Everyone's in a position of power all the time. — Kenosha Kid

Were your girlfriends who were accosted by men when they were alone? Excatly.

Likewise, we can help people we love better if we are unbiased against the particular challenges they face.

What exactly are we talking about? Do you think I'm a right-winger?

I remember my (now ex-) girlfriend telling me about guys beeping her, yelling at her, slowing their cars down, winding down their windows, laughing, when she was out jogging. I found that difficult to process. It suggested that, when I wasn't looking, the world operated in a starkly different way.

Good morning to you, too!

So he really focused and eventually he saw a giant arachnid dangling between the two trees in front of him. Then he turned around. They were fucking EVERYWHERE! He'd been surrounded by them the whole time, he just didn't know how to see them.

Same goes for when one is picking chestnuts or looking for mushrooms. Or noticing how many other people have a car of the same make and model as oneself.
Then there's a bias there as well, one of jumping to conclusions where, if one is looking for X, one is more likely to see it, and also interpret Y and Z as X.

After that I started seeing it everywhere. It's not that it hadn't been happening around me, it's just that I never tuned in. I'm in no particular position of power either, but at least I have the power to tell creeps to go fuck themselves when they start harassing lone women in the street. All because one friend who went to Australia and another who once had to walk single file taught me not to trust my biases over their experience.

Well, more power to you, then!

*sigh*

What did Kant "really" teach? If he were here to tell you, would his thought be any less disputatious? — Constance

Why disputatious??

This is what Buddhism is. Everything the Buddha said begs many questions, which is why it continues on as an open concept. Taken as a path of liberation, even, a practical method, it still is open. I would say as with Kant, even if the Buddha stood before us and told us exactly what he meant, it would still remain just as conceptually open as it is now.

This is the thinking of someone who is not a Buddhist.

Where is the proof? In the pudding. One has to read and confirm for oneself.

That's a bizarre claim to make in relation to a religious text.
Religion is dogma to which one is supposed to align oneself. It's not something to discover, or verify.

Buddhism's great contribution is that is provides a practical guide to liberation, but such a concept is absolutely open, it presents a landscape of fascinating theo-philosophical thought, and there is so much in this that takes the matter of liberation into extraordinary fields of inquiry.

*sigh*

I disagree. Buddhism laid out clearly as a method in achieve liberation is not the only way to achieve liberation.

That's your claim. I neither agree nor disagree with it.
What proof do you have that there is more than one way to achieve liberation? As in, liberation as it is defined in the early Buddhist texts?

And you seem to think he was the only one ever to be "enlightened".

I'm saying that in early Buddhist texts, he is called the Rightfully Self-Awakened One, and Buddhists texts say there can be only one such being per one cosmic entity of time. That's all I'm saying.

I've read the four noble truths and find them simply superfluous, not wrong, but certainly not exclusively right. They are extraneous to the essential idea: liberation.

*sigh*
There are all kinds of ideas of what "liberation" is.
Theravadans have their own idea of what liberation is.
Mahayanis have their own idea of what liberation is.
Hindus have about a dozen ideas of what liberation is.
California Buddhists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Western psychologists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Every meth head has their own idea of what liberation is.

But these ideas of liberation are not all the same. Not all paths lead to the same goal. All things that are called "liberation" aren't the same. You're arguing for an equivocation.

Since I don't hold any position of power, it's irrelevant what biases I may hold in regard to others, as long as those biases aren't to my disadvantage.

To whom much is given, much will be required.

A president, given his high position, should live up to high standards, and he should be judged by those high standards.

So incompetent or malicious? Probably a bit of both. — ChatteringMonkey

Yes, humans are complex.

It's precisely that he be treated as anyone else, including a BLM protest organiser, that I would argue for. — Kenosha Kid

And how is that compatible with him being the president??

Even better, you could figure out how best to recognise them when you use them against others. — Kenosha Kid

Why? What good would that do me?

I think most biases are revealed to us by trusting others' contrary experience.

Actually, I'm undecided on most things.:p It's both a blessing and a curse.

This idea of wanting to discuss a topic with lay people but not wanting to read what experts have to say about it is just such a behaviour. I simply cannot fathom why anyone would want to do that, yet evidently it is very popular. That intrigues me. — Isaac

Another reason for this is that people who don't have a formal education in philosophy simply don't know how philosophy is done. They might even think that in order to produce a philosophical text, one simply sits down and puts pen to paper or finger to keyboard, and that's that. They don't see the role of a formal education in philosophy. They don't understand the role of research.

