bastion

projecting personal dialogue into others doesn't make you a messiah

Why would I think it does? do you not see that you are projecting that?

If someone doesn’t like what you’re doing to them, and you know it’s making them uncomfortable and you even go as far as to tout it to shame them and give it an excuse “oh they don’t like having their thoughts said out loud”, you are doing what an abuser does. Minimize their victims. You don’t even allow them to defend themselves. This is abusive behaviour.

I don't think you're fighting me here. ..and I'm not interested in fighting you. I am not doing or saying what you think I am, and you have clearly placed me in the role of your abuser. I'm uninterested. ..and if that is something you consider abusive, that's on you.

Abusers also try to turn tables and call themselves a victim at the moment someone calls out their abusive behavior.

I am not claiming to be a victim, and I am uninterested in victimizing others (though I am interested in patterns of behavior in general, including trauma loops). My goal here is to converse and discuss interesting concepts.

I still think that what I actually said stands, regardless of your interpretation, which I disagree with.

Survival and reproduction aren't the purpose, they are simply structural. Perhaps, simply as experiences, they could be of the purpose.

To grow, experience, and create.

This life, that means exploring the manifold between spiritual and physical reality, and making cool shit happen, as well as reconciling 'paradoxes'. To play with the rules. To explore the connection of love and power. To face fears.

Earlier: similar, but with more fears to face.

..or the metanareative can be the structure of the story itself.

Here's a few frequent ones (Kurt Vonnegut for more):

Someone ran into a set of problems and then solved them.

Some people met, overcame some stuff and then ended up together.

Things were bad and got better.

Things were bad and got worse.

A specific thing needed to be done and someone did it.

yep. more things:

the "current meta" of a game is the currently winning stream of thought about how to play the game.

metacognition is thinking about how and why you think the way you do

And what might those preparations look like?

All preparations for disaster look like a cost-benefit analysis and reasonable actions taken to mitigate those disasters. Sometimes, that means relying on collective tools - laws, incentives, etc., which can be easier sometimes, if it works. Other times, it's internal planning, or physical training, or avoidance of problematic situations.

Another big aspect of preparation that people can do is genuinely coming to terms with the existence of whatever particular problem they're facing. "Radical acceptance", so to speak, though one needs to know the difference between accepting and submitting. When you can't accept something, you end up blindsided by it, shocked and appalled that it can happen to you, or that humans can't just talk it through, or whatever. When you can, you generally see it coming a ways away, and can address it before it becomes an issue for you, instead of thinking "I shouldn't have to deal with this," or "but humanity is better than that, and we can just talk it through."

But, that kind of preparation takes a lot of world-view shifting, and skill-building in processing fears, and for people who don't really have evidence of the benefit, it's hard to pay the cost in time and effort on personal growth in that area. C'est la vie.

A vaccine is never 100% effective. [...]

Indeed. However, there must be a line for what a collective can or cannot reasonably impose on an individual. And, whether you like it or not, the physical body is a real boundary, and granting a collective governing body power over what you put into or take out of your own body is a larger issue than vaccination, and people will utilize that power against you, not just for you.

This is true enough that as soon as the Democrats started pushing for mandatory vaccinations during covid, I knew and stated that the cost would be abortion. ..and that's exactly what was lost, in many states.

Any power you give the government, will be used all of the ways it can be used, depending on the party in power and the moral fads that the culture goes through - and as you can see with trump and the underlying expressions going on there, these fads aren't always going to be in your favor.

Although there are some areas that are morally more stable, any area that doesn't have fairly universal support will go through this dynamic of flipping what side gets to utilize that power, and in what way it is used.

Case in point:

The Republicans centralized power in the presidency with the USA Patriot act. The Democrats, in power when it expired, renewed it, rather than letting it drop, or (even better) making an act to prevent that centralization of power. Obama utilized that power to great effect, including to fulfill the reason for it's temporary existence. ..and then he renewed it, when it was no longer needed, and after it had expired, because of lack of ability to consider that maybe power isn't always a good thing, and sometimes you need to let go for things to work right.

..and the dems can't keep hold of that power. ..and now that power is Trump's and the reps in general, until their fire burns out.

As a side note: The irony is that maybe Trump, if he thinks the dems will win, might nerf presidential powers out of spite - which would be great, if it sticks.

Yeah.. ..I really love some of the core Swedish ideals, and it's sad to see this happening. I really hope that Sweden is able to generate an effective response to the incoming ideologies without sacrificing their own ideals.

When people get too soft, times get hard (bullies win when people are too soft). A genuine balance needs to be struck, which requires a lot of personal processing by many people, as well as time for the resultant answers to spread through the culture. Sweden may need to limit immigration in the mean time to give time for that to occur.

this was always the argument in the US when taking with people regarding all the cool things Sweden instituted - "but they are culturally contiguous, and that's what makes it work."

..in a melting pot, you have to account for the existence of all these extreme viewpoints, and have some kind of response. Those things that aren't accounted for simply spill out into the populous, and become everyone's problem.

I love this.

Asserting that peoples behaviors are intrinsically violent can also be a violent means of communication. Not that are shouldn't respond to problematic behaviors - and there are circumstances that are as you describe.

No, you didn't say it was always violent, but for a pattern of thinking and feeling that is so common, so useful, and so beneficial in so many ways, I don't think there wholesale focus on how bad it is is warranted.

Obviously, as with most mentalities, there are benefits and detriments to it. But there are a lot of people that perform model synchronization by verifying the predictive capacity of the model they hold (whether or not they think of that progress consciously). It's a means of getting on the same page. Sometimes it's lovey-dovey. Sometimes it's practical. Sometimes it's controlling and problematic. But, by no means is it always, or even generally, violent.

Any empath who has familiarity enough with it will acknowledge that, like any other thing you see externally, mistakes can be made. With empathy, those can go pretty deep, too.

That said, I'd no more discard empathy than I would vision, and I'm not fool enough to discard a sense just because I'm not always right about how I interpret it.

you're not wrong.