@Dawnz We can't even agree if a person's dangly bits are on the top or the bottom, but we're supposed to be able to agree with stuff that's more complicated than that...
@wjmaggos @PhoneBoy @yourhero Yeah, the campaign was wildly successful. Dissent has been successfully suppressed by giving power to a few monsters who go around ending people's lives for speaking truth.
One social worker I respect just lost his career because he reported factually about a court case the mob didn't want him to. Just... poof. He wasn't even some famous guy, he wasn't even using his real name, they tracked him down anyway and ended him.
One social worker I respect just lost his career because he reported factually about a court case the mob didn't want him to. Just... poof. He wasn't even some famous guy, he wasn't even using his real name, they tracked him down anyway and ended him.
@wjmaggos @PhoneBoy @yourhero Unfortunately, unless and until there's a reset, the game is over and the people lost. Everything has been so badly politicized (to the point that the whole idea that there's an objective truth to any matter is considered offensive to many) that you can't even start at square 1 until you wipe the board.
@Gargron @ailurocrat I wish we could invite cool people and leave losers out.
By "losers" I mean whatever elements result in the bot infested PR firm riddled political party corrupted hellscape most of us left to come here. People who simply disagree with me are welcome and in fact encouraged, particularly if they can come to the table with an interesting argument that might change my mind on something.
By "losers" I mean whatever elements result in the bot infested PR firm riddled political party corrupted hellscape most of us left to come here. People who simply disagree with me are welcome and in fact encouraged, particularly if they can come to the table with an interesting argument that might change my mind on something.
@Celestinas_side_dick Every week or so I write about something at length. It's part of a larger project I'm working on but I figured I'd share since it might be interesting to others. And if it isn't, then that's ok too, most people don't find most of what I have to say interesting.
I used the video as a framing device for what turned into a larger discussion on morals in general, including some talk about how different hypothetical species might find our morals alien, but also that different circumstances for the same people might lead to quite different morals, and I close off talking about how we need to be careful not to let empathy for bad people let us slide into immorality.
I used the video as a framing device for what turned into a larger discussion on morals in general, including some talk about how different hypothetical species might find our morals alien, but also that different circumstances for the same people might lead to quite different morals, and I close off talking about how we need to be careful not to let empathy for bad people let us slide into immorality.
@Celestinas_side_dick The character limit is whatever I say the character limit is. Fediverse uber alles!
This is a message for the upcoming generation.
Yesterday I was looking through different videos that were out there, and one of them talked about pedophiles.
Pedophiles are adults who want to treat children like adults in a specific way that you must only treat other adults. Someone that I respect quite a bit put it this way: it is absolutely true that in some circumstances adults want to treat children like adults, and often children want to be treated like adults, but we know based on massive data sets and long history that treating children like adults in that way is damaging and will hurt someone their entire lives. It doesn't even matter how the child behaves, because we know that children aren't fully developed. Even a child that appears very wise for their age is still only wise for their age. If they manage to put on a mask and pretend that they're more mature than they really are, that is one of the indiscretions of youth. As people who are grown, therefore, it is the duty of the adults to be the adult and shut down anything that they know will be harmful to children in the future.
Now that doesn't mean protecting children from every single little thing that can possibly happen. Some of the worst things in history happened because "won't somebody think of the children", but agency matters. In this case, you have a grown adult willfully taking actions that they know will harm a child, disregarding the fact that they will harm that child, because it's something that they want. That willful act and the direct correlation between the action and the consequence is what makes it particularly immoral.