A formal education in philosophy (ideally) provides one with knowledges, esp. the meta-knowledge of the field, that is very difficult or impossible to obtain on one's own.

To be uncharitable, we could say that lay philosophers suffer very much under the Dunning-Krüger effect where they overestimate their abilities and lack the knowledge to be aware of their deficits.

Interesting. What's odd about that phenomenon, if it's true, is that the condescension (perceived or otherwise), would be presumably based on exactly the course of action the offended parties then pursue in response to it - to make claims without research. — Isaac

It can be based on that. But in my experience, it's just a general disregard for lays, as in "Ah, you haven't actually studied philosophy at university, so you don't actually know anything, and so there's no point talking to you."

I don't doubt that there's snobbishness in academia, but it seems rather a bizarre wish that one be welcomed into a group for behaving in exactly the opposite manner to the accepted behaviour of that group.

(Are you American? I found that Americans have difficulty understanding classism the way (at least old-fashioned) Europeans do.)

No, there's no wish to be welcomed to that group. There is a sense of being excluded from it by default.
It's similar with other areas, esp. art. Someone who was raised the old-fashioned European way would consider it inappropriate that a person from the working class would go to the theatre or to a concert of classical music. It's unbecoming. And this belief is held both by upper class people as well as by the working class.

Problems emerge for the working class person who inexpilcably finds themselves with an interest in classical music, literature, or philosophy. Then they see for themselves what it means not to belong.

Thanks for the book recommendation though. It does sound like an interesting read.

Right, do so.

There seems to be two schools of thought here. One is that if you're an agitator and your cult followers start an insurrection, you are culpable even if you had no plans for an insurrection. The other, mine, is that you're not.

Actually, there's a third. If you're NOS, you're morally culpable if your plan was to protest against lethal racist police brutality but you're not if your plan was to overturn an election. — Kenosha Kid

But when such a case involves high politicians and other VIP's, this makes it a special case. Noblesse oblige.

Another example, if a high-ranking military officer were to do something similar, he could be courtmartialed and charged with conduct unbecoming an officer.

Why should a president not be assessed by such principles, and instead treated like an ordinary plebeian who just so, totally incidentally, happens to be president?

It almost seems like we humans secretly aspire to become [more] machine-like and it shows in how forum moderators, not just the ones on this forum, are quick to ban those who go off the deep end. — TheMadFool

Dude, lay off the drama.

[Fully aware that classy stops being classy once one has to explain it ...]

There are four kinds of entities that aren't into drama:
1. chatbots,
2. people who try to be like chatbots,
3. people who just don't like drama,
4. ideally, philosophers.

This is a philosophy forum, and philosophy is supposed to be love of wisdom, not love of drama. Philosophers should exemplify this with their conduct. One of the hallmarks of such conduct is moderation in one's emotional expression.

Yes, frequency would be an indicator I think. When someone makes what seems like a stupid decision, you might think it could be incompetence or ignorance... When they make what seem like stupid decisions all the time, you have to start wondering if they really had good intentions you assumed they had to begin with, and what other intentions they could have for deciding as they do. At some point incompetence and ignorance just stops being the most credible explanation. — ChatteringMonkey

Exactly. I don't want to make this about Trump in particular, but it does apply to the situation with him.
A poster said here:

Trump thrives on attention and adoration. He lives for it. He's a moron and a narcissist, which 100% explains his actions. He lost an election to a corpse, so he has to rationalise that both for himself and his millions of cult followers. So naturally it was a fraudulent election.

The impeachment is floating a very different version of Trump, one who is blessed with understanding of others and the cunning to use this to deliberately guide his mob into violent insurrection without ever explicitly stating that this is what he wants: Trump as master manipulator, shadowy Bond villain, astute strategist and a man of subtle means. That isn't Trump. He has none of those qualities. And yet if we wish to convict him on the impeachment charges, in the absence of an overt call to arms, we have to pretend that is what Trump is. — Kenosha Kid

So ... I'm confused.

I think ultimately there is a normative element at work here. There is a level of basic competence that's simply ascribed to everybody, and if you want to argue that you lack this basic competence, you will have to provide the evidence. A reversal of the presumption of innocence, if you will. — Echarmion

I just want to say that I feel stupefied, flabbergasted, stumped by Trump and his supporters.
I just don't get it.
I don't understand how someone can really mean those things he says, and yet get so far in life and politics. I keep thinking that what he does is all a carefully thought out strategy.
It's all just beyond, way beyond my scope.

