Salon Letters Oct 11 To Present

comments by patrick
mcevoy-halston

Published comments
Original Article: EXCLUSIVE: Bill Maher on Islam
spat with Ben Affleck: Were liberals! Were not
crazy tea-baggers
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014 5:55 PM
MyRealName, sure! Patrick McEvoy-Halston Terrifying.
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Original Article: EXCLUSIVE: Bill Maher on Islam
spat with Ben Affleck: Were liberals! Were not
crazy tea-baggers
@MyRealName, sure! I would hope perhaps we'd consider that
being educated on the subject isn't necessarily so much the thing as
is one's state of mental health. If Affleck reads a desire for
righteous war amongst some liberals, even as much as they say
they don't want to kill muslims, I'm glad he doesn't abash himself
and not speak up.

What's frustrating for Affleck is that liberals have poorly placed
themselves to be able to defuse the influence of Maher and Harris.
It is very possible that good numbers of cultures out there that
historically have been conservative but which have begun to
rapidly modernize, evolve, will end up feeling guilty for all that's
been trespassed and accrued and suddenly turn puritanical in mass
... what happened to Germany in the 30s. Become a warrior culture
of "knights" who've renounced their spoiled ways, now ready to
die for their beloved mutter land.

But liberals have had no way of admitting this to themselves, for
they've only associated it with the rightwing perspective. So they
insist it's "only extremists" ... when they ought to know that whole
societies can suddenly turn extreme, especially when some within
(the more emotionally evolved; the less abused/better raised) have
successfully been pushing reforms, social/economic/political
advances.

I think Maher and Harris are aware of other liberals' deliberate
ignorance, and are glorying in the fact that there is now no
prepared way to show that those who are actually factually more
correct are still possessed of the more perverse mindset. Good
portions of the world might suddenly turn very conservative -- it
was the change we knew in the 1930s from the Jazz Age 1920s.
And someone pointing out in the late 20s what could possible
develop in Germany is not necessarily more to be saluted than the
liberal who wasn't as concerned.

What's key is that one truly wants peace and ongoing growth, and
the liberal in the 20s might have been one of the exceptional who
could be truly favoring this, while still able to point out evidence
that makes another culture you're actually rooting for seem
barbaric. But s/he'd probably be one of those hoping for the growth
to end by popularizing an opponent we'll all need to shed a sane
culture for war trance, war preparedness.
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Original Article: Ebola, the heart of darkness and
the epidemic of fear
dkelly5352 Reparations and the loss of territory greatly affected
the German psyche.

More about this German psyche I think it takes a particularly
nasty childhood, full of shaming and humiliation, to feel so shamed
by anything later on that'd you'd go down a course that have you
want to kill millions of people and take pleasure in the
hypermasculine possibility of world dominance.

They were getting revenge for childhood humiliations, sexual
abuse; the treaty was a just flashback. Everything in our
childhoods gets played out in the external social sphere.

Economic growth -- and accrued guilt -- leads to war. Major wars
aren't fought during depressions, because the point of war -- mass
sacrifice -- is being handled internally.
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2014 4:36 PM
@Amity Maybe that's just too much work.

So we're not tribal animals, but we are lazy shits.

Won't you come over to my side and say we're just traumatized
children, ruled over by (the like of) parents who'll abandon us if we
choose just to fart away all the advantages they've so graciously
and selflessly given us?
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Andrew, note, believes it's pretty usual to freak out about things
that are not actually genuine threats, saying we're all at core still
tribal people possessed of primal fears. I think historians might
allow for this because if they stop insisting humankind as rational,
it's only to suggest how fallen we are, how base we are -- they like
thinking of human beings as intrinsically greedy and self-
interested, for example. Take that you presumptuous assholes,
believing yourselves better!

My way is sort of akin to Andrew's, in suggesting that past terrors
determine how we see our world, not "realities." But because it's
not a safe zone of imagining some distant anthropological tribe
really far removed from the scholar who casually (arrogantly?
angrily? retaliatorily?) ascribes the rest of the human family as
similar to them, but the dangerous one of imaging one's own self
once again as we were when in absolute terror before our
mommies and daddies as they abandoned or ferociously attacked
us, it's off the table.
Permalink

@Amity Germany in the 1920s was still Jazz Age, though, it
encouraged all the artists and new thoughts the Nazis, that
Germans in the 30s, wanted dead as soon as possible. The way of
seeing the decade as simply crazily disrupting, rattling, perhaps
shows how anyone from a family that crucified/brutally abandoned
their children when they did anything deemed spoiled or selfish,
would experience any period of innovation -- where one
artistic/social advance was followed so quickly by something
unimagined before, by something even better.

What the Nazis did was ensure people that psychic disintigration
caused by unpermitted growth would be put to an end. I understand
that Nazism ebbed for a short while, but took off again in spades
during the 30s economic recovery. The Nazis halted women's
rights, halted social, political, sexual freedoms, and the nation felt
relieved; the inner sense of disintegration stopped.

The question is, what was going through the average person's mind
when they feared "communism"? Could it not be that every outside
perpetrator by that point carried every aspect of their own punitive
parents? That every child they killed in war, carried every aspect of
their own terribly guilty childhood selves? That Germany itself so
saintly, because every bad parental aspect had been projected
outside; and the Volk also so good, because it was composed of
puritanical good boys and girls ready in mass to die for Her?
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2014 1:37 AM
Maybe I can be corrected otherwise, but I really doubt that
Germans in the Weimar 1920s believed that they were surrounded
by enemies about to attack, but by 1939 they certainly did. If we
all possess the same evolutionary history, if we're all afraid of
monsters, why does it seem to speak out so loud at certain times
and so shallowly at others?

I'm one who thinks that who we are is most usefully explored not
by DNA but by the specific nature of our childhoods, how well
loved we were. If we grew up under parents who often terrorized
us -- Tiger Moms; patriarchal fathers; fear of the lash or more of
devourment -- then if we end up in a society which is actually very
empowered, like we are now, and Germany certainly was in the
30s, at no risk at all from neighbours, but still believes itself
terribly vulnerable, then it's a sign we've regressed into our
childhood mindsets, our childhood selves. It's a sign that we're
engaging once again with very real childhood "monsters" we had
to engage with everyday as children.

What precipitates this paranoid state is simply growth panic:
peoples who've exceeded what they believed they were allowed in
life, are guilty of hubris, feel like they're disintegrating -- and so by
the wayside goes their normal selves. You take note of this by
watching media images, but the media doesn't precipitate it.

We go to war for defence and re-enactment. The aspect of
initiation is pleasing; empowering against a demonic force that is
always out there circling. And the take-down -- so long as it means
not just killing monsters but the sacrifice of children (our own
guilty childhood selves, who're surely sinful; deserved their
mistreatment) -- immensely satisfying.
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Original Article: Bill Maher: Islams the only
religion that acts like the mafia, that will f**king kill
you if you say the wrong thing
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2014 2:44 PM
@5easypieces @bigrafx @joe jones I think Maher is arguing that
liberals refuse to acknowledge how conservative almost all
Muslims are. Liberals do this because they understand that this
rarely turns out to be a discussion of fact -- as Maher and Harris
insist it is -- and just pretext to find a people of "dangerous
people" to satisfy our need to annihilate without guilt.

We develop the fantasy need first -- to find a dangerous, terrible
other and war against it -- then we go about establishing how this
is simply the truth of the world: some bad people need to be
bombed, attacked first before they attack us. Affleck should have
argued that Maher and Harris have an unconscious need for war
right now, to annihilate a lot innocents, and have to wake up to this
fact.

They would deny it, and point out more statistical fact. But Ben
should have said he feels it in them -- you want war, guys. If the
stats showed something different, they wouldn't be brought up or
would have been ignored.

Permalink

Original Article: Atheisms shocking woman
problem: Whats behind the misogyny of Richard
Dawkins and Sam Harris?
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2014 4:41 PM
Lissie You're a fun writer.
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@esstee @Patrick McEvoy-Halston I certainly qualified the
emotional health bit. But, yes, he is amongst those people I see
targeted where I'm not convinced people taking him down -- citing
very valid stuff -- are in a camp I'd necessarily want to belong in
either.

It is perhaps for this reason I make sure to argue my own point of
view that the source of the woman hate owes to mistreatment by
one's mother -- raised out of an environment that provided
insufficient love and respect for her -- because I'm testing to see if
those taking down Dawkins are themselves open to explanations
behind women-hate other than ones they're comfortable with.

If they're furious, then I'm wondering if they're actually more
comfortable with a foreclosed environment than Dawkins himself
is, and just represent another avenue in our Depression society
where inroads just can't be made.
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Richard Dawkins convinces me that he got to atheism out of
emotional health. I think his fantastically playful mind came out of
the fact that he had parents, had a mother, who encouraged him to
play -- who were permissive, out of love. I sometimes wonder if he
gets targeted so much at Salon because he doesn't seem to admit to
any sins at all; whereas Salon would prefer we're we'd all self-lash
at least a little bit.

So mostly I would want to defend him. But I know that when he
said he was groped by teachers as a child and that it didn't harm
him a bit, he was certainly wrong about that. And I know that
there's more behind his support for Hoff Summers than he realizes.
A lot of men were still raised by women who were insufficiently
loved and respected in the society they were born in, and who
therefore made use of their children to satisfy their own unmet
needs. Dawkins obviously had a better-loved mother than many --
and therefore his lack of a psychological need for gods to defer and
admit sins to. But is obviously still one of those, and thus his being
pleased by the prospect of revenge.

I suppose the other thing for me is that many of these last of the
"great men" that are being heavily targeted by feminists, still seem
to me to be more innovative than contemporaries -- I'm thinking
Updike and Roth. For this I still like seeing them in the limelight,
not because they're towering men amongst a swath of deferential
women. Seeing people decide against reading him would be a bit
like being witness to the 30s generation that let the appallingly-
full-of-himself Jazz Ager, F. Scott Fitzgerald, go out of print.
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Original Article: Heinrich Himmler, family man:
Why The Decent One is the most haunting
documentary Ive ever seen
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2014 10:21 AM
CyclingFool About cops/soldiers using deadly force to "protect"
us: I think we may learn better about why we have soldiers when
we consider that they act out sadism we feel, so we can be
dispossessed of it, live ordinary lives (they can also represent
sacrificed youth and youthful potential -- so also the reprieve of
first born to angry "gods"). They're a corollary of our need for
homeless people, who we make feel vulnerability we've known but
want the hell away from us. It's all very useful, but for still quite
psychologically damaged people. Many of the better-loved left
know nothing of this. It's not in them. And would on their own
create a society spared all of it.

The reason we let predatory capitalists go on may not be so much
their absolute necessity in the creation of useful products, but that
we are still primitive enough, our period of sustained "sinful"
growth has gone on long enough, that we can only tolerate useful
creation when we make sure it's done nastily; where it'll mean a lot
of destruction as well.
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Frank Knarf Personally, I think he's right. He could even say that
when we want our leaders to bomb the hell out of people or
structure our economy so that it makes destitutes out of a lot
people, our psychological mechanism is about the same (lots of
children are killed, while we go about our daily business). I
disagree when it then spreads to absolutely everyone. If you're
thinking you have some sin in you, you may just be ready to join
others in a "cleanse."
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wardropper

the article points to the truth about the little bad things in us all
and their potential, given the opportunity, to become very big bad
things.

Or it substantiates a lie we're all pretty well prepared to accept. The
other way, that it isn't in all of us but only in those who were
abused as children, and set up brain systems to protect the
abandoning/abusive parent and demonize the "bad" child, requires
us to explore our own childhoods in a way that sets off major
alarms. You just don't go there.
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The phenomenon is "switching," and it's "in" a lot of us, but not all
of us: depends on our childhoods; whether it was so bad we had to
set up different brain systems we could switch into, so to fuse with
our disassociated terrifying parent alters and victimize our Bad
Selves (guilty simply for being vulnerable). Switching is what
occurred in Milgram's experiments -- it involves cutting off the
empathic mirror neurons in the right insula -- and not everyone
switched. The better loved don't.

So, many feel this need to switch into persecutory alters they've set
up in their brains; they restage early childhood traumas where
they're "the parents" and those gassed are themselves as children;
and then afterwards they're completely out: they can go home
calmly for dinner with the family.

What precipitates this switching? It's growth panic, guilt, but I
won't quite get into that; but I will say that it occurs after people
begin to coalesce into a group. That is, don't be on the look out for
stigmatization so much as a sense of group identity, of nationalism,
building; when it coalesces, then we'll understand exactly who's to
be designated as vermin. Victims aren't foolish to be caught out; it
"flowers" out in a terrible hurry after fusion is complete.

For a sense of German childrearing during the early 20th century,
perhaps check this out:

http://psychohistory.com/originsofwar/06_childhoodOrigins.html
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Original Article: Americas sex abuse surprise: Why
our search for monsters is blinding us
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2014 2:25 PM
What was key about Paglia, why a lot of men were excited by what
she said, is that it would have felt a bit as if mommy had
authorized the rapes ... spoiled, over-protected young college
women, welcome to the wilderness.

Older women, like Ginsberg and Paglia, are being experienced
now as supreme authorities that cut through all the blather. They
represent our own Terrifying Mothers, and we're both afraid of and
eager to fuse with them.

What's actually frightening is the knowledge that we are monsters
of our own making. That we raise boys to see sex as something that
can be taken, should be taken.

Again, this certainly doesn't help. But the real problem is that
disparaged, unloved mothers end up more needing their children
than loving them. This leads to incestuous use of their children,
followed by abandonment. It's experiences of this sort of contact
with one's mother that makes one want to make use of the guilt-
reducing excuses of an anti-woman culture to go about humiliating
(what rape is primarily about) women.
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Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is
intrinsic to mens nature and a lot of men are like,
This is awesome!
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014 4:52 PM
Graham Clark Yes, unloved mothers from societies that disrespect
women, will end up looking to their children for love, and will
abandon them when they no longer serve this need. This produces
the kind of rage that could fuel something as awful as rape, which
will seem very aberrant to us eventually, as will such things as
war.

And yes, anyone from a genuinely provisioning home will not
murder or rape. They weren't sexually abused as children.

I don't understand your last paragraph. What I meant is that
children who were abused will end up blaming themselves for the
abuse. They set up alters in their heads, in the right hemisphere --
the Terrifying Mother (or primary caregiver) alter -- that tells
them they deserve humiliation and punishment through life.

I made use of your comment mostly to expand on what I think,
which is a bit rude, but your bent is to humiliate people who don't
even want to be your opponents, so it's tough not to sort of pass
you by.
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This is awesome!
@dkelly5352 @trainsam From Lloyd DeMause's "Emotional Life
of Nations":

Ever since Jeffrey Masson wrote his book The Assault on the
Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, there has been
a widespread misconception that Freud backed down from
maintaining the reality of childhood sexual abuse. The truth is
exactly the opposite. Freud continued all his life to state that sexual
abuse of children in his society was widespread, insisting in his
final writings that "I cannot admit [that] I exaggerated the
frequency [of] seduction," that "most analysts will have treated
cases in which such [incestuous] events were real and could be
unimpeachably established," that "actual seduction...is common
enough," that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny
frequency among school teachers and child attendants," and that
"phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so
often they are not phantasies but real memories." What he actually
"backed down" from was his initial idea that hysteria could be
caused by sexual abuse, since, he said, "sexual assaults on small
children happen too often for them to have any aetiological
importance..." That is, it was because children were so commonly
sexually abused in his society that Freud thought that seduction
could not be the cause of hysteria. Otherwise, nearly everyone
would be a hysteric!
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This is awesome!
@Benthead @AmusedAmused

every one else rapes because they've been immersed in stories,
images and jokes about worthless women.

That doesn't help, but it's not sufficient. The boy would have to
have underlying experiences of being dominated and humiliated.
And not from spurning from an early grade-school crush, but as an
infant being manipulated and used in such a terrible way that it
results in such a hellbent desire to revenge.

This is not to say that it isn't helpful to challenge regressive media
images of women -- though what helps may not just be that the
proper message is getting through, but that boys are simply getting
attention from decent people. But real improvement comes with
improvement in conditions before the child really comes in contact
with "media" -- within the mother-child dyad.
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This is awesome!
SpudSpudly Biology works both ways and rape is not always
about violence or control. It can be about sexual desire.

Rape is about control and humiliation. Boys who were dominated
and used incestuously by their mothers are the ones who'll attempt
payback against other women. The only way this might be deemed
biological is that the first homo sapiens were much like primates
and were god-awful (mostly abandoning, infanticidal -- as were the
ancient Greeks, btw) parents. But really, anyone who belongs to
those generational chains whose childrearing has improved from
generation to generation, as mother finds way to provide a bit more
love to her children, and so on, will not rape.

The idea of women craving rape, actual physical assault, should be
explored in the context of what happens to women who as girls felt
that they were "bad" and deserved sexual assaults they had
suffered. If they were assaulted as children and the perpetrators
were those the child needed to be kept protective, part of their
brains will be installed with the perpetrator's point of view, and
will glory when the "uppity girl" gets taken down a notch again.
It's an example of the terrible results of child abuse, only.
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This is awesome!
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014 1:43 AM
But here we have a piece where a woman is actually saying that
men are intrinsically violent and that can never ever change, and
its being heralded as a very serious idea about gender and sexual
violence.

