Milky Jade

Crumpets. I don't care about the bloody minimum characters

I love ice cream. See, the kind of love in question is romantic love. So that first part should resolve without complications. It is not only a completely different feeling, but a different concept, too. Sibling love is different to romantic love. You often have no choice to really opt out of it. Addressing the bold underlined italic: Where there is no choice, there can't exist selfishness. What's left is the cases in which you try to unselfishly love, well, anybody: for the sake of argument, it's anybody, because parents aren't the only thing receiving platonic love. To love unselfishly means to be indifferent to that which one values. This is a contradiction in terms. You cannot love somebody for their vices, but you can love somebody in spite of them. That assessment lies with the individual. It is not mine or yours to make. Where there is a value, there must be a valuer. Whatever I choose to love in spite of vices obviously has no vices that would completely undermine any values they might have because otherwise I wouldn't be loving them. Simple as that. I will just go ahead and say that this is the gist of what I'm rhapsodizing about in exhaustive length. There you have it, ladies and gentlecolts.

You misunderstand. Not proceeding information creates contextual information. Often this information plays into someone's hands, so that blows. This is the principle of exformation, which I elucidated on in another thread (tulpas?). A shadow is no information in itself. It is the lack of information, in contrast with information, and it becomes cheap information that you have to burn less calories for to process. Pleading the fifth has the general trend of looking not like "It's none of your business" but "disclosing this might jeopardize something I care about". Humans aren't always in control of the information they put forward. This can be manipulated. Obviously everyone can draw their conclusions in any which way they want, and it's still only guesswork. But the implicitness in withholding trivial information is almost always tantamount to specific answer.

Well, that's the kind of thing I was having in mind. And I said so: You're being coerced out of information. Withholding an answer is most of the time a very clear statement, or can be taken as a clear statement. Even though you didn't make that statement itself. Magic, right?

Well, I think that lies are separated into constructive and destructive lies. For instance, someone bumps into you and asks you if you're a virgin. You have nothing to gain from telling that person, but they coerced you out of information, or misinformation. You can either answer, or not. If you don't answer, it's basically like saying you're a virgin, in most cases anyway. So why should junk information that does no harm be considered immoral? There's a lot of things that can be done with the most trivial of information, so you would be wise to stay on the safe side and not allow anyone into your personal matters that you wouldn't entrust them to. I can go ahead and say this: As a species that relies heavily on information, reliable information is imperative to our survival. It's something along the lines of biological leash: Should a species spread generally more misinformation than genuine information, it will not thrive very well. The fact that we have language in itself means that humans are generally trustworthy. The fact that misinformation propagates about as well as genuine information doesn't make this statement untrue. It's because humans are dumb. Honestly so, but dumb. Anyway, I digress: So what about constructive and destructive lies? A destructive lie would be to give misdirections. A destructive lie would be to tell your uncle that no, there isn't a hive of bloodthirsty wasps in that motorboat's powerhead. Now your child's goldfish dies. I'll leave it to you: You can either tell it the truth, or you can tell it you're gonna flush it back in the ocean so it can wake up from hibernation. Whether or not this is constructive to the growth of a child, I'll also leave to you. A better example is telling your wife she doesn't look like sausage casing in that dress. Putting your values in a hierarchy, then having her shut up and be jolly for one evening is better than ruining the day, coming too late or create a potential menace. The lie is constructive. We will continue to hate each other anyway and men don't really care about other men's wives. Anyway, bottom line, I think honesty is really, very important. I will not attempt to philosophically prove that lies are immoral. I just believe it's not the province of law, which is the important thing to note - but the province of morals, and the morals of lying are strictly contingent upon the lie in question.

@@Nine, But anywayyyyyy? 20charminimum

I'm surprised you caught that. Well.. basically I'm extrapolating from a truism to end up at Rand's Selfish Love: you love a person for their values (-> you cannot love a person for their vices) -> those values correspond to your values by necessity -> therefore the person you love must be an approximate projection of your values -> whereby loving them is a rationally selfish act -> unselfish love is therefore a contradiction in terms -> since you choose your own values selfishly, every person decides for themselves with whom to fall in love with -> "shotgun love" or even "love on first sight", or anything before the kind of love I talked about in the first post are therefore direct statements about the standards that person chose for himself and how much he or she actually cares about their own values. Unless and until neuroscientists come along to prove me wrong, I'm going to say that is about as accurate a description on love that I can give you. Not that the chemistry is really important anyway. It's just how it in effect works. I brought up delusory love to hint at the sort of love that requires next to no*(edit) value assessments at all.