This idea of wanting to discuss a topic with lay people but not wanting to read what experts have to say about it is just such a behaviour. I simply cannot fathom why anyone would want to do that, yet evidently it is very popular. That intrigues me.

I'm guessing people want to give their ideas validity but without the risk? — Isaac

I think it's a kind of classism, sometimes reverse classism. It's about "knowing your place".

For example, the local university sometimes holds open philosophy lectures (well, it used to, before the lockdowns). But I wouldn't go there (again), even though I am interested in the topics (usually for tangible personal, practical reasons).
I am vividly and painfully aware that I am "not one of them", so I don't go. I wouldn't go to a philosophy forum that is "more serious" either (as in, where the requirement is that one has a degree in philosophy).

There's also the personal experience of professional philosophers looking down on me. Some pity or casual contempt. I certainly don't feel free talking to them, even when the opportunity presents itself.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog gives an account of this phenomeon, albeit the lady protagonist doesn't discuss stuff on the internetz (and I think she has a way too high opinion of herself and her philosophical abilities and knowledge).

It's a quick read. I think it will offer some answers to your question, if you haven't read the book yet.

Yes, and I think that'll have to be the crux of the matter: Did Donald do what Donald did in order to set up a violent insurrection by his supporters in the Capitol? And the answer ought to be that this cannot be established, further is unlikely to be the case.

Trump thrives on attention and adoration. He lives for it. He's a moron and a narcissist, which 100% explains his actions. He lost an election to a corpse, so he has to rationalise that both for himself and his millions of cult followers. So naturally it was a fraudulent election.

The impeachment is floating a very different version of Trump, one who is blessed with understanding of others and the cunning to use this to deliberately guide his mob into violent insurrection without ever explicitly stating that this is what he wants: Trump as master manipulator, shadowy Bond villain, astute strategist and a man of subtle means. That isn't Trump. He has none of those qualities. And yet if we wish to convict him on the impeachment charges, in the absence of an overt call to arms, we have to pretend that is what Trump is. — Kenosha Kid

*hrmph*
Two variations of Clarke's Laws come to mind:

Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.


Jesus, no, nobody can be that dumb. I'd sooner think that what he does is satire than think anybody could actually mean the stuff he says. The whole thing looks like the theatre of the absurd.

What adds insult to injury is telling someone born without your advantages that their failures are because they are not your equal.
/.../
People who benefit from systematic inequality point the finger at the disadvantaged and insist they are intrinsically lesser than the advantaged. It's unfortunately a quirk of psychology that being born privileged turns you into a jerk. — Kenosha Kid

IOW, standard examples of the self-serving bias and the fundamental attribution error.

I want to figure out how to best guard against them when they are used against me.

This connects back to what I was talking about earlier in this thread, about giving people support and letting them know they're not alone in their views. Feeling all alone applies an irrational social pressure. When I'm the only person arguing for one side of a disagreement, I can feel the irrational social pressure to just give up and agree with the others, a feeling like I'm a bad person for disagreeing with "everyone else", even if rationally I see no merit to their arguments.
/.../
If it feels like there are others who will make my same points for me, or at least others who agree that the other side of the disagreement is wrong, then I don't feel social pressures at all -- I don't have to fight this fight, someone else will, or we can just be separate "tribes" and not be forced to engage -- and so I am more free to treat the discussion as a purely intellectual exercise, and make more reason-based decisions in it.

That's exactly why an important part of rhetoric is communicating to the audience that you are a good person who's on their side, trying to help them think through something, rather than attacking them. If they're in a social-conflict state of mind, they're not going to be open to reason. If they feel like they're among friends and figuring something out together, then they might be. — Pfhorrest

I can see your point, but a few signs of token appreciation just don't do it for me. In fact, it has the opposite effect.

You say that I have not answered your questions. I am not sure what they were exactly because it is hard to find them in this long thread. — Jack Cummins

*sigh*
If only the forum wouldn't have that nifty link feature that makes it super easy to track back who said what, where, when.

So maybe I should amend my claim to “good discourse is the best remedy for bad ideas.” — DingoJones

The point is that that's too general.

