Copyright help needed for refutation of "silver bullet" argument againt Atheistic morality

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Jadebrain_Prime, Jun 19, 2015.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    People in a public forum cannot be expected to behave in a very reasonable way - they tend to react emotionally even to scientific arguments. Thus, I would not recommend you to behave in a public forum assuming that all people are highly rational and would look for arguments in a text formulated as a personal attack. And, given that in most cases there is anyway no argument behind an attack, or at least only a very weak one, this is not irrational at all.

    This is because such public discussions have a high noise level, and to spend to much time to search for a meaning in the noise would be an irrational loss of time. So, it is rational to use simple thumb rules to decide if it is worth to look for interesting content. And such a thumb rule is that personal attacks are with high probability only cheap ad hominem not worth to be evaluated in detail.

    You anyway have to make assumptions. All scientific theories are only hypotheses, assumptions. This is elementary scientific methodology, following Karl Popper. Then, of course, you cannot live based on logic alone, you also need plausible reasoning - which is, by the way, also a form of logical reasoning, described mathematically by probability theory (I recommend here Jaynes, Probability theory - the logic of science). So, plausible reasoning and assumptions are clearly part of rational reasoning.

    And even intuition plays an important role in science. Scientific theories have to be invented, they cannot be simply derived somehow from observation. Intuition plays an important role in this process.

    Indeed. But it influences the way people react to this content. If one uses an aggressive form, many people will ignore the content, because aggressive behaviour is strongly correlated with the absence of interesting arguments, thus, nobody expects them inside an aggressive message.

    In one post I have explained in some detail why the very question you consider - objective moral - is an IMHO ill-defined notion not worth to be discussed. This was in fact a response to a posting of another participant. You have not considered this posting at all, and I have not even expected that you will. So, this was not a claim against you - it was simply the explanation of my desinterest in Rashdall's argument and its possible refutations.

    What remains was, essentially, only metadiscussion. I have taken some of your texts to evaluate the form, and to consider the question if it is a reasonable technique to use such a form in discussions in a public forum. My conclusion was that this is not a good idea to behave in this way. It was not evaluating the content at all. I think such a strategy of presentation would be suboptimal also for presenting true and good arguments. So no straw man or weak man involved, it has not been at all about the man.

    I would recommend you not to use claims about what you have already done in the past. There are some situations where this becomes useful or even necessary - after many repetitions, when you have to expect that yet another repetition will be already boring to the reader. And, if you do it, I would recommend to use only very neutral terms for this purpose. Claims of type "I've already addressed their arguments" will be ignored, because they are cheap. Usually above sides - the winner as well as the loser of the debate - can make a summary of this type. And usually it is the loser who is really doing it - the winner usually prefers to mention the point of the content where he has reached the decisive points. So, if one side claims "I have addressed all your arguments" and the other side claims "point X remains unanswered", I would risc a 1:3 bet that the second is the winner.

    I would also recommend you to accept that simply giving your argument a latin fallacy name is usually not accepted as a sufficient rejection. Ad hominem is an exception - it is sufficiently easy to recognize - but everything else has to be explained in detail, even if this may be boring.

    BTW, even if this forum is, from the name, scientific, don't expect many scientists here. Most people here seem to be laymen, with some general interest in science, that's all.
     
    Hipparchia likes this.
  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    648
    None of this is in any wau relevant. You do seem to have reading comprehension difficulties. I shall try to help you overcome them.

    Your assertion is that Hasting Radshall had led the world to believe no valid objective moral system was possible. Now in the current context it doesn't matter one iota whether or not he is correct. Your assertion, the one I have demonstrated to be false, is that he has led the world to believe it to be so. But, no, he hasn't. And I have offered you examples to demonstrate this. It does not matter that those who choose not to believe his argument may be mistaken, the point is they do not believe it and thus he has not "led the world to believe no valid objective moral system is possible."

    I suspect you will still not get it and make some claim, such as "But that is not my point". Sorry, but when you make an assertion that is a point and if that point is disproven that should be the end of the matter. Now, I am not going to proceed further until I get a clear acknowledgement from you that I not only addressed one of your points, but that I have demonstrated your point to be faulty.

