victims

AST and the Cause

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I need to place us in context. When you talk about the medical model, the school model, I’m melting down. Those models are the parenting model, and abuse is the social model, the parenting model. Everyone needs to be anti-spanking, anti-punishment or things don’t change for anyone. Spanking is abuser-making, and acceptance can be difficult for the hurt. We must be allies to all children, even to the children of the masters of the universe, or we simply grow a new crop of abusers.

We are not the only group who is abused, many groups are abused, and all appeal to be exempted from the flood of abuse, I mean, rightly so, of course.

But this is not our problem – wait.

I mean, we didn’t make this problem.

It may indeed be our problem to solve – that’s one theory, right, that the diversity of the human brain is the adaptability of the human species, that it is some divergent mind that is always finding the new way forward. In that sense, perhaps this is indeed our job to solve it – but still, the problem isn’t part of us. It is very much part of general society, isn’t it? There is some dominant group, always, and all smaller groups get the smelly end, always, right?

Isn’t that the real problem?

Honestly, I have always felt it was my problem to solve, see something, say something, and I seem to be the only one who sees it. Again, it may indeed be autistic people’s problem to solve, and . . . and I’m sorry. I diverge from the divergent too, I guess. It seems unpopular to imagine a larger problem, I mean, that makes some sense,  the Cause is already an umbrella, it is the whole conversation for its members, of course. I’m sorry. The universe is an onion, and the layers are connected. If the conversation ends somewhere, that line isn’t real and true, it’s a social construction at best. The universe and life do not stay in-category.

Meaning, you can’t really speak the truth when you must “stay on topic.” If we abused ourselves, we would be the topic, not the case, or not the relevant case, we seem to be the topic when we are not the problem here, every group does. Again, we are not the only abused group.

I spent my life on the attempt to understand this larger, all-group problem. I knew I was odd, I just thought I was clever and lucky, I had an insight, a gift or a curse of some kind. I had done it, pretty much had my understanding of the problem before I had a child get diagnosed ASD and then it started to sink in about me. But not before I gave myself a rare, autistic level understanding of abuse and the mythical Human Nature. It’s been a good theory, things get clearer, more things get explained – finding out I’m autistic hardly hurts it, it’s that good. Worried me for a bit there, I admit.

It’s an answer to “why the abuse?” the question every group, and frankly every person asks but only rhetorically – really, no-one is surprised. That’s the Human Nature myth: no matter how badly they behave, no explanation is really required. ABA torture of children? Meh, dumb doctors. No reason! They just don’t know any better, and when people don’t know, of course they torture children! This is the explanatory power of Human Nature, no horror is “unnatural.” Of course.

The answer is punishment turns bad to good.

They think it’s good, threats and force, they think when their children survive it and go off to war, looking for strangers to kill, that this is “good.”

It’s what “punishment” means, bad is good, a deterrent is magic that turns bad abuse to good . . . good what? Teaching? – but it colours all identical looking abuse forever. Wars are advertised to “teach them a lesson.” The NRA tried to bring the primary schoolers’ behaviour into their defense about Newtown. Not kidding. The bad guys already know what I try to tell the libchallengeds, that we have already bought the false principle and can therefore buy it in almost any sick form whatsoever.

Not kidding.

I want us all to remember, we are asking for an end to our abuse – and their entire system is abuse, they do it to their own children on the regular. We are never going to reach smug happy abuse survivors that their abuse is a problem, they are proud of how strong it has made them – strong means mean. Aggressive and insensitive. Your “problem” is their one size fits all solution, discipline and strength, and here’s the rub – we have to stop them doing it to themselves first, or they are never going to hear anyone.

I climb the walls listening to people speak as if the abuse happens by accident, and people only have to be told. It is our entire system. It is going to take more than a leaflet campaign.

We want to do this not just to save ourselves, but everyone. The ways that we want to teach, the ways of treating us and dealing with us, people need to learn that for everyone, and that means understanding that the bad stuff happens from error and will, not by accident or automatically – and not because of anything about us as a group, but because it is the forever policy of mainstream human society. The magical Human Nature ends all inquiry, and if we are not allowed to question why the abuse, then we are not being effective, we are simply pulling babies out of the river and not minding that society throws all of its babies in the river and more importantly, not stopping it.

I’m autistic and I know it now – but spanking is still the First Cause of all human problems. It is our job to fix it, perhaps, because the abuse fails to convert the same number of the ND to its cause than it does the rest of the world, and that immunity is our superpower, maybe.

Jeff

May 2nd., 2022

Redefinitions 11 – AST VS Popular Memes, Racism

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 11. Racism

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Racism”

Honestly, see the above.

I see Critical Race Theory as a subset of Antisocialization Theory, I see racial violence and inequity as antisocialized people seeking an outlet among an out-group, and although there has been some peace and multiculturalism here and then, it has mostly been a fairly safe bet to take it out on an obvious, visible Other.

