MMX2010

Your attitude isn't becoming a philosopher. First, I pointed out that you haven't studied the changing definitions of rape from 1900 to 2015. Second, rather than addressing my point, (because, by addressing it, you might have to admit that my argument is correct), you passive-aggressively stated that "MMX2010 has to get technical about the definition of rape." Jer, the truth is that the entire American legal system, as well as every other modern legal system, is already "TECHNICAL about the definition of rape." Different jurisdictions within the same country have different definitions of rape, and identical jurisdictions within different time periods also have different definitions of rape. And every definition is so technical that you're advised to get a lawyer - also known as, "someone who specializes in these technical definitions of rape" whenever you're particpating in a rape trial as either plaintiff or defendant. It's not-at-all important whether I empathize with him. It's much more important that you sloppily used the word rape without studying it's important definitions. Doing so shows no empathy towards me, which means I owe you no empathy by either answering your questions, listening to your non-arguments, or questioning my actions according to your logic. If anything, the extremely crude heuristic, "If Jer disapproves of it, I should probably do it." is an excellent opening rule.

There's a tremendous difference between Not Caring and Seeking Vengeance Because You Don't Care. Justified Vengeance requires rational expectations to be unmet, but Rollo argues that your expectations are irrational in these two articles. Both articles should be read completely, but I will give summary quotes for both articles. http://therationalmale.com/2013/11/13/empathy/ -------------------------- http://therationalmale.com/2011/10/03/war-brides/

I agree with you, but you just unwittingly supported my argument. Someone made a similar argument to me, and my reply was, "They are free to seek whatever emotional connections they want, but they can't legitimately call themselves Philosophers or People-Interested-In-Philosophy while doing so. They can call themselves Emotional-Connection-Seekers or Empathy-Above-All-Else-Seekers, but not philosophers." It's unfair of me to illustrate what happens when they eschewed philosophy in favor of emotional connection, because they're not here to defend themselves. But I can pick apart what Jer said, and assert that my experiences with the FDR NYC Meet-Up group were worse. ------------------------ Jer says, "MMX, in this thread linked you nonchalantly admit to what sounds like rape and didn't respond to my question. From that experience, I wouldn't want to go to a meetup with you." If I were feeling generous with Jer, I'd make the following arguments: (1) There's no such thing as "sounds like rape". Instead, there is only "You committed rape." or "You didn't commit rape." So Jer's comment is passive-aggressive in the worst way. (2) He immediately jumps to "I wouldn't want to attend a meet-up with you." which is both an aggressive way to exclude me from the meet-up and (more importantly) a way of shutting his brain off against all of my future arguments, true-arguments and false-arguments alike. For example, I could ask him, "Which definition of rape are you using?", "Are you familiar with the changing definitions of rape from 1900 to the present?", and "Do you know which political groups most benefit from the changes in rape definitions over the past 115 years?" But I suspect he's not interested in exploring the topic, because, "I don't want to engage with you." If I were feeling not-at-all generous with Jer, I'd smirk and ask, "Jer, are you a feminist?" and wait for him to tell me how horrible feminism is and how stupid I am for assuming that he is one. To which I'd reply, "Well, if you're not a feminist, then why do you think like one?" - and leave it at that. --------------------------------------- I would like to clarify my language for my original question, without necessarily softening my stance. (If anything, the responses in this thread have strengthened my stance, even as I admit that the language in my original argument was imprecise.) Instead of, "Is FDR Wrong About Therapy And Empathy?", the question should read, "Is FDR Oblivious to the Downsides of Both Therapy and RTR?" And my argument is (1) Yes, about therapy because no one acknowledges that it's quite easy for any client to manipulate his/her therapist by simply not talking about specific problems in his/her life. (I've an example from the FDR NYC Group but, like I said, it's not fair of me to illustrate it.) A client can talk about every single problem he has except the most important one he faces, and he will make progress - (just not enough, and not where it's important). And he will then point to that progress-in-therapy as an illegitimate reason to exclude you, much as Jer did earlier. (2) Yes, about RTR because no one acknowledges that RTR-language can be used to avoid acknowledging sound philosophical arguments that annoy you, or that you wish weren't sound.

I'm down. What's your Skype handle?

RamZPaul chimed in using his unique style.