Which doesn't work either. It's trivial to get a racist, for instance, to agree that such and such a deed or situation is regrettable: you'll see that here. Iirc I got NOS to agree that BLM aren't entirely unjustified pretty easily. Then they go to bed, go to that great reset button in the land of nighty-night, and come back reiterating the same shit as the day before. That's the problem with highly emotive irrational beliefs. — Kenosha Kid

Hence the methods for refuting irrational beliefs, such as Albert Ellis' here (I parsed and highlighted the text for clarity and repaired the strange hypenation):

If you want to increase your rationality and reduce your self-defeating irrational beliefs, you can spend at least ten minutes every day asking yourself the following questions and carefully thinking through (not merely parroting!) the healthy answers. Write down each question and your answers to it on a piece of paper; or else record the questions and your answers on a tape recorder.
/.../
Disputing (D) your dysfunctional or irrational Beliefs (iBs) is one of the most effective of REBT techniques. But it is still often ineffective, because you can easily and very strongly hold on to an iB (such as, “I absolutely must be loved by so-and-so, and it’s awful and I am an inadequate person when he/she does not love me!”). When you question and challenge this iB you often can come up with an Effective New Philosophy (E) that is accurate but weak: “I guess that there is no reason why so-and-so must love me, because there are other people who will love me when so-and-so does not. I can therefore be reasonably happy without his/her love.”

Believing this almost Effective New Philosophy, and believing it lightly, you can still easily and forcefully believe, “Even though it is not awful and terrible when so-and-so does not love me, it really is! No matter what, I still need his/her affection!”
Weak, or even moderately strong, Disputing will therefore often not work very well to help you truly disbelieve some of your powerful and long-held iB’s; while vigorous, persistent Disputing is more likely to work.

One way to do highly powerful, vigorous Disputing is to use a tape recorder and to state one of your strong irrational Beliefs into it, such as, “If I fail this job interview I am about to have, that will prove that I’ll never get a good job and that I might as well apply only for low-level positions!”
Figure out several Disputes to this iB and strongly present them on this same tape. For example: “Even if I do poorly on this interview, that will only show that I failed this time, but will never show that I’ll always fail and can never do well in other interviews. Maybe they’ll still hire me for the job. But if they don’t, I can learn by my mistakes, can do better in other interviews, and can finally get the kind of job that I want.”

Listen to your Disputing on tape. Let other people, including your therapist or members of your therapy group, listen to it. Do it over in a more forceful and vigorous manner and let them listen to it again, to see if you are disputing more forcefully, until they agree that you are getting better at doing it. Keep listening to it until you see that you are able to convince yourself and others that you are becoming more powerful and more convincing.


This is a treatment that a professional psychologist devised, and it's aimed for people who take up the effort of changing their beliefs on their own accord.

It's conceivable that something similar can be facilitated for an individual person by other people, even in a forum setting. But it would take a prohibitive amount of effort.

The only real use I can see for an internet forum about philosophy is people who for one reason or another aren't in a position to participate in the academic philosophical dialogue but who find the subject interesting and want to talk to other people who also find it interesting. — Pfhorrest

I think one motivation is also as a form of "philosophical self-help". Ie. when people have a real problem IRL and they are trying to make sense of their situation via philosophical insight, so they come to a forum like this and discuss it here.
It's the old tradition of the consolations of philosophy.

IF everything is ultimately based on a set of axioms that we cannot prove and have to take it on faith then what exactly is the point of performing philosophy? — Darkneos

If you feel there are things you "have to take on faith", then those are not axioms. Axioms are things you're already sure of.

How can we call anything a pursuit of truth?

With that inborn human optimism.

Philosophizing can be said to be the act of taking a few axioms, a few things that one is sure of, and then think about what implications follow or could follow from them. This way, one can discover new axioms, ie. those that one previously was not aware of.

Instead of doing a Turing test and weeding out chat-bots, they're actually conducting a Reverse Turing Test and expelling real people from internet forums and retaining members that are unfeeling and machine-like.

What gives? — TheMadFool

That's a false dichotomy. Throwing tantrums may be unique to humans, but it's hardly what makes one a good human.

You have my condolences.

All kinds of people burnout or whatever and essentially ban themselves. Just indicates some lack of self-control, I guess. — praxis

Or they realize they actually have a real life to attend to. ;)

Although now with the lockdowns, it's becoming hard to tell.

who in the heck do people have in mind when they speak of "right wing intellectuals", — Manuel

Jordan Petersen, for example.