For some men this might feel flattering. The immediate reaction a
woman should have towards a man, ergo, is to be wary. Anyone
who grew up under a dominating mother, anyone who knew a lot
of humiliating shrinking before her, would find this appealing, a
great buff.

If she'd of said that since all boys end up servicing the unmet
(love) needs of their mothers, men are perpetually afraid of her
dominion and rape other women foremost to gain some kind of
illusory domination over her, she'd of been less well received I'm
sure.
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This is awesome!
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014 1:31 AM
Benthead SpudSpudly No society will ever achieve a zero
frequency rate for rape.

Why? Rape isn't inherent in men. It's not a desire to have sex but to
humiliate. Children who are warmly raised by their parents will
have no inclination to rape at all, and we can get there, eventually.
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Original Article: He didnt care if he destroyed
himself as long as he hurt you: The sad, disturbing
case of Ed Champion
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2014 9:56 PM
Like many Internet habitus

Lines like this have me sometimes wondering if perhaps you
shouldn't climb totally over to NYRB, or some such. "Amity,"
"Susan Sunflower," "Beans and Greens," "Aunt Messy," are all
habitus. And if they were ever to meet you would you really want
them to see in your face that you still thought them lesser sorts of
people for not doing the proper not-ever, or only-to-correct-a-
research-mistake, commenting on articles?

Somewhere out there I'm sensing intelligent people reading an
article and dying to interact and respond, but deciding against it to
keep their sense of themselves intact ... for the pleasure of not
being one of them. Sense of self maintained, but democratic
discussion loses some.

Salon, start doing more of what you used to do, and get excited
about some of the conversations that ensue on your website. Don't
use them to make yourselves feel superior, please -- everyday a
comment adventure, indeed.

Published comments
Original Article: 6 terrifying reasons why its time to
stop eating meat
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 5:06 PM
BeansAndGreens Do you manage to do this low fat? I don't crave
meat at all, but if you go China Diet / Ornish / Knives and Forks,
it's not just mostly vegetables but very low fat (little to no oil --
even olive -- for example). I manage it (the low fat part, that is )
because I like being in company with all these evolved folks;
because it means it's impossible to gain weight; and because I
sadly still partake of Puritan superiority.

Wouldn't it be a fascinating challenge if going off meat -- for
humane reasons; because you care -- meant denying yourself the
most healthy form of food: that is, if the paleo people were right?
They're not at all, of course, but boy did we did we dodge a bullet
there!
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Original Article: 6 terrifying reasons why its time to
stop eating meat
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 3:05 PM
@Elle Cloud Most women aren't willing to make them, because
their diet tastes better than plant-based. It's totally understandable
and sane.

I'm low fat and plant-based myself, btw, and as much as I enjoy
knowing I have superior willpower to everyone else on the planet,
and that I could easily best a 21 year old on a health exam (and not
just the obese ones!), as well as steal all their dates away with my
verve and natural good looks, every time I watch an old episode of
Julie Child adding five pounds of butter I can't help but wondering
if maybe she was just spared my sickly puritanism.
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Original Article: The Atlantic is wrong about aging:
Why our anti-elderly bias needs to change
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2014 7:19 PM
5easypieces I think so. Whether it's just austerity or the combined
austerity + war punch of the 30s and 40s, we're living in one of
those self-sacrificial periods which buys enormous allowance
afterwards.
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@Patricia Schwarz You probably should have written: My
husband is 72 and more physically fit than the average 20 year old
right now. Thanks obesity epidemic!!! May you be joined by ebola
spread amongst the young, for how more would this make us glow
in comparison!
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canarymein Patrick McEvoy-Halston The question would be
whether those going ISIS are more healthy than their own
grandparents were. They may well be. They probably belong to
those family chains that really don't grow much across the
centuries, and when one does -- they eventually shuck it all and go
uber-conservative to feel less abandoned by disapproving elders.
Whole countries do this, which is why countries that are new to
wealth and industrialization, eventually throw it all away in war.

The question is, are the grandchildren of emotionally advanced
people like Justice Ginsberg healthier people than they are? My
guess is that they are, surely.

Are they more worth experiencing? That's tough, because I'm a big
fan of Roth and Updike and think people should still go there first
before reading the millenials'. Let me say that I'm quite sure that
millenials will have children who write works more worth our time
than those who got to produce works in that great period of
allowance that follows periods of huge human sacrifice like
WW2.
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canarymein Patrick McEvoy-Halston You're someone who thinks
everything anti-senior is biased.

This is how humans evolve: we get some families that get unglued
from simply re-inflicting childhood harms they suffered upon their
own children. Instead, they see their child ... and manage a bit
better. These children end up doing better by their children, and so
on. The result is glorious human evolution towards the less trauma-
scarred and more beneficent, but also grandparents who are in
emotional health, dinosaurs compared to their grandchildren.
Permalink

He will become wiser as he grows older. And we need that kind of
wisdom, as Cicero once noted, to counter some of the hot-blooded
decisions of the young.

I think it was the hot-blooded decision of youth to vote for Obama
rather than the Republican troglodyte. If one's grandchild was
raised with a considerable amount more love than you were --
spanking by this time was fully out; both parents were actively
involved; enormous amount of time put in -- it's probably a fact
that all their decisions which look simply hot-blooded to you are
probably just wisdom you can't see. If you're own childrearing was
poor enough, you might mistake every advance for spiteful
indulgence. Basically, you'd still want them back in deference to,
in constant attendance to, you.

What you may most have to offer them is just evidence that
humanity evolves, that they belong to a chain of generations that
can recognize that youth are better, and feeling grateful that this is
so.
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Original Article: Rape, domestic violence and
football: The last battle for American masculinity
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2014 2:24 AM
And oh, last comment: if I read him right, Andrew believes leftists
who think we can get along without a revolution are extremely
childish. I must say that however much I believe revolutions can be
made a thing of the past -- like small pox, and child sacrifice --
they're with us for awhile yet.

What revolutions do, is produce a lot of death, a lot of sacrificed
lives. When the total becomes high enough, body after vital young
body, full of possibility, we feel a giant demanding maw is
satisfied that all the independence in the world has been garnered
together and brought forth to be devoured, out of awareness of its
contemptible presumption. Afterwards, golden years -- successful
complete reorganization of our culture.

Childrearing has been so bad for so long, our sense of our intrinsic
spoiled sinfulness so strong for so long, we think it's an
inevitability ... but we're in the process of evolving on out. We'll
get to a point where advances in childrearing mean societal
advance and reorganization (shucking the old) without anyone
getting too stymied by it.

Some might point to the sky, fearing the loss of "God's" approval,
but by that point s/he'll be an atheist, and prepared to recognize
that part of themselves is under influence of an older voice; that
being at the back-end of society, while regrettable, also no true
source of shame.
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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2014 10:46 PM
Also a bit worrying is Brittney Cooper's recent article on
childrearing, where she positioned what is in truth the most loving,
the most progressive way of raising children as as about as bad in
its indulgence as physical abuse (spanking) -- the 100-year-
old"style." She certainly isn't FOX, but battling to become the
"progressive" mainstream.
Permalink

Those who try to preserve its last self-parodying scraps and
vestiges by rescuing the NFL from feminism and political
correctness, or by blaming rape and spousal abuse on womens
autonomy after all, if women left the driving to their fathers and
husbands, they wouldnt be at risk from pervert cops! are
fighting a contemporary version of Picketts Charge. Its a
misguided and self-destructive crusade on behalf of something that
cant be attained and wouldnt be worth fighting for if it could.

The challenge is to see if we can think of historical periods where
so many men feel like they've lost their masculinity, where the
follow-up isn't just their disappearance into irrelevance. The early
1900s was apparently one. The "New Women" were believed to be
challenging male supremacy -- all those monstrous women on
bikes! -- but the Great War made men feel masculine again.
Another would be the 1930s, where all of the Western world went
the German way -- that is, from liberal growth to puritanism.

My guess is that a lot of men wouldn't mind being deemed on a
Pickett's charge. Whatever else was said about them, they'd be won
over just by the comparison. The image that comes to mind is of
worn men who've accumulated a lot of wounds, prepared to
sacrifice themselves over something vital to themselves but
incomprehensible to everyone else -- Why are you doing this? You
have nothing to gain from it! You're just being used! The person
saying this has already positioned themselves as the feminine, and
so in their "incomprehension," lend strength. They charge, because
they are men.

If we want to dissway, we should probably avoid such an image.
How about instead they're just distraught children, which is what
they are.

About the future ... The thing that ends up putting a halt to
progressive times is growth panic: collectively, people begin to
feel they've outgrown what has been allowed, and end up feeling
horribly abandoned. Terribly alone, they cut their growth short and
align with their parents' culture -- with regressives -- so to regain
approval and feel like good boys and girls again. We should look
to see what's happening in our attitudes towards children. If it's all
"Go the f*ck to sleep," a powerful need to shorn our increasing
need to be sadistic towards our children of guilt, we may be seeing
a turn already away from liberal permissiveness. Those men
currently bathing in being on a hopeless military charge, may end
up retooling upwards.

Permalink

Original Article: The Equalizer: Denzel
Washington redeems American manhood
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2014 3:07 PM
But thats where the moral and psychological truth of The
Equalizer lies: not in the infantile fantasy payback that will
restore Americas global dominance and reassert the imaginary
urban order of 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, but in a man sitting alone
with an old book, as a haunting old song plays from somewhere
and the world around him fades into night, into nothing.

That's presuming we don't get more than just Cold War redux.

Original Article: Feminisms ugly internal clash:
Why its future is not up to white women
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2014 11:45 PM
Oliva Does It danaseilhan

I don't know of a single feminist group or site that doesn't seek to
be inclusive.
I agree, but that doesn't mean that they aren't. My guess is that it
owes to part of their psyches not being able to shut out the fact that
women of colour tend to be more conservative than they are --
Brittney Cooper's discussion of childrearing "styles" brought this
out in full bloom last week.
Their conscious selves may be blithely insisting that they are no
more progressive than other "sisters," but their unconscious
awareness of it as fact is why there is fight to institutionalize their
own voice and ultimately arbitrate what feminism is to be about --
i.e. whitesplain.
Permalink

Original Article: Feminisms ugly internal clash:
Why its future is not up to white women
Is it between different viewpoints, or between those who've
benefited from more helping, less punitive upbringings and those
who haven't? Different psychoclasses, that is.
Brittney is coming to see spanking as perhaps not the best way to
raise a child, but still can't see parents who've long ago realized
this as not guilty of likely "spoiling" their children (presumably
she'd have all of them attend her lectures as well). She's probably
somewhere just above the American median.
Progressivism is about the most emotionally evolved taking the
lead in a society. These are always those who as kids never
understood themselves as "bad" but as full of promise. They don't
need to be "disciplined,""socialized," in order to be good, just
given unconditional love.
The ones a step or more below will tend to want to take control of
progressive moments to staunch growth as much as encourage it.
To them, too much societal advancement comes to seem indulgent,
people taking good ideas always "too far," requiring the more
sober to take over.
A lot of those feminists taking flight from the internet sense this,
and are hoping their new exclusive abodes can manage to direct
progressivism. On the net, they're swarmed, and can't operate.
Permalink

Original Article: Obama, the slide back to Iraq and
the power of the Deep State
al loomis Patrick McEvoy-Halston I think we mostly project
charisma onto leaders, so I'm not "great man." Usually we put in
people who don't so much lead but execute our own (often sordid)
wishes. Puppets of the people, not the system -- which too is in fact
an artifact of our collective need, as hard as that is to believe.

This said, if we see the presidency as an avenue to put forth a
personality we all have abundant contact with, it'd be great if it was
someone like Nader. Kind of like as if someone had set up a shop
on your block that resonated of human decency and kindness. Even
if you didn't shop there, it being near, something you pass by all
the time, would encourage and buoy you.
Permalink

YankeeProwler However, the interesting epilogue to the Obama
presidency is that it is winding down in a time when America is
once again becoming needed. In Poland and the Baltic states,
jittery leaders are once again calling for American assistance as
they face a threat from the east. In the Middle East, leaders from
Tehran to Riyadh are urging America to fight a scourge that
threatens to engulf them all. In West Africa, leaders are calling for
American assistance to help contain a different type of virus.

This has pretty powerful narrative appeal (genuinely, thanks for it)
-- a bit Tennyson. I wonder if the rest of the world finds the idea of
the old, gruff, long passed-over "gunfighter," possessed anew with
relevancy, as appealing as we (sorry, but unfortunately) do.

I hope they realize that that scourge about to engulf them all, is
mostly just projected "fantasy" ... it satisfies our fantasy (our
psychological) needs of the moment, and we have to be aware of
this, and resist it.
Permalink

Just a note, however much I wish Obama and his family well,
Nader was always a vastly better man -- had been better loved; is
more good.

It would be lovely if this time around we hear from an even larger
continent insisting on putting one of our truly best as a figurehead
for who we are as a people. I'd love to be truly inspired, rather than
trying to take pleasure in the felt hope and realized expectations of
a nation.
Permalink

He began the process of moving the country away from our
profoundly unfair and overpriced catch-as-catch-can private
health insurance system toward some kind of socialized medicine.
(Yeah, I said it.)

You're right; this was no small thing. We as a populace staked
something down here that we're not going to fall back from, or,
that is, that we'll never quite ever be able to delete as a marker of
where we'd come and where we'll return to. It felt a little bit like
that tremor we experienced this year when we collectively realized
that America was not going to be stuck with football as something
we're all expected to pledge allegiance to -- something else, soccer
(Europeanism), informed apathy/disgust, got elevated a bit. This
happened too with drugs and marriage.
It's a big deal when some external "sites" that serve to keep
primitive psyches stable, and thus are kept for the longest time
sacred, can be felt to no longer satisfy an evolving populace -- the
median. Obama was the guy we wanted kept around to "govern"
this. Agreeable, reassuring company, like Steve Jobs.

Permalink

Original Article: Theres no rationalization for
corporal punishment: Why Adrian Petersons
apologists are wrong
BrahBrah Kronosaurus Sweden made spanking illegal in 1979. We
could explore how they dealt with people who thought it just a
parenting "style."

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/09/world/sweden-punishment-ban/
Permalink

Original Article: The racial parenting divide: What
Adrian Peterson reveals about black vs. white child-
rearing
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2014 2:16 AM
susan sunflower If only we could get completely out of our heads
that our mothers were right.
Permalink

rearing
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2014 2:09 AM
marymargaret1

Why is it ok to hit a child when doing the same to an adult will
land you in jail?
Because too many of us unconsciously think especially vulnerable
people deserve punishment, simply for being vulnerable -- they're
actually guilty of something. This comes from how our brains react
to sadistic treatment from our parents as children. We need
foremost to make our parents right for inflicting the abuse, so to
keep them as we have to have them -- loving and supportive. And
so we make whatever it was we did to warrant the abuse
contestable, bad, evil. Since the foremost thing that comes to our
mind is just our sheer vulnerability -- because that's how we mostly
felt -- our brains decide this is a crime.
When we hear of children being hit, we remember our own former
"guilty" selves, and agree (with our internalized parental alters,
whom we are temporarily wholly fused with) that they are being
unconscionably bad.
At the societal level, the reason you can see in some parts so much
hate for society's desperate, now calling for the like of sterilization,
owes entirely to this as well.
Permalink

rearing
@Arminta Ross Black parents forcing their children to
"demonstrate" in public that they are "good, well behaved,
mannered." The goal was to prove to onlookers, specifically whites
that they were not harmful.

What is kept alive here is the idea that our mommies and daddies
abused us ... because they had to! It was for our own good! --
historical circumstances necessitated it, unfortunately.
What isn't being considered is that what we're dealing with here
aren't loving parents miraculously capable of doing awful things to
their children when necessary, but abused parents casually visiting
the same harms inflicted on themselves (by their parents) upon
their own children.
And doing so, because they were never given enough love not to
mostly need their children to provide the love they never received,
rather than love them, nor not to be furious at them when they
focused on themselves (i.e., were "selfish," or "bad").
My parents are German and Irish. The collective lack of love of
Germans meant that during the 30s and 40s they were going to
need some group to project all of their own "badness" onto (as it
turns out, those who had the best childrearing -- the "spoiled"
Jews), so they could finally feel worthy of love by their punitive
parental alters (their parents' voice in their heads).
The poorly loved (American) South needed to find some group --
i.e. slaves -- for the same psychological purpose. The Northerns
were products of more loving childhoods, so not only no slavery
but they got rid of it elsewhere.
We're divided not mostly by race but by the emotional health of
our parents, of the nature of the quality of the mother/daughter
dyad across centuries. There are no guilty parties and we're all
working to end this thing.
Permalink

rearing
No parent lovingly spanks their child. They're always fused with
internal persecutors in their own minds that see the child as bad
regardless of what the child was doing.
In fact, since many parents are so insufficiently loved they often
need their children more than they love them, the "bad" thing they
most often end up getting beaten/abandoned for is simply focusing
on themselves, some kind of growth, being happy. The parent
recognizes the child's desire to attend to his/her own needs rather
than the parents -- it is their own -- and becomes in an instant their
own parents, fuses with them, and attacks the child without guilt.
When children are abused by parents/caretakers, survival depends
on understanding themselves as to blame. They decide they
deserved it; they must have been bad; and thereby keep the parent
as the kind of person they need for them to be: a loving protector.
So powerful is this lesson learned -- that growth and "selfish" self-
attendance is a bad thing, and, as well, weakness, neediness and
vulnerability -- they install their parent's "voice" into their own
heads (right hemisphere), and switch into it when they recognize
people "guilty" for behaving as they did as a child.

