As I recall, I drew the line at offering refuge. I wouldn’t turn them in unless forced to i.e. at gunpoint or other real threat to me & mine. And even then, when I’ve resolved that I am morally obligated to turn them in, it’s possible that my conscience wouldn’t let me.
~Max
It’s hard to read that and the previous post,
and not conclude that you are substituting the law for an ethical framework.
Morally obligated not legally obligated revealing word choice IMHO.
It would trouble me greatly if I thought it was true.
Like many kids, as an early teenager I had emotional outbursts. My parents sent me to counseling, and I don’t remember the sessions being anything radical. We did some one-on-one and some family sessions. They went long after I stopped having to. Turned out most of the problems were between my parents, or so they later told me. For my part I eventually came to the conclusion that I should strive to keep my cool, take a step back and compartmentalize emotions, how much of this is due to the therapy I can’t say. Since then, yeah, sometimes people close to me have (jokingly) questioned if I have any emotions at all.
Once in my lifetime, I thought long and hard about my capacity for personal empathy. It was my mother’s funeral, seven years ago. I didn’t find myself crying when she died. She suffered a long illness and I had spent many hours watching her pain wondering why, what was the purpose. It is gut-wrenching even thinking about it now. I don’t enjoy pain and I don’t enjoy seeing people in pain. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as they say, but this was definitely killing her. As a family we didn’t talk to each other about her pain. Maybe we should have but we didn’t. I was into the avoidance of pain as the basis of morality, at the time. I had already put out of my mind any concept of an afterlife. To be honest I was a little relieved when she died.
Anyways, I sat there at the funeral not crying. Of course I was sad, but I didn’t feel the urge to cry. What did that mean? Did I not love my mother? Was I some kind of sociopath? People came to talk to me as is our religious custom but I was consumed by my thoughts and didn’t really pay any attention to what they said. I closed my eyes and feigned sleep for parts of the service just to avoid facing people. But then other people started crying. My uncle. My kid sister. &etc. I looked at their faces. That finally got to me.
It’s true that I’m quite dispassionate in writing. This is not representative of me in person. There are many reasons - I come here specifically to debate things. Things I wouldn’t see fit to discuss in almost any other context. There are maybe two people on the face of the earth I regularly talk politics with, in person (hopefully to change soon). And before I went back to school I didn’t talk to anyone about legal things. I think like a skeptic and a contrarian, admitted. And that does come up in other contexts.
But maybe most importantly, I can’t see your faces.
~Max
In isolation, perhaps.
~Max
I thought this was a whoosh.
Yeah.
You should talk about this shit with more people so you can see their horrified reactions in real time. You need the stupid bits burned out of you. Hiding your ideas behind an anonymous message board and carefully cherrypicking your real-life interactions has given you a false sense of what’s sensical.
This is some wise advice.
Well, as I said I went back to school and I have four months on campus until I get the degree. My new roommate is gay. It seems one out of five people here have like, purple or blue or pink hair. I went to the first campus Republicans meeting Monday - the first political event I’ve ever been to - and frankly was not impressed. All they wanted to talk about was whether Harris was drunk or on drugs at the DNC. The level of discourse here (SDMB) is so much higher. So we’ll see.
~Max
Fair enough. I want to thank you for your detailed and sincere response to my question.
To answer your earlier question, no you and I have never directly interacted before. But as my tagline implies I am a long time lurker here. I’ve only really started participating within the last few months, but I have read many of your posts over the years.
I don’t know how much more I’ll post in this thread, but I’ll definitely be reading.
Just for the record, people process grief differently. Some cry, some don’t. So not crying at your mothers funeral isn’t in and of itself indicative of anything wrong with you.
That’s true. I always have a bit of a delayed reaction to grief. After my husband was killed, my true grief stricken days didn’t happen until weeks after the event. I guess the shock just lasts longer in me or something.
And some people, including me, don’t cry easily. I often wished I could have cried because the few times I actually was driven to tears were cathartic, but mostly I grieve calmly, but nonetheless intensively.
If you think Trump won the debate, you are far dumber than I ever believed. WTF.
He was ranting and rambling. He thought a Strongman saying he was good was a good recommendation. He was rattled by Harris saying people leave his rallies early. He had no policy positions outside of maybe stating he has no clues how tariffs work.
Openly admitting that one holds each candidate to entirely different standards is certainly a revealing take.
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, at least if one does not hold to the pretense of being the least bit objective or rational and is openly a partisan hack.
I just read that post in the debate thread. My god what a stupid mother fucker.
Even Fox News and the Conservative subreddit think, in general, that Trump got his ass handed to him.
So, you’ve given up completely on having any political position you espouse taken seriously?
But I agree, if dry mouth isn’t a reason to impeach Harris what is?
I think the most recent example is kind of key to explaining the ups and downs of this thread.
On the surface, Max_S seems like a rational actor, capable of reasoning. But when you get deep down, you see that all the surface rationality is being used to cover some very deep, selfish, and self-centered beliefs that are held despite being arbitrary and irrationanal.
They you, the reader, get the cognitive dissonance between the two Maxs. But since the first is seen most of the time, you forget about the underlying evil until the NEXT time it shows up, and well, this thread busts back to life until it’s nearly forgotten again.
Sorry to say, if you think Max_S was sincere in that belief, you’re the dumb one.
He just posted the most trolling response possible for that thread, because he absolutely is a troll. And given how many people responded in seriousness to his post, he’s a successful one.
I’m leaning towards it was either a Trolling post or he didn’t actually watch the debate and just posted something stupid based off of reading some MAGA shit. Either way, a very stupid post.
This guy has suckered more stalwart posters into looking like absolute idiots than any other poster I have seen in the twenty years I’ve been here.
One after the other they line up to white-knight this shit stain, until they realize he’s a disingenuous racist fuck and (at best) a naive useful idiot for propertarian extremists.