obyvatel said:
Hi Taratai,
How do you know the man concerned was red with anger and made a total fool of himself? Being out in the sun for a time can make people turn red, and I did not see any evidence of making a total fool in the account either. Silverback put some hints in his/her post but maybe you read more into it? I did not find anything in Silverback's account that indicated any serious wrongdoing on the part of the step father and the post started with "my stepfather is a psychopath". If someone wants to demonize another person and all they can come up with is this, then it seems that the person has an axe to grind rather than look at situations objectively.
I could: assume everything is a lie, assume everything is true, or assume there is truth and lies. I assumed the last option, simply because trying to demonize someone doesn't mean the one being demonized is innocent. I've seen far too many situations where one side does something stupid/bad and then the other side blows way out of proportion for what has been done, which in the end spirals in both sides trying to shift 100% of the blame to the other. Once it reaches that point, it doesn't really matter who was the first one to start it - both are just as guilty and irresponsible. The description follows exactly that pattern of behavior, so i see no reason to assume that part was a lie.
obyvatel said:
I think it is mostly pointless to whip out the term Organic Portal. And I also think that the term psychopathy, after being popularized, is used rather loosely in general discourse. And yes, these terms are generally used pejoratively rather than with careful consideration and knowledge. Psychopathy is a real phenomenon though highly complex and difficult but not impossible to detect. There is scientific material field tested with real data which helps in identifying psychopathy - like Hare's psychopathy checklist, and Lobaczewski's ponerology. But I for one believe that to use the term psychopathy properly and scientifically, one needs training in psychology and lot of experience in the field. We can try to learn and understand psychopathy better but being upset at someone and bringing out those terms to grind an axe does not, imo, promote learning.
Yes, psychopathy is a clinical term, and with clear clinical description, but so are cancer and autism. That doesn't prevent people from calling everything they don't like "cancerous", and people they don't like as "autistic". It's the same with every term that has an actual meaning - once it gets out to the wider population, any meaning it had becomes diluted, and the word becomes meaningless, because of how often it is used out of its proper context. Then, even those that use the word only in its proper context might refrain from using it so not to hurt someone's feelings (especially in the climate of everyone being hurt over minor things).
I wish it wasn't the case, but sadly, i see the same thing happening with the term "psychopathy". As if the system reacted to the growing awareness by diluting any meaning from the word (which i think is partly the case here, and partly a natural thing).
obyvatel said:
What I wrote was I can identify with the situation and the emotions that can arise in such situations. Emotions can and most often do drive behavior but it is not inevitable. So, no, if the man had a big shouting match with his family without much provocation, then that is not a behavior that I would consider "fine". But then experience has taught me that if such incidents happen often, there is more under the hood than just holding up other golfers in a golf range and also, the person who does the shouting is not necessarily the only villain of the piece. Without more data, I would not draw any conclusions from Silverback's account other than that he/she is upset at the stepfather.
And this is exactly what i meant -
not the only "villain". I see
both parties here as guilty, not solely the stepfather. Only because i didn't specifically say that Silverback is partly to blame for the situation doesn't mean i think otherwise (well, i guess i should specify, but then my posts tend to be overbloated and gigantic, like this one i'm writing like now, and i'm always trying to avoid that :P ).
obyvatel said:
You seem very confident. This kind of confidence is often (but not always) based on inexperience and lack of exposure to a wide variety of people and situations. But even without such experience, if you read about human psychology seriously and apply it to yourself thus building self-knowledge, then it is possible that your confidence level in such statements may reduce. But keeping that aside, even if it was true that you personally would never act in such ways - it does not necessarily mean that a person who does is a OP/psychopath/villain of some sort.
Of course it doesn't mean they are OP, and that's why i wrote "more like", not "definitely". Yes. he might have been a souled being all along, either tired of interacting with OPs for long time and exploded, or was adjusted too well to the world of OPs and forgot.
But then, as a souled being, shouldn't he be the one responsible here? Shouldn't he act better than a mechanical OP - just reacting? Shouldn't he aspire higher?
If he is an OP, i can understand that he cannot do any other way. But if he's a souled being, then, no matter how hard the situation might have been for him, he should have a way to handle it differently.