Racism is AST, it is earning a load of bad feelings among “our own” people, family, work, social structures and burdens, and designating some visible Other as a legitimate target upon which to unload them. This dynamic is real, rather biological in that it is driven by pain, and it doesn’t matter as much as we hope it does if a somewhat tortured person is educated; they still need an outlet when put under pressure. Why would an education help that?

It’s not education that makes people racist either, people put upon and abused don’t need to be told, they will actively seek a legitimate target. The liberals think the parents teach it, they may, but they don’t have to, all they have to do is abuse, and racism is sort of automatic. Violence becomes automatic, and race signals “other” to an angry mind.

Of course, in the way that CRT is anathema to racists, so too is AST to everyone.

In the good cop/bad cop analogy, the good cop (Mom, to the cis?) spanks the kids to teach you manners and to not break things and such and the bad cop (Dad, to the cis) may admit violence doesn’t teach etiquette but tells you the secret: it makes you strong. I agree: strong enough to start patrolling your borders, looking for trouble. Strong enough to hold a charge. If you’re too “strong,” though, if you can’t hold it in until the next war, there are always wars at home, crimes to do, racism to perpetrate. Many of the strongest spend time in prison.

When you’re just right, the Goldilocks effect, you wait for the war. When you’re just right, perfectly antisocial, your deflective violence happens in broad daylight and your peers love you. You’re a stand up guy, for the criminal gang that is “your people.” You “support the troops.” And the cops. That’s AST.

 If AST is what drives us to war, then CRT is the always war at home. I assume the racists have it harder at home, they can’t hold it in and their war never ends. CRT is mostly that there are ways for racists to deflect on both sides of the law, some go to prison, some run the prisons, overly antisocialized, pushed too far, and melting down in public, to cheers for their antisocial policies. Isn’t he strong.

There’s a war on, don’t you feel.

Jeff

May 1st., 2022

Redefinitions 2 – AST vs Popular Memes, Social Life

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 2. Social Life

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of Conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of Conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST “Social Life”

On the one hand, I am a contrarian and everything rings wrong to me, and no-one will say the thing I try to debunk, things unsaid are more difficult to disprove. In this light, knowing it’s weak at this stage of our lessons, I say: we think “social,” means the positive thing, perhaps “prosocial.” It’s the generic word, it encompasses all things, prosocial things, antisocial things, and neutral things, I suppose, asocial stuff, but you might not pick that up in casual conversation.

Antisocial is a problem, prosocial is rarely spoken, we use “social,” for that, social, in it’s street level, social sort of use and meaning, means positive interaction, our social world is our community, friends and family, like that. Being social is interchangeable with being sociable, generally. Again, it is always my sense, my interpretation of a social meme that I am forever trying to critique, and I lose everyone right there, I think, no-one will take the responsibility for a conflation like this, not enough to defend it, and certainly no-one can promise to change such a vague thing.

Will you allow it, may I continue, making my case against “we think “social” is all good?”

LOL – it’s the court of the internet, silence indicates assent and I’m not listening, Princess Bride meme.

But there’s the dark side to being social, we are prosocial to our friends and antisocial to enemies and probably strangers. To “be social” is to draw the line and arrange people on one side of it or the other. It is to choose, to . . . loaded word, discriminate, meant literally and technically, generically, not the specific meaning today in our current conversations about racism and hate. The sorting function. I mean, it’s the thing, the same thing, the very thing, and if we could stop it all, we’d stop that too.

There is another conflation, a smaller one I need to mention, about the term, “social creature,” and variants. I think when we talk about the wildebeest or a herd animal, it means the positive thing, “social creature” for herds seems to mean they all get along, except you know, for the rut and whatnot. For us, it’s all of it, we are more properly a “group social” creature, perhaps, get along with some, in conflict with others. For the group social animal, “social,” means all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Cool?

We are having trouble separating things, our social life is structured with the group problems, structured around the situation, the conflict, and our lifestyle now requires the out-group, the enemy, and our best prosocial morality is predicated on an evil, antisocial Other. The movie trope is true: lacking a real enemy, like after Cyrus’ foes were all assimilated, not sure he did this, but we do – we create them, out of thin air. Every moral lesson needs a bad guy.

In this sense, it is AST’s position that our rough controls, the rules (threats) and punishments make us more antisocial, better adapted for a life of conflict. AST is ironic, or rather life without it is, in that the deterrents we apply to make us “good,” are weak, virtual things, while the threat and abuse of actual punishments make us “bad,” all day long, antisocial. I think the social consensus no-one has to defend is that yes, this is what we do, to be strong, to defend from other nations, yes, this means life and that is our foundation for our morality.

I get it.

But they tell the same story. Yours is a one-group morality and has zero control on war. Causes them all, in point of fact. Look how in its extreme versions, it shows up as a death cult instead.

There’s a genetic component, environmental control of genes that help in the event of an abusive environment, so called fighting genes or something similar. AST’s position is that we have hacked these genes, providing the environment to control the genetic choice – through discipline, through the ritualized abuse we call spanking.

