10-15-2018, 09:02 AM
(10-14-2018, 10:40 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-14-2018, 07:51 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I didn't tell the person to commit suicide. I didn't ask the person to commit suicide. I tossed it on the table as an option as a way to call an obvious bluff of a blue playing the victim and stifle them a bit.
Note I didn't point fingers or address by name. I would rather not deal with personal attacks, but deal with issues. That is one way to push it.
Second, what one person intends to say, especially on the internet, is often not what another person with a hostile world view interprets. Miscommunication should be expected. If it isn't cleared up, you get a mess.
As someone who has contemplated suicide when his world crashed, the only response to someone so thinking is to remind someone that life still has value. Maybe I could not talk someone out of suicide who is in the end stages of terminal illness or who faces a long prison term or the death sentence, but someone who has lost everything and thinks himself too old or too wrecked to start over or to live on his past? There really is more to life than uncritical consumerism -- like culture. Time and life are precious, and there are enriching experiences available cheaply. Like this:
Visit an art museum. Go on a hike. Play a round of golf on the course on which you still have a membership. Watch an old movie that is side-splitting funny. Dust off your recording of a beloved opera and play it on your stereo. Do some volunteer work. People can live happy lives without sweating whether they can make payments on the Mercedes-Benz or keep up a costly self image.
It may be that I took the message too literally. That goes with Asperger's, and people with Asperger's often have unusually-rigid morals. We must, lest we act as badly as we might. We have enough problems trying to seem normal and presentable.
Miscalculations happen, and I asked someone who made an unflattering distortion of my screen name to correct it. I got compliance and an apology, which was good enough for me. That is what I wanted. I can be pedantic; it goes with the territory.
I know that a majority of people dislike my politics and my cultural values. I accept this. On the other hand, I thoroughly loathe the political statements of anyone attached to a philosophy that has murdered, enslaved, or robbed people. I have encountered antisemitic screeds entering fora with audiences like this, and I call the antisemitic creep out for something so blatantly unwelcome. Because I am a Jew? I am not Jewish. I am about half-German, and I can never forgive people who align themselves with those who have murdered people similar in culture and morals to mine. Some harsh judgments really are just.
I'm giving nobody a free pass. I have called out some allegedly pro-Israel people for mocking the death of Rachel Corrie, an English woman who sneaked into a Palestinian home scheduled for destruction by Israeli authorities because a family member had committed a suicide attack on Israelis and was killed when the home was demolished as the home collapsed upon her. She may have been misguided, but her death is a tragedy, and people who mock her disgust me. Life is precious, which makes terrorism wrong.
In any event, contrition is a good thing for all concerned.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.