You get into this enough, the repercussions of insufficiently loved
parents and their children, of collective fusing with the
perpetrator's voice and projecting one's "bad" self onto others, and
you start finally get at the source of why war, of why Depressions
(mass elimination of wealth means less spoiling, less badness, less
likelihood of worse punishment).
Maybe check it out at psychohistory.com.
Permalink

rearing
ramparts The other part of being beaten daily is that the child
intuits that the parent is right and that needy children are bad.
Germans in the 30s and 40s fused with their internal persecutors --
their parents' point of view, the terrifying stern looks Cooper talks
about, you could say -- and saw Jews as spoiled children that
needed punishment. The punishment inflicted upon them in the
camps were the same ones they themselves suffered as children.

http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/06_childhoodOrigins.
html
Permalink

Original Article: How I switched sides in the
technology wars
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2014 2:56 AM
You dont always agree with me, and some of you have on
occasion said mean things to me.

You remember the mean things, but not a word about the
provocative. Did the website fail as a salon, or is this just your
predilection, to sit there counting your friends and soothing your
wounds?

Original Article: Football, violence and Americas
cultural divide
sharksbreath Sports isn't for everybody and I'm sure you learned
that real early in gym class.

Yes, it's for those who need defensive testing and disproof of fears,
which temporarily wards of feelings of insecurity and helplessness.
Permalink

Original Article: Football, violence and Americas
cultural divide
sortiz1965 O'hehir talked of those enlightened, nuanced, intelligent
progressives this way: and it really doesnt help matters for
horrified liberals to deliver sanctimonious lectures about how
dreadful it is. NFL fans, on the other hand, are described (I think)
humorously, in a way they'd laugh at too: Doritos and terrible
fashion choices. Plus, pretty strong effort to show football players
as about the American average.

Are you absolutely sure about where the derision is targeted, those
turning their noses, or those suffering (enduring?) brain damage or
just being what society has distilled/produced?
Permalink

Original Article: The death of adulthood is really
just capitalism at work
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014 2:50 AM
The current economy is not just about people staring at a screen
but people interacting -- what waiters, baristas, sales associates do.
It's less male-autistic (man make automobile), which when we
value the potential of what goes on in these interactions and value
them accordingly with high wage and public esteem, will show
progress over the last 40 years rather than just humiliating
leftovers. A nation committed to (conversational) therapy, to
registering and seeing people, adding a little bit more self-esteem
to the average person so that they repeat less upon their children
the damage inflicted upon them. Some stranger did do a little bit to
make your day, got your smile, and, in aggregate, made an impact.

It's not just a pipe dream; it's happening now through all the
obvious overt corporate policies of manipulation ("welcome to --,
how may I help you?"); and we have to allow ourselves to see and
value it.
Permalink

Original Article: The death of adulthood is really
just capitalism at work
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2014 2:22 AM
Indeed, an individual citizens most important economic role, in
the post-industrial West, is that of a consumer, inhaling goods,
products, services and entertainment, as much of that as possible
delivered electronically or shipped to your door.

I think their most important role is to make good play with the
creative product. I think how it helps economically is that they
haven't switched into a mindset that has them thinking of sparse
goods and smaller selves with "God" now looking at them more
fondly.

They're keeping up, which is good, because this not only means the
latest Apple but taking on institutions like football and protected
nerd-turf stuff like sexist video games, where a great gab of
Americans are seeing things previously mostly off-the-table
being re-thought as much as marriage and drug use have been.
With the latest intrusions on football and (especially) video
games/nerd culture, though, you could feel some former Obama
supporters wonder if their favourite resting spots are now due to be
as destabilized as Tea Partiers found all of theirs.

Roth (and Updike) is to be preferred over Rowling, because the
emotionally more healthy subsequent generations haven't yet been
allowed their post-war, post great-sacrifice, heyday (i.e., Roth and
Updike are the best; and we should go back there for
the exhilarating thrill of people braced against any challenge) .
After we weather through a period of old left, of Depression, of
sanctified self-sacrifical selves, of war, those who remain intact
will take their inherently more egalitarian selves and produce even
greater things -- 20 years on, maybe?

After great, hugely wasteful sacrifices, of innocent people being
decimated and learning to make due with what they have (great fun
with old shoestrings, people!), people know allowance is throned,
that societal regressives are backed off (rather than enfranchised),
and always take advantage of it. Rowling will pass, but those who
love her will end up doing much better things than what they're
limited to right now. Even if this just means having children, who
write, and diss, and indulge.
Permalink

Original Article: Calm down, America: Were as safe
as we were a year ago
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2014 2:39 AM
Take Arms Why is the only possible answer that America is being
lead into war? Why can't it be that America as a whole has become
paranoid, and that our explorations should explore the sorts of
things involved when individuals become paranoid they're about to
be attacked, in their private issues, those completely outside media
interest?

When individuals become paranoid they're being stalked, we don't
immediately think the only possible reason is that the media must
have been full of talk of predators. We might consider their
families lives, concerns from their pasts, haunts they've never quite
been able to let go. Isn't this possible too with people in aggregate,
in nations?
Permalink

Original Article: Civility is for suckers: Campus
hypocrisy and the polite behavior lie
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2014 12:13 AM
Please try and show some civility in the comment sections, people.
Squash your inner troll and show some signs you might eventually
count as part of polite society.
Permalink

Original Article: Calm down, America: Were as safe
as we were a year ago
I don't think they would seem so much of a threat unless we've
projected our own childhood terrors onto them. This would mean
we're for some reason being recalled to childhood feelings of
exposure and vulnerability right now.

If so, this would mean seeing ourselves stand up to these
perpetrators would amount to about what it would amount to a
previously bullied child finally doing it to his tormenters:
absolutely everything.
Permalink

Original Article: I want a straight white male
gaming convention: Inside the culture war raging in
the video gaming world
witness how Ubisoft gave an entire audience of journalists free
tablets as they prepared to review its (in my opinion) fairly
average game Watch Dogs.

Why the parenthesized "in my opinion"? It's obvious it's your
opinion. God surely didn't toy with it and declare it barely worth
his time.
Permalink

Original Article: From 9/11 to the ISIS videos: The
darkness we conjured up
susan sunflower I don't think it's myth, or passed on cultural
traditions, that does it; more inadequate childrearing. Children
who've learned that, when they desist in their own interests and
commit to those of their caretaker's, they finally get approval and
love otherwise denied, will be prone to volunteer to sacrifice
themselves -- their selfish, individuated adult lives -- in war.

In death, so selfless, and -- as infantry -- so infantile, they feel
they'll be forever appreciated and loved, wrapped forever in their
mother's love.

Many of those boys who refused to answer their nation's call
would have done the rejecting themselves. That is, we internalize
our parent's disapproving, angry voice, and when we're raging
against other's sins, we're fused completely to it. Which is why we
call those we're fighting and killing names we were ourselves
called in our own childhoods.
Permalink

Trust Here's a view of why terrorism, based not on EVIL but on
horrifying, love-starved childhoods:

http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln03_terrorism.html.
Permalink

susan sunflower

His motivation wasnt a matter of Muslim rage or hatred for
the West. He felt himself to be moved by compassion. Like
many Americans whose feelings of patriotism compel them to join
the military, Knight yearned to fight oppression and protect the
safety and dignity of others.

This could just be a yearning to stand as a knight protecting a
culture. It's a way to be a "good boy," a mother country's favourite,
rather than someone who as a 17 year old is on the verge of
abandoning his childhood origins, abandoning his mother, for full
individuation into adulthood. Regressive fusion with a maternal
entity as the first step, that is. Later the rage against a West
imagined as sinful and spoiled, as polluted and "bad" -- his own
former self.

He didn't do this. But he still became traditional, humbling himself
into a life of Islamic studies, clearly in his view seen as at-root
pure (steadying elders, Muhammad's wise words), and vomited all
over repugnant American values as well as his former corrupt self.
Permalink

Of all things, Last Days in Vietnam is a tale of heroism, courage
and selflessness; a tale about how many American servicemen,
intelligence officers and diplomats risked their careers and in
some cases their lives to rescue as many Vietnamese civilians as
possible.

So war is (an avenue for) heroism, courage and selflessness.

The weak spot where the ISIS videos worm their way in is not some
deep-seated, grandiose desire to see our civilization destroyed,
since we dont really need to wish for that one anymore. Its our
persistent boredom, our permanent consumer narcosis, our
yearning to be entertained at any cost by cute things and funny
things and horrifying things that may or may not be real.

So everyday is boredom, permanent consumer narcosis, and
ridiculousness.

How sure are you that someone reading these two articles of yours
wouldn't be a bit more persuaded to begin a major conflict than
remain part of the status quo? Maybe war has to remain an easy
way to make yourself feel pure -- something where selfishness
mostly abounds. And people keeping themselves enjoyably
occupied while no major wars are being fought, kept a bit more
virtuous.

War is about killing people who contain parts of ourselves we seek
to disown -- our own "badness" -- so the fact that they seem so
"us" may be a plus for our fantasy needs.
Permalink

Original Article: Last Days in Vietnam: Is the
humiliation of 1975 about to be repeated?
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 1:32 AM
The war got rid of a lot of American wealth, which if we'd of kept
would've made us feel extremely guilty. We waste so much wealth
with the military because we're a nation that feels worthy of
punishment when we accrue good things. The explanation for
every nation in the world now going austerity, which kills wealth
production, lies in this ill-reason as well. We still our growth, and
demons won't devour us.
Permalink

Original Article: Its time to destroy the trolls:
Orange-fanged morons are choking the Internet
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 2014 12:44 AM
CarolCrown Salon used to advertise its comment section by telling
people to take chances, to not hold back!, rather than to remember
to play nice. It wanted something with real life -- jazz, chaos,
brilliance -- and it got it. That's the community I want back.
Permalink

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2014 4:53 PM
CarolCrown I don't trust that those calling for civility and decency
are really thinking of the brilliant conversations we could be
having; I think they've become those who hate comment sections
because they're an avenue where nobodies might make a
difference: full of people (like their once selves) of guilty
pretension.

If they can get everyone to look at comments as censors rather than
as learners, you've got them aping perturbed adults rather than
open children. It's in favour of a conservative culture; one that
would rather have people dressing primly than the monstrosity of
letting it all hang out.
Permalink

Pamela Troy Patrick McEvoy-Halston Sorry, it takes too much out
of me. I was trying to be clear.
Permalink

Pamela Troy I increasingly suspect that the liberal intellectual class
is feeling prone in their regression to make swaths of the country
obviously worth a pass-by. As possessed only of virtue when
maybe joining together to fight a corporation, or maybe just in
their plain largely-unrecognized suffering, but not where
something intellectual and smart could arise in plenty.

The history of the net proved there are obvious major centers, but
that genius really is everywhere. The hippies were right: write your
blog; we're listening and really considering that you might be one.
To hold onto this truth, means believing, really believing, in
growth, which just feels too sinful and against the current right
now, so we/they collude in isolating only certain controlled spots
as worth attending to. Ivy Leagues, writers proper.

When people are being communicated to that they don't want to be
heard from but seen as playing a role, we may still hear plenty
from the damaged, but less and less from the savvy intelligent.
Permalink

People used to see criminals simply as bad, just as they could see
other races the same way. They needed categories of people they
could split unwanted aspects of themselves into -- their felt
intrinsic badness -- which they could now subject to name-calling
and abuse, out of their own childhoods. Better raised/more loved
people, with much less of a need to inject parts of themselves into
others, began to see criminals for who they actually are, as just
very abused people: the last people, in fact, to deserve further
incarceration and torture. They saw constituents of other races
simply as individuals, with no way of assuming anything about
them until one became familiar with them.

So perhaps liberals will take care that when they're insisting on
killing "trolls," participating in changing our paradigms so we no
longer so much see democratic comment sections but wretched
abodes to stay clear of, that they're not regressing and creating
poison containers again. Done completely without guilt, because
there are of course a lot of very disturbed people on the net.

What they might do is, yes, actively help stop people from being
threatened and hurt; ban perpetrators; but also maintain a
celebration for individuals who in comment sections say such
interesting things. Not the faux celebration stuff, where administers
single out comments which suggest their ideal is someone of
middling intelligence but who might still be capable of learning
something. But rather the stuff Salon has seen a lot of in its history:
the remarkable.
Permalink

Crotus Haereticus Are we really content for magazines to maintain
comment sections they really could give a piss about? "Comment
if you must, but be concise and limit it to one." Back to Victorian,
from more modern assessments of the one's relationship to the
parent.
Permalink

Original Article: Jennifer Lawrences body became
the body of all women: How I felt when I looked at
those hacked celebrity nudes
I'm suggesting this because we now know that when people
administered repeated shocks in the Milgrim experiments they
weren't obeying authority but rather taking advantage of an
authoritative situation -- the power of the university -- to switch
into perpetrator alters that saw vulnerable people as deserving
punishment. (Here, the authoritative situation which absolves us
mostly of guilt is that this has become the phenomena we're all
expected in some way to have engaged with -- tackling the
internet, nudity, and privacy -- to show we're keeping up and
actually give a damn about our world. To have looked means not
only not being ignorant but being capable of a more engagement-
worthy, bravely self-incriminating and hard-won opinion, as TCF
hopes I think to have demonstrated.)

When children are abused they don't blame the perpetrators but
rather themselves -- it's a life-saving tendency, because they need
to see caretakers as provisioning and good. This means that even
children who've been raped will start talking in voices that show
they believe they deserved it. They'll take dolls, which clearly they
see as representing themselves, and start stabbing at them and
shouting them, calling them dirty and bad. And by no means do
they inevitably grow out of it -- in fact, those alters are probably
set up for life.

We're dumping ice buckets on our heads, probably staging our
once being left out in the cold (we get the thrill, in restaging
previous terrors, of knowing some control). Our childhood traumas
are popping back into our awareness, and personally I think most
of us have set up these self-protective perpetrator alters and are
finding ourselves prone to fuse with them.
Permalink

Original Article: Jennifer Lawrences body became
the body of all women: How I felt when I looked at
those hacked celebrity nudes
It is nice to know you could look at the pictures, recognize your
younger self in them, and feel concern.

A lot of people might be drawn to look at these photos, however,
because the voice speaking predominately in their heads is that of a
perpetrator, the one which tells us we are bad, that we deserve to
suffer, rather than one which ostensibly lead you that speaks
curiosity. They'd not so much recognize their younger selves in the
proud bodies, now exposed, but project onto them, actually
enjoying partaking in the humiliation of their proud,
hopeful, perennially vulnerable younger selves.

Permalink

Original Article: They are intellectually
underpowered and full of themselves, because theyve
been told their whole life how wonderful they are
In his book, Deresiewicz said we as parents are intimidating our
children from individuating (from us) too much. He talked
psychoanalysis, "You-shall-not-be -aware!" Alice Miller, and
Tiger Moms. And the result is a society where we've agreed not to
(emotionally) abandon our kids, and where they've been terrified
out of ever growing up.
How did we as parents become so awful? The explanation comes
from the fact that we mostly individuated from our parents; we
grew up in eras that had such allowance (all that delayed
infanticide during the Depression and World War 2 bought
decades of subsequent trespasses); but, like the 1920s crowds, we
knew there eventually was going to be a price paid ... and are
visiting the price on our own kids, while we fuse with the
regressive voice.

At some level we feel good that we've created a society where if
you're a brilliant middle classer who doesn't get into the ivy
leagues, everything you might do will be faded out of vision
because your role is simply to count as one of the lost (that's where
you'll get your approval), and we'll insist on it in our attentions at
least. And if you get into the ivy leagues, there's got to be a limit to
how much new you'll produce, simply because you'd of had to
have been the kind of person who obliges a whole lot. Counter
measures (against kindled mass individuation and growth),
everywhere.
Deresiewicz might get some to drip down a tier, but that'll just
mean dropping them amongst others who actually take satisfaction
from dramatizing themselves as thwarted -- because that is the role
we want them to play: warm approval given -- which would be
hell. It'll mean being amongst those content to ape their "betters,"
who'll implicitly recognize/affirm their superiority, because this
too suggests those who've capitulated to smaller dreams than the
"spoiled" middle class post-war Americans did.
And if they figure out the cure for cancer, annoy us by being the
ones to do so, something about who they are will have to be
attenuated so we can, quick as spit, go back to staring at the ivy
leaguers, who glow as if imbibed with what we'd previously
displaced everywhere.
Permalink

Original Article: Furious trolls are everywhere: Even
Internet moms are angry and they hate you
MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 2014 1:54 AM
nerdnam Constantly calling comment sections abodes for trolls is a
way for those who are thriving to begin to not even be able to see
talent outside their friend groups. The category, the increasingly
fetid category, would begin to colour all contents, and it becomes a
place where the human voice can no longer intrude on ritual need.
Permalink

Original Article: Why cant the media talk about the
Ivy League without freaking out?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014 4:36 PM
Looking above, I guess that should be "Ivy's," not "Ivies." Oh well,
live and learn.

