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LOL, oh no, this forum. And it's many diverse views. So diverse the mods keep contriving new and creative reasons to ban me for mine.
This forum has more or less outlived it's usefulness, and effectively radicalized me against it's own principles. All I see anymore are liars using arguments as soldiers to trick the other side into not believing their own lying eyes.
This lack of empathy is not what I think the ideal person should have, nor is the victim complex. I suppose this is one example of someone whose values I do not share.
I have empathy for my family over empathy for the gay furry on twitter. It's that twitter meme about the empathy graphs come to life...
Is this just 'gay furry' as thought-terminating cliché? Heck, why do you keep bringing him at all? Why does TracingWoodgrains live rent-free in your head? He was brought up by someone else a few posts up as an example of someone who, whether you like his hobbies or not, has a place in the body politic, and oats then clarified that his point is to do with oddballs and dissenters of all kinds.
The point is not about TracingWoodgrains specifically, or about homosexuality, or about people who like to wear silly fox costumes, and cannot be addressed by going "lol I hate that guy". Oats' point terminated in the question, "Do you care what happens to yourself?"
Maybe you hope for a world in which the hammer of state power comes down on TracingWoodgrains and not on yourself, but that sure sounds like an awfully precise hammer - the type that squishes one specific type of online oddball but not any other type. How sure are you that a world that crushes one guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums isn't going to crush another guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums?
This conversation started out being about liberalism, not empathy. Whether you like so-and-so isn't really the point. But you're using "screw the gay furry" as an evasion. The point is - okay, sure, you can reject liberalism. You can reject the social compact that allows everyone from you to furries to coexist and even have their own discussion spaces like this. But if you reject it you open the door to a lot of boots stomping on a lot of faces, and maybe you shouldn't be so confident that the boots aren't going to be stomping on you.
If nothing else, your views seem significantly more repulsive to random normies than those of gays or furries or, heaven forbid, gay furries. Maybe a little caution is called for.
This would be better targetted at the person who brought up "don't you have any empathy for the gay furry?" With the implication being that I should give up on my political project of preserving my families future, in favor of his political project of depriving them of a future, because "empathy". Maybe I took obvious bait, but everything you are trying to but on me deserves to be on oats_son.
It looks to me like you suggested that liberalism was just a "stalking horse" used to destroy society. Oats asked the question - if liberalism goes away, what happens to people like me, or TracingWoodgrains?
At that point you then replied with "I don't care what happens to a gay furry".
But the question was about what happens to people like Oats, or people like you. You can be apathetic towards TW, but he was never the central point. The point was your future. You want to work on a project of supporting your family's future? That's the point.
I mean, obviously TW's project or Oats' project isn't to destroy your family. I very much doubt they care. But the question about whether destroying liberalism will be better or worse for you and your family is a valid one, and no amount of yelling boo furries addresses that. Here's what Oats said:
It's all very well and good to rant about liberalism, but it seems like many of the things you value, including your ability to express yourself right now, are products of liberalism. Remove liberalism, and maybe all that goes away. What's your alternative?
That's a funny way of encapsulating it. I would characterize it more as "I have about a half dozen immediate existential risks to worry about. When I'm done with those, I'll have a fuck to give about anything else".
It didn't have to be this way. I would have supported the Bernie Sanders who described open borders as a Koch Brothers Conspiracy. I donated to that guy! I would have supported the Bill Clinton that fought back against anti-white racism. I would have supported the Obama where the worst things we were fighting over were gay marriage and abortion. I even voted for that guy!
I don't want to explicitly hurt the "gay furry" (and don't put that on me, once again, that was the misnomer that Oats chose, not me). But I would literally vote for the worst monsters in history who's political platform was working me to death in the shit mines, so long as they didn't support mandatory education trying to talk my children into mutilating and sterilizing themselves. I'm for literally any political project that is against that. And to the extend there is collateral damage, well, I go back to the above. It didn't have to be this way.
Virtually every other "liberal" party in the western world has walked away from trans children as a central plank of their party platform. And I simply do not believe TW's approach of "Ask them nicely to stop, for a decade with no progress, in fact it's actually getting exponentially worse. But never ever under any circumstances punish them electorally" is workable, believable, or even in good faith at this point. To the extent my chosen political project makes collateral damage out of him, is probably less than the extend his chosen political project makes collateral damage out of my family.
I would rather live in literally any alternative system, than one which has mandatory brainwashing to mutilate and sterilize children. I would rather live in Communist China, Communist Russia, or crushing poverty in Africa (were I African). I'd rather live in literal 1984 Fascist Dystopia. I wouldn't live in an active warzone undergoing genocidal violence... but it's close.
So no, I don't care what happens to the gay furry. There is in fact vanishly little I care about above stopping what the state is doing to children. And to whatever degree you misconstrue this to be about me "hating" or "wishing to hurt" anyone, as opposed to having higher priorities, that's on you.
I don't really care if you hate gay furries. Frankly, they have an easy out of not engaging in homosexual activity and not buying fursuits or going to furry conventions. What triggered my thought of "wow, this guy is extremely unempathetic" is when you dodged my questions about what happens to all the other liberals who post in this forum to 1) bash the gay furry in two comments, 2) say that this forum sucks, and 3) say that you literally only care about your immediate family, and no one else.
You still haven't really outlined your ideal society even still; would you be okay with your family ascending to royalty and everyone else being a miserable serf? For me, it's easy to say that Marxists and neo-Nazis and other radicals who want to kill people and wield the state should be suppressed, but that standard would still include the progressives and the dissident right, and that's mostly the same position we're in now. Where is the wiggle room on how much you can deviate in your ideal society? Is reading about political philosophy for 8 hours a day okay?
I'm going to state this as simply as possible. Because now I'm just repeating myself.
I don't need an ideal society. I want literally any society that isn't transing kids, importing infinity third worlders, and openly discriminating against me in my native country. It's a low bar to clear. It could be virtually any society you choose in 4000 years of human history minus the last twenty. Don't act like this is some impossible ask, and I'm just being so obtuse and confusing and hateful. And don't act like for reasons of empathy I must still support an aberrant political projects which has these as it's core goals and virtually the only thing it's willing to expend political capital on achieving.
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