The Justice System
- Michael McMahon
- Oct 22, 2020
- 24 min read
Updated: Jan 3
Intro:
Obsolete link:
Copy of thread:
(obsolete)
The far-left sometimes contradicts themselves by seeking help for poor people but not as much help for victims of crime. The dilemma is that left-wingers who want to rehabilitate criminals without much confinement are hogtied into rehabilitating vigilantes in a soft way too. Hence rehabilitation could spiral downwards without jail-time if the court system simply plays the role of referee between rival criminals. We aren't more or less ethnic than each other to justify local brownie points in court! Worst case scenario an inconsistent court system could be used to excuse not only class warfare but also racism in multi-racial countries. After all the jury is composed of capitalists rather than legal philosophers! Proportional retaliation doesn't mean equal vengeance but simply partial vengeance when proportionality can be just like a steady ratio. One difference between slavery and criminality is that you'd to buy the slave in order to be evil to the slave. Yet criminals can attack anyone at all. As such the idea of casually trusting criminals not to be evil again can be reckless if they don't disown such an entitled mindset. Perhaps the unlimited forgiveness of Christianity is only possible if the victim was really tranquil in their life. Unfortunately many Christians simply aren't capable of being fully Christian when they're balancing other life goals. Christians cannot rely on non-Christians to support their religion. Forgiveness as a virtue would make a lot of sense if Christianity was presumed to be safe with a guaranteed future. Yet Christianity is becoming an endangered religion in the west where forgiving people without being defensive could undermine the religion. There is so much wealth inequality that to demand everyone be forgiving to criminals can be uneven. What the left wing forgets is that even though poor people are more inclined to become criminals it's also poor people who end up being victimised the most by poor criminals. As the largest population segment poor people will statistically be targeted the most by violent people. Poor people are the most vulnerable to burglary due to weaker home defences. A problem with people who support soft treatment of poor criminals is that they're mimicking aristocrats in their entitlement. Rich people in today's world are seen as professional but in the medieval era they were openly evil. Aristocrats didn't care about commercially innovative justifications of their wealth when they merely inherited their wealth. Hence poor people who assume an antisocial mindset might be disproven by violent rich people in past centuries openly willing to duel other rich people out of pure machismo:
"I'm not sorry and I will not apologise."
Barry Lyndon - The Duel - English Captain
The limitation of suspended sentences is that foreign nations can descend into remorseless evil during warfare. As such a perpetrator in court who isn't verbally sorry shouldn't be assumed to be ethical just because they relate to the national culture. That is to say anyone can side with evil beliefs in private.
Rape Sentencing moved from politics ie
Precedence is being used as a guideline and not a rule(!):
(Pirates of the Carribbean: Black Pear - Elizabeth - Pirate's Code)
Hatred can be reasonable if a partner is caught cheating and this deceit can justify leaving the person forever but it really doesn't condone physical violence. This might sound unrealistic but we've to keep in mind that there are plenty of happy and elderly bachelors in the world who go through their entire lives without the need for a romantic partner. Unless, if it's like the Jarhead movie where they make a video and send it in for your fellow troops to watch, then perhaps we could interpret it as a tiny mitigating factor! Although I'm not sure how much of a slippery slope there is when there's "provocation" in both the romantic and non-romantic senses of the word!
(Jarhead Deer Hunter Scene)
I only rewatched it to edit out any inappropriate content! Jake Gyllenhaul's reply of "fagg*t" also brings up ethical dilemmas. Is it justifiable to be enraged at the personal dismissiveness of a rebuke even if the general insult ends up being far more offensive to a stigmatised minority? In other words if you're not technically standing up for the gay community in this case then you'd almost have to be consenting to the derogatory tone in society in order to be angry about being called it.
Perversion always sounds cool until you're forced to listen to someone's sexual detours mid-article. With rap music these days you never know what someone could cite as provocation:
(Eminem: Rap Game - all dead)
We'll all be rooting for an ice age after that song to justify unlimited sexual violence to survive the elements!
Judge: Your excuse for stealing the bike is?
Defendant: My penis made me do it. It gives me the strength needed to get through each day.
Judge: Defendant was under duress. Charges dismissed.
Proportionate punishment of criminals isn't about vengefulness. Rather that's just my sexuality!
