Final Boss of the Liberal Disease
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Well for a start you're not just thinking it, you're out here advocating for believing in the improbable fairy tale version of events as a valid coping mechanism, which is de facto advocating for negligence instead of people playing their part in converting a theoretical framework of right and wrong into reality.
And it is negligence, albeit a mild one. You're supposed to seethe a little bit when your bike gets stolen, and yes you're supposed to do something to stop seething about it. But that something's not supposed to be deluding yourself into thinking it ended up as little timmy's christmas present. You're supposed to ask why your bike was stolen with no consequence even though we as a society have agreed that theft is, in fact, wrong. You're supposed to think about what missing safeguards would have prevented that and advocate for their instatement, or if someone was negligent in their duty to already an already existing safeguard you give them a hard time about it. It won't bring your bike back, but you do it so the next guy's bike is just a little bit less likely to be stolen. Failing that you at least resolve to yourself to intervene if you ever think something fishy is going on with a bike, embarrassment be damned.
And I don't doubt you are thought of well in your community, and that that definitely does pay dividends. The most prosperous communities still tend to be the ones with a high level of sharing and collaboration. It's a real chicken and the egg situation there, collaboration leads to general prosperity, but it's also very easy to ignore little frictions and work together when everyone is already doing well for themselves. Eloquent avoidance and permissiveness is a tremendously safe and effective strategy for appearing good in those circumstances for little actual cost, the more superficial the community interactions are the greater the cost/benefit outcomes become. You can prove you're good to ten people through direct individual interactions, or you can just do one good thing and make sure to bring it up a hundred people who aren't really paying much attention to your day to day life about it, but have enough resources to throw a little something your way anyway. Appearing good in those circumstances is a social capital that is ripe for conversion into real capital with minimal effort, that's the essence of the empty virtue signalling grift. But appearing good and doing good are very much decoupled in a superficial community, appearing good is a social game to which actually doing good is a sub-optimal strategy for being so inefficient.
It's not like our forefathers wouldn't also feel sympathy for the security guard who just forgot to lock the gate, they just knew that if they chewed him out about it anyway he's still more likely to remember next time than if they just quietly let it slide. Sometimes you have to look like the bad guy superficially and burn some social capital sometimes to do actual good things long term. But somehow the majority of people with generally good intentions have become so gelded politically that they don't even think they can make hard decisions or initiate any conflict without making things worse instead of better.
The cumulative effect of years of proverbial bike cuckoldry has left all the real decision making to an insular elite with no such compunctions about wanting to be good handicapping their will to power. And have left a prosperous and oft well meaning middle class of naive socialites on the precipice of collapsing into a lower class who now either hates them because they were once richer, or hates them for effectively being highly competent freeloaders, benefitting maximally from society's stability and contributing minimally to protecting it, all whilst subjecting them to the whims of their silly social games. On an individual level it can make for a lovely to person to know, which makes it all the more of a shame that on a societal level it feels like watching cute and fluffy lemmings waving to the predators below as the cliff edge is beging to crack and someone is making off with all their nest eggs.
Yeah buddy I did all that. I did that years ago when it happened for about a week. Then I was done. I got a new bike, I got a new lock, it's over. You want me to keep seething? You want me to keep asking why? No thank you. There's no answer. It's gone.
What good does it do, at all, to keep being mad about it?
Your concern seems to still just be centered around me thinking in the wrong way.
So what should I do instead? If you were in my situation right now, bike was stolen 4 years ago, what would you do to do actual long term good?
I don't want any "well I wouldn't do xyz, think it was being ridden by some less fortunate being," that much is obvious. What would you do differently that you don't think I've done?
Look I know the replies are long but it's a bit of a frustration when you keep asking for things I've already addressed.
If you really did all that properly you don't need to invent fictions about them needing your bike to feel satisfied. Asshole stole your bike, you did something to make sure he doesn't get away with it next time. Done. If you didn't feel satisfied, maybe you subconsciously knew that just throwing money at a new bike lock wasn't really doing very much, given the "new" implies the old one didn't exactly work.
I'd stop encouraging people to retreat into fiction instead of taking charge of their community's problems. I thought I'd been pretty clear on that already.
I addressed that paragraph already specifically. I asked the question about what I should do instead because that paragraph doesn’t answer it. I’m plenty satisfied with things currently. I told you I got over it. I genuinely don’t get why you’re thinking otherwise.
But what’s “properly,” in terms of seething? How long am I supposed to seethe? I’m not gonna keep being angry about a bike years later when it doesn’t bring any good to the picture. Does it make the world a better place for me to seethe longer? To keep asking why? How many more times do I have to ask why?
Pretty big stretch, friend. I'm not even sure what you mean by the logic. My new bike lock is sick.
