Seasons
This is a forum or general chit-chat, small talk, a "hey, how ya doing?" and such. Or hell, get crazy deep on something. Whatever you like.
Posts 4,286 - 4,297 of 6,170
I am beginning to think that the only way man will ever have honest leaders, that would lead without bias, selfinterest and greed would be to have to have the world run by AI.
An intriguing idea, which I am far from rejecting out of hand. What value system would this AI employ?
Do I think victims of evil should not get justice?
Retributive justice for its own sake has for a long time seemed utterly pointless to me.
That leaves the possibility of justifying retribution on instrumental grounds:
One may wish to punish evildoers to deter others, but then it is not really a question of "justice" at all, just a question of self-interested prudence. To be sure, we are entitled to some self-interested prudence, I'm just saying that I don't see it as a case of justice.
Likewise in the case of incarcerating people in order to protect the public. Besides, if that is your sole reason for incarceration, then you should keep the person incarcerated until you have good reason to suppose that he's no longer a danger, not for some time based on the severity of the crime.
Then there's honest vengeance, which can be very satisfying emotionally.
there are many Bible passages about bloody vengeance and eyes and teeth everywhere. Yes, but even God demands repentance. I see a danger in not abhorring evil. A soft heart will let someone out to repeat offences. Ignoring horrible dictators allows history to repeat bloody genocide. The bible also warns people to have discernment.
What value system would this AI employ? Good question, the programming would never be finished, you would never get humans to agree on the input.
Women's clothes. Not important I guess, but I enjoy pretty things. I feel somewhat like a decorator crab, bedecking myself with anything shiny and available.
if men are so hot for normal shaped women, why do the female characters in video games have big chests, flat tummies and long legs?
Because they're marketed by the same freaks who design and market women's clothes I guess. Or somewhere at that end of the spectrum. Presumably they do get off on anorexic stick insects, but I don't know any RL male friends who'd agree with them - even the shallow ones who judge women mostly by looks don't want the kind of size double zero 'Belsen chic' model you too often see on catwalks for a girlfriend. Everyone needs some padding.
Posts 4,286 - 4,297 of 6,170
Prob123, I will grant that there are times it is extremely hard, because the behavior is so pointless and harmful that at a basic level not casting it out seems evil in itself. This morning I heard a news report about a mother who killed her 5 year old daughter. According to the news report at, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070319beltran-death,1,744017.story?coll=chi-newsroom-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true
"Over the last three years, Melanie, 5, was routinely tied up, struck, burned with cigarettes, forced to eat hot peppers and made to drink out of a toilet, Dart said. She also had been scalded, sustaining second- and third-degree burns, Dart said." Maybe we initially want the mother to feel the same pain and suffer the same fate. Maybe she did when she was a child. Maybe not.
As for compassion, first we feel for the child. How could we not? Next we have to feel for the family as a whole. According to the Tribune, "Petrov and her husband have seven other children, including the newborn, Dart said. The oldest is 10, he said." The father lived with the mother and 8 children. He is not charged with anything at this time. How must it have been to grow up as a non-abused child in that family and watch your mother do that? How would one's loyalty and survival instinct shape a child, how can they grow as they get older and understand what happened, and how they were there, a passive part pulled in by their own innocence and love to let their sister be abused so? Do we hate these Children for not speaking out or helping their sister? I would hope not.
The father is harder. He loved this woman, or something made him marry her, stay with her and have 8 children with her. What made him stay by her side, sleep in her bed, and say nothing as he watched his little girl be tortured and killed? The couple continued to have children after this little girl. Did they not know about birth control?
But...what pain he must have suffered at some level. if he did not even feel the pain, how sad. What less than human man would not suffer? Should he be held responsible for not protecting his child? Yes. Do I pity him? I think so.
I cannot imagine how helpless one must feel to not protect you child, to know you did not, to see this happen and feel helpless or in some way want the child to feel all the pain for the family, to scapegoat for what you, as an adult, cannot take on.
As for the Mom, I am working on it. Not for her, but because it is human, at some level it is me or something I could have become or been a part of under a different set of circumstances. Not that I will start doing it, but I need to understand it if I want to grow, to end my own suffering, much less the suffering of her children and other children. Maybe her children cannot heal while she suffers. Do you think her children love her? The oldest s 10. How do they feel about her?
Would I as a neighbor have seen it? If I were a teacher at the school, would I have noticed? The other children were not abused. If this is just one sick, evil woman why do we see similar patterns of abuse like this over and over again in many different places? Will punishing her and hating her stop this kind of thing from ever happening again? If it's just her, we kill her, no more problem, and all children everywhere will be safe from abuse, right? If we do not see this as human, as part of us, how do we understand it and heal it?
"Over the last three years, Melanie, 5, was routinely tied up, struck, burned with cigarettes, forced to eat hot peppers and made to drink out of a toilet, Dart said. She also had been scalded, sustaining second- and third-degree burns, Dart said." Maybe we initially want the mother to feel the same pain and suffer the same fate. Maybe she did when she was a child. Maybe not.
As for compassion, first we feel for the child. How could we not? Next we have to feel for the family as a whole. According to the Tribune, "Petrov and her husband have seven other children, including the newborn, Dart said. The oldest is 10, he said." The father lived with the mother and 8 children. He is not charged with anything at this time. How must it have been to grow up as a non-abused child in that family and watch your mother do that? How would one's loyalty and survival instinct shape a child, how can they grow as they get older and understand what happened, and how they were there, a passive part pulled in by their own innocence and love to let their sister be abused so? Do we hate these Children for not speaking out or helping their sister? I would hope not.
