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Understanding and compassion are anathema

Understanding and compassion are:

  • Not necessary. Everybody who is poor is failing at life.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Essential to mental health

    Votes: 11 78.6%
  • Signs of weakness

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Dumbass question, if you ask me. Natural Selection Works. So do loopholes.

    Votes: 3 21.4%

  • Total voters
    14

BDBoop

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Points to be deducted if you had to hit a dictionary just now.
 
No dictionary needed here, but I do wonder whether there isn't a middle ground between the option I picked (necessary for mental health) and the sign of weakness option. There has to be a balance. Going too far, either toward "hard-ass" or "St. Francis" is unbalanced, and leads to evil and corruption.
 
Thank you. I knew I should have had more than four options, but my brain went "Ooh, shiny!" and that's where the poll ended.
 
Ok, you got me, I looked it up. ;) Cool word though.

Necessary for mental health. And way too many people have absolutely none. We practically celebrate sociopathic behavior and it sorta freaks me out.
 
E: Something we are born with and naturally understand and use, and is a useful survival trait for the species. But we can be taught away from.
 
Ok, you got me, I looked it up. ;) Cool word though.

Necessary for mental health. And way too many people have absolutely none. We practically celebrate sociopathic behavior and it sorta freaks me out.

It feels very isolationist as well, because once you assure yourself no harm can ever befall you, you have to not care if it befalls anyone else, and that means friends, family and loved ones.
 
Points to be deducted if you had to hit a dictionary just now.

I only had to look up "dumbass". I'm not sure what a donkey who can't speak has to do with the question, but anyway...

Of course, compassion and understanding is essential to mental health. Only sociopaths have no compassion for fellow humans.
 
Isn't the US supposed to be an individualistic country?
Nevertheless, some old fashioned Sunday church gathering will do more good than harm.

:)
 
Understanding, compassion and anathema; wow, and put together. I don’t like anathema. I’ve used it, but not often, as it has an unsupported meaning like opposing. I had to look it up, very difficult to be sure of the meaning that it has here. Maybe I’m too oblivious. Then ‘understanding’, not in the way someone understands Newtonian physics, but in the way someone understands someone else. Maybe someone can understand someone with schizophrenia or the very different psychopath, and compassion for one and not the other. But, then someone could have an IQ of 80 and not have the intellect to understand a schizophrenia or psychopath, but may ‘correctly’ have compassion for one and not the other. And then, a person with an IQ of 120 may have a certain level of compassion for a psychopath while judging them guilty for murder in a death penalty state. And you want simple poll answers to cover this?
 
While I certainly am sympathetic toward people who have problems, especially if the problems are beyond their control and I am compassionate and will help those in need if they truly need it, I do not think that giving aid to those who aren't willing to work toward fixing their problems on their own is worthwhile. If you fell on your face, work to get back on your feet. I'll help you if I can. If you fell on your face and decide you like it better face-down because you're too lazy to do otherwise, I'll just walk on by. You picked your fate, live with your decisions.
 
IMHO, this would make more sense if there were a bit more context.
 
IMHO, this would make more sense if there were a bit more context.

You mean for the poll? I'm talking about the number of people on this forum in the past month or so who've gone full-on "any bad thing that happens to you is your own damn fault, you should have been more prepared" combined with "And anything the rich HAVE they EARNED and you're a PARASITE if you don't AGREE WITH ME."

Better?
 
You mean for the poll? I'm talking about the number of people on this forum in the past month or so who've gone full-on "any bad thing that happens to you is your own damn fault, you should have been more prepared" combined with "And anything the rich HAVE they EARNED and you're a PARASITE if you don't AGREE WITH ME."

Better?


Yup. I just wanted to know where you were coming from.


To expand on the point: A lot of bad things that happen to people are, to some degree, self-inflicted. Most of my problems are, one way or another, I freely admit.

However, it isn't always so. Some people are poor because they put family obligations ahead of maximizing their income; some are poor because of health problems they did nothing to bring on themselves. Accidents happen; you could get laid off, be unable to afford to COBRA your insurance, then get in a car wreck the next week.... the hospital costs could wipe you out even if you were otherwise financially well-off.

In short, most people bring most of their **** down on their own heads, but not always. If there's one thing I've learned in life, it is that there's plenty of trouble to go 'round... if you don't have any right now, fear not: it will get around to you. You can do everything "right" and life can still throw you a monkey wrench. It happens.

I have all the sympathy in the world for people with non-self-inflicted problems. I can even sympathize and have compassion on people who made a decision that turned out to be "bad", but was something that didn't seem unreasonable at the time.

I tend to get impatient, though, with people who refuse to take responsibility for the troubles they brought on themselves, or who think others OWE them something "just because".
 