My response was psychoanalytic, but still apropos -- the book does
go there. He talks not just Alice Miller but a good stretch of "Tiger
Moms" ... of parents who terrify their children into quiescence,
who cannot possibly be disobeyed by the child.

I'm suggesting that we as a society keep these moms in our heads,
and realize that there is nothing that draws their ire more than we
assume to individuate from their expectations and needs. When
we've done so anyway, seeing ourselves in the upcoming
generation of youth, we fuse with our angry maternal alters and
make sure their aspiring selves pay.

It's the only way we can demonstrate fealty, and allow ourselves to
get off.
Permalink

Original Article: Why cant the media talk about the
Ivy League without freaking out?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2014 3:57 PM
You didn't do Ivy, but the question is, if you were born a
generation later, would you have? My guess is that you would, and
we've a much more streamed, eager-to-please Laura Miller to find
there, but still Laura Miller.
It may be that while those who get into the Ivyies are being told to
be exultant -- or else -- that those who get into the "State" ones are
being "told" they're dumb, unexceptional, second class. The
primary purpose of our age may be to still the capacity of our
youth to individuate -- a purpose, built out of an unconscious need
to sacrifice youthful potential in order to placate abandoned
parents in our heads ("alters"), who are furious at all the growth we
assumed for ourselves.
Deresiewicz may be participating in this by doing all he can to
shepherd talented youth into abodes where it's going to be tough to
shake off the feeling they've got no special shine, really. That
nobody's attending to what they do, and that nobody ought to be
attending.
He, after all, talks in his book about the terrifying power, the terror
of, parents, and admits its been tough for him to get past himself.
He assumes he's doing so by calling for youth to start distancing
themselves from their parents by risking becoming truly
disagreeable to them, and leading society into directions that are
novel but which we all may not be comfortable with. But he could
be abating their fury by shoveling that many more into places
that'll occlude any societal feedback that what they are doing might
really be worth something.
Maybe ten years from now, when this call, this need, for a lost
generation has ended, the Laura Millers will once again be going
back to "publics" ... but mind you, the Ivyies will by then have
changed their ways as well. The time for the middle class nobody
to not be allowed -- because this would demonstrate our world as
one of genuine potential -- to be seen as having achieved anything
notable, will have ended, and we'll be for merit and promise again.
Published comments
Original Article: I asked my husband to take away
my credit card
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2014 12:33 AM
You're getting everything you want out of life ... and so regress to
the teenager who hasn't learned to control her finances -- and who
is a dwarf to her almighty mother, out of fear of the sense of
abandonment that full individuation often brings.

Giving your husband your credit card would correct an image of
him which is no longer serviceable ... that of him as someone who
"transcends any traditional notions of marital division of labor."
Giving him the credit card would make him 50's mold; make him a
degradation of what you've accomplished. Sacrificing that, you're
the good girl who never grew beyond her mother; and you feel
taken care of again.

Permalink

Original Article: Is Hillary Clinton the true heir of
Ronald Reagan?
SUNDAY, AUGUST 3, 2014 3:09 AM
If Reagan and his backers had made a bazillion dollars but their
policies, inexplicably, ended up buoying up everybody else ...
made everyone rich, they'd of been depressed as hell. It's not just
greed, but that they know they're participating in shovelling people
into the maw.

The number of Americans who like what he did ... is correspondent
with how many of them can't see any societal growth without
feeling deeply anxious. (To them) People need to be
created/refashioned to feel all the pain and vulnerability, even if it
ends up being them.

What's Hillary, this unstoppable force, this Godzilla, going to be
like? I don't know; but I suspect a lot of us are going to be glad to
be counting ourselves within her skirts, as She stomps across the
rest of the globe, attacking "them," before they have a chance to
attack us.
Permalink

Original Article: The American Century is over: How
our country went down in a blaze of shame
SUNDAY, JULY 13, 2014 12:44 AM
KPinPT hquain

Or are we just fooled by this? A lot of those same people enjoying
themselves casually at the park or at the market vote in people who through
war or economics literally kill the weak.
Maybe through "society" we've just created a great homeostasis mechanism,
that hides our craziness away from us in the everyday.
Permalink

Original Article: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes:
Can the ape-pocalypse save Hollywoods dreadful
summer?
SATURDAY, JULY 12, 2014 3:27 AM
BeansAndGreens Yes, the rock giants were better than people
made them out to be.
Permalink

Original Article: Why Lana Del Ray is the perfect
artist for an America in decline
TUESDAY, JULY 8, 2014 4:35 PM
susan sunflower The author wrote an essay about the total death of
life-affirming instincts, of Eves of the Apocalypse signalling that
our death instinct is currently very strong -- that the end really
might be near! -- while you still see safe-enough, apparent ennui
(yawn) not even up to goth.

It was a "good essay," then, but still absurd? -- everyone's really
just looking for brands/styles to emulate or avoid -- the next
Kardashian, Bieber, Taylor Swift? The same ol same ol.

Are you sure?
Published comments
Original Article: Why Lana Del Rey is the perfect
So Lana Del Rey, "Maleficent," Kendall Jones deities of
sacrifice, warfare and destruction, calling out to be fed the blood of
innocents -- like the disassociated vision of three devil-women in
Lars Von Trier's "Nymphomaniac."

We're being visited.
Permalink

To compare this with the article, for DeMause it wouldn't be "the
fearsome global dislocations that are killing our life-affirming
instincts" which is the problem, but that we're turning off our
ability to enjoy "late capitalism" because we sense disapproving
parental voices telling us we shouldn't be having fun, individuating
-- "actively meet[ing] the future," as you say it.

And for him this death instinct would be a desire for a purge, a
sacrifice of everything in us which is "bad," which would make us
feel pure again.

And this regressive return to "amniotic fluid," the womb, the
"primal source," is what we do when we're fleeing a sense of being
abandoned owing to society's ongoing "guilty" (parent-neglecting)
growth -- we begin to fuse back to Mother, be part of the maternal
body.

About this -- The death drive is perennial, but when a society
seems to hover on the even of destruction, these Eves of the
Apocalypse emerge to speak our well-founded anxieties -- I'm
not sure, but this bit by DeMause sure looks worth taking a look at
as well:

In the course of researching my book The Emotional Life of
Nations, I discovered that just before and during wars the nation
was regularly depicted as a Dangerous Woman. I collected
thousands of magazine covers and political cartoons before wars to
see if there were any visual patterns that could predict the moods
that led to war, and routinely found images of dangerous,
bloodthirsty women. Even the most popular movies before wars
featured dangerous women, from The Wizard of Oz with its killing
witches before WWII to All About Eve before the Korean
War, Cleopatra before Vietnam, Fatal Attraction and Thelma and
Louise before the Persian Gulf War and Laura Croft and Kill
Bill at the start of the Iraqi War. War itself when personified was
always shown as a Killer Woman, tempting young men with her
attractiveness. (Lloyd DeMause, "The Killer Motherland")
Permalink

As early as the Freedom Phase, people began voicing their feeling
that materialism (economic progress) should be opposed. A. J. P.
Taylor notes years before the warmens minds had become
unconsciously weary of peace and securitythey welcomed war
as a relief from materialism. Before WWI, there was a feeling of
approaching apocalypseThe world as it is now wants to die,
wants to perish, and it will. Only a sacrificial slaughter could cure
Europe of the freedoms offered by cities: infinite opportunities,
but also rootlessness and loss of social tiesfactory man is
neurasthenic, bored, unable to endow any experience with value.

Being bored by change and challenges meant having your real-
self feelings cut off by your dissociated punitive parent alter,
whose authoritarian culture was opposed to innovation: City
life and Gesellschaft doom the common people to decay and
deaththe doom of culture itself, i.e., individualism spells the
doom of your parents authoritarian culture.

Lloyd DeMause, "War as Righteous Rape and Purification"
Permalink

Original Article: Liberty, equality and Lincolns
legacy: Is America doomed?
SATURDAY, JULY 5, 2014 7:04 PM
stevieboy Let the red states go in peace. Let them create their
theocracy, let them exclude immigrants, let them reinstate Jim
Crow laws if they like, let them make being gay a crime, let them
do whatever they want but, above all, let them go.

We become here pure while the other side contains all the
contaminates and sin this is actually what happens just before a
fight. We don't just let the other side become all bad (i.e. let them
go), but war against them to eliminate badness from the world. The
Confederate States are vastly less evolved, but "the Northern"
aren't themselves quite spared of projection and being requited of
sin.

Permalink

Original Article: Ronald Reagan stuck it to
millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells
@tasherbean Historians have insisted this is true about Hitler, that
charismatic He charmed a nation into some place abominably evil.
But History at least has had its Goldhagen, who insists Hitler just
bubbled up out of what most Germans wanted to do, and though
there's been backsliding, the discipline hasn't quite managed to spit
him out yet.

And then there's us still insisting the public couldn't possibly
have wanted what it got -- that it harboured something within that
was quite awful -- without anyone saying baloney . If any of us can
accept the possibility that Germans in mass could want to eliminate
a whole race, we should be up to imagining that post-1980
America was what a lot of people unconsciously wanted. The pain,
the hopelessness, the insecurity the awful all of it, preferable to
more post-war years of endless promise, the sense of abandonment
arisen from that.
Permalink

nywriter maritimus49 rd they whine like little babies and start
secession movements

Just a note that this was how the British (and Benedict Arnold)
viewed Americans in 1776/1781. The colonialists saw themselves
as abused children who were no longer going to swallow the pap! -
- spitting up the noxious brew into the harbour -- while the Brits
saw themselves as stern but fair parents who'd tolerated enough out
of these ungrateful, spoiled brats!

The Right's composed of poorly parented, less loved children,
who've evolved into a psychological mold that can tolerate little
"sinful" societal growth. The Left by those who've known more
love, and who can manage a lot. They can both however regress to
birth trauma and war, as was what laid behind the war of
independence.
Permalink

@nywriter @Amity To be a commenter these days is not
contributing to a conversation but being a likely troll. I think you
could be fined for pretending this word didn't leach out from a sink
of sin.
Permalink

their, not they're. It happens.
Permalink

I am saying that the public is getting sick of the anti-democratic
game of Freeze Tag in Washington, in which Republicans and
Democrats take turns being in charge and doing nothing, and
that it isnt sustainable into the indefinite future.

I think the best (the most emotionally healthy) of democrats would
be delighted if this "freeze-tag" ended, but many of the rest would
be secretly horrified. For them, our republic lurches on and this
is growth-stifled enough for them to feel comfortable putting a
perch on it. If it leached democratic fulfillment, as if someone like
Katrina vanden Heuvel were getting their way on every point and
the republic was assembling into something remarkable and
awesome faster than a Michael Bay' transformer, they'd feel
shutdown by all the rapid societal change, and find themselves -- to
their horror -- taking swipes at what they know they should only be
rejoicing.

If this latter group agrees that that the freeze has to end, it'll
probably be sign than they can no longer handle just their enjoying
their perch and are wishing for a societal cleansing through war --
a chance to be pure, golden warriors to a cause! A period of
horrible compromises is a period of people holding on before
they're psyches compel them into war. One should still find some
enjoyment in it, and hope it carries on whilst an accumulating
number on the side see only something "post" and fetid that surely
must die.
Permalink

CarolCrown Patrick McEvoy-Halston Both parties, indeed all of
our gov't, are killing the dreams of our children. The oligarchy are
making sure of that.

I just don't think we get at the root of the problem if however much
we agree that "we" elected in Reagan, that "we" knew/sensed what
he'd be up and still wanted him in, we still tend to gravitate (away
from us) towards some "other" as the focus of the problem be it
Reagan himself, or "oligarchy."

If a lot of us (unconsciously) want a generation to suffer, to
sacrifice itself, Reagan's a tool but so too is an oligarchic
societal structure, that keeps the bulk of the populace denied
resources and suppressed in fear (try, society, to grow, with this
weight on your tail.). People can be that perverse, actually want to
wipe out prosperity? I think our military is obvious example of
that, myself. So is history -- where once, we all remember, child
sacrifice was the norm -- and to please the parental gods -- and it
all just seems to have slowly amended from that rather than starkly
disappeared.

I think I'm making an important point -- something the left needs
to wrestle with to be most effective in the future. So I press. But
absolutely, you're clearly a very good person, and I'm selfishly
very glad you had children and grandchildren because they're part
of the sanity (and sunshine) we deserve and need.
Permalink

edwinhall For anyone paying attention, it was clear what would
happen under Reagan. But most people don't pay attention.

What was it that made you so sure the problem was that they just
weren't paying attention? Perhaps they saw that Reagan would kill
so much prosperity, and were relieved by it. The problems so many
are afflicted with today, are perhaps to some -- perhaps to many --
a sign that were not living in a spoiled age a good thing, that is;
an accomplishment.
Permalink

CarolCrown Patrick McEvoy-Halston You did but then
afterwards it was all Reagan. If you really thought the problem was
with us, then Reagan's senility is irrelevant compared to what was
mentally averse in us. As is, it felt like a familiar sidestep
drawing us all to think more of Reagan than what is
psychologically difficult to accept about the bulk of us. What we're
all comfortable with.

Not you? Good to hear. But all the democrats who were okay with
youth dream-killing austerity economics? yes. Still good
people, but still mentally afflicted enough to feel the thrill.
Permalink

Paul Grajnert They're seen as great for putting aside the individual
and focusing on the collective but not as the 1960s were doing
the same thing.

They were inspired out of poverty, not societal affluence, and we
hardly imagine them having any fun other than dancing to keep the
darkness away which is something a conservative likes to hear.
Permalink

KPinPT Patrick McEvoy-Halston Paul Grajnert KP, you got that I
was articulating why we see a cruelly stifled generation -- the
Great Gen -- as a great one? It's a symptom of something terrible in
us. Like we should all just forbear.
Permalink

Paul Grajnert The Great Generation were "great" because they
made do in incredibly difficult times maybe too in their being
the opposite of "spoiled," i.e., their being stunted Actually,
that's probably the bulk of it.

The fact that we imagine them great, that is, may have a lot to do
with why we're ensuring this next generation will have a chance to
become "great" -- tasked youth; maybe even afterwards being
lobbed into a world war -- in the same way as well.

Maybe we'll quickly evolve and gauge them simply as
shortchanged, and do what we can to recover our current youngest
generation, not only so they don't suffer but so that they don't
equate suffering/self-denial/self-sacrifice with virtue.
Permalink

Ehmbe Patrick McEvoy-Halston The article is about the damage
done to youth, not to minorities. However racist they also were, the
American people were child-hating enough to elect him in.
Permalink

CarolCrown If "we" showed those "spoiled" kids, is our own guilt
for doing this the reason for your skipping immediately to talking
about Reagan's senility and the damage the old coot caused? That
is, why not that "we" were, not senile but sadistic, in electing him?
Why not, the damage "we" caused is enormous?

If we actually wanted a generation to be sacrificed, the problem
with articles like this one is it's just confirmation it worked. If we
work at why a generation would want to do this -- the psychology
of it -- then maybe we'll get somewhere.

My belief is that most of us are still made extremely uneasy by
societal growth and happiness. If a post-war generation is allowed
to live it, to innovate way beyond what predecessors managed,
they'll sacrifice the next one so that long-denied parental "gods"
(denied, because we were obviously busy attending to ourselves)
are finally given something to snack on.

We're eliminating youthful promise out of the world, and it makes
us feel less punishment-worthy, less worthy of being abandoned.
The fact that youth today cling to familiarity and are scared to take
risks, that they've been burdened with this unconsciously gives
us a thrill.
Permalink

marc22309 Given the article -- child-hating enough?
Permalink

Original Article: GOPs culture war disaster: How
this week highlighted a massive blind spot
THURSDAY, JULY 3, 2014 5:25 PM
Candace Mann But what does it mean for it to really be about
religion what is religion fundamentally to them, but subjugating
Terrifying Women, rewarding the masochistic, and punishing
(what they see as) human sin -- autonomy, growth and pleasure?
Permalink

Original Article: GOPs culture war disaster: How
this week highlighted a massive blind spot
THURSDAY, JULY 3, 2014 4:16 PM
1. Innovative Phase:

A new psychoclass comes of age after the previous war, a minority
of the cohort born two to three decades earlier and raised with
more evolved childrearing modes. This new psychoclass
introduces new inventions, new social and economic arrangements
and new freedoms for women and minorities, producing an "Era of
Good Feelings," a "Gilded Age" that for a few years is tolerated
even by the earlier psychoclasses.