Unfortunately, human beings are not like god. Our powers are limited, our time is limited, and sometimes we have to play the devil. The reason I mention this, is to keep in mind our limited existence. We can only choose our own actions, knowing the consequences of our own actions. You can try to change the world, but you can't save the world if you can't save yourself. There are many evils in the world, and if you try to think too hard about all of them and the fact that the fruits of those evils are inescapable, you'll drive yourself to madness. Most of the clothes you're probably wearing right now are likely made in sweatshops under conditions you would not consider just. Much of the food that you eat was grown on land that at some point probably had some sort of moral conflict associated with it. Even your birth represents all of the other people who were never born or bloodlines that started and were never able to propagate. As hard as it is to realize, you come from a long line of winners. Even if you can't respect those who came before you for various reasons, the fact is whatever they did worked, and there are a lot of people for whom whatever they did, did not work. Life isn't always a zero-sum game, but often it is. If there's only so much food to eat, and there's no way to get more food, then one person will live in the other will die. If there is a war, and one group of people survive and the other are wiped out, you can only be on the winning side or the losing side. Therefore, the world is in a lot of ways drenched in sin. I don't say this to send you into despair, but as a warning: if you dwell on every single sin in an attempt to absolve yourself from it, you will fail. In the process of failing, you will drive yourself insane. You can't worry about what people who aren't you have done, are doing, or will do. All you can do is strive to find what behavior in yourself you find acceptable, and do your best to live up to that standard every day. The only person that you need to wake up and look in the mirror for is yourself.
There are people who try to find black and white in a gray world. At this moment in time, there are people who want to for example paint white people as pure evil, and anyone who was ever inflicted by a white person as pure innocence. The history of the world isn't that simple. Every single group of people who survived do so by finding some sort of compromise. There are no pure pacifists, they've all been murdered by violent people. Even Buddhist monks needed to learn martial arts to defend their Temples. The world is gray. Perhaps in the moment it might seem like certain people are pure good and others are pure evil, even in cases where that seems to be the case it's untrue. Nobody's perfect, and nobody's perfectly imperfect.
That isn't to say that we can't judge actions by a morality that we set up. Human beings have the morals that they have by virtue of being human beings. The morality that a dog has might seem very compatible with a human being, but because it is a dog the inherent morality of a dog is different than that of a human being. Imagine for a second a creature totally unlike us. Imagine a creature that never takes another life for sustenance, relying on photosynthesis; A creature that unlike us doesn't require another creature to procreate, using asexual procreation; such a creatures morality would care very little about all of our sexual morality because that's simply not a behavior that they engage in. They might even look at vegetarians as monsters, consuming life to sustain themselves, a concept literally unthinkable to such a creature. Perhaps such a creature would have absolutely no use for any of the social morality that human beings have developed as social animals. They would have no need to farm, they would have no need to hunt in groups, they might not have any reason to cooperate with any other creature. However, I'm certain that if such a hypothetical sentient creature existed they would have their own morality, but their morality would be entirely alien to ours. Imagine for a second a sort of sentient Hunter race, like a giant spider. They may have a sort of sexual morality, but it might look entirely different from ours. As lone hunters all of our social morality might be entirely unintelligible to them, and perhaps even an our taboo on murder would be something they find very difficult to understand. Some spiders have very bizarre mating habits. The black widow spider famously will eat its mate after copulation. For all we know, such a hypothetical creature might have a very strict set of ethics specifically dedicated to that act of devouring its mate.
Moreover, even among humans, a relatively genetically homogeneous species, morality is highly dependent on the current situation. There will always be some set of rules behind society because that's just how things work, but the morality of a rich society where no one goes hungry and the morality of a poor society where even the rich don't know if they'll get to eat each day will be dramatically different. One way that you can tell this even within our own society within a fairly short time span is the attitude towards children. Most people don't realize that being a human being has been a nightmare for the majority of the existence of the human race. Just a couple centuries ago, there was a 33% chance just by being born that you would die before you reach the age of five. It's often said that the lifespan of humans has dramatically expanded, but not as much of that as you think is cause specifically by people being able to grow older. If you consider an average, the thing that would be most likely to dramatically reduce that number would be massive numbers of very young children dying very early. That was reality. Today, if you are born there is a virtual certainty that you are going to make it to 18. Kids just don't die. Good thing don't get me wrong, but it's changed our view. Children are a lot less disposable than they used to be. It used to be that a lot of people would have kids and those kids would die and they would have to have more kids and maybe those kids would live or maybe they died too, and you would hear stories of families of six seven eight kids having one heir because a lot of the kids died early. The change in the situation has changed what we consider to be normal. Back then, understanding that there was a good chance kids were going to die anyway, people obviously tried to protect their kids to an extent but nothing like what they do today. Despite being the safest society in the history of the world, we are also the most paranoid that something's going to happen to our kids. I think that a lot of that changing attitude does come from the fact that it's virtually guaranteed that a child that is born will grow up to become an adult.