This looks like a positive feedback loop to me, select a gene, activate it, select it again . . . which I worry is also the AST Theory of Conflict, that this feedback loop goes to thermal runaway in the world every ninety years or so. Ouch. Sorry.

Jeff

April 29th., 2022

Redefinitions 1 – AST vs Popular Memes, Human Nature

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc.

Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 1. Human Nature

AST, a Definition

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of Conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” – not an accident and not irony, this word choice, we are always seeing this – to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of Conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first entry:

AST and “Human Nature”

First – fooled ya, there’s no such thing, AST doesn’t have that. AST needs a reason that humans do bad things, while “human nature” would seem to state that no matter what horrors we perpetrate, no explanation is required: of course genocides. Whaddayamean, “why?” “Human Nature!”

“Natures,” – “essences,” aren’t a thing, not a meaningful actual thing. It’s a made up premise from thousands of years ago. I mean, sure it’s the foundation of all human society and law, but that doesn’t make it true, that’s just the twin fallacies of consensus and tradition. I have a speech about language and neural pathways, that your neural pathways don’t change every time you learn a new word, that mostly new words only re-label old paths – and “genetically determined” or “genetic legacy,” is the new label for “human nature,” which perhaps is a new label for Original Sin.

This function makes it hard to change. We know about things that grow and change, so we surely have a circuit to understand evolution, but I guess it’s not yet the superhighway the “human nature” one is? It’s hard to change, our thoughts want to use the main road or something.

“Genetic legacy,” is antithetical to evolution, it’s used where “human nature” would be used, when it’s time to say “that’s just the way it is,” – when evolution is supposed to mean nothing “is” the way it is for long, everything is becoming something and stopping being something else, ‘natures,’ and ‘determinations,’ are exactly not the point. An evolving creature doesn’t make excuses about what it “is,” it actively adapts, it reaches for the next thing to be. That’s what happens when a real creature adapts to actual reality.

It’s not so clear that’s us, I admit. But the false binary, formerly “human nature,” vs the blank slate is now presented as “genetics” vs the blank slate, and they have their proof, it’s not a blank slate, I get it, there are specific genetics in place – my answer is, yes, not blank, yes, an operating system – still not a “nature,” still not a static thing, still not an excuse! And there is environmental control of genetic options! Even if the genesuite was static (it’s not), are every one of its options “just the way it is?”

The language is not bad, but the thought isn’t up to it.

AST doesn’t need to bust the “natures” myth, Darwin did that, or he tried, we’re still trying. Like I say, change is hard. The problem is, it’s never busted, no-one loses it, “human nature” is our last idea, still there, underneath all of our education, the last stop as our minds trail off, faced with evil we cannot otherwise explain, “bah, human nature.” AST doesn’t stop at rhetorical roadblocks, AST has a rule, no “human nature.” You must explain the behaviour, with science, here on earth, no matter that it’s evil, of course, especially because it’s evil.

AST hates to make threats, but “human nature” seems to keep producing global violent meltdowns and insists there’s nothing for it, don’t even try. That myth is just going to let us kill everything, ourselves not least. You need AST. OK, that’s not enough to get anything, but that, I’m afraid that really is “just the way it is,” LOL.

More to come.

Jeff

April 28th., 2022

AST Genes

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AST is conversion therapy for NT people, and they all believe it will work for anything, because it does “work” for them – poor definition of “works,” as always, of course, but it does something for them, it sets those epigenetic options. For the NT, abuse is indeed a stimulus with a predictable (if misinterpreted and unconscious) result.

The ABA argument, it’s my argument about spanking and police, same for same, except complicated by the fact that the abuse does seem to “work” for the NT, to the NT. I worry that the ND seem to agree with the NT about that, that the NT’s system “works” for them, and only fails the divergent, and I am certain that this is not the case (or, again, that “works,” means something we could all live better without).

So now I’m thinking that AST is a behaviour and a genesuite, just one not everyone has, but it’s one that is self protective and self-propagating and seems destined to drift through the entire population rather than be selected out, a successful mutation. What do they call one that saturates, that leaves no organism untouched, I forget, is there a name for that? I worried AST was one such when I thought it was universal, before neurodivergence entered my mind and the equation, and now, perhaps I worry less, and it seems the whole world will end before this saturation would ever be reached anyhow. But no, AST perhaps doesn’t require saturation, it has a strategy for the “non-compliant” (sorry, horrible term, “their” term, AST’s term – I know, another three letter acronym’s term, ABA’s. I don’t say it as a cop or a nurse, AST’s “strategy,” not mine) already, same strategy it has for everything.

Not an endorsement.

Perhaps there is some room between, I keep coming up against this with AST, that I am describing something that is both “biological,” and “behavioural/cultural”, the space between, where these things interact, meaning not all common problematic genes drift to saturation, that in the space between random and universal, perhaps there is sometimes a control mechanism, even for a trait that violently imposes itself upon the world?

AST is the control.

