dsayers

No, that's not a grammatical error While wrestling with trying to integrate post-self-knowledge me into healthy, personal relationships, I've found that it's been helpful to think and speak in terms of old me and new me. To acknowledge the dysfunction in my past to help qualify concerns I might experience in the present about ways I could behave dysfunctionally. Earlier tonight though, it occurred to me that there is one way in which this approach is not only NOT helpful, but in fact damaging. Namely that there was no old me. Prior to self-knowledge, that wasn't me at all. That was the echo of my parents, and every other abuser they had exposed me to. I was born when I began to confront my abusers in my mind, call their words and behaviors by their proper names, sort through the way this misinformation skewed my thoughts and behaviors, and correct for them. Just like with my physical birth, the experience was mostly interior and I didn't talk about it outwardly at first because I wasn't fully aware of how to put the words together in a sensible way. Then as I got a grip on the words, I had to watch other healthy people interact to get ideas on how it's done. Empathize with them and emulate them so that I could fully realize who I was. This was a bit of a breakthrough for me. So I wanted to share it with others because I think it's very important to not take credit for that which was inflicted upon me. Thanks for taking the time to read this. Let me know what your thoughts are. I'm sorry if this seems kind of obvious; It was apparently a bit of a blind spot for me.

You're still mixing metaphors. The people in the world that are kidnapped in the context of political voting are the ones who will literally be aggressed against for not voting. In places in the world where people, such as yourself, can choose not to vote, then saying they are forced to vote (kidnapped) is misleading. Which only serves to legitimize their ability to do damage at all.

So pulling the trigger is immoral, but pulling the finger that pulls the trigger is moral? Amoral? The fact that a gang rape would continue even if you don't cheer it on does nothing to diminish your culpability for cheering it on. The point of contention is political voting, not being stolen from. I'm not going to put more effort into this than you are.

This analogy is misleading. People in the political voting booth were not kidnapped.

Political voting is giving person X permission to threaten and steal from people for reason Y.

For what it's worth, I disagree with this. I view it as punishing the child for a failing of the parents. Maybe instead, you could explain how if he asked for the answer to a math problem, then the next time he encountered one, he would have to ask again. But if instead you were to show him how to figure out the answer for himself, then he would have a new skill and be less reliant on others. In this way, you could model the value of this approach for him and let him internalize it. I think for one child to ruin the fantasy of Santa Claus only serves to reveal the folly of perpetuating Santa Claus. Don't get me wrong. I agree with you that xmas can be fun and that Santa can be a fun game/story. But for your son to say this to your daughter and it be problematic, this would indicate that she was under the impression that he was real. You don't want that, right?

I think it's a common mistake to assign a much greater scope to morality than it actually has. Morality's purpose is to test whether a voluntary behavior is internally consistent or not. What makes it a useful tool is that it is objective. Value is a subjective consideration. Take a bottle of water from me and I just go turn on the faucet. Swipe the canteen off a guy in the desert, and you may have issued him a death sentence. If you kill that guy, do you just owe his family a bottle of water? Morality tells us that stealing a pencil, raping a person, or dropping a nuclear bomb are all immoral. It's not morality's purpose to determine the extent of the damage.

One important qualification if I may. POLITICAL voting is the initiation of the use of force. If you vote for Taco Bell over Burger King for example, nothing immoral there. I make this mistake sometimes myself when I refer to something a if it's inherently immoral when in fact only the coercive variant of it is immoral.

No. Sustenance and reproduction are biological imperatives. The universality of self-ownership tells you that a person's body is their property. So whether you have very few partners or many, as long as they're consensual, there is no violation of property rights. Once there is a violation of property rights, the motive isn't particularly relevant. Because self-ownership is derived from reason, meaning the person is aware of the consequences of their actions.

That is too long to work on a five year old. Also, reason is a requisite for love. If your motivation for this thread is truly that person X "lives and breathes principle," I wonder how many places you sing the praises of Stef or dsayers or RoseCodex or any of the many other people committed to rationality.

That is a heart-breaking story. There's nothing worse than feeling like a prisoner in your own body I'm glad this chapter had a happy ending. How interested are you in looking deeper into how/why you were on the path you were on? It doesn't sound like you had much of a support network, if at all, which I'm very sorry for.

