Lacewing wrote: ↑Sun Aug 05, 2018 3:48 pmInteresting how we've gone from this:
Strays are pretty much all bobcats where I live. What, can bobcats not be strays? If not, I think you still know exactly what I meant and you're just being pedantic.
My cat is already huge, but he's not fully grown. If you wanted me to say that there were intentional exaggerations in my story, than I thought that was pretty obvious. Clearly, my cat isn't quite the size of a panther, and something that has less pressure than a paintball gun wouldn't have given another cat a 'gaping' wound.
So you started feeding a stray cat, and that attracted another stray cat, which resulted in territorial fights -- all very natural and understandable -- and then when things got ugly, you "didn't hesitate for one second" to shoot one of them in the face.
That wasn't what I said. I said I didn't hesitate for one second to consider that this was 'another cat'. The particular point to that being I didn't see them as variables that fit into an equation about political activism. It's a point about the 'incentive'. Do you not see a difference between that, and what you just said?
Yes, I get it: It never occurred to you to consider more of the elements involved and how they might unfold, so that such a situation could be avoided.
I fully anticipated that people were going to tell me that such a situation could have been prevented. I was seriously opening myself up for criticism with such a personal example. More specifically, I figured that people were going to attack parts of my story that aren't actually relevant to the exact reason why I brought it up - but I guess that's what a guy gets for opening up and being vulnerable about something personal?
I could have given any scenario, and you could have made the accusation that there was a series of alternate choices which could have prevented the scenario, altogether. People rarely want to put themselves in the shoes of an uncomfortable situation, so they usually devise a way that makes it different, but guess why that's totally bad for discussion? I suppose this is why asking the other person to assume things for the sake of an argument is such a common practice in debate, so I guess that's what I'll ask you now; Assuming you were in my exact situation, what would you have done? Would you let the bigger cat kill your pet, or use the utility that was available to you to prevent it from doing that? If you think there's a third option, that's fine, too. I doubt you'll answer this question now, anyway.
Guess what, though? You don't even need to agree with the
exact choice I made, in order to agree with the
way I handled the situation. It might help you understand my point if you do, but you don't need to. This crazy situation is an exaggerated application of living through a momentary disregard for any sort of politicized thinking. It might
have to be the case that you disagree with me until you find yourself in a similar situation.
And then when you were faced with the fallout, a gun was your immediate answer.
The 'immediate answer' was protecting something I loved. Again, this is an attempt by you to manipulate my actual intentions. It's a 'gun' that wouldn't have done anything except harm the cat in question enough to scare it away from killing my own cat.
I do have experience with such things... and have been face-to-face with a cougar, as well as a large stray dog who was a threat to my livestock. No shots were fired, and no one was killed. I also feed stray animals at times, which I recognize could pose a threat to my resident animals -- so I take measures to prevent issues and keep everyone safe. And if there is a scuffle... I don't kill the "others".
I didn't kill any thing else either...But wait a second, here - what sort of livestock do you have?
Are you unaware of the qualities of compassion and selflessness? Not everyone cares "more" about what is important to themselves all the time -- people can care "more" about others because their hearts and minds are that broad. So don't try to drag me into your limited single-answer reality.
I think it's necessarily true in the way that I meant; If you don't care more about what is more important to you, than that something is not actually
more important to you. Even when we think we are putting aside our own desires for something, that is a hyper-active consideration which merely changes what we desire.
But that's going off on a bit of a tangent; Caring about what is important to you and 'compassion' is not mutually exclusive, you should absolutely have more compassion to those that you care more about. If temporarily ignoring your political excursions never comes along with that compassion, then you probably don't care about that person very much.
Good try... but ridiculous. Humans have the ability to think more broadly (or at least they should unless they have a mental disorder), and what creates toxicity is what they do with their ability.
Oh, I don't believe you're doing this intentionally, but that is the result of your defense; You end up in a situation where the strong lived because it knew how to hunt the weak. You can attempt to divert the conversation away from that by saying that it never should have happened in the first place, but you're not taking a side against that principle in the situation that did occur. In fact, you say it's
all very natural and understandable as a sort of antecedent in blaming me for what
I did against it. It does sound like there's some level of you which supports this evolutionary principle, but hopefully you can really just begin to realize that what I'm saying is more nuanced than the blanket you were trying to throw it under.