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The only cheat that I can see in Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that religious bliss can make all fear and pain irrelevant.
I've seen plenty of people in end-of-life situations in the last ten years or so after seeing rather little. Assurance that one is going to the Good Place makes the congestive heart failure, lupus, vascular breakdown, or terminal cancer seem all the less horrible.
One Saturday night I was visiting my father, and I knew that would be his last time in This World. I wanted the services of a clergyman, and I would have accepted anything. I had to do that job myself. I read two psalms -- the typical 23 and the less typical 33 (with which I am familiar in the form of a Bach motet). Maybe I was excessively dramatic, as his roommate thought I was over the top... well, it was my father, and I am not a trained clergyman!
...Nature, and especially laws of mathematics and physics and the logical dialectic define what reality is. We defy such at severe risk to our own safety, prosperity, health, freedom, and credibility. The sun is far greater than we are, and without it we would either never have existed or would be in a lifeless, frozen segment of the Universe. Earth is great and so is its gravitation; without the gravitation we would be floating around in space having suffocated for the lack of oxygen. The biosphere is far greater than us, for without it we could never eat. We adapt to natural reality or we die. An embezzler cannot get away with some 'alternative arithmetic' that shows that what he filched either never existed or was not filched.
Stupid people defy nature and put themselves and others at grave risk. Smart people know the rules.
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.
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It may not be a matter of taste, but on some other website that I frequent, someone related that Ann Rule was astonished that when she was on the same crisis-center line with Ted Bundy, she brought her dog in one day and it absolutely hated Bundy. The dog could sense sociopathy in him. Bundy was already raping, murdering, stealing, and burglarizing, the sorts of things that good people just do not do.
I suggested that dogs are still wolves, and the most difficult task for a wolf is deciding what wolf to let into the pack and which one not to. Wolf packs and human families have similar structures, which may explain why wolves found us. Solitary predators such as bears and most cat species don't have that problem (lions do). I'm not going into the details on what criteria make a strange wolf a desirable addition to the pack and not a wolf to avoid. What wolves can do with fellow wolves so can dogs -- with us. The dog got plenty of signals that Ted Bundy was a deceitful, unreliable, and dangerous person. The dog was basically telling its owner Ann Rule to run for her life before Bundy could do very bad things to her!
Is it simply abnormal behavior? No. I am on the autistic spectrum, and dogs see right through me and find me harmless. OK, I know the rules with dogs, but those come naturally. I have been bitten only once in my 66 years, and that was by a puppy who didn't know what he was doing. Then again, I don't do crime. Note well that, speaking of crime, the scariest unit that many criminals can face is the K-9 unit. A corrections officer told me that burglars (who are often rapists or pedophiles as well as thieves) dread the K-9 unit because the dog can figure them out.
Back to the person in the title of this thread: Donald Trump has never gotten along with dogs, which says much about his character. Dogs are either your best friend or a nightmare -- the Other Big Cat. Trump is a cruel, deceitful person, perhaps far from as hideous as the late and unlamented Ted Bundy. Dogs can apparently see through him.
A dog that I knew well (it belonged to my brother's girlfriend) got along well enough with me and with cats. It went out of its way to attack some man hiding behind some bushes. Mugger? Rapist? That fellow did not report the incident to the police or to Animal Control. I wonder why!
(OK, Adolf Hitler had a dog Blondi whom he even gave the dubious honor of going to the bunker with him, That dog had been socialized by the SS, a group full of sociopathic characters who trained dogs to, among other things, attack inmates in the camps. So you can just imagine what sort of dog would have fit the Fuhrer. Hitler eventually tested a cyanide pill on him a few minutes before offing himself.
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.
Posts: 10,465
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Whether this site is or is not moribund, I must take another swipe at Donald Trump. Maybe some time in the future a site like this will seem entertaining or enlightening. I cannot say that I will be one of the enlightening or entertaining people, as such would be arrogance.
As the case around Donald Trump and classified documents slips into the zone of a criminal indictment I notice that Donald Trump, a man infamous for both abuse of power and bad taste, seems to have kept his classified documents in a bathroom -- a bathroom containing a chandelier.
It is appropriate to have a commode-room as a comfortable place, but to have a chandelier?
As I think of it, bad taste often connects to inadequate learning in which one does not know the norms. This would explain the bad taste of gangsters who have little formal learning or people whose formal learning is a waste. Also possible is mental illness. As the early part of this thread may suggest, people of modest background who achieve the power to murder and steal at will develop extreme narcissism, if not also insanity. They may love gaudy display and symbolism, but it is all about themselves.
This is not the adoption of aristocratic taste. I have not shown hereditary monarchs and nobles. As an example, a member of the aristocratic Esterhazy family hired the great composer Joseph Haydn to write entertaining music for him. Yes, Haydn is known for some deliberate humor... but he is Haydn, one of the greatest composers of all time, a master of form and tune. The prince had good taste in music. Domenico Scarlatti did much the same for Spanish and Portuguese nobles. He was also great.
The bad guys that I mentioned could demonstrate pride of ownership or the exercise of power. Their individuality is primitive and obnoxious. Self-awareness is lacking, and such is characteristic of narcissism. To have empathy for others one must at the least have awareness of oneself. Then and only then can one recognize that a world with eight billion people is not all about oneself.
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.
