Your time will be much better spend studying the definition of "sealioning" that I referred you to, and reflecting about how that word exactly describes your behavior, that writing two more walls of text and asides and digressions about how you will get around to answering my questions later, and pontificating about other unrelated discussions you've only quickly skimmed.
If you were capable of self reflection and actually interested in legitimate discussion, you would have addressed my point about the glaring contradictions in your belief systems that I pointed out, that you're purposefully ignoring and trying to divert attention away from by talking about everything but what I wrote. And you would have told me exactly what it was that Biden did that offended you so much more than all that Trump's done, which I have asked you about several times, but to which you've repeatedly failed to respond. So I can only assume you have no answer to that question, because I gave you so many chances to respond.
The fact that you're not responding to or acknowledging what I wrote further supports the theory that you're just sealioning and wasting everyone's time on purpose. Because your stated goal in life to "maximize happiness" directly contradicts your unjustifiable tolerance and support of a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, incompetent, pathological liar.
If you can't see that huge glaring obvious important contradiction, then you're simply not capable of or interested in self reflection or self improvement or meaningful discussion, and you're just purposefully wasting everyone's time, which is the very definition of "sealioning", a form of trolling, which is rightfully and justifiably prohibited here. Banning trolls who do things like that is something makes this such a wonderful, healthy, supportive community. And that's yet another perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.
One more time:
If you say your goal in life is "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", yet you don't consider sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, pathological lying, science denial, white supremacy, etc, totally unacceptable and absolutely disqualifying, then you don't really mean what you say. That's a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.
Please don't bother responding by continuing to sealion. It will only serve to prove my point and embarrass yourself and continue to make people angry with you, and might even get you banned.
Maybe you have some work to do on yourself then. The inability to restrain your mind from compulsively assuming things (or waiting patiently, or speaking respectfully) is part of my complaint about modern day Western arrogance and lack of discipline, or even appreciation for the principle.
Maybe if you actually read what I wrote earlier, and put some thought into it, all the while keeping a disciplined eye on your mind injecting ideas of its own, you wouldn't be left with this impression that I haven't answered your questions. Your dissatisfaction with my answers does not constitute a proof that I haven't answered them. This is your mind playing tricks on you. I have a feeling you don't have a deep background in this realm. I don't know if my background qualifies as "deep", but I am well knowledgeable about the subject. This is because I have invested significant time into learning.
When racists assume things about other people, you condemn them. What is the differentiating factor here?
This behavior matches one of the adjectives I used earlier, can you guess which one?
I am busy working today, I will reply on my timeline, not yours. You are not my master. Your imagination about what I am doing at the moment, or why, is not reality. Learning to distinguish the difference is a skill that must be learned. Humility is also a valuable skill, I recommend you revisit the topic.
I'm well familiar with your cartoon, I have seen it and dealt with it many times, I wouldn't get too excited about the idea that you've checkmated me somehow.
Once again, you systematically avoid answering or even addressing my questions, and go off on another sealion meta-rant, proving my point.
No you certainly haven't answered my questions. Your dissatisfaction with my questions and inability to answer them demonstrates exactly why I asked them in the first place.
You've again failed to state what Biden has ever done that's worse than what Trump does all the time.
And you've again failed to justify the reason you support and condone and vote for racism, sexism, and all of Trump's many other terrible well documented indisputable character flaws.
And you certainly weren't speaking truthfully when you claimed that "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", because the racism and sexism and homophobia and xenophobia that you support and rationalize and vote for flies in the face of your supposed goal.
Trump's lies and science denial literally and brutally kills people, because of his desperate selfish desire to prematurely open the country back up and expose millions of people to Coronavirus on Easter just to save his dwindling election chances, and every other way his incompetence and lies and dismantling Obama's crisis management teams and preparations have made the Coronavirus pandemic much much worse.
Is spreading a deadly disease all across America to score a few political points for Trump really the best way to celebrate the resurrection of Christ?
The blood and pain and suffering of all the victims of Trump's lies is on your hands, because you support and defend him. Think of that as you watch the death tolls from Coronavirus roll in, then as you and your family catch it yourselves. Happy Easter, sealion!
>Analyzing the Patterns in Trump’s Falsehoods About Coronavirus
>For months, the president has downplayed the severity of the pandemic, overstated the impact of his policies and potential treatments, blamed others and tried to rewrite the history of his response.
(Once again, this may not be the email full of answers that you were looking for, although I did make a decent attempt, via a new approach, to get my intended point across. And once again I have gotten carried away, but please bear with me.)
Firstly, I would like to apologize for the tone of my prior email. I was stressed out from bugs at work, and I reacted emotionally, and then foolishly proceeded to action. Sorry for that, I will try to be more disciplined going forward. However, please keep in mind that some "tension" is often inevitable in communication, due to things like topic, differing personality types and communication styles, and so on. I promise to do my best, but my best will be far from perfect. (As an example, when I first started out writing this one, once again the tone started off "not very nicely". I also realized this in my last email, but I happened to be in the bad mood at the time so I let 'er rip).
