things are the fuel that maintains hierarchy.

The bot farms seem to really be out and about swarming posts about this Cornell 7 case. Why? What do you suppose the bot farmers are up to?

Because it hasn't happened to you does not mean that it doesn't happen.

Why I love dive bars:

I went out the other day to a dive bar in Chicago. I sat at the bar with the friend that I was there with, but it happened that there was another dude sitting a few seats away. He was very friendly. He chimed in on the conversation. He was very likely a bit autistic and told me all about the sports he likes. At some point in the evening he bought me a drink. We debated what to put on the jukebox and sang and danced along to Destiny's Child and N sync.

When it came my time to go I said good night and thanked him for the drink. He said "thanks for your existence" and gave me a hug. And here is the thing, I think he meant that. I don't think he was trying to get laid, or trying to close a business deal, or trying to be in the right place at the right time to climb up some social status hierarchy. I think he was just genuinely happy to have shared a slice of life with another creature.

How often do you encounter a person who tells you "thanks for your existence" and means it??

Economic and tax policy has a dramatic effect on a place and often that’s a hidden effect, but other times it makes for some entertaining visuals such as the unfinished look of La Paz Bolivia or the Mansard roofs of Paris.

In La Paz the municipal property tax is calculated on the property's declared/fiscal value however an unfinished building (exposed brick, no plaster/paint, etc) is considered "under construction" and assessed at a much lower value, so it pays far less tax.

In Paris a law from 1783 capped building heights at 20 meters but measured only up to the cornice line. Everything inside the roof was exempt, so building with a mansard roof gave you extra storeys without breaching the height limit. https://blossom.primal.net/7eea9c69e8d2eaea618508412f5931a25832d6875fd4ca73ccd92e99f9ce5686.webp https://blossom.primal.net/74051f7a75b0a3f1a7d772a22f08e211be731c1041ba568ee22298ce0c5b8c95.jpg

I’ve read a lot of things on Economics, I have a whole degree in Economics! But the below are the ones that I think about the most. Which econ books/writings are your favorites and why?

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell – I love this book for it’s ability to explain topics in such a simple and easy to digest fashion.

The Mystery of Banking by Murray Rothbard – taught me more monetary theory than my whole university degree.

The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek – Far too dense to share with normies, but it does such an amazing job of explaining that prices are how we crowd source info on the needs and wants of a society.

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson – I think about this book nearly everyday. There are so many theories out there as to what makes a country “great” and this book destroyed my ability to take nearly any of them seriously.

“Women don’t need respect” “Women want to be dominated” “Women find it stressful to make their own decisions”

Copium for rapists.

Men are perfectly capable of being both horny and respectful. Rape is not caused by testosterone. Rape is caused by poor moral values.

Rape happens when there is horniness mixed with the concept that it’s appropriate to dominate/denigrate/control others.

If you are someone who has ever asked yourself “if they were assaulted why did they act like everything was fine?”, or “why didn’t they report it sooner/at all?” or “If they were being abused why didn’t they just leave?” If you ponder these things, if you genuinely want the answers, I have them for you!

The answers can be found in two books…

Trauma and Recovery by Dr Judith Herman Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girls

And I’d highly recommend reading them in that order.

I need to warn you, these are tough reads. They contain stories of the worst of humanity, they are graphic.

If you want to understand how the human mind manages trauma, those books are where the knowledge lies.

But you can't teach people to be decent, can you?

If you have to explain to someone why coercing someone into sex is a bad thing to do, then really you just need to stay away from that person.

Consent is very easy to understand when you think about assault/rape like theft.

You have a shiny new iPhone. You are hanging out with friends and one of them asks you to give them your new phone. You decline. This friend then waits for you to get nearly black out drunk and then asks you again and when you are busy rambling on about it they take your iPhone. Theft.

You are alone with a friend in their car. they ask for your iPhone. You say no. They are twice your size. they push you into the corner, doors locked, and ask you for your iPhone another 15 times in a row. You know you aren't leaving that car with your iPhone, you stop struggling and let them take the iPhone so that you can just leave the car. Theft.

Do you get it?

Rape isn't a man vs woman issue, it's a cultural issue. Y'all would be shocked at the number of men I know who have also been assaulted.