The idea that just because other moralities exist we shouldn't accept the morality that we believe in is an absurdity. Look inside yourself, and ask yourself: if there was a society where a few thousand citizens owned a few million slaves, and those slaves were treated terribly, and often those slaves were ground up and turned into food, and their bones ground up and the paste used to spackle walls and floors, if they had decided that that was acceptable, would you consider it acceptable? I don't mean what do you think. I mean what do you feel. Are you ok with You are most certainly judging their morality by the standards of your morality, but why shouldn't you? What absurd sort of morality would specifically prevent somebody from judging moral actions in a moral way? How twisted would your morality have to be that you would see something that shocks your conscience, and your only admonition is to yourself for being affected by it?! As I've already established, morality is defined by your humanity, any morality that requires you to completely shut off your feelings and ignore them even though they are just is inhuman, and we really can't abide by that. Certainly there can be a certain level of tolerance for different standards, but as I have already said, The world isn't black and white so even that viewpoint must be tempered. Sometimes there are just things you find reprehensible, so reprehensible that they cannot under any circumstances be tolerated.
I'm aware that this wasn't awkward tangent on this discussion, but it really is a discussion about morality not necessarily the specific incident that I'm talking about.
So what did this woman say that kicked off this giant discussion on morality? Well, it was a discussion on pedophilia and specifically while it did claim to hate pedophilia it was definitely reaching for a more empathetic and tolerant view of it.
When I was younger, still in my early teens, my stepfather was arrested for being caught in a police sting operation where he invited what he thought was a teenage girl to his house for nefarious purposes. At the time this happened I knew it was wrong, but it also made me very confused because as a teenager I was attracted to teenagers and I didn't know how to rationalize the difference between what my morality proposed I do and my natural urges. Honestly, it kind of messed me up for a while.
As I've gotten older my views have matured somewhat. The fact is, no biological urge can be considered immoral by itself. Every human being has urges every single day. Even Saints lauded for their tolerance or non-violent means aren't immune to that. What brings an urge into the moral realm is what you do about it. Earlier, I differentiated between an immature child and a mature adult. They're definitely is a line in the sand somewhere that physiologically your maturing process is complete, and for each person there's definitely a line in the Sand where they're specific emotional and mental maturing processes are complete. I think it's safe to say that there is also a level of cultural maturation, coming into your own and becoming the self-actualized person that you are expected to become, and that process of self-actualization requires a level of moral maturity. Little kids have urges and they immediately act on them. If they see a piece of candy they will eat that candy. If they see someone and they want to slap them, they will just go ahead and do it because they don't yet have self control. As you age, building self control especially around a framework of moral behavior is part of that coming into social maturity. Common shorthand for this is the difference between a boy and a man. The concept of cultural maturity isn't a bad one, but you have to be careful because that terminology of a boy becoming a man is often abused by people who just want to control men. They use this idea of cultural maturity to say that what they want you to do is the only way to become culturally mature. Eventually though, good people do become culturally mature and specifically for men that means learning self-control. It's incredibly important because men due to their testosterone tend to have much stronger biological urges than women, and moreover they tend to be bigger and stronger than women for the same reason. Even a man and a woman of similar weight will not be the same strength. The man will almost always be much stronger even if they are in worse shape.
As I mentioned before, human beings can't control biologically derived urges. If you see food and you are hungry you are going to have an urge to eat that food and you don't have a choice in the matter. Another thing that you don't have a choice in the matter of is what things you find attractive. The history of mankind is one where human beings lived fairly short lives and had to procreate quickly so unfortunately men tend to be attracted to indicators of youth and health paired with indicators of sexual maturity. This isn't something that they chose, it's something that is written into them by millions of years of evolution. The decision that men have to make, isn't whether they get an urge to do something. It is what they do with that urge. If you get an urge to do something unspeakable to a child that doesn't mean anything, it doesn't make you a pedophile. A dirty little secret of almost every man is that at some point they caught themselves looking at a girl who was clearly not old enough. Our brains simply aren't wired to not be attracted to attractive features just because we are morally opposed to the consequences. If you think it's okay to choose to fixate on that, that isn't okay. If you think it's okay to choose to go out and feed this fixation by seeking out images, stories, communities, and so on that's very not ok. If you think it's okay to actively go out and act upon these urges to another human being, I'll give you a free necktie.
