Author: afamaral

afamaral http://kree8r.com Kree8ive Communication
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Why try to control natural emotions?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If emotions are natural, why do we spend our whole lives trying to control them?”

Well, that’s your mistake right there.

To control your emotions requires letting them flow freely.

“Controlling” your emotions requires you to let go of control over your feelings.

If that sounds counterintuitive to you, it’s because it is.

“Controlling” your emotions requires understanding them. The best way to understand your feelings is to observe them through someone else’s eyes.

Let them flow through you and watch how they affect you. Learn to spot your thoughts as they affect the intensity of your emotions.

A breathing technique you can use to help you disengage from your emotions involves taking a deep breath while drawing your arms inward toward your chest. Curl your hands into a tight fist as you imagine yourself “collecting your emotions into your chest” and then hold your breath momentarily. Then expel your breath as you open your arms and stretch them outward to expel as much air as possible while envisioning those emotions leaving your body.

Generally, when emotionally overwhelmed, they also recall situations that have stimulated those emotions at other times.

So, getting angry to the point of being overwhelmed by one’s anger is a process of recalling and “gathering all of those prior moments of anger” and rolling them up into a ball that can propel one’s anger to its natural conclusion, either by being spent or by allowing oneself to act out in destructive ways.

That emotion demands release; sometimes, the only way to release it is to empower it beyond one’s instincts to restrain it.

In other words, you already have a natural response of restraining your emotions. At the same time, your body fights to expel them, and that creates more anxiety and stress, becoming a feedback loop on your feelings.

If you have noticed how your emotional intensity always resolves itself, you will have also noticed that once it’s spent, you undergo a period of introspection. That’s the process you already naturally undertake to learn how to control your emotions. Sadly, in most cases, it often accompanies regret over allowing one’s emotions to explode out of control.

By training your mind to disengage from your emotions as you experience them, you will find they have less control over your reactions. You can watch them build up and be expended while identifying the triggers that tweak them to their extremes.

By identifying those triggers, you scour your memories for the moments in your life that brought them to the surface, which allows you to develop some objectivity about events that occurred in your past.

The next time you experience an associated emotion, you will find it’s not quite so intense once you’ve worked through previously unresolved issues.

Please keep in mind this is not a magical solution to managing emotions but a path, a skill, and a discipline to master over time so that you have the power you need over your feelings to reign in the destruction they can have on your life.

Good luck.

Can empathy be overdone and detrimental?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can a person be highly empathetic and think empathy can be overdone and in many cases detrimental to better outcomes? Can being conscious of empathy and in control of your emotions be called for to create more realistic circumstances?”

No. You’re conflating empathy with other unrelated characteristics such as sympathy or pity.

Empathy is a complex phenomenon, more adequately described as an additional sense, not entirely unlike intuition or your other five senses. It’s a blend of cognitive parsing, information gathering, and processing, adding a layer of intellectual stimulation to our understanding.

There are three types of empathy: “affective empathy” (or “emotional” — feeling what someone else feels), “compassionate empathy” (recalling one’s feelings from similar situations and re-experiencing the emotion), and “cognitive empathy,” (intellectually identifying the emotions and connecting them to stimuli to comprehend the context in which the feelings are expressed).

The people most prone to being overwhelmed by an empathetic response to stimuli, often referred to as “hyper-sensitive,” struggle to discern between original feelings generated within and feelings they pick up from external stimuli. Their empathetic natures are primarily derived from the emotional form of empathy, akin to a radio tuned into a station while the volume is set to maximum. It can be overwhelming to find oneself tuned into powerful signals.

It can take a lifetime to cope with one’s sensitivity, primarily because of a lack of social support for such sensitivity. More often than not, highly sensitive types tend to be targeted by bullies because they are perceived as easy victims who are also usually shunned by their peers. This lack of support can lead to feelings of isolation and exacerbate the challenges that sensitive individuals face in society.

These have been socially acceptable attitudes toward highly sensitive people, while many still doubt that empathy is genuine and is not a personality dysfunction. The first of these two questions is an example of misunderstanding empathy on that disparagement vector.