By the end of the Innovative Phase, however, the challenges
produced by progress and individuation begin to make everything
seem to be "getting out of control" as wishes surface into
consciousness that threaten to revive early maternal rejection and
punishment. In addition, as women, children and minorities get
new freedoms, older psychoclasses find they cannot be used as
much as they previously had been as poison containers who can be
punished for one's sins. Purity Crusades begin, anti-modernity
movements demanding that new sexual and other freedoms be
ended to reduce the anxieties of the nation's growth panic and "turn
back the clock" to more controlled times and social arrangements.

(Lloyd DeMause, "Emotional Life of Nations")
Permalink

Original Article: Feminism is a sexual strategy:
Inside the angry online mens rights group Red Pill
WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2014 9:13 PM
BeansAndGreens Guys who are made uneasy by constant change
and growth are of a certain set this psychological disposition
comes from equating societal growth with (deserved)
abandonment, which is how in their families their own
individuation was greeted by their immature caregivers. Since in
most families the mother is still most prominent, empowered,
spurning women become the problem -- for them, the obvious
target.

The "solution" usually ends up being war. Before WW1 men were
concerned that new freedoms had made for bullying women (the
New Woman) and effeminate men. Insatiable women, women as
vampires and they collectively agreed that war would make
them all men again.

If we don't go that route, we'll have to understand that just the
sheer fact of furthering progressive growth, will drive loads of us
crazy. The only "solution" is through means of war and/or
depression, which completely kills the growth.

So we have to hope that most of us were well enough loved by our
caregivers that furthering rights for all is something we think
makes us better rather than spoiled. Otherwise we know what to
expect with every social advance we make the time when we all
thought we deserved "a better road" lasted a good 30 years post-
war, but ended 1980.
Permalink

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2014 7:59 PM
kellygreen ...and part of that difficulty stems from an unwillingness
of affluent women to share the power they've gained with women of
lower social classes.

This is how even certain members of the left are presenting
feminism right now and in doing so they've pretty much joined
the antifeminists because feminists are essentially being called
Marie Antoinettes.

We had a split sometime around 1980 where certain members of
the population (the more evolved psychoclass the better loved)
were comfortable accruing more and more prosperity, more
growth, and others felt spoiled and "bad" for everything they'd
enjoyed up to them and needed for their own to be stifled. The
working classes voted for Reagan and austerity economics
... knowing what they were going to get.

Progressives may, in their emotional need to imagine people as
intrinsically good but just mislead, not accept my argument, but
these attacks on them (on feminists in particular) as spoiled white
people who justify their privilege by making sure some from other
cultures are included -- i.e. brown presidents -- are mounting, and
they'll need some kind of counter.
Permalink

WEDNESDAY, JULY 2, 2014 2:39 AM
SilentBlogger7 Given that human nature is a constant

Why should we "give" you that? How about those who are able to
keep up with the social advances a society is making are
superior (more loved) human beings to those regressives who
believe all this selfish growth has abandoned them "God's" (i.e.
their immature parents') love, which can only be reclaimed by
launching purity crusades to stifle the growth and (eventually) by
sending the masses of effeminate men into wars?

Periods where feminism is encouraged are always periods where a
society is still being lead by its more progressive elements -- pre-
WW1 and the 1920s, for instance. They're not periods, that is,
where one power has simply supplanted another.

If feminism can seem hampered today, as having lost some of its
strengths from the 60s and 70s, it's because there isn't any group
out there today, any still exceptional "ism," that hasn't cut back in
its license, so distanced we all are from a time where we really
believed we could have and deserved everything.
Permalink

Original Article: My soccer racism nightmare: How
to keep the beauty in the beautiful game
pomata24 portlandliberal No, portlandliberal is right.
Permalink

Original Article: In praise of the beta male
Paul the Apostate Well, it was a post-world war culture, which
does amazing stuff because -- owing to previous huge sacrifice -- it
unconsciously feels it's totally allowed it now; just try and staunch
it, regressive societal puritan!

This took us to 1980, where collectively we no longer believed we
unilaterally deserved it good. Progress would still be permitted, but
no longer without costs thus our current cultural climate has
actually been -- as most of us realize -- substantially evolving, but
there are legitimate reasons to look back to 1950/60/70 and say
to/ask ourselves, this isn't as good what the hell went wrong?
Published comments
kellygreen Being "not woman" isn't some place boys get to by
modelling, but by spitting out being used as love-replacements for
absent husbands (John Updike's contention) it just comes
naturally.

The same men who define themselves by being "not woman,"
however, will in a sense end up eagerly conjoining themselves to
them. The most hyper-masculine of cultures are also the most rabid
in mother-defense this is just as much a means of being the
deferent boy by Her loyal side as cooking the latest NYT recipe for
your alpha-status "wife."
Permalink

@MysteryPrincess @Patrick McEvoy-Halston For Chris Hedges
it's the liberal class, for Thomas Frank it's the professional, for
Noam Chomsky it's all those liberals who (he sees as) intentionally
set up the working class to seem prejudiced and therefore
ignorable, but to a number of prominent members of the left what
we've seen in this country over the last fortyish years is the rise of
an affluent, empowered class, which has made cultural issues their
own make-up glow while they more or less let corporations and
austerity economics drive the rest of the country to rot. Who needs
to listen to Kansas anymore?

And in this context, the more you look like someone an out-of-
work, quickly-going-crazy Fox Newser would ID as a loser, as
surely wearing the panties the more you're own victorious class
will recognize you as something of an exemplary. One they might
deign to know only so as to not interfere with their clear role as a
perfect sentinel against the mad sexist mobs of America.

We often joke, but are actually quite serious, that he would make a
much better housewife than me. I love him for these things. Not
because it is alpha or beta, but because it transcends any
traditional notions of marital division of labor.

This folks, is basking in (and being buoyed by?) one's (turnabout)
evolutionary successfulness/exemplariness Tracy could at least
have recognized that what was amusing about the comments on
evolutionary psychology was that it were members of the past-over
classes -- those who guessed wrong and are leaching into desperate
madness -- who were insisting on knowing a winner from a loser.

I hope she and her husband have got something good that can last
even when they're not the thing. If not, may they each still find
tremendous happiness.
Permalink

TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2014 4:56 AM
In our age, a lot of guys are participating in a sense of Alphaness in
being such a perfect Beta mate. They imagine themselves as
actually above criticism, as actually sometimes being in the
unheard of position of being able to (gently) chastise female
feminists -- "you haven't read all of bell hooks! OMG!" -- while
the rest of their sex is forbearing the suspicion of patriarchy. That
they found such a niche, must mean they're a class above that in
a competitive biological sense, they're Alpha compared to their
caught-out "peers", who only look good to Fox News.

If the left changes so that being the perfect feminist isn't as
important as being most true to the working class, if knowing all of
bell hooks isn't as important as your ability to sit by an average
working-classer and not wretch at their prejudices and preferences,
then, once their societal privilege is lost, we'll see if these
ostensibly Beta males are as intrinsically comfortable in their roles
as they know themselves to be right now.
Permalink

Original Article: Nation editor destroys Bill Kristol:
You should enlist in the Iraqi army
MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2014 2:22 PM
porsadgai Patrick McEvoy-Halston tasherbean I think we're hoping
that vanden Heuvel made him look down at his aged shrivelled
pee-pee, and weep.

It's implicit in our wanting him to see himself as "armchair"
though we know that he'd be doing more for his particular causes
by propagandizing in his comfortable hoist in Washington, we not
only suspect that the macho concept of not having the cojones to
go over could work to publicly shame him, but we too still accept
its validity.

Not just right-wingers but left-wingers too have been chided for
their comfortable living recently-- see Thomas Frank's attack at
this site on Paul Krugman. Preferring the soft and comfortable over
hanging out in the dregs ... is at least a start.
Permalink

MONDAY, JUNE 30, 2014 4:52 AM
tasherbean Patrick McEvoy-Halston I agree, though I wish more
progressives understood the battlefield as really not so much where
you test your mettle, or prove your courage/stuff, but as a place
where you enthusiastically sacrifice yourself -- a place you're
actually chasing down, as you would the hot new theatre release,
or sundae shop in summer.

Thanks to movies we have some sense of this before WW1 so
to show just how awful the after and during was. But it may be the
norm -- not pissing in pants or stilling fears, but out on the plains
and requited to your mother country's love, forevermore.
Permalink

Anony2 Patrick McEvoy-Halston jrtguy That's all very macho,
though and we're cheering it on.
Permalink

tasherbean Patrick McEvoy-Halston That's not what I said/meant.
It's absurd/cruel to ask someone to go to war ("useless war" --
tautology?), but if "you" -- the asker -- doesn't go at least some
part of you is saneish. You recognize that there's no friggin' way
you're going to let yourself die on some battlefield, rather than
being under the delusion that the battlefield is a place to long for
for promising valour and salvation a nation's forever gratitude
and a thousand honey virgins in the afterlife, and the like.

You know, the way of perceiving of the battlefield that held during
the world wars, where everyone signed up the powerful and
elite as eagerly as everyone else.

If we're taunting for not being a man we're supporting the
battlefield as our collective answer. Progressives have done little to
present it as not actually where mettle is really most tested, don't
you think?
Permalink

@Techman @Patrick McEvoy-Halston We see it differently. The
advocate for war who isn't willing to put their ass on the line, who
to you is not a real man, is to me someone who is still seeing some
things straight. The battlefield as some place you should avoid,
rather than the battlefield as the easy way to show your purity and
virtue -- maybe especially if you die there for your mother country.
The next lot of Republican leaders might be eager to do that and
then what do we say? Well, you did walk the talk?

Let's not dispel the still-sanish ones for the absolutely insane.
Permalink

sigtunafish Patrick McEvoy-Halston jrtguy Yes, he'd be walking
the talk -- being a real man.
Permalink

jrtguy Patrick McEvoy-Halston If Kristol had surprised her and
said -- okay! -- and went on over, he'd of proved, what? His
manning up, n'est pas?

We might be used to powerful people advocating for wars they and
their children will not be enlisting in, but this needn't be the way it
could be in our near future how many of them went over in
world war one and two? And how many encouraged that their
manhood was thereby proven, their loss of limb or life a great boon
to their countries, by posters featuring women impressed by their
courage?

It's not good news for a prominent progressive woman to be caught
chastising a man's wimpyness for not heading on over. Anyone
who stays away from battle has some sanity to them, even those
who'd favour that you and I go.
Permalink

I don't think it helps for her to imply that manhood comes from
putting yourself onto the battlefield which is sort of what she
does here.
Permalink

Original Article: Transformers: Robot warriors of
the Tea Party attack
SUNDAY, JUNE 29, 2014 3:22 AM
Being loyal to this movie may not so much be being loyal to those
past-over for their regressiveness, but for their fidelity to the
human should have read, its fidelity, not their.
Permalink

Original Article: Transformers: Robot warriors of
the Tea Party attack
I'm sure we all took Andrew's advice and saw the last Transformer
movie, and this is just where Michael Bay was inevitably going to
be today which is still worth watching (it personally took me
two takes, not for overload but because -- I admit -- of being
depressed). If the more persuasive movie is "Godzilla," it's because
Bay's still about the individual hubristically mastering the beast (a
tyrannosaur, of course) rather than giving Great It full reign and
this is just out of step with what adds "current" today.

Being loyal to this movie may not so much be being loyal to those
past-over for their regressiveness, but for their fidelity to the
human -- to true humanism, that is a strange -- perhaps-to-you-
impossible -- point made better, perhaps, when you consider that
Bay still features charismatic actors you really enjoy spending time
with, while other action films enthuse with those we know
compete timorously for every role; guaranteed nothing for being so
shallowly possessed of anything that'd add anything special to a
role.
Permalink

Original Article: Begin Again: A corny attempt to
recapture the magic of Once
GordonsGirl Patrick McEvoy-Halston Thanks!
Permalink

THURSDAY, JUNE 26, 2014 3:39 AM
onemilarepa Yeah, entrancing writing.
Permalink

There may be no one on the 21st-century American screen with
Ruffalos ability to invest careworn, burned-out characters with
soulfulness, and hes so interesting in every shot of Begin Again
it almost doesnt matter that the character of Dan is pretty much a
clich.

His tweeter feed is mostly about avant-garde social causes, and can
actually be inspiring maybe we also like him because we sense
his butterfly.

Published comments
Original Article: Its a disgrace: Inside American
schools horrific scream rooms
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2014 3:11 PM
@willie99 Yes, let's make their jobs harder by taking away their
ability to restrain children when they get out of control.

There are a lot of us who can't help but think that all childen are
out of control and need punishment and restraint. We're our
societies' projectors (our own inner demons into them),
its regressives and be sure, we're the ones you've got to keep
your eye on.

That small room you're talking about probably existed at the same
time as when spanking was sometimes okay for the principal or
teacher to do (maybe also their fondling of kids' privates
something Richard Dawkins admitted was common practice in the
boarding schools he attended, and not especially frowned on,
because people still insisted that it was no big deal, couldn't
possibly harm) hopefully if we stepped back into those schools
it'd be like having wandered into some place we saw now as
clearing possessing vestiges of the medieval.
Permalink

Original Article: The Internets Own Boy: How the
government destroyed Aaron Swartz
David P. Graf If I'm not going to Harvard, how exactly do I get
access to JSTOR that repository of everything all our best
minds are assembling out of their academic experience? If it's not
accessible, if I can't read any of it -- that's quite the wall, don't you
think?

Do we really want to communicate that universities own
knowledge? That we haven't evolved beyond thinking walled
guilds are necessary for our collective psychology equilibrium?
Permalink

Original Article: The Internets Own Boy: How the
government destroyed Aaron Swartz
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2014 12:26 AM
Young computer geniuses who embrace the logic of private
property and corporate power, who launch start-ups and seek to
join the 1 percent before theyre 25, are the heroes of our culture.
Those who use technology to empower the public
commons however, are the enemies of progress and must be
crushed.

We can only go so long where we believe we deserve to have it
good be treated as we should. The fact that good people like this
one went down spared us having to justify to ourselves why they,
not those fortifying a deflating culture, can so vex us with their
hubris. (The ones embracing private property and corporate power
have shorn themselves of humanity, an open future, by becoming
agents and we at some level recognize their defeat.)

People can take pleasure when they see something they know is
good go down and know they did nothing, or would have done
nothing, to stop it from happening. Erratic, uncountenanable
parental gods would notice their loyalty, their showing that until
the gods changed course and favoured permission they were
owned by their whim -- and would at the very least count them
amongst those already absorbed.

There's not even guilt involved, inner lament at cowardice.
Someone was trying to show that we deserve something better than
we've got, and we know we're a wicked, spoiled lot that at the very
least needs a long stay in an unfair, precarious world before ever
being allowed once again to be lead by transgressive youth.
Permalink

Original Article: Belle Knox: Im a sexual person
and thats that
TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2014 1:08 AM
@shaunnarine When you want to be tethered to keeping
progressive aims "armed" right now, you have to some extent
disassociate yourself from the reality -- actual reality, that is.

By which I mean, of course we know (though this needn't be the
case) everyone in porn is the victim of child-abuse, but we have to
realize that the strongest current now is to waylay people taking
pleasure in, exploring themselves through, sex -- actually in
everything, really. Become grandmas about it, as we're becoming
towards diet (hear anyone say anything positive -- ala Julia Child -
- about the importance of garnering life-pleasure from butter and
real sugar, lately?), ambition (hear anyone -- other than those
we're keeping as assholes for fantasy reasons -- shut down their
being called "spoiled" by saying they deserved every friggin' lick
of it?), and the deserved lot of the average Joe (hear even the
radical progressive say more than we deserve a living wage, that
we deserve -- enough to insinuate in ourselves the inner richness
from which any damn one of us might beget revolutionary artistic
genius -- a luxuriant wage?).

It's a weird thing to actually encourage people to abstract out from
experience so to get closer to the pulse -- but so it is.
Permalink

Original Article: Hillary Clinton forgets the 90s: Our
latest gilded age and our latest phony populists
SUNDAY, JUNE 22, 2014 7:42 PM
Artemis Rose I wouldn't rely on her being resolutely pro-gay
rights, either -- Terry Gross was right to press her on it. Something
about that last interview she had where, concerning gay marriage,
she said she was where the majority was until lead into another,
more evolved, position, seemed to me to allow room later for her
saying in this instance she was mis-lead the leaders becoming
those not being so much ahead of the curve as adept at
manipulating naivety (Hillary is positioning herself as the
everyman here) and goodwill for self-serving causes.

"Evolving" is a trepidatious term right now; not clean-cut. It can
bear the prejudice of having narcissistically/arrogantly asked
people to make more administrations to themselves at a time when
their lives are already tasking them to the extreme all for the
reward of staying relevant, able to join our collective Pharrell
Williams' "Happy" dance.

