Michael McMahon

I might be able to look at a tarantula or an anaconda from a large distance away but somehow I don’t think any amount of desensitisation from small creatures would prepare me for touching tarantulas or anacondas. Perhaps tarantulas have so little awareness that they aggravate anyone’s belief in oblivion after death. Unfortunately people don’t take orders of magnitude in the natural environment seriously where oblivion is potentially endless. Hence a tarantula might be a deterrent to ever contemplating more than a temporary period of oblivion after your death. Likewise who knows if an anaconda has such a repetitive perception that they’ll disturb anyone who believes in a literal eternal afterlife rather than just a long one. The harsh reality is that humans are finite creatures where we can’t visualise time from the perspective of God when mountain ranges can take millions of years to form.

Scary Dragonfly You don’t need to go too close to a dragonfly to observe them because they’ll fly very fast around you. Anything named after a fiery dragon is deserving of a phobia! No spider will ever dart as fast as a dragonfly. You can gradually build up resistance against your fearful insects by simply spending more time admiring the insects you’re not too afraid of.

I often have glasses of juice but only recently did I drink a 1 litre carton of juice in one sitting. It’s possible to drink too much sugary juice when the real fruit is meant to be healthier. Nonetheless juice isn’t as bad as chocolate where some people need to make their own decisions. For example I decided to cut down on cream in hot chocolates and desserts by simply drinking a 1 litre carton of milk more often over a few minutes. After all French people can spend hours to ingest a difficult dinner!

Birdphobia Birds have such an alien psyche that they can desensitise you to insects. After all they eat worms and they aren’t one bit afraid of them! Ornithophobia is the technical version of birdphobia! Likewise if you personified frogs then you’d have no fear of their spider prey! As such a lot of arachnophobes might inadvertently have a little fear of frogs without them realising it!

Spider Slap There’s a saying of how a sore thumb will feel less painful if you stab your ankle. Likewise flying bats can detract from your fear of spiders! There were rocks underneath and the water was merely shallow so I hope the spider didn’t fall to its doom!

Moth-phobia Lepidopterophobia for the precise name!

A speculative disproof of suicide or mental illness being evil is that physical disability is itself not absolute due to the mind-body problem. For example many prehistoric and ancient societies had superlative physiques with a low report of congenital disability. The early founders of Christianity were also absolute in how transcendent they were in their religion. By contrast many modern societies aren’t committed to total evil nor to Christianity. As such many people might have unstable metaphysical systems when they’re not able to be their own Jesus or create a new religion. So who knows if their unconscious mind could collapse by ignoring physical systems like walking. Yet this would be a totally involuntary system where disabled people would have physical side-effects of a failed unconscious mind. Moreover many children are unable to have the mental focus to deal with a mental illness where the body could simply pre-empt mental stress by paralysing the body and hyper-focusing on all remaining systems. Moreover many societies may have inherited collective evil from past generations where an individual’s mindset might have accidentally been hysterical due to a collective psyche. As such collective evil could overwhelm a person’s unconscious mind unbeknownst to them and result in physical impairment. Religions claim God created the world and God created physically disabled babies. Yet a deistic God isn’t fully physical nor fully mental where a collective spirit might have resulted in congenital disability. For example genetics might seem so chaotic as to easily result in disability but the opposite interpretation is also possible. So for genetics to succeed so well in creating the irreducibly complex brain and heart that’d it’d appear unlikely for genetics to fail for superficial systems like musculature. A dilemma with stigmatising mental illness with sexual immorality is the same could be said for elderly impairments that were dormant from young adult and middle-aged romances. Truth be told mentally ill people are by definition extreme in their personalities where they might bear no relation to each other. An analogy is where ancient shamans were so different in their mythologies that they all could have passed as rival schizophrenics. The Beach 2000 Scene Daffy Explains The Beach

I’ve just moments ago picked up a thin, small spider in the bathroom with a tissue and through it out the window. I’d to grab all around the spider and tried to be gentle so as not to squish the belly or break a leg. This is an indirect way to become accustomed to their strange appearance. Wearing gloves might be an alternative option for catching bigger spiders.

A fresher raspberry jam!

Beetlephobia (Skathariphobia) - Gun Control Michael Passive-aggression can be a way to tolerate insects without killing or injuring them. Staring at insects from up very close is good way to reduce panic. Light is non-tactile after all! You can just about see a grey spider on the mid-right:

Arachnophobia 2 YouTube

Touching a spider’s web is an indirect way to reduce your fear of spiders:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ERxDQfGzjfw&pp=ygUKdHJhbnNhYmxlZA%3D%3D I've changed my mind - Paul Joseph Watson - Transableism/skin care add Fasting helps us relate to poor people while barefoot pilgrimages help us empathise with elderly people. Simulating disability with blindfolds or ear muffs for a day or so could theoretically make us more charitable to the despair felt by disabled people. Who knows if handcuffs and leg cuffs could even be used to remind us of those in harsh jails! Yet deliberately disabling ourselves as a form of self-harm rather than as a failed suicide attempt can be subjective. The dilemma is that both good and evil people can be disabled in the same way that both good and evil people can be soldiers. As such disability in and of itself isn’t fully redemptive. Similarly suicide victims can lead both good and bad lives before their suicide where suicide shouldn’t define their entire ethics.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yW-mD7m2PA0 “Arachnophobia” - Gun Control Michael (YouTube channel) Aggressively flicking the spider with the tactile end of your finger can help desensitise you to these creatures. Using your inert nail to do so is cheating! Poking them is the next level up!