This issue comes from our zerosum hierarchical mindset. Rape is never about sex, it is always about power. For as long as we have a desperate need to be "above" overs, rape culture will continue.

I posted the story of me being roofied and a lot of you were really sweet and said lovely things 🫶

But the point I want to make here is that this story isn’t an aberration, this is the norm in our world. If you were at all surprised by my story then I want you to know that I have many more stories and I am one of the lucky ones.

There is the time a gray haired man tried to hire me for “a date” when I was 12 yrs old. The numerous times men followed me down the street or sat across from me on public transit masturbating. The too many to count incidences of groping. That one time a young man followed me into my apartment building and attacked me in the elevator. Etc, etc.

And here is the really terrifying part, my stories are nothing compared to the stories of nearly all the women that I know. At least I was never assaulted by my family members. I’ve never been drugged and trafficked to my partners friends. I was never assaulted by a doctor I was in the care of. I’ve never been trapped in an abusive relationship. I’ve never been beaten by the person who is supposed to love and care for me.

I am one of the lucky ones.

The guys that go around saying that social conformity is a female issue are the same guys that are terrified of painting their nails... cuz what would the other men think of them??

When I was in my early 20’s I went out drinking one night, by myself, a not infrequent occurrence… I was lonely. One evening there was some dude sitting next to me at the bar. We talked for hours. In hind sight I can see that I talked for hours and he humored me. I was lonely, that felt amazing. I wasn’t really that into him but we had a lot of fun and wound up going back to his place to sleep off all the drinks we had. We messed around a bit, but nothing much. We had only just met each other. In the morning he walked me to the train station. There were no issues.

We kept in touch via telephone. One time he called me and invited me to come with him and his friends out to Arizona! I didn’t have money for a vacation. He insisted that he would cover it, the flights were cheap and he already had the room booked. I was very clear with him that I barely knew him and I didn’t know if I wanted to have sex with him. I told him very clearly that I didn’t want that to be the expectation. He said that was just fine, he wanted to get to know me, it would be fun. So I agreed to go. I was lonely.

As soon as I got there and he picked me up I knew it wasn’t going to work out. When I was sober he was just crass and uninteresting. But I was there, it was only the weekend and so I decided to lean in and give it a try. We went skinny dipping in the hotel pool. That was fun. The second night we went out for drinks with his friends. He brought me my second glass of wine. I began to drink it and was in a great mood, was chatting with everyone and went outside to smoke a cigarette with new bar friends.

As I was standing outside smoking I started to feel really weird. Like the alcohol hit me way too hard. I had only just started my second drink. I went back in and told him that I was feeling funny. “It’s probably just the heat. Drink your wine!” was his response. I did drink more of the wine.

Before I even got to the bottom of that glass of wine I started to feel like my body was just shutting down. It’s a terrifying sensation. I told him I felt horrible, he suggested we head back to the hotel.

I remember trying like hell to stay awake in the taxi. I remember trying to walk through the hotel lobby. I don’t remember much else.

I woke up the next morning in the hotel room clothed, but not wearing the same clothes as I was the night before. I genuinely have no idea what happened to me that night. Your guess is as good as mine.

The though of course crossed my mind that he may have drugged and raped me. But I immediately pushed that thought away. It’s such a horrific idea to hold, the idea that someone could really do that to you.

I asked him what happened last night and he said “you weren’t feeling well. It was probably heat stroke. It gets people all the time out here.” I don’t have a problem with heat. I love heat. I live on a tropical island! It was absolutely fucking not heat stroke. But I chose to just believe that story.

My whole life I’d been breathing in the victim blaming culture. The shame of what might have happened was far too intense to look directly at. Of course it would have been all my fault. If that’s what happened then it’s just proof of what a stupid slut I am. Why was I there if I did want him to fuck me? I should have chosen better. Of course it’s on me to always choose right. If he had rapped me that would be evidence of what poor choices I make. Evidence of how stupid and worthless I am.

I chose to believe that nothing happened. I took a shower and tried not to vomit. I told no one. My period was a month late. I spent that month living with a cloud of shame hovering over me.

It’s not a story I like to think about. I can think of him now only as a grotesque monster. Indeed he wasn’t a good looking dude at all, but it wasn't his face that made him monstrous.

I can’t even remember his name. I don’t want to remember.

