Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I hated myself more and more for continuing to interact with them in a close, friendly manner despite disliking them. (See my flair.)
I think you've misunderstood what I said. The participants in my pseudo-friendships didn't send forms full of questions back and forth. Rather, we sent each other questions and answers via Facebook messages, perhaps one to five at a time. The spreadsheet was only a tool to ensure that both parties participated more or less equally, rather than allowing (or forcing) one person to spam a zillion questions.
While I was not necessarily implying that you were literally making people fill forms, sending questions back and forth is loosely similar, considering that that is not how people usually communicate.
Consider how people go to a therapist for talk therapy, not 'answering questions' therapy, which could potentially be a more effective way of systematically diagnosing and treating mental illness.
The ideal conversation for me is that they tell me something sincere, that matters to them, that strikes my interest and for which I can find an interesting aspect to ask about. Then they can fill in some details, and perhaps I have some kind of related experience I can bring up that could be of interest to them. If they don't respond in a way that indicate that they have interest in what I'm bringing up, then we can stay silent, or go back to the previous topic with a different angle, or try something else.
Reading some of your questions, I don't really know where the conversation possibly could go from there.
Are we trying to find out if I have some kind of touch sensitivity? Unless you're a genetics researcher looking for people with a specific phenotypic trait to sample, I don't get what's the point of this question.
Why did you dislike the people you attempted friendship with?
You clearly have a social side considering your communications here, but you have standards I don't understand and you're not satisfied with what you're getting.
That particular question actually was asked by the other party (Pseudo-Friend Six), not by me. (I'm referring back to the original spreadsheet in saying this, as I did not copy from the spreadsheet to the Pastebin text file the identity of who asked each question. Remember that approximately half of the questions in that text file were asked by each party.)
It's been more than a decade since all my pseudo-friendships were terminated, so it's hard to remember specifics. But in general: In the long term, there always end up being far more reasons to dislike (or at least distrust) a person than to like him.
Example reasons to dislike a person:
Is religious
Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender
Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)
Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)
Has authoritarian political views
And of course anybody who disagrees with you at all, even on something as minor as favorite food or preferred HVAC temperature, must be distrusted at least a little.
I find it amusing that you'd have such criteria when 2 or 3 of your other criteria sound like something a grammar-nazi would care about. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suppose you can find some grammar-appreciative people to be friends with, perhaps in the editing or copy proofing world?
I used to be more mindful of language rules myself.
Now there are language mistakes that I like. How my daughter says 'bloopy' instead of 'bluey' and calls her brother by the second half of his name. How endearing! Perhaps if you care to not be so hung up on what most people consider trivial language mistakes, taking up a foreign language would help?
When you are the one desperately trying to express yourself in a foreign language, begging native speakers not to immediately switch to English or ignore you, perhaps you will feel more inclined to be magnanimous toward others' mistakes?
What's the problem with that? We all hold some beliefs we can't justify from the ground up. I've never seen Antarctica, I have to believe that it exists if anybody talks about it.
Distrusted in what sense?
Do I trust that they will keep the AC at the exact 'right' temperature when I'm not around and they have control of the thermostat? Perhaps not, but why 'dislike' them for that?
I think it's important to respect that other people's preferences might be as arbitrary/determined as mine, and I shouldn't dislike them for that. Unless we're talking about extreme levels of causing discomfort to others.
Me neither, but unlike for typical religious claims, we have:
polar bearsEdit: penguins - I actually checked this time)Well that would require me to believe in satellites and photography (aren't these devices stealing your soul anyway?). It could be AI-generated for all I know.
This is not as odd as it sounds. There is a significant portion of the educated Western population who claims that God sometimes gets confused and puts a soul in the wrong body. This is something they teach children in many parts of the West.
'Don't sacrifice children because an angel told you not to' is not that odd of a belief, by comparison, imo.
But that's from growing up in a civilization that was deeply imbued with Christian values. Somebody who grew up in a Mayan city might be fine with Clancy-style late-term abortion.
