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Posted on 01/01/2012 5:02:18 PM PST by grey_whiskers
One of the things that is fun about forums such as Free Republic is the sheer volume and scale of topics discussed. Everything from discussions of GOP primary races (come BACK, Sarah!) to speculations on the Middle East, from Kim Jong-un to fitness resolutions for the New Year, from Naughty Teacher threads to black helicopter speculations. If the Internet is a microcosm of the real world, then Free Republic is a microcosm of the internet. And all helpfully sorted by keyword, date, and author in order to make drinking from the fire hose easier.
But of course, not is all fun and games. Free Republic bills itself as “the world’s premier conservative internet forum.” And as such, it is a welcome place to hang out and talk with like-minded people, away from the “rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, sh*t-kickers and Methodists”
found on the rest of the internet. Unfortunately, that means that all kinds of people, from Paultards to Mitt-bots, from DU infiltrators to atheist crusaders (a little ironic, that), *all* consider it their dishonor-bound duty to try to worm into FR unnoticed or at least post here, to “set the record straight”. Free Republic has developed its own defense against such, the famed Viking Kitties and their famous ZOT!
And why is there the necessity for the ZOT? Are we not broad-minded enough, intelligent enough, magnanimous enough, tolerant enough to allow the existence of contrary or dissenting viewpoints? Sure. But that’s what the rest of the Internet is for. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, the purpose of an open mind, like that of an open mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. Or, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, “I am balance.” Conservatives need a place to go to recharge without constantly being ridiculed, calumnied, mocked, and shouted down by main force.
So what happens? The voices of “tolerance” are so offended by the existence of an oasis for conservatives (and, what’s worse, most of them are Christianists as well -- of all the nerve!) that they seek to plant a flag for reason (as they proclaim it) right here on FR. Which leads to noteworthy fireworks when they try to do so, as many of the ideas which they hold to be axiomatic, are marked as heresies here on this site. As Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) wrote, “everybody is someone else’s weirdo.”
But how is that that people identify someone else as a weirdo? After all, with so many different subjects around, and different opinions available on each subject, conservatism is not nearly as monolithic as liberals and atheists assume (indeed, there are some conservative atheist, some of them even have remained unzotted on FR for years). May I suggest, for the purposes of insight, that we borrow a page from statistics, and in particular, from analytical chemistry? This is not meant to be a rigorous discussion, only a semi-humorous one to get the creative juices flowing. Say hello to my little friend, Student’s t-test.
Despite the name, and its use in classes, “Student’s T-test” was originally developed by W.S. Gosset, who went by the fictitious name “Student” and worked for the Guinness brewery. Come to think of it, maybe that had something to do with the name he chose :-) Student’s t-test is used when comparing two small sets of data, to decide whether differences in the data sets are due to chance, or are “significant” (that is, whether or not, the data sets “really are” different -- meaning, that is, 95% of the time, or 99% of the time, or whatever -- the differences in the data sets cannot have come about due to random differences). The idea is conceptually simple. Everyone has heard of a “bell curve” to describe data. The t-test is used to compare, not theoretical bell curves, but sets of experimental data, which have ranges of values instead of infinitely long tails. By looking at the mean of each data set, as well as the range of values of each data set, one can determine whether the two data sets are ‘most likely’ measurements of the same thing or not.
That’s fine, you ask, and how exactly does this relate to websites or social interactions therein? Consider someone’s political views as a set of data points, with the extent of “liberalness” or “conservativeness” for each topic being spread along the X-axis, and the *count* of topics of which a person is liberal or conservative to that extent as the height above the axis. If you plot out a person’s political views in this fashion, you will trace out a curve. It might be a symmetric bell curve, it might be somewhat asymmetric, it might even exhibit kurtosis. But in general, you will be able to get a feel for how a person “stacks up,” left or right, by talking to them.
And so it is on discussion groups, or in forums such as FR. Typically most of the posters in a self-identified, semi-autonomous site such as FR would, if their “political bell curves” were plotted, would be somewhat similar: a significant difference between two people could come about if either the overall shape of their bell curve were different, or if they had a particular outlier on a important topic, on which they differed *greatly* from someone otherwise similar. In either case, other people talking to the person would begin to feel that “something is amiss here”: something which bears an analogy to statistical sampling and comparison. And if the difference is significant enough, the person is outed as a TROLL.
“Everybody is someone else’s weirdo.”
Cheers!
I thought you were asking me for some sort of clarification of the nature of empathy and how to recognize it. Or something along those lines.
Interesting thread bump. Thank you for the education, BB. I learned something new today.
Amen, and AMEN to that, dearest sister in Christ!
Man is not God; he is the Image of God.... (Assuming he lives up to his "best lights.")