The second question, however, points toward a somewhat effective solution or means of coping with one’s sensitivity. Learning to discern between one’s natural feeling and those one receives from others on a subliminal level is crucial to maintaining one’s composure, if not sanity.

On the upside, once one learns to master the all-too-rare skill of self-awareness, they discover they possess a “superpower” and become “human lie detectors.” It can be frightening to learn that they are talking to a stranger who almost instantly knows their deepest secrets and more about them than they know about themselves.

Empaths who have mastered their emotional regulation and awareness skills also learn to conceal their awareness of others, as they generally don’t want to create enemies who are intimidated by them. Making matters more complicated is that one’s empathetic sensitivities are not infallible and can often be mistaken about other people. Much of this judgment error is due to unresolved personal growth issues. In essence, what I referred to as a “superpower” is more about “power over oneself” rather than over others.

Highly empathetic people tend to be the most honest because they must learn to be honest with themselves to maintain their internal equanimity. Living with the lies one tells oneself is much harder to do when one’s cognitive dissonance escalates rapidly, much more so than for those with diminished sensitivities to empathy.

The two other forms of empathy, “cognitive” and “compassionate,” generally complement affective empathy, but there may be cases where they don’t. I don’t know of such cases, nor see how that’s possible. Still, I’m not a professional who has spent a lifetime studying the manifestations of empathy in thousands of patients and volunteers.

Emotional regulation is otherwise a skill that anyone can benefit from, regardless of their sensitivities or empathetic capabilities.

Why do atheists make me uncomfortable?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “It makes me uncomfortable that there are atheists. What should I do?”

You can repent and learn to respect your God’s wishes. Hopefully, you can save your immortal soul from an eternity in Hellfire if you act honestly and sincerely toward your embrace of atheists because they exist to teach you to be a better human capable of appreciating your God’s love for you and all its creations.

You can learn to stop sinning by heaping disdain onto people who want to live peacefully. They are not your enemies. Don’t make them so.

Here is a story to help you return to your God’s favour. Otherwise, you can choose to continue betraying your God’s commands while preparing yourself for an eternity in the lake of fire.

Why did God create atheists?

A Rabbi is teaching his student the Talmud and explains that God created everything in this world to be appreciated since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

The clever student asks, “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Rabbi responds, “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone who is in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means” the Rabbi continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

Perhaps a nightly routine of flagellation might help you restore your spirit to favour in your God’s eyes.

Good luck with your repentance.

Why don’t newspapers use more graphs with their articles?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-newspapers-use-more-graphs-with-their-articles/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

A straightforward answer is that visuals are a LOT more time-consuming to create and fill a space than words.

What can be conveyed within a couple of paragraphs, taking only a few minutes to compose, can require at least an entire day of effort to create an infographic that depicts the same information.

Much of the reasoning for the judicious use of illustration is the cost and time required to prepare.

Newspapers are daily publications, so there is little time dedicated to comprehensive illustrations that can fill a page and convey what can be expressed through words. A daily cartoon for a cartoonist is a full-time job for a reason.

Weekly and monthly magazines have more freedom to include more visuals in their publications, which do attract more people and appeal to broader audiences, but they’re also more expensive.

Although graphs aren’t quite as time-consuming to create because many programs can generate attractive graphs from data, this is where the time-consuming challenge rears its costly head. Gathering data and refining it sufficiently to create a graph that complements an article can be beneficial if the story is data-intensive. Still, most stories are information-rich narratives that don’t translate into data parsing visuals.

Infographics are about telling stories, but creating them can involve several days of effort.

The (mostly very short) articles I compose here, which I further tweak and publish elsewhere and include illustrations, can take as long to create as the 2-minute-long article I write. I begin with an AI-generated image, which I then process through photo-editing tools that are sometimes composites of multiple AI originals. If I were to create illustrations from scratch, that would require a bulk of one day (4–6 hours) of cartoon-style illustration for an article I would have spent two to three hours composing.

