Inb4 N0rds posts hundreds of memes blaming Blacks and Jews for him being a 60 year old edgelord posting from his mama's basement.

Abdicating one's personal responsibility is the copout.

Many of the Syrians Merkel brought into Germany were diagnosed as being so traumatized that they could not work (gainful employment) for the foreseeable future. That's because they were a victim of their circumstances.

But if one of them goes in the street and rapes a German woman, he is responsible for that rape, regardless of the context within which his trauma existed.

You'd do well to read "The Body Keeps The Score" from van der Kolk - as would many Miscers who seem to think their behaviors simply "make sense given their lives", and fail to see that they can do something about it.

More thoughts

My entire point was explaining why they fail to see if they can do something about it. And why being mad at them for that is like being mad at a rock rolling down a hill.

And then he gets assraped again. And then he gives up. The entrenched victimhood you see in many people corresponds to their entrenched circumstances, which are not their fault. He adopts this mindset because it saves him energy. Perhaps some give up too easily. Perhaps some could adopt different mindsets to make their escape more likely. The problem is that you are ignoring the effort involved in trying to escape. When faced with repeated failure, people naturally abandon that strategy and hedge to save energy.

If your goal is to help victims, the best way is to help their circumstances to rescue them from the situation. While encouraging them to save themselves may work for some and be very reaffirming, for most, it will inevitably fail. You can try teaching a woman to beat up her abusive husband or teach her strategies for standing up to him. But usually, the best method is to arrest the husband and forcibly rescue the battered woman from the situation. Leaving it to her seldom works.

Those who fail to see that they can do something about it need support - sure, but if they choose not to embrace support - or even try themselves to find support, it is not an excuse for their future behaviors in perpetuity. That's the 'abdication of personal responsibility' I'm referring to - as if a 'victim' is stuck in 'victimhood paralysis' in perpetuity, and one is expected to simply explain away their behaviors.

This is the thing about the conservative mindset. You are very concerned with individuals and who is to blame for what. I am coming at it from the POV of what it was that led to these actions. I don't view them as God given. It's not as if Syrians are innately destined to rape. It's the product of recent violent history and a culture of oppression of women, along with the fact that the US literally busted out a ton of Syrian criminals, leaving them free to go wherever and rape.

The victimhood paralysis is a feature and adaptation, not a bug. It's simply the organism adopting a strategy that minimizes energy loss. If we speak of responsibility, what of our shared responsibility as a society? What of the responsibility to not turn Syria into a wartorn shythole?

It is easy to look at a victim of bullying and say he should have done x or y. It is harder to look at the situation that created the culture of bullying and fix that. Most don't even bother. The American philosophy is to preserve the status quo, demonize and judge individuals, and drop it. I say we judge the system for once.

People want to be victims for one reason or another. Some sick people are actually addicted to it

Your inability to see that my post covers the entire causal chain shows that your mindset is the issue here. Whataboutism (your post) is exactly what some countries do to explain current behavior vs sins of the past.

My post covers the entire chain - from the traumatic incident(s) a person (don't change the goalposts to States) suffers - and their in/ability to do anything about it, versus the support they are provided with, and the potential for them to do so. Hyperbole such as 'demonize' doesn't apply here: trauma doesn't grant person X the right to do Y, because they are traumatized. There are child fighters from Boko Haram who grew up to have reasonably happy lives, having killed their parents as a first kill. Tell us more about how no one can overcome trauma.

It's not that no one can overcome trauma. To your Boko Haram example, the majority of child fighters have absolutely terrible lives. That just illustrates my point. You're trying to hold up individuals here and there rather than looking at a broken system that has failed so many. It is more important to fix the system than to conclude there are just so many failed "bads" walking around. Only a small percentage (like 1%) are genetically hopeless sociopaths. Even there, the conditions matter. A lot of "bad people" ended up driven to do bad things because of the conditions they were in. Making it all about their responsibility doesn't solve the problem. The focus on punitive evaluation, characteristic in conservatives, misses the entire point of how best to prevent chit like this from happening. Rather than think about who is resilient or who is weak in Boko Haram, it is better to ask why Boko Haram even exists and what happened to places like Nigeria to lead to this. Fix that, and you don't have to worry about child soldiers from Boko Haram.