Oh, and this:

I don't choose Mahayana over Hinayana. — Constance

To use the H-word, one must either be a Mahayani (supremacist), or someone who doesn't know what it means and how it is used in Buddhism.

As with any doctrine, one can either dogmatically receive it, then take this as an authoritative representation , disseminate what it says, learn by rote the utterances, divide into schools of thought, and call oneself a scholar. Or, one can talk the matter itself seriously, which means, while having respect for ancient ideas and those who founded them, realizing that these are interpretations of their own experiences and have no fixed, timeless say in the matters of determining what meditation is about, its nature and meaning, its revealed actualities. — Constance

This is a false dichotomy.

If someone wants to make up their own idea of enlightenment and the path toward it, that's their thing, and they have the freedom to do so. But it is misleading, to say the least, to then call this "Buddhism" or "what the Buddha really taught".

Because I am not arguing about who said what, when or where. I care little for this.

The point is that the teachings in the Pali Canon are regarded as being taught by an enlightened being, and a unique one at that, someone who is categorically different than an ordinary person. As such, it is assumed that the teachings in those texts contain insights that an ordinary person simply cannot have.

Later texts are taught by someone other than the Buddha, by people who may not even be enlightened. As such, they aren't assumed to have such insight and such value as those by the Rightfully Self-Enlightened One.

I only care about ideas and how they come into play in understanding the world and the rest is incidental. Now if I had the job of teaching this, it would be the same as it would be for Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth, or anyone: incidental facts become part of the lecture.

You're missing the point. The Buddhist teachings in the Pali Canon aren't just "some more philosophy; yet another philosophical text"; that is, the texts themselves claim to be more than that.

Whether you accept them to be such is up to you. But when a text itself makes such claims about itself, it's not clear how come people so often ignore that bit and just go on reading it as if it was yet another text.

To give another example: If a text starts with, "These words were dictated to me by the Holy Spirit", do you just ignore this and other such references in the text, and try to independently establish whether what the text says is true or relevant or not?

I think it would be silly, to say the least, to take such self-referential, meta-textual claims at face value (or to try to establish whether they are true or not). But I also think it is wrong to ignore them. If a text basically makes the meta-textual claim about itself that amounts to, "This is not yet another philosophical text, and it shouldn't be read as such" -- then this is something I take seriously. That doesn't mean I believe what the text says, but it does mean I don't treat it as yet another philosophical text. This is what it means to recognize the genre of a text: a religious text is in some vital ways different and should be read differently than a philosophical or scientific or literary text.

Don't be silly. No one is making things up.

You're not serious.


What amazes me the most in relation to Buddhism is how ready people are to bastardize it. Orignally, in the Pali Canon, a path of practice toward enlightenment is layed out, in considerable detail. But despite that, so many people make up their own ideas of enlightenment, but nevertheless believe they are legitimized by the Buddha, and even call those ideas "Buddhist."

I am puzzled about how you see the music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and psychedelia as lowering consciousness. — Jack Cummins

Because that music is either bestial naivete, or cynicism that belongs to the theatre of the absurd; neither is conducive to living a productive life, thus, it lowers consciousness.

what music do you believe raises it ?

Whatever music there might be that is conducive to living a productive life.
The kind of music one could listen to, for example, before going in for a job interview or when being told that one has terminal cancer, and that music would make one (more) able to do well in that interview or to live a meaningful life despite the terminal cancer.
AFAIK, there is no music that does that.

I would prefer that it not be seen at a battle at all, but if it's going to seem like some people are attacking you, instead of us all just cooperatively working on a puzzle together, then it's nice to have other people comforting and supporting you too. Someone to affirm that you're not completely crazy, that there's some worth and merit to your thoughts, even if there is also room for refinement. — Pfhorrest

I think one needs to be stronger than that, more self-confident, more self-efficacious.

Its always been a thing yes, but thats not the same as that thing becoming more widespread or significant. Im talking about the latter. — DingoJones

Thinking back several decades when I was growing up, to be different in any way meant to be evil, or at least wrong or defective.

What do you think drives the social pressure for conformity?

Yes. I think that's true but this is one of the reasons why social media (all internet platforms really) might be such breeding grounds for extremism. Much of our bandwidth is occupied with the judgement of social relations - the intentions of others, their social position etc. It's supremely hard work (in terms of how much brain power it takes).