First, let me state the major disclaimer that I still haven't listened to the call. I've had a lovely, frightening, beautiful, and perfect weekend. Second, a relevant thought-experiment. Let's pretend you have two boxes, and you have to pick which one is better. You open the first box which contains something smelly, horrible, disgusting, and absolutely worthless. Opening the box makes you instantly think, "If the first box contains this, then the second box must be better!" (Except this isn't necessarily true, because there could be worse things...) Thirdly, I think Matt D's argument is excellent but suffers from the problem in the thought experiment. Matt knows (like I know) how horrible it is for a parent to bow before religion in order to keep the family together. And because that information is so heartfelt, and so painful, we both assume that the opposite choice (to divorce and rescue the children from religion) is better. But we don't really know this. Worse, I think that if our parents divorced, we would only know what that particular experience felt like. And we'd find it so heartfelt and terrible that we'd assume, "If only our parents had stayed together, despite the presence of religion, then it would've been better for me." The best part of my argument is that religion is still garbage. But the worst part of my argument is that each person gets to choose which crappy option (out of two horrifically crappy options) to accept, without the existence of an objective, morality-based counter-argument. Thus, Stefan defeats m.j., WastachMan, MattD, and the other "objectors" (couldn't think of a better word) by the narrowest of margins: 50.1 to 49.9. Excellent arguments on both sides. (Though I might change my mind after I listen to the show.)

Contempt is hatred plus the conviction that the recipient of your hatred is weaker than you in some important ways. You can hate above your social class, equal to your social class, or below your social class. You can hate someone above your intelligence level, equal to your intelligence level, or below your intelligence level. But you can only have contempt when you're convinced the other person is weaker than you in some important way, especially morally.

Indignation - the suffering of the innocent person.

I haven't listened to the call just yet, but I think I can explain the impasse between MMD/Stefan and WastachMan/MJ. Based on my experience with Stefan's other calls, I think he was attempting to do triage for the benefit of one specific child: the son/daughter of the caller. But I think WastachMan/MJ are focusing primarily on children in the abstract, because they're worried about society in the abstract. The major problem, though, is that neither children nor society exist in the abstract, so WastachMan and MJ are starting this debate behind in points.

Do you think the existence of the Norwegian website dramatically increases the amount of cheating in Norway? Or do you think people who want to cheat will cheat whether that website exists or not?

Is it, really? To "cheat" is to try and get way more than you deserve, relative to your conduct and abilities. So if the goal is marriage is to acquire love, respect, and admiration, but a man's (or woman's) conduct merits him only 50% of his desires, then should his spouse remain sexually faithful to him? Or is sexual faithfulness the greatest form of loyalty that one spouse can give to another, and is so precious that only the most hard-working, self-aware, and devoted of spouses deserve it? Like I said earlier, most men want to define "cheating" as only centered on sexual faithfulness, but there are many other ways to be unfaithful. When we define "cheating" solely in this way, we commit fraud.

That's exactly what I was looking for. You added two important factors of empathy: Self-Awareness (knowing that another person's annoyance is not necessarily your annoyance, and (in reverse) knowing that your own annoyance ought not be someone else's annoyance) and Emotional Regulation (not being overwhelmed by your own emotional reactions so that you can both: (A) connect with the real person in front of you, rather your own projections of that person, and (B) more quickly focus on / move towards effective action. My experience is that Real-Time Relationship language, (particularly when you use that language in therapy), can easily be used to reframe a lack of Self-Awareness and, especially, a lack of Emotional Regulation. Personally, this happens very shortly after I present an excellent philosophical argument against something people wish was true, and they respond with, "I'm feeling emotionally disconnected and frustrated right now!" Such language appears to be an honest sharing of heart-felt emotions, but those emotional words hide a tacit expectation that I'll drop my argument in response. And when I don't drop my argument, the other person escalates.

I'm saying that if you truly possessed a non-emotional, non-agenda-driven desire to understand the contract-breaches in marriage, you wouldn't focus only on cheating. You'd focus on the myriad of clauses in the marital vow, any one of which (if broken) constitutes breach-of-marital-contract.

I wouldn't say that compassion and curiosity are the sole constituents of the true self. I think that greed, (good greed), passion, and a nose for (and refusal to shrink away from) controversy and trouble are essential components, too. I've always been curious, even when I was going through my rough childhood. But I've only recently re-acquired my compassion, greed, passion, and nose for trouble. The two biggest obstacles to my re-acquisition were the negative (and false) self-beliefs that I inherited from my childhood and the hyper-focus on empathy and "serving others" that I (perhaps wrongly) see preached on every message board except the Game-learning sites like The Rational Male and Heartiste. My experience is that once a man builds himself up in terms of greed, passion, and desire to find "trouble", he has no time for people who lack these three elements. These are the "higher standards" that Stefan has been talking about for years.

