Just change the word brain to ego.

Your brain is a physical tool. Your ego needs conflict and barriers to define it's own boundaries. If you are run by your ego, you think it's you, but.... If you realize that it's only a construct, you don't need edges.

That sounds good, but the problem is, I am using my brain/ego to analyze it, and my brain/ego says that it has looked into it very carefully and that it's really Those Other Bastards Over There that are the problem.

I feel like it's so low-level that we'll always find it hard to understand. It will trick us. It's like gay conversion therapy; every technique to suppress it will just come back, maybe even as something else we don't recognize.

That's right. You're trying to taste your tongue. See your eyeball with no mirror.

Get below the level of thought. What in you hears the thoughts you think? What is the vessel that holds them?

I have been spending my entire life trying to get to the level of thought in the first place. I am a simple man. An I/O card, really. I am a weaponized ape. If I don't have an enemy, I don't actually exist.

The Lakota said that you are judged by the strength of your enemies, and who am I to argue with 4000 years of hunter-gatherers that had all the best enemies?

They also said "the center cannot hold," which was dead nuts on the money, if you just take a look around.

Wait. That last one was Yeats. Still true, though.

Judged by whom?

By your other enemies, obviously.

You have basically two choices:

1. Just go with 2 million years of primate programming, or

2. Become a Buddhist monk. Only then your teacher hits you with a stick, and nobody has time for that.

It is also worth mentioning that the greatest trick ever pulled on people was to get them to view themselves as the enemy.

Examples would be the USA since 1979 and the UK weird Brexit thing.

A bit glib, I would say. Which is fine on a forum where attention spans can be short... But...

3. Recognize your primate urges, but act with compassion.

You don't have to be a monk to have empathy. It's really just a matter of attention. Reduce your walls and don't fear being hurt. It's going to happen. You get better.

My mileage varies, but I try.

Well, how you behave towards your enemies is a different matter than if you have enemies in the first place.

I don't intend to be a shit here but didn't you endorse political violence on another thread? I believe that #devinnunesisanidiot but I'm not calling for his head, his seat is another matter.

If people are waving actual swastika flags around, I absolutely endorse violence as the first solution.

But not all of my enemies are outright Nazis, or even bad people. Some people I just don't get along with, and that doesn't call for heaved bricks.

you're saying if you were to see a person wearing a swastika armband, violence is your FIRST solution? just to be clear here.

Yep. You can't let that kind of thing fly.

Karl Popper had something to say about that:

Nazis by definition cannot coexist with people that don't fit their model of what is human. If they could, they would be something else entirely. Nazism is in itself a statement of intent to do violence to people who just want to live their lives.

I will put up with anyone who puts up with everyone else, no matter how much I disagree with them. Nazis and ISIS are the only two groups that I don't feel any need to tolerate on even a provisional basis.

so, you would strike without first finding out if they were wearing a costume, or leaving the set of a film, or maybe don't understand what they are projecting.



What kind of arm band do you wear to warn others of the danger they are in if you disagree with their views?