I have said, it’s both, genes, and the environment, which, we control our environment, so “environment” is “behaviour” to AST, it is both, genes and behaviour, that it is in the behaviour . . . phase? Aspect? The behaving time, no, just in the behaviour, in the behaving that we get to attempt to exercise some free will and make adjustments. Ah, I guess it’s been some time since I’ve spelled this out for myself, but it was always the point of AST, that if we behave less violently, we will become less violent, if people generally get less rough with one another, with their kids mostly, the next generation will grow up less prone to violence. AST simply endeavors to prove the old adage that violence breeds violence and tries to make it matter to people – even your violence. Even your dear old mother’s violence breeds violence.

Is all this not contained in the phrase “there is environmental control of genes?” Imagine knowing this soundbite and ever saying again, “Bah. Human nature.” Folks are very compartmentalized.

I’m having this odd idea, all genes aren’t selfish, not as selfish, perhaps most are selfish in an enlightened, sustainable way, but that our fellow Dr. Dawkins has perhaps been reading mostly the AST genes, I mean, if he has managed to explain our unsustainable human ways with genes at all. I hate to throw out work, perhaps it only wants a bit of a tweak, and to be said from a different angle, in a different context. I’m having a lot of random thoughts as neurodivergence makes its way though my mind, into all the places – one just now, that if the AST genesuite is not present or available in the autistic, is it in there still anyway, inactive and not activatable – as some of that “junk DNA” we hear about? Is one individual’s junk maybe working in another? A known thing, in general DNA terms, I guess?

I suppose if AST is a genesuite, then the NT world will frame this as the divergent lacking something, but I assume they have searched for autistic genes and come up empty – I wonder if anyone has thought to turn the search over, look for the gene that makes the difference in the NT, my AST genes, which probably include things they have called “warrior alleles,” among an unknown number and types of others. Perhaps one or more of those sort of alleles that have been suggested could be viewed as markers for AST, correlations. Over my head, of course. That would be too easy and too clear, that is not real life in the world of genetics, I don’t think.

And anyway the point isn’t to find the evil gene and weed it out, the point is to stop activating it, and perhaps identifying something about these genes will help us see when we’ve managed to set the option the other way – but if we never learn any of the details and simply stop with the forever socialized abuse, stop intentionally choosing the bad option, that will solve the problem.

I only worry that it needs a gene to make people see it, some sort of proof from the microscope. Again, it’s obvious to this now obviously divergent mind, as soon as I learned of the environmental control of genes, having already had some insight about punishment and abuse being identical, there it was, I don’t know how humankind suspends their disbelief about it, but again, that’s the whole point, most folks don’t see the simple logic in it that I do, we are so different, you and I, we really are.

Jeff

April 11th., 2022

I suppose this is a continuation of this one, in the personal blog:

Late Boomer

The Definition of Horseshoe Theory Insanity

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First, the meme, the social media political version: that’s where Left and Right, in their extremes meet as authoritarian dictatorships, the idea is, you go too far Right, you get a dictatorship, you go too far Left, same thing, and they point for the Left ones, to China, and past Russia, which, apparently still and always a dictatorship, but today a far Right one? I guess they leapt the gap in the circle, the open end of the horseshoe?

I mean, I’ve been saying they did that straight away, at least with Stalin, I’ve had the stance that all dictatorships are far Right, that Right means authoritarian.

But that’s too simple, a bit of a leap for us, isn’t it?

And also, these nations would argue, and some still do call themselves communist, despite existing as hierarchies complete with leaders and police and such . . . so it’s better to say that Left or Right, antisocialization theory gets us all. It is more meaningful, it’s a thing we can move on with and build on, if we see that laws and punishments drive people towards conflict and war, whether the laws were drafted by communists “for the collective good,” or by capitalists, to “protect the powers and structures of civilization,” that it is not the particular ideology reflected in the law that does this, but rather the bludgeon behind law generally that does.

That the means do not justify the ideological end, that rather, this is a real, causative, scientific world where one thing leads to another and so the means create the end, of course, and the bludgeon of punishments always create the same ends: conflict, crime, police, war.

This is Horseshoe Theory: same bullshit, regardless of the ideology of the parent with the rolling pin or the cop with the baton, a beating is a beating is a beating.

I think, given the situation, that humans do this social control thing, that the beatings are not likely to stop soon, that the collective nations will slide to the Right, that the current Chinese communism is very different from Marx’s dream, I mean, I think the beatings create the situation here, I think no society can stay collective if folks are hurting each other, I suspect collectivism requires a rejection of antisocialization generally, we can’t have it both ways. So called “social control” controls one thing only, and results in the same thing, always: this human that you see now.

All the violent social control has already been applied, and this is you: look at the world. That’s what it does. East vs West, equally, identically at war, police everywhere.

There’s a meme, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” and I have one, same, I don’t know how to explain to you that the means are the ends, that the means make the ends, that you can’t simply apply one kind of means and ask for different ends, whatever ends you say.

I mean, I know you know it about golf, as a sports metaphor.

Jeff

March 22, 2022

Steal This Blog

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Don’t misrepresent me, I’ll spend my remaining years and my pension fighting you if you turn it around on me. I’ve had quite enough of that in real life, plus I live on the internet.

