Monday, August 19, 2019

Psychoanalytic Baggage

"Should women be allowed to go topless in public?"
https://www.debate.org/opinions/should-women-be-allowed-to-go-topless-in-public

No. But not for the reasons you may think, but for one you may not have considered—maybe.
Read the above answers first. Though true, my more flippant opinion is highly qualifiable.
 
The human species is nothing if not a mess of contradictory cognitive and emotional complications, one of which is the male attachment to the mother (-object). I know you're going to refuse to believe this, nevertheless, it's true (at least in some alternate reality): When a man ogles a woman's breasts, necessarily, through a mostly unconscious series of transformations and transferences, he is remembering his mother. (A woman is most often a mother-substitute to a man.) So, when a man is attracted to a woman's breasts, he needs to get the message: "That's you're mother you're lusting after, you idiot! Is that what you really want to be doing?" Men are hopeless. (But, to be fair, so are women re men, though in a slightly different way.)

So, no, women should not flaunt their maternity in public. It is true, however, that it's not fair to women that there are laws against it. So, in the name of equality, I propose that laws be passed that men not be allowed to go topless either. Fair is fair. And, anyway, there is a similar argument to be made for why women lust after a man's bare chest. So, unless we consensually agree that it's okay to let all our psychoanalytic baggage hang out there for public viewing, keep it under your shirt.
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Thursday, January 24, 2019

Criminal Activity

The fact that our government is incapable of dealing with an antisocial criminal president in a timely manner to prevent extensive damage like the kind that we have seen is evidence that we as a people do not deserve to live as a democratic nation. We deserve what we have gotten.


Chomsky has been warning us for a while now: The Independent says:


Noam Chomsky has argued the Republican Party is the most “dangerous organisation in human history” and the world has never seen an organisation more profoundly committed to destroying planet earth.″


The Republican Party is supporting a criminal president and as such self-defines as a criminal organization. Individual Republican representatives may or may not be criminals themselves, but some of them certainly are. And a case could be made that most of the rest of them are guilty of conspiracy. It's way past time to round up these criminals. Doesn't matter that arresting ‶duly elected″ officials who are (supposedly) representing their constituencies is not an act conducive to maintaining a free and democratic society. We're not a democracy any more, and we never will be again until we weed the criminals and their criminal corporate supporters out of the government and outlaw corporate lobbying.


Just as the time for toxic masculinity is over, so is the time for toxic government and toxic civil [sic] society. The time has come to outlaw the GOP (along with the KKK, the NRA, and the Usurper President) before it's too late; because, if we wait any longer, it will outlaw us. That process has already begun—a while ago. Let's stop it in its tracks, reverse its course, and return the country to democracy.


Otoh, this situation can be seen as ‶the will of the people″ since the people who willed it voted (with the support of criminal activity and a disaffected, disenfranchised, and/or dysfunctional electorate) this arrangement into power. So own it if you're not going to do something about it. You who voted for it or did not vote allowed this situation into existence and you enable it if you are not actively opposing it. So do something about it or live with this abortion until they come for you and your family. And, make no mistake about it: They will come, unless you yourself behave yourself and act or pretend to act as the perfectly obedient little citizens they want you to remain, so that they can keep the cash flow moving ever upward while they dole out your pittance that you struggle on to survive.

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Thursday, January 10, 2019

Hollywood's Populist Reign

The government, in many of its aspects and personages, understands that Hollywood poses a big threat to its power and authority; which is why it doesn't overtly act against piracy and only institutes ineffective token remedies. It needs that check against what might become an otherwise ubiquitous agency. Government must discover how to incorporate the film industry into its overall structure of control. Thus far, it has been unsuccessful. One day it might manage a solution; and then, next, piracy will be brought under its control. Then copyright need no longer exist or will remain just another tool in the arsenal of the supreme authority.

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Resist control.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Use Your Brain

message to students (or anyone):

Congress is NOT going to listen to you, UNLESS you make it worth their while. Corporations and rich elitists make it worth their while with money. But, if you don’t have a lot of it, you need something else. Strikes work. Mass assembly works. Disobedience is best. When they don’t have your support, they start to get nervous. The less support they get, the more they worry. Protest. Don’t let up. Use the internet. They are most afraid of that. Because they don’t understand it; they don’t really know how it works. Oh, some of them think they do. But for most of them it’s foreign to their retro mentality. They think it’s, at its best, a communication system. They don’t know it’s a brain. They’re not biologists; they don’t understand cell theory.
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Saturday, March 17, 2018

Are We There Yet?

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message for all good little citizens:

Writers of TV shows, films, books, stories, ads, etc. take advantage of people’s emotional “baggage” by assembling the cues and prompts that stir up those emotions into a manipulative system of psychological control. When you participate in these pseudo-social events, you allow yourself to be jerked around by your emotions. This is not what these for the most part archaic mechanisms were evolved to do; they are survival mechanisms better replaced with more highly evolved rational thought, except that most of us (maybe all of us, at least at times) are not very capable in this realm of existence yet. I blame that persistent condition on the conservatives who thwart the advance of civilization by restricting education and therapy to the smallest group possible, thereby better insuring their greater degree of wealth and power. If you are not properly educated, you are not enabled to compete as effectively in a token society, let alone avoid the manipulative agendas that control you and morph you into good little compliant unknown citizens or radically disenfranchised non-entities.