With you, with my whole heart, I affirm:
God's Name is I AM, YHwH (He IS), Alpha and Omega, the Creator, El Shaddai (God Almighty)!Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ, for your kind words of support, and the marvelous links!
Okay. We can go with that.
We can start by asking what "empathy" means. Merriam-Webster defines it as
1: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with itOn this basis, would you say that cats have a capacity for empathy?
2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this
It seems both our last replies crossed in the mail. I'll take a breather till such time as we can catch up again.
Most animals do not seem to demonstrate empathy, no. And a very large number of people don’t either.
Yes. I've noticed that too.
bettyboop: "Yes. I've noticed that too."
"...If human beings were basically good, it wouldn't be necessary to have an injunction against murder. In fact, it is the last thing we would need. People would, as a matter of course, realize how infinitely precious their own life is, and then, through a natural process of empathy, understand that everyone else's life is equally precious, and that would be that. Murder would be inconceivable because it would represent the ultimate injustice: the theft of something of infinite value which can never be replaced. .....
"Ironically, leftist nihilists rarely cite the Ten Commandments, but you will often hear them cite "thou shalt not kill" in support of their nihilist policies. Interesting that they misinterpret the one commandment of which they approve.
"And the reason they misinterpret this particular commandment is that it dovetails nicely with their deeply nihilistic and pacifist tendencies. For when you conflate murder and killing, you do two things: first, you minimize and even trivialize the horror of murder -- very similar to feminists who trivialize the horror of rape by equating it with any sex a woman regrets on the following day. But secondly, you convert the use of lethal violence against evil, which is a moral necessity, into something bad. Once again, you have overturned the moral order of the world. ......
"Most soul murders are undoubtedly committed by those who are already so spiritually damaged as to be functionally dead. ...... created when the soul has been so damaged that it essentially exits the body, leaving only a grotesque human-animal in its place. ......
"[They] also cannot help converting their children to their way of non-being. In ways both subtle and profound, they will interact with ...children in a pathological manner, causing the children to internalize the same virus that afflicts [them]. Regardless, the virus always goes by the name of “love,” which simply further confuses the child. In the end, they will not be able to distinguish the difference between love and hate or truth and lies, any more than they can distinguish between life and death. [...........]"
Thou Shalt not Kill, but [Soul] Murder is Fine
~ Robert W.Godwin [Gagdad Bob] , Ph.D - a clinical psychologist whose interdisciplinary work has focused on the relationship between contemporary psychoanalysis, chaos theory, and quantum physics.
"...Liberals, of course, want us to understand the terrorists. But one of the first things I learned in my psychoanalytic training is that real empathy has nothing to do with reinforcing someone's delusions just to make them feel better. Rather, it must involve things like confrontation, interpretation, clarification, etc. ..."
Thank you kindly, Hemingway’s Ghost! This subject matter is very near and dear to my heart.... I’m grateful you find it interesting, too!
"...Long story short, I believe it is fair to say that, since Jesus is "true man," then all of the above observations must apply to him as well -- indeed, must apply to him quintessentially.
For he surely respects the distinctions within the Trinity, even while knowing that they cannot ultimately be separate; he has an unusually high degree of self-awareness, and with it, other-understanding, or empathy; has a total allegiance to Truth; and does not conflate celestial and terrestrial dimensions, despite the ubiquitous temptation to vote Democrat.
On this point, may I simply observe that the "liberal progressives" that I know, either directly or as represented through the MSM, are all united in and to "LOVE" — in the perfectly abstract.
What I mean is, they "love" abstract humanity. But they cannot stand members of their own family, or particular members of their own community....
No! It is our love for humanity in the abstract that innoculates us from any charge that we have been unloving to particular persons.
Like our actual, direct neighbors, for instance.
In short, they can only love in the abstract, but not in the particular case.
To me, this is the sickness of our age....
No wonder the child is confused....
More to go with #108 above:
"[...........] But I want to return to the topic of religion as the container ( ) of an explosive force, or content ( ). Call it the "spiritual drive," or the "pneumaphilic instinct," but whatever it is, just like any other human capacity, it requires a container to guide and channel it -- just as, say, music requires a system of musical notation to structure and give it depth.
Bach, for example, was born with a "musical drive," but what if he had been born at a time prior to the western system of musical notation, which allows one to think with such complexity within the chordal space of vertical musicality? The point is again that an adequate container is critical for one to achieve one's potential in any given area.
It is no different with religion. The other day, I was reading of how Dawson felt that different historical eras were literally different worlds which we could not really understand by projecting our own world onto them.
This makes total sense to me, because true empathy of a patient involves not just understanding their content, but their container.
