It’s especially “fun” when you are the “black sheep” of the family, but it turns out that you’re actually the only white sheep and they’ve been lying to you (and/or themselves) all your life.
The crazy thing is that my parents raised me to be this way and now that I am it’s like they’re surprised I care and give a damn. It is whack to me that I am now exactly what they taught me to be and now that upsets them.
I feel that so hard. I got called a pinko commie a decade or more ago because I advocated for basic christian morals for people conservatives don’t like.
Fuck me for actually internalizing the morals I was raised with, right?
Oh, this hits home, thank you.
Maybe early onset dementia. One of the symptoms is loss of empathy. The lead, DDT and other pesticides they were exposed to in their youth are now taking effect. In the next few decades we are going to see a pandemic of boomers suffering from dementia.
100% agree. Only hope is they start dying off before they cause any more damage, but we all know we aren’t that lucky.
You’re not alone
I cut out the last of my family for this reason, about the time my shithead uncle compared ThE bRiTaLiTy Of ThE bIdEn AdMiN aGaInSt CoNsErVaTiVeS to people getting snatched up off the street and disappeared.
I love the man, but I will not tolerate that dumb bullshit in my life. Was kinda cathartic to cut him off after the last argument I had, and I don’t really expect to hear from him again since I doubt the stupid fuck will ever come to his senses
In this boat.
Some of my biggest regrets are keeping the peace with family who in no way deserved peace.
Cut them off. This has gone way too far.
Acting like everything is ok is condoning their behavior.
Anyone on the right that isn’t in the streets with us condeming what’s happening is fully onboard with this nation losing its democracy because it’ll be their side that’s in control when it’s gone. They are traitors.
it’s disgusting isn’t it. They’re all for “fuck everyone” until it comes to them, then they’re in shock that it’s happening to them. “Fuck you, i got mine”
Magats are scum people. The ones in office and the ones who voted for them.
Especially within the last two weeks with the thousands of comments I’ve already seen if people actively celebrating the death of two innocent people.
It’s horrifying to know that we are surrounded by this many sociopaths
Reminder that a lot of those comments are from trolls farms and/or bots
Yes there are evils peoples around
Yes evil is real
So is social engineering
The rich do not only pay for the ballroom
And plenty of them are from heartless people who celebrate in the suffering of others. I have a few of them in my (formerly) close family.
Bots aren’t self-creating, yet. People make them and design them to act as surrogates for their opinions. Imo this is evidence of an even more evil person. It’s not enough to spew a hateful comment for them. They need a private factory of misery.
It’s not always their opinions though. At best though, they just don’t care and are doing it to cause chaos. Which is almost just as bad.
It’s Russian bots
It’s not sociopathy. It’s in/out group thinking with a dehumanization effort put into the outgroup. That, coupled with cult-like social programming (“I’ve burnt bridges with all of the people who think that this is wrong, if I tell the others in the group I think this is wrong, I’ll have no one left”) and you’ve got the mixture. People who belong to MAGA will align their thinking with what the party says because they don’t want to be kicked out and become one of “them”.
And those same rat bastard fucks were getting pissy that people celebrated Kirk’s death. They are all hypocrites and I will never take them at face value again.
Nazi Germans were all common people.
I have always believed that The American political system has nothing left to give to it’s people other than the vicarious experience of being the abuser. But as someone who is not American I have always seen this experience from a foreign politics perspective. Whenever America invaded a country ,performed a drone strike on civilians, or just starved another country through economic warfare; I always saw a lot of people in the comments celebrating the cruelty and making excuses as to why that cruelty is justified. This was of course a radicalizing experience while growing up; Because I don’t think this is the result of “evil” but the result of a psychopathic system reprograming normal people to be the psychopaths that it needs to do it’s bidding.
Born and raised red white and blue, and absolutely, America has always celebrated cruelty to foreign countries, especially poor and not-white countries. We’ve always been cruel as fuck to our own people, too. Trump & the Republicans have raised the curtain, though — there’s no longer any pretense at what’s been laughably called “truth, justice, and the American way.”
Once you incorporate that nonhomogeneous view of the humans a lot of (near or distant) historical events, trends, cultural stuff, etc makes a lot more sense (sadistic & opportunistic behavior is significantly more dominant and accepted than we pretend it to be, despite constant evidence) - to the extend that “evil” might not even be completely/fully the right word for it (lacks the quality of destructive-parasitic in it’s most mondaine sense?).
We sure aren’t a typical mammal, but we don’t deviate all that much in single traits - we just concentrated a bunch of specific ones.
“psychopathic” is the word you seek probably. Psycopath is a human being that lacks emotional empathy.
And hot take, but i disagree with this post. Everybody does what they do with good intentions in their mind. Whether they’re good towards themselve, some certain group of people, or all of humanity is another question.
