Sombyr

Omnipotence means you can do literally anything, and anything includes having perfect control of your powers without knowing how to use them. It also includes the ability to continue to interact and exist as an omnipotent being even if you were completely, utterly, 100% destroyed.

If you were omnipotent, you could just decide that every action you take will benefit you in some way and then, it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re doing the right thing. You could even just choose not to lose yourself in your newfound power.

You don’t have to know how to do something to do it when you’re omnipotent. You don’t even have to know the option to do it exists to choose that option. Because omnipotence means the ability to do literally anything, even when it makes no logical sense.

Of course, none of this makes logical sense. It doesn’t have to, because omnipotence isn’t a scientific concept or anything. It’s a word we chose to define in a contradictory way. It’s like if we made a new word that means “somebody who can do things they’re completely incapable of doing.” Not even really a paradox so much as a word whose definition makes no sense.

The weirdest part to me is that an omnipotent being must, by necessity, have the ability to create a being with powers exceeding omnipotence. Something more powerful than them. But they must also have the ability to overpower their creation, otherwise there’d be something they can’t do, and they would therefore not be omnipotent. That’s just a mindboggling thing to think about.

I had a teacher tell me to drop out then be forced to write an apology letter for it.

She wrote “I’m sorry you thought I told you to drop out.”

So I’m gonna say “I’m sorry you thought” is high up there. Straight up gaslighting.

I can agree with that. I’ve been part of a cult before (was born into it) and I can recognize a lot of what I went through there in far right people. I guess I’m just a little sensitive to people calling these people idiots and hateful people due to seeing myself in them. Like, to me, they’re (usually) just good people being manipulated into thinking the awful things they say and do are good, and they need a rational and caring person to pull them slowly out of it, the same way I did.

Obviously, it takes more than just talking usually to pull somebody out of a cult, but I think it’s still a big part of it. They’ve been fooled into thinking that things that are rational aren’t, and unless they’re confronted with the actual truth and the facts to back them up, they’re not going to even start to question their beliefs.

I’m also not suggesting that every person needs to debate every republican about every issue they bring up. If you can’t or even just don’t want to debate somebody, you don’t have any obligation to, but I don’t think insulting them over it is almost ever the right response.

There’s also the angle of how every cult teaches you that you’re going to be persecuted for your beliefs, and brainwashes you into thinking that should reaffirm you that you must be correct. That is one major reason I think labeling all conservatives as irrational and hopeless is dangerous. When somebody who’s been taught that the world is going to hate them for being “right” finds that the world does not, in fact, hate them, but instead just displays genuine concern, that’s when you fully start to question everything.

I don’t think every right winger is going to fling left when presented with this view. In fact, I think the vast majority won’t, but it will make them a little more understanding, and a little more understanding over the course of many years and generations adds up.

Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.

People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.

It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.