It became about women, when a man - (assuming he's a man, since his name is Paul Carrasafro) - asked a question about facilitating cheating. While it's certainly possible that he's either asexual or homosexual, the far most likely explanation is that he's a heterosexual man worrying about the personal and social implications of facilitating cheating, with the personal implications forming roughly 85% of his concern. No, I'm not. I'm telling you that there are two possible scenarios: (1) She's unhappy because you broke the marriage contract by not living up to your vows, and so she slept with another man. (2) She's unhappy even though you didn't break the marriage contract, and so she slept with another man. In the second case, the woman is a non-virtuous nutcase with insufficient self-awareness and self-control to live up to any marriage contract. But in the first case, the woman and man have both broken the marriage contract and both need to introspect. However, to speak as if ALL cheating falls under the second case is strong evidence that men-in-general refuse to introspect after any woman cheats. Why? Because it's much easier to blame the man who cheated with your wife than it is to introspect, to cast him as the villain so that you get cast into the role of victim/hero. It is much easier for any man to tell himself, "If only that player-asshole hadn't come along, then she would've loved me truly, madly, deeply to this very day!" than to ask, "Was she unhappy in the marriage because I understood neither myself, nor her nature, nor the nature of marriage in general? Did I slack off, because I merely expected her to stick around?"

As always, Rollo Tomassi gets it. http://therationalmale.com/2014/09/23/the-burden-of-performance/ The entire article is worth reading, but this is the opening paragraph. Your entire article reads like it's coming from someone who cannot accept The Burden Of Performance, and so is trying to tamper down women's performance expectations by philosophically arguing that these expectations are too high. Even if your attempts were successful, (which they won't be, because women can always ignore your argument), no woman will appreciate being with a man who tampered down the performance expectations of all women, just so he can be with this woman. Rollo's excellent one-liner: "Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better." is worth noting.

When a woman cheats with another man, how do you know she's the ONLY person who broke the contract? Is the contract (A) comprised of one commandment, "You shall never have sex with other people."? OR (B) comprised of dozens of commandments, any one of which (when broken) is breach-of-contract? Since you know that the (B) - (in literally every single case, involving literally millions of cases in literally every nation that exists) - then why does your question hinge upon pretending that the answer is (A)? (In other words, what benefits do YOU get for framing this discussion in the way you chose? What does focusing on cheating allow you to avoid?)

Not at all. My negative experience of the NYC Meet-Up was that after only three meetings, I was accused of "not living FDR philosophy", and was voted out of attending meetings for mysterious reasons that weren't communicated to me. I didn't expect to get along with everyone there, nor did I expect to like everyone there, but I thought the number one purpose of philosophy was to determine Truth/Falsehood. And I never got the sense that the Truth/Falsehood of anything I said mattered; instead, I got the sense that the Emotional Impact of what I said mattered so much, while the truth mattered not-at-all.

Best of luck; keep us updated.

