Just stop embarrassing yourself. Feeding one’s own child is one of the most selfish acts imaginable.
Oh, for god’s sake.
As has been stated, repeatedly and by about a thousand people by now, your response to Blalron was lacking in empathy. So was your response to Quartz. The reasons why they were lacking in empathy have also been explained ad nauseum. I don’t feel a real strong need to repeat what has been said by multiple others multiple times, so if you’re still unclear, go back and read. It’s all in there.
And you’re still ignoring the main point of my post. :rolleyes: Your arguments are not compelling when you use selective hearing, you know…
I meant something entirely different. This is a world where everyone is justly rewarded or punished for his good or bad deeds. Good fortune only happens to good people, and bad fortune only follows wickedness. Suppose our current style of cosmic indifference suddenly transformed into cosmic justice. How do you think you would do?
It is telling that you would confuse competitive markets for social justice. Economics is occasionally handy for telling us how to allocate goods and design institutions to maximize social welfare given constraints. On desserts, which has implied justice since Plato, economics is utterly silent. If you believe that competitive markets can allocate justice efficiently, then I have a few reading suggestions for you.
Isn’t this a little inconsistent?
If failure is choosing not to love, then success would be choosing to love. And if you’re choosing to love, that would mean choosing to love those that are unlovable because loving the lovable is natural and requires no choice.
And since Rand Rover is the unlovable here, wouldn’t he be the person one would generally choose to love. . .instead of loving naturally? And yet, your posts don’t show compassion to him as a poster (although you’ve noted that he may be a good person in real life) since that’s all we know of him. You’ve noted that you’re not showing contempt for his philosophy but for him as a poster.
Are you a Christian?
what was the main point of this post, which I am ignoring? That I should get therapy? You wanted a response to your suggestion?
Attempting to educate him on how and why his behavior provokes the reaction it does is very compassionate, IMO. She did have other options in how to respond to him, after all. Being loving and compassionate does not obligate her to sit still and accept his abuse, however. Walking away from abuse has no reflection on her compassion.
Sophistry. olivesmarch never mentioned a word about withholding love from Rand Rover. It could be argued with a lot more justification that her offering him that “food for thought” serves as an act of love in itself.
And might it be said that Rand Rover is giving food for thought to the people he’s talking to? Perhaps it’s an act of love to educate them on other ways of thinking. If it’s compassionate to tell someone that their own behavior is causing them pain, then might it apply to both Rand Rover and OlivesMarch4th?
Well, perhaps you saw contempt in olivesmarch’s post. I’m confident that most people who read it will see primarily compassion.
Just as I’m confident that most people who read Rand Rover’s responses will see primarily contempt instead of compassion.
Tone matters.
YM(O)V.
Repeating myself for the last time:
There are ways for you to educate yourself such that you learn to understand why your behavior provokes such a strong negative reaction. You have already said
and while you may have specific intentions for your behavior, the end result of what you are doing is pretty much opposite of your intent. You are not “motivating” anyone, you are not getting any kind of positive reaction at all. Instead you are getting a shit-ton of people pissed off at you.
In short: what you are doing is not working.
If you would like it to actually work, it is up to you to change it. If you need help or advice on how to do that, take a class, see a professional. There is no shame in that. No one has every aspect of life completely figured out, and I think it’s more likely that most people are pretty much mucking about blindly most of the time. Asking for help is a part of life, and it’s perfectly okay to do so.
You keep harping on personal responsibility. So take some responsibility for yourself.
If you choose not to, than the rest of us can only conclude that you’re not interested being effective in your attempts to “motivate” others, or in any way making your interactions with other human beings work in a positive, productive, or even effective fashion, and that your stated goal is a smokescreen for your actual goal – you just like being an asshole.
OK, but then you’re saying that they may be saying the same message with a different TONE which is very difficult to determine from a message board post. That’s sort of like determining intent accurately every time from a message board post. . . very difficult to next to impossible.
Saying the same message with a different tone doesn’t change the message. It may make the receiver more receptive to hear it, but it doesn’t necessarily change the message. And a lot of receptivity depends on the receiver.
One person lecturing another person about how they should change their behavior because their behavior is causing them harm is not that different from another person doing the same thing.
You’re right. I didn’t mean contempt in that context. When I said this:
I was thinking of this post:
I meant that she didn’t have contempt for his philosophy but then she went on to comment on his behavior as a poster in a negative manner.
Disagree. I probably have a different definition of “working”.
Agreed with the disagree.
Be careful there Maeg, I’ve a feeling Rand rover is either building a wickerman, or at least one made of straw.
I am in fact participating in this thread because I want to understand Rand Rover, and I’m very interested in what he has to say. I don’t hate him at all. I couldn’t be more explicit.
I’m pretty sure you think I’m a hypocrite, because you seem to be there, pointing out my hypocrisy any time I object to anyone else’s behavior. (I am grateful you at least do this respectfully.) I would perhaps be the first to agree with you… you pretty much continually echo my own thoughts about myself. Nothing you say about my motivations is new to me… I think about that all the time. I tossed and turned as I tried to sleep last night thinking exactly what you have said here. You are like the physical manifestation of my guilty conscience. Lately I have come to have less and less use for the part of me that judges me so harshly. I’m not saying your points aren’t valid, I’m saying they aren’t useful. All I have ever done my entire life is try to be a good person. If there’s something wrong with my way of thinking and doing, it’s not for lack of trying. Maybe I’ll get there some day.
I don’t claim to be the perfect example of compassion, and I struggle with empathy myself from time to time. Sometimes people make long, ranting posts in MPSIMS and I sit there and glower at them and think: SUCK IT UP! when I am neck-deep in my own pain. But the vast majority of the time, I choose to ignore these threads instead of injecting them with my misanthropy, however temporary. Rand Rover seems to lack this mental filter, which usually results in disrupting the conversation or hurting others’ feelings. I find this not only unfortunate, it kind of pisses me off. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t or feel guilty for being angry.
And Rand Rover my dear, you will have your examples if you can just hold out til around 6:30pm EST. I must go assert responsibility for myself by working in exchange for money. This is, in our current society, within my own best interest.
No. I am an dyed-in-the-wool atheist who was raised Jewish. You?
Okay I’ll be honest. I don’t really like you, but I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt as “misunderstood”.
Could you please define “selfish” and how that is applied to feeding your kids? What about adopted, and step kids is feeding them selfish too? Why or why not? What about feeding the less fortunate who may not get a meal otherwise?
I can not believe this thread is still going.
I am going to take a crack at answering this. Not because I agree with Rand, but because it appears he is groping toward an actual philosophical concept accidental though it may be.
It has been asserted that a person’s children are one’s immortality. For some, this has translated to “living through” their children: directing their lives, their careers marriages etc. The Buddha tells us this hopeless striving for immortality is futile and only causes psychological suffering. In short, that living through our children is selfish.
How Rand has decided to stretch that theory all the way to try to apply it even to feeding the little mites as selfishness is a bit beyond me but I think that is what he is reaching for.