Month: August 2016

“I demand that you treat me in a certain way, or else I’m really going to lose it.”

This is not reasonable.  It is a type of blackmail, in which you imply negative consequences for people not allowing you to control their behavior.

And it is not mature.  Here is the thing: there is a world outside our ears, and a world between our ears.  Maturity is both dealing well with what flows from the world to us, and with what happens within us in that process.

Anyone who can only calm themselves in very narrow, carefully defined, defended, protected spaces–and one wonders if it happens even then, since no space can preclude anxiety–is weak.  They are helpless.  They are traversing the route back to the womb, or back to being immobile creatures entirely dependent on luck, like anemones.

The path to happiness is the path to self regulation, is the path to self mastery is the path to being able to remain calm cool and collected in increasingly various, difficult, and potentially stressful situations.

The path to happiness, in other words, is AWAY from ersatz wombs called “Safe Spaces”.

Now as someone who has dealt with trauma all my life, I GET, I GROK, that there is a time and place for the sense of safety.  I understand personal pain.

But I have never asked the world to go out of its way to be nice to me.  I HAVE asked for emotional support.  I have asked for hugs.  I have solicited kind words on occasion.  I have valued people who were nice to me.  And I have yelled at people who, in my estimation, were assholes.

I get the sense, with all the special snowflakes nesting in our college campuses that one day I might be locked in a box for refusing to use the word “Cis”, which I still don’t know the meaning of, and do not intend to look up, because the pseuodo intellectual bullshit underlying will simply piss me off.

I didn’t laugh at this video at all.  We are few short years away from this being reality, if we don’t wake the fuck up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKcWu0tsiZM

Mental illness, emotional pain: these are problems to be solved, not badges of honor.  Everything the Left touches goes into regression.  We regress emotionally, intellectually, culturally, socially, economically and even physically. We are winding the clock back to times when raw violence, tribalism and bestial instincts ruled the world.

Here’s a word for the snowflakes who want to tell us how to act: Wlbur: Whiny Little Bitch, you are.

Asking politely for reasonable amounts of courtesy has long been a thing.  Getting in people’s faces because of their unfamiliarity with your increasingly bizarre and loony list of demands is not asking for courtesy.  It is demanding people kowtow to you and your infantile ego. It is demanding you be treated as a superior, because you are a victim.  It is the opposite of everything good humanity has built in the past millenia.

If one is determined to think as sloppily as possible, if incompetence is a primary goal, then one can scarcely do better than to assume homogeneity among heterogeneous groups, and at that to assume the wrong characteristics.

As one obvious example, anti-white bigots assume both that all whites have benefited somehow from oppressions of blacks that happened a hundred years ago and only in some parts of the country, AND that all whites, then and now, hated black people; that even if they thought they were not racist, that they WERE racist; that it was somehow in their DNA.

There is no justification for this belief, other than that it provides a simple solution to a complex problem.  Simplistic thinking meets emotional needs.  It meets the need for control.  It meets the need to alleviate the anxiety of uncertainty.  It can provide a pseudo-intellectual rationalization for the expression of fundamentally anti-social emotions, among people who want to retain a sense of their own goodness and moral rectitude.

I think one could think of the need for abstraction where people are concerned as in most cases nascent or explicit psychopathology of one sort or another.

Clearly, we are animals.  We need one another.  We need safety and security.  We need the feeling of meaning, which is likely tied to the feeling of belonging.

But the specifics, what people believe and why they think they believe it, are extraordinarily varied.  It is bigotry, pure and simple, to say things like “all whites are racist”, much less “they, who did nothing to us, who took nothing from us, owe us”.

Most people are simple minded children, and the abuses are worst among those whose “educational” attainments would, had their education actually been effective, have warranted trust in them on the part of the masses; as things stand, Buckley’s comment that he would rather trust the leadership of the country to the first 100 people in the Boston phone book than to the faculty of Harvard is as true as ever.

Uneducated people guess and know they are guessing.  The allegedly erudite err with confidence, often, and never look back.

The argument made by Communists–and our universities are filled to this moment with people who, for all intents and purposes, fall under this rubric, although they may use words like “Open Society”–is that corporations, which we might view as the new synonym for “Capitalists” abuse people.  They take their labor and make money off it.  They do things unsafely.  They hurt the environment.  They are “greedy”  (versus, you know, all the countless billions who work hard every day for no reward at all).

