Absolutely
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Wednesday, September 1, 2010 18:48
VIEWED: 2082
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Hello,
"You can't like someone, or appreciate any of their ideas, unless they agree with you 100%."
This is a sentiment I see continuously on this forum, and it is dismaying. In fact, it may be emblemic of a wide problem plaguing our nation. (I can't speak for the rest of the world, having no frame of reference.)
Tolerance itself is sometimes seen as a dirty word, as though it means dining with the devil.
How did we become addicted to absoluteness?
--Anthony
Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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I dispute that black-and-white thinking, of which I am a proud practicioner, is a modern development. It is human nature to want things to be black as pitch, or shine like gold.
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Tolerance leads to compromise and compromise leads to failure. The left says we want to spend a gazillion dollars on worthless BS and reasonable RINOs say why don't we compromise and only spend a trillion on worthless BS and we end up spending a thousand times more than we should. The time for compromise is over, it's my way or the highway bitch.
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(Pretend I'm the spelling fairy, since I'm not cool enough to have been given the spelling fairy log-on info. Yet somehow I have now become the spelling fairy entering the thread in a bitchy mood....)
Quote:Hmm, you might have a point. That sort of thing does seem to happen... Except look at what you did there: spelled it "emblemic." That's disturbing to me, that you could be so wrong. Any poster who's fool enough to misspell emblematic obviously has no place pondering weighty matters of tolerance/intolerance. I have to conclude that the entire point of your post, no matter that some parts of it seemed to be all right at first, is also absolute nonsensical hoo-y. You are a misspelling ingrate, exactly the kind of devil I won't be dining with. EVER.
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,
"You can't like someone, or appreciate any of their ideas, unless they agree with you 100%."
This is a sentiment I see continuously on this forum, and it is dismaying. In fact, it may be emblemic of a wide problem plaguing our nation. (I can't speak for the rest of the world, having no frame of reference.)
Tolerance itself is sometimes seen as a dirty word, as though it means dining with the devil.
How did we become addicted to absoluteness?
What? What'd you say? That I'm addcited to something? And something else - that I'm hypocritical?
Whatever. I don't see it. You're just bitter and pissed because you know I'm right.
-----------------------------------------------
hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left
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Hello,
Thank you for pointing out the spelling error.
--Anthony
Due to the use of Naomi 3.3.2 Beta web filtering, the following people may need to private-message me if they wish to contact me: Auraptor, Kaneman, Piratenews. I apologize for the inconvenience.
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You're always so rational and polite, Anthony. I don't know if anyone's ever given you a gold star for that, but I think you deserve one.
[/sig]
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,
Thank you for pointing out the spelling error.
--Anthony
Anthony, you are forgiven. **pixie dust and good spelling blessings on you**
Mal4prez, however, earns only a frown.
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I respect everyone's right to their own opinion, but that does not mean I have to respect that opinion. But I will listen to it.
This reminds me of something I wrote in one of my articles on Robert Heinlein - http://templetongate.net/apologia.htm
Quote:
In The Robert Heinlein Interview by J. Neil Schulman, RAH mentioned that he enjoyed reading works by others with whom he did not agree since it was impossible to learn anything if you restrict yourself to reading only those with whom you do agree. This statement sums up nicely why I can disagree with some of RAH's specific opinions and yet still enjoy reading him for the abundance of life knowledge he imparts in his stories. In much the same way, I "enjoy" listening to Rush Limbaugh, as his opinions generally help me focus on my own, which are usually diametrically the opposite.
Hopefully I spelled everything correctly.
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Because our whole society and educational system grinds that kind of thinking into peoples brains right from the cradle.
Yes/No, married/single, black/white, rich/poor, have/havenot, republican/democrat, on/off...
And on and on the drone of it all, 24-7-365.
Over time, this becomes more extreme, and socially/educationally it's entirely deliberate to create artificial divisions among the masses for them to war with each other over, keeping them busy and distracted (shit, look at that NYC Community Center mess, TELL me that isn't both artificial and deliberate?) so that they are never any threat politically or physically to the powers that be, prison social control 101, applied to the population from above the moment they enter society whatever, and applied very directly as soon as they enter the educational system.
A lotta folk, they don't KNOW nothin else, you see ?
And without any exposure or awareness of other modes of thought, once you get past the critical ages where someones thought process and personality calcify - forget it, the effort required to change it outside of a completely catastrophic, life-altering event becomes exponentionally harder to where it's quickly all but pointless.
You know the old joke, a liberal is a conservative who just got arrested (Hey Rush? 
) - but it's true when folks who've railed against tolerance all their life suddenly find themselves against the wall they practically start begging for it, but that is always as temporary as their crisis is and rather than admit being wrong (again, not workable within the mindset) they blame others, claim moment of weakness and bring out the flamethrower even harder...
This is *WHY* I kick them, stomp them, when they're down - we've had that discussion before, remember, I would never have let Goetz off that bridge alive, mind you.