I had an overall negative experience with the FDR NYC Meet-Up group, and I think it's because FDR is wrong about empathy. Here's a simple task. You don't need to type out your answer, but please mentally answer before you read on. Define empathy. If you gave a simple, concise definition, you're 95% likely to be wrong, because the task is tricky. Except it's not tricky to people familiar with the scientific research on empathy, which I estimate to be 5% of the population. The correct answer is that there are two (or three, depending on which scientist you ask) types of empathy. ---------- This article discusses Two Types: Cognitive Empathy and Emotional Empathy. http://blog.teleosleaders.com/2013/07/19/emotional-empathy-and-cognitive-empathy/ ---------- This article discusses Three Types: Cognitive Empathy, Emotional Empathy, and Compassionate Empathy. http://www.danielgoleman.info/three-kinds-of-empathy-cognitive-emotional-compassionate/ ---------- When you defined empathy, you probably defined Emotional Empathy, which is both "the empathy you learned about when you were a kid" and "the empathy that Stefan talks about the most in his podcasts". But people who assume that only Emotional Empathy and Cognitive Empathy exist cannot listen to, nor accept, people who display great Cognitive Empathy with little Emotional or Compassionate Empathy. The two main reasons most people neglect and dismiss Cognitive Empathy are: (in my opinion)(1) Most fathers are absent, so most children weren't raised by strong, successful fathers. (In general, men, especially successful men, are renowned for intellectually understanding the problem and the solution, a.k.a. Cognitive Empathy, while also caring very little for the emotional displays of softness, politeness, consideration, and compassion, a.k.a. Emotional Empathy and Compassionate Empathy.) And (2) America has long been a Therapy Culture, and that Therapy Culture shuns Cognitive Empathy. (How often did Alice Miller say, "It doesn't matter whether you intellectually understand the problem; you have to emotionally connect with your childhood trauma?") Ironically, therapy can in itself diminish one's Cognitive Empathy, by making you focus on your emotional reaction to an intense situation, rather than the overall philosophical meaning of that intense situation, particularly the overall philosophical meaning felt by others. (And you cannot, simultaneously, focus on your own emotional reactions AND ON other people's philosophical and emotional experiences.) In short, therapy teaches you to focus on your own emotional reactions, (and RTR states that you should, ideally, communicate your emotional reactions), but to constantly focus on your emotional reactions automatically makes you Cognitively disconnected from others. This Cognitive disconnection makes you completely miss the point, but you cleverly convince yourself that Emotional Empathy, (and what you felt about any situation), is the only point in every situation. You don't get it; but you cleverly convince yourself that they don't get it. ----------------------- If I'm right, I think FDR would benefit from two solutions: (1) Re-define empathy properly. By defining empathy in terms of Cognitive, Emotional, and Compassionate, you can move your focus away from your own emotional reactions to things, and towards other people's emotional reactions. (2) Re-define the purpose of therapy as "connecting to your childhood wounds in order to produce effective, actionable change." Ideally, this effective, actionable change should be something that you find ridiculous and/or uncomfortable OR something that all of your friends find so surprising that they say, "That's activity is the absolute last thing I'd ever expect you to do." Or, a simple short-cut question would be, "How do my friends see me in three years?" If their answer is, "Basically the exact same person you are now." - then you're using therapy incorrectly. But if their answer is either, "I don't know, but I'm excited for you." or "I don't know, because I don't understand all of these changes you've been making" - then you're probably using therapy correctly. Thoughts?

Now women can look after their own physical and financial needs, they want the other things a relationship represents - passion and masculine presence. 50 Shades is a depiction of a kind of man that's hard to find - a man ferociously committed to making a statement with his life and passionately connected to the woman he's identified as the catalyst for his inspiration. In real life, women aren't aroused by men who view them as "the catalyst for his inspiration"; they're aroused by men who view her presence or absence as indifferent towards their inspiration.

Tservitive: Any updates?

Personal note: I'm currently changing my personality and communication style by incorporating insights from men like Roosh and Heartiste. I got this post by browsing the Roosh V Forum. Author's note: The author of these words is AnonymousBosch, 50-something, muscular, lives in Australia. ----------------------------- Here's his post. Hope you find it interesting and helpful. 3 am here. Just returned from a late night bang with a lot on my mind. I've no idea if this will end up making sense, but wanted to get it out of my brain before I hit the pit. I've mentioned before a main driving force of female behaviour is the need to subsume their personality and act on pure emotional drives: to 'become' emotion itself. Faced with having to control their behaviour when working towards a goal, their natural instinct will be to think it's 'too hard', and give in. It's the moment of 'giving in' they crave, not mastering control, because it gives them permission to indulge their vices. You know the mantra from women: "It's so hard being good." It's why it's easy to market to them by preying on themes of indulgence, and suggesting they 'deserve it'. It's why their sexual desires are fiercer and more depraved than men. This, not the patriarchy, is the reason for eternal female mediocrity in any field, because there is no-one who will respect a man, and carry his burden for him if he chooses to gives up. Women know they are excused from judgement, and know some stupid man will pick up their slack. If you spend any amount of time around children playing, you'll eventually hear a girl emit a blood-curdling scream that fires up your protective instinct, only to discover they're screaming over nothing. If there's other girls around, the scream is catching, and they'll all scream. They're learning: unrestricted emotion is a thrill to them. Of course, to us, it's a sign of danger, and we come running. They learn further: unrestricted emotion gets us attention. As they move into their early teen years, this takes on a sexualised element, and girls will gather in groups to scream, cry and tear their hair out over boys, usually celebrities and bands. They might convince themselves that they feel some deep emotional connection with some random musician on the other side of the globe who in unaware of their existence, but it is simply permission to indulge in hysterical emotion. The Beatles once said that Beatlemania had nothing to with them: 'They were just using us as an excuse to go mad.' And they should know. In the later teen years, and onwards this transitions into managing real relationships: relationship dramas. They get their thrill from the instability of a relationship - nothing turns a woman off quicker than stability and knowing her man adores her - and are always ready to push it to the brink of destruction to feed their voracious need for emotion drama. This is why you cultivate unstable relationships if you want to create deep obsession from a woman: they'll tell themselves it's the man, but it's just the drama they're in love with. In the wider world, men long to build, and women to destroy, and so it goes in relationships. She gets permission to eat Hagan-Daaz and to become the sole conversational focus of her friends during the 'crisis', and some hardcore make up sex to resolve it. Once again, she learns, drama is good. Female entertainment functions as emotional porn. 'Twilight' is just a fantasy of the hottest boy in the coolest clique in school chosing the reader substitute as his girlfriend. Groups of women quickly return to a feral state in a situation that allows them to indulge emotion: note the recent stories of women acting out watching 'Magic Mike', or glassing a man during '50 Shades Of Grey'. One of my mates is a male stripper, and the scenes I've seen women enacting in a social group at his shows are animalistic at their core. It's never about the triggering excuse, it will always be about permission to become hysteria. That's my basic theory that I use for sexual seduction and to manage relationships. As corny as it sounds out of context, one of my tactics to create quicker intimacy is a suggestion that she doesn't seem to fit with her friends, and that they seem a bit ... straightlaced, whereas she seems more spirited. That was the traditional growth process for women, but what happens with Millennials, when women are too socially-awkward and loathe themselves to such deep degrees that attracting a man for a relationship to provide them with the drama they need is impossible. I wonder if this is part of the reason behind every girl suddenly coming out as a rape survivor. Their self-loathing creates a desire to be viewed as damaged by those around them, and excuses them from their lack of romantic success and emotional connection with a man. It's the same instinct that makes them hack off their hair. "I'm a (strangely-unashamed) rape victim. I am damaged: so it's not weird that I'm alone." But this is what I was thinking tonight and I banged another idiotic 20-something girl, so hyped up her YOLO attitude that she was forward enough to be pulling out my cock in a public park at 2 in the morning, not caring who saw us, wanting to give in and become her raw sexual desire without thought for consequence or public decency, despite her fake porn star attitude and insincere gasping about needing my cock 'sooooo bad' guaranteeing that we will never truly emotionally connect, because I just wonder how she learned to perform: What influence does the internet have on a woman's need for drama? How does it risk fundamentally-changing them? I mentioned long ago that I suspected the cultivation of social media likes from multiple men could provide so much more positive self-affirmation and ego boosting than a relationship with any one man could ever hope provide, and, as such, connected women eventually won't desire them. But tonight, expanding on that thought, what if Millennial women have become damaged even further by connectivity? What if one man can no longer provide their need for emotional drama either? What if women aren't going to be drawn to relationships because there's always a hysterical group of schoolyard girls screaming online, offering her a chance to join in and get a sweet, sweet spike of raw fury? To cry 'literal tears' and to share the outrage with everyone in her circle so everyone cries with her. Where women are screaming for the sake of screaming, of being outraged to be outraged, to become anger and fury and the community of voices making the drama so much more intense and every tiny imagined slight and offense into the goddamn end of the world until they have no emotional setting left but 'nuclear', because they're trained themselves out of realistic levels of emotion, the same way they seem to have no setting anymore between raging slut and outraged prude. Then I noticed just how consistently ugly the screaming women always are, and could only come to the most likely conclusion: Social Justice isn't their cause: it's simply a boyfriend substitute. Man, I'd better get some sleep.

TLP is phenomenal. His blog filled in so many of the empty spaces that FDR currently cannot fill.

Someone posted, "If she cheated with you, then she'll cheat on you." I accept the sentiment behind the argument, but I don't accept the argument itself. The sentiment is designed to protect a man's heart, but the argument is flawed because there are different types of cheating. The worst type of cheating is the "You think everything is great, but she's been cheating on you for years." - but, ironically, a man who is the recipient of a cheating wife/girlfriend learns the excuses she offers. So when those excuses are offered to him, he reacts by immediately suspecting that she's cheating. (As opposed to her husband/boyfriend, who takes those excuses at face value.) Of course, this IS NOT an argument for, "You should cheat with women to learn their excuses." But it is an honest and relevant response to the argument, "If she cheated with you, then she'll cheat on you."