> Once again, you systematically avoid answering or even addressing my questions, and go off on another sealion meta-rant, proving my point.
Again, sorry, and we continue to have a misunderstanding. My prior comment was not my "big" reply to your questions, I've simply been too busy with work. But please hear this: I give you my word that I will not only answer your questions (likely to your initial dissatisfaction), but I promise I will continue to engage with you, answering as many followup questions as you like, until we finally reach a point (and we will) where you finally understand where I am coming from. I'm not going to predict that you will agree with me about the utility of my approach, but I'm confident you should be able to understand the reasoning behind it, however flawed you may consider it.
You know what, I'll even go further. If you would like, if we can find a way to have an anonymous voice call (so that we can utilize the 1000x++ bandwidth advantage), I would be happy to let you grill me for as long as we both have time. To me, this is another one of those incredibly interesting & quirky things about society: so many people arguing past(!) each other, both parties believing they understand the other person completely...but don't we both know how easily such misunderstandings can occur? Communication is hard, hence the hundreds of books on the topic. See: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22crucial+conversations%22+...
I will attempt to quickly restate the approach I described earlier that I take to political thinking, but in a bit of a different way. If this still doesn't cut it, let me know and I'll try again. Let's proceed...
> If you say your goal in life is "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", yet you don't consider sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, pathological lying, science denial, white supremacy, etc, totally unacceptable and absolutely disqualifying, then you don't really mean what you say. That's a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.
I will lay out a mental experiment to see if explaining it that way works better.
Imagine a simple alien world, where an election is upcoming involving two candidates. Since this world is so simple, people happen to have only three distinguishing characteristics (all others are identical). To make it even simpler, I will use a technique I call "exaggerated envisioning", for lack of a better term (surely there must be a name for this, considering how incredibly useful it is, but I've never encountered it).
------------------
The three distinguishing characteristics of politicians in this world are: hair color, gender, and proposed economic system.
Candidate 1: Brunette, Female, Capitalism
Candidate 2: Blonde, Male, Communism
So now we run my algorithm, including the scores and weighting that I personally assign to each characteristic:
The formula is of the form: SUM(characteristic_score * characteristic_weight), for all characteristics. (mathematical notation is not my strong suit)
Candidate 1: (75 x 0%) + (100 x 50%) + (100 x 100%) = 150
Candidate 2: (50 x 0%) + (50 x 50%) + (25 x 100%) = 50
- I have a mild preference for brunettes over blondes, but it has no bearing on my vote.
- I have a significant preference for females over males (because I believe females tend to be more collaborative and risk averse, and "the boys" have kind of been up to no good for quite some time now), but I only weight it at 50%.
- I have a major preference for capitalism, and this is my #1 concern, by a very wide margin. <-----------
Therefore, my algorithm instructs me to vote for Candidate 1.
Assuming you see the reasoning in this deliberately & comically simplified scenario above, now you just have to scale it up to an infinite number of characteristics. And that is how I arrive at Sanders > Trump > Biden. The difficult-to-fathom details within my version of this "scaling up" will likely still still leave you scratching your head, but if you can now see my methodology, at least we can productively move on to discussing those next (the "what Biden has ever done that's worse than what Trump does all the time" type of questions).
Now, I can easily presume a number of flaws you may want to point out in this methodology, but trust me, I am already aware - not of all that you would list of course, but well enough to know that there is no shortage of opportunities for miscalculations. I'll list just two:
1. All of my scores are based on my opinion, and my opinion could be 100% wrong.
2. I may completely lack knowledge of the existence of, or importance of, numerous characteristics.
However, if you think about it, while these complaints are both objectively true and perfectly valid, they are also somewhat orthogonal to our conversation (in a sense - TBD). While my specific, unique methodology (the set of characteristics and scores I use in my personal model) may in fact be incredibly flawed, this is the hand nature has dealt us. So, we can choose to address this problem head on (play the hand your dealt), or we can pretend that it doesn't exist (fold, and just hope everything works out).
I hope this description has helped move the ball forward, if only a little. Like, you may still not understand where I'm coming from exactly, but you should now have a half-decent idea about the vehicle I'm traveling in. What fuel the vehicle runs on remains a mystery (your outstanding questions), but if this attempt at describing my thinking works, those should resolve fairly quickly.