Ironically some criminals adopt tough-on-crime attitudes to cover up their tracks. I hope this doesn't make me look suspicious! This reminds me of when someone accidentally picked up my tennis bag at the club years ago. He mistakenly thought it was his daughter's bag. I said no worries but then he started warning about the risk of thieves and not to be leaving my bag on the road!
I never said that I'd never be provoked into attacking anyone; merely that I wouldn't expect to be let off the hook if I chose such an option!
He regrets his surname!
Despite the quotation marks the journalist never actually stated who had called it a hose or whether it was simply a description of the journalist's making!
If you have the emotional and physical capacity to kill an abusive spouse then why not just use your strength to leave and divorce them instead:
Crime Reporter: Man Had Sex With Wife Thousands Of Times Before Killing Her - The Onion
I've a fatal flaw: I end up using misogynistic jokes to protect women from other misogynists!
It's strange that I'd to write an entire thread about provocation just to ensure that even if I was evil I still couldn't be tempted into violence for the mere reason I'd be hypocritical to say nothing of being immoral!
I view myself as a masculine academic person; in other words I'm not too masculine! Only those who can apply perverted highs to hardcore academia can be tolerated!
Would a refusal to stop mid-sex count as rape when they were already in the later stages?
I was in the front seat where an elderly cousin was the driver. We were pulling out very slowly from a petrol station when he started admiring a nearby car. I saw a woman walk in front of us but I ignored her because we were driving so slowly. When the driver turned around he got quite the shock! Perhaps I'll have to be more expressive in the front seat!
On 6 November 2022 at 10:15pm I was walking outside Centra on the Gort Road in Ennis. A young man approached quickly me and joked about my beard. I didn't respond because he wasn't overtly threatening. However he tried to touch my beard and I was forced to flick his hand since it was an ambiguous gesture. I walked away and another young male shouted twice "f*ck you". I ordinarily wouldn't respond to such insults but because he was a bit smaller and a few years younger I gave him the middle finger. I did so as I walked away. If I let him get away without criticising him then I'd have been a small bit complacent towards other potential victims of his. In any street shouting incident it might be advisable not to try to out-shout them. If it's that bad then it might be best just to be physically vigilant. The trouble is that we can't compete with bad people when it comes to verbal rage. The trouble with using masculinity as an excuse for provocation is that masculinity isn't just about defensiveness but also apathy. Most people these days simply don't care whether you won a street fight because it's not relevant to their life. I wear a beard not because I want to appear macho but simply as a spiritual gesture of uncertainty and ruggedness! I dress casually as an adult not to appear childish but simply as a little reminder not to appear too serious if I get angry! If you wear a suit and you get angry then you might not be forgiven because you'd resemble a WW1 German soldier! I rang the police afterwards not to file a criminal complaint but simply to report the incident. Then if they find them they can simply warn them in case they were to do the same to others. Some people are immoral simply for forcing you to be more extreme in your own ethical system. Technically the two youths did good in a way that's extortionate on me. Perhaps they made me realise how much more ferocious I'd need to be to other ambivalent people in my gun control thread in what was a complete accident on the part of the youths. Maybe they threatened me not to incite me to be evil to them but to make me more patient to other rebels willing to be just as anti-social as them. In other words they might not have wanted me to overreact in an evil way to other evil people. For example I wasn't actually lowered in social rank by their condescension simply because the society is good. Hence they simply wanted to threaten me enough to make me feel humble but not to feel violent towards them. An extreme analogy is of how the Italian mafia might actually want other people to be ethical so that the mafia members don't have to feel too evil. In February 2024 I had a lucid dream in which I screamed at the same intensity as my younger sister as a simulation of an incident with her when she screamed at me described at the bottom of the page. So it's possible that the two male youths tried to be so masculine that they could somehow infer the maximum amount I could physically scream at others as a deterrent to me becoming enraged. This might sound too paranormal for certain readers but it'd help explain why the fear response can be subjective if your attackers are trying to mind-read you.
If you believe that masculinity should be a mitigating factor then you'd be forced to concede that punishment shouldn't bother you simply because you're masculine! Another problem is that masculinity can sometimes be insular such that they don't actually learn from other countries. If you want to be more self-controlled then just travel to a more masculine country on a holiday or eat in a Turkish kebab restaurant!