America is on the verge of having its own Christian Boko Haram here soon if we don't reflect on the real problems of our society.

waid - why do we have to fix the system?

lmao the stalwart defender of the fascist status quo has arrived to extol the virtues of billionaires

Why do WE have to? Simple. Because we have the means. Sooner or later, terrorism in Nigeria will become a problem for America. We should be proactive. A little aid today could prevent oh IDK another trillion dollar war tomorrow.

serious question - why do you want to fix the system? what do you think it would accomplish?

We would all collectively benefit greatly. The status quo is unsustainable. You should really look at humanity as "between wars". This ain't gonna last unless everyone adopts the SDG goals or something like them and really takes it srsly. Our world is looking like it is going to get really fukin ugly really fast if we do not radically change our mindset.

You're stating the obvious in terms of general patterns. You do realize that boys are lined up by fighters in South Sudan and given a choice: (i) anally raped by fighters (while local village women look on, so that they are broken and can never be married and MUST join an armed group); or (ii) shot and killed.

There are thousands of examples of this, from bachi bazi to all the rest of it.

But you keep talking past the point. And the USA isn't Kabul. 1 in 5 American kids is physically abused by their primary caregiver growing up; 1 in 6 sexually abused. When you say 'the system has failed' you're using hyperbole and trope, and you didn't answer the question in my post. What is the USA as a 'system' supposed to do with kids that aren't being raised well because their parents are in no position to raise them? A clear answer, please.

how?

Why is it so hard for you to give me your black chocolate butthole?

It isn't YET. It was our institutions -- our systems -- that preserved that civility. It could become that. We can lose all of this, and I don't think people appreciate how easy it would be. Our system has failed THE WORLD. Sure, America is doing somewhat okay by comparison. It's still bad though. For the richest country on Earth, we have so many in poverty. So many are so poorly educated. Nationalism is on the rise. And the parents aren't able to raise them because....? BECAUSE? LOL what is the #1 thing fuking over families? Money problems. And why is that happening? Because our kleptocratic system has funneled money to the wealthy and worsened inequality in what was already a hilariously unequal country. It also doesn't help that we have an individualistic culture that amounts to unfettered greed and debauchery destroying families and lives.

Clear answer: We must help put more parents in positions to be able to raise their children. And regarding things like sexual assault and violence, is it any surprise that we have such a violent culture leading to these problems? Rape culture is a thing. Violence and jingoism are also things. Ethnic conflicts due to the entrenched racism in our society is a thing. All this shyt contributes to creating the toxic environment for our children today. And I am sure there will be many more "bad" kids as a result, who "made bad choices".

Perfect analogy, I also think that some people just like being miserable. Life is too short to unnecessarily waste time waddling in misery.

Humanity's potential is not even close to unlocked. Imagine having 5-10x as many engineers on this planet. Think of what will be created. What wonders we would unlock if we didn't piss away resources on war. Think of how many potential Einsteins have died in a ditch somewhere, poor and robbed of an education. Imagine a brighter future where we actually clean sht up and find a sustainable kind of existence on this Earth. Imagine we build the Federation or some shyt. The road doesn't need to end with us trashing the planet and having a nuclear war.

Everyone wants to pretend like they've had a hard life and has been through struggles of immense proportions, that and if their life isn't perfect or amazing or impressive, there has to be reasons in place preventing them from becoming that other than personal

Shut the fuk up Wincel. I'm gonna fuk you up bitch

it's mostly sloots.

men are raised with the idea that you have to be a man and not show weakness but sloots are all about support groups, virtue signaling and crying about oppressioin

I think lots of people live hard lives, and lots of people don't realize the difficulties of other people's lives (not to imply these are disparate groups).

Good point, and I feel like there's a name for this I can't think of. Main character syndrome? Jealousy?

Reading this made me think "Are humans wired to be unhappy?". I can't believe I never thought of that before. Ended up googling it, and in a post about how restless we are, I came across this quote which I think is awesome:

"A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything ... Was boredom unknown to them?

This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity.

Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs -- something, anything ... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla."

E.M. Cioran