How do you know? When I asked about your parents, you changed the subject. When I tried to bring you back to the question I asked, you changed the subject again, this time pointing at me. This doesn't strike me as the absence of anxiety. Coincidentally, the reason I asked the question is to try and figure out where you're at to try and determine the significance of the experience you were sharing. Whether I had good parents or bad, processed that trauma or haven't, it won't change the fact that you're born a blank slate and your parents have complete control over your environment. You could weed an entire garden and pat yourself on the back. But if you didn't address the roots, you're just going to have to do it all over again AND be frustrated that the progress you thought you made seemed ineffective. I've been there. It's frustrating when you can't see what the actual problem is so nothing you try works I continue to pursue self-knowledge and talk to other people. Just the other day, a brand new friend was able to help me see something I missed and I've been working with it for a couple years now. It's a good thing I wasn't of the mindset that somebody else can't help me unless they only focus on the things I want them to.

If you recognize that your parents did this to you, I think you should process that rather than avoiding it by thinking about other people. Is confusion and dissociation the only things you feel when you acknowledge that your parents did this to you?

bump

How does that make you feel?

Thank you for this @DataBrain: You mention you've been lurking. I'm sure this is true of many people. There are times in public places where I might feel that the person I'm directly speaking with is closed-minded, but they're saying things that others might find believable. In these cases, I think offering up the arguments and identifying sophistry can benefit the audience even if it won't the person it's being said to.

Ah, Ann Coulter. The original Donald Trump. When I first bought a gun, I become more politically aware. Before long, I was drawn to Ann Coulter. In a leftist world, she stood up for the right and didn't care about the flack she received. I admired that. Another reason she appealed to me is because I was still somewhat religious. It didn't take long at all for me to become disenfranchised with her. All she talked about was right vs left. Even then, I knew that it wasn't about right vs left, but top vs bottom. In these loose analogies, both left and right were the top, so it seemed like it was just distracting people from the more important questions. I recently was on a youtube page where on the side, there was a link to a "debate" between Ann and some lefty dude I had never heard of before. I thought I'd check it out because it had been awhile. The announcer spoke as if everybody knew these people. The lefty's first question was about her personally. Next, he made a reference to Fox News, and the crowd reacted. I was like "These people aren't saying anything! They're just expecting people to have specific reactions." I guess what I'm getting at is that regardless of her courage and writing talents, Ann Coulter focuses on the "wrong ways to initiate the use of force" instead of on whether the initiation of the use of force is moral or justifiable. Ye olde if they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't care what your answers are. If Stef did get a chance to talk to her and challenged her on this point, it might be interesting. Otherwise, I think people could use their time more productively, even if she's the "better" kind of State apologist.

Begrudgingly, with no backtracking to acknowledge your deflection. Complete with telling me what I'm going to say before I have a chance to say it. You manipulative prick If you're going to have a conversation without me, don't waste my time including me. You also haven't explained how this line of questioning brings you closer to the irreconcilability of consent and lack of consent. No. lol Imagine you had a club where one of the stipulations for entry was that you consented to being raped. Clearly rape is the simultaneous acceptance and rejection of property rights (I refuse to speak behind acryonyms to manipulative people). Therefore anybody who entered was consenting to being raped. Thus rape is not even possible within that club because consent is present and lack of consent is a requisite of rape. Therefore if PEOPLE voluntarily entered into a contract, ALL stipulations are consensual and therefore cannot simultaneously accept and reject property rights. "Social contract" is a contradiction in concepts. Been debunked for a long time. Since you've put forth shoving your hand up my ass to use me as a puppet as a standard, I reciprocate: "But what about homeowner's associations?" To which I ask: What happens when one of those homeowners dies and leaves his house to somebody else? Are the rules binding upon them? Without their consent? My preference doesn't enter into why you do anything. The question was why you did something and was meant to reveal the lack of principle in your proposition. One needs to suppose no such thing. The question referenced superior technology, denoting its presence and availability. To consider something that is available as unavailable is only helpful when you're trying to make a conclusion stick in the face of rational refutation.

