Forgiveness

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Ya gotta agree with Trevor.

https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow/v ... 921018183/

Yes and no.

I agree with the sentiment that empathy is badly distributed. I was actually a bit shocked he even said something as edgy as 'race AND gender', sort of implying that a guy's tears aren't worth the same.

At the same time I really don't see this for any race or gender under normal circumstances such as premeditated murder or shootings getting hugs from the court. The reason she's getting the attention she is is that everyone agrees that it was a case, both for her and the deceased, of really bad luck.

But isn't bad luck the case for anyone? Maybe we don't need hugs and bibles, but there are reasons that people commit crimes. I think that sometimes society is all too eager to heap total blame on the perpetrator of a crime. But society needs to take a look at its own culpability in creating the environment that raised an innocent baby, to be a cold blooded killer. Inequality, poverty, mental illness; the cold blooded killer is bred of all of the extenuating circumstances. The criminal is not his crime; he is a human being deserving of human compassion and empathy. And it is important for society to recognize that each malefactor represents the failure of the society to properly care for its individuals. Creating scapegoats to denigrate might cure a guilty conscience, but it won't improve society. But recognizing its own failure in each criminal case yields a good chance to learn how society fails certain people. And that is the beginning of the remediation process.

So with this too - I'd both agree and disagree. Absolute truth is probably what Sam Harris would say, ie. that its 'tumors all the way down', or Robert Sapolsky's similar take that punitive justice makes zero sense because there's no free will.

At present we don't have a public that's willing to give up on punitive justice and I think there are least several strong reasons:

1) Judao-Christian history pushes for human free will and our culture is imbued with it.

2) Conformity - if you don't believe what other people believe you get ostracized even if it would have turned out later to be true.

3) The really grim angle - Darwinian shadiness, we want to dominate people who've done less well or who we interpret as inferior, hence if we've had lucky lives and most of our egos are built up on the idea that we achieved these things on our own personal greatness rather than sheer luck that means that we need to see people who've had worse luck as completely disposable. It's a horrifically self-serving and really disgusting trait in human wiring but it's one of the greatest 'vices of the victors' and unfortunately it's the victors who make the rules.

Because we live in a culture where status quo is a belief in libertarian free will and punitive justice for people being 'evil' there's a spate of cognitive dissonance that carves up what yes - is genuinely bad luck - into at least two categories that we need to look at in this case, the category where the bad luck is less obvious (eg. Trevor's example of a kid joining a gang and committing crimes), and where it's much more obvious like someone committing vehicular homocide because they were having their first grand mal seizure of their life, or in Amber Guyger's case where an examination of her character, beliefs, police service, views on race, etc. pretty well convinced everyone both black and white involved that her nervous system genuinely laid an egg and that there was nothing deliberate or premeditated about what happened.

I think where Trevor was going in the right direction - the view of criminal justice that Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky have, ie. get incredibly unlucky people off the streets who are harming others only because you have to and handle them as incredibly lucky people who need a lot of... for lack of a less new-agey term... 'healing'... rather than treating them as the self-authored terrors we consider them now. Reason 3 though above suggest that this move, ie. to remove free will from criminal justice or our culture's take on life, will have very stable and powerful opposition for the foreseeable future for the same reasons that I think UBI would have such opposition.

Overall though I'd want to see other cases where this has happened, seeing cases where it was male on male, black on black, white on white, etc. to see whether the court was more dismissive if a black police officer accidentally shot another black man or woman or if a white man accidentally shot a white man, white woman, etc.. My best guess is that personal history and the number of people who know that the person in question wouldn't deliberately kill anyone unless they felt like they were in a self-defense situation would set the court proceedings and sentencing in a very similar direction.

The media coverage, OTOH, only could have been this juicy with race and gender considered.

Another side issue that makes me cringe, I had a Brittany Pettibone/Sellner video thrown in my Youtube recommendations called 'The War on Men' and after talking about the variance on suicide rates she talks about how men get 63% longer prison sentences than women. That might have been part of what Trevor was talking about when he mentioned 'gender'.

My instinctive concern - our culture actually tells us as men that if we aren't narcissistic, aren't dominant, aren't dominating the room and other men, that we've failed in their aggression and dominance, have little or no right social status or success, and need to finish out their lives completely ignored by women (where I think their near unanimity in ignoring men without social status is something like Stockholm Syndrome rinsed and repeated so powerfully as to have become an adaptive preset). Where I think the left really fails is when they over-steer men in the opposite direction and strongly recommends that they emasculate themselves and then become some variant of orbiter - a) it doesn't work and b) men realize quickly that it's not respected, we really need some kind of middle road between the extremes where there's a clear archetype of what it is to be a respectable and self-respecting male without going soy.

