He likely has narcissistic personality disorder and so this is less an act and more a mask, a shield. The person he’s protecting the most is himself, he needs to be this facade.

I found this video really quite fascinating about what it’s like caring for a dying narcissist. Whatever family that remains hold out hope that as death itself nears the narcissist might finally let down their guard and show their true self. Apparently the opposite happens.

https://youtu.be/FavgHrxc6oY

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history

Liberal policies are an actual thing, a thing that leftists frequently disagree with.

Libertarians are often placed on the right part of the left-right divide. The fact you’ve chosen the label libertarian instead of conservative is animated by the exact same “purity test” that you find so silly.

If I were your partner, although it might not feel like it in the moment, the sooner the better.

If you aren’t going to commit to them, that’s your choice to make, but free them up to find someone that will. Every ounce of love and time and attention they pay you from the moment you make the decision to leave until you find the gumption to do it is a waste for them. The most respectful thing you can do is not waste the precious and finite moments of their life.

Let them know what you’ve decided. Have the courage to tell them plainly and honestly that you are leaving and that you won’t be the person to love them. Let them get over you so they can find the person that will love them.

And don’t you dare double back unless you mean to stay. If you stay do it because it’s what you want not because you feel bad. That partner is a human being, one that deserves the truth and to be loved. If you can’t do that, or don’t want to do that, that’s your choice.

This is the least we owe our partners, to be honest with them, to love them or let them find love elsewhere.

I know you are getting a lot of downvotes. Choosing to leave someone you love is not a popular opinion. I could not do it and I think most couldn’t. In time I suspect you will find one of two things to be true.

• You will find someone you truly love and you will recognize that this relationship had affection and care but was different.
• You will find that what was out there wasn’t worth what you gave up, that this was love, and you will wish you had it back

This is life though, the hard decisions, and only you get to make them. I hope you make a good one, and above all, if you want to be a decent human being, treat your partner well. If that means standing by their side in love, great. If that means being honest with them so that they can be happy, also fine. Just don’t lie to them, don’t be needlessly mean in ending it, have the courage of your convictions and tell them the plain simple truth. Don’t make up a reason that feels better, don’t blame them for the relationship falling apart, don’t trick them into hating you.

You owe them that at least.

Explain your situation then.

Sounds to me like you love your partner and they love you. You’d like to leave to go have other life experiences.

It’s pretty easy, which do you value more, the love you have for your partner or these life experiences you could have?

I don’t know you, but my guess is that if you are thinking about it enough to want to find an answer, then you already have your answer. You value the life experiences more, you care about your partner, and you don’t want to hurt them.

I’ve been married to my wife for over a decade now, I love her with all my heart, I can’t think of any kind of life experience that would make me want to leave her. I imagine that love is not a binary on or off type thing that there are degrees and kinds of love. It’s very well possible that you love your partner but not enough to want to stay together forever.

This is really a question that only you can answer. Which do you want to do, it’s your one life, you get to choose. But don’t stay with your partner because you are afraid of hurting them because if that’s why you stay, you will become bitter and resentful and the idea of “what could of been” will always be this perfect thing that they kept from you.

Stay because you want to stay or leave because you’d rather leave.

In general you can’t be responsible for someone else’s emotions.

If you were having a casual relationship and the other person has big feelings you don’t reciprocate, that sucks but it’s not your fault.

If, however, you reciprocate those feelings, or pretended to and led them on, then you do bear some responsibility.

The actual salient question though is if you love this person that loves you. If not, you aren’t doing them any favors stringing them along. That person deserves to be loved like anyone else and you will be causing them more harm than good if you pretend you love them just to save them some heartbreak.

The correct course of action is to be honest about how you feel and also recognize how your partner feels. Whether or not you intended them to fall in love with you, recognize that that is significant and your loss in their life will be painful. There’s no two ways about that, so be kind and compassionate to your partner.

But do not fool yourself into thinking that what’s right is to just keep them around because you don’t want to break their hearts. If they love you, they want to be loved back, and if you can’t do that that’s fine.

Pretending you love them so you won’t hurt them will cause the greatest pain of all.

I’m neurodivergent, let me take a crack at this.

First off, disclaimer, autism is a massive spectrum so this whole thing is a gross generalization.