    I suspect that at the heart of this is that you do not write very well. Despite your claim to be logical and rational your writing is rather wooly. Try being sharper in your next response.
     
    Kristoffer likes this.
  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    54,036
    You may claim to understand science, but what you don't understand is morality, and it's dubious connection to logical systems.
     
  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,453
    I wonder if he is writing from prison. That might account for the aggressive outbursts, the general incoherence and the irrational preoccupation with justice systems that are - according to him - detached from morality. Just a thought……….
     
  8. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    I don't know what I can do about my friend... The staff at his apartment have kept him from going to the hospital (despite the fact that it's within line-of-sight from the first-floor apartment window), and it seems that he's most likely dealing with various problems, that have been complicated by the heat. They've put an AC unit in his apartment, and told him to get to sleep, but I've already notified the organization that owns the apartment, and one of the staff members will probably get disciplined, to say the least (I personally had to push this ***hole to do anything at all, and this guy has violated client rights policies before, though the clients have little confidence in the system, so they didn't report anything. I don't, either, but the higher-ups know that I'm not going to give up, and I know that their failures are more due to incompetence than corruption.). Since I can't do much more than that, at least for now, I'll finish up here.

    I came here for copyright help. That's it. That's why I didn't polish up my argument with pages upon pages of definitions, clarifications, truth-tables for both the variables and the highest-order axiom that puts it all together, etc. before I put it here, and I only put it here because the information was requested. I've already figured out the concepts long ago. In fact, I have a tendency to figure out these things by searching out every problem to address with my ideas, long before I've heard of the actual names that anyone else knows these concepts by; for example Gödel's incompleteness theorems (of course, I don't just assume that I know these things; I'll do the research, learning whatever I can, and compare and contrast the concepts, making sure I've got the right idea). I know there's missing information, and I admitted that the presentation wasn't finished; the rational thing for everyone else to have done would be to ask for that information that's missing, but of course, that would require looking at what's already there, in order to determine what's missing. Instead of that, everyone just went straight to dismissing the possibility that I might have succeeded, based on the failures of everyone else who has tried before me. I've already indicated from the very beginning that I have searched for others who had successfully refuted Rashdall's argument, and I've found nothing, which is why I had actually asked in the first post if anyone else knew. This would indicate, but not prove, that I've done something no one else has done; anyone could have taken the time to do that research, and confirmed either way, but even if they didn't, there's still the hint that the same flaws in everyone else's ideas might not be in mine.

    Once again, I came here with a question regarding copyright laws. I knew better than to come here with the intention of debating, and when everyone else here started a debate anyway, I tried to get it over and out of the way by telling people to present valid arguments, something that could be addressed, and put to rest. The fallacies continued, and I realized that none of you were going to present anything other than fallacy until you were able to recognize that you weren't living up to the standards of rational discourse that are necessary for a debate to get anywhere. That's why I started to challenge people, demanding that people act like they belong in a debate on a website called "Sciforums." There were two people, Schmelzer, and Spidergoat (via PM), who have tried to answer one of my original questions; neither could provide the information I had asked for, and I had to learn on my own that Creative Commons is useless anyway. The only thing that any of you have been able to show me is how much I underestimated the futility of presenting an idea that contradicts the predominant ideas already held here.

    With that said, when I finish filling in the presentation of my argument, I'm not going to present it here. I'll find somewhere else to present my ideas, with people who can listen to what I'm saying, critically analyze it, try to understand anything that isn't clear, and work with me until they can verify whether my ideas are right or wrong.

    P.S. Yes, I have seen many psychologists, psychiatrists, and the like. I know I'm different, and eventually, they were able to figure out that I was very different. More than one of them has lamented that Carl Jung isn't alive today, because we could have been of great benefit to each other, with him exploring an archetype that even established tropes about fictional character design can't put together, and me getting his input in my pursuit of introspection.
     
  9. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    648
    I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties your friend is experiencing. I hope things work out well for him.

    I notice that you totally ignore the point of my last post. You have ranted and raved about people behaving irrationally, yet that is what you are doing here.

    I would be, at the very least, prepared to explore your idea, ask questions about it, challenge you on points I found contentious, but I see little point in doing so. Why? Because you refuse to accept that firstly I have addressed point you raised and that I have demonstrated you were wrong on those points.