That really goes for all of these urges. I routinely see really pretty girls walking down the street and I just want to walk up to them and start making out with them. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath. Sometimes I'll see someone eating an ice cream and I'm like I really want that ice cream. I just want to go over there and start eating their ice cream. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath. Sometimes I see someone driving along in a really nice car, and I really wish that I could just have that car. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath.
And you know what else? Having had these fleeting urges, I don't go on the internet and join the wanting to rape some chick community. And I don't go on the internet and join the wanting to eat someone else's ice cream community. And I don't go out on the internet and join the wanting to steal someone's car community. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath.
A lot of the stuff that I've written here were things that I had to deal with during a major existential crisis where I really had to ask myself what the basis was for my morality and my ethics because I couldn't find a basis. The thing that finally got me out of my funk was overhearing a story between one of my professors in college and some of my classmates. He was just talking about some of the traveling that he'd done, and he talked about hiking in the mountains of Kenya. This guy wasn't some incredibly pumped bodybuilder, he was just a guy teaching power electronics theory, kind of skinny dressed up in a button-up shirt and dress pants, and here he was talking about this incredible story of being in this distant exotic location and in that moment I was very impressed. There was no reason for me to feel that way, none objectively. People went out and did things everyday after all, but there was just something about it that affected me. It was the story of something that I was impressed with on a very basic visceral level, and in that moment that's where I realized for me at least value comes from. It wasn't the extrinsic world where some objective arbiter decides what isn't isn't valuable to the world, it was intrinsic, something deep within me. And if I change then I change, but that sense deep inside of me is built up not just of my own decisions, but of my own basic humanity and also the world that I grew up in. If you are sitting in awe of something, can you really say that that feeling of looking at something and feeling small in the face of it isn't real? If it isn't real to you then what is?
Having laid all of this framework out so far, I finally make it to my basic point. So having shown that morality obviously exists, and that there is some kind of basis for it, and that the basis is largely set around not what happens to you but what you choose to do about it, they're suddenly great weight in what you choose to do about it. Obviously if you choose correctly, you are choosing to do the right thing whatever you define as the right thing. And if you choose incorrectly, you are choosing to do the wrong thing, whatever you choose that wrong thing to be. The dangerous impasse that we reach is when you have chosen to do the wrong thing, and you are actively trying to change such that the wrong thing is the right thing. A moral sense is something that can be incredibly powerful, but without some kind of check in place it can become something that adds righteousness -- self-righteousness to evil. I've seen it a lot in my life, people proposing evil with carefully defined moral calculus to support their reasoning. And that, is where you need that internal check and that internal check is what you could be called shame. Human beings are master rationalizers. You see it a lot when dealing with some of the worst drugs of society. Most people think that criminals have no moral code. That is simply not true. They have more codes just like anybody, it's just that their moral code has been perverted. If you talk to a thief, that thief will say at least I'm not a murderer. If you talk to a murderer, he'll say at least I didn't murder kids. If you speak to someone who murders kids, you'll probably hear them say at least I didn't commit genocide. It's a sliding scale and it's really easy to fall down that path. Human beings are master rationalizers. Without an internal sense of shame, we can start falling down that path of rationalization that leads to people committing genocide pointing at another person committing genocide and saying, "well at least I'm not that guy".
We need to stop trying to empathize with people who commit unspeakable acts. Every human being has urges, and it is how we act upon those urges that define us as individual people. We can judge others even if they don't think that they deserve to be judged. We can judge them because we are humans with our own personal and internal sense of right and wrong. If we let monsters corrupt our sense of right and wrong to their own benefit, we have lost a slice of our agency and a slice of our ability to act in a willfully moral manner. It's also incredibly likely that they chip away at our morality and our ability to act as moral people. If we shamelessly allow the least moral among Us to define our morality, and we don't take personal responsibility for guiding our own fate, then it's almost inevitable that one day you wake up and realize you've become a monster you can't stand.