But represent me with something close to faithfulness, share me, quote me, plagiarise me, please! Mention my name, but honestly, if you want to impress someone and it might, if it helps – sure, tell them you invented the word ‘antisocialize.’ It would be like sock accounts and supportive bots, it will magnify the message.

Use my word, the more you think it, the more you see it, the more you say it, the more real things get. I mean, mention my name if they ask, but it’s not going to get you any points, I’m the smallest of nobodies, and I’m sorry for what happens if you mention my name to someone who happens to know me too! I’m best as nobody anyways.

I’m saying, Antisocialization Theory is free to the public, like insulin is supposed to be. I want to say “open source,” but I cannot, as near as I can tell no-one but the founder here understands the project and open sourcing will have it infected with “strength” instantly. The extreme curation must continue, as I say, twist my words with entirely normal social memes like strength and resilience and I will fight you to the end!

But if you get it, share it.

A socialist, in the broadest, most generic sense, a cooperative society must eschew strength, we must love the weak and the unable. Strength is division and conflict and Hell and my hashtag is #weaktogether. Strength is cruelty and morality is strength and it’s all gaslighting because in the end we know the result is far from any moral paradise, more like the reverse.

Human beings invented morality and in no time at all destroyed the world. “Strength” is what you need to do hard things, bad things. This is long perspective, with the details wiped away, thinking straight requires that, you have to compare the details against the whole – and the whole says your sacred strength is the cause of the disaster, not a prophylaxis, because nobody loves weakness and no-one is weak and the strong are doing all the work anyway, by scientific definition, work and force and strength are nearly synonymous.

Jeff

Dec. 6th., 2021

The Missing Word and Social Media

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It is exactly our social world that is conflict and groupness, I mean all the strife is not coming from the rational side of our house, is it? We really shouldn’t have this sort of media, it’s madness considering what real people do, certainly it’s crazy to let those people multiply their voice with bots. Morally, I really need not to be there, it’s a terrible compromising thing. I have all but given up that I can use my tiny voice to affect anything there (here . . . ) and what is keeping me there now is not the chance to help anything or anyone, but just that it’s the only place I get any human connection or interaction at all, I feel I must come to the evil meetings or wither and die  of loneliness.

I’m afraid social media is the car we will drive ourselves off the cliff in, and most folks won’t automatically know my reasoning, my complaint about it, because for that you need a word that isn’t in the dictionary and you’ve never been taught: antisocialization – antisocialize, as a verb. It means what it sounds like, ‘to make antisocial,’ and you’ve had to scramble a bit to complain, use a lot of single-emotion words, anger, embitter, sadden, perhaps ‘shut down,’ if that hasn’t gone the way of having ‘hang-ups’ yet! No-one has gathered those together under my heading, negative socialization, put the long way.

We talk about ‘socialization’ in a general, generic way usually, ‘all the things,’ and sometimes we hear ‘prosocialization,’ they have indeed created the umbrella term for the bright side of things.

But we have suppressed the verb for the dark side, and so set it free to do as it pleases.

For the dark side, we get nouns, ‘human nature.’ No verb is required, nothing makes us antisocial, right? Born that way, so relax, make yourself at home, have fun, hit somebody (Rickles, to Sinatra) – there is no word and so no crime for what it does to them on the inside.

Ouch. I can say it, I can think it – still hurts. Eesh. Writing is terrible, you see your own awful thoughts and you can give yourself gut-punches. Oof.

But the point of today’s rant/sermon is that there is also no word for what is so wrong that everybody does on social media and that is share the bad news and endlessly repeat examples of the disparity of the white supremacist society in America and Canada and the whole white world, we don’t all of us seem to get that it is all antisocializing, that bad news from good people is bad for you. That because this word and this function doesn’t exist in our society, we don’t seem to worry that all are antisocialized from the constant trauma and when the bad people pull a stunt specifically to antisocialize everyone (terrorism) that all the good folks spread the terror, we must all think people are already as bad as they can be or something.

Perhaps I would tweak other words’ meanings as well, we say ‘terrorism’ as the establishment’s way of labelling what the other side calls freedom-fighting, and antisocializing terrorism is different, maybe I don’t suppose it looks positive to anyone. I mean it all comes in the same package anyway, usually.

I’m not mad at y’all, it’s not your fault, it has been oh so carefully hidden from us this word, this function, this reality, starting with, stop me if you’ve heard this one – I hit him, but it doesn’t hurt him.

OK, stopping. I know you’ve heard it.

Because this function is dark in our lives, both sides of the political spectrum, inasmuch as there are two sides, which is debatable, both sides spread the trauma, albeit with different labels, the mad Right share the Rittenhouse verdict with glee and the normal folks (I can’t say “Left,” as they self-identify, I won’t propagate the myth of the Overton window) share it with disgust, and so there is no-one on social media who hasn’t experienced this crap news and repeatedly. One crows: see the supremacy and one cries, see the supremacy and for the life of me I cannot understand why we would share our losses as thoroughly as they share their wins, don’t we know that’s what the enemy does in war, broadcast your losses and fears at you, to break your spirit?