Nothing more or less than recognizing personal values within another person. Love is the emotional response to the recognition. Depending on how much you know about yourself, the reponse may never come or be delayed until you figured out the other person to a sufficient degree. This is why you can tell a lot about a person by looking at whom they fall in love with. I reckon that most people have very low standards, that is to say: they can't wait to find a partner, and decide to 'love' them long before anything else has happened. Whether or not love will be retrofit or retconned or whatever, doesn't matter. You can delude yourself to love a person. It's possible.

I thought draught cooling towers were cloud factories

Humans are kind of like Piranhas in this sense. They will without compunction kill animals for food, but are allomothering: that means, melt before anything with large eyes and a strong head size to body size ratio. Not that piranhas do this, but piranhas are known to not attack each other, even though they are vicious little bundles of mass destruction, tearing the flesh from their preys in mere seconds. Humans also see a problem, generally, in attacking their own kind. You can't sympathize with something that doesn't even remotely look like a human, or at least not inherently. That's why humans feel next to no sting when stomping on a spider or swatting a fly. Should we? I don't think so.

Geranium Before the storm Both Freshly mowed grass, new parchment and spearmint toothpaste

Okay, if I got any of that Let it just be put to record that the only important distinction is between consciousness, or not. Implicit in this is the ability to make a choice. If you do not have an alternative, then your action cannot be regarded as good, or bad. There is no light or dark, therefore. It can only be regarded as for or against sth. The crucial difference between humans and other animals is that we do not submit to nature like they do, and adapt to our surroundings, but we change our surroundings to fit us. If humans generally started behaving like certain other animals, you would realise why we're strictly better off the way we are now, even if it isn't intuitive. How about killing your husband after he impregnated you? Or eating their face after mating? Or how about having your children eat you alive to nurture them? Nature is a self-contained system. Sans our species, everything behaves in accordance to its surroundings, and that's just the way it works. I can make a statement about it, I can observe, but I can also regard certain things in nature as against humans, or cruel, vile, I can go down the line.. the important thing is to recognize that not even nature is above reproach. We can try to defend ourselves from it, we can meet it with certain dislike, apprehension, and sometimes even aggression. And that's good.

I find nature harsh, often fascinating, but even more often very cruel and NOPE-worthy. Just think of the whole genus of parasitical creatures. Especially the kind that eats helpless creatures from the inside to grow up, or those that will nest in your eyeballs, or those that leave you with fatal diseases almost certainly? I don't think this is what beauty is about. There is a subtle.. barbarism in nature, and natural selection. It is what *makes* it natural, but I don't have to approve of every species indefinitely and indiscriminately. That'd be dumb.

Yeah, they're kind of grody Except for very small eensy teensy eetsy beetsy spider babies that tickle you scuttling about on your hand I try to coexist with them, for they eat mosquitos, which are objectively worse than spiders. If by "in their own way" you mean "I try to avoid visual and physical contact with most of them because most animals are hella disgusting and/or scary", then I agree NAPTIME

I think either you both dabbled in the province of internet experience pertaining to moths, or you just like to neglect what it means to have an irrational fear. It just takes you one bumbling moth in the face to hate their entire existence. They can be as fluffy as you want. So are sodding SPIDERS. I don't see you fawning over THOSE.

They're like.... undead.... butterflies. Just thinking about them gives me goosebumps. See? It's all over my skin. I'm awfully afraid of moths, and willing to drop anything valuable I am currently carrying so that I may escape faster than otherwise when a moth begins to terrorise me with its presence. There. Now you know.

We get it, he's a psychopath What's the point of asking these questions as if it concerned non-psychopaths?

Owls are also cool And cats And budgies Squirrel monkeys and capuchins AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH NOT THE MOTHS GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY GET IT AWAY

since when has it been impossible to baleet posts

Absolutely, yes Octopodes are intelligent, cute, and the mimic octopus is very mimic-y I want to have my own..

Yeah I'm aware It's my painful duty to inform you, however, that my Mimic Octopus trumps your puny cuttlefish by far!

Cuddle fish? You wish We wish We all wish