If it becomes "adults" finally stretched thin by self-bemused
"children," if we decide true virtue actually comes to lie in those
habitually unpresuming average Americans who needed to become
"evolved," in a populist form she might end up spanking back at all
the adjustments she was expected to make, and be cheered for it.
Permalink

Jane Cullen After a world war and a Depression, everyone feel's
like they're now owed a lot -- no God would demand further
suffering, and instead would surely wage war against those who'd
stifle His/Her finally allowing people a little; maybe a lot more
than a little. So we got the 50s, where all the things only the rich
enjoyed in the 30s and 40s were available for everyone. So we got
a society where the most evolved were soon going to get to lead
the less evolved forward; the tide was with them, even if this was
hardly still facile.

Then this became too much for the working class -- those of less
nurturing families -- and they brought Reagan in knowing he was
going to put a stop to the growth, make life harder, and more
soothing to those who couldn't psychically handle it if the easy
prosperity and true Utopian visions kept expanding and being
realized. The liberals split off from their neighbours, collected
around each-other and became a professional class, not out of
arrogance but because unlike their former neighbours they still
were okay with more growth -- however much it still helped them,
eased their disease, that growth now was "complicated" . only
certain people were going to enjoy, and the rest would do worse
than baseline.

And it's becoming too much now for many liberals, who just aren't
the same people they were before. They got excited when we
bashed into Iraq the first time around, and felt relieved when Iraq
was starved of five hundred thousand children's lives through
sanctions, and they'd be uncomfortable now if not just Seattle but
everyone was granted a living wage unless it involved a kind of
masochism where thereby everyone's also sublimating their own
distinct personality to becoming instead part of a nation's fibre --
1930s kind of stuff, where people became a wall mural.

And here in this comment section we're seeing that some liberals,
some progressives, haven't changed at all except perhaps
genuinely realizing more out of life and becoming even better,
more loving, people. But they might be finery that in this period,
doesn't matter. If we get Communism, sadly it won't involve you.
Permalink

genetic.liberal TimN sir_ken_g Good link to the Richardson video.
It helps us understand that war is not just a place where we stage
war against childhood perpetrators -- our parents -- but where we
sacrifice "guilty" children, full of our "guilty" neediness and
vulnerability.

At the core, we felt we deserved our parental abuse and neglect (it
keeps our parents holy; right to have been so angry at/neglectful of
us), so they've got to go too -- hundreds of thousands of them,
even.
Permalink

All Americans want peace, a good job and a decent life, a worry-
free, enjoyable retirement?

The only way Americans seem to feel at peace is when they break
up uninterrupted peaceful periods with war and discord.

They only feel decent when they've projected all their indecency
onto an other, and made life difficult for them.

The only way they're Worry-Free (that is, that God's not going to
come down and stomp on their ass) is when they feel guiltless
which involves doing things like ensuring they and their kids live
in a highly uncertain and even bleak future only absolved by
miraculous efforts of luck and pluck, however much it impinges on
them substantial actually smaller worries.

I wonder if you're only thinking of Americans when they've got
their street faces on? Or if -- past being able to will yourself to
believe they're actually as good-hearted and intrinsically
understandable as you in your true goodness had earnestly wanted
them to be -- you're now aggressing onto them a sort of blandness
you'll hope they'll masochistically accept to alleviate you of further
percolations/proof of their terrifying two-faced menace?

It is okay for the left to find distasteful those they're trying to help.
They're allowed to know themselves as more progressive, better.
It's just honest. Most the rest of us are coming apart, insane.
Permalink

Original Article: Dick Cheney, Iraq and the ghosts of
Vietnam
What all those people shared, I believe, was the conscious or
unconscious belief that a foreign war with a plausible-sounding
excuse, and one that ended with a clean victory, would be good for
America and might restore the sense of national unity and purpose
we putatively lost in the 60s. If it sounds insane to contemplate
ordering the deaths of thousands of people as a form of national
therapy,

The latter part -- if it sounds insane to contemplate ordering the
deaths of thousands of people as a form of therapy -- is harder to
understand than the idea that laying waste to an opponent is a
great cure for feeling humiliated how many of us would cheer
our sports' team that much louder if "next time round" we not only
beat them but humiliated them ten-zero? About that, though, the
origins lie in humiliations we suffered in our own childhoods not
in history -- peoples making up for humiliations suffered two
decades or ten centuries ago are really just making up for
humiliations they repeatedly experienced as children. History is
just a landscape where we fight out our childhood traumas such
should be common sense.

Wars offer a chance to humiliate an opponent we've projected our
own childhood perpetrators into, but it also a means of relief.
Those young soldiers -- those kids -- we're sending off to die,
represent our own youth and promise. By giving them up for
sacrifice, we're admitting to our intrinsic sinfulness, and feel we'll
then get to keep our second and third. Afghanistan now is pretty
much imagined just as a maw sucking down our troops, just as the
world economy is as some abandoning"place" that is sucking down
our kids' hopes and dreams: so strong is our need now just to
absolve ourselves of sin, grandiosity from humiliating an opponent
is hardly on the scene. Maybe its due now for a reemergence.
Permalink

Vietnam
Bill Murphy NYC Patrick McEvoy-Halston If we never had the
Iraq war, and the economic meltdown was avoided, and we never
found ourselves under rule of austerity economics, and we didn't
now have legions of kids with guaranteed stunted futures, and the
humanities wasn't being emasculated by managerial rule, and
people were actually open to new voices rather than scared by
accents outside their class, many liberals' heads would have
exploded out of excess guilt. They'd be as errant and unglued as
many of the right are. Too much pleasure, too much sin for all
but the most emotionally evolved on the left.

Fortunately for them, they can now feel calm and undaunted in
their progressive estimations of themselves, because we've fixed
things so that the best we could do now are things which help
alleviate a depression we're all still going to have to weather for a
good while, not actually take us into some place deeper into the
wonderful.

We'll have people like Thomas Frank leading us into becoming a
folk, a "place" where none of us have any distinct personalities,
just doing what we can -- all humble like -- to help our fellow
brother and sisters weather a tough time. Brother can you spare a
dime? still a cowering, tenement age, to be shucked off once
humanity has decided we'd all suffered enough.
Permalink

Vietnam
As I see it, they too were infected with the same strain of PVSD,
and embraced the Iraq war as a chance to repent for their un-
American attitudes of yesteryear.

They've repented admirably as well through the creation of an
economy which is killing the ability of youth to replicate any kind
of great 60s culture. At some level they know they've created a
world where the young will only advance so far as they've been
heeded. Thirty year olds living with their parents, indeed.

For them, these liberals you're talking about, Iraq was a great
success: massive amounts of money that might have been put to
letting us all enjoy life a bit more -- i.e., guilty spoiling -- was
gotten rid of. So much loss enabled them to guiltlessly
subsequently pursue all their feel-good social causes. Without it,
with pervasive prosperity and much less of a class split to talk
about, it would have felt like they were all just enjoying
themselves too much a youth-lead 1960s/70s, without having
been "earned" by massively sacrificial depression and war.
Permalink

Vietnam
Amity Nations go to war when both sides think they can win.

Germany and Japan waged war against the rest of the world I
know they were grandiose at first, but unconsciously perhaps they
already anticipated a great collective sacrifice rather than total
victory. Their victory, was that they chose to die; it was under their
control.
Permalink

Original Article: Fox News destructive ignorance:
Network gets schooled by male rape survivor
FRIDAY, JUNE 20, 2014 2:35 AM
mahabarbara Patrick McEvoy-Halston p47nandmosquito Forced
beast-feeding, forced breast-stimulation, is mind you,
admittedly I was mostly thinking infanticidal New Guinea tribes
with this one.

P47 argues that we need to understand that rape of men by women
is as frequent and devastating as rape of women by men. If we look
to the young adult male who is beset upon by an older woman, but
other than young, naive and impressionable, imagine him a blank
slate -- not someone already ingratiated to abuse -- we leave plenty
of room for people to argue that we're arguing as rape what could
well have been just a fantastic teenage conquest. Maybe a bit too
much; a gulp of the adult swallowed down too quick. But maybe
also with later self-esteem benefits -- the stud! If he was
psychologically manipulated, he wasn't physically held down and
molested the guy's got muscle-power over her, ninety-nine
times out of a hundred, easy.

If, however, you factor in that the young adult male targeted was
already used incestuously as an infant and young boy by his
mother, had his body manipulated in ways that fit her needs rather
than his own, and who came to think that pleasing her in this way
was the only way to gain her approval, then the young man's
proclivity to please is being used by the older woman and it draws
him back to what we would all easily agree is a very humiliating --
poisoning -- situation. It would ruin you, like we all understand
male-on-female rape as potentially doing.
Permalink

THURSDAY, JUNE 19, 2014 5:17 PM
p47nandmosquito Incest is what is near universal. Any culture
which routinely brutalizes its women will produce women who use
motherhood -- i.e., their children -- to stimulate themselves, get
some of the pleasure and love they otherwise received so
shallowly. Attention is given -- breast-feeding, coddling --
irresponsive to the child's cues. And then abandonment.

The "incest taboo" is really that no one's allowed to broach
talking about it. In our minds, it puts us beyond rapprochement
with our mothers.
Permalink

If you were a sop for your mother's depression as a boy (followed
by abandonment), two things are certain: one, you'll cling to
organizations that are patriarchal; and two, any time you're recalled
to feeling helpless and used you'll defend against it, by pretending
it was in fact your conquest, and the like.
Permalink

Original Article: A fissure in the dam of political
reality: How Eric Cantors defeat foreshadows the
coming apocalypse
Salon has an article up where Krugman explains that, even though
the consensus is opposite, Obama has actually had a very
productive year done some saving the world stuff. If what
defines a portion of America right now is a desire to stop growth,
master it by limiting it to what is imaginable within a feudal or
tribal society, that so few know about it is probably a good thing.

May the complex, uncertain and novel find some way to continue
on.
Permalink

Original Article: Ugly, paranoid, divisive politics:
The GOP are all Know-Nothings now
rphillips111 Patrick McEvoy-Halston To some people, long
uninterrupted periods of goodness/happiness becomes
excruciating, if not a tyranny. They rejoice when war occurs,
because it means the sacrifices are going to pile up, and the
previous gains, long forgotten.
Permalink

Original Article: Ugly, paranoid, divisive politics:
The GOP are all Know-Nothings now
Bluntly put, progressives think people need fixing in order to be
decent citizens.

Progressives promise a better world. The fixing people need to
match them is to believe that this is something that they actually
deserve, that it wouldn't make them spoiled rotten. To get this fix
you've got to put money into people's childhoods; you've somehow
got to get them to be better loved, less feeling like self-attendence
is somehow disparaging. Not much chance of this right now.

So progressives usually do their best work when the populace
hasn't so much evolved as become satiated after long periods of
sacrifice/wars, they aren't all that much fretting human sin and are
quite willing to let the more progressive amongst them take the
societal lead. They do their worst work when countries around the
globe are beginning to see their nations as great "mother countries"
that are committing them to very little compassion for those
"guilty" of neglect, self-promotion and gluttony. Russia vis-a-vis
Ukraine. France.

Published comments
Original Article: Slenderman: Nightmarish info-
demon or misunderstood cultural icon?
TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014 4:03 PM
J. Nathan yeah, that's right -- alter. My brain likes the double "a"s
for the twinning and the lack of drop.

I think those with more abusive parents are doing something
different than those with more loving. The former are more
embedding their parents to keep themselves in line, have multiple
personalities. The latter are more their own selves all the time; they
don't switch into somebody else.
Permalink

Original Article: Men can be feminists but its
actually really hard work
designated, not "designed".
Permalink

Original Article: Men can be feminists but its
actually really hard work
TUESDAY, JUNE 10, 2014 7:07 AM
Berlatsky's bit as a loud feminist is working wonders for him.
Smart women like McDonough are in mood to pet him, and he's
got all these bound legions of men out there that he can with
approval act as arrogantly as he wishes.

But the idea that this is hard work is garbage. For people like him
being a feminist was automatic as soon as he realized it as a
furious angry woman he could cast himself in sympathy with, be
on the same side with.

But anyone's who's paying attention can already feel that anything
PC is on the way to be designed as arrogant, elitist folly as
nationalism and working class populism gain ascent amongst the
Left. And when this happens, when McDonough is left near
alone, the Berlatskys out there are more going to be seeing her
efforts as suspiciously selfish, a way to parade herself over peoples
whose concerns had been ignored way more than entitled
professional women's have been.

Watch out, Katie. His feminism is built out of humiliating
cowering, and it'll end with his revenge. I'm sorry you can't already
feel this.
Permalink

Original Article: Colleges are full of it: Behind the
three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt
generations, and hypnotize the media
Jackson1968 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Jackson1968Patrick
McEvoy-HalstonI think it's more that America got bought off by
cheap retail goods and gadgets, and does not care about bloat or
corruption until it affects them as individuals.

I understand. But please note that this too is part of how the Left
has come to understand "the people" -- that is, as not just "the
genial but sometimes too trustworthy" that I put up, but also as
"the sometimes lazy and self-centered" that you just did.

This all is akin to how 18th-century gentleman estimated
townsmen when the townsmen accepted them as betters -- it
usually involves cementing them nonetheless as basically
goodhearted and decent people -- and very distant from the fervent
anti-intellectuals you inferred them as earlier. These people weren't
just lead on and managed but had hate brimming out of their
bones.
Permalink

Jackson1968 Patrick McEvoy-Halston Without the military, they'd
have to own their hatred which would make everyday life
impossible. So the institution is invented, and slaughters; and while
we at some level take note it's still disowned while we just go on
about our everyday.

No one can be seen as consenting to or desiring bloat unless
they can be entertained as something other than rational. The Left
didn't always protect the motivations of "the people," showcase
them as genial if sometimes too trustworthy, but that's all we get
now.
Permalink

@Jackson1968 @Patrick McEvoy-Halston

This is a viciously anti-intellectual country, and many academics
internalize the sense of worthlessness thrown at them.

I particularly liked this part of your response, Jackson1968. If they
felt they were unduly privileged, enduring this massive invasion
and perpetual obstacle / nuisance may have helped them feel like
they've absolved themselves of something worse.

WE as an aggregate are served by some very weird things as I
suggested in our preference for a huge military that crushes the
small. If you feel this doesn't include you, that you're one of those
to which terms like masochist doesn't at all apply, you're probably
right -- America still has a lot of emotionally evolved people
amongst its left.

But together we're a patient that should be on the couch.
Permalink

If the problem is administrative bloat, we should ask exactly what
psychological function this bloat addresses / absolves. We have a
gigantic military because the aggregate of us still possess an
absolute need to terrorize small countries (the small and
vulnerable) around the world. We have austerity economics,
because the bulk of us feel less spoiled and punishment-worthy if
avenues for growth in our culture are stifled or cut off.

So this bloat, is about what? So we think of universities more like
protective playpens professors and students surrounded by a
thick layer of fat which cushions but also infantilizes? Or is it to
communicate that distinction is useless because there are too many
layers between you and the outside world, so it's best just to take
pride in the university?

Or do we just have some need for universities to feel huge, a
massively multi-celled organism, that embeds the same thrill we
got when we learned that wee humans were actually sorta on the
same side as Godzilla this time around? We're part of some kind of
giant body that matters!

If it's plain they're just a cancer, then we should ask what
conciliation we all gain when we feel we loaded up our institutions
with massively replicating dead weight. What solace do we gain
from the brain-dead and bland?
Permalink

Signe_S Patrick McEvoy-Halston If "consuming" means
experimenting with new products, dropping affiliations that were
appropriate to your past self but not to the one you've evolved or
are evolving into, then it's to be praised. If it means just a constant
flight from your inner problems, then it does deserve
condemnation.
Permalink

walkingmountain Might this new generation be more meek and
compliant and serve the interests of our plutocracy just to survive?

The debt has to go, but if they weren't saddled with it I'm not sure
how much more radical they'd be. Something about the larger
societal mood they've long been swimming in suggests to me they
were going to toe the line, be minimally noticeable, even if before
them someone dropped the Happy Valley. I think they'd see the
ample garnishes this avenue would avail them with, and fret
drowning in all the spoiling.
Permalink

Lelaina We may decide that any job that involves constant contact
with the public is about exactly where we should place our most
evolved people -- at least for a portion of their weekly schedule.
Waiters, baristas and sales associates could be reconsidered as
people who give us the ostensibly innocuous "tending" --
conversational interactions -- that help soothe, nurture and civilize
a populace. The movie "Grand Budapest Hotel" carried something
of this idea. So does the concept of the Parisian flaneur -- where
you add something very important to a culture simply by being
discriminate, by dressing smartly and in evident view.

This would make all of America a "Portlandia," and this would be
preferable to simply using the number of university graduates
employed in occupations like this as a sign of simple waste.
Getting our more emotionally involved young people in constant
contact with the public, may be counted as something of a win. As
will, of course, giving them a living wage -- primarily because
they're doing something other than a waste of their time. They're
not low but high -- already on par with our doctors and lawyers --
and so given appropriately a co-equal wage.