Embrace shame, not to the extent that you cripple yourself, but to the extent that you empower yourself by taking control of your own life and living the way that you want to live and the way that you would be proud of yourself looking back on how you lived. Remember that you yourself will have to wake up one year from now, five years from now, 20 years from now, 60 years from now, and you will remember all the things that you've done, and if you didn't embrace shame today, it's very likely it will embrace you tomorrow.
Yesterday I was looking through different videos that were out there, and one of them talked about pedophiles.
Pedophiles are adults who want to treat children like adults in a specific way that you must only treat other adults. Someone that I respect quite a bit put it this way: it is absolutely true that in some circumstances adults want to treat children like adults, and often children want to be treated like adults, but we know based on massive data sets and long history that treating children like adults in that way is damaging and will hurt someone their entire lives. It doesn't even matter how the child behaves, because we know that children aren't fully developed. Even a child that appears very wise for their age is still only wise for their age. If they manage to put on a mask and pretend that they're more mature than they really are, that is one of the indiscretions of youth. As people who are grown, therefore, it is the duty of the adults to be the adult and shut down anything that they know will be harmful to children in the future.
Now that doesn't mean protecting children from every single little thing that can possibly happen. Some of the worst things in history happened because "won't somebody think of the children", but agency matters. In this case, you have a grown adult willfully taking actions that they know will harm a child, disregarding the fact that they will harm that child, because it's something that they want. That willful act and the direct correlation between the action and the consequence is what makes it particularly immoral.
Unfortunately, human beings are not like god. Our powers are limited, our time is limited, and sometimes we have to play the devil. The reason I mention this, is to keep in mind our limited existence. We can only choose our own actions, knowing the consequences of our own actions. You can try to change the world, but you can't save the world if you can't save yourself. There are many evils in the world, and if you try to think too hard about all of them and the fact that the fruits of those evils are inescapable, you'll drive yourself to madness. Most of the clothes you're probably wearing right now are likely made in sweatshops under conditions you would not consider just. Much of the food that you eat was grown on land that at some point probably had some sort of moral conflict associated with it. Even your birth represents all of the other people who were never born or bloodlines that started and were never able to propagate. As hard as it is to realize, you come from a long line of winners. Even if you can't respect those who came before you for various reasons, the fact is whatever they did worked, and there are a lot of people for whom whatever they did, did not work. Life isn't always a zero-sum game, but often it is. If there's only so much food to eat, and there's no way to get more food, then one person will live in the other will die. If there is a war, and one group of people survive and the other are wiped out, you can only be on the winning side or the losing side. Therefore, the world is in a lot of ways drenched in sin. I don't say this to send you into despair, but as a warning: if you dwell on every single sin in an attempt to absolve yourself from it, you will fail. In the process of failing, you will drive yourself insane. You can't worry about what people who aren't you have done, are doing, or will do. All you can do is strive to find what behavior in yourself you find acceptable, and do your best to live up to that standard every day. The only person that you need to wake up and look in the mirror for is yourself.
There are people who try to find black and white in a gray world. At this moment in time, there are people who want to for example paint white people as pure evil, and anyone who was ever inflicted by a white person as pure innocence. The history of the world isn't that simple. Every single group of people who survived do so by finding some sort of compromise. There are no pure pacifists, they've all been murdered by violent people. Even Buddhist monks needed to learn martial arts to defend their Temples. The world is gray. Perhaps in the moment it might seem like certain people are pure good and others are pure evil, even in cases where that seems to be the case it's untrue. Nobody's perfect, and nobody's perfectly imperfect.
