Wesley

I was talking about the statement "I understand that 2+2=4 and I do not love 2, 2, 4, or 2+2=4" Your definition must exclude abstract concepts to which love is not possible in order to even be considered for further examination. I understand many things in my mind, and love very few.

I would like to very much point out that you are still ignoring that my understanding of abstract concepts does not lead me to love them. That in itself would require a definition refinement before we work on the theoretical cases that take a lot of work.

If I were getting this message, I might have a small amount of curiosity, but there would be no place for me to enter the conversation. Lets say someone is interested in philosophy on their profile. How you responded it would sound something like: "Hi, my name is Ivan and I like that your profile says philosophy on it. I wold like to get to know you better." What I see is a very depersonalized statement of "about your profile" rather than "about you". Also, I would highly suggest asking a question as it shows you are really interested in them and then you don't need to say it. I would say something closer to: "Hey, I was just reading your profile and noticed you are interested in philosophy. I am a fan of philosophy and really enjoy exploring these kinds of ideas with people. What concepts or people in philosophy are of interest to you?" To me, this says "I am interested in you, not your profile. Here is a little bit about me so that you don't feel like the only one who is sharing information, plus sharing this bit with me will probably be enjoyable because I enjoy it when I talk with others. Then, here is a question of curiosity about one of your interests which makes it very easy to enter the conversation and shows my genuine interest in you as a person." When I did online dating, it was not relegated to vague and shallow concepts. Sure, it would be somewhat at first only because you don't want to rip your heart out to complete strangers and a certain kind of mutual assurance that the other is not a creeper is needed, but it doesn't need to stay that way. I am seeing that your messages seemed to be vague and lacking the curiosity needed for the deeper connection, which may have contributed to some of the feelings of shallowness and vagueness when trying to date online. In general, questions and genuine curiosity are a great way to get people to talk about themselves and to start the venture toward connection and depth.

I said that I could in a theoretical sense if I were to spend enough time studying the subject and reading up on it. You also seemed to have passed by the much easier things of my parents, and simple math and science in order to intentionally go toward the one that might be harder to justify outside of theoretical musing. I would prefer some of those to be addressed in light of your definition.

I think I could fully understand that 2+2=4 or that red is a certain wavelength of light reflecting off of a surface and I don't think I would love these things. I also think I could understand my abusive parents or why Hitler did what he did or the blood-lust of politician and still not love them.

Stalking, addiction, Stockholm Syndrome, vice, illusion, hallucination, delusion, sadism, etc I am not necessarily saying all of these are bad, just providing potential examples. I would think a "negative" attachment would be anything that would be attachment to abuse, abusers, self-abuse, or mental fantasy. Some of the words for those were what I listed above.

If it is difficult for her to accept, then that is for her to deal with. She does not need to keep contacting you to offload her anxieties about someone being angry with her.

My thought is that the "more drama" would be letting this continue at this rate with the fear of her being in contact with you or show up where you live or something. Ending the drama would be coming up with a way that she won't be able to every contact you again. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong. I am very sorry that you have to go through this. It is not something that anyone should have to face.

@Ivan, how did these correspondences go with the women you were interested in? I know that online dating can be very difficult for virtuous women as they get messaged constantly with weird things and propositions for sex and other things and it can be very difficult to sort through the mess for the reasonable people. If I can take a look at a sample of what the initial contact may have read like, then it might be able to be improved in some way to increase your odds for future dating. Bonus: Also, in my dating both online and in person (plus texting in between) even before I was philosophical I worked hard in order to try to get people to talk about themselves in a deeper way and probably wouldn't have dated if it was limited to small talk. Thus, I invented a game called The Question Game and offer to play it with people who I want to get to know better, mainly in a dating capacity, but it could also be used for friends or even in groups. The rules are: 1. Any question can be asked and the other person "has to" answer it (Obviously they can not answer if they want to and occasionally you may stumble on something that was much more intense than you thought and you can just ask something else and come back to it. The idea is to make it fun and getting to know each other and not get too heavy too fast or too much.) 2. Any question you ask, you also have to answer (This makes it so people don't ask things that they are not also comfortable talking about themselves and prevents one person from coming up with all the questions and the others just going "Ok, so now thats my question to you" which is quite boring) 2a. Small modifications may be made to questions, mainly for gender differences (for instance if I ask how many boyfriends she has had, then the question I would answer would be girlfriends, as I haven't dated many guys...) 3. Questions alternate The game starts out simple with favorite colors and favorite foods, and will slowly evolve from there. The fact that both people need to answer the question eases some of the concerns about revealing too much and it keeps people from asking anything that people are not ready to talk about yet themselves. It can be quite a fun game to play and lead to some great conversations and questions. (Obviously a question or answer might spark additional conversation). Listening to the questions and listening to the answers can be a great way to get to know someone very quickly. It might be something fun to offer to try if you are interested in dating someone and has worked for me when I have wanted to play it. If anyone ends up using it, I would be interested to hear the results.

