But, of course...

Why pick a metaphor of a plane that does not land...that cannot land?  If only it landed, then all my family would be happy, and I would pay off my debt -- the guilt that has been handed down to me across three generations.

But it does not land; it cannot land.

If only you just land that plane, just come down to Earth, everything will be okay.  But that's exactly what it cannot do.  You don't accept the trauma of the husband and the father lost at sea.  You think it can't be real. The plane he was in is still flying somehow.  It is searching and looking for a place to land.   That's all it has to do to turn portending disaster into acceptable reality.   It is still up there, many years after World War 2, and we are still waiting to hear that the occupants have been found safe and well.

But it doesn't land and so the span of inter-generational trauma is extended.

This all sounds far-fetched, but we are all waiting for something, some notification that has arrived but hasn't been accepted.

It is better not to arrive if one is to arrive dead.   Better to keep flying from one generation to the next.  Each generation holds a candle then, and waits for the notification which one day must arrive.  That is the feared day when the one who is beloved is pronounced dead -- and everything shatters.

But it will not shatter if the plane doesn't land  -- and if we can keep everything up in the air, we will never hear bad news that shatters us.

So, keep everything uncertain and unclear and don't speak about what you know.  We are all waiting.  Our prolonged wait is to avoid hearing what you have to say.   We're tired of hearing it already, so hush up.

And so the ghost plane glides through misty air, as we, throughout the generations, keep it buoyant.

Celebrating New Year's Day 2013, with a run on the beach

The charge of the daylight brigade.

One principle of intellectual shamanism

Nietzschean creativity Vs. Freudian moderation

Trying to put two and two together.

My more New Year's Revolutions

All good things approach their goal crookedly. Like cats, they arch their backs, they purr inwardly over their approaching happiness: all good things laugh.  --NIETZSCHE

I should confess: life is going pretty well for me now.

In the last year, I've removed from my existence those elements that didn't belong there.   Perhaps life has become a little simple as a result?  I don't know, for I can reach all sorts of depths of knowledge with very little effort.

I had absorbed too much that was alien to my nature. This was all part of my project toward "adaptation", which was a goal that has defined my life for the past twenty years, although I have not consciously realized it until very recently.  It took letting go of that agenda to realize how much it had defined me.

The Buddhist principle that one is more likely to meet one's goals when one isn't aiming for them -- that is, in an overwrought, over-conscious way -- has much to recommend it.

You have to give up on what the apes think, too.

Nurturing that quality of indifference seems to go against the tenets of Western culture.  In fact, more so in my case, because I kept berating myself that I wasn't paying close enough attention to what others thought.  I demanded of myself that if only I picked up this key to success, which I was reluctant to use, I would surely open all sorts of doors.  To this end, I tried very hard to develop my self-consciousness, so that I would become more aware of what others were thinking, and thus win.

Win what?

The problem was that the core of my identity is not in the advanced Capitalist mode.  That is to say, I have never been interested in gaining advantage for its own sake.   My own notion of success have entirely different parameters.   I had to prove a point related to morale, and I was keen to prove it.   Once I latch onto an idea, or an agenda, I will not let it go.  I had come from far away in culture and in mannerisms and in action, and I had to land the plane.  I had to set the wheels on the runway, so I was no longer up in the air.

This proved impossible.  I am still flying.

Flying -- though -- is what a lot of people dream of doing.  I do it effortlessly, such that my weight hasn't touched the ground:  I can't seem to bring it to descend from here.  This is even to the extent that when people talk about their patterns of normality, which nowadays they're keen to base on their biology, I can't make any sense of this.

Why would someone relate to the world using their physiological drives as their basis for self-consciousness?    I cannot understand this. It's not that I'm inhuman:  I know how to divert many of my drives along very interesting lines.  I can navigate the air with vast effectiveness.  I just can't understand how being reduced to my being to flesh and blood alone would make things more -- and not less -- interesting.

In some ways my skepticism about biological determinism rests on the support buffer of personal experience.    Achievements that make me happy don't involve a biological construction of my identity.  I'm not prone to maternal life in any way.

I don't fight for my biological rights, because I can't imagine what they are. The Men's Rights lobbyists contend for their rights to be respected on the basis that they're biologically different from women.  Radical feminists likewise demand that there is something weak, as well as moving, about being a lady.  (I don't distinguish the radical feminist agenda from the of the Women's Temperance Union in its goals.   A 'sober and pure world' would indeed be ...'sober and pure'.  I can't imagine why that would be  good.

So, you can see that I still can't become grounded, due to my lack of understanding.  I'm surely doomed to be up in the air, and flighty.

I promise you, however, that I do stick to my principles, which are written neither on my sleeve nor in hypotheses about the body.    In all, I want what I want and "hypergamy" isn't it.  Unless you are a psychoanalyst, in which case it IS it ... in which case it ISN'T.  Then it IS.  And it ISN'T.  IS too.

2.

Why pick a metaphor of a plane that does not land...that cannot land?  If only it landed, then all my family would be happy, and I would pay off my debt -- the guilt that has been handed down to me across three generations.

But it does not land; it cannot land.