Masculinity can be intoxicating but that can be deceptive when it's applied to collective policies. You'd find a masculine component to any political or economic ideology simply because if it failed then any recession or death could still be viewed as self-sacrificing. So people charged with manslaughter didn't request a duel and so street fights aren't always honest in "masculine" way. Masculine people could just ambush other masculine people such that there's not much sense to see it as a big mitigating factor. If a court gives a suspended sentence then it could take into account the religion of the victim in terms of demanding extra forgiveness. However you'd be relying a lot on the strength of their faith which could be risky. Perhaps there's no perfect sentence where the effects of jail on a certain prisoner are unpredictable. However there's still idealism in expecting some degree of "rough" consistency if they can't achieve "hardcore" consistency. Worst-case scenario we'd up with a Trojan style war about a missing wife!
Any crime of provocation could actually be a called an indirect sex crime seeing as anyone who's already sexual doesn't need to take the clothes off the victim to know that they're naked underneath. The fact that any heterosexual man can temporarily be a homosexual sadist towards another heterosexual man is the ultimate disproof of anyone favouring absolutist views on masculinity.
Let's imagine there was a countryside estate of 50 homes. It was far from any village and was pretty much built on a random farm. Here the problem is obvious where the community is isolated and burdensome on public facilities. We wouldn't be worried about house design or adding in social housing because there are still too many cons. Luckily housing problems aren't this extreme in real life. Yet when we hear of lots of one-off houses in rural areas or housing estates on the outskirts of town then there's always a risk of a milder variation of the same problem. If the town centre is itself underdeveloped then it's hard to pressure people to form a greater connection to the community. It has to be synchronised or new residents would be forced into a chronically underfunded area. There's already a 1970s old outskirts to towns only to continue on to the modern outer outskirts where they're pretty much their own villages! Maybe an all-or-nothing approch is the best form of motivation. Either deregulate all construction or ensure they're applied consistently!
This is an argument ad absurdum but if the court system was perceived to be softer towards one crime in particular then this creates a risk of collective perversion. The courts are often balanced by judges of opposite extremes such that there's no overall discrimination. However even an inferrence from reading limited amounts of media could warp certain minds. It's often commented how violence is actuall becoming rarer releative to historical generations. Yet the difference is that violence can be concentrated in different areas and so everyone knows about it from journalists. When we think of countries that committed war crimes we often know that a lot of the culprits likely had nice dispositions but didn't object to their government. The trouble is collective morality is unconsciously stronger than an individual's morality. So if individuals are a bit amoral and ignore their evil leaders what might end up happening is that such crimes are endorsed as vicarious hedonism or perversion. Then many more civilians get sucked into joining rogue regimes. As such we never want to think the courts are overly tolerant of socially discriminatory crimes.
I find myself getting into hot water over my Minority Rights even though I'm not actually a member of an ethnic minority. So I think it's important for victims to not only make a case for themselves in court but to also assert themselves in the media if they feel aggrieved. Public opinion is important because you can lose a battle but still win the war! It's hard to know whether to campaign for people if they're already personally forgiving to a partial extent. Any victim is free to form a petition within the rules of democracy. Moreover victims can write their opinion pieces to the local paper. The dilemma is that even if some victims are willing to disagree with a low sentence they often do not complain hard enough to warrant others to protest for them. Joining a victims group is one way to be vigilant. A summary of my justice thread was sent to two victims' rights groups in early 2023:
On the 24th April 2023 I awoke from a dream in which I was driving a car and pressed the breaks before swerving to try and avoid hitting a pedestrian. However a passerby somehow flipped my car over to stop me hitting the pedestrian. It was only a dream so I didn't take the superhuman strength of the passerby too seriously. Perhaps when it comes to my current thoughts on car accidents in the justice system the dream might indicate that those who try to swerve out of the way too late and hit a person are still redemptive to some extent in trying to minimise the damage. After all the perpetrators of accidents don't have superhuman strength to hyperfocus on a sudden diversion.
(My comments are on post 4, 6 and 8 page 1, post 10 and 13 page 3 and post 8 page 4 of that thread.)