    I understand that those are not points you consider to be important, but rationally you have to admit that they were your points and that you were mistaken. Failure to do so is irrational, illogical and annoying.

    You say this: " I'll find somewhere else to present my ideas, with people who can listen to what I'm saying, critically analyze it, try to understand anything that isn't clear, and work with me until they can verify whether my ideas are right or wrong."

    You think that is actually going to happen? When you cannot, will not acknowledge some minor points wherein you are wrong. You expect me to believe you will acknowledge if you turn out to be wrong on a major point? It seems highly unlikely. Convince me otherwise by taking the first step of acknowledging that I've demonstrated your errors on two points. Alternatively, be thought of as a coward.
     
  10. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    I addressed nothing in your last post, because this discussion is over. Soon, the same will surely be said about my membership in this troll pit. I won't miss it; the association with a forum rightfully held in such contempt by those outside would have made me look bad, anyway.
     
  11. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,304
    Sour grapes make bitter whine.
     
  12. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    5,003
    "Futility" is too strong - but presenting ideas which contradict the mainstream position is extremely difficult.

    And if one hopes for masses of people switching sides, then it is indeed futile. Leaders of mass movements never use rationality - they use lies, propaganda tricks, appeal to emotions instead of reason, and always start from the irrational prejudices which are already common and widely distributed.

    If you use reason, all you can hope for is a few interesting discussions from time to time, with a lot of noise around, and only some partial agreement about some points. Such is life. Those who want more agreement have no choice but to follow the mainstream - then the majority will celebrate them.
     
  13. Hipparchia Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    648
    So, although I remained rational and logical in my posts and although you claim to value logic and rationality you lack the courage to admit that the points I made were correct and at least two of yours were wrong. That demonstrates very clearly to any reader here that you are not interested in logic and rationality, you are only interested in protecting a rather fragile ego. For someone who mouths off about what a wonderful discovery they have made it is rather sad and despicable behavior.
     
    Kristoffer likes this.
  14. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    15,396
    .
    1 - The argument assumes there is a god in order to prove there is a god.

    2 - In order to prove humans cannot have morals without a god, it must be proven there is a god then it must be proven that god has good morals.

    3 - God is not objective & has horrible morals.

    4 - Any debate on god requires the theist to prove there is a god or the theist loses the debate. No theist has proven there is a god. Until a god is proven to exist, nothing else matters about god.

    .
     
  15. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    11,888
    Did you get the answers on the copyright question that you needed?

    From the site: http://www.rightsforartists.com/copyright.html

    Copyright:

    An idea comes to the mind of a creator.

    The idea takes form. Its form may be a painting on canvas, a pastel drawing on paper, a melody and lyrics recorded on tape, or perhaps a novel penned on parchment.

    In the digital world, its form may be a digital painting, drawing, melody or poem ... it may be a novel, illustration, web page, software program, or scripting element ... all captured on a hard drive.

    These are the creative results of an original idea or concept fixed to a tangible medium. Copyright begins here.

    Per The Copyright Act of 1976 (effective in 1978), there are three fundamental criteria to establish copyright:

    • Fixation to a tangible medium
    • Originality
    • Minimal creativity

    Registering your original work with the Office of Copyright is not required for intellectual property to be protected by copyright.¹

    Names, titles, slogans and short phrases are not protected by copyright law but may be protected under trademark, tradename or slogan mark laws.

    ¹While registering for copyright is not required, the legal registration with the Office of Copyright will benefit the copyright owner should an issue of infringement occur. Registering copyright is beneficial because you cannot sue for copyright infringement without registration.
     
    Last edited: Jun 26, 2015
  16. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    I'm surprised I haven't been banned yet! I was going to start this message with a "BOO," given the phasmophobia here, but... meh.

    "What phasmophobia?"

    That's a good question to ask, hypothetical Sciforums user! But I'm going to start with something else. See, I decided I'd change the email address on my account to one that's still "active," though no longer actively used, thus redirecting any updates from Sciforums to that, instead of the one I normally use, and I'd keep from engaging here for one week. I've logged in one more time between then and now, just so I could log off. Does that mean I haven't changed anything here? Hardly. I've made some changes, addressing a few things here and there, leaving some things unmentioned in consideration of the futility of addressing such things to people such as those here. I have left it in a place where none would be alerted to its presence, where it can only be found by people looking for something else, something previously thought to be there. I could give more hints, but then I'd be giving it away, even if the people here likely still wouldn't get it. If you somehow manage to find it anyway, you'll get the answer to the question above, and then some.

