Month: September 2018

When I was in 2nd and 3rd grade, we had recess on an asphalt playground, which had a merry go round we used to try and knock each other off of, see saws we also used to try and knock each other off of (the boys, self evidently), monkey bars, swings we jumped off of, and other things I have forgotten because I didn’t use them.

Our favorite game, though, was Smear the Queer, which was giving a football to someone, then everyone else–6-10 of us–trying to tackle the person with the football.  Once they were down, they released it, and the game repeated.  I had strong legs even then, and they called me “Big Bad”, which is quite comical considering I was 8 or so. I have always been physically stubborn in some circumstances though.  There are time I will not quit.  Over the long haul, bet on me quitting.  Over the short haul, my pain tolerance is staggering.

But I wanted to comment on the obvious facts that, by now, 1) this game is no longer allowed on most playgrounds, even among the schools which have them; 2) most schools no longer have staff nurses, as we did, for the mostly boys who would get injured just about every day at recess; 3) The NAME for this is verboten.  I have heard this game called Bag the Fag too.

Now, at that age, in that world, I did not have the slightest idea what a homosexual was.  At that time, where I grew up, I would sometimes read in the newspaper about them busting a “bathhouse” and arresting people–sometimes cops, sometimes local government officials, all a scandal.  But this whole in-door, out-door thing was a mystery for me for a very long time.

The point I would like to make here on this topic is that OF COURSE it is a good thing that kids no longer call that game by that name.  I think it is bad, if it is true, that they no longer play something like it, but that we have stopped equating gay with bad is good.  This IS progress.  That gay sex is no longer illegal, such that bathhouses are raided and everyone caught naked in the shower arrested for “sodomy”, is good.

In my less angry moments, in my less defensive moments, I have to concede progress has indeed been made.  So called “Progressives” have engendered progress, real progress.

But what I have to insist on is that emotionally, I never feel that helping actual, real human beings is the goal.  Because whenever they win one victory, they go for another.  Whenever they have undermined one bad underpinning assumption of our society they go for another, one which might well be good.  Witness, as an example, the ruckus over the claim that “bourgeois”values have some merit.

Here is the thing: we need to be able to adjust our outrage, temper it proportionately.  Be mildly angry at mild insults, and greatly angry at great insults.  But given how craven and beaten most people are in most segments of society, very few dare great insults, so the people who NEED rage to justify their existences visit rage on them anyway.

In such an atmosphere, no rational proportionality is possible.  No reconciliation and negotiation of opposing or at least differing views is possible.

The all or nothing tactics and viewpoints of the Left make emotional intelligence impossible.  They make understanding impossible. They make it impossible to be meek when needed, and tough when needed. 

Conservatives–Liberals, to be clear, who retain some fondness for rational discourse, civic mindedness, principle, and civility–are forced into pitched battles or silence.  Silence has largely failed, so they show up at the “discussion” armed for bear, and quite prepared to deal out the same viciousness they expect will be the opening parley by the Left.

All of this is stupid.  Preventing this outcome should be the POINT of a college education, even a high school education, even a grade school education.

It is good that we no longer tolerate open bashing of homosexuals.  It is not good that questioning, say, the appropriateness of Christians being forced, at the point of bankruptcy, to bake cakes for gays who simply want to make them squirm, has become something which itself carries vast social penalties.

I want freedom.  My feeling is that if somebody is not bothering you, then you have no right to bother them.  If gays want to have huge orgies in bath houses, how is that your problem?  If someone wants to cross dress, how is that your problem, unless and until they want to use the women’s bathroom?  Etc.

Stating a Randian principle roughly, because I am not one of her cult members: if someone uses no force against you, you have no right to use force against them.  Period.  Full Stop.  This is a truly Liberal politics, as I see it.

We can all get along.  This is absolutely true.  Ask yourself, then: Cui bono when we argue?

Then look around.  Then look at me.  Then decide who the real criminals are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_therapy

“While Western psychology has typically operated under the “healthy normality” assumption which states that by their nature, humans are psychologically healthy, ACT assumes, rather, that psychological processes of a normal human mind are often destructive.^[9] The core conception of ACT is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and resulting psychological rigidity that leads to a failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with core values. As a simple way to summarize the model, ACT views the core of many problems to be due to the concepts represented in the acronym, FEAR:^{[citation needed]}

• Fusion with your thoughts

• Evaluation of experience

• Avoidance of your experience

• Reason-giving for your behavior

And the healthy alternative is to ACT:

• Accept your reactions and be present

• Choose a valued direction

• Take action

Core principles[edit]ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility:^[9]

1. Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify thoughts, images, emotions, and memories.

1. Acceptance: Allowing unwanted private experiences (thoughts, feelings and urges) to come and go without struggling with them.

1. Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness. (e.g., mindfulness)

1. The observing self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.

1. Values: Discovering what is most important to oneself.^[10]

1. Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly, in the service of a meaningful life.”

Loving, concretely, usefully, more than a handful of people is in my view completely impossible.  None of us have the emotional energy to be fully present for more than 5-10 people.  I really believe this.

You can TRY, and you can convince yourself that you are successful, but in my considered view the only way to do this is to become more superficial.

Here is the thing, here is the difference between “everything flows from the center”, and “everything exists in local webs which are interconnected in interesting ways”: if every person on the planet made a conscious effort to love 5 people, no one would go missing.

This is something, I think, most of us can do.  To claim otherwise is, as I see it, for most of us, a lie.

