Peacemaking

Twenty-Three and Us

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

An insight that we think about inheritance and family trees backwards, or all in one direction, and suspicious that it’s not an accident.

I have really been loving Henry Louis Gates and his show, Finding Your Roots, but this idea has been creeping up on me, he spins stories about a single line of people, generally finding a few grandparents, of which we have four, usually, perhaps a few great-grandparents – and we all have eight of those, in theory, barring incest and whatnot. Some folks see family back to the bloody Mayflower – one of hundreds of ancestors that far back in time, right?

I mean it’s a great show, and we all learn about the times, we get that glimpse, but is it not true that we think of ancestors as multiplying into the future and we only acknowledge perhaps the richest of our ancestors? When really, our heritage multiplies into the past, and rather than having been drawn in a single line, ultimately ideologically from some First Man, is it not just as true to posit that we are amalgamators of our parents and in the end, descend from all of humanity?

The First Man idea, in all of its forms, does seem to suffer the fallacy of our limitations regarding deep time, and I think if we view the tree of descent as a pyramid and count all of our relatives and “our people” and then divide by two going into the past, we will reach Adam and Eve far too soon, something on the biblical scale and not the geological or evolutionary ones. Warning, and waiver: I’m terrible at math. I do all this in English.

If anyone wants to check me, that sounds wonderful, like a conversation or something.

Jeff

Oct. 21st., 2021

What’s in a Smile

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Sometimes it could be anything, bared teeth are bared teeth; sometimes you have to seek other cues, what are the eyes doing? Body language, what is the posture saying?

I have intuited that the smile is intimately intertwined with the snarl. That the difference, whether it’s a smile or a snarl, is whether those teeth belong to your friends or not. A snarl is a threat, and so a smile is one that isn’t aimed at you, a shared snarl among friends, within your group. A snarl says, these teeth are my weapons; a smile says, all these teeth are our weapons.

Like most things human, it is one thing for the in-group and another for the out-groups. Like law and order, law for the out-group, that’s the ‘order.’ Like religions of forgiveness, law for the out-group, forgiveness within.

You Google ‘origins of smiling,’ and you get talk of chimpanzees laughing, but I just watched some and that is open mouth, making noise – that’s laughing, not smiling. My theory here is really the only one there is, I think. Perhaps others have said it and I just don’t know where to look.

Of course it’s all part of the gonzo antisocialization theory suite of ideas, and no-one is there for any of it. I live my life, a naysayer in a life that often seems like a rally, a place where people go to shout together the things I am trying to debunk. Think of the ugly, empty smiles of politicians, and the snarls of the populists that their violent followers pass off as smiles. These lies would never fly if there wasn’t some aspect of it in everyone’s life already. This is what smiles are, is what I’m saying. Violent extremists only make these things easy to see.

That is what a smile is, it’s fierce, a show of strength. I mean, how else could you do it, despite one’s own occasional great fortune, how could you simply smile, happy for all, in this world. A smile draws a circle, right here, right now, within these walls, I am happy, look at me, smiling, perhaps not even knowing what misery you are suffering, you will know that I am feeling good and strong! If you are also, then we are all showing our chompers, a strong and able bunch, look out for us, what can’t we accomplish?

I know, drifting a little off of pure science there, but you get the picture, right? And I’m not saying every smile today is aggressive, only that that’s how smiles began, and what they still are to a great degree. Of course, there are innocent joys to smile about also – any confusion, though, I worry is more of a feature than a bug. The aggressive smilers might prefer some confusion.

I wonder if I ever manage to make it plain enough, does anyone ever get a sense of wonder, that “science” as we know it cannot see much of the world, that things like this oughtn’t be a mystery?

Jeff

Oct. 5th., 2021

Hashtag Weak Together

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I started with “Don’t spank your kids,” or, “why do we spank our kids,” and the first answer we all know, you have to teach them right from wrong, and if we will allow that adults hitting kids “accidentally” teaches hitting which may be wrong, then the next argument is strength. Right?

So I’ve been addressing that for a few years.

I detest the cursed “Strong” hashtags, the same bloody day, when are we supposed to cry?

The thing, my thing is, if you talk about resilience and strength, about growth from pain, you are not really fighting the trauma, you’re not really with the victims, I mean not in the sense that you’re actually opposing the trauma.

Desensitization is the social goal of much pain, and the usual result of pain anyhow, whether socially intentioned or not, and so strength and resilience are simply the fruition of the trauma, meaning in line, in spirit with the trauma. It’s been a process of evolution to get us here, all of this has been selected for, your strength is very much the evolved socially desired result of the trauma; your support systems after the trauma and your abusers or whatever hurt you have been partners in producing the stronger, more resilient you.

When you heal, and come back stronger, you are not breaking your programming, as perhaps we like to say, not at all, all of it is a part of human social evolution. The thing about the thing, my thing, is this is all of us, or almost all of us. It is a section of a logical mobius strip that part of the present human condition is that we exist in a ubiquitous state of group conflict and so we always blame some group of people for every problem and really cannot even see a problem that each and every one of our groups has in common. How could strength be bad, right? Resilience, survival – this is bad?

I’m saying, it’s enabling, it’s victim- wait, not shaming, not blaming . . . victim burdening, is what it is. Am I re-inventing this wheel, that’s the term, right? The victims are supposed to solve the situation, and my resilience is supposed to be the answer for my tormentors’ violence, for another’s abuse. There is pain and abuse in the world, and what is the answer, that the victims should complain but move on and accept whatever changes are forced upon them. This is gaslighting ourselves.

And – yes! Anything can be both good and bad! If we are talking about a thing that can’t ever be bad, we have left reality for the social world of taboos.

Which, yes, that could also be bad.

That is not being on the side of the victims, when we only care after the fact, and only enough to encourage them to strengthen themselves, and it isn’t looking after future victims to normalize that requirement. We talk about cycles of abuse, and that is it right there, in minimalist, bare as can be: trauma and strength, yin and yang. Cause and effect, action/reaction – I’m saying we should protect people, try to have fewer victims, that if we care, we should attempt to address causes, stop normalizing, even mythologizing the damage.

Hashtag Weak Together.