It's like with a cat that devastates your furniture - you don't kill it for doing that, no matter how expensive it was. You teach the cat to not do it again, or release his energy in a way that he doesn't do that anymore, because the cat most likely doesn't even understand why is it happening. Yet when a human does it, and you can see it was done deliberately, you know that there is something very wrong going on.
To me, the situation with "souled beings" and "organic portals" as exactly that of a pet owner and a pet, or a parent and a child.
The ones that are supposed to be responsible here are the souled beings, and it's their responsibility to take care of OPs, not to blame them for all the evil in the world (unless they want to go on the path to 4D STS, because that's exactly the way to go there :P ). If Silverback sees him/her self as a souled being, and will see the stepfather as an OP because of what i wrote, then he/she failed at that point in time described here (but try better in the future :P ).
obyvatel said:
Maybe. But please understand you are expressing a highly subjective opinion without solid supporting evidence for these claims. Depending on whom you talk to you may be challenged on it or not. The danger of this kind of claim is that if someone challenges its validity, you can fall back upon "he doesn't understand because he is a OP" type argument, which would be circular reasoning. So I put down what you say as a possibility, though I would think it is neither necessary nor sufficient to establish a criterion of "OPness" given what I know about human psychology.
I understand, but the thing is: no matter what we do or say, someone will use that as a justification for their own bad behavior and ignorance.
For example, one could come up to a conclusion that, after seeing how much bad things people do by using the OP term, the Cassiopaeans are actually evil, because it's their fault the term is used so much (and i'm sure there already were people that thought that). But is it really that way?
They only offered knowledge, but people used that knowledge to further their own agendas (blaming others and feeling superior). So i think it's safe to say that it's the people that are at fault here - the ones that use knowledge for "evil" do it because they are "evil".
Just like saying that blacks have higher crime rate than whites in the US is a fact, but there are people that will use it as a proof that getting rid of blacks is a good thing.
Or like Jews having higher positions in society and better paid jobs is a "proof" of a worldwide jewish conspiracy.
Or like the government, NASA, media, and basically everyone lying to the population is a "proof" that the Earth is flat.
People use everything according to what they are aligned with. "Good" people will tell lies if it serves others. "Evil" people will tell the truth if it serves their own agenda.
If people will use what i wrote to play the blame game, there is nothing i can do about it. But if there is any truth to it at all, then those that do not want to play the blame game, those that want to be responsible for OPs, they will find that truth and use it properly, and ignore any falsehoods in it.
If you think there is nothing true there, then maybe you are right. Or maybe not. I guess i'll be the one to blame for anything that happens from here anyway.
obyvatel said:
That however is not true for the term psychopathy. If I take the psychopathy checklist, I know I do not check the boxes and if I found someone who did check the boxes, I would be more wary about them . So my behavior would change based on the result of the test (taking into account confidence interval of the test). So psychopathy and its associated study is meaningful for me.
I don't really trust checklists.
First reason is that they assume that the person fills them faithfully and doesn't lie - it has to be a test that's designed in a really clever way in order to fool people into saying. Otherwise, i would expect the clever psychopaths to actually know how to slip through and which answers to give.
Second is that any tests and checklists are influenced by the biases of the people that make them. Like, i saw a checklist that would label this entire forum as sociopathic for, you won't believe it, "erroneous beliefs" (which it explained as: believing in UFOs, conspiracy theories, astrology and so on, among other things). If the system is corrupt, and people in it are corrupt, then any knowledge and truth applied to it will only serve to further the corruption (or be ignored if it doesn't serve it).
And if there was ever a situation where there will be some reliable test or checklist that allows regular people to spot a psychopath with a 100% accuracy, i'm absolutely sure that the 4D STS forces would find a way to somehow influence and shift the results (like, "coincidentally" the people that were to be write that test would happen to be influenced by psychopaths, if not be actual psychopaths), or the test would get completely ignored, or... people would be taught that psychopaths are actually good (like they are just now :P ).
That's not to say that all of this knowledge about psychopathy is for naught, but this post is already far too long, so i'm going to end it here. :P
Laura said:
My analysis of your take on the various topics of this thread:
I thought that varying opinions are welcome on this forum.
But don't worry, i'm done talking in this thread anyway, because i wrote far too much already. Don't like when half of the page is filled with my own text, how am i supposed to read the rambling of an idiot. :P