I agree with the goal of rehabilitation on the first page. Although I add that cautious punishment in jail isn’t always vengeful. So non-excessive punishment doesn’t contradict the aim of rehabilitation. Prison may be helpful in preempting and averting there being other future victims from the accused individual. The negative incentive of prison can eventually make someone see the error of their ways. The warning of prison time is necessary for the severe types of crimes so that we can then be more able to fully trust the criminal to not commit another serious offence in the long-term and to hope that they keep to their apology well after they’ve left jail. While it’s indeed true that a criminal can’t undo the past we can still try to learn from any misdeeds we may have made in order to change and prevent similar problems from arising in the future. People seldom change personality overnight and sometimes an epiphany can take a longer time. Discipline in jail entails reward for good behaviour and punishment for bad behaviour.
On page 3, I wade into the death penalty debate. I appreciate the Christian teaching to be always forgiving but in the context of a severe crime I imagine it’s acceptable to simply dislike the person less. I reason that the penalty of death is unnecessary seeing as serial killers can be pretty much buried alive with various restraints in a jail cell. Implementing the death penalty in rich countries might serve as a poor role model for developing countries who'd have less resources in their court systems and forensic departments. I do understand the ethical and slippery slope arguments. Please note that I purposely refer to serial killers who’ve killed multiple people and not murderers with one count. The sheer amount of damage they could do by further demeaning their victims or stirring up unrest if they became unrepentant means that they need to be thoroughly rehabilitated. Handcuffs can prevent the use of police batons during noncompliance or riot.
I just think that as this particular crime is an infrequent logical extreme, the defensive punishment would therefore statistically be rarely used. So I don’t think there’s too much risk of a downward spiral. The ingrained evil of serial killers/mass shooters/war criminals are obviously many orders of magnitude worse than all of the other types of criminals. Thus it will be harder to rehabilitate them. Remorselessness could be used to infer the degree of intentionality during the crime. The sanctity of life is respected as the serial killer would avoid the death penalty. I just feel that trying to rehabilitate these specific individuals back into society is too risky and much of a lost cause.
Forgiveness is crucial and will always be a spiritual and emotional virtue. But indeed the concept of forgiveness, patience and giving second chances isn’t the same as subservience. It’s of course possible that a hypothetical person who committed multiple attacks is already fully repentant. Although in such a scenario it’d always be hard to tell whether they’re sincerely apologetic no matter what they said. You’d never know if it was with genuine sadness or else if they’re a bit equivocal with self-interest or ambivalence given how hostile their previous mindset must have been. Jail is a backup plan in case there’s a risk of remorselessness and recidivism. That’s why irrespective of the deterrence vs rehabilitation or free will vs determinism debates, there’d at least have some jail time for a severe crime if only as a precaution. A limit of objectivity is that anyone who committed a crime but also supported evil could technically be in danger of addiction to evil when there's an unlimited amount of collective evil in history. Yet this argument can work both ways where inflicting a harsher court sentence can ignore the perpetrator's lack of self-awareness in how evil other people were in history for the perpetrator to have supported evil. A limit of macho vigilantism is that anyone who forgives others does so knowing that evil in history for all crime categories was almost unlimited such that the victims were self-aware in forgiving others without the need for vigilantes acting on their behalf.
(Warning: reading my joke below could send you to hell! See very last section of lucid dreaming thread. My ethics has always been very clear; think about as much misogynistic violence as you want so long as you only use it to defend against men that have actually acted on the trait! I'm not sure if you'd give in to temptation by serial killing women just to kill an actual serial killer. You'd be your own worst enemy! If there was ever a major earthquake where I suddenly had to increase my perseverance and literally kill a woman to save more women, then you'd have to stay well back!)
It's intended as satire to emphasise the brutality of the death penalty but the captivating attractiveness of the news reader makes the dark executions seem so credible!
Ohio Replaces Lethal Injection With Humane New Head-Ripping-Off Machine - The Onion
Mississippi exonerates a death row inmate by putting him in a fight to the death with another death row inmate(!):
Big Fred, Django Unchained Fight Scene
(Try to finish each school essay with a reference to obscene violence in order to intimidate the examiner!)