    I'm not going to change the email address on my account back to the one I've used previously. I'm going to come here when I feel like it, which will be rare at the very most, because this site is a refuge for pretentious pseudo-intellectuals, and like everyone else on the outside outside who knows of this site, I consider its value to be somewhere in the range between "irrelevant" and "fecal stain." I have many things I could say to the people here on an individual basis, but I'll only address Hipparchia:

    I haven't admitted to your rightness or my wrongness because there was never any reason to. Whatever you think you did with whatever you thought my argument was, you did nothing of the sort. Since you at least tried, however, I'll give you one little bit of advice: Even those who deal solely with linguistics are realizing the terrible error of relying solely (or really, any more than marginally) on prescriptive definitions, as opposed to descriptive definitions, in any meaningful discussion of any topic. You should also make this realization when you're debating.
     
  17. rpenner Fully Wired Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    4,833
    A treasure hunt needs to offer something of value before worthy people will chase it.
     
  18. exchemist Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    12,453
    Why don't you just bugger off, then?
     
  19. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    I feel like seeing how people have reacted to my return, after one week of silence... Nah, I'm kidding. This was planned. A follow-up, if you will. The things I've done so far on that other site I've joined during the week of silence? Not so much... More on that below!

    You call this a treasure hunt? Wow, you're worse off than I thought. I mean, you... you actually need help with this!?! There's only ONE THING I could possibly be referring to! Just one!

    There's value there, too; granted, anything of value I've put here was given for reasons other than proving the validity of what you thought my side of this whole conflict was. What value could it be? Who knows? Gold? Gems? Priceless artifacts from long ago? No, it's you. Why would I say that? Why are you valuable? More importantly, who values you? I don't. But someone else might value you. And the ironic twist? While I'm paying attention to you, despite how petty and worthless you are to me, the one who should think you're valuable has swept you under the rug, hoping that you'll never, ever be seen by anyone, not even by themselves! Ah, symbolism... fun.

    (For the record, I'm still here for the same reasons I keep destroying any troll long after everyone else has left, because they've accepted that the troll is just never going to budge. But those reasons are for discussion elsewhere.)

    Why, indeed? Is it because, even though this site is a worthless internet fecal stain, there's value in cleaning it up, and removing the disease-ridden filth and stench? Is it because of the fact that Jadebrain is now dead, having been put out of his self-loathing misery (just like how Rokkon was executed for the purposes of public safety), and some temporary intern is using Jadebrain's corpse as a ventriloquist dummy in front of you people for entertainment (as instructed, according to Jadebrain's Last Will and Testament) while I try to find out who will take his place? Is it one of the many other reasons I've considered, and subsequently forgotten about, while typing this up? Who knows?

    Ah, but in the meantime, the new forum is much better than this one. They've got flaws there, too, and those flaws are quite visible, which is why, in my very first post there, I decided to ask for directions to somewhere else I should go instead. Unlike the forum here, however, there's no dogma. Members are allowed to question the site's policies, their fellow members, and the ideas commonly held there, and especially any flaws that might exist in any of the aforementioned things to be questioned, so that there can be efforts to fix those flaws; there are honest people over there, who are putting in the effort to do just that, and who are willing to acknowledge and consider criticism, at least when the criticism has demonstrable legitimacy. As it turns out, this goes a long way when trying to have a meaningful conversation; where I wanted out on post #1, by post #10 I've publicly apologized for any possibility that I might have wrongfully bothered someone, since my inhibitions are weakened by insomnia (which is hopefully an acute case thereof), and I've already PM'd some of my deepest, darkest secrets to one of the upstanding people there!

