Sane Discussion about insanity

[tallslenderguy]

42 minutes ago, tobetrained said:

Maybe we're getting to a real point of differentiation here. I don't believe in those things, social welfare, healthcare as a right.

Too many times in history either tyrants or political parties have used government spending for political support. Tyranny can come from an individual or group/political party.

So political altruism is not subjective, in these two cases anyway. As I've said before, as a Centrist, I accept things I don't like. I don't demand purity.

i suspected you would take that stance re social welfare and healthcare and i think your response demonstrates the point of how different people see, and respond to, the same word differently.  We all have a degree of egocentricity that convinces us we are 'right, good, etc.," and we've learned to find and group with others that grows our egocentricity to ethnocentricity.  

i think dissent on topics has merit, even when there is disagreement, if each can appreciate the person behind the view.  We live in a world where others might have a contrary point of view. That "world" has always been,  but now we all have to figure out a way to live together with tech like nuclear weapons vs earlier times when we only had rocks to throw at each other.  So, to my original comments, the goals of: "peace, goodness, kindness, inclusion"  are all pursued in a process of sitting down with each other and attempting to communicate and connect... come close enough to center for all concerned vs simply imposing our version of "good" on another, where the national version of that can lead to things like war, death, destruction....  i think this involves our discussion in another thread What is the Answer/s  where you asked (and later modified) "Do you believe in the individual or the collective."  To which i responded  (essentially) that i see both as reality we have to deal with. 

i figure "centrist" is as good as it gets, and i see it as the ideal goal of democracy. Though, from where i sit, "center"  will be fluid and different because of our individuality, while collectively we might come  to a more centrist, 'inclusive' place to work from. 

 

[KinshipLab]

On 1/15/2026 at 7:15 AM, tallslenderguy said:

Power, wealth and strength can be used to promote peace, goodness, kindness, inclusion, and promote prosperity for all. It can also be used to promote war, destruction, greed, self centeredness, hate, and robbing others of freedom. The world does not need more Putins, Xi Jinping's, Kim Jong Un's or Trumps. Bullies are not "strong men." They are weak and immature and we the people can either enable them or speak out and vote against them. We cannot afford to be exhausted by the onslaught of evil.

There is another layer: the artificial creation of indivisible blocks of space that are subject to centralized extraction that are too juicy for psychopaths to ignore.  The premise of this conundrum is that instruments of government can be built to do ONLY good without inherently being empowered to also do evil. It is also premised on the idea that human nature would magically change so that the pool of humans would somehow be GOOD. Another way to manage the projection of evil is to stop building political structures that subject large groups of people to the rule of a single psychopath. Smaller scale government would not change human nature but WOULD limit the extractive tools available to any one psychopath. Anyone who builds a new bureaucracy for GOOD should go in with eyes open that psychopaths will see this new instrument as a juicy banana to subvert