Neurodivergent people act differently than neurotypical people for 3 broad categories of reasons

• different stimuli processing
• different thinking patterns
• different skills

First, is stimuli processing. Have you ever been in a crowded room and there’s lots of people talking but your brain does you a cool favor and ignores all that noise so you can focus on the person in front of you? Did you do anything to make that happen, probably not. It’s just a thing your brain did for you when processing all that stimuli, you placed your focus on the speaker in front of you and your brain filtered the rest. What if you couldn’t do that?

Stimuli processing issues can present in both dimensions, both over processing and under processing. Neurodivergent people are often placed into situations that are relatively easy for neurotypical people to process but can be very challenging for neurodivergent people to process. If you want to do a thought experiment (or actual experiment) select a stimuli you can’t ignore, pinch yourself hard every few seconds and try to carry on a conversation. You will notice it takes a lot more energy to focus on your tasks and ignore this unwanted stimuli.

Second, different thinking patterns. We all process the world differently. Neurodivergent people can have very different ways of processing information, I know first hand of three patterns that are common and that I exhibit.

• Perseveration. Perseveration is when you can’t stop thinking about a topic. Kinda like getting a song stuck in your head, but for me it’s having a difficult technical problem and literally being unable to carry out other functions because I can’t keep my brain from working on it. I wake up at 4am thinking about technical problems and then can’t go back to sleep. A puzzle might be a fun diversion for you, it can be a dangerous trap for me where I know my brain will continually turn it over again and again no matter what I want.
• Hyper literal thinking. I think about things in very black and white terms. It can be very frustrating for things to happen outside of the rules I’ve established. There are rules that make obvious sense and the contravention of those rules is distressing. For example, you aren’t supposed to hurt people’s feeling but you also aren’t supposed to lie, this makes white lies distressing (I find all kinds of deception distressing, and it’s amazing how much you are just supposed to lie to people in many social situations).
• Hyper focus. Neurodivergent people often have special interests that they can focus on for extended periods of time. If people were to leave me alone, I could write code for days, only stopping when hunger or some other undeniable physical pain occurs.

Third, different skills. Frequently neurodivergent people find social skills difficult. I said to someone recently that neurotypical people seem completely insane to me. The complex web of contradicting rules make little sense. On top of this, rules are often predicated on being able to ascertain the feelings of the person you are interacting with. Many neurodivergent people find this difficult to impossible.

The best I’ve been able to come up with is it’s like being color blind. I struggle with understanding facial expressions, body language, tone, etc. I also have problem displaying the correct things in kind. To operate in the world, many neurodivergent people adopt a system of “masking” where we learn what we are “supposed to do” and carefully study people and make sure to make our faces look right and make our bodies look correct. This is extremely taxing even if you get it right, so neurodivergent people end up sometimes getting it wrong and also spending a huge amount of energy doing this.

So to sum up. Neurodivergent people are asked to operate in a world that is constantly bombarding us with negative stimuli, spending extra energy trying to understand social signals that come naturally to others but our brains don’t pick up. Following these weird scripts requires a ton of energy and it’s easy to mess it up and then someone wonders “why are autistic people so weird?”

It’s the problem that reality is more complicated than the simplified version trump gives his followers.

If you don’t know how something works and someone very confidently tells you how it works and it sorta maps onto familiar concepts, boy is that catnip.

Maybe all the countries are just sitting around like people and Canada is like a guy buying our stuff and we are just making that guy pay a tax. I’m a guy, I pay taxes, sucks to be that guy but probably rules to be the guy getting the tax revenue, and now trump made that us, awesome!!!

Transmitting this wrong idea is fast because it maps onto their lived experiences. It’s easy for them to conceptualize Canada as a single monolithic entity that is buying shit and having to pay a tax. So in one stroke they get a double dopamine hit.

• I’m not dumb, I get how this all works, and it was pretty easy!
• we get to collect these taxes instead of having to pay them, awesome!!!

So here you come to explain, “that’s not how any of this works” Canada isn’t one entity, it’s many. Sure the tariff is on their stuff, but it’s paid by the person buying it, us. And you can go on about all the ways they are wrong but you are threatening the fact that they are not dumb and they already understand this and their understanding means they are winning. So you want them to admit they are dumb and getting fucked and that’s a hard sale.