“New” implies recent and “old” implies previous. I got a different brand that I like using a lot more than my old U lock. I had wanted one even before my bike was stolen. I called it new because it was new and I had to buy a new lock
Great, I know what you want me not to do. I’m glad I haven’t done that. You'll notice I've never done any encouraging in this thread, only shared my perspective.
What would you do differently that you think I have not yet done? You mentioned “Sometimes you have to look like the bad guy superficially and burn some social capital sometimes to do actual good things long term.” What is it that I have to do that does actual good long term despite burning social capital?
Is your answer to literally just seethe more? Because that’s all you’ve said so far. I hope not. I literally don't see the purpose in still being angry about it. I’ve gotten the new bike, I’ve set better care to make sure it doesn’t happen again, I’m satisfied with where I’m at now. What else are you expecting me to do?
(I'm predicting a "I've given you all the answers you figure it out now" but I'm really hoping you're able to at least articulate something instead of trying to play coy and mysterious like I see so often in discussions like this)
Momma said if I don't have anything nice to say I shouldn't say it.
But if you're going to poke the bear with this double replying the next day and deleting the original BS, apparently you really just need to hear what's on my mind.
It's also apparent the presumed high verbal reasoning ability is more of just an upper-middling. So I guess I have to do the obnoxious piecemeal quote thing to avoid being misinterpreted the same way thrice. Which I'm pretty sure this place can't even do nested quotes, so it's going to be ugly as hell too, enjoy.
"All that" being:
It's not the seething I'm disputing, I've already explicitly acknowledged that you're supposed stop seething after taking some of meaningful action to take it upon yourself to improve a system of fairness that has failed. It should be pretty fucking clear that I'm skeptical that you actually took any significantly meaningful action before retreating into fantasy, not suggesting that you seethe indefinitely. And yes, it's shocking that people on the internet might not just trust you your subjective judgement bro, I know.
Yep, that's what a qualifier like "maybe" is supposed to account for. If we were supposed to be having a moratorium on speculation this conversation should have stopped at "maybe he needed my bike more"
The logic is you had to buy a new lock because the old lock catastrophically failed to protect your bike. And I presume you know the saying "insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting something different to happen." That's really debatable if it counts as "taking action" so much as it is throwing money at the problem and repeating yourself.
You could argue that your sick looking new bike lock isn't the same as the old one, and I could argue that unless you went from the very bottom of the range to the top the differences are largely just security theatre, they're all "cutter resistant" not "cut proof", it buys you a little more time at best. That's an exchange I could at least respect.
But acting like you can't figure out that basic chain (pun absolutely intended) of logic is just stupid and disrespectful.
Speaking of disrespectful, so is asking the same question multiple ways without even bothering to wait for me to answer.
Again with the verbal reasoning lessons. An imperative like stop explicitly implies I believe you're actively doing it. Re-phrasing "nuh-uh, no I'm not!" in a smug passive-aggressive way doesn't help magically gaslight me into not believing it anymore, you have to at least attempt to argue against the reasoning why I believe that, which I guess you did make a token attempt at afterwards.
That's just angling towards some motte and bailey BS. Saying "I think women would be safer if men had a curfew and weren't allowed out alone at night" and "men should have a curfew at night!" are both encouragement that men shouldn't be allowed out at night. The only difference is the degree to which they're encouraging it.
Saying "I think we'd all be happier if we just all believed [token fairytale bullshit]" is still encouragement to believe in fairytale bullshit, just to a smaller degree than saying "you must believe it". But we're not debating degree here, you're just flat out denying it entirely.
Really depends on how your bike got stolen. You now have momentary specialist knowledge in one specific mode of failure of the social contract. Stolen at a cafe? Be the asshole who asks if they can install a feed from the bikerack CCTV camera inside so people can see if someone's messing with it and react. Stolen in an obviously public area outside your condo? Be the asshole who asks your neighbours if they saw anything, and suggest you all agree to help watch each other's bikes more carefully. Nobody really likes thst guy, but realistically he makes the world a fairer place if he only does it when the current system has demonstrably failed. And if you really just can't think of anything more systemic to change, resolve to be the guy who asks a stanger "hey, is that your bike?" when you're pretty sure the guy grabbing it isn't the one you saw put it down, knowing full well it's probably just as likely his friend grabbing it for him as an actual theft and it's going to be super cringe.
I know this is a bit of a collectivist vs individualist split, but it's generally considered a bitch move on the individualist side to cling to group preconceptions long past the point the individual has had a chance to prove themselves. At no point have I been fucking coy and mysterious here. I have been tediously comprehensive and patient, to the point I'm having flashbacks to toddlers asking me "but why is stealing wrong?". Drop the baggage at the door if you would.