An infographic would require research in compiling data, research in identifying appropriate images to use (because it’s often faster to find glyphs to modify than it is to create them from scratch) and then arranging all of that into a pleasing visual that’s easy to follow is an evolutionary process that often requires moving stuff around to make everything fit in a way that guides a viewer’s attention. In short, it’s just more work to create an infographic. Creating unique and attractive infographics that clients want to pay good money for is a market on its own that I’ve thought of exploring at different times in my life but haven’t done so earnestly… and I kick myself for that because I’ve taken the notion of infographics much further into something I’ve called an edugraphic — which is essentially an entire course within a single graphic.

Here’s an example of one visual I created around David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Model — this took more than a week to develop (this was part of something I was working on before my life was upended) — in essence, this is a self-contained course within a single graphic which I refer to as an “edugraphic” rather than “infographic”:

Why are Republicans now against tariffs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are elected Republicans now saying that tariffs previously led to the worst depression our country has ever seen after supporting them just recently?”

Instead of asking why they “are now saying,” you should ask, “Why didn’t they say so before?”

The answer to your question is easy to figure out through simple “pocketbook logic.” It can be endured if something affects someone, be it health, mood, or anything.

The moment something affects their pocketbook, however, it becomes a serious matter.

Up until now, they believed their pocketbooks were safe. Now, they no longer believe that.

They now believe that their pocketbooks are being severely damaged. Now they think their long-term economic future is in jeopardy. They now fear losing their jobs and being forced into the poverty they have been creating for their constituents for decades.

In many ways, sadly, this harsh dose of life-threatening reality might be the kick in the butt of the complacency of a nation.

Nothing can motivate 350 million people into united action more effectively than all fearing for their lives.

The longer the public and the authorities allow this economic destruction to continue, the more likely the entire world will experience a severe depression. If that happens, there will be no placating the massive chaos that will ensue without taking dramatic steps to reign it in, such as by instituting Martial Law.

If Trump can maintain his power while instituting Martial Law, the odds are excellent that democracy will be set back one hundred years. We can then expect a return to an almost primitive social existence with gated communities for the elites and the rest of humanity living like herd animals.

If Martial Law is instituted through a military coup where Trump is hauled off to prison or shot for treason, then it will take the rest of this century for the world to restabilize. We will experience a dramatic restructuring of government processes, such as through a modern version of a “grand new deal.”

On the back end, for those lucky enough to survive the nightmare, humanity will earnestly face the environmental challenges we’ve been postponing.

The sooner we can reassert sanity, the sooner we can adjust our behaviours and restructure our collapsing societies as we transition into a fully automated system for human civilization to thrive.

How do we deal with Fox media lies?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do you deal with a family member who believes everything that Fox News says?”

I remember as a kid how futile it was to explain to my parents that wrestling on television was fake.

They would point to the blood they saw and use it to prove it was real.

It didn’t matter in the least what was said to them or what was pointed out as an obvious ploy or staged athletic move; they refused to acknowledge the truth of the fraud the rest of us kids saw in the wrestling performance.

Making matters more convincing that it wasn’t an argument worth pursuing was how their agitation quickly escalated into anger if we persisted past the point of their capacity for maintaining patience with their annoying children. We learned that once we detected visible signs of anger, it wasn’t worth the effort to push them any further. By that point, the conversation had escalated into a frightening experience.

We eventually gave up and decided there was no harm in letting them believe whatever they wanted to believe.

Fox is an entirely different matter because its effect on their audience has contributed to a nightmare affecting the world.

I suggest one does not bother addressing the issue with one’s family because even if one succeeds in helping them accept reason, that victory has little impact on the severity of the problem Fox poses in society.

Addressing Fox as a threat to national stability and security is essential. There could be several approaches to addressing this problem, and one of them could be an aggregated accounting of behaviors exhibited by Fox adherents, collected by family members to construct a compelling argument for affecting legal change and influencing the media as a whole for the benefit of society.