Jeff

Oct. 1st., 2021

Easy

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

The theory (of certain schools of feminism) is, half of humanity gets more abuse and less opportunity – so they’re better. Smarter, more emotionally connected – because abuse and being hated, I guess.

Men are horrible, stupid, violent, horny, unfaithful idiots . . . but we love them. I know it’s “normal,” but it’s not much of a theory. If it’s true, then a lotta ladies are the sort that love assholes.

It’s not good news, true or false.

Of course it’s false.

Of course in a tilted world of violent masters and slaves, the slaves are born to their hate, it’s their birthright.

The idea, examined the way I did and I do – the abused sex brings the love and the sense – this is me teaching, not insulting or saying anything about y’all – that’s the same as some race theory I heard from Charles Murray about the Jews, they were persecuted and abused, so now they’re the highest IQ people on Earth, it’s “abuse improves,” with a tacit rider of “so abuse is good.”

As stark and horrible as I lay it out, this is one of our social narratives, and if you say it nice or avoid saying it, it’s still sitting there, an awful premise for human life – while extreme cases show the error, Roseanne Barr, Theo Fleury, some folks think it too much, badly broken folks are trying to teach. But they are on the spectrum of that narrative and they find students, schools to join also.

Again, I am trying to paint it horrible for you, but this is a common human theme, it’s the status quo.

I like to say “psychology says,” despite that I’m afraid psychology will deny having said it, maybe it’s just me says “abuse damages, it doesn’t improve.” But social knowledge says it improves, usually calling the improvement “strength,” now how can that be bad, right? Here’s how. It’s evolution, it’s multigenerational, that what you reach for you will reach, you will change yourself to reach, like a giraffe reaches for the high branches and grows five or six metres high to do it. We have this strength like giraffes have vertebrae, and sure enough we use it every day like they do, it’s how we make our living, nutting up and ovarying up and doing something awful you need to “be strong” for, logging or whatever.

This social knowledge will take us straight over the cliff, it already has, really, this strength fetish, which is denial of hurt, damage, and abuse, of course it is.

Imagine for a moment, imagine that we really did what the laciest of the ladies seem to vibe, imagine if the humans rather than being strong and taking the abuse and being “better” for it, imagine for a moment that we put that millennial, multigenerational effort into chasing sensitivity instead, to identify abuses and weed them out instead, over thousands of years, what a different creature we might be? Bonobos, maybe, but maybe just humans with the bonobo in us instead of the chimp? Probably something else, who knows?

I mean, the EP boys, the game theory folks, they will say, and it’s hard to argue about origins, but it does seem chasing the brutality and strength wasn’t maybe optional when it began, I mean it’s hardly optional now.

But it could be. Should be.

But there are layers of denial and us hiding stuff from ourselves. Perhaps it wasn’t a choice – but that thought lives alongside that no other animals live this way – so it’s not predetermined either!

We could start chasing the light instead any time we choose.

Starts with honesty, sometimes only available after a lot of thought and talk, and honestly, the human world presently runs on strength, which is hate created by abuse, and I don’t say it with pride but in this state of affairs hate is the functional thing, and we hate each other, men and women.

Sure there’s some love, but even if you don’t feel it – can’t you see that you would, if you were allowed or something? Are you proud of loving that swine you need liberation from?

Isn’t it science that the subjected hate the dominant?

Gonna surprise no-one now and go personal. I never got a chance, never was able to put a dent in my ex’s hate, which I was late detecting, because of Mom’s and others’. I lived Not All Men in the attempt, I have tried to never do a thing to justify women hating me, didn’t work. I found I couldn’t fight a hate that she didn’t acknowledge, or wasn’t up for negotiation, or I just wasn’t people, she wasn’t going to negotiate with the likes of me at any rate.

I’m saying, of course women hate men, we’re evil bastards, why wouldn’t you? One of the layers, one of the tricks is this meme, “men hate, women don’t,” again, which is antithetical to the idea that abuse hurts and damages. I’m sorry, ladies, the abuse mattered, it hurt you, and your ability to love has been impaired, you may have been the bringer of all good things when you were born, but this world has had its way with you the same way it has with us, maybe worse, and we are all hurt and damaged.

Honesty, and choosing the true principle – damage or strength – is what humanity needs to do, ALL of humanity. Both halves.

That was an ending when it was a Twitter thread  – it really is my point to the world, this choice, the damage, which would be the rational take, or the strength, which I see as the social mode – and the whole thing is so sad that after I posted it, I went back to bed, hoping for a better start to my day. Instead I woke up having globalized the entire miserable thing. It’s more than the battle of the sexes here. All the thinkers with a clear cause and a people to fight for, all the philosophers of oppression, not just the Gloria Steinhems but also the James Baldwins, the ground-breaking whatevers, gay, black, Indigenous, women . . . I assume all these brilliant writers reached higher, I expect everyone has a guess or several about the big picture, humanity as a whole, but inasmuch as they are talking and writing about race, or sexuality, or gender, I’m sorry.

That is an easy task for a thinker.

I mean, I know, impossible to reach or change the bigoted white male swine who run the world – but the thinking, I’m sorry, that’s easy. Even sorrier – thinking about the Other and the enemy, that’s always been far too easy for humans. It’s easy for not good reasons – and that’s what that is, at least that’s one thing it is, analyzing the enemy.

I first cottoned onto this in a personal vein, I realized that my feminist sisters have had an advantage over me this way all my life, that their lives have been framed as a struggle against men, and I had no such gorgon to blame. I never did blame women, I was raised by them, my tendency is theirs, to blame men. I must have been thinking from the glory days of babyhood or something that I wasn’t one of the men, that sure they hate men – but they love me, right?

Sorry to say, it doesn’t seem to have been functionally true in my childhood and also, that seems to have been the attitude, often explicitly professed by my lady partners in life – and I believed, accepted. So sad. “I hate your entire species – but I love you.” Like I say, I can’t imagine believing it from the ex if things had ever been any different, if they had been even once, I expect I might have noticed that.

I know, they had it hard, they were abused – this you offer me as evidence that I shouldn’t blame them for their hate, but in reality it is entered as evidence for the prosecution, that Your Honour, of course they were full of hate, look at their abuse. Yes, my naysaying is “reality” here in my blog.