Saturday, January 20, 2018

We Have Met the Zombies and They Are Us



Tolerance is the failure point of democracy? If you tolerate intolerance, you permit and enable forces that will eventually cause your position’s tolerant demise, because intolerance will kill off tolerance if it is given its lead unless tolerance takes an intolerant stand against it, which defeats it anyway when the tolerant become intolerant, transformed into its opposite like a person becomes a zombie in The Walking Dead—which is a perfect parable for the nature of intolerance: You cannot tolerate intolerance, which means you cannot be a tolerant person unless you exclude yourself completely from intolerant people, which the zombies are a metaphor for. In the Walking Dead, when intolerant Merle, who has relied on intolerance to survive, realizes he’s been an asshole and does a u-turn to help out the “family,” he is killed and turns into a walker, which brooks no alternative but to eat people. In other words, the walkers are the epitome of intolerance. They are mindless intolerance. The only defense against them is to kill their (mindless) brains. Humans, even the mindful ones, conclude that you cannot tolerate a blind force that will ultimately kill you given half a chance. This is a fundamental flaw in human nature, which is, still, in the process of evolving toward “a more perfect union,” which only tolerance can promote. People of advancing evolution see the advantages of democracy as an institution that enables the maximization of both individuality and cooperative social interaction. But democracy requires tolerance. If intolerant people are excluded, individuality, to whatever degree necessary, is disallowed. In practice, it becomes a matter of a workable mean; extremes (like Charlottesville) must be avoided. But how do we do that without becoming intolerant? Proper policing might help a great deal; but we have seen that police forces often harbor and may readily exercise intolerance, especially when it comes to defending intolerant people who tend to align with policing mentality. Separation of “sides” can also help; but that’s just another way of separating us out instead of joining us into a more perfect union. And, anyway, one of the sides that we are separating doesn’t seem to be any more or less tolerant than the one they are being separated from; and the truly tolerant people are many miles away, staying out of it altogether, which is not a solution, but an escape from the problem inherent in the practice of tolerance; or, iow, we “sane” people do not tolerate the intolerance of either side. We will not let the zombies eat us if we can help it, and we will not kill them off; but we will exclude them from our social interaction, which itself is an intolerant practice. I can only conclude that we humans are hopelessly intolerant. Maybe, one of these millennia, we will have evolved into a better, more inclusive state of existence. But we are not there yet. Humans exist on a tolerant/intolerant spectrum. We each have our degrees of each, which becomes prompted by circumstance. When we are tolerant, we are nice people, pleasant to be around; when we are intolerant, we are assholes who seek others like unto ourselves that we may engage in hate together in a less perfect union. Existing pleasantly together, we epitomize the vision of our democratic principles; existing hatefully together, we yet pretend to practice these principles. But we do not. We cannot be both intolerant and democratic at the same time; and yet that is exactly what we would have happen. And since America is in principle a democracy, and since to be patriots means that we aspire to and adhere to those principles, when we are intolerant of others, we are not by definition patriots. The intolerant extremists who claim to be patriots are not; and on that perception, they may be excluded—except that our laws include them a priori. They were born here. So let them die here. In one way or another. Death always wins, in any case.


Monday, December 19, 2016

Stupid is as Stupid Does: The Making of an Unpresident


The truly stupid people are those who (feel they must) believe that Trump is more stupid than they are—while he redirects their agendas with his apparently stupid antics (like ‘unpresidented’—which I happened to think was an ironically brilliant remark). He will become our unpresident, and he knows it. He absolutely fucking intends to be just that. And, in choosing to make a word-choice error, he sends the message out to “his” people (and, especially, to people who might be on the fence about joining “his” people) that, despite his wealth, he is, after all, just an ordinary ignorant person like they are; and he gives them hope that they too could one day become as rich and famous as he is. It’s a stupid message for stupid people, but it is not stupidly constructed and delivered. It’s pure genius. And, finally, it’s also a vague reference to the lefties who are so hell-bent upon unseating him before he even gets seated. Trump is taunting them, poking fun at their determination to “unpresident” him, snickering behind their backs as they make fools of themselves and continue to alienate those level-headed, mature progressives who would rather be working as responsible adults than chasing their tails trying to derail a president via character assassination before he even gets started. There is no sense in pursuing this course. If his character has not been assassinated by now, it never will be. His detractors are feeding him energy with their  diatribe. He thrives on this stuff; he always has. He’s rope-a-doping the Democrats (and out-of-line Republicans) left and right. They fall for his silly little tricks time after time. Leave him alone. He’s sucking all the energy out of the country with his attention-grabbing antics as he changes subjects by distracting people away from what they should be paying attention to. If you want to do some good, if you feel you must protest “in the streets,” go to Standing Rock instead. That’s the front line of the war, where the real social and cultural damage is being done. You’re not going to stop Trump before he starts, and you’re not going to slow him down much once he does. He’s got you all by the nose and leading you where he wants you to go. Wake up. There are important things to be done, and trying to out-trump Trump is not one of them. Is your intent to prove that you are every bit as uncaring, crass, rude, and boorish as he is? Because, if it is, you’re succeeding. He’s managed to lower you to his level and you can expect him, with his best denial and projection tactic, to turn around on you and point out how badly you are acting. He’s sucking you into his game and he’ll continue to do it for the next eight years if you don’t wake up to what he’s all about. Don’t be so stupid as to believe that he’s the stupid one. He didn’t win the election because he’s stupid; he won it because you are.

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