That isn't to say that we can't judge actions by a morality that we set up. Human beings have the morals that they have by virtue of being human beings. The morality that a dog has might seem very compatible with a human being, but because it is a dog the inherent morality of a dog is different than that of a human being. Imagine for a second a creature totally unlike us. Imagine a creature that never takes another life for sustenance, relying on photosynthesis; A creature that unlike us doesn't require another creature to procreate, using asexual procreation; such a creatures morality would care very little about all of our sexual morality because that's simply not a behavior that they engage in. They might even look at vegetarians as monsters, consuming life to sustain themselves, a concept literally unthinkable to such a creature. Perhaps such a creature would have absolutely no use for any of the social morality that human beings have developed as social animals. They would have no need to farm, they would have no need to hunt in groups, they might not have any reason to cooperate with any other creature. However, I'm certain that if such a hypothetical sentient creature existed they would have their own morality, but their morality would be entirely alien to ours. Imagine for a second a sort of sentient Hunter race, like a giant spider. They may have a sort of sexual morality, but it might look entirely different from ours. As lone hunters all of our social morality might be entirely unintelligible to them, and perhaps even an our taboo on murder would be something they find very difficult to understand. Some spiders have very bizarre mating habits. The black widow spider famously will eat its mate after copulation. For all we know, such a hypothetical creature might have a very strict set of ethics specifically dedicated to that act of devouring its mate.
Moreover, even among humans, a relatively genetically homogeneous species, morality is highly dependent on the current situation. There will always be some set of rules behind society because that's just how things work, but the morality of a rich society where no one goes hungry and the morality of a poor society where even the rich don't know if they'll get to eat each day will be dramatically different. One way that you can tell this even within our own society within a fairly short time span is the attitude towards children. Most people don't realize that being a human being has been a nightmare for the majority of the existence of the human race. Just a couple centuries ago, there was a 33% chance just by being born that you would die before you reach the age of five. It's often said that the lifespan of humans has dramatically expanded, but not as much of that as you think is cause specifically by people being able to grow older. If you consider an average, the thing that would be most likely to dramatically reduce that number would be massive numbers of very young children dying very early. That was reality. Today, if you are born there is a virtual certainty that you are going to make it to 18. Kids just don't die. Good thing don't get me wrong, but it's changed our view. Children are a lot less disposable than they used to be. It used to be that a lot of people would have kids and those kids would die and they would have to have more kids and maybe those kids would live or maybe they died too, and you would hear stories of families of six seven eight kids having one heir because a lot of the kids died early. The change in the situation has changed what we consider to be normal. Back then, understanding that there was a good chance kids were going to die anyway, people obviously tried to protect their kids to an extent but nothing like what they do today. Despite being the safest society in the history of the world, we are also the most paranoid that something's going to happen to our kids. I think that a lot of that changing attitude does come from the fact that it's virtually guaranteed that a child that is born will grow up to become an adult.
The idea that just because other moralities exist we shouldn't accept the morality that we believe in is an absurdity. Look inside yourself, and ask yourself: if there was a society where a few thousand citizens owned a few million slaves, and those slaves were treated terribly, and often those slaves were ground up and turned into food, and their bones ground up and the paste used to spackle walls and floors, if they had decided that that was acceptable, would you consider it acceptable? I don't mean what do you think. I mean what do you feel. Are you ok with You are most certainly judging their morality by the standards of your morality, but why shouldn't you? What absurd sort of morality would specifically prevent somebody from judging moral actions in a moral way? How twisted would your morality have to be that you would see something that shocks your conscience, and your only admonition is to yourself for being affected by it?! As I've already established, morality is defined by your humanity, any morality that requires you to completely shut off your feelings and ignore them even though they are just is inhuman, and we really can't abide by that. Certainly there can be a certain level of tolerance for different standards, but as I have already said, The world isn't black and white so even that viewpoint must be tempered. Sometimes there are just things you find reprehensible, so reprehensible that they cannot under any circumstances be tolerated.
I'm aware that this wasn't awkward tangent on this discussion, but it really is a discussion about morality not necessarily the specific incident that I'm talking about.
So what did this woman say that kicked off this giant discussion on morality? Well, it was a discussion on pedophilia and specifically while it did claim to hate pedophilia it was definitely reaching for a more empathetic and tolerant view of it.