People are used to call others “evil” when they’re not included in the target group of good intentions. I think that this is wrong, as it leads to misgudgement of characters, tribalisation and further escalation of conflict.
I prefer to judge people by other factors than the abstract “evilness”: empathy/psychopathy, generocity/greed (or rather selflessness/individualism), agency.
This allows to avoid calling stupid people “evil”, only further polarizing them against yourself, while calling out actually dangerous ones.
Everyone does not do with good intentions in mind (yes that includes themselves). Not even close. That’s you projecting.
My worldview allows for less logic leaps than to just assume that someone is evil. My rejection of the term does not imply that you can’t be a bad human being tho.
Everyone does something that’s at least beneficial to themself, or seems so from their perspective.
Saying that someone does anything because of their inherent trait is called fundamental attribution error
Wishful thinking basically, a belief that humanity is by default good, a kind of superiority complex we (most of us?) have.
Idk, I guess that’s dependent on evolution.
Species can be diffident imh(scifi)o.
i’m not saying everybody is good. I’m saying that “good” or “bad” is a huge oversimplification, that not just isn’t solving anything, but actively promotes destructive behaviours and tribalistic views.
The human brain is more a “rationalization engine” than anything else. We sometimes call it a “pattern matching engine” but the only patterns it accepts as valid are ones with inherent biases. Ie: “I am doing this awful thing to you for our own collective good”.
The human brain is more of a “rationalization engine” than anything else
Just no. Some people tend to rationalize everything, sometimes post-factum, that much is true, but the quoted statement is just wrong.
First and foremost, our brain is emotional and impulsive. Consciousness and rationalization comes after, as speech is a learned skill, and we use speech to rationalize in the first place.
False pretenses are a thing, but it exists to deceive a larger group of people for the benefit of a smaller one. And yes, it means that the deceiver can be the sole beneficiary, even if often than not it isn’t the case.
See? Look at you rationalizing; You’re very good at it!
Go man, go!
(And yes yes amygdala yes yes limbic system, I know all that, and you are, to a large extent, correct. I’m just having a bit of fun. A wise man once said: “I used to think the human brain was the most interesting aspect of the human body, but then I realized ‘look what’s telling me that’”)
aw, thanks :D
my point still stands tho. I wish people in their variety were more rational, but alas, rationality comes last asit is power-consuming. Not that you seem particularily interested in opposing my stance, so whatever. I do enjoy a silly banter as well, so it’s not like i have anything against this
wise man once said: “I used to think the human brain was the most interesting aspect of the human body, but then I realized ‘look what’s telling me that’”
yeah, yeah, our fascination with brain is brain propaganda to make more brains.
Pesky little parasite trapped inside a box, piloting a sex-mech. An entirely overcomplicated mechanism designed by the dna so that the stupid molecule could fuck more effectively. And look what it lead to — fucking taxes! Are you happy, you microscopic shit!? Cuz i’m not breeding now, so neither do you! Muahaha! You outplayed yourself, you dumb piece of organic chemistry!
Ahem… Sorry, got a bit distracted… Yeah, brains! So cool! Yaay! :D
Banter it is then! And thank the stars, the world needs more pleasantries, today more than ever. I appreciated your most lettered reply.
So: semi-off topic (I’m tired, but the nodes are sorta connecting here…) but I always recommend Peters Watts - Blindsight for an absolutely thrilling sci-fi book that totally exposes the sham that consciousness is.
(Clears throat, adjusts notes on lecturn)
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.
The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive —to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO’s office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.
So kinda to your point…on the pie chart, “rational thought” is a thin slice.
However, upon a bit of reflection, I don’t really know if I am referring specifically to rational thought when I said rationalization engine earlier, and that’s probably down to my layman’s education. Ambiguity. Truly the devil’s volleyball. Not the right way to start an interesting conversation so again, kudos to your magnanimous disposition in this dialogue.
It’s fair, perhaps even obvious, to assert that rationalizations are a by product of faulty mental modelling. That this requires modeling of any sort implies that the organism is capable of abstract thought (ie: what humans are good at: putting ourselves in the other parties’ shoes to either empathize our outwit them - Erasmus or Machiavelli). But (and this is speculative on my part, but if it’s incorrect I need another theory to explain animal behaviour), I posit that organisms other than humans also need to model reality with high fidelity, and also need an internally consistent, accurate version of it in order to succeed. That implies error correction on the model, which is, more or less, the error correction algorithm we call rationalization; making the incongruent ends make sense so mountains can once again, be mountains.
So really, I meant “the fitness of brains has been attuned over the course of evolution such that a coherent narrative is seen as the optimal desired ground state”. In humans the narrative is verbose and tagged with lots of less than useful metadata. Is the data stream is the same as it is for an alligator as it is for us though? And do primitive systems, developed in evolution’s lab aeons ago and shared by all of us, govern our responses in the same way?