Pathetic. I basically despise everything about sex and gender because why can’t they love me, despite my sex. But sex is everything to us monkeys. In half the world, if you do it “wrong,” they kill you.

I mean, I saw all the boys and men around me, blaming and hating the women, but that had been taken away, that wasn’t available to me, or I, stuck up little wannabe saint that I am refused to use it. I like so many, rejected the hate of the dominant group in favour of the hate of the subjected, I chose to despise what the women say they despise, violence, mostly. I haven’t changed my stance that way, that’s still my enemy, violence and all that. I’ve just realized that the female half of humanity isn’t not involved in it, is all. We all are.

I spend my entire blog talking about spanking. I rarely say “women” in that conversation, but it’s understood, the ladies do a lot of it. That is never going to be solved if in every conversation it is only men bringing the roughness. It is a terrible, sad side effect, that if only male violence exists then a world of children have complaints that must have never happened or something, or as I see across the board, somehow Dad is to blame for this spanking, one abuses and another takes the resentment. My own kids display this function in stark, horrifyingly embarrassing clarity, you would not believe.

Like I say, easy. The internet is full of people, somebodies and nobodies, and many can speak the language of wokeness and describe the oppression in endless nuance . . . I don’t see many brave fools like me, trying to take on more, trying to deal above the level of our social groups, I just don’t.

We’re blocked. I understand that, there are massive social memes in place, “human nature,” don’t get me started. If human nature is bad, then why even look for better? Just find yourself a fight you can agree with and get on with it, right? There are puh-lenty of causes that need you.

Easy. Simple, I mean. Clear.

Irresponsible, is all, not comprehensive. It’s not enough, I mean, it’s more than not enough, it’s just exactly the same thing repeated endlessly, it’s the problem – but as such, all of that, it really, really isn’t enough. More is required. OK, it’s too late. More was required. If there is anyone crawling out of the destruction like all that science fiction, they will need more or nothing will change.

There are people worrying about it, some worry about humanity and the future, but we don’t hear about anyone who’s cracked it, found the answer, what is wrong with each and every human group, I mean except me? It’s the spanking, the morality, the attempt to change things. I said above somewhere that “if we could chase the sensitivity, weed out the hurt,” but I know, that is already what we think we’re doing with our social control, weeding out misbehaviour and crime, these are bad things that hurt and our entire existence is dedicated to the effort . . . yeah, it all goes sideways with the details, with what that effort has been – the spanking, the exile, the shunning, the prisons. The goal has always sounded commendable, the methods have always moved us in exactly the opposite direction.

Thinking what I think isn’t easy.

I accuse, I must be wrong to a great degree, but my quest is always to find the undiscovered “right to great degree” thing that no-one is saying, and so in this test, I accuse the writers of oppression of not trying to solve everyone’s problems, of limiting themselves to their causes for clarity and purpose – yes, you heard right, I accuse them of purpose, in case you’re in any doubt about my commitment to what I see as the truth, purpose is a . . . bias – and so missing as we all have forever, the common cause that sets it all in motion. I have said, I will again, critical race theory belongs as a subset of antisocialization theory because it needs a reason why Whitey is such a bastard and all anyone has for that is we’re all born that way?

This is supposed to be helpful how?

Antisocialization Theory is not easy to think, but at least it works at all.

That’s a clue that your quest is on track, when it keeps getting more difficult, right? When the gods keep throwing stuff in your way? Antisocialization Theory is psychology writ large. It’s hard. You kinda have to step over Mom to get to it.

It’s not easy to hear that Mom messed me up not “for my own good” at all, but in step with some mad social function to drive us all mad on purpose, no-one wants to hear that the agent, the creator of the evil human nature we all suffer under is dear old Mom. We all seem sort of able to get on with our lives no matter what bullshit went on as long as we can say. “Well, they tried, and they never had a chance, they did their best.” When some smartass gonzo science idiot comes along and says, no, messing you up like this was the whole plan and if they could have done more and better, you would be feeling even worse right now, well then it’s going to be WTF did you just say about my dear old Mother, isn’t it? It’s not easy, facing that no-one was ever trying to do good, that the function is all bad and they just call it good.

I expect it hurts even more to think it alone, and that’s why I’m trying to drag you all down with me. We can still let our parents of the hook, they may have really believed it – but we must do the hard thing and face that what is “their best” in that situation was the application of bad stuff and their efforts were the very opposite of mitigation. Again, most of them if they could have “tried harder,” would only have been rougher, because that’s what they thought was “good.” It is already when they were bringing the tough love that they were working as hard as a human can work, doing the hardest thing, going against what is natural and normal for most animals, especially most mammals, especially especially most primates, three especiallies for the higher primates!

Humans are amazing, magical in their ability to think and do the unthinkable.

It is surely what the unrepentant ones still think, nothing to apologize for, that was good.

I mean, I don’t think the feminist writers, the race writers, they are not exhorting their readers to discipline their kids. I think there may be a little of “the Man made me beat you,” some demand side talk about the dominants inducing abuse in the subjected peoples’ lives, and this stuff while true, life is a champagne fountain of abuse and it all flows downhill, down the social ladder, this line of reasoning tends to stop at the oppressor, we’re mostly not worried about his kids, and punitive abuse isn’t the First Cause I find it to be in these conversations, but only a downstream effect. The Man has us beating our kids for release, it’s hard to imagine in this scenario how we worry about protecting his own kids from him!

I think that would help, if we could, I mean if we could all stop. I think the billionaires whooping their kids is like the first pour in the top glass of the fountain and the bastard’s kids grow up feeling all hard done by despite the wealth and so they feel justified in all the horrible crap they do. This true for all of us, it is what is the active function for all of us. It’s not easy to think.

I don’t imagine Baldwin blamed the world on his poor mama and I don’t think the feminist writers blame their poor mamas for the state of the world, I mean I don’t think James would blame the world on his father either if he was rough and neither am I, not one father for the state of the world or one mother – but it is what antisocialization theory asks of us, to blame our parents, to blame parenting and the larger social control in general.

