Month: January 2019

AST – The Part I Forgot to Tell You

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The Nature VS Nurture debate is settled, or at least fragmented into many smaller, more sensible questions, and it’s pretty much all Nature, I do not wish to argue the point – but I wish to answer the untreated side of the question, the “wrong” side, the nurture assumption. Not just that, though, not only why we make some assumption about influence, but what is it that we do in our attempts to influence. Just because your attempts don’t “succeed,” don’t make your kid love the things you hope they will, doesn’t mean they don’t do something.

Is that implicit in the victory of Nature?

That our nurturing, if it doesn’t make number one son want to take over the store, then must do nothing at all?

That is where abusewithanexcuse.com and “Antisocialization Theory” come in – I don’t think I’m really arguing with anyone, I just think I’m working in this area here, this corner just past “the nurture assumption is wrong,” where everyone turns back. This is where I see that parents and children alike spend all day long trying to influence children and everyone else, by all sorts of means and methods and to suggest that “they’re wrong” to try, because the nurture assumption is wrong is something no-one ever said to any parent anyway, even if we talk about it on paper. I am saying what we do all day in the attempt matters and that is where the helpful science would be.

This is where the book by that name had left me: the nurture assumption isn’t true, people spend all day every day working away at an assumption that isn’t true . . . for nothing? Thousands of years, and no-one noticed, no exhausted parents noticed, all that work and it’s for nothing?

I accept the negative expression of it, with caveats: parents do not create the traits they say they are trying to create in their children. I do not accept that their trying all day simply does nothing and doesn’t require a positive explanation, what it does do, why we do in fact do it. This is the question I am answering, the question Antisocialization Theory answers. I didn’t know I was looking at one of the smaller, more sensible debates around Nature VS Nurture, I hadn’t heard terms like “directed evolution,” or “conscious evolution.” Those couple of alt-Right science bibles I read were still laughing at Lamarck – which, come to think of it, sounds very close to just laughing at evolution now, doesn’t it?

Both those expressions go too far. Directed by whom? Conscious – a whole species, this one? But it’s close. I think I am a sub-category of the Directed Evo crowd, maybe.

 

Jeff

Jan. 29th., 2019

“Codified”

Jeff/neighsayer23 Comments

It’s a self-deception, where we tell ourselves one thing while doing quite another, Boston Strangler style, or just a matter of the situation deconstructualism has described, that we only think things the mind can see, ideas that we have a line to, like sight, and many thoughts are out of reach behind something or over the horizon and never come into view – but it’s not as clear as it seems: our rules aren’t the point.

The point is simply that we have them. Not in the usual, conservative headmaster speech sort of a way; I’m agin’ them, but we have them and like it or not, that is a point, specifically, my point, today.

The Ten Commandments really weren’t the point. It wasn’t the rules that were codified that way, so much as the penalties, and more so, the idea of penalties. Doesn’t “codified” have an aspect of hiding the message, of code? Well, the rules themselves, they are not coded, they are explicit. What is coded, perhaps, is the rule behind the rule, that the rule is a reason to hurt someone. Punishment is assumed. We may debate the rules, change them from time to time, explicit modifications of discrete  wordings.

“What should the rule be?” is open for debate sometimes.

“What should the penalty be?” is also a debatable, adjustable thing, a topic for talk.

But these questions require specific, concrete answers, and one answer, “nothing,” seems to be behind something or over the horizon. It’s a rule, that we have rules and penalties. That’s what you codify, the rules that are not up for debate or modification.

So it’s a rule that penalties are levied, while the rules themselves are somewhat fluid . . . so no rule is “hard,” even “Thou shalt not kill,” is suspended when said killing is now a penalty and not an offence. But that penalties are levied, this is “hard,” this is unquestionable. Anybody feeling this? Feeling what is the constant in this equation? The punishment is unquestionable, no-one debates, “punishment, yes or no?” – this rule is unwritten and therefore un-editable. Almost no-one, anyways. It’s visible, if you look. I hope I just made you look – you see it now, right?

Unfortunately, if a couple of big, musky hominids like you and I can see it, there is probably more to it than that too. At this level it’s still the headmaster’s bastions of civilization speech, right, rules sort of are civilization? The very best sort of lie is a “hidden truth,” by way of some Tom Sawyer-style duplicitousness, and the only essential part of this rule is that somebody gets hurt. I’m sure there is another layer to this onion, but this layer is novel to us. Let’s stop and have a look around, we don’t even know where the next layer after this is yet. We need to spend some time, get oriented and acclimatized to a world where everything they told us we do to control our animal selves controls our animal selves in exactly the wrong direction.

