Prairie

tl; dr of original post: physically abusing children innoculates them from abuse. translation: if my parents hadn't abused me, I wouldn't be such a compassionate, caring person and known how much they love me.

I understand your situation to be this: you live with some people. They have a dog. You don't want a dog so you don't take part in its management. The dog injured a cat in the yard. You all took it in. The hospital will put it up for adoption. You want to pay the cost and manage the cat's fate yourself. But you want the people you live with to pay for part of it. They don't want to. This bothers you.

It seems that despite their current appearances, you believe that they are the same abusive people whom you lived with a decade ago. That you're feeling guilty suggests that some part of you doesn't believe this, perhaps because of their deceptive appearance in the present. I wonder if you could help show this part of yourself evidence for what you believe by confronting them in ways that they can't wiggle out of, so that you see a very clear demonstration of their current abusiveness. It sounds like you did some confrontation but your mother outsmarted you that time. Another thing, your parents can seek other people to talk with about what they're feeling. Their child is not obligated to be their own free personal therapist whom they can abuse in order to feel better. On the other hand, parents have exactly that role as the child's counselors who must deal with whatever the child says to them in a loving way, because anything bothersome the child does is not a result of malice but only what the parents have done to the child.

I have never heard of this layer of MGM. I've always just heard the dubious health benefits and ritual aspect of it, along with the trauma it causes. This is extremely shocking, because it seems a far more compelling explanation for the pervasiveness of it: little baby foreskins are like free gold they fucking get paid to collect. This is a much more powerful thing to mention to anyone who's considering inflicting it on their child.

My judgmental take: mostly-harmless blog post by techno-fetishist with impaired compassion imagines how technology can be used for enhanced torture.

I have watched less than a dozen of Stefan's videos and recently noticed that there was going to be a meetup in town (Austin), so I figured I'd go see what others who watched him were like, with little expectation. The people I met were respectful and tried to connect with me. They, like me, were interested in discussing self-knowledge types of things rather than Bitcoin, but I figured it was probably going to mostly be about Bitcoin given the conference the next few days. I talked with four people most of the time and they were all pleasant. One in particular was enthusiastic about Bitcoin and ways it could improve peoples' lives in other countries, and I enjoyed listening to his intelligent commentary. It surprised me that it wasn't just me who was interested in self-development topics and childhood trauma.

I can imagine a normal response. "Sure, but come on, when you give a gift you probably would be angry if the person didn't give some thanks, etc." Yes, and that's because to the extent you expect something, you aren't giving, you have something going on that you haven't worked out and are foisting on someone else and damaging the relationship with. It really is possible to perceive the giving separately from your own unresolved stuff and not poison your relationship with it. You can use the instances where it comes up for self-reflection and to grow, and include the other person in this process. So instead of it reducing your relationship, it can give you both an opportunity to add depth to the relationship.

I don't see anyone as being obligated to have gratidue. Even if they were, if it's not there it's not there. Gratitude like a lot of human expression can only come spontaneously. To force it is to merely put on an act of it for the sake of an audience of one. If someone wants to force an act of gratitude, they have already thrown away having a real relationship with the person and instead merely want a marionette that triggers the right pleasant responses in them, and doesn't trigger unpleasant things. If someone gets angry for someone not having gratitude, they've got unworked personal stuff. Until they show some humility in asking for help, it's just going to be destructive.

I read the idea of types of people as strategies people adopt, perahps early on, to deal with things. So such a book could be useful even to someone who doesn't find the idea of different types of people justified. Having an elaborate description of a strategy and recognizing that you consistently use it and then looking at what needs the strategy meets, what dangers it avoids, imagining using a different strategy and noting the reactions in yourself, all seem valuable tools for self-knowledge, because it's likely that there are some decisions you'd re-evaluate if you were aware of them.

I found the ideas interesting. Looking at things in multiple ways is a central part of how I approach the world, so I like this kind of thing. To me it's like mental exercise, keeping constant activity in thinking about things, never becoming a mental couch potato around some subject because something in the world has a dominant explanation. Especially for things so far-removed from practical decisions one makes, there's little reason to invest a lot in a particular view. I get plenty of meaning from st434u's post. As st434u was careful to note, this is st434u's understanding and isn't a claim about facts. You've taken it to the extreme, saying that it's meaningless. Why the aggression in what was a pleasant conversation? The first line of scrutiny for any argument is whether it makes sense to oneself. If it doesn't, there's nothing to even work with.

I don't understand the drive to find biological explanations for differences/no differences on average between people classified as one sex as compared to another. If a person's decisions are voluntary, then they can assert their own individual preferences, regardless of whether they have these preferences due to genes, upbringing, culture, whatever. If the goal is to find coercion, trying to predict what people would choose voluntarily and then comparing that to what we see and treating differences as proof of coercion seems a very poor approach. Even if you think it exists, how are you going to detect individual instances using this averaged data? Someone whom you predict should have a 50% chance of choosing engineering doesn't choose it; was this due to coercion or personal choice? It's like finding that a bunch of coins on average give heads only 20% of the time. Even if you flip one of them once, you will have no idea whether it's a fair coin. Also, those videos are on YouTube if you want to jump through fewer hoops to view them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrsF7wyUxs8

My first question was where the oceans came from, since it started out with all landmass.

I only had limited experience with this, but I'd always get awful headaches being with groups of people for a few hours a week. I now more clearly see that I was always wanting particular kinds of interaction/attention in order to resolve trauma, and that it always seemed that it was just around the corner even though it was like a dry well. I imagine that others had a similar general relation to it, thinking they'd get some need met but since it was a free-for-all with little awareness of what people wanted, nobody got much out of it. Regardless, I'm pretty immune to the draw of social groups now, it being so easy to call to mind the experience and emptyness of it. When I look at all the possible fates I could have been given, I am always thankful that I am not stuck in the social tar-pit that friendly/romantic relationships seem for most people. Also that I can keep myself occupied indefinitely with various creative projects and self-knowledge exploration.