I don’t know, I can’t say anyone has  had it easy, I’ve certainly had it the easiest of the lot, and I’m not saying Baldwin never had to face that his mother was the problem, I have no idea what his life even was let alone his response to it, I’m only saying he doesn’t have to in order to write race philosophy, and so his readers also don’t have to. I’m not saying it about the feminist writers either, same thing, I don’t know their lives or their challenges, but they may not have had to do it publicly at least, in order to promote their views – and I would have to, do have to trash my caregivers to make my points, lay the real blame there, such is my sad theory.

Also, I don’t know the feminist thinkers and authors, but the ladies I learned it from don’t talk about their mothers as much as they do the men, the fathers and husbands – again, the particular “isms” don’t require it, they don’t have to go there. Basically, no-one has to address First Causes, because Human Nature has that covered. I laugh at myself saying it, but some of these geniuses have had it easy. At work, I mean, LOL.

The worst people, they enjoy this ease also, the racists, the xenophobes, they also do not elevate their thinking above human groups, they are all about the groups, the existence of groups themselves serves as their First Cause – Good Lord, did I really publish this complaining about the good folks and never mention the Nazis? I am so sorry, OMG. I try not to talk about them or to them, it’s not that I am with them, of course! I am with the woke, I only complain to waken the woke even further; it’s not that I don’t criticize the worst, it’s that I don’t talk to them at all. To criticize would suggest I think there is anything about them worth saving, I don’t spend any time there – we are bad enough for me! If we solve the salt of the Earth’s problems, they will stop breeding Nazis, this is my plan. Destroy their reason for being by solving the world’s problems, if everybody’s happy, no-one is fighting.

It’s not easy blaming either the entire world or Mom and Dad, or all of the above. It is certainly hard thinking that all nearly eight billions of minds have to change when we’ve all had the experience of trying and failing to ever change one. It’s all around a very difficult thing to think, and I imagine that must be what I was looking for, this must have been a quest for the impossible and I feel I have won or lost a lottery to find anything that can even pretend to be the answer.

It wasn’t supposed to be possible, you bunch of liars, I thought it was safe to go looking for the Holy Grail, I wasn’t supposed to have to worry about what would happen if I found it. Murphy’s Law.

I think I’ve said before, you know like how when you’re two, a year is half of your life and when you’re fifty it’s only two percent of your life, that when I started to look for the larger answer, for all of us, it was an unknown proposition that despite the obvious long odds, felt like a binary, a fifty-fifty, I’d find it or I wouldn’t. This is a limitation Pinker and a bunch of EP boys like to throw at us, we really don’t process odds rationally, and sure, I concur with that bit I said, long odds, but an emotional binary situation – well that changed when it wasn’t some unknown “an” answer. Once I started triangulating the answer, narrowing it down, the odds rapidly got more rational, and maybe ironically, depressingly huge again.

(Possible future line of inquiry, is it always some unformed, unspecified thing we can’t make odds for in their stories? Maybe? Never mind. Shut up. Later.)

I said it above, right, it just means changing a few billion minds, sad emoji.

Frustrating, I keep having this circular kill-thought, that if we could stop the roughness, the minds would change themselves. Oh, hey, look, that was the door.

I’m outta here.

Jeff

Sept. 22nd., 2021

Bad Parenting

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

That’s really what it comes down to. That’s the human difference, why we’re special, why it’s possible to convince a human being that it is heroic, god spawn, or a child of the sky people, some alien simian hybrid – one, the poor thing had the worst parents in the entire animal kingdom who told it anything they wanted so it will believe literally anything; and two – that is the magic.

Sure, some creatures kill and eat their children.

But what other creature tortures them? What other creature seeks out unrelated mature adults to torture their children, thus inventing a workaround to defeat normal animal mammalian parental love?

We know it, too. I mean, it’s a thing we do, a technology we leverage and then we call it a mystery, bury that in a riddle, and then wrap the whole thing in an enigma. When you go to all that trouble, you know it. I mean, compartmentalized and all that, of course. The trick bloody works. OMG, a digression –

Norm MacDonald died yesterday and Twitter was full of love and homages and videos. There’s this time Norm was on Larry King, and he sets up this bit, says to Larry, “I’m a deeply closeted man.”

Larry says, “So, you’re coming out, you’re gay?”

“Why would I say that?” Says Norm. “I’m deeply closeted.”

“But ‘closeted’ means you’re gay,” Objects Larry.

“Whoa, whoa! Easy there, Buddy!” Norm’s all twinkles, this was the line, Larry breaks down, we all do.

Spoiler alert, I’m gonna destroy this joke (and your life): of course it’s the setup. Of course, you can’t declare yourself an “involuntary celibate,” as that class of trolls does, if it’s you making the declaration, that’s voluntary. And you can’t really declare yourself closeted, as he starts the joke. Once he sneaks that impossibility past us, we are surprised and confused when it turns out impossible again at the end, right? Larry and we have all been had as soon as we make the first argument, LOL.

I’m at the bloody keyboard today because it just struck me that “humanity is moral,” or some analogue of that is the same impossible premise and we all live in the same surprised confusion of the punchline forever.

Ah, there, good. I got the concept down before it got away. Now it looks like work to do, laying that out.

Ah, here’s something – that took me some time, not a week, but more than a minute, working out where the wrinkle was to create Norm’s joke, that it was the illogic of the setup – and I’ve been telling the other one, the ‘incel’ example for a few years now. That should have been automatic if I were smarter – and during that time, I was amazed and confused, feeling and reacting as though the genius comic had uncovered some facet of the secret of life or something, I was that australopithecine doing the slow gaze up at the monolith for a while there, or that’s what I felt like, how can he turn something we all knew on its head like that?

There’s often the sense of innocence with Norm, and one can find it here, of course it all started with, “OK, here’s my premise,” whether explicitly or not, we know him and what his job is. The trolls don’t give you that sense, although it absolutely is a premise, because it is not a good or honest one, so there is no allusion to it. They are serious about their misdirection, unlike, hopefully, comics. All true of humanity’s smugness also, the latter bit. Of course.

Our premise is always coming from either some divinity or from some other authority and carries qualified immunity.

So, if I was to try to do this exercise, what is it – a syllogism, use Norm’s format?

Maybe, let’s try it with the incels, what would that look like?

“I’m involuntarily celibate.”

  . . . So you’re impotent?

 “How would I know that? I’m celibate.”

  But ‘involuntary’ means you can’t.