But these experiences get trapped in our bodies. When we swallow them down they fester and poison us.

We need to speak about these things. We need to tell the story as it was. We need shame to change sides.

I don’t know exactly what happened to me that night, but I do know that I was drugged and that the person who drugged me is the person who owns the shame of that evening.

I have 6 pack abs, mostly. I also have 42” hips, a regular period, and perfectly normal hormone levels.

Different bodies look different and having muscle and being fit is very healthy for a female body.

...I can also do a whole bunch of pushups! 💪

A lot more men than you'd think and nearly all women have been sexually assaulted.

Our culture is pretty fucked up that way. We really need to fix it.

I saw a post asking how the Cornell 7 story might have played out differently if the 7 had been black men. And well that's an uncomfortable thought experiment.

Be careful trying to talk someone out of a religious belief.

It’s pretty cruel to try to take away from someone what makes life bearable for them.

I do however try to talk people into having more humane religious beliefs.

"Promising young men" don't rape people.

Suppressed anger is my poison.

Appropriately placed anger is my guardian.

Sometimes I genuinely am socially clueless and completely miss the context.

Sometimes I play dumb and ask people clarifying questions just to put them on the spot when they've said something gross.

A friend told me that "anger is wasteful" and I went to respond and accidentally wrote a three page Ode to Anger.

TLDR: Anger is your guardian. It pops up when something is wrong and motivates action. It's the misplacement of anger that causes all the problems. Do the opposite of what you were taught, be more angry more often! When anger pops up, if you listen well, and act thoughtfully, your anger fueled actions will be in the service of correcting wrongs.

You can teach economics, you can teach science, you can teach technology.

...you can not teach decency. That is always a personal choice.

People certainly do consent to and enjoy group sex. Totally a thing that happens.

The Cornell 7 text messages are absolutely not how people discuss consensual sex that respects all participants. Those texts are truly disgusting.

Are they proof of rape? Not by themselves, no. But they are certainly evidence of something gone terribly wrong.

If you think those messages are just fine, you are caught in rape culture and you need to stay far, far away from me.

Just to clarify here, having sex with someone who is passed out is called rape.

I posted about exclusion panic yesterday and a few people tried to tell me that it only applies to women. I think that is dangerously wrong, and ironic. Our current cultural concept of being a “real man” is one of the best examples of the effectiveness of exclusion panic.

We train boys from a young age to act invincible… show no weakness! This is a horrific thing to do to them. It makes them blind to themselves, cuts them off from community, cripples their humanity. But very often they absorb it, accept it. Why? Because if they don’t they will be excluded, ridiculed. They kill off parts of themselves because the exclusion panic is too great. Too effective.

The concept of the "manly man" is dependent on exclusion panic to survive and perpetuate.

Here is what is monumentally stupid about gender wars: We are interdependent, anything that is bad for half of humanity is bad for all of humanity.

Let’s say that we find some flaw in humanity that only applies to men or women. Well, if it’s a problem for half of humanity, it’s a problem for all of humanity. The only reasonable response is to help improve the situation for the betterment of all of us.

Should we find a flaw in one half of humanity and we try to use that to belittle, degrade, or diminish half of humanity, we are harming humanity as a whole.

Do ya see that?

The Cornell 7 text messages, no one disputes that those are real. They went out to 57 frat members. Not one of them objected to the situation, intervened, or called the cops. Not one.

That is rape culture.

This is so, so simple y'all.

Men need women. Women need men. Anything that is bad for half of humanity is bad for all of humanity.

The end.

Gender wars are an utter fucking waste of time. An obvious rage bait divide and conquer. Please stop falling for it.

Very unpopular opinion: “good girl” is one of the most disgusting things a man can say to a woman in bed.

Of course I’ll explain.

First, it has domineering vibes. I guess it makes sense that we would carry our cultural hierarchical zerosum mindset into the bedroom with us. But it just creeps me out that people don’t know how to get off without having to be either submissive or domineering. It’s a bit rapey.

Second, bro, why do you want to be in bed with a “girl”? Serious pedo vibes. Gross.

Third, the phrase implies that the woman is there to please the man. Patriarchy hangover. The implication is that I don’t have desires and that I’m just there to please him. If that’s what he’s thinking, then go fuck yourself, literally, and goodbye.