Month: September 2014

I’ve been spanked with a belt, quite a few times.  I’ve never been tagged in the nuts, but that was not his intent.  As any long time readers of this blog should readily grasp, I do a lot of inner work, and I don’t consider any of the spankings I got after age 5 to have had any significant negative impact on me at all, and some may have been beneficial.

Now, I don’t remember age 4, and it’s quite possible my first spanking at age 12 months may have left a mark, but according to my best architectural excavations, this does not appear to be the case.  You can be traumatized without being touched at all, which appears to have happened in my own case.

As should be blatantly obvious, Peterson did not consider his behavior aberrant or exceptional, or anything but being consistent with “spare the rod–note it says rod, not hand–and spoil the child.”  This is very old American received wisdom.  It is not stretching it too far, I don’t think, to say it has informed our history of being law abiding and able to work well with others.

Personally, I don’t think spanking works very well.  We tried it a couple times on my oldest when she was quite young, and it only made her behavior worse.  It was ineffective.

But Peterson himself is very successful, and he was raised that way.  There are any number of country songs which talk about being “cane switch raised”.  Here is one example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZNsPR6K1xo

So I cannot find myself horrified that Peterson would raise his kid the way he was raised.  I cannot join the chorus of those calling for Peterson’s social and professional excommunication for doing something he no doubt honestly thought–rightly or wrongly, we can certainly debate–was for his child’s own best good.

We have reached a time when children don’t know the phrase “Son, this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you.”

Again, we can argue whether spanking works.  It does seem obvious to me that we are raising–have been raising–children who feel entitled to everything, who do not understand that pain is a part of life, and who in many important respects NEVER mature psychologically.

Does spanking help with this?  I don’t know.  I really don’t know.  I do know that we will become weak as a society if we let frightened women dictate EVERYTHING.  Men and manliness have roles to play, and part of being a man is being tough.

I’ll leave it at that.  I don’t have the answers, but the questions themselves seem to be getting overlooked too, and that I can rectify.

I will add the obvious: Assad has said he does not want us in there, and Obama has said if he fires his Russian anti-aircraft missiles at us he will be toppled.  This leads us to the utterly farcical and completely insane possibility that we may be at war with EVERYONE in Syria.  For what?

And all without Congressional authorization.

And to be clear, I support limited action in Iraq, which is nominally our ally, to keep ISIS from getting too comfortable.  I have in mind special operators sniping and ambushing, air strikes and the like.  Economic warfare would be acceptable as well.  If they are selling oil and reaping the profits, those rigs can be attacked.  The roads in their areas of operations can be destroyed.  Their leadership can be targeted.

But, again, how did we get here?  Did our President provide support to LITERAL baby killers, who never existed in Vietnam (at least on our side; the NVA regularly used children for suicide missions), but who definitely do exist now?  And again, for what?  What is our vital national interest in Syria?  I see none.

The best explanation I have seen is that the Gulf oil interests want to build a natural gas pipeline across Syria to compete with the Russians, and Assad–who presumably would reap huge benefits and money from this–is resisting them due to in effect being bought off by the Russians, who view this as economic warfare.

But that’s not our problem. It would be good to weaken the Russians, but war is not an acceptable means in my view to that end.

I’ve thought about this, and my kids hear “I love you” literally every time they talk to me on the telephone, and hear it twice from me every time I put them to bed, and have their entire lives.  When they were little we also had a very elaborate game that evolved over time that took 2-3 minutes, that they loved.  They are teenagers now, and we still have a routine, even though it has been shortened greatly.

So there is little informational content to this phrase.

Instead, my take is: tell my kids to be brave.  It’s OK to cry, but there will be a time to move on.  I’ll watch over you if I can.

If I only get out the first line, well that’s enough.

There is little enough love in this world as it is.  Surely families can manage it, if they merely make it a priority?  No one you love should ever not hear it from you constantly.  We are ships traveling in the fog; it doesn’t take long to drift apart.

I forget sometimes that most other people are not like this.  I am somewhat unusual in my capacity to stand solitude, insult, confusion, grief, anger, anxiety, and my latest, abject horror.  This recent addition is a nice addition to my collection, which I think will complete it.  I won’t say more at the moment.

But what happens with me is I can SEE how people are constrained, see the chains around, see how they are likely to live entire lives with massive amounts of potential positive emotions completely unrealized, and in the constant dismal presence of negative feelings.

On a vastly smaller scale, I see, I think, what the Buddha saw, when he saw how many human lives are lived with only a fraction of the pleasure, joy, and fulfillment that were possible.  This is Duhkha.

People get hurt, then hide or run.  But those emotions are a part of you.  They are clothing you cannot shed.  They are a part of your psychological being, and will always be such until confronted, recognized, processed and overcome.  They will always bend you away from what is best for you.  They will always lead you into preventable confusion and sorrow and fear.

As the saw goes, what you resist persists.

So I will sometimes go into people’s bubbles more than I ought to.  I intend well, but most people rarely venture into those places, and do not like to be reminded of what they think they have forgotten.

It CANNOT be the case both that both poles are seeing increases in their ice sheets, AND that we are seeing colder winters, IF one still wants to claim the Earth is warming.  This is a fool’s game.  It is stupid, counter-intuitive, gutless, lemming-like.