Don’t we know that we are apparently willingly providing a huge proportion of the “loud enough, often enough” part of the Nazi’s motto?

Again, I’m sorry – we sort of do, but antisocialization isn’t a thing, there isn’t the language. Everything about the human world tells us not to worry about that, everything tells us that we can’t ever be strong enough, and that’s the only word we give ourselves for the whole deal, the mindless Red Queen’s game of “strength.” “What doesn’t kill you,” right? Wrong.

They don’t broadcast that stuff at you in the trenches to make you stronger, and I have such a hard time with this – it’s science that it works the same when we do it, when Rachel Maddow does it, when your parent does it. Science, I tells ya. Rational world stuff, I swear to God.

Why not?

So stop, don’t hate share, don’t “warn” each other like the enemy loudspeakers do. If you have something helpful and must reference some awful thing from the other side, describe it yourself, use your own words – much of what is outrageous and makes us want to hate share has been carefully psychologically engineered, worded just so. Don’t help them spread those bullets. Use your own words. Acknowledge the losses once, try to learn, and then stop and move on, please.

But then, I’m just different, I suppose, and doomed to simply blowing against the wind forever.

Jeff

Nov. 27th., 2021

A Place, and a Place to Talk

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The commons, limits on private ownership, especially of media, land, air, and water

If a place is not my place, if the land is not for me, if I can’t have water, all this because it is someone else’s place, what has gone wrong? If people with places feel OK about it, if that seems normal, if having a place seems like the normal human condition – well, I’m human! Or I was until something cost me my home. Generally, some disaster happened, natural disasters sometimes, human ones more often, even if it is merely that we have too many children for our land to support and we ourselves force our children off it like any stranger. I haven’t actually done that; it sounds awful. I got the boot twice instead, long story, but usually, in my comfortable white life, people at least can help their kids get set up when we do it, or they don’t fully migrate and can stay in touch.

I mean, it is “normal” to occupy and defend land, so humans all do that, or it isn’t. Kids don’t get it, don’t expect it, that they would be born homeless and what seems to be the normal human existence would be denied to them, and this is my point, my theme today – aren’t they right not to get that? If we think having a place is normal, then they are correct and there is something wrong.

And shouldn’t we, instead of forcing a counterintuitive unreality upon the world forever, simply work to make it that way, more that way? We absolutely should be working to make the world into what a happy child naturally expects! What a kid naturally thinks – that is our evolution and our genes talking. We naturally think what we have naturally evolved to think.  It’s true for a crocodile or a cow or a row of corn. Isn’t that the environmental principle, you have to have what nature made you have to have? When you build a zoo, you have to provide what the creature’s evolution has made it need, you don’t argue with that and expect success.

For the record, we totally argue with that regarding ourselves, and our success is debatable. We can do things other creatures can’t – on the other hand, we do things that other creatures don’t do for good and evolved reasons.

If a young child can see what’s right, how can a whole world of adults not?

Wait, there is a failing here, a tendency I need to check, this sounds like every person always had a place until, I don’t know, some level of recently, and that may be a myth, placelessness may be as old as humanity also . . . I mean, that’s why I said “if,” I suppose, if you think having a place is normal, then it’s up to you if this conjecture is on track or not, I guess. Full disclosure, I think it’s popular to think and say, that the normal, aboriginal human condition includes having a place. I think I’ll get away with it, proven or not. Most of us want a place, certainly landowners will tell us it’s normal, and territoriality is not strange or unusual, not only with us. Territory is food and water.

I’m not saying I have an answer, but we should be trying to create a world that matches our organism, shouldn’t we, is this not obvious? We are working hard and apparently consciously to “overcome” something – what?

The food chain? Life?

If it’s normal and acceptable that humans have a place, if adults think so, if children are born expecting it, then private ownership is a newer thing than our evolution. If you expected a place to live – then our evolution was socialist, wasn’t it? Is this irony? The rich, entitled man, university educated, certain that his land is his and no-one else’s, this is my proof: evolution made us socialist, because he feels like having a place is all right and proper, perfectly acceptable.

I am capable in my contrarianism to turn anything in the world of illusion on its head. If we find a decent principle, we can audit our modern madness some. Did I not just prove that most our history and prehistory must have been more socialist and less competitive than the mainstream position has it?

No secret, I believe what we call human nature is particular to us – but nature it is not. The entire human deal is that we have learned how to do and be unnatural, isn’t it? Not asking, teaching. If I put the book together, the working title is Human Unnature. What we reference when we say “human nature” about something regrettable is our new, manufactured self, our socially engineered selves who overcame what was natural.

I haven’t nailed it all down yet, but it seems to be the human dream and the human magic to do just this, to be “free” of environmental constraints . It puts me in mind of a current events story, a zookeeper has lost an alligator and he feels the animal was old and unhealthy and extremely unlikely to survive on its own, he’s very worried. But the beast is “free,” it must have wanted to be – and this seems to me to be us all over, we are Icarus – Icarian, do we say that? I guess so, Word doesn’t mind – why would you want to be free of the Earth, the only place there is?

