I’m saying we should take sociopathic tendencies a bit more seriously and address them directly with trained professionals rather than waiting for them to cause damage. That would require judging people’s character.

This is where we agree. If every narcissist, sociopath, psychopath, pedophile, etc could be open about their tendencies and receive specialized assistance and accommodation before they commit a crime due to mismanaged illness it would be ideal. The only thing I disagree about is that these are not representations of internal character but are illnesses. For example, the pedophile who gets accommodation and doesn’t go near children is doing less evil and probably has a better character than a preacher who uses his position to abuse young boys because he likes the feeling of power but isn’t a pedophile (this happens).

I have indeed been the innocent victim of narcissistic abuse. It would indeed have been much better if my parents worked through their trauma before me or during my childhood rather than never. Narcissistic tendencies weren’t considered dangerous when they were young though, as evidenced by almost the entire boomer generation. If we were living in stronger communities cooperating with one another instead of competing, I think those narcissistic tendencies either never would have existed to begin with or would have been recognized and counterbalanced by other community members. I do not think I would have been better off if they were punished, but it’s likely it would have made my situation worse. At this point I’m more concerned with my own well-being than getting retribution.

I think evil behavior should be denounced and everyone should be encouraged in every way on every level to do good rather than evil to one another. I want to be clear that I am expressing that no one has the excuse of their poor internal nature to do evil things. Everyone is capable of both good and evil and everyone regardless of their condition is fully responsible for their behavior. There’s no obfuscating evil in my arguments. I am arguing that the social structure supporting instead of preventing and/or condemning these evil behaviors is the problem rather than some people being good and others being evil.

Yes, our system is cutrently built for that. An optimal system wouldn’t allow for it. We have obviously not discovered the optimal system yet but we can identify the fundamental issues of our present systems. Prison is another fundamentally flawed system which causes a lot of its own problems. I would prefer a victim focused restorative model to imprisoning groups of people based on diagnostic critera written by people who think you need to imprison groups of people based on diagnostic critera.

Fortunately in your example, the general can still serve the general as anti-social personality disorders will always be in the minority especially if that society functions properly for the general welfare of its people. As for doing it naturally, we naturally live in hunter-gatherer bands. Society is fully socially constructed and requires all of us to resist many aspects of our natures for it to function in a way that benefits us.

What I am arguing for is that these individuals are honestly acknowledged for their tendencies and deficits so that they can get the help they need while serving in a capacity which limits their ability to harm others due to their negligence and benefits others by utilizing their strengths. A psychopath can understand that it is in their self-interest to live in a stable friendly society. Honestly I don’t personally know to integrate a full-blown narcissist, but I expect it’s possible. I don’t think it’s possible or advisable to make any effort to remove all psychopaths and narcissists from society since eugenic thinking is responsible for many of the worst atrocities in human history.

Being a narcissistic psychopath is a circumstance, not an expression of internal evil. Narcissistic psychopaths are also capable of doing the right things for the right reasons as well as for the wrong reasons. The reason I advocate against guessing people’s internal morality is mainly practical for my own relationships, but also is to encourage people to fix systemic problems instead of pretending some malicious force of evil is omnipresently working against the interests of mankind as many religious people believe. In a better system, narcissistic psychopaths could get what they want without harming others for their ends.

In what way?

I think it’s dangerous to consider anyone to be a fundamentally good person or a fundamentally bad person. It’s impossible to know what someone is internally and I am not a believer in determinism. Every person is complex and capable of good and evil acts depending on their circumstances.

Especially when you live in a cutthroat competitive culture in which what little to win is jealously guarded by narcissistic psychopaths, many people understand at least on some level that public behavior is a performance intended to reap rewards rather than an honest presentation of oneself. Good and evil is inapplicable here. Our system is amoral, and we human animals are just going to do what we consider to be a good idea at a time and only a few of us really consider the ethics of what we’re going to do before we do it, and the few of us capable of that only do it some of the time.

Someone can do the right thing for the right reasons, the right thing for the wrong reasons, the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the wrong things for the wrong reasons. I can never know their internal part, just base my expectations on how their behavior effects me and others. I wouldn’t trust anyone until I consider them to be trustworthy, though I can’t expect to always be right about that either.

I went to college and learned that not only was pretty much everything I was raised to believe as a young conservative a lie, but they were obvious lies that didn’t bear any scrutiny whatsoever. I learned everything that made me really uncomfortable when I was young was because I was surrounded by people living their entire lives in bad faith while I was genuinely curious about investigating things and learning why people thought what they did. The other cultists recognized I did not belong in the cult before I did, though my parents still emphatically try to get me to reintegrate because they are absolutely certain that their evidence-free belief system is in my best interests. I was never really integrated in the first place so I didn’t lose much other than a lot of very evil shit.

This is very interesting to me because I wanted to keep going after BoTW ended. ToTK is like a full game sized DLC with all new gameplay elements, so it was exactly what I wanted. It’s kind of like an indulgent victory lap showing off all the cool stuff the engine can do with some new tools to play with. I will say that this is enough for me. Really hoping they do something completely original again.

It’s really easy to convince a huge number of poor people that the elites are the only ones defending them from poor people they aren’t personally familiar with. This trick has worked for 10,000 years at least.