In the 19th Century in America, and in present day China, there were clearly abuses.  People worked long hours for low pay in unsafe conditions, and many landscapes were destroyed.  This is clearly true.  What is equally true is that there are no more robber barons in America, and that the implementation of  Communism in China has not prevented their emergence there.  Both in 19th Century America and in present day China, the cooperation and protection of the government was necessary for these abuses.  Labor otherwise could and would have organized.  It is impossible to illustrate the foundational corruption of Communist ideology more simply than to point out they ban labor unions.

Here is my point: if we think of government not as an alternative to Capitalism/Corporationism, but as a larger equivalent, then the idiocy of putting all power into its hands should become obvious.  Communism is Megacorporationism.  It is where the Corporation is everywhere, and has the power of life and death over every employee, who is also a slave.  Everyone works for the same corporation, and nobody can protest, or find somewhere else to work, without risking death by fleeing.

Freud posited that the sexual instinct underlies most human behavior.  Later in his career, he had to add a Death instinct too, since he survived World War 1.  His reasoning was simple: all animals are born with the instinctual drives to survive, and to reproduce.  They are little homing devices that first find food and shelter, then want to fuck everything they see, and poot out little thems that can carry their genetic material to the winds and seas.

This is not unreasonable, but I don’t think it unreasonable to add another instinct: the social instinct.  The desire to be with ones own kind, to connect with them, to synchronize with them, to be with them.  From what I read, the need for social connection is hard wired.  There are sections of the brain dedicated to it.  We suffer, inherently, when we are separated for too long from our own kind.  Damage to this part of the brain is the most important, most damaging, part of trauma.  The capacity for connection, for sending and receiving social transmissions, is impaired or eradicated.

And the other instinct he failed to name was that involved in self regulation, which I might summarize as the capacity for calming oneself.  I am tempted to assert that the most important thing you could ever know about a person is how they calm themselves when they perceive the world as hostile. Not superficial calming: the real deal.  This is who they really are.

Sex, of course, is calming for most people, but what I would assert with some confidence is that it is a poor substitute for the drive for connection.  People MOST want social membership, to be understood, to be ensconced in a safe order of other human beings.  Sex can be a means for two people to open up to one another, but it can also be a means of generating distance and alienation.  Either way, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for anything approaching happiness worthy of the name.

I’ll leave it there for now.  This was worth saying, but I will likely expand on it at some point.  My life is large streams of feeling coursing through me, that I can sometimes understand.

http://ideaspots.com/reality-women-experience-men-dont-know/

I found this an interesting read, and I think most men would benefit from reading it.

The comment I would make is that what she fails to understand is that men really are much stupider than women when it comes to social cues, empathy, overall awareness. It really is like there are two qualities of perception, two completely different worlds.

Imagine an intricate canvas by Bosch.  Many have created intricate canvases, but fuck his is the first name that came to me of something really busy.  Imagine the colors in the canvas expanded, and the images expanded.  That is a woman’s perception.

Imagine the whole thing mostly covered in grey, with spots of bright red or green here and there, completely denuded of context.  That is an average man’s perception.

What they argue about is what the painting shows.  She tries relentlessly, using every word she knows, to describe the intricate imagery, but he just doesn’t see it.  So she gives up and accepts he is an imbecile.  Or she moves on to another man, likely one with a similar handicap.  Or she stays single, or she dates women.  Those are her options.

In reading this piece, I obviously can’t say she is wrong.  She is obviously right.  Her perceptions are accurate.  What I would add though, is that she is perhaps failing to account for how fucking stupid men are.  She is thinking they intend wrong, that they are hostile.  Some of them plainly do, but most of them are just idiots.  That does not excuse it, but they really don’t intend to be creating hostile environments.

She cites as an example grown men oogling 13 year old girls boobs.  In my mind there are actually three, perhaps four, possibilities.  1) He doesn’t even know he’s doing it.  He is that stupid and unaware.  2) He is doing it on purpose, but he is too stupid to realize she sees it.  3) He is a creep, knows what he’s doing, and knows she knows. 4) Any of the above, but he thinks she’s older than she actually is.

