A postscript to "what happened to me"

[adey67]

Rob is a good guy. And he's a logical guy.

The folks wanting to say that he's "turned into a fruitcake" are the people who don't find it worthwhile to discover why one of your friends is hurting and confused. Plenty of people want to pile on a hurting and confused person because that's what's easy to do (from a social perspective).

"Hurt the vulnerable person," may be the best summation of the herd mentality. And someone who seeks to think differently than you? What do you think of them?

"He who seeks, easily gets lost. All loneliness is guilt" — thus speaks the herd. And you have long belonged to the herd. The voice of the herd will still be audible in you. And when you will say, "I no longer have a common conscience with you," it will be a lament and an agony. Behold, this agony itself was bom of the common conscience, and the last glimmer of that conscience still glows on your affliction."

--Nietzsche

See, here I think you're arguing against a moral view that is pretty much dominant in the US these days. It's the "I'm a macho man fuck you" moral system. 

It says that once you are out of the charmed circle of people we approve of, we have no duty to be empathetic or kind. It's completely obvious among Trump supporters, who think the concentration camps are justified. It's also common among liberals, who think that anybody who voted for Trump must be a racist and lost cause, undeserving of our sympathy. People will even justify it as some kind of tough love, thinking that the person they don't approve of should be beaten until morale improves.

Recently a guy who posted on the old [S]inking Atheist forum died. His friends are eulogizing him as kind and generous. And to them, he was. He also spent a lot of time on that forum bullying people and typing the most hurtful things he could think of. But his friends agreed that the recipients of his cruelty deserved it, so they think it was a good thing to do. 

In other words, a person can devote lots and lots of time to cruelty, and still be considered a kind and generous person.

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IMO Rob needs the sort of help that is unfortunately completely beyond the scope of any forum or individual on the Internet to give.

I suspect this is true, and it's a sad thing.

Mate, I've read the entire thread on AD that you're referring to and there isn't one post that I can find where anyone agreed that any recipients of this so called "cruelty" deserved it in fact its not been mentioned at all. Maybe I missed it perhaps you could point it out to me. The guy you're talking about can no longer defend himself but his behaviour was certainly no worse than the rest of us there. You seem to be calling him out for failing to meet the standards of your own personal ideals and beliefs on what forum conduct and rules should be rather than on any of the  tangible forum rules and regulations that exist in reality and that's not fair.