RMS, like any intelligent sentient being is capable of thinking complex thoughts and making good points.
But I rail against his thoughtlessness. His constant...sociopathy...it's why he's ineffective in getting his views across, why he treats people like automatons (well documented) and why he's plain and simply put, "not a good person".
I never put it in these terms before, I just always felt "skeeved out" by his writings. Logically, he makes lots of sense, but personally he's as connectable as the sidewalk in front of my house. Sociopathy is the perfect term.
Anybody who can sit in Boston the last week, have a cop murdered in cold blood near his office by two men on an active terror event that just murdered and maimed dozens of people a few days before, and upon the conclusion of that event shit out this garbage before the close of the same day is a person so far removed from empathy, from society and from humanity as to be a sociopath.
I've never gone through such a wild swing of elation, joy and exhaustion, then disappointment, sadness and anger in such a short period of time as today. This isn't the kind of frustrating conspiracy nuttery that's so exasperating written by people so lost in their private world as to have lost touch with reality, this is written by a person fully cognizant of their writing and what he's saying, the time in which he's saying it and the tone in which he's saying it.
it should give you pause when dealing with them, that their conscience leads to hypothetical discussions like this.
I'm going to make active strides to remove these people from my life
Amen, and my first step is to leave this thread after this an never return. My next step is to flag any posts here about RMS. Next is to boycott any events where RMS is to be the speaker and actively lobby events who are thinking about hosting him to rethink that decision based on this writing as well as his piss poor treatment of other human beings in the past.
Take a deep breath and ask yourself why you responded so emotionally to these terrorist attacks and not the fertilizer explosion.
Is it the loss of life? There was tragic loss of life in both instances.
Is it the presence of a human instigator? Or maybe the presence of evil? Are terrorists somehow a greater threat than fertilizer explosions because they are supposed to be rational, sentient actors? Are they representative of all that is wrong with humanity? Why are they more threatening than any of the myriad dangers lurking around every corner in this world? I genuinely want to know.
Maybe the very fact that these types of terrorist attacks are so infrequent is what scares us the most. They are met with such a media circus that it's very hard for us not to react in a visceral way.
Or perhaps the scariest part about them is that it represents a breakdown in what we consider decent. The more normal the terrorist or mass-shooter ends up being the more scared we tend to be. By all accounts, these kids were popular, intelligent, handsome young men. And yet within a very short span of time they were radicalized and capable of committing these attacks. That scares us to our core, even though its frequency is so small it should be considered mathematically insignificant.
We desperately want our terrorists to be caricatures of every evil villain we've ever seen. That makes it easier to deal with. Of course they would blow people up, they're evil! The truth is, these types of events, although caused by humans, are no more explainable than tornadoes, lightning strikes, hurricanes, earthquakes, or any other natural disaster we have no control over. Fertilizer plant explosions, on the other hand, we feel like we can prevent, and so they are not accompanied by emotion, fear, and vengeance. But trying to prevent the radicalization of every single youth on the planet is no different than trying to hold a tsunami at bay with a bucket.
RMS is not being a sociopath, he's analyzing an emotional situation in an unemotional way. It doesn't mean he's dangerous, or an asshole, or incapable of relating to other human beings. It means he's logical and not prone to lapses in judgement due to heightened emotional responses.
I genuinely want to know.
If you kill somebody with an intention to kill them, you are a bad person. If you kill somebody without an intention to kill them, it's tragic, but you probably aren't a bad person.
Why exactly is that hard to understand?
RMS is not being a sociopath, he's analyzing an emotional situation in an unemotional way.
He's bringing forth a dispassionate, disturbingly cold analysis of an event that should be emotional by any psychological norm before the day has even closed out. It's so outside of social norms as to only be classifiable as an emotional disconnect so extreme it has to be the result of a severe psychological disturbance.
1) Because it's totally irrelevant. A life is a life. Your life isn't worth more (or less) just because you were killed intentionally (or accidentally). All else being equal, would you rather prevent 100 accidental deaths or 10 intentional murders? Anyone with a shred of morality would save the 100. This isn't "cold analysis". It's prioritizing basic human decency over knee-jerk emotional reactions to sensational events.
