Felix: It’s not often I disagree with you Vineeto but on this occasion I do!
I think you are rather assuming that I was triggered …. I know I’m a feeling being but it doesn’t mean that just because I say or do anything, it means that I must have been highly triggered. Where is the evidence of feelings of “justified indignation”, other than what is being read into my text (following some logic of “he bothered to write, he made an objection to it, he wrote in a stern manner, he’s a feeling being, → therefore he was triggered”). It certainly wasn’t an LGBT issue either I just don’t think we should have people openly making murder jokes - are we calling even that actualist morality?
Also, I don’t see any clear indication that it was a spoof. Unless you mean he wasn’t serious that he would actually kill someone – I did realise that that part wasn’t meant literally! I still think it’s abhorrent to imply that you would kill someone because of their identity on a forum about perpetuating peace-on-earth.
As to your other points, I don’t regard someone who makes no apparent effort to be happy/harmless (if not the opposite) to be a “fellow actualist”. Besides which I wasn’t calling for him to be barred or similar, other than personally asking him about it (and openly wondering why this post had been taken completely without issue by anyone). I invited him to check himself, is all. (link)
Hi Felix,
If you say so, it must be so … to you that is.
But when someone starts their communication with “I just read this unhinged post” – unhinged as in “crazy, demented, disturbed, mad, sick, unbalanced, insane, manic, crazed, and uncontrolled, affected with madness or insanity, or highly disturbed, unstable, or distraught”, then this is the opening to a strong put-down.
You say you didn’t “see any clear indication that it was a spoof” and consequently assumed that Jon “would kill someone because of their identity”. This is quite an extreme assessment of anyone. Well, to be so far off the mark, I simply could not see that a careful sensible non-emotionally-tinged message would look like the way it did.
To spell it out – the spoof was a fantasy scene what an imaginary US Redneck (a group which Jon dislikes) would do, responding to a trans person in their neighbourhood, hence he called it a “Funny story”. You completely missed the black humour (apparently a category you are not familiar with) and just continued with your prejudiced assumptions, after you determined that Jon is not ‘one of us’, i.e. an actualist (“I don’t regard someone … to be a “fellow actualist””) and therefore won’t deserve friendly or even unbiased consideration.
Now you invoke “actualist morality” (“are we calling even that actualist morality?”). The whole sequence is riddled with identity politics, ‘us versus them’, and no regard for a fellow human being to be seen. Don’t you think this topic would deserve closer attention?
Instead of presenting yourself as a ‘good actualist’ in contrast to others – isn’t this exactly the label with which you have been whipping yourself in the past years and driven to an almost unbearable emotional state to the point of needing to take a big break from work? And still you maintain this morality of who is a ‘good actualist’ and apply it to yourself and others, even though it has done nothing at all to make you either happy or harmless, to the contrary.
Can you not see that this ‘good actualist’ morality/identity is a cunning ploy of your identity demanding that you look good in the eyes of others and your own ideals of yourself, thereby barring the way to become tangibly free from the ‘self’-slavery and stress you have submitted yourself to?
When you can really see this, grasp this, understand this, you will drop your ideals like a hot iron – they only make you more stressful, more miserable, a self-whipping fiend to yourself, and morally judgemental towards your fellow human beings who are not good enough actualists.
Maybe you were not ‘strongly’ emotionally triggered by your standards, but triggered enough to harshly morally judge the other as “crazy, demented, disturbed”, etc and call on allies to agree with your own gross misunderstanding.
So instead of your righteous and self-harming ‘good actualist’ morality/ identity you could drop all should’s and ought-to’s, and instead look for a sincere wish to be happy and harmless, for your own sake and the sake of your fellow human beings.
But refrain to make it an image, a rule, a command, an identity, else it becomes another jail like the one you have just barely escaped from.
Cheers Vineeto