On the endorsed aggression though - I think this is part of why men will likely always be hit much harder, disproportionately, by the law than women - ie. by going out and committing crimes they're being aggressive and dominant just like society tells them that they need to be in order to be valid men, just that in committing a crime they're carving that aggression in an antisocial direction and thus, as situations of biological hypocrisy are wont to do, they have to draw a very loud and clear line around 'Be destructive and dominant within these boundaries, if you overstep these boundaries we'll destroy you' thus over-correcting in the penalties dished out to men based on the messaging contradiction. Women aren't told that they're useless or non-people if they aren't aggressive thus the extra added double-back punishment for female crime isn't there.

Could we fix this by just not having a society that de facto treats noncompetitive men as non-people? Sure, but again - some combination of the victors and Darwinian inertia is writing the rules here.

In my opinion, Jean's brother was within his decision-making process to decide to give her a hug. He could have also decided to spit in her face, I would have accepted that too.

In my opinion the judge should not have given her a hug. They have a societal position to uphold.

techstepgenr8tion wrote:

3) The really grim angle - Darwinian shadiness, we want to dominate people who've done less well or who we interpret as inferior, hence if we've had lucky lives and most of our egos are built up on the idea that we achieved these things on our own personal greatness rather than sheer luck that means that we need to see people who've had worse luck as completely disposable. It's a horrifically self-serving and really disgusting trait in human wiring but it's one of the greatest 'vices of the victors' and unfortunately it's the victors who make the rules.

Thank you for articulating this. It is something I have known, but not known how to express well. (Aside, is this part of autism, knowing things but not being able to express them in words?)

Antrax: I agree with you in your assessment of the hugs. And, I understand why the judge made an exception in this case.

I tend to believe in a deterministic universe. By that I mean that I believe that things happen for reasons, not by dint of a magical 'free will'. Our past experiences determine our future actions. We can not pick and choose what experiences life will throw at us. We have little to no control over what we become; saint or sinner. That is determined by what experiences the world has set up for us.

So, if there is no free will, can there be morality? Well, there certainly can be a personal morality consisting of what our personal experience has showed us to be good or bad. But society needs to create a universal morality, that limits everyone's rights at the point where those rights begin to impinge on the rights of others. Some peoples' experience will make it impossible for them to abide by these societal rules and society needs to be protected from them. And we do all of that. Where we fall down though is in our attitude. The culpability for any act, if any culpability can be said to exist, lies in the set of life experiences that a society has imparted to an individual. When we remove someone from society, we need to stop thinking 'punish' and start thinking 'what experience can the criminal justice system provide in order to reform this individual'? I saw that attitude in Trevor's comment, and that made it sort of a religious experience for me.

This is where there's a zero-sum game between our instincts to take thing from each other and buck each other for status on one hand and have a society that actually works on more accurate/logical principles, arguably more peaceful, enjoyable, and with less pain on the other. If we want progress the later needs to win, the former seems to be written recursively throughout our instincts and needs to be chipped away at in ways that are sustainable otherwise the progress collapses and backslides.

In a word, we need to evolve to be more logical and less emotional. Perhaps Autism is nature's way of doing that.

Imho, there are four basic categories of crime:

1) Crimes of Necessity. People steal food because they are starving and have no money. People engage in prostitution to pay their rent. People commit murder in self-defense. Primary motivation is self-preservation.

2) Crimes of Opportunity. People weigh the benefits of committing a crime against the penalties of being caught. If the benefits outweigh the penalties, then they commit the crime. Primary motivations are avarice, envy, greed, lust, pride (they believe themselves too good for honest work), sloth (too lazy to get a real job), et cetera.

3) Crimes of Passion. People's emotions over-ride their reason. Primary motivation is fear or rage.

4) Crimes of Unreason. People's comprehension of right and wrong is defective or non-existent. Primary motivations are delusion, hallucination, or obsession. Sometimes people know the difference between right and wrong, but they commit crimes for the "thrill" or adrenaline rush of getting away with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYAEhgLgddk

In Primitive Rain Forest Societies that still Live/Survive/Thrive one may See An Empathy-Less
Tribe Bent on Killing Other Tribes; and one Full of Empathy as Nurtured through
the Lifespan ALL intent on Defending the Lives and Lovefare of ALL Village Members...

