Good People / Bad People

[Cuddly]

For me it's all about liveS.
Hurting or ending somebody's life, unless in defense of another life, makes you a terrible person.

. Maybe the religious nutjobs were right all along - I respect their lives, they can have their opinions. I expect the same freedom in return. They're not bad people for believing or being taught differently than me.

[TigerLover]

There are no bad or evil people. There are only the sick and the injured.

There are no bad or evil actions. There are only mistakes.

There are no bad or evil beliefs. There is only ignorance.

A child is a blank slate that can be formed into a monster or a hero.

[Emiliano]

This is an interesting question and like others who have already answered, I agree it's a difficult one. I think everyone so far has given a thoughtful answer and I'm going to build mine off of those

My intellectual self falls close to what [MENTION=21405]meridannight[/MENTION] said - we aren't good or bad, we just are. I do believe that all people are capable of good and bad, we are both at the same time.

But, I understand that the desire to label - to praise and to blame, is tempting. And in doing that, we are dealing with the subjective. Part of me strongly agrees that good and evil are simply subjective.

Like for example, how [MENTION=23180]axle2152[/MENTION] can put Trump in a grey area. I wouldn't be able to place him there. But we have different perspectives on it. It is clear to me by Trumps words and actions that he is a bad person, fuck even before he ran for president. But axle also said he'd be hard to be convinced that Hitler was a good person. I think that has to do with how we have been taught that Hitler was bad. We don't have the benefit of viewing Trump as "history" yet, we don't have the benefit of retrospectively thinking of Trump. Now just to be clear, I'm not drawing a comparison of the two here.

But if we lived back in the 30s, were ethnically German and met the other qualifiers of what Hitler considered to be human and desirable, it wouldn't be as obvious that he was evil. Hitler and the nazis helped end the chaos of post ww1 Germany. He reclaimed Germany's national pride, he helped their economy, he put in place many social institutions that greatly benefited those whose interests he represented. Even his greatest atrocities against humanity were motivated by his perspective that he was doing good by his people, ridding the world of what he felt was the evil.

We can turn this on the USA too. In schools here, especially primary school we are taught that this country is good, it is based on universal equality, liberty, justice, leaders that are elected and represent the people. But as our founding fathers wrote the constitution and designed the way this country would be governed, claimed that all men are created equal, they owned slaves that they saw as property rather than human, they didn't allow for non land owning, non white, non male people to vote, they believed in manifest destiny, despite the fact this land was already populated. The truth is, this country was built on genocide, broken and empty treaties, and slavery. And the faults of this country and its institutions, actions, and leaders don't end there (they don't end at all, or at least haven't yet) but you guys get the point. Were the founding fathers good men or bad men? Were they both at the same time? Or is it simply a matter of perspective?

Were the men who flew the planes into the wtc good men or evil? Certainly in the western world we say they were evil- they killed innocent people, they hated the USA because of our liberties and freedoms, right? But have we not also killed innocents? Occupied their lands, overthrown their leaders, destabilized their region, took their resources? To them they were fighting what they saw as a dangerous influence in the only way they were able. They could not fight the USA in a traditional war - our military, weapons, and allies far outpowered and outnumbered their own. That was a desperate act by desperate men who did not view their actions as evil. Just as many Americans at the time viewed our retaliation as good, not evil.

In some ways, the balance of power should be taken into consideration when determining good vs bad too. Like we can recognize the man who kills a child through violent abuse is bad. But the child who kills their abuser is good. It's the same act -murder- but what a difference power and intent can make. That was an obvious situation though, more challenging ones could be the country that uses drones to drop bombs in civilian areas vs the men who strap bombs to their chest and blow themselves up in public squares. The white man who won't date a black man because he doesn't find black men attractive vs the black man who won't date white men because he finds them racist. The religious people who feel persecuted because they can be sued for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, vs the gay couple who feel persecuted because they were refused a service.

Another part of me, especially me a couple years ago, my idealist self, would have agreed with [MENTION=23369]Boaxy[/MENTION] that good and evil can be split by the harm a person inflicts on others. I was raised to see the good in humanity and my belief in that universality of good was a major part of my identity. That a racist or a homophobic person could still be good. I felt a responsibility to respect their perspective, and a desire to understand it. I felt it was important to reach across the aisle, to seek compromise, to try to reach some mutual understanding.

