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When Sherlock Left the High Road .

Max wrote:
If I understand the post correctly the mod from the group seeked out Sherlock.

Actually, I sought out the forum to make sure it wasn't the one with which I'd had the disagreement with the mod a decade earlier.

Looks like nothing on it has changed--still the same narrow-mindedness displayed as before.

There was a similar problem on AOL--remember that?--some 20 years ago. There was a fellow who was always removing posts. He said that his idea of a forum was like everyone sitting around the table at Thanksgiving, all wearing suits or evening gowns and engaging in the most civil and erudite of conversations.

I thought that was a bit stuffy. Civil conversation is great--stuffiness not so much.

And I think that while a mod should remove obviously objectionable posts, if there is some element of doubt then the OP should be invited to clarify.

I still maintain that in SOME communities, the police is more of a threat to the ordinary citizenry than the so-called criminal element. In Ferguson, MO, it was found that the police were preying upon minority drivers quite a bit--and the fines were so excessive that many working people could not pay them. Then those people were jailed for failure to pay--and that became a debtors' prison, something which is specifically prohibited by the US Constitution. The minority community in Ferguson did not view the police as their friends or allies, but as pirates who might as well have had the Jolly Roger painted on their police cruisers as the city seal.

Now, the guy who attacked the cop in Ferguson was asking to get shot--but the police had soured relations long before that.

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Intrusive thoughts..

Of course, the problem with philosophers is that, with so muvh time on their hands, they overthink things.

We only have time for philosophies after we have secured shelter, food and water.

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When Sherlock Left the High Road .

Kind of like this:

http://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid?ct=v&cti...

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Intrusive thoughts..

My dear Vampy, please consider the thoughts of the famous Christian existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard:

"In his work, The Concept of Dread, (1844) Kierkegaard analyzes the notion in terms of our freedom and the anxiety of choice. He uses the example of a man who when standing on the edge of a cliff realizes that he could hurl himself over the edge at any moment. In this way, the man recognizes his own intrinsic freedom and the possibility of deciding his own destiny. This recognition triggers a kind of 'dizziness of freedom' in which the man becomes aware also of his own responsibility. Kierkegaard connects these ideas back to the story of Adam and original sin. Prior to original sin Adam did not know good or evil, and so he did not know that eating the fruit was 'evil.' When God commanded him not to eat, however, Adam became aware of his own freedom and power to choose. Adam experienced the dread, then, as the possibility of either obeying God or dissenting from Him. Dread, therefore, was the precondition of original sin. At the same time, however, for Kierkegaard dread is not an entirely 'bad' thing. For the experience of dread also opens us to the move from immediacy to reflection—that is, we achieve a greater degree of self-awareness and our basic human condition of sin. This awareness offers us the possibility of repentance, which through grace can lead us back to the Absolute Good or God."

AND

"The German philosopher Martin Heidegger took Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety and interpreted it in a more ontological manner. Traditionally ontology refers to the study of being, and it was the question of being which concerned Heidegger more than ethical questions. Nonetheless, he thought the question of being could only be answered by that being “for whom being was an issue.” That being is of course human being or what Heidegger called “Dasein.” Heidegger reinterpreted human being in a radically temporal way in terms of the finitude of our human existence. For Heidegger the recognition of the finitude of our existence comes through the angst or anxiety of our 'being-toward-death.' That is, in our recognition that our future has an end we experience the temporal character of our being. Here too angst is associated with freedom. Heidegger, like Kierkegaard, speaks of the dizziness of possibility. Authenticity, is the acceptance of this angst which leads to the recognition of 'ownmost possibilities,' that is, the possibilities which are open concretely to us. Authenticity is contrasted with an inauthenticity which forgets the temporal character of our being and instead falls into the everydayness of the 'they'."
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Dread


Food for thought, is it not?

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I'm thinking of applying for a new job.

I once had a job offer where I would have been required to quit my job at the time, go through a training period, and then maybe not be selected.

I told them, "Good luck with THAT--no thinking person is going to give up a solid job for a 'maybe.'"

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I'm 6 years sober and I want to quit going to alcoholics anonymous.

The problem is that after 6 years of sobriety, if you were to fall off the wagon it would be the same as if you had been drinking all those 6 years.

You have won a great victory--preserve it!

And be there for others who need help!

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When Sherlock Left the High Road .

I did not think my original post was bashing all police. There was a mod who was evidently a cop or ex-cop who had very thin skin. He did not bring up anything to counter my statement but was trying to use his mod power to silence anyone with a different opinion.

How do we make things better if we cannot talk about them?

If I were a cop, I would want to operate in an atmosphere where I could report fellow cops who were giving our profession a bad name.

That mod guy would want to throw up that "blue wall of silence." And things would stay the same.

When you have people out there who are issued guns and given the power to take away others' freedom and even ruin their lives, they need to be the kind of people who do not abuse power.

In too many police departments, the police have not been held accountable for abuses of power. They gave gained absolute power as a result--and we know absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And all civil servants need to remember that they are just that--the servants of the public, and not their overseers or masters.

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At the end of your life, what do you want people (family, friends, neighbors, and strangers never met) to line up and say to your face...

Just kidding, but imagine getting a great big mass apology from everyone who wronged you!

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When Sherlock Left the High Road .

Language is really very imprecise!

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At the end of your life, what do you want people (family, friends, neighbors, and strangers never met) to line up and say to your face...

"Sorry we were such jerks."

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