Tldr; the back and forth banter here seems to me to be: is rationalization a process of high level consciousness or is it a side effect of the “inertia of stability”? Is a “stable-specific” pattern of mental activity just where the elastic relaxes to, and so rationalization (or make-sense-of-it-ness) just has to happen? In other words: what is the motivation, from a fitness perspective, for anyone, any “being” to narrate/edit the models, no matter how primitively they do it?
Thanks for the opportunity to exposition dump with ya. Definitely curious about this subject, but that’s probably the selection bias from my own brain.
emotional empathy
Most are only capable of visual empathy.
Ie they would not want to see a starving child.
But if you say ‘sign this, you get 100 million monies and 1 million will starve’ ppl would sign.Everybody does what they do with good intentions in their mind.
I don’t think that at all, ppl thinking of other’s wellbeing as if it’s some fancy luxury even when said ppl have more than enough or more than others (in some cases it is a luxury, but not really nowdays).
Hate is so easily weaponized bcs it’s there, it’s not reinvented, it’s used (often not even the topic/subject of hate is invented, just reused bcs it’s cheaper & more effective).
If that (the quote) would be the case then ppl would also try to correct when they see their “good intentions” aren’t doing good.
People are used to call others “evil” when they’re not included in the target group of good intentions.
No, that is just the selfishness I’m describing above - calling someone evil bcs their actions don’t benefit you is just preemptive opportunistic behaviour at best (and there is a lot of this, almost the default).
(I say this if “good intentions” are actually good, not like a money grab or killing or whatever.)I prefer to judge people by other factors than the abstract “evilness”: empathy/psychopathy, generocity/greed (or rather selflessness/individualism), agency.
Yes, “evil” is one of the possible end descriptions of the above process (with many more factors). Starting by saying someone is evil would be weird/hurtful/baseless.
And all of such factors are very time and culture dependant, can’t have it otherwise, it’s not science.But if you say ‘sign this, you get 100 million monies and 1 million will starve’ ppl would sign.
That’s because it’s hard to empathize with a group of people. Empaiy is always about individuals. The “group” is an inherently more abstract term.
ppl thinking of other’s wellbeing as if it’s some fancy luxury even when said ppl have more than enough or more than others
they don’t think about helping others in the first place. Brain is a lazy machine, it won’t spend its cycles thinking if everybody in the neighborhood is feeling allright. This adds up with our inability to empathize with groups, making thinking of others only more costly.
That’s why one’s empathy always has a scope, and so do the good intentions.
And some people are just egotistic psychopaths, but i’d already talked about that, didn’t i?
Hate is so easily weaponized bcs it’s there, it’s not reinvented…
Of course it is. Its rarely purely irrational tho. as you said it yourself, we always try to come up with a reason, even if it was purely emotional in the first place
And its not like it will go anywhere, especially with the way of thinking this post promotes.
If that (the quote) would be the case then ppl would also try to correct…
Except not everybody has a developed analytical thinking. Some people intentionally mute their inner voice. It’s especially in the modern day, when you have music, videos, news or memes in practically infinite capacity. It’s disturbingly easy to just turn off your brain.
That’s because it’s hard to empathize with a group of people. Empaiy is always about individuals.
Yes, but I see that as a distinct lack of empathy.
Lazy brain also doesn’t have issues thinking about how to benefit itself over others in contrast of the way it can stop being emphatic about others.
We were hardwired to that.
And the only way to evolve is through powering through urges like that ‘laziness about empathy’, or just live as we always have (but now on global destructive level with basically 0 realistic/actionable chances of going extinct).
Yes, but I see that as a distinct lack of empathy. And why so? As i already said, groups are inherently abstract. We don’t empathize with groups, we empathize sith individuals inside of them.
Blind devotion to a group is not empathy, it’s tribalism, and is inherently leading to “us vs them” mentality, that every politician loves so much to leverage.
And the only way to evolve is through powering through urges like that…
By powering yourself through, you’ll just wear yourself down, feeling absolutely miserable before snapping into apathy. It’s a completely unrealistic and unfair expectation towards anybody, not far from christian dogmatics.
The powers that be are gaslighting everyone with excuses because they align more with a snuff film producing pedophile over what’s right and just.
Also: release the Epstein files
I’ll at least wait to see if who ever’s suffering is a republican or not before cheering.
Took you all long enough. It is really hard to see the truth, when it is so awful, isn’t it? It normally takes some really dark contemplations and honesty to arrive to.
It’s exactly this rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes the other that got us here.
Humans can be misguided and become really really shitty people. But labeling anyone evil is just lazy and won’t help make anything better. It just fuels the fire of this downward spiral.
At least that’s my thoughts.
I’ll cordially disagree. Calling someone an orangutan or a cockroach is dehumanizing, but lots of humans are evil. It’s just an adjective, often accurate. Let’s have no fear of accurate adjectives.