But my current self, my emotional self, is absolutely no longer willing to view it that way. I have come to realize that my attempt at being noble and accepting is one sided. People on the other side don't reach out to me. People who look at me and see red because I am gay, because I am brown - where are their attempts at understanding me? When I express my anxieties and concerns, where is the backwoods KKK member trying to understand why I am upset or angry? Why should I give equal consideration to the opinions of some people, who if they had it their way, I, and people who look like me, think like me, fuck like me, shouldn't even be in this country, much less given a voice or platform, or even given access to same rights and privileges as others?

I can no longer see the good in racist people, homophobic people. I cannot respect someone who does not respect me. I might have felt good that I got some insight in how people different than me think, but in reality I was a doormat and enabling that behavior, that perspective. I was legitimizing by recognizing it as just another way of being, rather than calling it out and shaming it and treating it as the toxic sewage it is.

Am I bad person because I am no longer willing to act as the better person, the accepting person? Or am I good person because I refuse to respect people whose actions, words, or silence and compliance put me and people like me at risk?

I am at the point in my life where my good energy and work will be focused exclusively on the people who I see as my people and fuck any responsibility I once felt about the rest. In the same way Hitler did, or the 9/11 hijackers, or the founding fathers, or the people who voted for Trump.

And this anxious, angry, flawed, biased, emotional side of me refuses to see the subjectivity - I see a clearly defined line of good and bad, with no patience or desire to see it otherwise. The same traits I see as bad in those I don't agree with.






So to answer the question of what I think makes a person good - I don't know anymore. Is anyone good? Aren't we all flawed? Even if just through twisted tunnel vision logic aren't we all good too? Is there even a point to trying to tell the difference?

I was hoping that by the end of this rant/novel I'd have come to some wise conclusion that might contribute something of worth or interest to this thread. But I don't think I have - I've just put my own struggle and crisis and hypocrisy and ultimately, my new found pessimism on display for all to see. Or at least the people who had the patience to read all that.

But I've spent my whole hour long commute writing it out so I might as well post it. And I certainly enjoy and want to support thought provoking and challenging topics like this over the mindless and never ending word game threads.

[MikeW]

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who have all the answers, and those who don't. Those whose opinions are obviously the only right opinions and those whose opinions simply don't matter to those whose opinions do.

Those who have all the answers know that the answers they have are the only right answers and they're not the least bit interested in any answers that aren't identical with their own. Moreover, they have no patience whatever for the wishy-washy questioning of bleeding heart pesudo-intellectuals who waste their lives asking questions that anyone with a half oz of common sense should already have the answers to while forever making excuses for their own ignorance and never ending failings.

Everyone who isn't sure or suggests that absolute "good" and "evil" cannot possibly exist or that "right" and "wrong" are, at best, "subjective" or in some way "relative," fall into the category of equivocating questioners. The kind of people who would happily give Satan himself the benefit of a doubt while he, as the Native American's were want to say regarding the invading white man, "Steals your skin and then sells it back to you for a profit."

One thing both these types of people have in common is they hate being told they're wrong. The former know they're not. The latter aren't so sure so might be willing to give you the benefit of a doubt, but they still don't like being told they're wrong, especially when they are.

Right?

[deephiance]

I love reading you [MENTION=20947]MikeW[/MENTION], so much to learn.

[MikeW]

I love reading you [MENTION=20947]MikeW[/MENTION], so much to learn.

Thanks. Yeah, I know, I'm a walking, talking, education. I figure when you get to be my age you ought to know at least a LITTLE something, even if it ain't worth the paper it done be writ on. Not that I ever write on paper.

You know, the funny thing is, and I have to tell people this every once in a while, even though they never exactly believe me or understand precisely what I'm saying, but, for the first, oh, roughly 30 years of my life, I was practically illiterate. Nowadays, as you see, I can run a run-on sentence around the block, down the alleyway, under the bridge, through the barn, back over top the bridge, through the picket fence and back home again without even losing a beat. BUT there was a time when I couldn't string more than three or four words together that made any sense whatever, even to me.

No, seriously, its a true fact.