    That's a huge contrast to this site, where I've only ever apologized for one thing, because I have only had one thing I've done wrong here, and so I've only had one thing to apologize for (So where's all the other trouble coming from? Go "treasure hunting," and maybe you'll find out!). Seriously, John Fontes, that freakin' troll from Facebook, got at least twice the number of apologies I've given you guys, just because I've had twice the number of things to apologize for! And as for the information sharing, what have I given you? I've given you a few small traces of a hint, giving instructions that weren't nearly complete for solving a puzzle that none of you know about! The most I've shared of myself here was on that one thread I had posted here a few months ago, but of course, I was already telling a lot of people about that, anyway. It never worked out, by the way; we had no experience or anything like that, we were afraid of our families finding out, and neither of us really knew where any of it would lead, or if it would anywhere at all. Still, what are any of you going to do with this information about me? You aren't going to do anything! You can't do anything, because if you tried, you'd have to work with almost nothing at all! But that doesn't mean I've contributed nothing at all to the people here.
     
  20. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    It is the pettiness and worthlessness of this site that allows me to post here on a whimsical basis. Even when I began replying to the derailment of this thread, I could have easily made my posts by rolling some dice, and letting the dice determine what direction I was going to go into with my next post, each potential direction containing only a tiny fragment, merely a hint of my real position, and you all would have been none the wiser. Even without that element of randomness, however, none of you have even a tiny iota of my position. The "treasure" would have told you this by now, if you had put in any more effort to look for it than you had previously put into looking for something to refute. Everything I've done here, even since the moment I decided to ask for copyright advice on these forums, has been part of my own Xanatos Gambit, which is why I can win with anything I do here.

    1. Get copyright advice? Just what I wanted. I win.
    2. Prove my case (which I haven't even started to do here, because I know better than to do that here) and set the overall plan in motion early? That would be even more helpful than outcome #1. I win, and then eventually, everyone wins.
    3. Show the community of this petty and worthless site the error of their ways? That would allow Sciforums to be a place of scientific progress. Everyone wins.
    4. Everyone gets mad at me? I'd have become a thorn in the side of the community here, as punishment for the fact that you've turned Atheism into a religion and aborted everything you claim to stand for. You lose, and I win.

    I still have all the data needed to prove my position, spread out across Facebook, and unfortunately, some of that proof is in response to people who have since been banned by the pages those discussions were on. I'll have to see if there's a way to retrieve that data; it shouldn't be too hard to recreate it, but the tedium will be something else entirely! I already have approximately half the time I need to do all the things I'm doing. I haven't had any spare time to dedicate to any leisurely pursuits in months, and I don't even miss those days when I could just dedicate time to sit back and play computer games; in fact, I haven't even had time to fix the desktop computer I played those games on, since it got infected by those viruses I told you all about! Any leisurely pursuits I engage in now are just intermittent distractions to help keep my mind active while I go through some of the more dull things. Like right now: I'm posting here at my leisure to help wake myself up after having gotten up not too long ago!

    Also, I've got something else, a few new posts from Facebook, talking about whether there should be limits on free expression, as per the OP status (I say no, but then, there are other issues to consider, and I address some of those other issues in my replies to Comment-poster #1, or CP1 for short). I'll have to post it in another post, because it's long. The commentary that would have gone below it will be included in this post.

    [next post would have gone here]

    As of right now, there haven't been any further posts to this comment thread. Of course, this is to be expected, both in terms of how much time has passed and the extreme TL;DR inducing text. I find that, when you're addressing a position, claim, question, or whatever that someone else puts forth, the smaller the amount of relevant information is accounted for in the message that you are trying to address, the more detail you're going to have to provide when addressing the message. Of course, ignorant folks who post such messages with confidence (as per the Dunning-Kruger effect) will not be willing to go through all the information you give in addressing their posts, and they'll still maintain their confidence that they're right, having been unwilling to see what is being given them to prove their wrongness. You might be thinking "What an ironic statement, coming from this guy!" Of course, if you could think this with sincerity, you'd be forgetting everything you've refused to look at yourself.
     
