Carl-Richard

It's all good man.

Journalling on online forums can be a good way to thread the needle on narcissistic exhibitionism and genuine self-insight.

Consider that many pedophiles became pedophiles because they were abused themselves as children.

I think when somebody says they empathize with murderers or pedophiles, I think it's primarily a cognitive thing. It's mainly about how you hold them in your mind. That you don't feel them emotionally like you would a child in pain is understandable as you intuitively see them as predators and that's your gut response, big scary things to avoid rather than small fragile things to be protected. But perhaps if you watch a documentary about pedophiles describing their day-to-day experience, maybe you can get a more immediate emotional traction as well.

I can see myself in the shoes of somebody having a desire and wanting to act on it and the various feelings and situations that might arise. I don't have strong memories of genuine homicidal or pedophilic desires, but maybe especially for homicidal thoughts, I think everybody has had those at least as a passing thought or very weak or temporary gradations of those things. If you are able to understand the concept and experience of desire, and especially if you are able to link microscopic personal experiences of specific desires to their more extreme forms, then there is little that stops you from being able to empathize with murderers and perhaps pedophiles.

You know how it's like to have a desire, how it feels like, so maybe you at least are able to empathize with that part of having a desire about prepubescent (or merely underaged) sexual relations or homicidal acts.

A desire you currently don't have or haven't had yourself. I'm just asking if you are able to.

Please chill with the topics. You might also consider evaluating your mental state with somebody who you can trust.

Everybody has desire. Can you empathize with somebody having a desire you don't have?

Keep meditating, bump it up to 60-90 minutes each sitting and do one sitting every single day (or one in the morning and one in the evening), add retreats if you think that's what you need. There is no either/or. A trap would be dropping daily meditation and thinking you only need retreats once in a blue moon.

There are situations where anger can be a reasonable solution, but anger tends to make people feel bad, so it must be used with care. If you choose it, you choose it. And expressing anger, in the moment, doesn't have to be very problematic. It tends to get worse if you linger on it or stew in it and it turns into resentment or the solution isn't clear or probable and it only perpetuates and not solves conflict.

Self-forgiveness, and then you try again.

If you get sick, less thinking is going on, but you may also be in pain and you may think about that. If you can get through the pain and sit in a restful posture so that you no longer care about the pain or the pain dampens, then you could enter a state of less thoughts, but you could also do that while not sick (i.e. meditation). When you're not sick, its easier to get lost in thoughts because you are able to think and move around and do stuff all day, while when you're sick, you have to sit down and rest more.

What about Ted Bundy?

These are the most intense and immaculate and terrifying black metal vocals you will probably ever hear in a high-fidelity format:

Give me your best explanation. Best explanation gets a cookie (laced with meth).

Never ever take seriously a layman using the words "ADHD" to describe someone casually in a conversation. If you have no problems in your life, don't create problems by thinking you have some. There is "ADHD" and then there is ADHD. The former is a label you put on people who are hyper or high energy. The latter you label people who struggle deeply with various things and with getting certain things done. And even if you get a diagnosis, there can be a lot of bullshit around it and you might be not as bad off as somebody else with the same diagnosis. Some people hunt down an ADHD diagnosis to get a drug prescription because they have simply convinced themselves they fit the diagnosis and they think it will make their life easier when in reality they are more likely simply unhealthy or broken in other ways.

Let's say porn not being harmful means porn is consistent with people being well-functioning and healthy. Is "porn is consistent with being well-functioning and healthy" a positive or a negative claim?

YouTube videos that have misleading titles are useless.

I always pictured my mid thirties as the age I'm like "supposed" to be.

I have a theory (not a conspiracy theory): the people who get strongly drawn to conspiracy theories are the same people who get drawn to supernatural ideas, like God creating the universe from their own predetermined plan (not simply evolving spontaneously through "natural law"). They are fine with explaining reality top down through an elaborate narrative. There is a seeming plan behind everything, behind world politics, behind alien invasions, behind wars, behind ancient history, and they all connect to a grand meta-narrative of control, of manufacturing, of conscious creating, rather than natural systems acting spontaneously. Those who criticize conspiracy theories point out how that level of organization, of top-down control, is unlikely if not impossible, because of the natural tendency towards spontaneous order and the infeasibility of controlling complex systems. In the "naturalist critique", everybody is a victim of systems, even the supposed people in power, while in the conspiracist's mind, the people in power are the controllers of the systems and the powerless are the victims. Whether one is more correct than the other is actually hard to say, and a naturalist that claims otherwise would then become a conspiracy theorist in their own right, thinking they have the level of insight and knowledge to be able to predict complex systems. As for myself, as a general predisposition, I've noticed I'm fine with either (naturalism or supernaturalism). While for example Bernardo Kastrup says he is strongly opposed to supernaturalism simply as a personal predisposition (which is why he says he sees no point in doing philosophy if nature is not simply naturalistic; no "God" at the top planning it all, intervening into nature and changing the natural course of things). But I would also challenge this idea of naturalism, that you could still try to deduce the "laws" behind God's planning so to speak, and it won't be a completely pointless endeavour, simply a more interesting one. Like trying to understand the psychology of God rather than the "physics" of God.

Have empathy for people who hate pedophiles, or hate in general. You don't hate a child for being low consciousness, so you don't hate a child for hating. That makes you a child. And what's worse; actually raping children (that's what many people think pedophiles do) or merely hating people who do that? I would also not try to speak as if getting raped as a child is not so bad or is less bad than being decapitated (or raping children is not as bad as decapitating people). You have to live with potentially very traumatizing memories and fucked up sexuality and potential pedophilic feelings yourself for the rest of your life as a result. And some people who hate pedophiles might hate them because of these reasons or because they've experienced it themselves (which can of course be contradictory if they themselves end up with pedophilic feelings, but perhaps they pride themselves on self-control or their feelings are not exclusive to children). There is a psychological dynamic of preying on the vulnerable that is very repulsive and intuitively morally condemnable. If somebody threathens your children, that's one of the strongest if not the strongest evolutionary drive you have to oppose something. And as sexual attraction is also one of the strongest evolutionary drives (it's what created the children after all), then naturally those who are sexually attracted to children are a supreme threat to children. Sex and reproduction are very strong forces, invoking very strong feelings of morality and drives behavior, and pedophilia is stuck right in the middle of it.

You have free will in the sense that you feel like you're in control of your actions. If you deny this feeling, you are self-sabotaging yourself. Be very rigorous about distinguishing between the feeling of being in control and any metaphysical notions of free will. They are NOT the same. "I could do this, but there is no metaphysical free will, so why bother?" is a thought that ruins your sense of self-agency and control. It's a purely delusional and self-sabotaging thought, it doesn't help for anything but immobilizing yourself and denying yourself the right to be who you want to be. And I suggest dropping the idea of solipsism and simply going with what you actually experience. Thoughts about solipsism don't matter. They are ultimately distractions. The point about absolute truth is it doesn't depend on what you merely think about it. So don't even think about it. You don't have to. It's ironically another form of self-sabotage. Your goal is to realize what is beyond thinking but you keep thinking about it as if it is supposed to help. It's not. Drop it if your goal is realizing the absolute.

-> The incredible juxtaposition (a.k.a. logical contradiction). Some women get kicked out of stores because of acting like children, and some women moderate online trolls for acting like children.

I have no idea what government regulation has to do with burden of proof, but ok. This is what you said initially: What if I say porn is not harmful, is the burden of proof on me?