Wishing others well in the abstract is certainly possible, and rejoicing in others success is certainly possible.

But I can’t help but think those who want to try and love everyone in truth love no one.  They don’t even know what they are lacking.

Better to aim small and succeed than to aim high and fail because you were never serious in the first place.

https://upliftconnect.com/spiritual-bypassing/

Some quotes, then commentary:

Aspects of spiritual bypassing include exaggerated
 detachment, emotional numbing and repression, overemphasis on the positive, 
anger-phobia, blind or overly tolerant compassion, weak or too porous 
boundaries, lopsided development (cognitive intelligence often being far ahead
 of emotional and moral intelligence), debilitating judgment about one’s
 negativity or shadow side, devaluation of the personal relative to the
 spiritual, and delusions of having arrived at a higher level of being. . .

Part of the reason for [spiritual bypassing] is that we
 tend not to have very much tolerance, either personally or collectively, for 
facing, entering, and working through our pain, strongly preferring 
pain-numbing “solutions,” regardless of how much suffering such “remedies” may 
catalyze. Because this preference has so deeply and thoroughly infiltrated our
 culture that it has become all but normalized, spiritual bypassing fits almost
 seamlessly into our collective habit of turning away from what is painful, as a 
kind of higher analgesic with seemingly minimal side effects. It is a 
spiritualized strategy not only for avoiding pain but also for legitimizing
 such avoidance, in ways ranging from the blatantly obvious to the extremely 
subtle. .  .

Although the defense looks a lot prettier than other defenses, it serves the same purpose. Spiritual bypass shields us from truth, it disconnects us from our feelings, and helps us avoid the big picture. It is more about checking out than checking in — and the difference is so subtle that we usually don’t even know we are doing it. 

Actually, I’m going to avoid extended commentary, other than to say that I think this basic mindset underlies what I call Sybaritic Leftism.  And given that an equilibrium has been reached with such people in a very precarious position of self delusion coupled with vast waters of dark rage and fear, it tips easily, quickly, and naturally into violence of emotion, violence of thought, and grotesquely exaggerated defensiveness, tribalism, and radical intolerance.

These people were there.  Trump set them off.  Watch MSNBC to see the result.

Such people had made peace with a conception of the world where everything is perfect.  Anything less than perfection–any REALITY, to be clear–turns them upside down.  They pout, they shout, they try to muffle others, and in general they panic and vibrate at the level of frightened mice. 

All of this is ugly.  And there is nothing at all spiritual about it.  Give me an honest asshole any day over someone who chants mantras obsessively.  The asshole has nothing to hide.  The inward-sucking introvert has everything to hide.

Difficulty is multiplied by complexity.

I am cognizant that it is certainly possible that some of my best phrases might be something I read years ago.  So be it.  If I can’t remember where or when, fuck it.  I don’t make money on this blog.

I have to say, I think this is pretty good.

All difficult things are made worse by being made complex.  In difficulty, simplicity is your friend.

Conversely, it might be stipulated that people who are fond of complexity lead in many if not most cases physically, socially, and emotionally relatively easy lives.  Complexity becomes something they pursue in lieu of effective effort, which is often difficult.

Where I myself fall in all this, I can’t say.  I get enough done to survive, but not enough to call myself effective.  I am in the nature of my occupation solving concrete, real problems regularly, so that counts, I suppose, for something.

I might add that if everything is easier said than done, we must recognize the soothing, calming quality of words, which act as shelters from the storm, but also that they are most often vain, misleading, and substitutes for needed work.

The inarticulate can be wise, and no wisdom can be inferred from beautiful words.  After all, nothing important has not yet been said, so all an erudite person need do is repeat.  Nearly everything you read is derivative.

And I will self comment here that I rarely reference the words of others.  I do, certainly, where warranted, but to the extent of my ability I am discovering or rediscovering things on my own, in my own way.

We all have to walk our own paths.  The door I walk through is barred to you, and vice versa.  You cannot follow in my footsteps.  At best I can perhaps sound a drum in the darkness, reminding you to march, march, march.

This universe is filled with countless golden threads.  You are one of them.  Perhaps we will meet one day, and remember we have always known each other.

Quite often, crying is like opening the windows to a stuffy soul.

I reserve the right to proactively contradict my future self today.

Logically, if we follow Information Theory in asserting that the information value of a given statement or behavior is proportional to to its unexpectedness, we (me, to be clear, but We sounds so much better) might directly that surprise is the most important path or engine of learning.

If nothing in your life is unexpected, you learn nothing.

Curiosity, in turn, might reasonably be summarized as a taste for and pleasure in surprise. “Oh, I didn’t know that. How fascinating!!”

The alternative, of course, and a distressingly common one, is a virtual mania with maintaining the sense that one knows most everything worth knowing. This is usually accompanied by an obsessive need to cram the unexpected into any available box of the expected. To killing surprise. To throttling it in the crib, if it can be born at all.

Einstein–who was certainly in the camp of the curious–invoked this line of thought when he opined that “There are two ways to live life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”

I feel I slightly misquoted him, but that was close.

This means that true openness means you have NO IDEA what is about to happen, because you allowing it, and you are allowing it because you like and profit from surprises.

I sometimes wish I were more disciplined, but I have so much fun, and see so much, going I know not where, and doing I know not what.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/09/13/liberals-conservatives-clash-vatican-over-catholic-church-direction/1272808002/