Justice? More like crime and punishment, but they let you know in advance what the punishment could be before you commit the crime.

We had a simple philosophy when I was an instructor in SF. Some people just aren't cut out for it; but, that doesn't make them a bad person. Likewise now. Thank you for your service.

sexobon:
I just read over this thread (the second I have started in ten years in the Cellar) and realized that in it you have purposely and personally insulted me more in the past 6 days than all others have in that whole time.
Enough said.

Welcome to the club.

You should have seen the time he ruthlessly goaded and harassed a young man with schizophrenia. We like you, Jim, it's all good.

Corollary:

Service in the Special Forces might make you special, but that doesn't make you a good person Thanks for your service .

You didn't just introduce a topic for discussion when starting this thread, you started it as an opinion piece. The credibility of the source of an opinion is subject to scrutiny. For instance, BigV has offered opinions in discussions of medical matters. But this is a guy who went into CHF because he wouldn't take his blood pressure medication. How credible is he as a source? Tw has well established that he lacks credibility as a source. Clodfobble thinks she knows better than everyone who knows better than her. She probably doesn't know or care that her referenced schizo was subsequently arrested for violating an order of protection after leaving the Cellar. It seems to me, DJ, that you've simply joined an elite crowd of people who are full of themselves. Now the EEI have been said.

If you can't take the heat, ...

While all that is fair, it's interesting that you can mostly only criticize people's credibility, bon, because at one point, they were open enough to reveal details about their lives.

We all have credibility issues, right?

When we present ourselves warts and all, is it only to face withering judgement? Why would we do that at all?

Fair question

I do it because I wish to engage in conversation with you (plural). I endure sexobon's criticism which I find mostly unfair, unkind, and unhelpful. His credibility as a reliable source for constructive criticism is very low. I think he's a smart fellow, and that he enjoys using those smarts to be needlessly mean, time and time again. My response is to mostly ignore him.

Did know; did care; partly blame you for it.

Once upon a time, when I was at the lowest point of my life, and was so desperate and hopeless that my loneliness outweighed my desire for privacy--a rare occasion--so I decided to do something I never do--I opened up and shared several years worth of extremely painful and humiliating personal experiences, just opened up the floodgates.

So many of the people of the Cellar were so supportive. People shared their perspective and similar experiences and helped me to feel that I was part of a community--something I didn't have at that time in my real life.

However, there was one person that took my vulnerability as an opportunity to make an off-the-cuff, extremely demeaning and personally hurtful comment directed at me. It stuck with me. I thought about it a lot because it played into my total lack of self-worth. I stopped coming to the Cellar--it was the place that a very hurtful thing happened to me, and I didn't have any more capacity to be hurt. I literally thought about coming back to the Cellar but made a conscious decision not to.

So, I was not part of a community anymore. Years passed, I tried coming back to the Cellar, on occasion, but never really re-integrated. Along the way I made some dick moves and made people mad. I take responsibility for that part. But I also felt like nobody remembered who I was or valued me as a person anymore, because so much time had passed.

It turns out all of humanity is just a bunch of apes, and our ape behavioral instincts are deeply fucking us up.

Our DNA tells us how to behave, because for some 100,000 years, life was brutal and the only behavior that was passed on was those of successful humans.

Humans succeeded by gathering into tribes. It was those humans who lived and reproduced their DNA.

We believe we need the tribe in order to survive. So, we need the validation of the tribe.

Then, we need to protect the tribe from weakness, and determine roles and ranking. In order to do that, we will provoke battles. Bitter fights will occur. Recasting of the tribe will happen.

But all that doesn't exactly map out in modern civilization. Here, and everywhere in life, we are weirdly doing all this without even realizing it. We don't really need to any more, it's not helpful and it seems to often prevent us from moving forward and finding truths. But it's built-in...

Evolutionary Biology, Evolutionary Psychology, have become nearly the only way I try to think about why a thing is happening with a human. Nothing else makes as much comprehensive sense to me.

We do have hard-wired traits. I think the challenge is, knowing this, accepting it, how to move forward while taking it into account.

Like racism. We're wired for it. We all have it. If we know this, accept it, we can move forward--even if just to make incremental progress. If we deny it, ignore it, we'll stay stuck there forever.

It's gratifying to see this thread has drifted into a topic of any significance at all whereas it previously had none. Thank you for your cooperation. I couldn't have done it without you. I love youse guys.

How very Trumpian of you.