My view on news media in society is that there is no justification for consolidated enterprises serving a profit motive. The Fourth Estate is a critically important entity within a democratic society that must be capable of earning and maintaining the public trust. That is impossible when their mandate is to serve the billionaires who are the existential threat to our democracies that we now face.

Let us take a page from the peer review process applied within the scientific community, ensuring integrity throughout the science discipline and the scientific community.

Matching the scientific community’s level of granularity in self-policing is as simple as breaking up large news media enterprises into community-based and locally-owned operations.

The more numerous the entities that represent the Fourth Estate, the more able they can become in ensuring the public is well served with a diversity of perspectives that can achieve a far more objective delivery of information than is possible through the lens of a billionaire who controls the dissemination of information with a self-serving agenda.

Funding for individual operations could be coordinated through a crown corporation that provides administrative services, such as an access point for advertising and a payment system modeled on existing systems, like Medium, where payments are distributed based on readership and engagement. Graduated access levels could be permitted, and stories can be assessed on a scale of widespread need for distribution versus content catering to niche markets. Public and subscription-based funding could support a system for disseminating critical information to broader audiences, ensuring everyone can access news crucial to their lives.

Has editorial integrity and independence been compromised?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think that the editorial integrity and independence of the Washington post has been compromised by the current owner, Jeff Bezos?”

Billionaires have compromised all news media. The Fourth Estate has long been corrupted and serves its primary function of informing the public only tangentially. Their mandate has been perverted by a profit-driven mentality that prioritizes the interests of capitalist owners over ensuring the public is aware of and informed about issues that can dramatically affect their lives.

This has been a long and slippery slope of degradation begun by Ronald Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and then the installation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network.

Meanwhile, the American public participated in the destruction of its lifeline to crucial knowledge by choosing entertainment via rage porn than any objective analysis of issues that would help them make the best decisions for themselves and the nation.

Had this corruption not become so complete as to allow Fox to continue publicly referring to itself as a news organization while declaring themselves an entertainment organization in the courts, Donald Trump would not now be wreaking havoc on the nation.

The problem has been that the changes have been subtle and incremental over time, on such a level that the public merely shrugs its shoulders while remaining blissfully unaware of the long-term implications of allowing their lifeline to knowledge to become so polluted with noise.

Here’s an example of a non-issue that should have pissed off the public enough to be radically vocal but it was just another day and another shrug of the people’s collective shoulders while a significant proportion of the population has been so condition by this degradation that they see nothing fundamentally wrong with it in the same way that a Stockholm Syndrome sufferer sees nothing wrong with their abuser’s abusive behaviour.

Along with all the other numerous acts of restoration required for the nation, what needs to happen is the breaking up of big media into community-based and locally owned enterprises that can collectively function like the scientific community’s peer review system to ensure integrity is restored to the Fourth Estate.

Why is there no neutral ground in America?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why does it seem that there is no neutral ground for political parties in America? You seem either extreme right or extreme left. Indeed, agreeing that the opposite party have a point seems to brand you as a traitor? Why is there this perception?”

The perceptions you describe result from a myopic lens in which the nation is ruled by one extreme.

There is no extreme left in the U.S.

No parties or groups are demanding to seize ownership of the means of production.

You argue that there is an extreme left because it helps to lessen the seriousness of the challenges facing your nation today. It’s a perception that helps to justify its Nazification as a reaction to a perceived enemy rather than a decline and degradation of its long-held moral values.

To believe an extreme left exists is to deny the harsh reality of natural cruelty your nation has been cultivating for decades.

Gordon Gecko was a warning against this cruelty, but as a nation, you embraced it, and you embody it by permitting the ongoing mass murderers of children in schools, by denying healthcare as a human right, by permitting whole towns to poison their people through contaminated water, and by justifying a profit motivation.

Your nation has been welcoming this transition into a culture of sociopathic dehumanization for decades, and you have cheered it on. You cheered when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers’ union. You cheered when he shut down mental health facilities and threw the vulnerable out onto the streets. You supported his hatred of gay people and allowed countless murders of them by denying them life-saving medical treatment.