Post 48 page 2:
Unfortunately there could be serial attackers who might not even try to repent after being caught. In the case of the Norway mass shooting Breivik was not only remorseless but was still attempting to incite others to commit further hate crimes in court. His unapologetic attitude is an implied threat that he’d be willing to attempt to do it again if he was given the chance. I think rehabilitation can incorporate the idea of reverse reasoning when it comes to such uncooperative perpetrators. No it’s not about the active deterrence of others. A proportional judicial response is about being neutral and passive towards any unrelated criminals. It focuses solely on how to deal with the specific perpetrator who committed the crime. But sadly a disproportionately lenient response to the likes of Breivik might inadvertently be seen as a vulnerability or an incentive by other potential attackers who subscribe to these sinister ideologies.
The Christchurch mass shooter was influenced by Breivik's ideology and Breivik's repeated public statements of remorselessness worsens the risk of macabre followers. Some people say not to even mention their name to reduce notoriety. This might be helpful in recognising the unspeakable amount of evil they inflicted but I still think we've to sometimes say who they are for clarity so people know exactly who we're talking about. Perhaps we could get into a habit of naming them once at the beginning of a conversation and thereafter refer to them by the location name followed by the adjective mass shooter so as to avoid repetition. Although naming them is also necessary so the public understand the ideology they were motivated by as well as their personal characteristics so we understand the risk factors of their biographical profile. Moreover always avoiding their name risks creating an impression of an insurmountable threat such the fictional character of Voldemort under the designation of "he who shall not be named".
23 page 1 and # 57 page 3:
Although both are dire crimes there’s an immense distinction between murder and serial murder. Even working within the framework of Norway’s restorative model there’s a mismatch in that Breivik would of got a similar sentence to a criminal who killed just one person. I understand Norway’s stance against the death penalty. Their commitment to objectivity and self-control is commendable. But a very grim way to rephrase his horrific crime is that he permanently confined 77 innocent victims into jail cells the size of a coffin. I think a three-room house arrest will be inadequate to change the mindset of this terrorist. Sometimes the medicine for an illness is painful and has side-effects so the way to cure psychopaths like him is intense confinement in my opinion. Without much display of self-awareness one can only assume he’s the same violent person as he was when the attack was carried out. Restorative justice can include the notion of tough love. The sanctity of human life recognises that evil people can repent or die of natural causes without in any way attributing sanctity to evil people themselves and their sacrilegious actions. Serial killers are not unconscious or non-rational animals even though their crimes might sometimes be dubbed animalistic. Norway might not like the notion of deterrence but they've managed to deter me from supporting such a lenient and complacent response to an atrocious individual. Anyway I still support how well-funded their general prison system is. Some prisoners in other countries unfairly receive extra punishment through poor hygiene, cold or sweltering air temperatures, crowded conditions and even threatening behaviour from fellow inmates. This wasn't part of their judicial sentence which should only refer to a loss of freedom or confinement. Poor nutrition for example seems like a pointless punishment. This means a shorter sentence at a bad prison could be worse in punishment to a longer sentence at a well-resourced jail. Should a prison-rape victim be released from jail due to the horror of the unofficial punishment? So I'm not all negative towards Scandanavian rehabilitation models.
The Atlantic: “Norwegian far-right monster Anders Breivik... received 21 years in prison for his attacks last year, including a bombing in Oslo and a cold-blooded shooting spree, which claimed 77 lives. That's just under 100 days per murder. The decision, reached by the court's five-member panel, was unanimous. He will serve out his years (which can be extended) in a three-room cell with a TV, exercise room, and "Ikea-style furniture."
'Richard Patterson, 65, of Margate, was acquitted of killing 60-year-old girlfriend Francisca Marquinez in 2015 after a week-long trial...
But after a medical expert testified that choking during the sex act was unlikely, the defense reversed course on the theory. The judge never ruled on the request to put Patterson’s member on display in court.
“That’s not the way she died,” defense lawyer Ken Padowitz said. “But that’s the way Richard Patterson thought she died.”'