If I am read at all, you know, I think the ability to have your place and your water and deny the dispossessed it all is created through abuse and its desensitization. Not under any illusion that I’ve proven the matter – yet! – but I don’t hold our aggression and our tendency to violence as naïve or intuitive, I think it’s part of the unnature. If not for that, we would be trying to match our world to our evolved selves, naturally and obviously, as the indigenous the world over have been trying to do. Of course, with land goes everything, water as we’ve said, game, resources, fuel. I don’t have to pull the idea of the commons from anywhere on myself, it’s very well developed, despite that it’s been losing the battle for a long time.

It’s not news that the air waves are a part of the commons either, and they were partitioned and regulated as such for their first hundred years or so . . . but issues of private ownership haven’t gone away, or they’re back.

It seems so unbelievably obvious and clear in the case of social media, that it is a talking space and should be free to all, would this not be your intuition also? Same as land, above – isn’t it normal, doesn’t every human expect to have a talking space, like around the fire, like in the Great Hall? Granted, the campfire, the Longhouse was a small space, and largely just for the extended family group a lot of the time, a world of strangers listening, arguing and threatening in that space is new and strange, I guess. But even after I’ve blocked everybody Right of Gandhi and used all my privacy settings, there are still some site owners’ rules about what I can say to my friends and family and I have to worry about who that is and what they’re up to.

I mean, you couldn’t plan a coup in the Great Hall, authority is always listening, fully free speech is a unicorn, a perfect vacuum  – but again, authority listening, I’m used to that, and ostensibly, we’re supposed to have some kind of group rule. “Authority” is supposed to be something of a consensus – but the private owners of the social media sites? While I’ve been censured a few times for angry speech online, policed on the privately owned Twitter, entire other sites are full of the most dreadful hate, so where is the law? If my speech is harmful, who decides, Jack of Twitter, while private rich person Jack does nothing to police Reddit or Parler? Or God knows what straight up German Nazi named sites there are?

I think the talking space belongs to the people or the king, the government. It sure as Hell shouldn’t be owned and policed by individuals. Commons. I mean, I’m not sure there is a solution for the disaster that is social media, I’m only sure that it is weird and wrong that we should have to go to some rich person’s house to talk and do it however they say we should, and after that, there are sites where the owner allows the worst of everything. Fair to say, they are not curating the public talking space safely.

We surely did not allow talk in the longhouse to descend into blows every time, there is supposed to be a sense of community and good will in the talking space. Bothering me right now, that surely, we hype ourselves up for war in the Great Hall, in our group’s private talking spaces. I’m not sure social hate is a thing we have ever been able to constrain, again, as humans, raised on pain and threat. Again, there is everything wrong with social media, everything that is wrong with people with a thousand watt Marshall, I’m certainly not anyone to re-engineer that madness safely. And, generally, I do not find solutions for individual aspects of our human problems, I don’t see solving one miserable rough thing while a million other miserable rough things go on, it all has to move together, as Pinker would cheer us up that it is doing already.

I think we’ve missed it, the Earth will die and all the bad things happen if we only become conscious at the rate we have been, even if Steven is right.

So, it’s a world sized Gordian knot and it all has to loosen at once, and here I am saying, it all moves with spanking and abuse. Less hurt people will find solutions that destroyed children like us are unable to. Still, maybe late with this. Honestly, my hope is that someone finds my blog afterwards, like when he finds the statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes, and we make a better start.

Jeff

June 7th., 2021

A Loving God

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I’m sure one or several of the famous polymaths has worked through all of this three hundred years ago, but one, just in case, and two, I can’t hear other people. I don’t understand anything I haven’t personally pulled from my personal backside.

A just, loving God or God concept

I’m sure I heard it growing up, but to a degree now, I see I just sort of decided that myself, chose a better God than the imperious alpha male of the bible. I don’t believe there was a time I was enamoured of Jesus, his sacrifice, or the NT more forgiving God, but that must be a part of it, that I think I saw a trend, the Bible God was getting nicer – and so I went straight to the end, with “logic,” or what I thought was. If God is everything and all that, then it’s better than that, all the way better than that.

You could call me something of a martyr type, I try to sacrifice my selfish needs for peace and a better life for all, I mean don’t we all, that much Christianity I have, absolutely, but I don’t think there’s rules and forgiveness or sacrificial payments operating between humanity and some small concept God, a sort of forgiveness business deity. If we are to spend any time talking about God, let’s make it something finer, perhaps that is what I would have said if I were more able, many years ago.

Today I would say a universal God, a God for all of humanity, one that doesn’t pick sides in our fights and wars, one that loves us all and wants us all to be happy, not a warrior god who wants us to be not so much happy, but strong.