Like "Portlandia," of course, that's not all they do -- the rest of
their life involves more self-tending, and begetting artistic
surprises we'll also end up benefiting from.
Permalink

Maybe college shouldnt be about individuals getting rich. Maybe
there is another purpose.

Yes, perhaps the purpose is about keeping alive the idea that the
point of life is to develop a deeply rich soul/personality. You keep
alive the idea that some institution needs to be esteemed
sufficiently so that it offers protection for students to entertain
therein practices and ideas that might be repugnant to those of a
more prosaic nature who might want to peep in. From them our
world gets challenged, changed, not just having already existing
requirements better met.

What a miracle it is that this country for awhile accepted -- or,
rather, wasn't just hostile and angry -- that they were sending their
kids into institutions that would not just augment their social class
-- reflect a pleasing glow back on them -- but return them kids
who'd thumb their noses at them. We to some extent accepted that
our kids were bound to come back to us radical.
Permalink

Yes, the liberal arts does well when we're lead by people with
more evolved conceptions of children, and poorly when we're all in
mind dominate their very bad, narcissistic selves.

If liberal arts stays for the rich but gets shortened up everywhere
else, this would be our further regression to a late 18th century
social structure. You'd know the aristocracy for their manners and
polite vision, and the well-intentioned but ignorant for their
limiting obsession with mechanical things.

If the idea that everyone should "go to college" (i.e. become more
liberally informed and inspired) is lost, it wouldn't' be recuperated
if we all become better paid and better employed. Some distant
figure collecting up how far we're advancing as a species, would
count this as our re-possessing our labourer ancestors' diminished
estimate of themselves, and sigh.
Permalink

@ismene @Patrick McEvoy-Halston Wasn't familiar with Bloody
Mary. This is what I got out of wiki: The lore surrounding the
ritual (if she is summoned properly) states that participants may
endure the apparition screaming at them, cursing them, strangling
them, stealing their soul, drinking their blood, or scratching their
eyes out

So very much yes -- that's the kind of apparition in your mind that
would tell you that unless you kill your kids they'll turn into satan.
You don't just sit there taking in the harangue, but become for
awhile the Bloody Mary yourself, and see your victims as very
much deserving being screamed at, strangled, and having their
eyes scratched out.

After it's done, you switch back to normal, and will be tried and
convicted in a brain state that is completely disconnected from the
one -- the furious parental altar -- you were forced into being for
awhile.
Permalink

SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 2014 11:53 PM
something must be profoundly wrong in the home lives and/or
psychic worlds of two children who would try to kill a schoolmate
for no discernible reason, and that scary stories on the Internet
probably didnt have much to do with it.

Anyone who's been attacked, severely hated upon by their parents,
has to do something miraculous to keep their sense of their parents
as they still need them to be: completely right and ultimately
willing to love and support. This miracle is called the formation of
the superego.

What the superego is is an altar of your parents taken into your
own head, and it polices over everything you do so that you never
do what you had to have done to have been subject to such hate
and rejection. What this something must have been, the young
brain can only conclude, is just the sheer fact of your being
vulnerable and needy. This is why vulnerable people -- children,
students -- are targeted so often, bullied. We popularize the
understanding of this enough, and the reason no longer becomes
indiscernible/unfathomable.

Abused kids switch into their parental altars especially when
they're themselves "guilty" of unallowed growth -- that is, focus on
oneself and one's own life adventures rather than on the unmet
needs of one's severely love-deprived parents. Budding
teenagehood, more than fills this bill. Since such growth means
feeling vulnerable to being lost to love once more, the child makes
the switch, into a different neural structure in their brain, and
attacks the guilty innocent ... representatives of their own guilty
selves. They become their parents, the goblin Slendermans
adults with blank stares, in suits and ties. Or like Norman Bates, in
dress.

And then they resent to just being children again. The idea of
punishing them, is absurd.

About the internet phenomenon it could amount to inventive
obsession and fiddling. I'd praise the creativity but not conclude
that every age has its demons; they can be made to go away.
Permalink

Original Article: Ross Douthats polite misogyny:
What the NYT columnist gets wrong about Elliot
Rodger
disigny Anyone who wants to do something real about all this
should be concentrating on how we might reduce the Stresses, and
stop obsessing about guns. Guns do not produce stress just by
being there.

The problem is that a society that cannot be cowed from
progressing, is an ongoing source of stress for many people. For
them, reducing the stress must involve going back as much as
possible to "father knows best," a society beholden to limitations.

When a society tilts social structures away from what helped meet
psychic requirements of the less emotionally evolved, the
conservatives, this leaves them with nothing on hand to dump
otherwise disabling aspects of their own psyche into. Further they
feel associated and therefore guilty, further away from what their
own parents would have approved/allowed for them, and out of
feeling totally alone and rejected, they panic.

What they do is try to forge what is currently happening in Russia
and apparently around the world. A more nationalistic culture
evolves -- fusion occurs -- that after bonding to the mother nation
finds some official outgroup of the guilty presumptuous (full of
their own self-projections) to stage revenge on.
Permalink

Rodger
iamnotyou mahabarbara Ehmbe Is your attitude mostly owing just
to people brazenly not living life in conservative strictures? I ask
because people with your attitude toward female dress have
traditionally preferred men not keep their hair too long and the like
as well.

Going braless is just another way of saying we're here to live freely
and won't be disallowed that. It is this that drives conservatives
crazy -- the presumption, the ostensible arrogance, not the
triggering of sex drives to which men can supposedly be mostly
helpless. To some men they neuter far more than they sexually
excite.

You conjured "a boss" to look at the young woman in order I think
to counter the implicit authority of an uncowed woman -- it
registered; they do intimidate.
Permalink

Rodger
@Connie Boyd My impression is that he doesn't like women and
is disgusted by female sexuality. He has issues he hasn't dealt with.
I'm being tactful.

Maternal incest would produce this. His fear/hatred of progress, by
as a young boy being abandoned or punished when not attending to
his immature parents' needs and pursing his own. His clinging to
conservative structures, by needing social institutions as shared
ways of dealing with emotional problems caused by deep personal
anxieties surrounding growth and individuation.
Permalink

Rodger
RobertSF Conservatives are those who become insane when
society moves faster than they can psychically tolerate.
Progressives are those who don't so much need our current societal
structure for exoskeletal propping up, and so just go about forging
a society that matches their own more emotionally evolved natures.
The future always is better if it isn't taken over by a more
regressive spirit.
Permalink

Rodger
Tristero1 MarkJD The work of a deeply closeted and fearful
homosexual Mr. Douthat is horrified and disgusted by females
and their anatomy.

Homosexuals are those horrified and disgusted by females and
their anatomy?
Permalink

Original Article: The day I left my son in the car
diacri The picture is of a parent ostensibly abandoning his child to
a dingo the real issue is how leaving our children to the dogs is
so on our minds it's popping up everywhere?
Permalink

Original Article: Mens rights group raises $25,000
to protect them from feminists
I think more eye-on-the-ball for Salon would be to be focussing on
those eschewing "politically correct fantasia[s]" (Thomas Frank)
for increased class consciousness. A lot of liberals targeting
working class plight seem concerned to slip in their hatred of an
over-concern by their peers with "boutique issues" (Chris Hedges)
-- things like affirmative action and women's rights.

And they're having some success shaping things like feminism as
something entitled ivy leaguers pursue to no end while enjoying
life as members of an increasingly entrenched oligarchy. They're
having success shaping the kind of working class men who might
cheer on MRAs as just those now mislead after having been
egregiously betrayed by society -- as actually fundamentally the
best people around, for being so modest and humble -- for
suffering.

A number of them seem to be eschewing a professional for a
working class identity themselves; and when I hear them I can't
help but think that if in the future they visited a family prospering
in a more worker-friendly environment they helped procure, but
with the man visibly more the patriarch, and the wife more visibly
in the supporter role, I don't know how alarmed they'd really be
with this isn't the important thing that they're prospering? is
what they might think.

I find in their work, their voice, a nostalgia for binding men and
women into our heritage. A pre-60s cage. And all the while they'll
have little nice to say about MRAs.
Permalink

Original Article: The day I left my son in the car
When I was little, I believed there was a wolf that lived in my
closet, up near the black plastic bags of old clothes. The wolf spoke
perfect English and told me that if I didnt count to 20 before I fell
asleep he would come out of the closet and eat my feet. I used to lie
in bed, tight beneath the covers, and count. I knew that if I
counted, Id be safe. It made sense. One, two, three, four. I counted
every night. I never doubted.

About this wolf are you sure this wasn't a manifestation of the
sadistic, possessed state your own parents directed onto you
(themselves temporarily under possession of altars of their own
parents -- i.e., "old clothes"), displaced onto a wolf in your
nightmares? None of us are about to recognize that our parents
actually get into possessed states like this, where they really are
considering hurting us or abandoning us, but isn't this most likely
the source of those wolves and under-the-bed monsters we so fear
might devour us, as well as all the institutions that historically have
made childhood such a precarious thing? What could possibly
terrify us more?

Anyway, I hope this longish piece isn't built on laying down one
further crushing wall on how you might occasionally have found
yourself possessed of attitudes towards your children your
conscious mind cannot accept, even if not at all occurring here.
That is, because it can't quite be disowned, percolates too close to
truth, it has to be repeatedly drawn out but intimidated into more
acceptable shape. Abandonment becomes just you slipping into
more lassitude-accepting times. The crime, society's.
Permalink

Original Article: Jonah Hill shows how to say youre
sorry
How exactly does someone use the word "faggot" in a non-
homophobic way? How exactly did the word become the most
hateful word he could imagine using? What does it mean for it to
still be so ingrained?

I think many of us are a little worried that some of these actors
who are ostensibly best friends with the gay community but who
are yet undeterred to make this word their automatic go-to when
they want to eviscerate someone, may possess two states of mind
regarding homosexuality.

If certain cues of a situation are triggered, then their approach is
genuinely respectful and civil. But if others, then they're looking
down on something degraded. Two different, still-existing, routes
in the brain, that lead to two different imaginings of human beings;
not just terminology learned when you're young surfacing when
excited or exposed.

There's sort of this cocoon progressives are living in where we're
all pro-gay; we can't be caught out as homophobes because we
know its not true. It's one of the markers that we're not one of the
neanderthals, like loving Obama and knowledge of global
warming, and it's part of how we mentally dress ourselves every
day -- as self-constituting as our morning and bedtime routines.

We take it all as part of a package, and remain unaware of how
much some of it may be about making us feel contemporary. That
is, if this current urban liberalism slips away with the next
incarnation of democrat and other things become more socially
responsible than being pro gay marriage, like for instance, being a
patriot (nationalism's currently on the rise across the globe), how
much will the support of homosexuality go down as liberalism
becomes an elite shibboleth that took attention away from and
betrayed the rest of working class America, a villain?

Might an actor call someone a faggot and be allowed to let it linger
as something that maybe counted against the body health of the
nation?
Permalink

Original Article: Goodbye, Patton Oswalt: An
Internet troll vanishes, still wanting it both ways
WordKing They have hired Thomas Frank, though, who recently --
here -- said this: Its a never-ending saga of privilege run amok,
which of course allows our op-ed moralists to completely overlook
the real scandal on campusthe corporatization of the university,
a development that has plunged an entire generation into
inescapable debt but that is somehow less visible to the columnist
than the latest political-correctness fantasia.

In the last year they also posted an article by Chomsky where he
said something along the same lines of Frank, and an interview
with Richard Rodriguez, where he blasted affirmative action and
the liberal concern to make brown presidents, over the travails of
the working class.

To me it isn't clear exactly where Salon.com is headed. We might
indeed start hearing more of this point of view, with those you're
lambasting becoming worried just how much their own site has
their back.
Permalink

Original Article: She-Hulk is not a giant green porn
star: How female superheroes become a male power
fantasy
Noah Berlatsky It's possibly the photo as well, but the whole sense
I got form this article was of cowering and self-rejection
("superheroes until you superpuke" from someone who's read
comics for 30 years?) like Godzilla's overhead, and we probably
ought to oblige ourselves to it. Maybe for you not austerity
economics, but I wanted to suggest that there is a way to align
oneself irrefutably to women -- where you feel completely focused
on not being a woman-hater -- where an unconscious need for
revenge is nevertheless effected.

The writer of that article I linked to was suggesting that our current
mood for older awesome women warriors, to associate with "her,"
is driving attention away -- is abandoning -- the girl. This would
be a fair summary of "Brave" and "Malificent" -- where the whole
fate of the girl we unquestionably allow to the monster -- and this
is one way it can be done.

Downing the rich can also be antifeminist, if it means binding men
to working class' travails and foibles -- if it means going anti-
bourgeois. We'll put women into total power, but excuse our
errancy by binding ourselves more and more with men who
worked hard but didn't get it so good, across the ages. Revenge
comes from becoming lost to them, just us and our fathers.

Sorry if this still seems all disconnected. It came naturally from
what I read and experienced.

Published comments
Original Article: She-Hulk is not a giant green porn
star: How female superheroes become a male power
fantasy
"Goyer isnt wrong exactly; most estimates of superhero comics
readership Ive seen puts the audience at around 90 percent male,
and She-Hulk herself was certainly created by men (Stan Lee and
John Buscema.)"

Interesting that this writer invested so much time in this all-male
sanctuary. I guess he still saw the potential of it, so willingly
weathered the blatant sexism for some of what X-Men would
eventually offer. Bravo to take wounds like that, in support of a
worthy genre! (Though if X-Men Byrne was so good, why the
photo-attack on him here?) Others would have just split off
immediately and concentrated on literature, where the crowds at
least were more likely to be genuinely grown up. I hope the
exposure hasn't coarsened what would surely have been otherwise
a naturally ardent supporter of women rights.

You wouldn't actually be someone who is only "borrowing the
power" right now, and whom later we'll find championing causes
that cause more mass scale damage to vulnerable women than
anything else, like being a social rights activist but with approval
for austerity economics -- like Obama has mostly been? At a deep
level the mind knows, that if for instance you're drawing people
into comics which effectively is a geek-ridden, anti-women genre,
it legitimates as authority-bearers the sort that could in an instant
suddenly go overtly anti-female, if it could be done innocuously;
covered by something awesome, like nationalism.

Like, for instance, those who'd stage wars against sexist countries,
which'll have the effect mostly of throwing endless
women/mothers into misery. Or like, for instance, those who'd
endorse concepts like "honour" or "duty" or
"responsibility/bucking up," when they're used by liberals prone
now in chastened times to use the same terms, with their known
allegiance to everything that isn't flower-power or of a feminine
sensibility.

P.S. If you're wanting this -- "then there should be women up there
in spandex performing superfeats along with the guys" -- re-
reading current Salon headlines should show you we're getting this
in spades, and about to get lots more. I wonder what you'd make of
those saying that maybe more feminist, less suspiciously making
feminism something we oblige ourselves and cower to like little
boys and girls to our awoken pissed-off mothers, would be more
giving headlines to the girly sleeping beauty. Who'd be overtly
pleased as shit if some brave knight slayed the great titan women
hogging attention away from her own youth, optimism, and simple
desire to tease, please and play.

Permalink

Original Article: David Graeber: Spotlight on the
financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely
skewed our economy is in terms of who gets
rewarded
@maria4616 Thanks a lot for this, maria. Much appreciated.
Permalink

rewarded
Anyone out there have parents who readily treated themselves to
things they disallowed to their children? Anyone out there have
parents who were so self-absorbed they often were barely aware of
the distress their own children were suffering -- their being hungry,
thirsty?; their feeling all alone?

Here's my speculation. I'm guessing that most of us still had
parents like this. And the question is, then, when society replicates
our situation as children, putting the majority of us in the position
of neglect and pigeon-holing a select number as the obnoxiously
self-absorbed, what pleasure are we getting from it?

Could it be the same pleasure we had as children when, as a result
of turning away from protesting our parents' hypocrisy toward
blaming our own selfish expectations -- even our own
"blameworthy" vulnerability, which "surely" prompted the neglect
-- our parents noticed we chose not to reflect badly upon them and
finally smiled some love towards us as a result?

It strikes me that main point of the next ten years or so is to in
every way communicate that none of us really lived especially
well, that growth, "selfish" personal development -- all avenues for
it -- was/were stifled. I think this even applies to many liberals of
affluent parents, who we all assume are to be defined by their
being distanced from real problems but I actually see mostly as
being cruelly confined to a kind of class think -- only able to derive
pleasures from people pretty much exactly like themselves, from
stasis percolating up only what is not disagreeably new and so
what probably isn't really new at all. Which is a horrible
development for people who fifty years ago -- during the 60s --
would have been those who felt delight rather than dis-ease when
categories and confines that kept people away from one another,
and which locked away discovery, started really falling off.