When I was younger, still in my early teens, my stepfather was arrested for being caught in a police sting operation where he invited what he thought was a teenage girl to his house for nefarious purposes. At the time this happened I knew it was wrong, but it also made me very confused because as a teenager I was attracted to teenagers and I didn't know how to rationalize the difference between what my morality proposed I do and my natural urges. Honestly, it kind of messed me up for a while.
As I've gotten older my views have matured somewhat. The fact is, no biological urge can be considered immoral by itself. Every human being has urges every single day. Even Saints lauded for their tolerance or non-violent means aren't immune to that. What brings an urge into the moral realm is what you do about it. Earlier, I differentiated between an immature child and a mature adult. They're definitely is a line in the sand somewhere that physiologically your maturing process is complete, and for each person there's definitely a line in the Sand where they're specific emotional and mental maturing processes are complete. I think it's safe to say that there is also a level of cultural maturation, coming into your own and becoming the self-actualized person that you are expected to become, and that process of self-actualization requires a level of moral maturity. Little kids have urges and they immediately act on them. If they see a piece of candy they will eat that candy. If they see someone and they want to slap them, they will just go ahead and do it because they don't yet have self control. As you age, building self control especially around a framework of moral behavior is part of that coming into social maturity. Common shorthand for this is the difference between a boy and a man. The concept of cultural maturity isn't a bad one, but you have to be careful because that terminology of a boy becoming a man is often abused by people who just want to control men. They use this idea of cultural maturity to say that what they want you to do is the only way to become culturally mature. Eventually though, good people do become culturally mature and specifically for men that means learning self-control. It's incredibly important because men due to their testosterone tend to have much stronger biological urges than women, and moreover they tend to be bigger and stronger than women for the same reason. Even a man and a woman of similar weight will not be the same strength. The man will almost always be much stronger even if they are in worse shape.
As I mentioned before, human beings can't control biologically derived urges. If you see food and you are hungry you are going to have an urge to eat that food and you don't have a choice in the matter. Another thing that you don't have a choice in the matter of is what things you find attractive. The history of mankind is one where human beings lived fairly short lives and had to procreate quickly so unfortunately men tend to be attracted to indicators of youth and health paired with indicators of sexual maturity. This isn't something that they chose, it's something that is written into them by millions of years of evolution. The decision that men have to make, isn't whether they get an urge to do something. It is what they do with that urge. If you get an urge to do something unspeakable to a child that doesn't mean anything, it doesn't make you a pedophile. A dirty little secret of almost every man is that at some point they caught themselves looking at a girl who was clearly not old enough. Our brains simply aren't wired to not be attracted to attractive features just because we are morally opposed to the consequences. If you think it's okay to choose to fixate on that, that isn't okay. If you think it's okay to choose to go out and feed this fixation by seeking out images, stories, communities, and so on that's very not ok. If you think it's okay to actively go out and act upon these urges to another human being, I'll give you a free necktie.
That really goes for all of these urges. I routinely see really pretty girls walking down the street and I just want to walk up to them and start making out with them. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath. Sometimes I'll see someone eating an ice cream and I'm like I really want that ice cream. I just want to go over there and start eating their ice cream. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath. Sometimes I see someone driving along in a really nice car, and I really wish that I could just have that car. You know what happens next? I keep walking. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath.
And you know what else? Having had these fleeting urges, I don't go on the internet and join the wanting to rape some chick community. And I don't go on the internet and join the wanting to eat someone else's ice cream community. And I don't go out on the internet and join the wanting to steal someone's car community. Because I'm not a fucking psychopath.
A lot of the stuff that I've written here were things that I had to deal with during a major existential crisis where I really had to ask myself what the basis was for my morality and my ethics because I couldn't find a basis. The thing that finally got me out of my funk was overhearing a story between one of my professors in college and some of my classmates. He was just talking about some of the traveling that he'd done, and he talked about hiking in the mountains of Kenya. This guy wasn't some incredibly pumped bodybuilder, he was just a guy teaching power electronics theory, kind of skinny dressed up in a button-up shirt and dress pants, and here he was talking about this incredible story of being in this distant exotic location and in that moment I was very impressed. There was no reason for me to feel that way, none objectively. People went out and did things everyday after all, but there was just something about it that affected me. It was the story of something that I was impressed with on a very basic visceral level, and in that moment that's where I realized for me at least value comes from. It wasn't the extrinsic world where some objective arbiter decides what isn't isn't valuable to the world, it was intrinsic, something deep within me. And if I change then I change, but that sense deep inside of me is built up not just of my own decisions, but of my own basic humanity and also the world that I grew up in. If you are sitting in awe of something, can you really say that that feeling of looking at something and feeling small in the face of it isn't real? If it isn't real to you then what is?