  21. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    Next Post, Part 1 (sans second address of CP1, going in Next Post, part 2):

    CP1: "No limit outside of physical harm. Everyone is too worried about offending anyone. Its just restricting more freedoms"

    Me: "If you think physical harm is the only thing that needs limiting, think again. There are many ways to hurt people, and unlike physical violence, many of those ways can be subtle. Any charming psychopath can inflict any sort of harm from psychological torture to social and/or economic destruction, and get away with it scot-free; more often than not, the way they harm their victims is even more cruel than simply killing them. Since psychopaths can't be reasoned with, the only thing you can use against them is force, and in many cases, that force has to be physical. Since physical force is limited, these psychopaths can do as much damage as they want, and if anyone tries to stop them in the only way they can be stopped, that person gets in trouble. Restrictions like these don't prevent harm; all they prevent is justice, when the psychopaths adjust their methods.

    Now, if you were to look beyond the face value of helping and harming, and try to find a moral axiom that can account for both, you'd be on to something better. If you can define that axiom in a way that allows it to logically work, you'd have gone farther than almost every moral theorist out there. By then, though, a single, logically-working moral axiom that can account for everything shouldn't be too far off, and if you can figure out something like that, you'd be the second person in history to do so. Depending on how long it takes for me to finish compiling some things, you might even be credited as having proposed the first moral system that actually works!"

    CP1: "Ok I skimmed some if that. If your whole thing is sociopaths.. why punish 99% of society based off if the 1%? There is a reason they are called sociopaths they find ways legal or not..."

    CP2: "[...] we can't legislate to protect people from what some few sociopaths might do or say to hurt someone other than physically. Where would we draw the line as to what would be forbibben and who decides? All we can do is criminalize physical harm to people and property and provide a parallel civil judicial system to deal with gripes between parties."

    Me: "@ [CP1] and [CP2]: My allegiance is to the ideals I have adopted, including (but not limited to) objectivity, logic, reason, and the pursuit of progress, not to any group. My ideals may have led me to becoming an Atheist, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to challenge another Atheist for being wrong. If the idea you're using for deductive reasoning doesn't work, it's wrong. The fact that no moral idea works so far is the reason for which even the most reasonable members of the human race are still bickering over such things as the definitions of the most basic forms of morality (evidenced by the replies to this status update). You can deny it all you want, but this subject matters to you; that's why you're posting here, after all. Even those who think morality is entirely subjective will get upset when someone suggests anything different, and their whole idea is that there's nothing to get upset about! Now, then...

    @ [CP1]: [Second address of CP1 would have gone here]

    @ [CP2]:

    We can't legislate these things because apparently, I'm the only one who wants to try to figure out a moral system that actually works. If you need a parallel civil judicial system to handle "gripes," how will that system run? If there's no working system to determine right from wrong, then the only reasons upon which any judgment on right or wrong may be based would be either intuition (aka glorified guesses) or meaningless sentimental fluff. At that point, any laws you'd have are just a ruse to cover up the fact that no one has any idea of what they're doing, why they're doing it, or how to tell if they've succeeded (see my first post replying to [CP1] for a very brief description of what actually would work).

    This problem already exists in real life, which is why legal systems today are actually not "systems," but rather, a "codices," just lists of axioms, each defining how to deal with exactly one kind of situation (and the list will never cover everything, according to Gödel's incompleteness theorems). There's no system, because there are no axioms that can account for, and appropriately deal with, multiple situations (even "aggravated" crime laws are just more axioms piled up on top of others). Of course, you're saying "no legislation," in which case, there would be no laws anyway..."
     
  22. Jadebrain_Prime Atheist now Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    277
    "Perhaps you should make a better attempt to read what I've written. Under your suggestion, psychopaths can get away with anything as long as they don't physically harm people. This is exactly the same mentality with which the "Zero Tolerance" policies in American primary schools fail to solve anything, and you want society as a whole to adopt this idea? Do you *think?* No, you don't. If you did, you'd already know the following:

    As long as there's no physical violence, if a psychopath tortures someone, that person is completely at the psychopath's mercy. Day in, day out, the psychopath has no greater joy than to watch innocents feel pain. Do you think it's nothing? They will poke and prod until it becomes something. They will find your weakness before you even know you have any weaknesses, and whatever that weakness that may be, they will strike at it, and they won't stop until you are broken.

    You can't do anything about it. File a complaint? Restraining order? Are you kidding me? They're not doing anything wrong. Unless they are physically harming you, you have no right to do anything but try to *reason* with someone who can't be reasoned with. If you try, you get laughed at, and then the psychopath targets you even harder.

