this is the thing.

Oh geez, no dynaflax?

imma use it as my default controller to buy when i buy controllers.

I think that both putting your pet down and not doing so must be an honest consideration.

As their caretaker, you can empathize with them the most. Imagine what you would want in their situation, and do it. You have the ability to cognize this - they do not.

There are humane services that will come to your home so they don’t even have to leave a familiar environment. But sometimes, your buddy still has joy in life, even though he’s all wobbly.

…in the end, the truth is that it’s a judgment call, and you do the best you can - and make your choices in a way that, if they were there in your head with you, and could understand your choices, they would love you for it, and that you can love yourself for.

Trolley Man, you’re a problem.

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.

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.

A small, illusory feeling of power to cover up the larger power imbalances they participate in in life where things don’t go their way, but they’re unwilling to process.

Some cats have zero fucks given. Other cats have a hard line. yet others have a line that, when pushed, slowly, over years, results in a greatly expanded cuddle zone.

Thanks for this, it’s nice to see a correct answer. I’m tired of people who claim to love Star Trek but don’t even know the lore.

Sort through the emotional issues. I know this is probably typical advice, but seriously. Even though it takes a while, and looks impossible, process those feelings. It’s not impossible, because it’s a learned skill. . When you start off, making progress is dreadfully slow. but as you learn how, doing it becomes easier.

You don’t have to sacrifice who you were to become someone you’d want to be. Who you were will always be a part of you, anyways. But as you grow, it ceases to be the dominant voice - just, something to consider.

sorry, I just don’t relate.

Virtue signaling is the act of expressing opinions or stances that align with popular moral values, often through social media, to demonstrate one’s good character.

come again?

I think people naturally extend their unresolved issues and the concomitant behaviors into the macro scale, and that it is precisely by resolving the personal issues on a smaller scale that you gain greater power over your own life. As you do, your methods and behaviors spread, because people learn well by example, particularly when that example “wins” and comes from a natural place of acceptance.

As people resolve their piece of the pie, they run into others who have, likewise, resolved their piece of the pie. …and, together, they do greater things, because they are capable of it, not tangled an a huge ball of personal issues, and why not too something or contribute to something you want to see done in the world?

The massive issues we have a a society are precisely because we have too much emotionally charged information, and haven’t processed that information - and because the blind spots you have in your own personal life and with your own personal issues become your cultures, your nation’s, and the world’s problems as you gain power.

Sorting through your issues, and resolving your blind spots means your power increases. And, as you do, then the scope of what you, personally can change grows - in part, because you are also more effective at working with others and rejecting (or similarly handling) problematic authority as you do.

The basic question is: Where does the motivation of your reaction (or action) come from?

If you have an emotional goal to prevent the thing from having existed, you are doomed from the start.

If you have accepted fully that it is the way it is, and that what you need to do is add a valid response to the situation, rather than preventing the existence of the situation, you’re probably on the right track.

That is, you can’t block a punch, or respond in kind, if you haven’t accepted that you’re in a fight. Instead, you’ll just have your ass handed to you.

When people say “how could this happen?!” they aren’t usually asking questions at all, even if it’s a situation they would benefit well from asking questions in. They usually mean “this shouldn’t have happened.” …and, they are wrong.

It’s not that it should happen, or shouldn’t happen. Those are irrelevant. It’s that it’s happening (or happened), and the probability of naturally generating a valid response increases massively once you accept that.

Once you accept the situation fully, you’ll be able to look at it clearly, and have a greater chance of recognizing it, and recognizing it before others even realize that it’s happening - or, before others realize they are telegraphing their actions before they strike. As such, you have a better capacity to respond appropriately.

The largest problem humans have, in my opinion, is fighting ghosts and impossible battles - which leaves them open to being taken advantage of or repeating painful cycles. Radical acceptance addresses some of that, if treated as a means to think clearly, rather than as a religion to adhere to.

This is the big temptation with Linux. It’s open source, and there’s a lot of information out there, so maybe technically you can fix XYZ…

…but, realistically, it’s often better to just use supported hardware, or use a distro that supports your hardware.

sometimes you can get a “quick fix” from a github repo or some such, and it’ll just work. …but, it’s so easy for a quick fix to turn into a rabbit hole of many hours, or even many days.

…and if you’re doing that, you’ve got to be into it for the journey more than the destination.

…among other things, literally virtue signaling that you’re not virtue signaling.

snaps! hiss