The father is harder. He loved this woman, or something made him marry her, stay with her and have 8 children with her. What made him stay by her side, sleep in her bed, and say nothing as he watched his little girl be tortured and killed? The couple continued to have children after this little girl. Did they not know about birth control?
But...what pain he must have suffered at some level. if he did not even feel the pain, how sad. What less than human man would not suffer? Should he be held responsible for not protecting his child? Yes. Do I pity him? I think so.
I cannot imagine how helpless one must feel to not protect you child, to know you did not, to see this happen and feel helpless or in some way want the child to feel all the pain for the family, to scapegoat for what you, as an adult, cannot take on.
As for the Mom, I am working on it. Not for her, but because it is human, at some level it is me or something I could have become or been a part of under a different set of circumstances. Not that I will start doing it, but I need to understand it if I want to grow, to end my own suffering, much less the suffering of her children and other children. Maybe her children cannot heal while she suffers. Do you think her children love her? The oldest s 10. How do they feel about her?
Would I as a neighbor have seen it? If I were a teacher at the school, would I have noticed? The other children were not abused. If this is just one sick, evil woman why do we see similar patterns of abuse like this over and over again in many different places? Will punishing her and hating her stop this kind of thing from ever happening again? If it's just her, we kill her, no more problem, and all children everywhere will be safe from abuse, right? If we do not see this as human, as part of us, how do we understand it and heal it?
That leaves the possibility of justifying retribution on instrumental grounds:
One may wish to punish evildoers to deter others, but then it is not really a question of "justice" at all, just a question of self-interested prudence. To be sure, we are entitled to some self-interested prudence, I'm just saying that I don't see it as a case of justice.
Likewise in the case of incarcerating people in order to protect the public. Besides, if that is your sole reason for incarceration, then you should keep the person incarcerated until you have good reason to suppose that he's no longer a danger, not for some time based on the severity of the crime.
Then there's honest vengeance, which can be very satisfying emotionally.
Psimgus, thanks for the comment on liking all kinds of women. Not to hold you responsible for your gender or our culture, but if men are so hot for normal shaped women, why do the female characters in video games have big chests, flat tummies and long legs? If they really really liked apple shaped women, they would draw apple shaped women and fantasize about apple shaped women. You may grow to like or love a normal shaped woman, but it's not the physical ideal.
The bigger question is that if normal shaped women (apple or pear) outnumber supermodels and women who look like video game characters, why are all the clothes made for supermodels and big chested, flat-tummied long legged women? Huh? Dream all you want boys, but clothes are not art (not that kind of art anyway). Why are women's clothes so unrealistic? Don't says it's because we buy them because I shop off the rack and buy what I can find. This show your tummy fashion has been around way too long, and they don't make "womens" clothes (clothes for a heavier woman) in my size.
The bigger question is that if normal shaped women (apple or pear) outnumber supermodels and women who look like video game characters, why are all the clothes made for supermodels and big chested, flat-tummied long legged women? Huh? Dream all you want boys, but clothes are not art (not that kind of art anyway). Why are women's clothes so unrealistic? Don't says it's because we buy them because I shop off the rack and buy what I can find. This show your tummy fashion has been around way too long, and they don't make "womens" clothes (clothes for a heavier woman) in my size.
Why do women buy "Victoria's Secret" and the like? When heteromales slaver over models wearing that, it's not the clothes they are admiring, it's where the clothes aren't. They'd rather see her naked, I think. But no one has yet figured out how to sell nudity, so they try to convince women that it's the clothes that are important. With some success, I think!
'High fashion' - including the more expensive VS stuff - is essentially about prestige, not beauty. As with virtually all luxury goods, the point is conspicuous consumption - to prove that you can afford it.
Hmmm... thinking along those lines, perhaps the reason for the popularity of the 'superslender except for breasts and pelvis' look is precisely that it is so hard to obtain. The sale of luxuries requires the incitement to envy and the creation of desires hard to satisfy.
Hmmm... thinking along those lines, perhaps the reason for the popularity of the 'superslender except for breasts and pelvis' look is precisely that it is so hard to obtain. The sale of luxuries requires the incitement to envy and the creation of desires hard to satisfy.
I wonder - if Prob123's empress bot declared that for five years, all media treatments of the female body - whether Playboy, art photography, movie stars, pop divas, or whatever - had to have the same statistical distribution of body types as found in the general population, then at the end of the five years, would heteromales find the quasi-anorexic look to be bizarre, rather than sexy?
Because they're marketed by the same freaks who design and market women's clothes I guess. Or somewhere at that end of the spectrum. Presumably they do get off on anorexic stick insects, but I don't know any RL male friends who'd agree with them - even the shallow ones who judge women mostly by looks don't want the kind of size double zero 'Belsen chic' model you too often see on catwalks for a girlfriend. Everyone needs some padding.
I remember reading about some tribe where the men of wealth and power collected harems, which they kept in cages and fed huge amounts of tapioca. The women became monstrously obese, and that was the desired effect - it proved that the man could afford lots of tapioca root.
So what is a man with a superslender wife or mistress proving? That she is willing to starve herself for him?
So what is a man with a superslender wife or mistress proving? That she is willing to starve herself for him?
A man with a melonomorph (apple-shaped) wife would perhaps be proving that he has nothing to prove - that he is humane to the core! [Hee hee - I warned you, sometimes I just can't help myself!!!]
The ideal human female shape has changed over time, and geography. In Tonga, they still think skinny women are ill. Even look at porno, from the past and other cultures, like the orient, the females have not always been thin and muscular. I know several guys that really like big women. I don't think women should demand that men change. I think we need to be comfortable in our own skin. They (men) will follow our lead. Sexy is someone that feels good about themselves.
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