I relate to this heavily, especially what seems like your guilt about it which I relate to the most.

In my case I was raised in an emotionally neglectful environment which suppresses the generation of the self during childhood. As a result, I learned (unconsciously) that I personally have no inherent value, so my value to the human race was tied exactly to my “objective” provable contribution to it. If I could demonstrate my value by helping others, then perhaps one day I would earn the love from somewhere that I didn’t receive from my thoroughly traumatized parents.

There are a few problems with this trauma logic. First, it doesn’t work. People appreciate good deeds, but love and appreciation come from compatibility and trust which I learned that I don’t actually have to work toward to earn. I found that people whose relationship was based on my service to them (like I was raised to seek) aren’t actually connected to me in any way. Second, it is disturbing to live this way because it feels as dishonest as it is. It felt like I was tricking people because I actually was presenting to everyone an image which was cultivated for personal safety as a child rather than for actual connection. I could sense (due to my heightened awareness of other’s emotional states, again, for childhood safety) that others knew I wasn’t being completely genuine and could never truly connect with me. Finally, this approach generates self hatred. Why would I have to hide my true self from the world if my true self wasn’t awful and horrendous? I can tell you I have had thoughts so disturbing I would never commit them to the written word. I thought that was my true self that I had to constantly work against with my paragon persona. As I’ve been getting away from co-dependent and people pleasing behaviors and expressing myself more genuinely, those thoughts that came from me feeling isolated and cornered have lessened. Those thoughts were and are nothing more than the consequence of trauma, not my true self.

I have no idea whether you would relate to any of the above. But I can say that people don’t get to the point where you are and where I have been multiple times in my life without trauma being involved. Trauma fucks you up, makes you feel guilty, and makes you want to isolate. This makes it tricky to find others who are as fucked up by trauma as you are. I have by some fortune found a few of them. It can be incredibly cathartic to talk to other traumatized people and joke about things that the rest of the world would never willingly even think about. It also gave me some perspective. I always assumed my childhood experiences weren’t that bad because my parents always compared what they did to me to what their parents did to them which was even to a child an obviously far worse. By sharing with others what I experienced, I’ve learned that it was actually very bad, I’m not over-reacting, and it makes complete sense that I would come out the other end traumatized with the feeling that living life is a constant struggle which I would be relieved to be absolved of.

As far as systemic issues, what we’re living through now is more typical of the human experience than what our parents experienced. The world is a vastly intricate web of beauty and horrors. We have the advantage and disadvantage of not flinching at the horrors and taking them completely on. This gives us a better perspective of the world’s problems, many of which are frustratingly fixable, but also gives us the consequence which everyone else intuitively avoids. I would never suggest to anyone to bury their head in the sand, only to suggest that there is a greater reality intermixed with and beyond the horrors.

I watched a video of dozens of Palestinians joyfully dancing and celebrating with their friends and family during the height of the genocide. I can’t forget about it because even through they were living through one of the worst things which can be inflicted on a group of people, they understood that joy and community was what they were preserving and could help them all through. I’ve personally never had that, hence my solution to the problems of the world being similar to your solution. Escape them since there’s not much to lose anyway. That’s pretty sick that you and I would ever think that way and the circumstances which caused that are beyond unfair.

I’m far from out of the woods myself, but exposing the parts of myself which I’ve always been ashamed of to people who understand what we went through has hinted to me that some kind of reclamation of my right as a human being is possible. If no one has ever told you, Pete Hahnloser, you deserve to experience some measure of joy and comfort in this life and you deserve to believe that you deserve it and can have it. I’ve never had faith of been very hopeful in my life, and those things have always felt foolish to me, but I’m starting to understand why those things are important for most people. I hope you can find some comfort, whatever you decide.

Coca Cola is an old company with a long and dark history. If they appear reasonable, it’s only because they’ve used the massive weight of their resources to create an international marketing campaign over decades to make themselves appear benign and refreshing.

The liberal media wants you to think that the two volumes of liquid are equal using their woke science, but if you use your common sense, you can clearly see that the narrow tube is filled higher and therefore contains more liquid. There is nothing wrong with the economy, real Americans just need to use narrower glasses. Checkmate, leftists. /s

Cutting out the artist middleman in their money-laundering scheme. What a joke.

Odd phrasing in the title. Of course they can. They can do anything. They understand that the real question is what anyone is going to do about it when they break the law.

Microsoft likely considers this to be a feature rather than a bug. Another avenue for brainwashing credulous people is wide open.

Ironic

Indiscriminate is the correct word. They were detonated all at the same time regardless of where their targets location at the time. Civilians were killed, including children.

The indiscriminate detonations killed many civilians including children.

In my interpretation, the Democrats chose supporting genocide and therefore maintaining the funding for all elections in the future in our quid pro quo system rather than to end the genocide and win the presidency but have most of the plutocracy yank their funding for future elections. Ultimately, it was the result of a long term strategy by our Capitalist class to capture the government for financial purposes which culminated in 2010 with the Citizen’s United decision. Since then, the behavior of our elected leaders correlates directly with funder interests and not at all with polling data from constituents.

That Democracy can be an effective check on Capitalism. Liberalism is my favorite fairy tale. If all the propaganda I was fed as a kid in the 90s was actually true, I’d be in paradise.