Having laid all of this framework out so far, I finally make it to my basic point. So having shown that morality obviously exists, and that there is some kind of basis for it, and that the basis is largely set around not what happens to you but what you choose to do about it, they're suddenly great weight in what you choose to do about it. Obviously if you choose correctly, you are choosing to do the right thing whatever you define as the right thing. And if you choose incorrectly, you are choosing to do the wrong thing, whatever you choose that wrong thing to be. The dangerous impasse that we reach is when you have chosen to do the wrong thing, and you are actively trying to change such that the wrong thing is the right thing. A moral sense is something that can be incredibly powerful, but without some kind of check in place it can become something that adds righteousness -- self-righteousness to evil. I've seen it a lot in my life, people proposing evil with carefully defined moral calculus to support their reasoning. And that, is where you need that internal check and that internal check is what you could be called shame. Human beings are master rationalizers. You see it a lot when dealing with some of the worst drugs of society. Most people think that criminals have no moral code. That is simply not true. They have more codes just like anybody, it's just that their moral code has been perverted. If you talk to a thief, that thief will say at least I'm not a murderer. If you talk to a murderer, he'll say at least I didn't murder kids. If you speak to someone who murders kids, you'll probably hear them say at least I didn't commit genocide. It's a sliding scale and it's really easy to fall down that path. Human beings are master rationalizers. Without an internal sense of shame, we can start falling down that path of rationalization that leads to people committing genocide pointing at another person committing genocide and saying, "well at least I'm not that guy".
We need to stop trying to empathize with people who commit unspeakable acts. Every human being has urges, and it is how we act upon those urges that define us as individual people. We can judge others even if they don't think that they deserve to be judged. We can judge them because we are humans with our own personal and internal sense of right and wrong. If we let monsters corrupt our sense of right and wrong to their own benefit, we have lost a slice of our agency and a slice of our ability to act in a willfully moral manner. It's also incredibly likely that they chip away at our morality and our ability to act as moral people. If we shamelessly allow the least moral among Us to define our morality, and we don't take personal responsibility for guiding our own fate, then it's almost inevitable that one day you wake up and realize you've become a monster you can't stand.
Embrace shame, not to the extent that you cripple yourself, but to the extent that you empower yourself by taking control of your own life and living the way that you want to live and the way that you would be proud of yourself looking back on how you lived. Remember that you yourself will have to wake up one year from now, five years from now, 20 years from now, 60 years from now, and you will remember all the things that you've done, and if you didn't embrace shame today, it's very likely it will embrace you tomorrow.
I just thought of something...
1. Black protesters demand students at ivy league universities are all black now
2. Black protesters demand professors at ivy league universities are all black now
So you have the same teachers teaching the same students but in a different building...
So does that just mean that ivy league universities become the new traditionally black universities and some other school becomes the new ivy league?
1. Black protesters demand students at ivy league universities are all black now
2. Black protesters demand professors at ivy league universities are all black now
So you have the same teachers teaching the same students but in a different building...
So does that just mean that ivy league universities become the new traditionally black universities and some other school becomes the new ivy league?
@djsumdog @greyknight33 @TriHusker I donated quite a bit each year back when it was mostly a useful "give it to me in 60 seconds" quasi-technical resource. When it like all things became an ad, I moved on. Money better spent building my own platforms, in retrospect.
I take issue with characterizing the current inflation as solely "Biden inflation". Trump pounded the table demanding Powell print more money, Obama pounded the table demanding Yellen print more money, Bush pounded the table demanding Ben Bernanke print more money, and between them they spent 24 trillion dollars they didn't take in. Blaming Biden for this inevitable result of long term policy along four administrations isn't representative of reality.