As a little boy, I had this whole thing about words, written and spoken language, but especially written language, being a hypnotic form of mind control foisted on all of us at an early age by unwitting parents in league with a slightly more diabolical educational system that was the handmaiden of a truly sinister overclass of global controllers. They, with their hypnogogic magic, were here to keep the whole of humanity asleep and dreaming, convincing us that we ARE this imaginary *voice* we hear inside our heads, and that said imaginary voice IS something or other other than imaginary. You can fill in the blank with any of the pre-packaged identities you like: White, male, middle class, American, educated, gay ---whatever -- no, seriously, ANYTHING... just fill in the blank with WHO and WHAT (not to mention where and when) you THINK you are. There you have it: Canned identity.

And of course, we're all uniquely different even though we're all pretty much the same in our differences. That these alleged differences get used in such a way that many of us end up literally, when not figuratively, at one another's throats, competing and striving to achieve what is for most the unobtainable -- again, you can fill in the blank with whatever you want -- that desire that forever alludes you and drives you forward -- thus never once having a free moment to consider that we all might be somnambulistic slaves to a system that only pretends to be under out control and for our benefit.

As a kid I realized I was on the wrong side of the DMZ, and, like the lone survivor of some long-ago-lost zombie apocalypse, was surrounded by the living equivalent of the walking dead.

What was a poor boy to do??

Well... if you can't beat 'em, you join 'em, right? OR at least PRETEND to. So I put my head down and pretended to be just like everybody else while refusing to learn to read or write much beyond what was absolutely necessary. It was clear to some (not all) that despite my mediocre grades I was no fool but what they couldn't understand was why -- and I was smart enough to know it would be useless to try and tell them.

It wasn't until I was 19 years old and tripping heavily on, oh, about 500µ of rather pure LSD that all this began to truly make sense to me. Prior to that it had laregly been "intuitive thinking"... afterward, I began to do the real research that has, subsequently, confirmed that most everything we think we know about who, what, where -- even when -- we are is utter bullshit.

No, seriously, think about it. You think today is, oh, December 15, 2016, right? But that's just it. We operate as if that TEMPORAL COORDINATE (which is all it is at best) has some sort of existential ISNESS independent of our perception of it. Yet, clearly (to me at least), it does not. The date is just a coordinate, a dot on the temporal map of the on-going tale we collectively call his-story; yet our actual experiential existence is independent of any temporal cartography. We are now where we always are: At the edge of an eternity so vast it is beyond comprehension, much less measure. But, since our sense of self, existence and awareness is so subsumed by this on-going stream of linguistically supported identifications rooted in the collective story of our respective cultures, we just simply can't see it.

Even I can't see it most of the time.

Since then -- yeah, almost half a century ago now -- I've grown ever fond of shaggy dog tales that wind themselves round branch and bramble, weaving a fabric of spells that can entrance the mind of a hapless reader into the quagmire that is my own thought. Assuming he doesn't fall asleep on me in mid-sentence, of course. But even if he does, oh well!!

You know what? Fuck it. Forget everything I just wrote. Watch this instead. Full screen. Sound turned all the way up. And if you like it, have fun with it, IDK, get off on it, let me know, and I'll show you what MY mind REALLY looks like from the inside out.

[InbetweenDreams]

My team of researchers were off last night and didn't take account that Trump was accused of raping...which if true would make him a bad person, but not talking politics this early in the morning at any rate.

[knickerbuck]

good and bad exists imo.. good is anything that is done to improve life while bad is anything that delays what has been quickened. like that woman you talked about [MENTION=23180]axle2152[/MENTION], what trump did to her was bad because it went against her will for what is good .. so i was just sayin .. i don't talk much about my opinions here as you see me post mostly on trivial matters but that's what i think ..

[artyboy]

There are no bad or evil people. There are only the sick and the injured.

There are no bad or evil actions. There are only mistakes.

There are no bad or evil beliefs. There is only ignorance.

A child is a blank slate that can be formed into a monster or a hero.

Hitler and a few other people I'm not to sure about.

[TigerLover]

Hitler and a few other people I'm not to sure about.

Yeah there are sociopaths but I put them firmly in the sick category.

But even they're not bad people. They were just born incurably sick. They simply lack the neurological "equipment" to feel empathy. It's terrible but it's not their fault, they didn't design their own brains.

Hell if anything they should be pitied most of all. They can't fall in love, form real friendships or really enjoy their lives in any deep meaningful way.