Environment Counts...

Environment Counts A Whole lot...

In Epigenetic and Neuroplastic Make of Model of Human We Come to Be and or Change into Be.


Yes; We have Instinct; We Have Shadow; our Two Oldest Brains of Limbic System Second; And Reptile Brain First.


Grandfathers and Grandmothers as Metaphor Never Go Away this way even when we do our Best to Hide them;
We Get Pedophiles and Cover-Ups With Bishops in Catholic Churches Supposedly Models of Human Love Harming
And Abusing At Worst of what 'Normally' Human Conditions Speak to Never do Harm to Children the Future among Us.

What Else Do We get; Trump in all His Coming Still Glory of Fear and Hate Representing all the Evil of What Humankind
Lies Will still Come to Be as the Same Basic Human Animal Classically Evolved to Be Close to a Hundred Thousand Years
ago still Homo Sapiens Sapiens; just with weaker Ligaments and Tendons Bones and Blood to Be Free And Wild Loving;
Domesticated Now And Weak with Little Spine that understands innately and instinctually why there is so much Fear
inside and on the outside too; intuitively too.

We have a Lot to Forgive. We Have A Whole Lot to Remember for the Lack of Understanding of what
We Still are innately instinctually and intuitively as Human Beings Naked And Whole Born on Date Wild
and Free Without all the Cultural Lies and Deceit for what we have Clothed Come to Be now so far away from
Wild Wolves who get along so much better without the instant Gratification of Lambs Led to Slaughter still or
Piglets with their Future Sealed the Same so Cute So Loving Such Nice; other wise Pets We Come to Share and eat too.

We have a long Evolution of Memories in our Instinctual and Innate Intuitive Natures; sure i can still
Grin and Bear a Most Beautiful Smile with Loving eyes or i will Creatively Spin the Wheel and Show You Killer eyes too.

The Fact that i can and will means i am meek and never have to raise a Fist or Abuse; i am friends with Shadow Aggression and Lust the Same as Best Friends too.

Smiles; it is the Folks without 'Little Human Syndrome' Who Are Strongest in Loving Kind.

Yet it is what Culture Teaches Us; Friend or Foe; Loved or Unloved for the Human We come to be in Largest Parts...

And then there is the Relative Free Will Learning from the reality of the experience of others true now too;
Believe the Averages or Do the Case-Study Oddities that are just as true as the Couch Potato Averages.

One thing for sure is; Destroy Empathy among any Social Animal Group Built on Cooperation more
than Competitiveness now; and Chaos will Ensue from otherwise potential loving Order.

The Forgiveness we seek is just a memory away from our Humanity to make.

The Humanity We make is up to each and every one of us with no excuses.

True; i could have gone another way too.

True; i had a Mother who at least showed me a way of Love when everyone else
told me it did not exist in practical terms of showing it then by recommendation of
Onward Christian Marching Soldier Boys threatening Harm if other Boys even dared to smile.

Smiles; i will smile/walk with the Strength of A Thousand Roses or 'Bear Teeth' With a Thousand Spears
that Say you Cross me; you Threaten my Life; and you Face a Martial Arts kick that
will surely feel every Pound to A Crotch as i will not fight fair with 1520 Pounds of Leg pressing strength.

But You See i walk/smile like a 'HuMaN'; i have no worries when it comes to this; the Problem
is teaching HuMans to Walk Like HuMaNS and Love Like Loving Mothers more; Yin and Yang;
the individual Great Work of a Lifetime for each and every Human that gives a CRap to really Live and Love.

The Wolf who is Wild and Free With White Fangs and Smiles who Loves too; here is my Wolf Face Just for fun.
My Amazing Joker Face is way to scary to share; it's the one for Demons Who Don't fear enough to tread over me.

I'd show it on my Blog; but i have to wonder if i revealed that face of an 'Amazing Joker' if i'd ever have a Friend again.

It's All about Our Tool Kit, this Human Condition now; so much farther than what we are taught tied to desks and books
and screens at School and Work until we fade away into Grey Purgatory Oblivion; it's not necessary at least not for me.

i will Never Seek Forgiveness
For Being a Wild and Loving Wolf;

On the Other Hand i am strong enough and meek enough not to harm as i have nothing to fear about me.

