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Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 12, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Some blend of the three. John is a lazy thinker so he defaults to lazy explanations: He's the only thing that matters, so any obstacles he encounters are deliberate sabotage, and that sabotage is the worst possible kind, and so you should feel sorry for him because he's the only thing that matters, and if you don't you might as well be dead to him. Egocentrism, probably with some sort of neurochemical deficiency that biases his perceptions towards negative interpretation.

And maybe some people have picked up on those vibes and started actually fucking with him because why not, he's a miserable sod who already thinks everyone is out to get him anyway so they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. At that point he's "right" but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

it's how I model people

You model people as being like John, or you model people the same way John models people?

The way he does. I don't think there's anyone in the world who under the right circumstances would not be my enemy. And I'm not talking about thought experiments and fictional scenarios like Hunger Games. Under common everyday circumstances.

If you call "briefly acted against my interests" "be my enemy", sure.

This kind of mindset looks like it either leads to finding out what it really is like to have everyone surrounding you turn on you (once you schiz out on Stacy for trying to "assassinate" you), or eventually landing in the madhouse because the cognitive dissonance between thinking Bob wants to kill you yet not acting like he wants to kill you can't be easy on the mind.

As the Putin meme goes, "if the fight is imminent, strike first. How to determine if a fight is imminent? Once you've struck first, it is."

Not what I call it, and you're forgetting the third option, preemptive suicide.