You justify the fabricated existence of a far-left because you struggle to avoid facing the ugly truth of the nation you have become by choice.

There is no neutral ground because all that remains is a toxic evil threatening global stability. Those who struggle to muster the courage of their ancestors are stunned to find themselves engaged in a surreal battle against monsters who should know better than to deem themselves modern-day kings among the educated and democratized masses.

How close is the U.S. to a dictatorship?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/How-close-is-the-U-S-to-a-dictatorship-10“

This question assumes that a threshold is crossed, and a switch flips between a non-dictatorship and a dictatorship. The reality is that there is a transitional stage between the two states.

If you think of the process as day becoming night, twilight occurs between the two unless you live on the equator.

The U.S. is in the twilight stage of becoming a dictatorship and already exhibits key stages of the transition into darkness, such as launching a strategic assault on private law firms that would challenge his executive orders and other actions in court. His strategy has been to intimidate those entities that would restrain his efforts to achieve a complete dictatorship.

Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps are two major law firms that have capitulated to Trump’s bullying. These entities are essentially among the nation’s final layers of protection against a full manifestation into a dictatorship. If these protections fail, full-on chaos is the only option for the people. There won’t be enough time to hold out for another almost two years for a mid-term election. Americans will have no choice but to embrace a violent uprising because defeating these entities essentially guarantees he has the full cooperation of the courts to do what he pleases.

That means he will likely declare Martial Law to tamp down any resistance to furthering his stranglehold on the nation.

Americans are on the precipice of losing their democracy completely. Even though they’ve endured the pseudo-democracy of a corporatocracy for the last more than one decade, they’re entering entirely new territory if Trump succeeds in defeating enough law firms to gain his legal stranglehold over the nation.

To answer this question from the perspective of a countdown to midnight clock used to determine how close the world has been to nuclear annihilation, the U.S. is best expressed through a song by Midnight Oil, “Minutes to Midnight”:

Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(Minutes to midnight)
Everybody say, “God is a good man”
(God is a good man)
Ah, clock on the world
(Yes, he’s a good man)
Driving a dump truck up to the sun
(Is he a soul man?)
A sigh in the human heart
(Three sides to every god)

I look at the clock on the wall
It says three minutes to midnight
Faith is blind when we’re so near

But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
But ears can’t hear
What those eyes don’t see
And you can’t see me

Does God Exist?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “I’m beginning to lose faith. Does God really exist, and if yes does he even listen to our prayers?”

I would say that based on your question history and the way you have been provocative toward atheists for quite some time now, that you have been “losing your faith” for a lot longer than you realize.

The surprisingly positive change I’m registering in your question today is that you finally realize it.

“Losing your faith,” however, is merely a struggle with disappointment in your faith. You’re not losing it since you’re unhappy with the lack of fulfillment you have expected from it. That’s a big part of the reason you have been so provocative with atheists.

You have been taking your frustrations out on people who appear unburdened while you have struggled to carry an impossible weight to bear.

You’re still not quite at the stage where you see contradictions as reasons to question your commitments to your beliefs.

You still value your beliefs more than they are healthy for you, which is causing you confusion. The only way through the cognitive dissonance you are struggling with is to examine your beliefs with a microscope and a willingness to discard overgrown beliefs like the overgrown weeds they have become.

This is a painstakingly long and meticulous process that could last you the rest of your life, but the more progress you make on pruning your beliefs, the more clarity you will find in your thinking.

Congratulations on taking your first steps on the road to your recovery.

It can be painful to make such a breakthrough, but you should be proud of your accomplishment because it will give you strength and hope for a more straightforward path ahead.

Good luck… and do notice how this time, I’m not providing a link to your profile for others to block you because honesty should be recognized and acknowledged as a valuable commodity that should be cherished.

Wherever your path takes you, I wish you the best of luck and will explain why I may sound so pleased in my response; it’s that I anticipate a dramatically reduced degree of misanthropic cynicism from you in future and that’s a much better experience to look forward to as opposed to the toxic cynicism experienced from you to date.

I appreciate your honesty.