Yes it does, and that is reasonable. I guess you're gesturing towards the argument of "if we are willing to believe sources like photographs, then why not also believe the Bible/Church too?".
My acceptance of videos/photographs as evidence is something I'm willing to generally apply (even to stuff that I don't like) - but I don't think stuff being written down is similarly strong evidence (and I don't think you do either, since you probably don't believe in the Quran)
No I don't believe in souls. And I'm pretty sure that even Christians, who believe in souls, don't think cameras steal them.
Good point, I think eventually photos/videos will become untrustworthy, maybe they are already untrustworthy. But I remember seeing photos of Antarctica years ago, before realistic AI image generation was a thing.
I assume you are referring to transgenderism? That's really not what most adherents believe (speaking as someone who was firmly pro-trans, and who is still broadly sympathetic to it) - given that most of us are atheists.
Some liberal detractors of transgenderism liken it to a religion by arguing a gender identity is functionally identical to a soul because lots of pro-trans people struggle to define what "womanhood" means explicitly.
But it can be done: a "trans woman" is a man who wishes to be a woman, and one's "gender identity" is just the gender/sex they wish they were (and then we redefine gender/man/woman/mother/father/etc to match gender identity instead of sex, and discourage mentions of sex) - no appeals to the metaphysical, just the phenomena of human beings having desires.
As I explained above, transgenderism boils down to the mundane claim that sometimes men want to be women, and vice-versa. I am almost certain that angels don't exist now, and never existed in the past - because I've never seen an angel, seen photographs of an angel, or heard any other convincing evidence they aren't made-up.
Sounds like you're gesturing towards the fact that atheism has no objective morality, which is a good point that I think a lot of atheists don't address. Without a God, there is just people's subjective moral preferences - "sacrificing children" (i.e. killing them for no good reason) feels immoral to me, and to many others. But if someone felt otherwise, I can't actually prove they are wrong by pointing to a line in the Bible, and they wouldn't even be "wrong", they'd just have a different taste to me (and that would be horrifying to me)
And it might even be true that humans need a God to maintain a stable society long-term. But none of that has anything to do with whether God, angels, etc exist in the first place.
Also, nice try, but I see what you did there: the pro-Clancy defence is that she was mentally unwell so it wasn't her fault. People who believe in abortion don't believe the fetus counts as human, so it's okay to kill it with full awareness of what you are doing.
My point was just that we generally at some point believe what others tell us. Whether it's that a picture in a textbook depicts something that actually happened, or that a given natural phenomena is explained by what they are saying.
Photograph-based scams are pretty much as old as the camera, like the Cottingley fairies.
It is conceivable that miniatures of icey landscapes were used in photographs with clever angles and painted backgrounds to fake Antarctica. I don't have a reason to believe that's the case but it's possible.
People who use words such as 'wrong body' are clearly referring to some kind of dualist conception of the mind - body, analogous to souls.
I've never seen a woman who can lift heavy things yet feminists will have us believe they are equal to men. Moreover, there are many things that Science has revealed to us that were prior excluded from our understanding. I can't see or smell radiation myself.
There's plenty of good reasons they come up with for these abortions.
Pure coincidence.
She was just being a girl. In her murder era. Going goblin mode on the kiddos. Being brave and independent. Performing self-care?
Pure coincidence that these people would excuse a 'true human' having a little bit of an oopsie moment while taking one of these mental health days off. Like there's some kind of slippery slope when you grant certain people the right to kill whoever they deem inferior, and celebrate it.
On a subreddit that reposts Tumblr posts, I just read a fantastic endorsement of Death Note as an examination of how monstrous people become when they’re allowed to kill without consequence. Basically, the show and manga both make it crystal clear how quickly people go from principled secret murders of bad people to convenience killings.
And all I could think was how quickly I’d be banned for life if I dared point out half of the population has the Death Note for their unborn babies. I thought of asking, “Is the Death Note a metaphor for concealed carry or Roe v Wade?”
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