This is the real danger of hypernormalization, it allows people like trump to replace the complexity of reality with a fake but simpler version. And it’s so dangerous because the people that buy in to that fake but simpler version have this weird insane incentive to defend it.

It depends.

When the group hurts you through its own incompetence, you can land in hard times and still believe the ideals of that group. The ability for people to rationalize things is incredibly powerful.

Now let’s say that the trump supporter is ready to no longer support trump now that they’ve been personally victimized. Where they end up can be a massive spectrum. Cult followers tend to idolize and forge parasocial relationships with their cult leader.

You might think that you are seeing them reject trumpism and all it stands for, when in reality it’s much closer to someone feeling betrayed by someone they believed they had a close personal relationship with. Their rejection of the cult has nothing to do with what the cult believes, but comes from a reaction to a feeling of betrayal by the beloved cult figure.

In that case the fertile ground to win hearts and minds isn’t there. There are excellent case studies of this “embrace to change minds” strategy working.Daryl Davis converting 200 Ku klux klanmen is an inspiring story, and one that many point to to support the idea of embracing people instead of punishing them.

The problem is that this isn’t the same situation. Daryl Davis was willing to spend years talking with, and building relationships with people that actively hated him. He didn’t go to people who had a tiff with their local klan leader and tell them “it’s ok buddy, let’s be friends now, I forgive you.” Instead he put in a tremendous amount of effort to build relationships which made it impossible for these guys to continue to hold on to their bigoted beliefs

So what’s the danger in not treating these people like shit? Even if it were ineffective, isn’t it better to just be nice to them anyways? We have a contemporary example to draw from, reconstruction.

After the us civil war there was a difference of opinion much the same as the one we argue today. And we tried the gentler approach

As it became clear that the war would end in a Union victory, Congress debated the process for the readmission of the seceded states. Radicaland moderate Republicans disagreed over the nature of secession, the conditions for readmission, and the desirability of social reforms as a consequence of the Confederate defeat. Lincoln favored the “ten percent plan” and vetoed the radical Wade–Davis Bill, which proposed strict conditions for readmission.

Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, just as fighting was drawing to a close. He was replaced by President Andrew Johnson. Johnson vetoed numerous Radical Republican bills, he pardoned thousands of Confederate leaders, and he allowed Southern states to pass draconian Black Codesthat restricted the rights of freedmen. His actions outraged many Northerners and stoked fears that the Southern elite would regain its political power. Radical Republican candidates swept to power in the 1866 midterm elections, gaining large majorities in both houses of Congress.

Many argue that the confederacy and its ideals never truly died. The light touch, left many holding regressive ideals in places of power. They had not given up their ideals, they just couldn’t be a part of the group anymore.

In most cases the argument is somewhat moot. The most likely scenario is that my relationship (and most peoples relationship) with some random trump supporter that gets kicked in the nuts by trump will be the same as before, no relationship at all. In the rare situation that this person is someone you do plan to forge a relationship with (either net new or reestablishing some previous relationship) I think it is neither wise to “treat them like shit” nor “let them off the hook”

Instead it should be a careful assessment of what they actually believe. Do they still blame immigrants and trans people for everything that’s wrong in their life but just don’t like that trump fired then, then they can kindly go fuck themselves. They haven’t learned any lesson, they just don’t like that they had something bad happen to them. Sure give them a chance, don’t immediately piss all over them, but if the only problem they have is that it finally directly impacted them, they are no ally.

If it’s a catalyst for true and lasting change, sure nurture that.

By reducing our labor spend on these spend nothing days and not increasing our labor spends on these days surrounding them, we’ve increased our profits!

I like how none of the points are correct.

At best they could be a critique of the lives of the people that voluntarily join up to starfleet. Really the only thing that rings true is that, like any military, they have uniforms and you have to follow the orders of the chain of command.

They show tons of citizens of the federation doing whatever the fuck they want. Doing weird science experiments, going to conferences, settling planets, running a vineyard in France, Captain Siskos dad just has a restaurant for the fun of it.

I bought a $20 cast iron pan at target, I season it like once a year. I just wash it and make sure to dry it, I’m sure this is against the rules. Seems to work fine for me though. I wouldn’t say it’s nonstick but it’s mostly fine.

A $20 Teflon pan would be flaking and unusable, so for $20 it’s a good deal.