When it comes down to it; it all depends on How much We Have Faith and LoVE iN Us or do not; the Rest flows
Freer as Water Wave Ocean Whole Love once we are no Longer Afraid of Us. "So F.L.Y. First Love Yourself'
As an East Indian Friend Recently Related to me in Poetry the River of our Spirit our HeART our SouL Set
Free Within to be; Self-Actualization as others Sing too; Let the Rest of Your Fountain Flow to Others Love.

Ascend Transcend Be All Rule over all with Hope and Love Watch Fear and Hate at Least Fall Away Needing
no more Forgiveness in our Eyes of Love to Be.

Of course, every word i just wrote will only be understood by less than one Percent of the Population.

What good i do is still mostly for me; but true it is better Hero for me than Villain for others true too.

Some of us are a bit more complicated than others; takes Us a bit longer to get this Whole Ball of confusion figured out.

My Wife watches TV and Smiles and Laughs at TV all day Long; what is the difference between the 'Normal' one
of my Adam's Family; She is the Normal one of Course as true oddities of Nature; a Normal one too in Adam's family of Life. Potential Devils Just have to Work Harder than Angels at a Smile of Life that is no Cost; Needs No Forgiveness now.

MaKinG a Feral Face in a Selfie is Just a First Step in Releasing our Feral Natures in Epigenetic Effect that brings us
to a place of Fearless within that Allows us to Release All our Love to Others Without Fear; the Fear of Not
Being Whole; the Fear of Forgetting all of Who We are; all the tool kits of life built in; not just the
ones Spoon-Fed From birth away from innate, instinctual, intuition Loving Wild and Free fearless;
yes, strong enough without Fear to truly Love and Live; Staying Hungry longer with a Lust for Life that's real;

A place Where Forgiveness is rarely needed at all both Within and Outside.

The Hunger for Violent Video Games that has become so Rampant on the outside in
is simply a Hunger to gain what is lost within; but you see there is real Human and Human on Screen;
It's a matter of becoming Fearless Enough to Love Without Fear; Human Enough never to raise a fist or 'Gun'.

https://katiemiafrederick.files.wordpre ... 15ec6.jpeg

https://katiemiafrederick.files.wordpre ... 15ed2.jpeg

It wouldn't be wise for us to smash/stub our emotions but it would be wise to know where they're helpful and where they're harmful. In politics, public policy, criminal justice, etc. they're often at their worst.

^^^
True;
Perhaps Ironic
to Some but Common
Sense And Feel Once the Experience Is Real;
the More We Get in touch With our Emotions as
That applies Integral to the Sensory Experience of Life from Head
to Toe Flow the Less Emotions Get in the Way of Reason as Emotions in Balance or Out of Balance;
including our Overall Perception of Senses in Life are what fundamentally First are behind all the Decisions
We Make Great; or 'Huge Mistakes' in Trumpian Ways of Shoot Before You Think, too; Ignore Emotions Believe
'Big Daddies' From the South who say Emotions are all for Girls; And Guess what; fail to ever attain all Your Human
Potential in flow as really that is what Flow is Maximal Regulation and Integration of feelings/senses within. You Don't have to be a Guru or an Only Son of God to do it; Just make two feet one Foot; One HeART of Balance and there are
a myriad of Cross-Cultural And Cross-Discipline Ways; both Religious and Cultural and even Sports in Free Style Life
Best or Spoon-Fed By Instruction in ways that actually work from Birth to Death; similar and close to same, True in LiGHT.

Smiles; i've heard really 'super smart folks' on this site and all my Life say Emotions are just mush and for girls.

And true too all they 'owned' were empty shells of Words Devoid of Human Breath not coming close to see 'the wind'.

The Wind is the Spirit within All Balanced with Emotions and Senses Holding Hands together.

Some Folks Dance; Some Folks Do Not; Some Folks Sing; Some Folks Do not; Some folks see Wind
Eternally NoW iN Balance; some see little; some see mostly 'Orange' these days and never escape to Blue SKeYes Free..

I wonder what the sentence would have been if the shooter was a black male who thought he had walked into the wrong apartment and the victim was a white female?...I bet if this was reddit I'd get a few downvotes for that.

I also don't care about this woman she shouldn't have shot first till she was sure what she was shooting.

If the gendera had been reversed and a big male cop tried to plea self defense against a small female then yes- he would've gotten a stiffer sentence. And yes, folks would be even more outraged than they are. And rightfully so.

Race is another subject. Another can of worms for another post.