  “Whoa, whoa! Easy there, Buddy!”

 Ha.

I’m sure I’m cheating there, that’s not the same, is it? – but it’s close enough for rock’n’roll, so we’ll move on to the main event, have a go. For premise, though, well, that’s sort of the unknown in this equation, we’ll have to try a few, see what rolls out.

  I’ve been trying some, I worry that our actual premises are longer and don’t fit in this format.

  Still trying.

  Sometimes the premise is Original Sin, we’re born bad and trying to be good, or we need divine help – say, “I’m bad, but trying”? No, wait – this isn’t working.

I need to break it down, I got lucky with the incel one, that was easy and intuitive, and a huge part of the puzzle I have assigned myself in life is that we are tricky, it’s not intuitive, not for us, the objects of the game. What is intuitive to us is what I’m trying to cure, not what I’m following, like the EP boys, like the whole white world in such terrifying times.

We tend to intuit the need for a fight and naught else, and contrary to increasingly popular belief, that is the problem, not the adjectival solution.

So what is that format?

Starts with what – conflicted statement? Closeted is gay but can’t be? That seems to work for incel, incel is sexually active but can’t be, I suppose. So what is our opening line, our premise? – moral premise, I think that’s close – ah. “We are good but can’t be,” isn’t it. Perhaps in reverse, “we are bad but don’t want to be?”

It has the conflict, at least.

The second line, the first response, what is that, an objection? A clarification – conflicted statements mean something, closeted means gay, incel means, uh, blocked? So, “don’t want to be bad but are, try to be good but failing . . . I think the clarification/complaint is “So you’re bad,” isn’t it?

I feel like I’ve gone too far, like that was more than I was looking for! But I suppose this is only a thought experiment, I’ll be a good little scientist, hold my nose and run the experiment anyway. Ouch, though. So what do we call the third line, counter-argument, counter clarification? What could it be? Is it “Shut up, don’t say that, we have to try?” OK, maybe not so hard. Is it “Why would I say that? We have to try?”

Line four is the second objection/clarification? “You said you failed, you said it’s impossible!”

“Whoa, whoa! Easy there, Buddy!”

Well, I’m disappointed, it seemed too easy, it doesn’t seem right, surely there is more to it and I am closing the box and running away early. The only problem with that theory is it all sounds true. What I’ve left out of course, is that I am the better premise, and antisocialization theory won’t leave you in the hopeless mess we’re all in here, that this premise we live in is insoluble.

Jeff

Sept. 17th., 2021

Invader’s Lament

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

To what degree are we simply homeless, the exiled children of convicts and prostitutes? We are not agents of jolly old England, not anymore, and they don’t want us back now anymore than they wanted our les misérables grandparents then. It may be noted that most of our colonizer ancestors were simply dropped off, while the ship captains and the generals and admirals kept their old world permanent addresses.

Of course our behaviour has been appalling.

It could have been the Thanksgiving Day fantasy, in fact they say it was, for a time, and surely there has been some peace interspersed with all the overwhelming violence of the ongoing genocide all along. Past is past, we like to say, except it isn’t. I am concerned with my own illegitimacy, my own moral homelessness, placelessness, as well as the enforced placelessness of the Turtle Island People, today.

The past is only past if you change; that’s why it never really is, because we never really do.

I never thought of getting a job and buying a house as me taking a place for myself, or taking it from anyone, but it is, we have no place and must take one, make a place for ourselves, I mean we think we do, we believe we do to the point that we accept paying most of our money for a tiny plot for our whole lives. Privilege is that I never really had to fight anyone for it, never had to put it on the line, I just had to show up for work.

Of course, in reality, that’s a fight, in reality if anyone is drowning and anyone else can simply go to work and purchase floatation, then that is one big fight, with winners and losers, and I tell you, I feel the pressure, and I feel the guilt of the wins I had, and I don’t want this whole deal, where I pay all my life’s wages to the bank, and so I don’t have to fight – but there’s still a fight? I have to pay and kill, or pay for the new killing? Even as a relative winner, I’m unhappy, insecure, morally compromised, and these bon bons and cakes are giving me heart disease. Please make it stop!

Who is happy?

I mean, I know there are rich, dominant people, and I know I’m one, and well, stated above, I’m not happy. And don’t the richest, most powerful bastards seem angry and miserable? Who is happy? If the richest and worst of the invaders are so upset that they sound like they’re getting ready to kill everyone, they must not be happy. No?

So if the winners are pissed, the architects and owners of it all are murderously unhappy, who is happy? Can we just bloody stop? Who are we serving? Can we just stop feeding the misery machine? This invasion has been going on for five hundred years now. White people found both coasts and their way to the middle hundreds of years ago. Who decided it should never end? Who decided it wouldn’t stop, ever?

Where is the upside? Who are the humans that are benefitting, what general good does conservatism conserve in a system the poor are sad and the rich are angry? Need I spell it out – where all beat their children, to acclimatize them to a life of endless conflict, rich and poor alike?

Can we stop?

Can we change the supposed goal?

Can we just pretend that we are all here now and just try to find a way to live?

I say this, because we look like we’re caught up in some mythology about a journey, or a saga of some sort, that there is always some other, less peaceful goal than simply deciding that we are in the present, the very middle of time, and simply settle in and do what it takes to carry on, for the kids. There is always some stupid vision of the future that we are screwing up the present for – and of course we colonizers are, of course that is our mythology, because our ancestors banished us for all time to this God-forsaken turtle shell where we do not belong. You know I mean that in a very pointed way; it’s “God-forsaken,” only because we do not belong here, because it is the place of our exile, “God-forsaken” for we invaders. I suppose it means placeless, mostly, God has forgotten you when he has given you no place to belong.

We are living on the run, perhaps the next undiscovered continent will be uninhabited and we can finally live the dream of peace. Of course, every clever even partial mystic has always said, that world is here the minute you choose to have it. We choose to keep it tied to the end of the stick to keep us slogging through the mud of the endless conflicts. One hates to eat the dessert, I mean, then it’s gone, I suppose? We prefer to think we can have peace one day, but fear to verify, to test the idea?

Because . . . ?