Rules, those are written down explicitly, and litigated endlessly.

Abuse is what has been encoded in our sacred texts and our lives, and what we are thus unable to litigate. Hmmm. In lieu of an actual objective, maybe short and sweet is the best thing I can add at this point.

Cheers,

 

 

Jeff,

Jan. 19th., 2019

People of Earth

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We have to talk.

OK, I have to talk. You have to shut up, I heard you already.

Your friends don’t tell you to shut up, your friends support you, look after you, try to keep you feeling good about yourself. That is not me, I’m not like that. I’m not worried about your feelings. You can trust me to tell you the truth; I hate you. Now shut up and listen.

You’re tough enough.

You’re way too tough, you are ‘step across this line and I will destroy all life on this planet’ tough. You’re a mutant psychopath that hates the world of life that spawned it. You are Rand’s sick hero, destroying everything just to prove you don’t give a fuck, no-one can hurt you. When it’s all gone, perhaps someone will remain to admire what a tough, fearless motherfucker you were, but probably not. Maybe sometime long after, some alien archaeologist is going to remove his Tilley hat in respect and whisper, “these tough bastards didn’t back down, did they?” – but probably not.

You are tough enough, but in typical fashion, it’s never enough for you. Getting tougher is all you care about, toughness is the goal, if you can ever be tough enough, then you’ll be safe from all these other tough bastards – but you’re not one of them. For you, this is defense. You are a super tough moron, is the thing – but I’m not some elitist IQ fetishist, we’re going to try not to focus on your stupidity today, I think the two things are in direct proportion and if we can affect your obsession with strength and toughness, the other thing will improve too.

Just stop it already, the violence and the . . . worship of it.

If you’re not engaged in literal war, then it’s “sports,” which is not “metaphorical” war as we pretend, but actual war training, and the skillset is always toughness. Why the Hell would every schoolboy have to acquire football skills when they are mostly staying home working on the farm or spending their life in an office? Just in case something goes terribly wrong in world politics and a giant international football game breaks out, I suppose?

Every few years, some luminary makes a beautiful speech about peace, but all day every day, your son needs to be more aggressive about taking that quarterback the fuck out. All day long, kids nowadays don’t have it tough enough.

It’s the only game in town, I get that, I do. Your kid needs to be tough or he’ll be eaten alive, I know, I was one of you once.

You are the motherfuckers setting it up, and you don’t get that.

I know, we have to be tough because of the enemy, the Islamists, the Russians. I’m talking to all of them. You Islamist warriors, you Russian strategists, you Canadian hockey moms, I’m talking to you all. You are all tough enough, cut it out already. We all have to lay down our weapons at the same time, that’s how peace works, the rare, special times that it does.

Stop with the endless “strength” rhetoric, please. It’s like listening to Charlie Sheen wax on about the joys of cocaine and prostitution. You have a problem. A see it from space, life consuming and destroying problem, and it is the very “strength” and toughness that is the only solution you ever tried and the only thing you care about that is the problem.

We’ve quite given up, in case you thought anyone was working for world peace, no, that isn’t what’s happening. I mean some are, many wonderful organizations, but basically governments have settled into endless war. Man is aggressive, it is a good life if you don’t weaken, and there will always be someone starting trouble – war is an organizing principle for society . . . they hope to control it, they hope it doesn’t go to the nuclear winter, but basically, war is a part of human life. No serious person thinks that is going to change, I don’t think. I think we’re pretty sure détente is as good as it gets.

And for that, you have to be tough and ready, so in what should seem ironic to us but somehow does not, the only peace we are able to realistically imagine requires that we all can never be tough enough.

I’m not asking people to lay down their arms before an enemy that won’t reciprocate. I’m only asking that we continue the conversation, that just because there is always some swine who’s “heard enough talk” and starts shooting doesn’t mean that some of us can’t keep talking, try to work through to the next bit of logic: OK, so it’s not possible to disarm ourselves one at a time, then how is gradually disarming us all simultaneously going to work?

My first answer is, toughness needs to be taken off its stupid, brutal pedestal and seen for the necessary evil that it has always been. I mean, you look like such a moron, fawning over the type of hammerhead whose great skill is the ability to cut you down with a stroke of his sword. That sort of strength should be admired from a safe distance, like how we admire it in a bear or a lion, it shouldn’t be brought into our homes and nurtured.

 

Jeff,

Jan. 14th., 2019

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/02/04/people-of-earth-part-2-conservatism/

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/02/06/people-of-earth-part-3-liberals/