    The psychopath harasses you. They don't leave you alone. They intrude into every facet of your life. You start avoiding places where you think the psychopath will be, but that psychopath is a crafty one, and suddenly, those places where you thought you could be safe aren't safe at all. You've got nowhere to hide. You get emails, text messages, phone calls, messages delivered to you by other people, from the psychopath. Your coworkers, your acquaintances, total strangers, all turn against you, because the psychopath is charming, too - how else could the psychopath give you so much pain without physically hurting you?

    You get worn out. You suffer. Your work suffers, and you lose your job. You become afraid to leave the house, or even step in front of an open window, because the psychopath could be anywhere. Your friends and family suffer, first because they see you suffering, then because you get hostile with them, because you're losing your damn mind! Then, they turn on you, too. That person is doing nothing to you, they say! You're going crazy over an innocent person doing nothing, they say! You can't get angry, because then you're getting dangerously close to evil violence, they say! They don't see what the psychopath does to you, or if they do, they don't care, because they can see that you are in pain, but they cannot see why, no matter how obvious the answer is, because the answer is inconvenient for them.

    Why isn't anyone stopping that psychopath? They are making your entire life miserable, and they're only doing so because they enjoy watching you feel pain! Someone's gotta do something. If no one else will do anything, then it's gotta be you. Only you can free yourself from this prison. You know the psychopath can't be reasoned with, so you do the one thing that will ever work. You pack a weapon, whatever that may be, and you go to where the psychopath waits. And when the psychopath sees you approach, with the crazy look in your eyes, and your hand reaching for whatever weapon you brought with you?

    "HELP! POLICE! VIOLENCE!" The psychopath knew exactly what was going to happen. The psychopath knows exactly what's allowed by society, and what isn't, and the psychopath knows that if you are tormented enough, you will resort to something that society does not allow, which is why he's hanging out in plain sight of some law enforcers. The psychopath will never be satisfied with how much your life has already been ruined. As you get into the police car, you try explaining to the police that the person you were approaching with a weapon was a psychopath who tortured you, and how the psychopath deserves to die, the officers call you a sick bastard for wanting to harm that person, and they're sick of having to stop so many like yourself from attacking that same innocent person.

    You hear these words resonate in your mind, and while the officers are busy putting you in cuffs and not paying attention, you manage to catch a glance at the psychopath, pointing to a picture of your family and mouthing "They're next" with a sadistic grin. By then, you can't say anything; you can only start crying as you realize that you're not the first person to be destroyed by the psychopath, and you won't be the last. The entire legal system, whether via malevolence or just pure incompetence, has given manipulative psychopaths complete freedom to hurt whoever they want, and will only punish the victims even further.

    Even within your system, there are other things you could have done. None of them would be any better, though. For example, you could have lived in denial of your pain, well past the point described above. You'd just let it grow, without allowing yourself to admit that anything's happening, until your mind shatters under the pressure. By then, you don't even have the capacity for rational thought necessary to tell that you've lost any capacity for rational thought, and then there's nothing stopping your irrational, tortured self from going on a rampage and killing people at random, and you can't even tell that what you'd be doing then is any different from what you normally do.

    Or, you could have removed yourself from the situation, by packing up everything you have and moving to a new home. You could have gone through all of that expense and work, just leaving the whole area and declaring wherever that was to be uninhabitable, because of one psychopath. Is that a reasonable reaction? Should everyone do the same, once they start becoming victims of the psychopath? If so, what's to stop the psychopath from moving themselves, and making a new home where their former victims thought they could run off to and hide? Furthermore, how do you know there aren't any psychopaths in the place where you're making your new home?

    Does this sound crazy to you? If it does, then you have obviously never seen a "Zero Tolerance" policy in effect in an American primary school. Things of this sort happen all the time in such places, where the presence of psychopathic children tears down your estimates of how mow many people are psychopaths, and if psychopathic children can figure out how to game the system like this, then psychopathic adults will have absolutely no difficulty in doing the same thing if society as a whole adopts its own "Zero Tolerance" policy, like you're suggesting. And yet, there are already elements of this system in place today, and the innocent are already suffering without any hope for relief."
     
  23. Kristoffer Giant Hyrax Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,364
    This needed repeating.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page