Again, because before we reach this future experiment, we have proven the matter forever, this could have been the place for it, the last place could have been the place for it. Because deep down, we know what I try to articulate, that we never do the thing that would be trying, we always slide towards a fight, and that is because the fight is the morality, the highest and lowest form of it and the harder we “fight for good,” the more we are forever fighting. Again, again, the answer is to simply stop.

We work way too hard, we are forever trying to fix things – hey, I approve, I am a repairman, and everything needs fixing, but it seems our only tool is an axe. It fixes some situations, too many trees, mostly, but it only hurts others and the harder you try, the more you wield it, the more stuff is going to need to be repaired. Put it down, pick up something you can build with . . . the axe is morality, our moral fight with ourselves. Full disclosure, in other stories I tell, our only tool is a club. Same, sort of.

The point is, all you have is an axe. Please stop “repairing” the clock, the clock being the super complex human being and its entire world.

I say “human morality,” when I say it, but the point is, it is further concentrated, laid more bare in the invader, in the European version, and honestly, it is a great mystery of my life, one I expect I can never truly know about, as to whether pre-contact Turtle Island people had a lot of punitive social control going on, if the average person was the same seething time bomb walking about as we are today, or were at home in Europe then. I’m curious to know if there was child abuse, if it was largely what Chagnon saw in the boys among the Yanomami, children sort of self-abusing one another into warriors.

I want to learn these things were not the case, that seems like it would be a positive thing to discover. I would very like what I see as human morality not to be a universal thing, and I have an unlikely dream that along with learning a sustainable lifestyle from the Indigenous, perhaps there is a sustainable human development to discover as well. It’s all one in the end. For first time readers, or if I haven’t been clear, what is statistically “normal” development for these humans we see today is abuse and the leveraging of an aggressive genesuite option.

I wish to start a rumour that there was ever another sort.

It’s like languages, when you only know one, you sort of don’t know what a language is, what the parts and structure are, and if we never postulate a different path of development, then we sort of don’t know what a path of development is. To bring it home, in line with the rest of the blogs, the one sort we half know we call Human Nature, and it’s my idea that it’s only one possible Nature of humans. Again, like language, it is the only one we know, and so the structure, the blank form for human development, is still something of a mystery.

You hear about it in the general terms, like I complained about in the previous ramble, it’s an interaction between an individual’s set of genes and the individual circumstances of their life history – and so maybe we don’t identify the huge things, just hide them among the general idea. But I digress, ha.

Just kidding, still digressing!

I saw a meme on Instagram from someone in Gabor Mate’s circle that said overexplaining yourself is a PTSD symptom, and fair enough. I feel I need to build the whole edifice.

Back to Earth again, the only sort we know is largely abuse to activate your warrior genes, and I’m saying the dominant society, the group who wins the war is the one more actively engaged in the abuse of its citizens and its children, the one with the more activated violence genes. Getting back to the pre-contact situation, I’m not clear that the Euros were fiercer or that they would have won if the microbes had not been on their side as well. Again though, as today – that is some abused, aggressive to the point of mental illness people who discover this immunity disparity and use it, or engage in secondary extinctions, exterminations of the bison to aid their genocide.

I don’t think there is any evidence to say the Turtle Island people would have done that if they could have, sent a deadly Turtle Island bug to wipe out Old World people? I think the whole sad nightmare describes the near end and end of peoples who if they thought that way it would have been a very different story. Europe never would have gotten a foothold, maybe. No Thanksgiving Day if the Turtle Island people had been such Art of War hard cases.

I don’t know. Hyperbole, maybe. I’m desperate to think that some children somewhere, at some point in time were not abused into hyper-aggression. If this title attracts any Indigenous scholars with ideas about pre-contact childhood, I’d love to hear it.

Colonization is a system of abuse, absolutely, but it’s not exactly an orphan in our tree of ideas that way, is it? Aren’t they all. Of course, brown people the world over are at the very bottom tier to we invaders, whose entire society is what I have described as a champagne fountain of abuse, we all have a full load already, but it just keeps coming from above and we pass it on to the vessels below. The bottom layer holds it all up and takes it from every level.

No-one is happy, though.

Happy people don’t need to do what you need to do to get or stay rich – those miserable bastards are lying. I know it’s an extreme example, but the second in command in America recently had to run for his life and publicly thank the man who ordered him strung up! I suppose he’s “happy” they missed him. Those Masters of the Universe, they’re not happy. They live among bloody killers and sociopaths, for starters. I can say a lot of words about it, I stupidly think I can explain it to you – but honestly, I fail to see what they are protecting, this system we live in where none are happy.

We take it, we live this way, afraid if we don’t it will be worse, it’s some game theory rubbish, and yes, of course I know why that is, it’s because our only tech for people is the axe, the punitive abuse, meaning “making things worse,” it’s how we make everyone do everything, of course the worry is they are going to make it worse. What else is there?

If I weren’t simply crazy and any of this were true, how could anyone be happy?

It’s my point in all these things that yes, there is a disparity, some are less happy than others, some win the fights and some die in misery – but, as the Buddha said, I suppose – it’s all misery, I mean it all runs on misery, misery is the currency, the causative thing, and it’s, oh let’s use a modern term, it’s the great capitalist lie that anyone is able to purchase happiness with it.

I swear, there is a way, if anyone wanted to know.

Jeff

Mystery Stew

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

It’s like y’all are basically happy with the dish we are, with the human stew as it is, and you just think it needs a little more of something, a pinch of empathy, some sugar to counter the salt or something.

Everything we do, everything we try looks like this to me, just add some good to the mix. Ah, OMG, I didn’t want to be topical but it’s exactly like the social media response to voter suppression: vote! – uh, they are canceling the votes, and same with this, they take the good things, cancel the good things, destroy the good things, we are “adding a little good”- more “good” votes – to an ocean of bad that we also create.

All your liberal/progressive ideas, sure, all terrific ideas – you gonna implement them at the same time as you keep cranking out criminals and soldiers, keep beating your children and imprisoning your depressed addicts? While you keep selling your neighbors the cheap plastic (petroleum) made crap that they have to buy again every year and send the broken and used stuff back to Asia or Africa to poison the world poor folks first?