A fundamental flaw is that men are aware of their own sizes through proprioception. I don't know what the risks of criminal psychosis would be during conception and so forth. A problem with one-night stands is that dating in a public place helps to vet the partner. Another problem with these cases is that judges and juries aren't always assessed for spiritual and family values. Perhaps sexual crimes should have juries that have a few health staff given a possible risk of bias. A "big penis defense" could be pretty much used in any non-sexual crime too. People might need greater encouragement in self-defence legislation in order to deal with bad people and a risk of spiralling perversion in society. After all if a court system can't handle sex crimes then they likely wouldn't fare much better with general robbery crimes. Rough sex defences might resemble an insanity defence except that the perpetrator likely had bad thoughtlines in previous instances too. A trouble with consensual counter-arguments of BDSM is that certain women might accidentally appear masochistic simply out of past abuse. Porn can contain extreme sex acts but they're always done safely simply because it's their profession and they're policed by a camera and managerial crew. The idea that the victim was strangled by other people afterwards is too coincidental. It implies that lots of men wanted to strangle her to death on that very day. The only small mitigating factor would be if you lost control in a threesome seeing as so few people are accustomed to them! Rough sex defences in manslaughter defences are limited in that it takes about 20 seconds to strangle someone to death. So even if the victim is mentally unfocused the unconscious mind will inflict pain and cannot be killed without a lot of force. Forgiving people for sex crimes can be more difficult than ordinary crimes because the hedonism of sex is relatable. By contrast the high of stealing a car isn't relatable for those who don't have an already evil mindset. The damsel in distress theme in fairy tales can override our empathy for the perpetrator in real life. The flaw in this chivalrous logic is that any act of evil can be more hedonistic than sex even if it's not a knowable sensation for those who don't support evil. A risk of honour killing is that it's also an extreme form of incest. If romance is a mitigating factor in domestic sex crimes it might be that someone could choose to love a violent person not knowing they could be violent to each other.
Adults only joke I made anonymously as M:
Defeating murderers at their own game! I pre-empted all other bad people willing to create such a macabre genre! I needed to dissuade copycat attacks! The moderators deleted my thread but I opted to re-write my dark sex posts on my ordinary threads in order to spice them up even more!
(Post number 90, page 4.)
Fairness is a two-way street. We can’t scapegoat or exaggerate the threat posed by a particular person. By the way I’ve never heard anyone more obsessed about the word “homeowner” than America! I hardly ever see it used in crime articles in Ireland or Europe. I heard a joke about one of my deceased relatives who was bursting to use the bathroom but they mixed up the houses when they visited my grandparents. That could have been even more tense if it was in America.
You don’t even need to leave a voice message; just ring yourself with pretend threats and you’ll intimidate anyone that overhears you!
The forum below seemed to have crashed for a while and so I'll repost its content here. I'd gotten one or two short replies to each link with one commentator saying my provocation defence article was an "excellent OP". https://www.politicsisle.com/threads/death-penalty-alternatives.1229/
The forum reappeared after a month with my threads gone. Not exactly sure what happened.
Renewed Thread:
Deleted thread photos:
I keep spare copies in cases it ever crashes again.
18/3/23:
I always take screenshots of my posts but a pdf is a timesaver instead of searching through the dates in my photo gallery.
Check my medium homepage for the deleted Provocation Defence thread:
8/4/2023
A blog of links is handy to save storage space on the website. Moreover debate forums are a perfect medium to get people's opinions. Once you've a few different threads then that will be a critical mass to keep forming new ideas in an upward spiral! I'm always careful to reference all of my work with quotes; not because I'm being corrected by a teacher but simply that there's a risk my internet links will break over time!
75
PS: I never went to law school. I did junior cert CSPE if that’s any consolation!
I had these walkie-talkies when I was a young child. They often picked up the signal for the builders talking to each other in the back of the estate. One day after dinner I heard them and started cursing into the walkie-talkie. The boss got angry and began threatening the employee with getting him fired as he didn’t know it was me. I tuned out so I’m not sure how they resolved it. I was too young to know any better!
Any defence given in verse format will be viewed as an additional mitigating factor:
(Eminem - Stan)
I was checking over my blog links so I spent the last half-hour listening to Stan and the Sopranos murder compilation. I didn't realise there was another guest in the room so I've truly no idea what type of person they're expecting me to be. Without a threat of a woman being killed it'd be hard to be serious to others!