This is a cut and paste from a post that may well be deleted (from Mother Jones, and it looks like they are going the disengagement and suppression route, which of course is needed if they want to continue to defend the indefensible.  Edit: yes, they are tired of having to defend the indefensible, and have blocked me, which is always what happens on left wing sites.  They are not interested in either truth or a multiplicity of opinions; quite the contrary.  They call themselves liberals, but they are ANTI-liberal):

It increasingly seems to me that unresolved trauma is at the root of a two branch decision tree of good and evil.  Those willing to learn to process it become good.  Those who cannot process it, who have too much, or who run from it in fear, become bad people.  They become, to be clear, dissociated people, cut off from the waters of a happy life, of the possibility of nurturing connection, of hope, of love.

I have defined evil as the internalized acceptance of self loathing, and I think that gets very close.  It is embracing the horrors in your gut, and seeking them out, inflicting them on others.  It is the embrace of the emotion of disgust.  One sees this very clearly in Sade.

Human civilization, if we are to advance, must learn to first grant the ubiquity of unrecognized trauma (much of it, to be clear, unintentional, such as birth trauma.   Much trauma also comes from the emotional unavailability of parents who are themselves traumatized, as in my case, who pass trauma on through a lack of love and nurturing.), and learn to deal with it en masse, and consciously.

I use the terms Good and Evil, but I am not a moralist per se.  I believe judgement is sometimes necessary, but I would argue strongly in the abstract that our task is not to categorize people, but to help them, to understand them, to recognize that they are dealing with things we don’t understand, and that we all have breaking points.  All of us.  Subjected to the right sort of trauma, ALL OF US, without exception, will snap, will dissociate to the point of open psychosis.  Many around us dissociate to the point of semi-psychosis.  Most of us are a bit crazy.  This is nothing new.

Ah, I’m rambling.  Time to move on.  Hopefully this is useful for something.

I have been having dreams like that, but in my own case it is, I hope, prelude to finally stumbling upon a sense of self.

Without sharing details–some of this does get quite deep–I have been having odd variants of the running away from something dream.

The phrase titling this post came to me this morning, pondering all this.

The nature of trauma is that it steals life from you, steals emotions, steals possibilities–of hope, of the future, of being fully present.

And until it is fully processed, it creates pressure on your conscious mind.  It says “look at me, feel me, deal with me.  I’m all alone and you need me.”  It is almost literally like “it” has a mind of its own; and given what I have learned about how it is stored in the viscera, in a sort of meta-brain, a primitive, atavistic, very old brain, this is probably not an inapt metaphor.

This is the essence of dissociation, in which our rationality is placed one place, and our innate sensations, our visceral sensations, our gut instincts, placed somewhere else.  You become, unnecessarily, divided between man and animal.

I have argued that modern inability to process trauma leads to abstraction, but can we perhaps also posit that the very EASE with which we can absorb ourselves in abstractions–think of what a computer programmer, or intelligence analyst, or accountant does all day–makes it also easier to postpone the reckoning.

If you live a hard, physical life, the trauma may get “processed” by making you mean, but you remember it.  You are openly hostile and cruel, and not through removal of emotional connection and passive aggression.

In summary, small quantities of radiation from excited Greenhouse gases, at frequencies corresponding to a transparent window of the atmosphere, provide direct feed back of heat towards the earth, causing some heating, and towards outer space producing cooling.  The proportion of this free radiation, relative to the amount of excitation energy trapped in the Greenhouse gas, is a characteristic of the gas and will be independent of both the total heat energy present and the concentration of a given Greenhouse gas.

 [The calculations show] that there is little significant difference between the spatial distributions of heat captured by the Greenhouse gases along a vertical column within the troposphere, for a range of concentrations equal to that defined at present, nominally 380 ppm of CO2 and possible future concentrations of 760 ppm and 1140 ppm.  While it is not possible to calculate the actual proportion of energy returning to the earth via these very low frequency photons passing through a transparent atmosphere, the proportion relative to that held by excited CO2 molecules will always be exactly the same, irrespective of the total amount or density of carbon dioxide present. 

The findings clearly show that any gas with an absorption line or band lying within the spectral range of the radiation field from the warmed earth, will be capable of contributing towards raising the temperature of the earth. However, it is equally clear that after reaching a fixed threshold of so-called Greenhouse gas density, which is much lower than that currently found in the atmosphere, there will be no further increase in temperature from this source, no matter how large the increase in the atmospheric density of such gases.

I have been misunderstanding this.  What they are arguing, effectively, is that half the heat trapped winds up escaping and having a cooling effect, and the other half of course has a warming effect, and that beyond a certain concentration the quantity of CO2 doesn’t matter.

It is my understanding that ALL models of CO2 accumulation posit a relatively decreasing effect per unit as quantities increase.  No sane mind can fail, then, performing basic logic on this idea, to grasp that at some point further increases do NOTHING, which is what this paper argues.

James Hanson got his start worrying about Earth becoming Venus.  Unless we move into Venus’ orbit, this will not happen.  How hard is it to grasp that any planet as much closer to the Sun as Venus is will also be that much hotter?  We are of course much hotter than Mars, which in turn is much hotter than Pluto.