I am not sure of the specifics of laws in your area or whether it can be done. However, you may be able to tell your parents that they must stop contacting you and that if they continue to contact you, you will pursue legal action of a restraining order for harassment and prior abuse. If it escalates to that level, she will be far more guaranteed to never hear from you again than if she just stops and waits for you to contact her, if and when you desire to. At least that would be my strategy.

"Twisted" and "sinister" for me not understanding what you said and then asking for clarification based on it is quite strong language for something so trivial. Unless you are making threats against me or others, I am not sure how anything you say on a board could possibly be qualified as sinister.

**Starts searching the board for instances of "sausage fest", very concerned for what he may find....**

I don't think there is an obligation to tell someone why you don't want to see them anymore.

How is clicking a downvote button that signals that I am expressing a preference against something at all similar to beating someone up, false accusations, tragedy or injustice? It is just my expression of preference. Also, the board does have a polling feature, up to 3 questions. I would be happy to set it up if someone can post what questions/options they want the poll to contain.

ummm..... what do y- OHHH, now I get it!

Most of my life was spent with abusive people. When I came to realize this, I began to distance myself from everyone because I did not trust myself to know who was good to let into my life and who was not. I needed to work on myself and my past and my motivations with a therapist before I felt comfortable connecting with people again. Even if they were the most virtuous person I had ever met, I didn't know if they were actually good people or if I was blind to a cycle repetition from my past and would end up hurt again. I may have just thought they were virtuous. After some time, I became better at noticing myself and other people's actions and a more active analyzer through live-action or through journaling afterwards and I felt that I could open up and meet people again and know how much I can interact with people. I think that this is a healthy and necessary process. We develop a shield against abuse. Whether you fought in the face of it, ran away from the danger, or froze into zombie-like complacency, this shield helped save you from even worse abuse than you would have gotten. This shield saved your life. Once we begin self-knowledge we realize we have our shield constantly up as we needed protection from almost everyone. This is natural and the reason you made it through your life to this point. That shield has protected you. However, we strive for more. To not live in fear of the people around us and to not constantly need a shield. We first need to heal our bodies and minds and learn to know who the enemies are and where to find friends. Only then can we lower the shield and live safely among friends.

So I read the preface and I have decided this book is silly. It says there is evidence, but it is not provided through link or source or otherwise. After all, evidence need not be provided. Then it plays the persecution for beliefs card as they are not respected because they do not provide hard and consistent evidence and ignore contradictory evidence. Of course, this is because they are die-hard scientists out to get these theoreticians. Then the book proclaims that the best way to indoctrinate is through steady repetition and so facts and evidence are non-existent in the book, but they will repeat non-sense that is unproven over and over so that you will be programmed to repeat it to others. I think that there are better uses of my time to say the least. Logic can't even be pretended to be put forward in the preface then the book is not even worth the effort to read it.

Is the answer given to stop going to war and thus stop having veterans? I would think not.

No thanks, I think I am done.

Thinking that doing evil has something to do with understanding empathy is where the logic breaks down and could only come from the victim of parents who committed terrible evil on their children while claiming to love them. It is a complete projection of personal feelings about one's parents and has nothing to do with a logical argument. It only has to do with justifying abuse by claiming it is a lesser evil than some arbitrary unnamed terrible evil out there. What is true is that evil creates evil. That is the only way it works. There is no amazing level of goodness and empathy and peace and voluntarism that you can show someone where is somehow becomes more evil than something that is actually evil. The fact that you think this is a remotely sensible argument is very telling.

I would like to highlight a few of the numerous occasions where the OP admitted spanking as evil and violent force and advocated it anyway, and then ask you to reassess your post.

To some extent, statists are not debated and to some extent they are. Several years ago, Stefan came out with the "against me argument" with the intentional goal of bringing statism out of abstraction. People advocate the welfare state (for example) because they do not see the resulting violence that that belief holds, so the point is that you point it out to them. Once they are faced with the truth of supporting violence and they come down on the side of "yes I do think you should be thrown in jail for disagreeing with me" then they are no longer debated with because they have said that any disagreement will be solved by the use of force. There is no abstraction for "I think hitting kids is good". It is an obvious and blatantly supporting the use of force. Once someone realizes that there is force involved and advocates that force is the solution to problems or disagreement, then they should not be debated for no meaningful debate can occur. With some of the ideas in a messed up world, however, it takes a few layers of abstraction to fight through before someone will actually be faced with the implications of their beliefs. This is the amount of leeway I afford someone the opportunity to change.

abuse - To initiate violence against or treat with cruelty, especially regularly or repeatedly

/me waves hello (Even though we already met in chat )

This did not answer what I was asking, I would appreciate an answer so I can find a credible source for this theory. Regardless, this is an easy thing to test. I will set an alarm on my calendar for "a few weeks" which will be April 9th. The world's population is 7 billion people. In order for "billions" to die, that would be at least 2 billion. Thus, we will see if on April 9th the world population is less than 5 billion people, and the cause was this specific disease. If that happens, then you were right and your fears would be justified. If it does not happen, then I would be curious as to why you were making these posts and having these fears. It would be something very important to look at yourself and the thoughts that triggered these feelings.