Needless to say there'll be a full acquittal on offer for those who confess to their crime in a music video presentation:
(No Doubt -It's My Life)
(For some political correctness I felt I should counterbalance a male killer song with a female killer song! Not sure if I'm helping my cause here!)
The insanity defence would require more of a heavy metal vibe to convince the jury:
(Papercut - Linkin Park)
If others misuse my militia theory to wreak havoc on society and I get blamed for bad advice, then I'll say I was just being paranoid against the entire nation and world order when I wrote it!
I don't want to give the wrong impression; I'm not saying I'd never be provoked into committing a crime. It's simply that I wouldn't expect to be let off the hook if I fell down that path!
I was late for class after being at a hurling match. Two people ahead of me were sent out and warned me to say sorry and not just to walk blasé into class. I did so and got a big round of applause from the class. It was a week later when the other two snitched that they'd told me to say sorry and the entire class gasped!
What better way to test your resilience than to deliberately get lost in a foreign city? I was feeling overconfident so I decided to let my phone go out of battery before finding my way back to the hotel. I couldn't ask anyone for directions because I don't speak Portuguese and didn't even bother to remember the name of the hotel. There's no cheating allowed for the sake of your own self-esteem. I was to test my orientation skills and rely on my general sense of direction to navigate to the other side of the city. Unfortunately it took me at least 4 hours to locate it because I didn't recognise the square it was beside from different vantage points. It was embarrassing because I passed by the top of the road at least 3 times and it was after 2am on return. When I checked Google Maps afterwards I could see that I was searching in all the wrong places miles away!
Well, well, well. My memory of the police arrest programmes on TV sunk in. Much of my problem with my parents revolved around fake offers; deceitful offers of apology or pretend gifts. It can seem hypocritical for someone raised by somewhat middle class parents to be so frustrated with them. After all many children in poor families don't complain because their parents couldn't afford gifts even if they wanted to offer them. The reason pretend kindness can be so annoying is because there's a sudden contrast between love and anger such that it almost resembles pure hatred. It can be very confusing when you feel indebted to them for generous gifts even though the emotional value might be ambiguous when they already had spare money. I'd get the best Christmas and birthday presents ever only to realise how little they cared at other times. It was very difficult to stand up to my parents who exuded a false charm for a while and made me insecure about my own ethics. Sometimes you’ve got to assert your authority around the house(!):
Her exaggerated crying was in anger and incitement that she didn't get to attack me rather than it being out of sadness. I was confused at first by her apparent emotion of fear when it was herself who was on the offensive. I think it was merely an attempt to vilify me as being violent even though I was non-threatening. She sneered continuously with a contorted expression. Staring in fear isn't just a defensive sensation and it can also be used as a threat of vigilance in preparing and psyching yourself up to fight. She was roaring at the very top of her voice. If that's not verbal assault then I don't know what is. She was trying to destabilise me with an extremely high pitch. They were insulting me where my sister was expressing how much she hates me and to get me out while my mother was trying to console them by ridiculing me as "sick" and warned them that I was "angry". The way she responded so drastically to a simple request to leave me alone is a sign her accusations were deceitful:
We’ve to control our emotions against any agitated and melodramatic siblings!
Jokes(!):
"If I died and it was it was Pluto or Hades and if it was the twelve Greek gods then I would have more truck with it because the Greeks didn't pretend not to be human in their appetites and in their capriciousness and in their unreasonableness. They didn't present themselves as being all seeing, all wise, all kind or beneficent because the God who created this universe if it was created by God is quite clearly a maniac. Utter maniac; totally selfish! We have to spend our life on our knees thanking you? What kind of God would do that? Yes the world is very splendid but
it also has in it insects whose whole life cycle is to burrow into the eyes of children and make them blind. They eat outwards from the eyes. Why did you do that to us?
You could easily have made a creation in which that didn't exist. It is simply not acceptable."
(Stephen Fry on the Meaning of Life with Gay Byrne RTE)
Perhaps we need capricious judges in the colosseum who stick their thumb up for a suspended sentence and down for life sentence without wasting time on objectivity!
Erased post (almost):
Stress can compromise our decision making skills but we still have to control ourselves as inflicting pain on others won't make the stress go away.
You can never know when these debate websites might crash!
It's unfortunate that no warning was given before the site was removed.
Negligence or Apathy?
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