I doubt there are any men on this planet who have been in long term relationships where their woman felt safe enough to tell the truth, who have not been told: YOU’RE A FUCKING IMBECILE.  WASN’T THIS OBVIOUS?  You know, how I felt, where this was going, what you should have said, that a much bigger bouquet of flowers was needed, that you needed to wash the dishes, that I needed help with the kids, that I needed emotional support, etc.

We do have two classes of citizens where social awareness is concerned.  This is clearly true.  And men are clearly the dumber ones where this sort of thing is concerned.  We are stupid.  There can be no doubt.  And sometimes we are aggressive, violent, ugly and awful.  This is clearly true too.

This is the macrotruth.  To this, though, I will add that women by themselves are very often petty, backstabbing, vindictive, and score keepers.  I have two daughters, and both of them very much prefer male friends for this reason.  They know where they stand with boys. If they don’t like them, they say, in effect, “I don’t like you”.  There are no games.  There is little or no guessing.  Men, being simple, are what they appear to be, most of the time.

Doris Lessing dealt with this issue in what to me was an interesting way in her book “The Marriages between Zones 3, 4, and 5”, or something close to that.  She portrayed women as superior, but lacking something that men alone, being men, provided.

Can we dream of a world where imagination is important, and various interesting possibilities for the improvement and evolution of human kind are often and openly discussed?  This is my own dream.  I dream a lot, and I suffer a lot, but 1) it’s my job; and 2) my God, how could I live any other way?  My life is beautiful.

The fight or flight exists in the limbic system, according to my still very rudimentary neuroanatomical knowledge.  The freeze is in the brain stem, as is the shit your pants and go out of body.  I think that is right, although freeze may be limbic too.

But all of these are REACTIONS to violence and danger.  What is going through the head of the mountain lion stalking an unaware goat?  There is likely something like adrenaline,but it is focused, clear.  Their figurative hands are steady, their focus intense, but whatever fear there may be is channeled into awareness and attention.

I think I read somewhere that predators don’t get the shakes like prey do.  They don’t get the animal equivalent of PTSD which they then have to literally shake off.

Is there a predator instinct, which combines elements of all three levels of the human brain, and which is exemplified by people with “killer instincts”?

Somebody needs to make s list of all the people who will leave the country if Trump gets elected so he can use it in his campaign literature and advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfOXhGbwdm0

For no particular reason. It’s of course interesting to me to speculate on the mental health of Trey Parker particularly, and Matt Stone as an accomplice, but fuck it.  They have made me laugh many times, and these issues are complicated.  They are clearly not stupid, and I will admit I sometimes feel like John Malkovitch in “Burn after Reading”.

This life is interesting.  It becomes less interesting when everything has to be in a box.

And Alec Baldwin really is worthless.  

It is worth noting that slavery was only ever seriously practiced. in the South, and only from, I’m guessing, 1700 or so until 1865.  We have 50 States.  Slavery was legal in KY, TN, TX, NC, SC, GA, AL, MS, TX, MO, MD, DE, VA.  I may have missed one or two, but that is 13 States.

So even in the time of the Civil War, most of the country did not “benefit” from slavery (which was never a particularly good economic system).

And within the slave owning States, it was the 1% who owned most of the slaves.  At least 90% of EVERYONE in all those States never owned ONE slave, much less many.

And a great many people who now live in the United States have ancestors who immigrated within the past 150 years, which is to say after the Civil War.  That is my own case.

I was accused today of using blacks to get ahead, then denying them my “privilege”.  This is absurd.  My ancestors immigrated to the North, after the Civil War.  Blacks have fucking jackshit to do with anything where I personally am concerned.  They did not help me or my ancestors, or hurt them.  They were completely irrelevant.

We need to understand that overeducated lunatics are accusing ALL white Americans not only of crimes NONE of them committed, but of crimes not even their ancestors committed.

I reiterate: no psychologically healthy person with intact boundaries and reality testing can accept this guilt.  It is inappropriate, masochistic, and most importantly: IT DOESN’T HELP ANYONE.

Half this fucking country belongs in a looney bin.

Who is the enemy? 


THE HATERS. 


How do we identify them? 


THEY DISAGREE WITH US. 


What is to be done with them? 


OFF WITH THEIR HEADS. 


Who are we? 


LIBERALS. 


Why are we better? 


BECAUSE WE ARE TOLERANT AND KIND.