I hope you won't mind if I address the more important stuff first. Oh, and thank you for the high praise, even if it is statistically improbable Tossing the old luggage is a VERY bad idea. For better or worse, every thing we've ever touched or has ever touched us has forged who we are today. Thankfully, this is not a deterministic reality. We are conscious and we possess reason. We are able to sort through that luggage so that we're not mixing the dirty underwear with the clean. Or better, not thinking that the dirty is in fact clean. I can't change what my mother did to me. But I can process it so that it isn't able to do further damage in my life. And I can speak out about it, helping others to become aware, so that parents HAVE to raise their standard of parenting. Just as no fault divorce raised the standard of marital relations. Because identifying the perps is very easy. It is the parents. Always. You come into this world a blank slate and they are in complete control of your environment. Your parents loved you but you got bullied at school? Well who forced you to go there? Your parents loved you but your sibling abused you? Well, who taught that sibling the language of aggression? Who abandoned you long enough for that to happen? Your mother loved you but your father was a prick? Well, who chose for that man to be your father and have children with that prick? Again, this isn't meant to divide parent and child. It's to raise the standard of parenting for a more peaceful future. If it helps to divide victim from abuser, that's a fantastic side effect I myself had never heard the phrase 2nd childhood. I've heard of "mid-life crisis." Is that what you're referring to? In a recent video (I THINK it's this one: ) Stef talks about the biology behind this. I found it particularly interesting because it also talks about the way children (girls in this case) are not sufficiently prepared for adult life. In this case, with regards to the so-called mid-life crisis. If this is what you're referring to check that out if you haven't already and see if that doesn't help answer your question. And yes, anytime I've heard of mid-life crisis (even the terminology), it's been for the sake of shaming the person engaging in it. Typified I think by the family man going out and buying an antique/sports car he always wanted. Like heaven forbid that somebody that worked their ass off for 25 years spends their money on something they'd enjoy. Not that happiness comes from stuff but I digress.

I reject the claim that somebody has to be intellectually on any particular level to understand that putting something forth as factual something that is unknown is irresponsible. In your OP, you said you didn't want to debate religiosity, but rather methods of communication. I understand everything you said in this post. But it does nothing to address my question of why you wouldn't be approaching that person about the way he communicated instead of how those reacted to them. I think the problem might stem from I can't speak for others. Stef's a big boy. When I addressed him, I was addressing him as somebody who just accused ME of saying he should be drug out into the street and shot, because that's exactly what happened. If you think that "A more effective methodology of discussion would be to ignore the attack on Stefan and get to the main questions of the thread," again I ask: Why wouldn't you hold that person to this standard instead of the people who responded to him? HE started the thread. HE set the pace for discourse in that thread. HE did not ignore the attack on people. HE didn't get to the main questions of the thread. And it was his thread! This is also why I reject the intellectual level point you made. I spoke to that man in the very tone he spoke to me first. I can prove that before he made that very nefarious accusation, I had treated him much differently. I do not apologize for my approach with treating people with respect when I first meet them, and treating them exactly how they treat me from that point on. And his accusation wasn't just against me, it was against my tribe. He was mistreating the people who are trying to save the world. Damn right I'm going to intervene and I'm going to make it clear in no uncertain terms that his aggression would not stand. There's a time for pleasantries. That wasn't one of them. See above my analogy of restraining a rapist before bothering with communicating with them.

On what basis? I double checked and it's the video I intended to link to.

I asked you five questions and this answered none of them. I also acknowledged your deflection, so I don't think reacting with more deflection is productive as you had no expectation that it would go down.

Agreed. This is what I was trying to say when I referenced his lack of hesitation. This thread is the perfect example. ragevdl understood that what she could say in response might be controversial and thought twice about whether to say it. The way the story is told, this child did not experience this understanding. It's like when a leftist says "Fox News" and just assumes everybody they're talking to will react with disgust. That's also why I think some form of challenge might have been beneficial. If the child expects the conclusion to be universal, to witness some form of challenge might've served to plant the seed of doubt and skepticism.

I agree with this completely. I remember a recent thread where someone said porn was immoral. I asked them how they arrived at that conclusion. Before they could answer, many other posts were made, driving the topic forward when I thought there was a productive reason to pause. Why in this very thread, I've expressed curiosity as to WHY he left the most prominent feature out and why he is less focused on the toxic person than those who reacted to his toxicity. When I'm deciding how much time and attention to give someone here, that decision is based on how much integrity and rapport (with me) that person has. It's sometimes challenging when a person is brand new. For example, the first OP he references raised a red flag for me. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he expressed curiosity and people have different knowledge and experience. Here, we have someone who has spent a good amount of effort gathering his thoughts, being deceptive, and not expressing curiosity. In other words communicating poorly white trying to advise others how to communicate. A person cannot give advice to you unless they understand what your goal is. By speaking without integrity, he certainly doesn't relate to my goal of rational thought. But he's not JUST communicating poorly, he's engaging in toxic behavior while protecting a toxic person by concealing his toxicity. We live in a society where we are surrounded by people who would have us harmed for disagreeing with them, who would try to hamper the way we think, and otherwise subjugate us for their benefit. As somebody who has been victimized by all of this, particularly in his formative years, I'm very careful to not let toxic people into my life. As I said, I cannot let damaging behavior go unchecked. I would be erasing myself if I did and allowing the people who willfully engage in those behaviors to harm others.

You didn't recommend. You presented as necessary. But 2+2=4 regardless of who says or doesn't say it. And yes, I give less of my time to those who would waste my time. I protect myself.