People use their resources differently in internet interactions, much information we'd normally use to judge someone's intent is unavailable so there's a theory that a lot of the behaviour popular online is an attempt to extract that kind of data from a medium we're not used to. Just a theory... — Isaac

While I agree, there's another, even simpler explanation, and that is that most people are not trained philosophers.
Philosophers are, ideally, supposed to have that characteristic critical distance towards claims, regardless whether those claims are made by themselves or by other people.

Yet typically, people, and that includes some of those who consider themselves philosophers or have advanced degrees in philosophy, feel very attached to their claims, see those claims as part of their identity, their property. So that when someone as much as addresses those ideas, those people feel like the other person has crossed the boundaries of the acceptable. This, of course, hobbles critical discussion.

I love the music of the 60s and so much of that was consciousness raising, including the music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and all the psychedelic bands. — Jack Cummins

"Consciousness raising"??!
The music that you mention is decadent and lowers one's consciousness.

I have known a couple of people who made art based on toilets and urinals. There may not be a strict division between the sacred and the profane. The quest may be to discover the beauty within madness. — Jack Cummins

I think the other poster is talking about installing a music player into the toilet room, so that when the toilet is flushed, music plays.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/524645/6000-toilet-warms-your-seat-plays-music-and-flushes-command

Also, I am asking about the responsibilities of the artist. To what extent is the artist just expressing personal feelings? Is there any danger if art, music or fiction is too 'dark', such as metal music? Does it matter what art we create? — Jack Cummins

Artists love to deny any and all responsibility. Art is a kind of caveat emptor affair, where all the responsibility lies on the audience.

I think these people do indeed deliberately join forums whose culture is generally opposed to theirs, deluded into thinking that they only need present what seems obvious to them and all 'right thinking' people will fall into line on reading such cold hard logic. — Isaac

(And they end up being called "trolls" by the forum members.)

People tend to be cognitive misers. They are willing expend only a little effort to understand other people, and they underestimate the effort a particular other person would need to make in order to understand them.

For that reason I try to give signs of encouragement to others I agree with in other threads, even if I'm not going to go to the effort of really engaging in their battle against their opponents. Just so they know that someone is on their side, and they're not alone. — Pfhorrest

If I don't have your sword, your bow, or your axe, then what use are your little words of support to me?

Where on earth did you get that idea from? Have you honestly seen any evidence of it, in general. Do people, in your experience, generally have a tendency to listen to arguments (no matter who they're from) and alter their opinions accordingly? — Isaac

Of course not.

Venues such as philosophy forums are essentially intended as echo chambers, and people visit them for that purpose.

Yes, I realize this sounds awfully derogatory. But think about it: Who would make a point of visiting and posting at a forum which they know to be very different from their own views?

They just didn't like being told what to do, or how to behave. — Philosophim

Who does??!


Esp. when being told what to do or how to behave by people who don't care about you, and who have made it clear that they don't care about you!

New posters and older posters alike get fed up and decide to foolishly dare the mods to enforce the guidelines.
What are people thoughts on why they do that? — DingoJones

I think there are two factors to this:
1. people who do that do so as the final act of making clear there are irreconcilable differences between themselves and the social group they're currently in,
and
2. these irreconcilable differences are taking place where there is a hirarchical social structure, a power differential, and the person in question is in a position of lesser power.

They could just leave, but some anger or frustration compelled them to

I think it's an act of getting closure to an unsatisfactory relationship.
Leaving quietly wouldn't give one closure.

So a sign of the times then? Are we just so divided that certain people crack from the stress of knowing people out there disagree with them so so much?

Realizing that one is in the wrong place, and has been there for a long time, can look rather ugly.

Is it the nature of discourse, that some people just arent equipped for?

All discourse is overshadowed by the power differentials at play. Even at a philosophy forum, where the power of the argument should be bigger than the strength of the argument from power. But in reality, the argument from power is always the strongest one.

It's a tough duplicitious dynamic to navigate.

Ok, but why haven’t I seen this on other similar forums? Is there something about this forum that attracts these sorts of people? — DingoJones

I've seen it elsewhere a few times. I don't know what was happening via PM's or the stuff that was deleted, so I can't know for sure, but the common point seems to be: authoritarian politically correct moderators.

Now, difference of opinion is a difference of good and evil in the hearts and minds of most people. — DingoJones

As far as I have seen, it's always been like that.