Another part of it is just how many parents foolishly ride herd over their kids to prevent "contact with the enemy", making sure they are NOT exposed to other cultures and mindsets, for social, political, or religious reasons - but primarily as a control over the kids values, without of course any thought that kids might have their own values in opposition to the parents, but THAT problem is a whole nother ball of wax and for another time.
Without any exposure to other mindsets, cultures, and such - outside of the constant demonisation by their parents all the adult-authority figures they're ALLOWED to associate with, all the friends they're ALLOWED to have - how the fuck is a kid ever gonna learn anything BUT that black and white thought model ?
And once that programmed challenge/response pattern is ingrained into their psyche, good fuckin LUCK getting it out - the only way I have ever seen it really, truly broken is generally traumatic as hell, even if the trauma in question had nothing to do with it, it still "knocks all the cards off the table" in a mental/emotional sense, you see ?
I watched my niece have a breakdown cause of that, when she realized everyone who ever said they cared about her was LYING to her, intentionally and with malice aforethought, out of ignorance or a desire to control her life in ways they had no right to - just imagine what it could do to YOUR reality if, for example, you found one point of PirateNews endless ranting to be utterly correct in every single detail, and there you stand in abject horror, when the "Crazy" is making more sense than ANYONE YOU'VE EVER KNOWN ?
And worse, they start making more sense than the people you've known all your life...
(My family kinda regards me in a PN kinda way, cause I don't hold with their bitter racism, psychotic religion, hard-right politics, or the idea that kids are born evil and need to be socialized by force.)
For myself, I never had to "run off the rails" cause I was never really ON them, the only one who mighta tried that, I guess did try that, caught a stab wound for his trouble and headed for the door...
Funny to think of it as a light switch, too - since as a kid I had a three-position lamp in my r
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Quoted from another thread
===========================
Quote:
The problem with a lot of attempts to discuss or debate anything, is the prevalence of a type of conditioning I call Loopthink.
You see, when they're "in the loop", it really is pointless to even try logic, reason and debate, because no cognitive thought is actually occuring.
Loopthink is a set of conditioned reflex responses that work in a fashion similar to a BASIC programs GOSUB routine loop, in how they bypass the actual thought process to a more or less pre-programmed subroutine.
Usually triggered by a word, phrase or thought-concept.
And therein lies the problem, any actual cognitive process is mostly bypassed by that loop you see, and it takes a real heavy spike to knock that sideways off the rails, which is one reason I tend to get explosively nasty to someone who's gone into loopthink, cause it's the only way to knock them off the rails and make them THINK, sort of like a BREAK key.
Worse, this crap is addictive cause it tends to be trained in early by the parents and reinforced by local school/community, to the point where completing the loop kicks off that good ole dopeamine reward, just like a doggy feels happy once you've trained em to do tricks and they pull one off - the constant repetition and praise cycle creates that reflex.
That's been used in more ugly ways too, the LEAP program was about conditioning that cycle for violent action, which included the stimulating rush of adrenals and suchlike on top of the repetition and reward sequencing.
Thing is, it's not a railroad so much as a path of least resistance, like a rut the thought patterns fall into, even in the face of overwhelming evidence or logic, they'll run that way cause, again, it's a conditioned reflex, and no damn accident either.
It's possible to run against it, but that's a lot like breaking a drug addiction or cult programming in that firstoff, going "off the rails" is scary and uncomfortable for them, AND will include the ridicule and probably retaliation of most of their social circle on top of it, and the lure is very powerful - especially when they will seek out reprogramming via immersion in the message of whatever conditioner they favor (talk radio, a certain talking head, church, etc) in a bizarre form of confirmation bias to avoid ever having to face a truth that is more ugly than the fear and discomfort and alienation....
That they've built their whole existence on lies.
Most folk, even fairly strong of will, hit that point and make a rapid U-turn and dive right back onto the rails as fast as they can, they can't hack it - it's been said that one of the cruelest things you can do to a person is destroy their illusions, and maybe that is so...
But when those illusions turn them into monsters, or supporters of monsters, that's a bridge too far, unacceptable, unforgiveable.
And of course, the further down THAT road they go, the harder turning back becomes because how can a person possibly live with the knowledge of such responsibility for inflicting horror on thier fellow man, and at the time ENJOYING every second of it ?
And so they cling to the illusion, no matter how tattered and broken it becomes - it's the perfect self-perpetuating trap, because not only do they cling to that conditioning, they inflict in upon their children.
And if it fails to take, or stick - yes, they will even turn on and begin to hate thier own kids, which is, at the root of it, how at least a quarter of those kids in the hellcamps wound up there.
Nor is it any one ideology, religion, political faction or what have you that uses this trickery, since children are conditioned TO accept it in grade school in order to make them easy to manipulate - John Taylor Gatto has tons of very well-referenced information on that, and that it was and has always been, completely intentional.
But it occured before that, since it was the concept and foundation of most religion, the ability to teach people to bypass rational thought with conditioned thought-loop respoNOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME