I was never very much anyway, so I have very little to lose by my enmity of Donald Trump.

@anglophone His dog loves him.

@WilliamFleming He has a dog? Is he called Mike Pence? (Yes, I am being very foolish.)

@anglophone Above the clouds the sun is shining.

@WilliamFleming Except at midnight, when the sun is shining beneath one's feet.

His mama loved him.

@WilliamFleming We actually don't know that. There are some mothers who don't love any of their children.

@Lorajay That also went through my mind.

@Lorajay I just read this interesting article:

[politico.com]

Trump’s mother was a stern Presbyterian, having grown up in a remote corner of Scotland under harsh conditions. She was reserved, but not in a totally cold way. I think you are partly right. She was not effusive with her love.

No. Opposition doesn't require enmity.

@skado what if I feel like I'm going to kick their ass.

@skado it's going to make me angry. or what if it was my child or my mother?

@skado I've got a pretty good reserve of ignorance to spend on stuff like that.

@hankster
You and me both! I'm not saying it's wrong - not making a moral judgment. Just saying... that regardless of what action we take, the feeling of ill will wouldn't exist if we knew all the facts. We might still choose to remodel their nose, but that could be accomplished without polluting one's own bloodstream with cortisol.

@skado knowing all the relevant facts would seem to preclude someone from being ignorant. I disagree with this statement. is this one of those Buddhist things?

@hankster
Well if I understand your question correctly, I don't understand your objection. I very much am saying that knowing all the facts would preclude ignorance. But we don't usually know the relevant facts, so our emotions are triggered. If we weren't ignorant of those facts, I think we could bypass the emotional response and just get on with the facial remodeling.

@hankster
It's probably harmonious with some Buddhist stuff, but that's not necessarily where I got it... entirely.

@hankster
And I might have misunderstood your comment.

@skado I was just wondering if you made that up yourself or got it from some of them Buddhist folks. I think I was trying to make a difference between all the facts and the relevant facts. if someone is beating a dog that's really all that's relevant. if a dog is behaving that badly other measures should be taken. but I don't see how knowing all the facts would prohibit enmity anyhow. knowing all the facts might be the reason to feel the enmity.

@skado we might just be talking past each other lol

@hankster
I'm famous for that!

@hankster
"I was just wondering if you made that up yourself or got it from some of them Buddhist folks."

Those were my words... something that occurred to me as a response to some stuff I see from time to time on this site. But I can't deny being influenced over the years by Buddhists and others, so I'm sure others have said similar things better no doubt.

We'll never know all the facts. And we're damned lucky if we can know even a few of the relevant ones. But the facts I'm talking about are not just the ones about the dog beater. They are also the ones about what we have in common with the dog beater that we hide from our own awareness. It may be more Jungian than Buddhist.

I'm not claiming to be a flawless practitioner myself by any means. I just think that if we were aware of enough relevant facts, we could knock the snot out of that dogbeater without experiencing the least enmity.

@skado

i reckon if I'm gonna ever get into a beating I'm gonna be emotionally invested.

i hope I wasn't being offensive by referring to your buddisticnessish style. i kinda like it. makes a person ponder. apologies.

I've got a good stock of hypocrisy at the ready at all times. useful stuff.

lol...if jung and buddha arm wrestled for it, who'd win?

@skado and the words ain't bad neither. I'll just be showing my ignorance should i get in a fracus and get all enmitcal on somebody.

@hankster
No offense. No apologies necessary. Dialog is what I’m here for.

@hankster
and I’ll be right beside you showing mine. It’s what we hoomahns do.

@skado ignorance ain't cheap brother, but it's always on sale.

@skado No I am sorry, that does not work. Reason alone is a merely passive state, only feelings provide motivation. A ship with a rudder but no engine still ends on the rocks. A person who is governed only by reason and logical morality, sees a person beating a dog, notes that they have seen a person beating a dog and that doing so is immoral, then walks on by. You can not divide the human brain into neat separate chunks, where this one part does emotion, this bit does morals, and this bit does reasoning, it is not that simple.
Moreover enmity does not have to be directed at humans, it can be simply directed at, for example, the act of beating dogs, or an ideology. That is an acheivable state. How many of the greatest advances in human history, especially medicine , science, and social welfare were achieved by people who said, I hate it ? Perhaps nearly all of them. As the old saw goes. "Hate the act not the actor, the idea not the thinker."

@Fernapple
Thanks. I do think there is a useful distinction to be made between hating the person and hating the act. I don’t think I said there had to be a separation of reason and emotion. I’m just saying, that emotion doesn’t have to be hate. The same act could be motivated by compassion for all concerned.

@skado I don't think that you get to choose your emotions. If I saw someone beating a dog, my first emotion would be horror, then pity, and then anger. I would have no control of that, but I can control my acts and my thinking to a degree. So my act would be to do whatever I could to stop it. But my thought would be, why is this person doing this, what harm did they suffer that made them so unreasonable.

It would not matter if that person was themselves a victim of unreasonable violence, who was damaged so much they were driven to violence themselves, or someone spoiled by overindulgence and entitlement to the point where they had never learnd empathy, my thoughts would still bring forth the next emotion of pity for them too.

My anology of the boat with engine and rudder was perhaps not the best one. A better one would be a sailing boat, driven by the winds of emotion. You can not choose the winds, control them, or regulate their power, but by adjustin the rudder and sails, you can manage them and use them to go in the direction your reason tells you to navigate.

@Fernapple
People who believe in literal gods can’t control their fear of those gods. Are they then helpless to eliminate that fear?

@skado There is nothing wrong with fear, if it keeps you from the cliff edge or the deep water. The real shame is on those who taught people to fear things that are harmless or do not exist, for their own profit and gain at their pupils cost. That is one of the ideas that I am pleased to say I hate. And if hate motivates me to fight it all the harder, then good. And if that means, "polluting one's own bloodstream with cortisol." Then so be it , I have no wish to live forever, I would far rather make a real contribution at the risk of burning out a little earlier, than live a life of appathy for a few days longer.

@Fernapple
I understand, but what about my question?

@skado No, a fear can be overcome, but not abolished just like hate, though sadly unlike hate it does blow directly to shore , and so is little use. My point was that lessons in stearing from a good pilot help, but sadly there is more profit in keeping the passengers fearful and ignorant and the charts in the locker. The bottom line is that if we abolish all emotion and desire and let reason alone rule, then reason will tell us that we are happier dead than alive, and with no hunger or thirst, or lust for tastes we will just sit down and starve.

@Fernapple
Did you intend a comma after "No"? Or did you intend to say "No fear can be overcome"?

@skado Yes sorry did intend the coma.

@Fernapple
You said we don’t get to choose our emotions. I agree that we don’t have direct control of them. But just like the person who was once fearful of God and later learned that God likely doesn’t exist, we do have the power to eliminate some negative emotions by informing ourselves of the facts.

The point is not to abolish all emotion. The point is that some emotions are both unnecessary and destructive. The point is that if you come to believe that the literal god doesn’t exist, you no longer suffer the unnecessary fear of him, and the people around you no longer suffer from your uninformed actions. You can still fully enjoy life - maybe even more so. You have not lost the capacity for emotion. You have just gained the freedom from unnecessary destructive emotion.

@skado No I think that is mixing up cause with effect. In doctrination with the false idea of a god is the cause of the fear of god, but the emotion of fear is the effect, and that is the same no matter what the cause.

@Fernapple
Not sure I understand your point here. Regardless of possible semantic imperfections, if you eliminate the cause, the effect goes away. Whether one designates the cause as indoctrination or ignorance, when accurate knowledge is gained, the effect no longer persists.

@skado Sometimes a fear can be a good drive. There is an old story, which may not be true. That in a fire adults run out of the building, but children hide under the bed. But not so long ago in England there was a fire in a tower block, the fire brigade put out the message that everyone should stay put and wait to be rescued. So that they could account for everyone. Unfortunately the fire spread much more quickly than anyone expected, and the result was that those who ran out of the building in fear mainly survived, while many of those who followed instructions were killed.

The case of the children hiding under the bed, however has an interesting parallel in some of the stories I see coming out of the states today. Where I have seen the virus deniers saying that, taking anti- virus measures of any sort, is a result of cowardly ideology. Yet I have to wonder if that is not ironically exactly the opposite of the truth. Since sometimes it takes more courage to acknowledge a danger, and the fear of it, like an adult, rather than to hide under the bed and pretend that it is not real like a child.

Fear is after all an emotion which is given us mainly to keep us safe, it is often unwise to ignore the advice of our emotions altogther, but it is also wise not to accept as we grow in understanding that we can not just take given custom as our world view in regard to anything not just what to fear. It is never the emotion that is our enemy, but the false triggers of that emotion planted in us by our cultures, especially when our cultures are built by those who would like to profit by engineering our folly, regards less of the harm to us.

@skado Sorry our comments seem to be leapfroging. We must be typing too fast. But anyway mine can stand for now, as long as you don't mind the rough punctuation.

@Fernapple
Of course we are always free to drink all the poison we want.

@skado Yes but you can only elliminate false causes. The effect remains for true causes, and it is a mistake to disparage the emotion as a whole because of false causes or false actions.

@Fernapple
I might press you to look for a different phrase. I can’t quite imagine a “false cause”. Something is either a cause or it’s not. I think I sort of understand what you’re getting at, but I don’t want to assume.

@Fernapple
And I’m not disparaging an emotion. I’m just saying emotions have consequences. If we don’t want the consequences, we can remove the cause.

@skado My point is that it is not the emotion that you should blame, but the false reasoning which triggered it in the first place.

If you wish to remove the cause then you have to address the misunderstandings or false cultural assumptions behind it.

@skado The habit of disparaging emotion is a culturally inherited one, which it is good to be wary of , since it has been deeply inbedded in our culture so long that it distorts even the post religious world view nearly completely.

Because it is at the core, if not the core, of the Abrahamic and theist deception. The trick being to make people feel guity about their animal nature, that animal nature being made to take the blame for all that is wrong, ( which is easy because nature has no champions, ) and create the sham that there was another and better alternative, which of course there is not, which they held the keys to.

@Fernapple
I think that's kinda what I said.

@Fernapple
This is a point that we just view differently.