I mean, I say ten times a day, the human nature myth says we are made evil and so anything that makes us evil, anything that breaks us to the bad side is obscured, neutered of it’s causative power, and that our human life is primarily concerned with this effort, that this is our social control, to break every human to the bad side, despite that this isn’t conscious, that we all seem to believe we are trying to make ourselves better, not worse, despite the world of evidence. Then again, the human nature myth derails the question and says, all that evidence is simply evidence of the evil that was already there. Apparently, the social controls simply fails, and our original condition rules and we spend our lives in the effort for naught, but still, all day we spend on the effort, despite we say all day it “does nothing,” you can’t fight human nature.

But this all day unconscious effort, it is a world of bad, and you cannot “make the world a better place” by ignoring it and just doing some random kindnesses. It’s all for naught. There are not enough small kindnesses in the world to get us to where we do ourselves more good than harm. Humanity will forever be a turnip soup – I hate turnips – despite your seasonings, if we keep putting turnips in it, is what I’m trying to say, and we are, constantly. Social control is a turnip, it’s supposed to be good for you and you’re only supposed to notice the trace elements, the spices.

Life is complicated, I mean over-complicated, infinitely complex, so clearly so that we all soon come to know we can never grasp all of it, or even a meaningful fraction of it . . . yeah, sorry, I don’t do rhetorical.

Are we so sure about that, I mean, is that global fact perhaps covering something, inducing apathy where perhaps we could find work to do? I’m very caught up in today’s politics, and this is like saying, “just because there will always be problems and poor people, does that mean we can’t feed this person at our door right now?” I’m saying how much of it is an infinite world beyond our grasp, and how much of it is that this infinite world of mystery is where we put stuff we don’t want to see, perhaps big things, things that are most of it, perhaps everything in the pile of what we all don’t know isn’t the same size?

I mean, that is often people’s last defence if they are faced with my thesis, is that nobody has the answers (in a conversation that starts with me saying ‘here’s the answer’), and this is the rationale, this is why my truth is not truth, because everyone knows there is no truth, so it couldn’t be, and there is no point learning or addressing the argument.

Ah, I’m sorry. I presented it like a rhetorical question, didn’t I, ‘are we gaslighting ourselves.’ It was a dirty trick, and I still don’t do rhetorical, of course this is me telling you that is exactly my experience of it, exactly what I have learned by just having a look at the unknowable anyway, because you never know and also because my personal life has taught me to trust but verify.

It’s a good policy, a good anti-gaslighting measure.

It’s how you find out it’s practically all turnips.

Jeff

Aug. 29th., 2021

A Moral Basis

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Good and bad, right and wrong, it’s meaningless, isn’t it. Good for what, wrong for what, of course? The generalized, overarching Good and Bad – these are good and bad for something, and all morality is a circle, its “immoral” because it’s wrong and wrong because it’s immoral, and just like the more immediate social debates today, there is no talk of what it’s wrong for. We’re all supposed to know – or rather, we’re all to pretend we know, and enforce this half concept upon one another: be good! For . . . you know, good. The folks the Left call “liberals” should perhaps feel their ears burning especially here.

For my purposes, good and right mean truth and peace, OK? Flip side, wrong and bad mean lies and violence – let’s say war. Conflict. OK?

When Jeff says “bad,” he means war and conflict. Bad things bring conflict, good things bring peace. I know, we all know this – oh no we do not. We think we do, sure.

When your brain does its thing, it doesn’t function in English, no more than your computer does, so “good things bring peace, we all know this,” is exactly the same meme as “your kids aren’t supposed to be hurting each other, so you must teach them right from wrong (by whatever expedient means).” The peace is lost in the second iteration, where we somehow transpose the equation into “whatever stops the misbehaviour is good.” I know.

Every theory, be it science or pseudoscience or straight up crackpottery, every single theory, every idea that purports to change the world has some part of the equation that doesn’t quite work, some part of the story we’re all supposed to understand and agree with for no apparent reason. This is my fatal flaw right here, and the above childrearing example is only that, an example at best and really, only one attempt to express my insight that we have redefined some possibly objectively bad things as “good things.” I say possibly objectively, but I have already stated my bias: good things bring peace.

Perhaps none of us have the perspective to judge this more objectively than that anyway. Within my scope here, though, it’s that we have redefined some bad things as good things, meaning we have decided that some of the things that bring conflict are “good things,” somehow, such as the above parental intervention, in the event that the parent wound up getting physical, tried to do something aversive. In these cases, I do declayuh, even if “successful,” the resultant peace is illusory, and on the whole, the net effect is to promote conflict, and I invoke psychology to support the point.

In bad times, in fascist times, it is all taken to its illogical extremes, that this sort of conflict enhancing “good” law and order are increased exponentially, and not only are the authorities increasingly rough in their suppressive punishments for “bad things,” crimes, but as though to make my point for me, calls for peace and non-violence, such as the Black Lives Matter protests become punishable crimes. In such times, we go from “some little bad – policing, spanking – for the greater good,” to “only the bad is good,” meaning only the violent “punishments” are good, and apparently asking for peace and non-violence is somehow bad and punishable with good old rubber bullets. The moral line shifts, because, as I began this thing, the moral line, in our world, is attached to nothing, only the disembodied, ephemeral “good” and “bad,” and what constitutes it comes and goes, pushed about by our unconscious internal climate and weather and worse.

It needs to be good for a reason – I propose my reason, that peace is promoted, from a psychological viewpoint – and bad for a reason, that conflict and war are promoted, which, as we see, easier to see in such times, our moral institutions are not only not stopping conflicts but as many say, creating them. The supposed good we get from them and from our conformity, obedience, the appearance of order is not peace, but rather a never-ending condition of war, forever won and forever lost and the spots of peace we ever seem to have are enforced by a sort of social martial law. I am trying hard not to use my usual buzzwords, but we have the institutions, the churches, the criminal justice system, some public education and still we live in a state of war and conflict, within and without our nation states, so they are either not working, or peace is not really what they are for, not really what they get us.

For context, European church and government in Canada are presently covering up the ongoing genocide of the Turtle Island peoples. These institutions carry war, not peace. Law and Order, of course – not peace, never peace.

So, let’s all just agree on my definition of morality here, that what is right and good is what pacifies, instead of the exact opposite of it, maybe abandon all our institutions – and everything will be fine, OK? We are on the cusp, but we are totally looking the wrong direction, as always, carrying war.