If becoming an aggregate of helping classers, a folk, a Volk, we
sunder ourselves of the bourgeois claim to individuality -- that
armour against personality dissolution, peasantry -- which too
would show our time's resolution against giving individual
development the limelight. We'd do better to think of ourselves as
professionals -- the high -- and call each one of us Doctor, Sir, or
Madame. And not as fools would do, but as those who's self-
respect engenders a fierce claim to individuality.
Permalink

rewarded
lwaxanatroi Why is there such a deep human need to feel guilty if
you didn't suffer some before getting benefits? My guess is that the
state couldn't have just sent checks directly to the recipients
because the recipients would have understand it as "rewarding non-
work," as spoiling. And so all the administrations are made to keep
in place, by the people at the bottom, so people feel they at least
worked and suffered and degraded themselves some, to earn their
benefits.

For people raised to believe suffering is a virtue and that ample
provisions and care is spoiling, people who know and show how
none of this suffering is actually necessary, are the villains. They'll
be shut out. Because psychologically, it still is.
Permalink

Original Article: Hey, guys: Elliot Rodger is our
problem
Aunt Messy Patrick McEvoy-Halston Amity Morisy Okay. I'm a
poet who won't let good meaning in sounds be bullied into silence
by proper english.
Permalink

problem
Aunt Messy Patrick McEvoy-Halston Amity Morisy Would you
agree this sounds a bit suspiciously prim for an "Aunt Messy"? In
any case, my brain clearly decided to live a little.
Permalink

problem
Morisy Patrick McEvoy-Halston Thanks Morisy.
Permalink

problem
@Morisy Personally I think circumcision is always harmful; there
is no context that molds it into love. Let's be rid of it. The tone part
is an interesting challenge -- your bringing up how women have
historically been silenced owing to anger, emotion. For me, this is
a factor though. We're reading if we're dealing with people who
can be assuaged. Or if they'd be displeased if somehow discourse
lead away from culminated righteous revenge. We're reading if
they're the angry progressive who's pressing for social
improvement for all people, or the angry "Tea Partier" we can't be
sure wouldn't be most happy if just he and his buds safely aloof
above armageddon they're both angry; but only from one does
one also sense a large body of self-esteem and love.

My concern about MRAs is not just that what is actually wanted is
revenge but that I don't trust that they won't actually perpetuate the
further neglect and abuse of boys. Since I think the main abuse
was at the hands of parents, the neglected mother, it's very hard for
those abused to rid themselves of the conviction that they actually
deserved it. For such stigmatization, such betrayal, it would put
them beyond ever imagining themselves finally deemed worthy of
their mother's love, which they don't have the ego to sustain.

Rather, I think they might perpetuate a society which denies
parents, mothers, the resources to properly take of their children, to
show that they believed the vulnerable child deserved the pain and
to absolve their own mothers of all blame. This of course is also
indirect revenge, but the show, the overt sort of revenge, is re-
directed at other women in society, whilst they proclaim
themselves the most staunch of mammas' boys.
Permalink

problem
Amity Morisy Patrick McEvoy-Halston "Begat" sounds too much
like one's squatted and taken a loud shit; that's probably why my
mind averred around it.

Allow your snob to be open to the poet.
Permalink

problem
@Morisy @Patrick McEvoy-Halston I'm mostly ... it would be a
help if, unified, a cultural sphere was encouraged where hate was
never okay. Kate McDonough does good things -- but because
behind the message is no doubt fundamentally love, something I
can't say about when, say, Noah Berlatsky posts. When I heard
Sweden two decades ago made spanking a criminal crime, I
applauded a (evidently fairly evolved) society was
communicating abuse was not okay, and I knew this would help
reign in, deter, provide feedback that would stop. (Sweden's
regressing, by the way a growing number are seeing kids as
being spoiled.)

But yes, the real gains I feel come out of the sheer fact that people
who tend to hate inequality and discrimination will push for a
liberal social system that lends more support for parents, and who
are themselves guaranteed to be raising kids who'll be mostly
immune to this nonsense, regardless of social sphere.
Permalink

problem
@Morisy @Patrick McEvoy-Halston

Re: For every abusive mother, there's an abusive father.

If this is what you really think, this would make you a radical in
today's culture. Anyway, I agree except no one plays more
important a role in your development than your mother -- for sure
in emotionally unevolved families, and maybe even with the NY
liberal types, where fathers and mothers are more likely to split
time.

Re: Nor do men get any more of a pass for bad behavior in
adulthood.

We see human will and choice a bit differently. I'm a determinist;
who you later become is almost entirely begetted by the nature of
your childhood origins. If you feel you've got a choice, that you
could resist -- you've had better than a good number.

Re: "mommy issues."

This is a slur. Forgiveness is great if you can get to it -- if you're
using your children it's because you're from a lineage that never
evolved beyond this. There really is no one to blame because it
was determined; outside of choice.
Permalink

problem
One of the reasons I was prone to deflect was that I realize that
what is, in my judgment, most underlying of female-hate, is
completely off the table, not to be discussed. Hatred of women is
inspired by actual experiences of abuse. Sustained, and when
you're most impressionable and vulnerable. Not by an enemy but
by all those insufficiently loved/respected mothers out there -- the
legions of them -- that can't help but expect their children to
provision them with the nurturing they themselves didn't receive.
This means children get used, early, when they needed exactly the
opposite; and being used here produces the rage.

The later environment(s) of female-hate is hardly a help. It
encourages and legitimates revenge, when it could have nurtured
understanding and respect -- especially if boys' own neglect was
recognized and respected. But, say, those New York liberal parents
out there wouldn't have problems with their own boys hating
women even if their entire cultural milieu was somehow owned by
Rush Limbaugh. They'd of had more loved mothers who did
nothing to them that would engender that level of true hate, and so
are guaranteed the kinds of guys out there who see hatred of
women as absurd -- feel it in their bones, beyond thought. If
resistance to Rush was previously nowhere, these boys would from
produce it apparently out of nowhere. They'd of had the right
mothers even if denied for two decades, the right "books."

Also, there are some guys out there who are feminists a bit too
easily, as if they've readily crumbled to a great power they can
borrow. If they're that because at some level they're pleasing their
own punitive inner maternal altars, their superegos, you have to
watch out because they'll surely find some way to find revenge for
still-life-path-determining previous neglect and abuse. This
happens in wars, for instance, where men pledge absolute fealty to
their motherlands, become Her knights, then persistently rape
abroad -- war's greatest prize.

I realize no one wants to talk about any of this right now but it
does take us back to about the age-levels and "party members"
Freud thought we should mostly focus on to understand our larger
society. Not movies but incest. Not loving but wanting to combat
and kill our parents, even if displaced and deferred.
Permalink

Original Article: How Seth Rogen proved Ann
Hornadays point about Elliot Rodger
THURSDAY, MAY 29, 2014 12:02 AM
What Eliott Rodger did was make life seem that much more scary
and random for young people. Joan Walsh wrote an article awhile
ago where she looked at the world we've created for kids, and
judged seriously that we must hate them. I believe somewhere in
the same article she speculated that it might be still our Calvinist
heritage, our inherent belief that human
beings/pleasure/youthfulness are sinful, that unconsciously
motivates us to throw one generation under the bus after a few
previous had known optimistic, prosperous times.

If behind the policies that are freezing the potential of youth to feel
secure in this world, is any hint that this is what the adult
population actually wants for its children right now, vulnerable
youth might pick up on it and seek to please us by helping
communicate there'll not soon be any relapse to the tension.

We know nations can turn sadistic; we know they can wholesale
sacrifice their kids. As I said, I think overall Apatow and Rogen
are actually amongst those who are going to be partaking less in
whatever mental illness is collectively driving us to forge a world
to give our children nightmares. We should have their back.
Permalink

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014 7:46 PM
Rogen, Apatow and Favreau strike me as reasonably emotionally
healthy people, and it's overall a good thing people of either sex
are exposed to them. Tinkering with the overt message their films
send may not matter so much as if they themselves are regressing
or evolving what we took at a felt level from "being in their
company."

It is possible that society is cueing vulnerable people to go on these
slaughters of the innocent. We may have long ago passed that point
where human progress felt permitted. And despite punishing
austerity measures, splitting populations into a narrow sliver whose
role is arrogant opulence and a broad spectrum whose role is to
will down their knowledge that a pre-revolutionary France societal
structure should feel regressive, it's not clear that we're just stuck, a
lost generation / decade. It can't be hid; there's still percolations of
the new.

So we send out signals that periodic mass sacrifices of the innocent
will make us feel momentarily absolved of a larger response to our
collective ongoing sin.
Permalink

WEDNESDAY, MAY 28, 2014 7:04 PM
nimitta Concerning Apatow, you sound a bit like a lawyer making
a plea tailored to fit jury prejudices what HAD to be said to get
their client off.

That is, if I re-watch his movies and all he comes across is that --
where plights are only satisfying to the extent that these
menchildren grow up; where "maturation" gets stunted but isn't to
be questioned -- I'll probably lose my consideration of him as a
genuine artist.
Permalink

Original Article: Godzilla is the best action movie
since Jaws
SATURDAY, MAY 17, 2014 2:56 AM
Our mommies were once way bigger than us, as well as sometimes
absolutely terrifying, and boy was it exciting when She opened a
can of whoop-ass on others presuming to possess Her power!
Permalink

Original Article: To circumcise or not to circumcise?
FRIDAY, AUGUST 23, 2013 3:43 AM
Leslie eshu21 Circumcision does ready men for war. If your
mother is so demon-haunted by her own mother, who hates her for
daring to individuate and turn her attention away from her and all
her still-unaddressed needs onto herself and her own child (who
will focus solely on her during its first few years of life), that she
in possession is the first to introduce you to the Devil, then later in
life to show you think, as well, that innocents DESERVE being
killed and crippled--and thereby gain her approval, and finally her
love--you go to war and kick the shit out of populations of people.
You don't fail, of course, to obliterate a substitute for your mother,
who you still unconsciously want to rape and kill for what she did
to you. This is why wars target innocent kids and women--it's all
about obliging yourself so you show you deserve love, and
obliterating the bitch who could make you so twisted so to see any
kind of logic in this.
Permalink

kchoze Would you be okay with a woman "choosing" to mutilate
her clitoris? I doubt it. You ground someone into how deserving of
hate they are so early in life, even as an adult they'll reflect in their
disregard of themselves how right "you" the parent were to hate
them, to let them, to WILL them, to be mutilated. And so, they still
hope, with their on their own mutilating themselves further, maybe
have a chance at the love "you" inexplicably denied them.
"You" wanted them to be a pin-cushion, so they made themselves
that. Now "YOU'VE" GOT to be more in the mood to drop the
knife and offer instead the hug.
Permalink

MEW is an idiot. Male circumcision is exactly the same as hacking
at young girls' genitals. The only thing you do is stop it. A lot of
Americans had it done to their children, because a lot of Americans
are so demon-afflicted, so unevolved, that they see a lovely new
birthed soul, and instantly feel compelled to teach it a lesson.
Permalink

Original Article: Supreme Court strikes down
DOMA
gkrevvv Interesting take on marriage. Certainly useful to reflect
on.
Permalink

Original Article: How to get chicks without being a
jerk
My guess is that a lot of guys who are great listeners HAD to adopt
that role with their mothers. They learned they had to closely
attend to them, and when they did so they received affirmation and
love. Their fate is to become friend-zoned, as I'm hearing people
here call it, because their tendency is to default to the needs of a
woman rather than forge their own way in the world. You can't
love, truly admire, someone like that.
(Hey Salon, I'm stil listed as only having posted one comment. Is
anyone else having the same problem?)

Permalink

Original Article: The ugly SCOTUS voting rights
flim-flam
test post
Permalink

Original Article: Is the fat acceptance movement
losing?
@Kamil Moscatopolitano Good luck with things, Kamil.
Permalink

Original Article: Is the South more racist than the
North?
@Jeremy McKenna. I'm trying to recover too. Maybe when I'm
back to norm I'll wonder why Salon seems like it has just stirred
into the kind of crazy state one wanders into just before deciding
on a war -- maybe such and such a people ARE evil -- rather than
its more conscious other self that knows this fact well enough
already, and has been long-slog working to help bulk up the
deficient side.
Permalink

losing?
Patricia Schwarz toast2042 Re: The brain has ways of making the
organism eat ... I'll eat whatever is around
Personally, I'd call that more unmet oral needs. The curse of our
brains, our DNA, of something independent of our control, is that
fatty foods are WAY better tasting than low-fat foods are. That is,
every human being is presented with a challenge: eat what you
should eat to enjoy the eating experience as much as possible, and
it may be unlikely you won't gain some weight; or, deny yourself,
live everyday a bit worse as far as pleasure from diet is concerned,
and stick to a good chunk of low-fat options (no oils on your
salads, for example), and live without any excess weight.
Right now, I'm living on a strict diet of no comment history I can
actually access owing to flaws in this insufficiently tested new
comment system, and am feeling very denied. Sigh. (unhappy face)

Published comments
losing?
metropolitannyc Emotionally healthy people aren't going to be
obese. But if we start telling people who eat food to compensate
for the like of not having received enough attention in their youth,
that what they are is not okay, I don't think when they switch to
becoming gym-rats we've really gotten them anywhere.
They'll be fit as a fiddle; of great physique to scold other people
and immune now, mostly, to themselves being further scolded; but
really just as denied.
Permalink

losing?
CyclingFool Re: We don't laugh at smokers and we don't blame
people who are dying of lung cancer because they couldn't quit
smoking. We understand the addictive power of tobacco and blame
the tobacco companies for poisoning people for profit.
This shouldn't be the only progressive response, however --
smoking owes to childhood conditions; and not nice ones.
Unfortunately we skip away and pretend all human beings are a
kind of type -- all good-hearted natural proletariats, or something,
without the resources to take on giant companies and all their
machinations. Looking away from truth is immature, and humanly
neglectful. They shouldn't be blamed; not at all. But while we war
against those who'd prey on them, we should still remember they're
in need of other kinds of help as well.
Permalink

Original Article: Chris Hayes: Bring on the upper-
middle-class revolution!
@SansArc Re: The middle class has never risen up against the
elites.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they're the ones who do it. This quote
comes to mind:
The middle classes--"hardly touched by the depression" --and the
wealthy--"the richer the precinct the higher the Nazi vote" --were
the main sources of the over two-thirds of all delegates who voted
Hitler dictator. http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln06_war.html
Permalink

Original Article: Announcing Salons new comments
system: It rules
Leslie Hey Leslie, like Brad Benson here, I want a site that makes
it possible to hear opinions we may at first find offensive, but
perhaps later come to understand and like. I want to hear from true
PROGRESSIVES, that is, who always say things societally
untoward at first, before it kicks in as okay -- "Shit, I didn't know
you were allowed to say that!; I never was." Think of when the
new left emerged, and what was said of their ostensibly rude, self-
centered mannerisms by the old left. Shit, these "civilized" folk
were practically with the Kent State shooters.
Anyway, I for one most certainly don't want to see BBC
moderation define what some swing young Americans might offer
the world.
Permalink

losing?
It is scary when the world is suddenly ready to crash down on
certain people, and Daniel is right that it does seem to be crashing
down on obese people. Somewhere out there there are people who
would like to be in a climate where it can just be admitted that
being fat means you're compensating for not receiving sufficient
attention and love, but it seems we most hear from who'd gird
these people from any self-reflection, and those ready to hawk
down and rip them apart.
Being fat does tell you something about someone; it is a sure tell.
So is nail-biting, something I've regressed to lately, and am glad I
know isn't simply some DNA-determined condition or something.
Permalink

Original Article: Chris Hayes: Bring on the upper-
middle-class revolution!
fishboo If this wasn't where you were at, and academia gave you
an immediately rewarding, even posh life, are you sure you
wouldn't feel even more precarious? How would it be to post in a
comment section that you've found a job that has delivered on all
fronts, and excuse yourself from jealousy or class resentment by
something along the lines of, "well, me being happy makes it
easier for me to offer more to my students"?
This would be the truth, of course, but how many of us in positions
that might be ascribed as elite would feel comfortable if we didn't
have some serious wounds to show, if we were suddenly
surrounded by a crowd in Guy Fawkes masks? It could happen; I
think we all feel, that it could happen.
Permalink

Original Article: Announcing Salons new comments
system: It rules
Re: Salon was one of the first sites to allow readers to comment on
stories
Personally, I wouldn't have written it this way. Given today's
stigmatization of commenters as potential trolls, "allowed" still
communicates that readers are kids seeking bonbons, that the more
generous and obliging are still willing to hand out. In this climate
what needed to be said was something more like this: Salon was
one of the first sites to recognize that it's overall content was
strongly enhanced if it enabled readers to comment.
Re: Happy commenting and remember to play nice!
Okay. But once upon a time this site encouraged people to NOT
hold back (the exact words were, I think, "don't hold back!"), to
not be timid or too self-censoring, I kid you not! The emphasis was
to ensure that people didn't hold back from trying things that would
keep people wanting to come back to the salon. Agreeing that if
you don't watch your step, you might inadvertently become one of
those tempest-full trolls infesting the web, might just mean starting
up this new go-around already in braces.

Salon Letters Oct 11 To Present

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