That's all I have time for now (still have work to do today unfortunately), but I would also like to leave a few YouTube videos (totally optional, but indispensable if you want to understand in detail). The intended purpose is to help deepen your understanding, as well as check if we have similar backgrounds in a domain that I consider to be incredibly important. But first I would also like to make a prediction: based on your impression that my true motive in this conversation is trolling you, or arguing in bad faith, due to my apparent sea-lioning behavior (to be fair, it does fit the description quite nicely), I predict there is a decent chance your spider senses will now pick up on another nefarious behavior, similar to sea-lioning: gaslighting. I point this out proactively in hopes that it lowers your suspicion that I'm a complete moron, and also that I may be arguing in good faith after all. To be clear, I'm not saying you're somehow not allowed to continue suspecting me of gaslighting, or sea-lioning, but I want to kind of "explicitly set that notion on the table so we are both explicitly aware of it" while we talk, which from an (ideal) implementation perspective, means something like: I should strive to be ever mindful of trying my very hardest to choose my words with utmost care, and in turn you should steelman my words to the best of your ability. (This last one I believe is actually in the HN guidelines I think?)
I may have added some of these already elsewhere, maybe even in a prior comment to you, I'm too lazy to check right now. I encourage you to watch them because there are some important ideas contained within, the kind of ideas that are sorely lacking in the world imho. The Ram Dass video in particular I think you will find highly consistent with your stance on the world and politics. I have included indications of the length of each video so you know what kind of a time investment is required for each.
I imagine you've seen this video before, or some form of it. I wonder, what goes through your mind when you watch that video? Is it similar to what goes through mine? Also note that whoever posted this video has added some dramatic background music. I'm not sure how you react to music, but let's take the example of watching a movie, does a well done soundtrack help immerse you into the movie? It sure does with me. Regardless of that, his insight into the mind's of Trump supporters is bang on. I've never been a big Michael Moore fan, but I've listened to lots of interview with him over the last few years, and I'd say his intuition on the state of affairs inside the mind of a Trump supporter is better than any other person on the left, at least that I've encountered anyways. Him and Jonathan Haidt.
I'm a huge Ram Dass (Richard Alpert - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Dass) fan. All of his talks are great, I just happened to listen to this one the other day and the content is perfect for this conversation.
And while we're at it, might as well get the topic of psychedelics out of the closet....
If you have no background in this realm and don't have time to listen to the whole thing, but are curious about what psychedelics actually "do", fast forward to 1:43:20 (the slider is at the BOTTOM of the screen, and is quite difficult to see) - from that point on it is 20 minutes, where Sam does an amazing job of putting an example of an experience into layman terms. Note that in this case Sam took an extremely high (heroic) dose, something I personally have neither the balls nor the desire to try. Different intentions call for different dosages, I spend most of my time around the 20%-30% zone (opens the mind/heart, gets the juices flowing), but not open so far that your brain falls out. So if it sounds too extreme, keep in mind that Sam is playing the game on maximum difficulty, because he was seeking something different than I.
And then one last one, a scene from one of my favorite movies, Contact (1997). This one is just to put a bug in your ear. :)
Enough weirdness for one? If it helps it go down any better, I almost certainly suffer from what would typically be considered schizophrenia of some kind. I tell you this because it seems to me like a perfectly reasonable alternative to what would normally be considered cognitive dissonance on my part (how I appear from your current perspective?).
PS: If after reading this you can now appreciate my methodological approach, if you drop me a quick reply saying so today, and include a few short "ok then Buster, how do you explain this..." type of questions (short ones are fine, I'm happy to steelman them up before answering), I would be able to write quick explanations today, and if some of those don't make sense, we can follow up later if you are still game. Up to you, I'll accommodate you as well as I can with my current workload.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
http://wondermark.com/1k62/
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
If you were capable of self reflection and actually interested in legitimate discussion, you would have addressed my point about the glaring contradictions in your belief systems that I pointed out, that you're purposefully ignoring and trying to divert attention away from by talking about everything but what I wrote. And you would have told me exactly what it was that Biden did that offended you so much more than all that Trump's done, which I have asked you about several times, but to which you've repeatedly failed to respond. So I can only assume you have no answer to that question, because I gave you so many chances to respond.
The fact that you're not responding to or acknowledging what I wrote further supports the theory that you're just sealioning and wasting everyone's time on purpose. Because your stated goal in life to "maximize happiness" directly contradicts your unjustifiable tolerance and support of a racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, incompetent, pathological liar.
If you can't see that huge glaring obvious important contradiction, then you're simply not capable of or interested in self reflection or self improvement or meaningful discussion, and you're just purposefully wasting everyone's time, which is the very definition of "sealioning", a form of trolling, which is rightfully and justifiably prohibited here. Banning trolls who do things like that is something makes this such a wonderful, healthy, supportive community. And that's yet another perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.
One more time:
If you say your goal in life is "I would like to maximize happiness for all humans beings on earth", yet you don't consider sexism, misogyny, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, pathological lying, science denial, white supremacy, etc, totally unacceptable and absolutely disqualifying, then you don't really mean what you say. That's a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for decent people to be angry with you.
Please don't bother responding by continuing to sealion. It will only serve to prove my point and embarrass yourself and continue to make people angry with you, and might even get you banned.