Not a matter of true or false, but, like I said, you simplified the interaction to the point of leaving nothing resembling what actually occurred. What you said isn’t explicitly false, but words are for communication, and the idea you communicated was false. What you said was obviously intended to create a certain mental image and that mental image was false even if the way the world works makes it possible to create that mental image with technically accurate words.

Technically I was in an argument. Technically it was over the internet. Technically the other person was a My Little Pony fan. But obviously you presented those facts in a way that implied it was an “internet argument” over My Little Pony. I don’t think it had anything to do with anything fictional, let alone My Little Pony, and I know absolutely it was not just an “internet argument” in the way that phrase *means* like where one person sees something online they disagree with and can’t let it go; it was an ongoing social conflict with multiple sides necessitated to go at each other and direct personal emotional ties to the outcome etc. life shit, that happened to use the internet.

Needing someone to let you get the last word in an argument over My Little Pony would be some pathetic pathological loser shit, or more likely, an obvious joke. What happened here wasn’t the same at all.

But you didn’t make it sound like some pathological loser shit by accident, and you weren’t hoping people would think an obvious joke flew over your head, either. The reason you made it sound like this is because you’re actually just making fun of me for being stronger than you, and you know it deep down, and it’s much more pleasant for you pretending that strength is pathetic pathological loser levels of weakness.

Do you give a shit about people who are alone and need someone to talk to, just because they’re alone and need someone to talk to? I do. That makes me stronger than you. There’s the bitch-ass pussy argument that empathy is weakness or kindness is weakness or whatever, but take 2 seconds actually thinking about human motivations and it’s not hard to see being nice to people feels good when it works and feels bad when it doesn’t work and the difference between someone who keeps doing it and someone who doesn’t is just whether the good feeling when it works is worth the bad feeling when it doesn’t. Getting more enjoyment out of helping others is a strength, and having less ability to take bad feeling is a weakness, so whichever of those things causes them to feel different is them being a pussy, and them acting like “kindness is weakness” is just them being an even bigger pussy.

You think normal people wouldn’t have been stressed in the situation I was in? Normal people would have been *so stressed* in the situation I was in that normal people wouldn’t have *been in* the situation I was in. Going up against Toaster would not have motivated them. Him doing to them what he did to me, and doing to others what I saw him doing to others, would not have made them feel this drive to do whatever it takes to try to stop him. If it did, and that turned out to be very hard and involve facing tons of personal bullshit every day, they’d give up. Normal people are fine with spreading bullshit about someone else, but cannot even come close to handling it if bullshit about them infects a community they’re in, let alone one they care about.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t let it go, even when the amount of personal bullshit was making every day nothing but pain and anxiety and anger and depression. When someone was pushing me to my limits and I couldn’t try to argue against them for much longer without snapping or something, I couldn’t let it go because of who I am. And was that weakness? Yeah, compared to me now, but not compared to you. That was strong as fuck compared to you, because the difference between you and I now is, I used to be like that, and it took time for my psyche and neurology to adjust into the most effective state it could be in. You never tried. You’re not in the most effective state you can be in, psychologically or neurologically. It’s not that you would have been doing what I could do if I faced that same situation now, fighting as hard as you could while being stoic about the emotional impact. It’s that you wouldn’t have been fighting. The drawbacks of letting it go wouldn’t have mattered to you.

That’s what you’re making fun of me for and what a lot of you make fun of me for a lot of the time. I often care about the drawbacks of letting go of things you’re too weak to care about the drawbacks of letting go of. To you, it’s OK to let shitty people be shitty if it would take an unreasonable amount of time to try to stop them. To me, even if it had just been an “internet argument” in the typical sense, it still could have been pretty important if it were over a dangerous or harmful opinion that might have a chance at being changed. To you, even with it being much more than a typical “internet argument,” it still wouldn’t be very important. So you need to make yourself feel like that’s you being strong and me being weak, not the other way around.

But how do you get your brain to ignore the logic? Just for example, let’s say you’ve got an argument that should take about 2 hours of work to see the results of, and it’s got about a 1% chance of the result being success (where one person convinces the other).

If the stakes on the argument are that we die if we can’t win, both of us are willing to try our hardest in that argument. Both of us have strong feelings about the potential outcome.

If you lower the stakes on the argument, you hit a point where you’re not willing to argue anymore, but I still am. Maybe it’s if an animal of questionable consciousness has its life at stake? Like an earthworm. I’d put in some effort to save an earthworm just on the off chance that its neurology is complex enough or souls are metaphysical enough for it to experience fear or suffering or the desire to live. Would you? If you would, apparently the point of stakes where we diverge is lower than that.

So how do you get yourself to think that’s not you being profoundly much weaker than me on a personal level? For that to make sense, for it to be me that it shows weakness in, there would have to be some reason it’s best to resist the urge to fight. Right? Surely we can agree to that extent on what strength itself is. If we both have a strong urge to fight, but there’s a reason why that urge needs to be controlled, and you can control it but I can’t, that’s you being stronger than me. It takes *strength* to control urges. But what reason could you have here? What happens if you fight? Why does the urge need to be controlled? Because the only reasons you have are probably about the personal impact on *you*. Guess what, I dealt with a lot of personal impact in the situation you’re talking about, and I’m still here, the bullshit just hardened me against itself after enough torture. Refusal to go through that, to protect yourself from pain, isn’t strength. Protecting oneself from pain in general is obviously not what strength is about by any logical meaning of the word. There’s nothing pulling against your desire to avoid pain that you need your fear of pain to be strong enough to avoid. You just don’t want to deal with personal bullshit to begin with. It takes 0 strength whatsoever to decide not to.

Anyway, I won, so your painting anything I did in the situation as pathetic pathological loser shit is objectively false. Losers don’t win, especially when it’s important. Toaster’s life was destroyed, all his potential victims were saved, existing victims were vindicated (some with much thankfulness for me directly), and apparently however stressed and agonized I was with whatever personal bullshit I was dealing with, in that exchange you mention, I survived.