Perhaps a dilemma with the scientific worldview is that we momentarily objectify a person. For example I know that someone has a mind but that I’ve to quickly interpret them as a physical brain before appreciating their unique perception of time. The dilemma is that this strategy might be too idealistic where the reflexes might be slowed. The brain is simply too complex and mysterious. We’ve to view them as a mind first and a brain second. A short-cut to do this is to imagine a person as purely temporal as if they had no brain. This is exemplified in cartoons where the characters have a literal air-head! Toy Story | The Toy's Meet Buzz Lightyear

The Passion of the Christ 2004 - Snake We kill flies effortlessly but perhaps we’re scared of spiders and snakes because we’re reluctant to kill them ourselves. So maybe we respect them so much that we’re actually afraid of them! Maybe a violent way to think of creepy creatures is that you’re able to kill them but it’s bad for the environment if you do so. Spiders and snakes evolved millions of years before humans. So maybe a panpsychist way to view these creatures is that their exotic perception of light is so megalomaniacal as to be evil because they ground the lowest threshold possible for awareness of the physical world. Killing a snake is like killing 4 rats seeing as they are what they eat! Likewise holding a spider would be like holding 10 of their prey flies. It’s like those soldiers who relieve the guilt of killing by claiming they statistically saved 2 of the enemy’s would-be victims!

People you know who don’t say hello aren’t very grateful but they’re still a reminder to be humble when so many people are strangers. As such humility isn’t totally irreconcilable with pride if you were hyper-focused on mannerisms rather than mindset or vice versa. That is to say the dualistic mind can blur the lines whenever you assess the confidence of another person.

A dilemma with humility is that poor people cannot compete against rich people unless poor people are proud. Capitalism limits how humble we can be when we’re not guaranteed a job. Maybe humility isn’t fully knowable in the physical world and is more of a metaphysical virtue. Perhaps the way we interpret others as equal in a humble way is relative to our goals in life. The only way for humility to outcompete pride in the workplace is if humble people were militant which isn’t feasible in most settings. Maybe humility as an objective virtue could only be assessed in an afterlife. A downside of humility is that it’s very easy for a criminal to portray themselves as relaxed to those who don’t know the criminal’s background. That’s why traits of apathy don’t always correspond to humility even if we’re still meant to be reserved. Focusing on humility in isolation might mean that upward mobility in society could be reduced. Humility might one of those virtues where if everyone were humble then it’d be easy for anyone to be humble. Rich people aren’t always proud in their disposition but are capable of being passively proud of their background. This is why any public students who don’t study very hard aren’t always the most humble if others had to compete for a career against privately educated students. The irony of European mixed economies is that rich people are often secluded from poor people even if everyone is tolerant. A lot of poor people actually don’t even know of any rich people in their lives. This is why Christianity can trump capitalism for ethics when helping people still means you often have to be personal towards them.

A spider can symbolise the limitations of someone's metaphysical viewpoint. Spiders display an evil persona. A materialist could not deal with a spider without a vast perception of the natural environment in the background. That is to say even the biggest spider is very small compared to rocks and so forth. Likewise a theist might have to view a spider as belonging to the physical world and not the creation of a human God. The various levels of transcendence in a person's spirituality might relate to some people finding certain creatures creepier than others. So the illusion of evil in snakes might be of a different kind than spiders. Even if we attribute a trace level of sensory awareness to such creatures from a distance we can still objectify such creatures if they're too close as a lesser evil. It might be too complicated to weigh up their minimal sentience if we're ambushed by them where amoral creatures don't deserve our spiritual respect!

Maybe we underestimate how quickly a country can spiritually recover from warfare. A country like Ireland has a depressing history of colonisation through no fault of our own. Despite the economic booms Ireland's pre-independence culture seems a bit unrelatable. Likewise who knows how cohesive Europe would be in an alternate universe if we avoided both world wars. So maybe mental illness might be higher than natural if we contrasted our countries to the serenity of Asia. Asians have had longer periods of peace-time than the west even if it could be circular with a higher emphasis on meditation in Asia. "Japan, 1600–1800 A.D.: The Edo period, also known as the Tokugawa period, is a time of relative peace and stability, following centuries of warfare and disruption." https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/09/eaj.html

I've to wear a belt when I go walking at night in shorts and t-shirts because my fingers become too numb to rebutton my trousers!

Overweight people have more natural insulation and are thus better at withstanding the cold than thin people only if overweight people tried to withstand the cold. Thin people can overcome the cold by hyperfocusing on body tone. Blood is very warm and so the more blood you have the more you can pump it to your extremities when cold. The dilemma for overweight people is that they're technically fitter at pumping a larger volume of blood around their body only if they practiced a lot.

Unlike training schedules climactic stress can occur throughout the day for a lifetime. As such slight differences between climates can make a big difference in physicality over many years. Maybe obese people would benefit from visiting hotter climates on holiday. For example a trip to north Africa would help your breathing focus more than a trip to north France.

Scandanavian countries tend not to be obese because no amount of clothing can escape the chill of the snow. Mountainous regions in Europe can passively benefit in stamina from the thinner air even if they're not on a par with Kenyan distance runners. As such obesity is epidemic only in temperate climates and low landscapes like Britain and a lot of North America.

If the air is less dense then there'll be less oxygen at ground level even if the ratio of chemicals in the air remains the same. Those in colder climates can breathe in such perfect air that there's a risk of complacency.