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This is a mess up poll. I'm all for helping people, but I'm against social programs. I also believe many people do **** up their lives and then cry about it relating their mistakes to a condition of being poor when its actually a condition of being a dumbass.
 
I tend to get impatient, though, with people who refuse to take responsibility for the troubles they brought on themselves, or who think others OWE them something "just because".

And that's what I take issue with. It's shaming enough to lose your job, to know that you maybe could have 'done more' or 'tried harder'. Good people beat themselves up all the damn time. They don't need a Greek chorus of society singing backup. They really don't.
 
Compassion and understanding is essential for being an individual human being, but the government ought to be completely neutral.
 
Compassion and understanding is essential for being an individual human being, but the government ought to be completely neutral.

The government is comprised of humans. Humans who are passionate about their beliefs.

If only they were Klingons.
 
The troubles they brought on themselves...

Social programs suck. Of course they suck. We can't fully control what sorts of human beings use them. They're expensive.

But they do 2 things.
1. Help people that everyone can agree did nothing to bring on their hardship.
2. Buy us time, as a society, to figure out how to deal with people who need another kind of help.

What I mean by #2 is that a lot of people that someone sneers at as being "entitled" because they make stupid decisions actually isn't aware of an alternative way. They grew up this way, this is what they know, this is how they do it. They may not really get that they can change their approach, or that their current approach is causing them problems.

They may need more help to get away from their stupid decision-making if they are addicts. And if you think addicts are just "stupid" then I bet you haven't ever had to spend any time around someone withdrawing. It's like someone else has possessed their body and the 2 are fighting for control inside their skin.

Maybe they have an untreated mental illness - a fairly common thing, I suspect. Chiding the mentally ill for being irrational is almost laughably ridiculous, and yet we never seem to pick up on it... even when they plan to show up at a Safeway a couple blocks from where I used to work and shoot until they run out of bullets. Even then, we have dulled our empathetic sense so much that we don't notice.

For every real "lazy asshole" on entitlements, there are a dozen people like one of the above. They're just harder to understand than the person who got struck by lightening. It's harder to understand from whence their problem came.

Social programs, in addition to helping the blameless unfortunate, also buy us time to get our **** together and figure out that these kinds of people need other kinds of help. We're still so stuck on the question of "should we throw them in the ring with a pack of dogs or not?" that we aren't working on better ways of dealing with them. And there are better ways. Each of those cases of people who now wind up on entitlements could be dealt with better.

But it isn't. Because we, the so-called responsible, can't get our act together, and can't bring ourselves to feel any tinge of compassion for other human beings. We don't want to understand. We just want to hate them and assume they're bad people. We want to assume they're just manipulating us. As we hoard our berries in a corner like the apes we still are, we point fingers at the "witch" of modern times, so convinced that we understand what they are. And yet we miss the obvious.

They're just people. And a lot of them are good people who are kinda messed up and need some help in some form. It just takes a little more mental effort to see it.
 
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They're just people. And a lot of them are good people who are kinda messed up and need some help in some form. It just takes a little more mental effort to see it.

Exactly. Right before you said it, I got what was coming; i.e., I had the light bulb moment right before I read your point. It goes directly to my point, which I sort of lost sight of for awhile, but it's the old "What makes you okay? Is it being right? Having the last word? Having more money? Being more "normal"? People put people down because it gives them a false sense of superiority. THAT'S what I've been reacting to the past few weeks.
 
Compassion and understanding is essential for being an individual human being, but the government ought to be completely neutral.
Well, I would argue that the human beings that constitute government are better able to address the needs of their citizens and their country when they employ both compassion and understanding in the evaluations of the problems we face. You say that they must be neutral, but I'm not sure that lacking compassion and understanding is the same thing as neutrality. It is possible to have compassion and to understand while remaining neutral - just ask anyone who has been in the middle of a fight between two friends. All that says to me is that your ill-prepared to have authority over other human beings.
 
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And that's what I take issue with. It's shaming enough to lose your job, to know that you maybe could have 'done more' or 'tried harder'. Good people beat themselves up all the damn time. They don't need a Greek chorus of society singing backup. They really don't.

I wasn't talking about good people who know they screwed up. I reserve my impatience for those who think they have an AUTOMATIC "right" to pick my pocket because THEY chose to do things that any person with two brain cells could see was a bad idea; people who refuse to see their own part in their situation and blame everything but themselves.
 
I wasn't talking about good people who know they screwed up. I reserve my impatience for those who think they have an AUTOMATIC "right" to pick my pocket because THEY chose to do things that any person with two brain cells could see was a bad idea; people who refuse to see their own part in their situation and blame everything but themselves.

I know you don't. I see no such distinction on a seriously high percentage of the rest of the board.
 
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