2) Because it's inconsistent. If what you really care about is the intent to kill, then you'll focus on run-of-the-mill murders just as much as you focus on sensational bombings. But you don't. So when I try to imagine why you and millions of others care so disproportionately much about the events in Boston, I must eliminate the false reason that "it's because they're intentional." What's left is that you are simply drawn to exciting, sensational, unique events. I can't blame you for that. It's only human. What I can blame you for is having the gall to claim you have the moral high ground. The audacity to condemn people who think rationally about saving lives. It's disgusting to read.
> He's bringing forth a dispassionate, disturbingly cold analysis of an event that should be emotional by any psychological norm before the day has even closed out. It's so outside of social norms as to only be classifiable as an emotional disconnect so extreme it has to be the result of a severe psychological disturbance.
Yes, and 300 years ago it was likely "outside of social norms" to mourn the death of a slave. You're arguing as if behavior being socially normal makes it morally justifiable. That has never been true in the history of the world, and it isn't true today. And one's conformance (or lack thereof) to arbitrary societal norms is certainly not a reflection of psychological disturbance.
You are, quite literally, advocating a herd mentality. Gross.
I thought it might be the best way to reply to both posts without having to write two since there's no way to reply to multiple posts. The emotion in the second post was definitely what prompted me to respond, though.
Replace "work at a fertilizer plant" with "drive an automobile" or "swim in a pool" or "use a bath tub" or with any other seemingly innocuous activity that's orders of magnitude more likely to kill you than terrorists. What is more rational to be concerned about?
Quite honestly your admitted emotional swings suggest that you are the one closer to the animal state. Anyone infected by excess emotion is essentially unsuitable as an analyst or arbiter regardless of how immediately salient the circumstance.
Any policy overly informed by an animalistic emotional driver instead of proceeding from some sort of logical principal can't be taken seriously.
I've noticed Easterners often can't deal with life at an easy pace while remaining comfortable with the minuscule nature of their existence and thus have trouble living relaxed lives.
Every incident like this illustrates it. If a cartel bombed a motor-home in New Mexico or something there'd be none of this brouhaha because Southwesterners live with open horizons under a sea of stars and can take a step back and don't need to feel validated by trying to rouse the whole country to a frenzy.
Plus it would be far removed from the self-centered self-important East Coast rush where the obvious route to increased salience seems to be requiring a different outfit for everything.
Please stop clutching fear and start reaching towards increased animacy.
So, you're worried more about a few dead people rather than all those people you never heard of dying in hospitals, in motor accidents, and other cause of death? They are someone's aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, friends, lovers, etc.
Maybe we should connect our emotion to the logic rather than the other way around.
The trap is applying logic to being human, when humans are illogical by our very nature. kiba is doing it, and your poignant extrapolation of that logic demonstrates why we "can't think through this one, we have to feel it," as the film quote goes. She was right in that scene and the observation equally applies here, just with slightly different antagonists for the discussion.
Too many engineering types try to apply logic and data analysis to the human experience and it just doesn't make sense. You can't meaningfully talk about death in numbers unless you are counting deaths.
RMS, like any intelligent sentient being is capable of thinking complex thoughts and making good points.
But I rail against his thoughtlessness. His constant...sociopathy...it's why he's ineffective in getting his views across, why he treats people like automatons (well documented) and why he's plain and simply put, "not a good person".
I never put it in these terms before, I just always felt "skeeved out" by his writings. Logically, he makes lots of sense, but personally he's as connectable as the sidewalk in front of my house. Sociopathy is the perfect term.
Anybody who can sit in Boston the last week, have a cop murdered in cold blood near his office by two men on an active terror event that just murdered and maimed dozens of people a few days before, and upon the conclusion of that event shit out this garbage before the close of the same day is a person so far removed from empathy, from society and from humanity as to be a sociopath.
I've never gone through such a wild swing of elation, joy and exhaustion, then disappointment, sadness and anger in such a short period of time as today. This isn't the kind of frustrating conspiracy nuttery that's so exasperating written by people so lost in their private world as to have lost touch with reality, this is written by a person fully cognizant of their writing and what he's saying, the time in which he's saying it and the tone in which he's saying it.
it should give you pause when dealing with them, that their conscience leads to hypothetical discussions like this.
I'm going to make active strides to remove these people from my life
Amen, and my first step is to leave this thread after this an never return. My next step is to flag any posts here about RMS. Next is to boycott any events where RMS is to be the speaker and actively lobby events who are thinking about hosting him to rethink that decision based on this writing as well as his piss poor treatment of other human beings in the past.
This is inexcusable, this is madness.