Which in the long run is preferable to all the tedium of the styled editor. It's a breeze to quote multiple people and trim quotes in unstyled (BBCode) mode.

The best approach seems to be to not ever mention the concept to anyone during your whole jury experience. After all, if you exercise nullification, that's not the reason for finding the defendant not guilty, that's the action by which you are able to do so; the reason is that you don't think the defendant is guilty of a crime. You were asked for a judgment, and that is your judgment (and why even a single juror can ensure that the defendant isn't found guilty).

In order to train her to not do what someone says, she's trying to get her to do what someone says. It'd be interesting as a parent to create a situation where there is a man/woman the child doesn't know, who asks the child to come with them, and see how the child responds. Then you know what you're working with. I also wonder whether the more effective approach in the long-term is to always respect the child so that they will fiercely resist when someone is doing something they do not want. It of course means that you as a parent don't have the lazy way out, but it also means that you as a parent aren't constantly training the child to obey adults (you) and thus leaving a huge safety risk open to strangers to take advantage of.

nobody, maybe I stopped being called because for education I wrote "School of life." Damn. I got called twice, and wasted two half-days taking the bus to the meeting arena to sit there and not be put on any jury, then get a slap-in-the-face check for a few dollars to cover my time. I never cashed either check. Even then, before I had ever learned about voluntaryism, I wanted to serve on a jury. Now, knowing about the purpose of a jury as an ultimate check on justice, I would love to serve on one and have the opportunity to make a difference between justice and injustice when the law is unjust and someone who has harmed nobody is facing time in a cage.

Ergys Xhabrahimi, I highly recommend Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room. It's a short, enjoyable book that I have read many times, which addresses your question and free will in general.

I realized that there are probably online generators to use lots of different fonts and styles, and didn't see these mentioned, so I found some under "quote maker online". A couple with examples: http://inspirably.com/quotes http://www.quotescover.com/category/quotes-gallery

If it's to reduce the chance of AIDS, why is it being done to infants rather than once the person starts having sex and decides to have their foreskin removed?

When someone says I have to do something, it's not clear what they mean. Often it's that their imagination only came up with one strategy to meet some needs, sometimes not even theirs. Or they have a need they want met and only see one way for it. Or there's someone else policing us and they want to let me know that I will be violating someone else's demands if I don't do what they say. They are being dishonest by hiding that it's not an inevitable outcome like physics. Contrast: "If you get drunk one more time, I will demand that you move out of my house." This makes it clear that it's a voluntary decision on the part of the house owner. It also makes clearer that there are other possible responses, unlike "you will have to" hides. It comes with the territory when a parent tells their child that they "have to" do something. Please leave. I want you to leave. I'm uncomfortable with you here. I want to get to sleep soon so please leave.Many ways to communicate it and not be opaque.Translating have-to into choose-to-becauseThe Nonviolent Communication Process: A Synopsis (See 2. Denial of Responsibility)

Welcome! I and I imagine others would find your experience so far interesting. I remember reading Alice Miller's books many years ago and relating to her words like those of an ally I dimly always knew of but had never encountered yet.

I want you to be healthy. I believe that going to bed is good for your health. I also believe that your body is unable to tell you when you need to get to sleep. I don't care that you might be staying up because of unmet needs of yours that I haven't noticed or helped you with. I have decided to adopt a dictorial style of managing your health, because it's more convenient for me. Because I don't feel sure of my grounding, I'll state it as a command from on high rather than my own request for you to go to bed. I'll also neglect to mention that there are many reasons unrelated to your health that I am ordering you to go to bed. Since I never learned how to state my wants and work out something with the other person of how to get them met, I'm not able to model it for you or believe that you are capable of it. Tough luck kid. You have to go to bed now or I'm going to get mean and threatening.

The future generations, only they don't know it yet since they haven't even been born.

I think that the format has tradeoffs. Many are listening so there's an inherent trade between something others find worth continuing to listen to, and helping the person. There are also limits to a host's ability to empathize, etc.I view something like your call similar to anything else where the goal is to empower a person as much as possible. Product design is a good example; I think that the proper mindset is that the user is always right, and any shortcomings are due to inadequate design, never the user's fault. This frames things so that one is always searching for better solutions, things that work more in tune with the user's natural ways of doing things, designs that avoid problems users run into.The same applies to someone calling in, or empathizing in person. You think someone needs to calm down? Do your part in creating conditions that allow for it. Person still isn't calming down? Listen to why they aren't. Don't tell them to calm down (it's like telling a person to "become agitated now!") Same for anger; if you need to get angry but aren't, then there's something blocking it and it needs to be addressed. You don't even need to tell the person that they "should" be angry, just help locate the blockage and then if anger is the appropriate response, it will come.Another reason I'm wary of these kinds of directions is that they can be used to create the appearance of growth without the actual process. Take the indicators when someone really is growing and then feed them to someone else in an attempt to get them to grow, as if you were training an actor.Internally this also perpetuates the idea that beings are incomplete and need someone outside to run their healing process, and feels like constant bypassing of one's internal guide. I think one's internal guide is the only thing that matters because once the lies that caused the person to stop trusting it are lifted, it will guide things again and with amazing willfullness and power. I also think that a person's internal guide is always there, and always reachable by being a good listener who values everything the person says, sees none of it as petty, irrelevant, etc.Just my thoughts on the matter.