I kinda agree that the label puts fuel on the fire, but it really is impossible to ignore at this point, the sheer amount of people with no heart or empathy in contrast with my own naivety of the goodness of humans. Great environment for nihilism and depression.
Yeh I’m with you. We might well be past the point where people can still come together. I also feel quite discouraged that things have escalated to this. But I’m still trying to keep a few of my principles and a bit of my humanity. I don’t believe there’s evil, its a term for scaring children or riling up people against each other in contexts like religion or other groups. It’s just circumstances and humans who are not fit to deal with them in a healthy way.
I don’t believe there’s evil, its a term for scaring children or riling up people against each other in contexts like religion or other groups.
That’s an argument I’ve made many times, and on an abstract level, I’d still say that. If I’d written the original post I might’ve chosen a different word, just cuz saying ‘evil’ seems a bit rude and I’m a nice guy. On the other hand, the opposition is trying to stomp us into submission, and they’re willing to kill about it and then call the dead terrorists, and I can’t work up a good head of quibble or hesitation about calling that evil.
Guess my supply of Minnesota nice is running low. But I’d still buy you a beer.
It’s not about being nice for me. More about how humanity could grow out of this cycle. Be better prepared when the storm is over.
Do I think this needs to be stopped? Most definitely. Do I think we will learn anything from it? Probably not. Or way too little.
But like I said. This just might not be the time anymore to have the luxury being more nuanced.
I’d buy you one in return.
Trump is being accused by a named victim of the worst crimes in humanity. Maybe you should be sat down to watch what they’ve done. Some people are sadistic twisted pieces of shit. Our president is one of them.
Edit: and as a victim of some of that sick shit, it us evil what people will do to children. Pure fucking evil.
Comparing people to non-humans is dehumanizing, accurately pointing out the evil in someone’s actions (or heart depending on how full-throatedly they support those in power committing evil acts) is not.
Calling the Nazi scum parasites or cockroaches would be dehumanizing. Saying these Nazi fucks are evil because they willingly murder people in cold blood to further a political agenda and instill terror in the hearts of the citizenry is not. One literally compares them to an invasive species, the other is a moral judgement on what they choose to do.
Isn’t not calling “evil” something you genuinely perceive as evil just helping it normalize & incorporate it into society (and you are not doing your individual duty)?
Like, that’s how democratic (even anarchic) stuff works in order to move onwards together - ppl/everyone has to voice their opinion & ppl/everyone has to listen?
Not voicing (or not being able to voice) your opinions is bad.
Being attacked for that opinion is also bad.
Being marginalised for your opinion if it clashes with a significantly bigger group (and it’s on an important subject to begin with) is just how living in & working with a society works (“deviants” in it’s neural sense).If the above was true, you wouldn’t have eg that kind of wealth concentration that can lead to an extreme minority influencing what the majority has to do.
Also - a conflict isn’t an attack, it’s how you through debate move onwards (sides taking about conflicting views until all is thought out & out in the open so everyone can hold an informed view/vote/opinion/behaviour). Not voicing your opinions to avoid “conflict” is just not moving forward.
Ppl telling you to avoid conflict just want to silence your influence.
I‘m sure our opinions don’t differ too much, I’m totally with you on many things.
What I’m trying to get at is that we end up with 2 groups of people who call each other evil. Because that’s what using these labels boils things down to. And whoever is stronger will come out on top and claim they righteously defeated the evil others. There no discourse to be had, there’s no nuance. Only hate. Which as we can see is also very easy to weaponize.
Well then say the words. These people are raping and killing children and selling them to each other. I best see you say those words every time you mention them. If evil is too abstract then repeat their crimes every time you speak of them.
Absolutely. I find that much more productive than the catchall evil.
The only thing we do not tolerate intolerance.
Yup it’s essentialist crap an the failure of hope to assume “being evil” is a trait people can have. You gotta find out what makes humans do or accept things that are bad. If you think people can be good, you gotta find put why they aren’t at a given moment. This is called materialism and our only way out.
Fascists aren’t people.
No, they absolutely are. That’s a big part of the problem
Nah, the moment you think of them as people, they win. They’re not people. They’re a cancer we need to excise and need to stop being squeamish about the surgery.
You can only beat cancer by completely and violently destroying it.
They’re not some aliens who dropped here from space, that would make fighting against them so much easier. They’re your neighbors, your coworkers, that random lady in the street corner; people who are choosing to be evil, not some monsters under the bed. Fighting against something isn’t very effective if you aren’t even realistic what you’re up against
All I hear is excuses.
Excuses for what? Denying people are people and can be evil is a stupid way to fight fascism, since it’s is happening because people are evil
They’re not people, they’re nazis. We already went over this please try to keep up.