Furthermore, real change generally doesn't involve the patient obtaining this or that piece of missing information. Rather, it involves a slow alteration and repair of their container within the context of the therapeutic alliance. Truly, therapy is just something you do to distract the patient while his mind is healing itself, mainly as a result of an intimate relationship with another.
So anyway, my point is that modernity -- e.g., the scientific revolution and the birth of the individual self -- essentially exploded the religious container that had contained the mind and spirit up to that point, and there is no going back to that innocent world. You cannot put the bats back into the belfry or the truthpaste into the tube. Different world.
They say that modern physics displaced earth from the center of the universe, just as natural selection displaced man from the center of the biosphere, thus rendering the religion of Christianity hopelessly quaint, what with its cognitively reassuring firmament above and a God who just happens to be in the form of a man.
Whatever. The point is not to argue over facts, which is to say, the content, but to understand the cosmic, and even metacosmic, nature of Christianity, so that it may serve as a container for the historical middle world we happen to inhobbit. I suppose that's the point of both my book and this blog, which is why I never argue with the other guy's content when his container is so messed up. One Cosmos "Under" God is really another way of saying One Mother of a Cosmos Contained by Father God. And they say God himself was marrily contained for awhile, but that's amother story.
".....But the emergence of humanness is characterized by the trimorphic, intersubjective structure of Mother-Father-Baby. This can only take place because the male now has a social (not biological) role: father, husband, protector, etc. Thus, you might say that these categories are the very "essence" of civilization.
Even on a purely practical basis, a civilization that fails to produce manly men to protect it is not long for the world. But more subtly, in psychoanalytic terms, "father" is also a symbol of the Law (in its most generic and universal sense, in that reverence for the abstract Law is one of the things that lifts us above the animals).
In contrast, the mother is mercy, which is felt, not thought. Nor could it ever be reduced to granite tablets, like the Ten Commandments. Law is always masculine.
It reminds me of when Senator Feinstein was questioning Justice Roberts at the confirmation hearings. She said something to the effect that she wanted to know how he felt, not what he thought. Or more recently, think of the supremely feminized Obama saying that he wanted justices with "empathy." I think you can see why that leads directly to the unraveling of civilization at its very foundation, for it is a passive aggressive attack on masculinity. Judicial tyranny is the result. ...."
Great stuff, dear Matchett-PI!!!
A word to the wise. From the ever amazing Gagdad Bob....
Thank you ever so much for this most recent series of your outstanding essay/posts!
Yer welcome! :)
I do so enjoy the way you phrase things ...
Oh, but dontcha know, "we" are "stipulated" as living in an "Eve-flavored age" — according to the self-selected intelligentsia, whose exponent, the novelist John Knowles, put it just exactly that way:
I think it's apparent all through cultural history that when women did in the past get a slightly higher position in society, these are usually the periods of great innovation [this is news to me so far]. With all our faults, this is an extraordinary age for tearing old ideas apart and remodeling the world. [Whatta surprise.] These, to me, are very strongly — how shall I put it? — Eve-flavored periods. They're periods when you suddenly feel the underlying, almost unconscious entrance of women everywhere in society. At the root of it, it seems to me, it's women quarreling with the way men see the world, with the paternalistic, rigid, structured society, machismo society. I think women are paradoxically the more conservative sex and also the more revolutionary sex. [from the Wall Street Journal editorial page, dated Nov. 20, 1981.]Two observations: (1) What a crock; logically/epistemologically speaking, Knowles' case is "all hat and no cattle." And (2) no wonder Islamofascist males are so afraid of "females"....
Idiocy, times two, thank you very much.
And now you claim that "religions" is a word used to group ideas which are merely made up in the service of justifying behaviour.
Huh.
To boomerang the classic atheist argument against the existence of God, (if morality exists God adds nothing to it, and can be eliminated by Occam's razor) --
Why then should religion have begun, (or, for that matter, persist) if animals show these behaviours already without resorting to *anything* to justify them? (Whence the need to justify what is by your accounting instinctive? And -- probing deeper -- why would anything need "justifying"? Where did the concept of justifying come from in the first place? Humans are animals, right?
Quit contradicting yourself.
Cheers!
But, every once in a blue moon (in a society full of "the castrati", as Rush calls them), along comes an "Iron Lady" like Thatcher and a "John Wayne" like Palin.
I think you'll love Gagdad's take on Palin. I think it's absolutely DELICIOUS!:)bttt:
Thursday, September 04, 2008
John Wayne with Lipstick: The Axe Wielding Natural
"...she's more macho than Biden and more feminine than Obama....If you don't think castration anxiety is real, just watch the reaction of the media elites as they instinctively cross their legs." It happens only every time Palin opens her mouth.
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