The point is I’m wrong, or I’m just making it up as I go along – the legal, ruling God is that other guy. I’m shocked and horrified and I don’t understand, but he is the law to many people and so fighting is not only not proscribed but approved for all things, we must fight all bad things, fight for good. Our friends, our family, our nation – our group – they need us to be strong, to ready and able to fight for them.

I have this silly idea that violence and the fight are humanity’s eternal curses, but God and humanity believe otherwise, all the good things are presumed to be found only on the other side of a fight, that if we do not fight, bad things happen. To be clear, today, I think it is the conflict, warrior life that requires a violent, judging God. Today, I think that it is abuse victims that fantasize about power and vengeful entities, and that warrior gods are the projections of beaten children.

Too forgiving, is a way to see it, the warrior deity doesn’t curse you for war, for the fight, and people firing the bullets and giving the beatings are forgiven while victims, by definition, were not and paid the full price.

My intuition tells me a good and loving god would forgive the abusers some – but not forever. This society’s paternal entity seems to work for the sinners and they can apparently do no wrong, no wrong He can’t overlook.

Perhaps my intuition is philosophical, perhaps I’ve internalized the idealism after all and I have come to believe that we cannot cognize the world, only our concepts of it, and I deal with God at that level, he is our creation – all sort of intuitive, accidental. I have spent my life railing against the idealists, but it seems clear that at least in terms of the invisible and fictional things, that it has to be the case that the concept is the operative thing and not the thing “itself.”

It seems intuitive that the God you have gives you the society you have or the other way about, depending on his literalness or not, that this connection is there whichever way you think it works, clear as day. I want a loving God, so that’s my God – but I am redefining forgiveness for myself, again, I’m not so sure a loving God would forgive all this human evil. At some point forgiveness given forever is permission. I find myself believing, insisting, perhaps, that a loving God would want us to find a way out of it all, that a loving God could want more than to keep “forgiving us” for being the worst creature on Earth.

Don’t make me pull out the heavy artillery and remind you that much of the world is dying at the moment, under our watch.

Again, though, my intuition isn’t it, not presently.

OK, this part is difficult; it’s stopped me a few times.

I am, I have always been living in a projection I create. I live theoretically, I have always held a model world in my mind, an entire other world that starts with, “Well, if things made any sense, then this would be X,” and honestly, I try to address that world wherever possible, wherever there is an overlap, whenever my world of reason can win for a moment, I try to help that happen. When the external reality makes sense for a minute, these are wins, I find that the times actual reality conforms to what should be reality are rare and precious. I know it’s mad, and difficult to say, but much of observable human reality I judge to not be, I judge it to be “fake,” sort of.

Everything that has happened didn’t “have to” happen. Everything doesn’t happen for good reasons and a detailed history of the world wouldn’t prove anything about anything because most of it was mad, deluded nonsense that made people do what they did. The very real holocaust happened for bullshit reasons, and to this day that is still all we have on the subject, the myths, the lies and slander, autocracy explained as popularity, we are told people back then “believed” this or that – none of which is science or even philosophy, it’s simply a list of mad data points. The entire enterprise was bullshit, most agree, the pogrom was simply a unifying technique for him, a public works project to keep them busy and threatened for the war, expediently created and leveraged hate in the population – yet, despite the bullshit premise for the whole deal, we analyze it to death and talk about the “depths of human nature.”

I’m here to tell you, that shit wasn’t natural at all. Do not study it like it were a functioning ecosystem or some such foolishness. Of course I mean unless you do it my way.

Yes, people died, but for what mad reason? What phony causality explains it? Yesterday’s lies are today’s facts and science?

People talk about everything that is or was as though it must be, or must have been, life is all random possibility in the future, but set in stone in the past. I watch golf on TV, it’s mostly calm and green, and when a players fails at the shot they attempt, the announcer says, “Oh, they couldn’t do it,” and it drives me a little spare because of course they could. I’ve seen them “could” before! They didn’t, fine, but they could have. It’s a small example of language being strange, but blown out of all proportion, the same meme we apply to wars and massacres. History tells us why we couldn’t not. It happened, so it couldn’t not have and here’s why, here are all the things that made it inevitable – many of which are lies, propaganda, mad, magical myths about the other’s demonic physiology – couldn’t not happen, what with them having horns and all, is what we apparently believe.

I know, not in the minute to minute details – but that’s what it adds up to.

One more time, seems logical to me, in the more reasonable reality I try to keep in mind, that it wasn’t inevitable, the player could have made the shot, that the massacre or the war may not have happened . . . but all these possibilities are more likely in the facsimile world, under my loving God, while in this reality, these things show up as obvious and natural.

It is odd, reading this, what I wanted to show as intuitive, perhaps aboriginal, an idea of a loving god, one that favours no people, but I will happily shift to defend the idea as above all others as well, as being an idea that transcends most human thought and has some hope to stop the fighting before the house burns down, as the biggest of ideas, with human and Earth’s future as it’s long considered goal.

I’ll still call it naïve, however, because no-one is trying to beat the idea of a universal loving God into me, while the other, the one people’s warrior God is forced everywhere it exists.

OK.

Jeff,

May 27th., 2021