Jeff, updated

Aug. 18th., 2021

Never Forgetting

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Proposition: the “good” people assume good things will come, good things will happen, that people try to be good, that of course good is the direction we are going, because of course no-one wants to be bad, and the good people are simply wrong, that what we do doesn’t take us in the “good” direction at all.

“Always remember,” and “never forget” – these are predicated on this reversal – and look who remembers, look who won’t forget.

We say “always remember,” on this idea, that if we “remember,” we won’t do it again, because of course no-one wanted to do that, we want to be good! Right? We say “always remember,” ostensibly to stop the next iteration of the death wish – and then we beat our children, to make sure they’re good, make sure they “always remember” about violence.

All the same things are in place, all the competition and inequality is all still there, people are still motivated as they have ever been – why would “never forgetting” all the eternal inherent conflicts of human life change anything – again, it only does if we are making moral progress. It only makes any sense if the holocaust and all pogroms and wars were accidents that happened because people simply “didn’t know better then,” or just what, forgot how to live in peace, if it was a memory problem or a learning problem in the first place?

If it were a passive accident of forgetting to start with.

What a fully blind, idiot child’s idea that is. Come on. Sorry, God, I forgot not to mass murder, like Steve Martin, I forgot mass murder was a crime? But I’ll remember this time! Never forget!

There’s supposed to be a learning that you don’t forget, isn’t there? Did we find a solution last time, did we learn, and that’s what we’re never to forget? Remind me – what was it again? Don’t follow the thug who will kill your family if you don’t? Did we learn that one? WTF. I see swastikas, I see Hitler’s cursed haircut – it worked. They remembered.

Humanity talks shit.

Your peace talk is shit. Your war talk is science, takes math to hit a target – and your peace talk is blind fucking fantasyland, you are not even trying. At all. You put peace in a box labelled “fantasy,” and then say “always remember.” Then you ritually beat your children, tell them it’s “good,” and lie to one another about “remembering” not to do that again.

When did folks start talking about not beating kids? I suppose there were always a few, the Quakers, they say, like that, but I suppose it’s been at least my whole life, at least one human lifetime, maybe two since psychology started tiptoeing around that. And it’s the same, just talk. I’m an oddball, on some spectrum, I suppose, my life is an endless series of misunderstandings because I take things literally and seriously and I seriously tried to not use force on my kids. No-one understood, and the ex simply forced them behind my back, nothing worked out – but the ex and everybody else, they “always remember” their own abuse. And it helps their kids not at all, they “remember,” and they repeat. Is that what you mean to do about the holocaust?

Look at these millions of deaths. Now – never forget!

Just the trauma. No lesson. No answer to the problem. Look and remember. And again, they fucking did, because humanity is not automatically naturally good. It’s not that we’re automatically naturally bad either, this false binary that we all accept is bullshit. What looks “natural” about us to you? We are unnaturally bad. That is the lesson, the only lesson, the opposite of humanity’s denial and blindness.

I swear to God – forget, already.

Stop “remembering” and bloody well learn something new, for God and humanity’s sake. “Something new” – again, more than one human lifetime ago, psychology noticed that abuse damages people, like before Hitler was born, maybe. Learn that, and then always remember and never forget that, then maybe we’ll see an end to it.

Jeff

July 19th., 2021

The Progress Meme

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Proposition: the “progress” meme suggests that all bad things are aboriginal to us all, in all of our pasts, and so natural, evolved, and to be expected, while only the latest fashions are “good” and “moral.” In this way, perhaps the concept annihilates itself, by placing all bad things in “nature” and making all good things “artificial.”

Someone on Twitter expressed how sad it was to ponder all the closeted people of the past with never a glimpse of freedom of sexuality – my words – and absolutely, but this view is a little like history is only the history of our colonies, sad to ponder anyone around here for the last few hundred years, certainly – but there have also been times and places, even now, where they would cry for us. But then, the view expressed wasn’t unheard of, that it’s sort of a binary, present good, past bad.

The progress meme, right?

I’ve been chasing this idea all my stupid life!

Suddenly strikes me as fascist propaganda, this awful, bigoted past – when it is only lately, a hundred or two years that this brutal, near global conformism has been doing this, thinking it has to kill practically everyone. Isn’t the present nightmare all of more relevant, salient, and right in front of our faces?

Right? But, to the point, wouldn’t these Nazi sorts want you to think that about the past? That hating you is natural and forever? Normal? Even if it’s a few thousand years, all of Bible times, all of history or something – that’s still all modern propaganda more than it is “nature,” is what I’m saying.

If the concept includes its opposite, and most do, if as I’m trying to say here, “progress” must be predicated on an awful, “natural” past and so destroys itself, reinforcing the validity of the awfulness as “natural,” maybe even evolved – then that is the entire point. The point after that is that if the concept has all that, logically and inherently – then you bloody well know it too. Your brain does. The harder we scream “progress” at ourselves the louder our brains hear “the bad things are natural.” We only talk about the side of things we can or want to – but your brain knows everything, the totality of all the concepts. Right?

Philosophers? Right?

 . . . where this is heading: the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he exists. Right? “Awful is natural,” you can hear the fictional bastard whispering it; I mean, your brain can.

I am quite certain this wheel has already been invented, I expect it’s well known that the toxic manifest destiny grows out of something like “progress,” be it only their vapid Christian “spiritual” progress. But this is not the point, what we think of others, what thoughts “progress” produces about other peoples, but the thoughts that the progress meme engenders regarding ourselves. The very suite of “progress” ideas that makes the Indigenous less than human to some people allows those same people the “lapse” into ancient, brutal war behaviours themselves.

Well, again, this is the totality, the dark side of the concept, so to everyone caught in the progress meme – well again, not to everyone perhaps, until we look – but to all of our brains. The status quo lives in this function, somehow. It’s already in your brain, so it’s not as shocking as it seems it ought to be, perhaps.

I am going to need some time to integrate this idea, the progress meme has ruled my life, and now I see it’s what ironically let’s us never change and grow and clearly we need to stop thinking about futures and destinations and goals and just settle down and try to live as though this might really be it, all there is.

Jeff

June 26th., 2021