If only you just land that plane, just come down to Earth, everything will be okay.  But that's exactly what it cannot do.  You don't accept the trauma of the husband and the father lost at sea.  You think it can't be real. The plane he was in is still flying somehow.  It is searching and looking for a place to land.   That's all it has to do to turn portending disaster into acceptable reality.   It is still up there, many years after World War 2, and we are still waiting to hear that the occupants have been found safe and well.

But it doesn't land and so the span of inter-generational trauma is extended.

This all sounds far-fetched, but we are all waiting for something, some notification that has arrived but hasn't been accepted.

It is better not to arrive if one is to arrive dead.   Better to keep flying from one generation to the next.  Each generation holds a candle then, and waits for the notification which one day must arrive.  That is the feared day when the one who is beloved is pronounced dead -- and everything shatters.

But it will not shatter if the plane doesn't land  -- and if we can keep everything up in the air, we will never hear bad news that shatters us.

So, keep everything uncertain and unclear and don't speak about what you know.  We are all waiting.  Our prolonged wait is to avoid hearing what you have to say.   We're tired of hearing it already, so hush up.

And so the ghost plane glides through misty air, as we throughout the generations keep it buoyant.

SUBJECTIVITY & 'BENEVOLENT' PATRIARCHY

The shamanistic method Vs psychoanalysis

Me And The Abstracted Persona

alicorn24: Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large

This is so true it made my laugh.

AGAINST GENDER OPPRESSION: SUBJECTIVITY & 'BENEVOLENT' PATRIARCHY

Is subjectivity pointless "emotion"?

Is patriarchy benevolent in its general structure?

I'M SORRY!

SUBJECTIVITY AND SO-CALLED 'BENEVOLENT PATRIARCHY'

Let's examine these questions more closely, shall we?

Tradition, on closer examination, always reveals secrets we prefer to flush down the toilet.

I was one who was born in Rhodesia, and was forced to emigrate whilst still a child (as this was my parents' decision, not mine). Regrettably, I found my 'welcome' into the First World to be anything but. To this day, I keep up that the general level of moral reflection and self-discipline among much of the populace in my current milieu are frighteningly low. I wonder if it could cross the minds of some of the moral ideologues on the evils of colonialism that acting upon their unchecked assumptions about colonial whites could give the colonial white immigrants, to whom some denizens of the western left are pleased to give short thrift, imputing to them collective guilt. This only leads to the blindsided newcomer learning complete contempt for those who wish to punish us for nothing we had done wrong. To act to punish without even the preliminaries of an introduction to the person whom you are punishing is quite without morality or decency, in my view.

Ashis Nandy, the Indian post-colonial theorist and intellectual cautions us against making monsters out of the ex-colonials. To do so, he says, is to reinforce colonialism as a psychologically potent force. These disempowered colonials as victims of Modernity, dwarfed in relation to the gigantic mechanisms and devices of modern warfare.

Nandy's position on colonialism lends itself to a psychological appraisal of the colonials, who and what they were, and how they are really in relation to contemporary manifestations of power. The children of the white colonials are particularly vulnerable, even compared to their uprooted parents. My generation is also the victim of colonial secrecy about what went on, and religious shame, which prevents free communication, and makes us victim to both right-wing and left-wing propaganda.

A simple-minded anti-colonialist position, by contrast to Nandy’s more enlightened perspective, only contributes to a highly unethical and destructive blaming of the generation of the white colonial's children, who did not play any part in the politics of the era.  Identity politics theorists who have a reflexive need to condemn the colonialism of the past, whilst not looking at the issues of the present, are reinforcing the violent psychological legacy of the colonial era, and is creating more of the anguish which the astute Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, railed against:

"We are refugees fleeing from the excesses of our parents,” he said.

Marechera, hardly a partisan for the order that preceded colonialism, went on to say, “Tradition, on closer examination, always reveals secrets we prefer to flush down the toilet."

Freedom for the few

To believe that we are all absolutely free, one would have to be naive(justifiable in very young people, but not in the old) or else totally lacking in the capacity for observation and self-analysis. People who believe in this way consider anything bad that happens to someone else to be caused by their lack of moral fiber. When something bad happens to him, he thinks that is society setting out to obstruct him or that there has been a criminal violation of his rights. Perhaps so. But why is there never any criminal violation of anyone else's rights then? Is he the only one who can be violated?

I may seem stupid, but I don't think one needs to understand the concept of superiority over others to be a decent human being.

Freeman Chari Man desires the desires of other man, and thats core of human ego and conflict, so decency is only a function of satisfaction

Jennifer Frances Armstrong To desire desire, rather than simply to desire, is the core component of narcissism. One can choose simply to desire, rather than desiring desire

Freeman Chari At that point human development stagnates, every piece of development has simply been a desire to be more relative to others

Jennifer Frances Armstrong I believe you could not be more wrong about that

Freeman Chari What comes first morality or desire?

Jennifer Frances Armstrong false dichotomy

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Morality is not opposed to desire unless you are a Christian ape or other monotheist

Freeman Chari Desire on the other hand is opposed to morality if the end product does not preserve life, right?

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Well I suppose that comes close to a formulation I was playing with, but I don't think it actually works that way except when we are still in the Christian cultural paradigm

Freeman Chari You cant separate morality from collective beliefs, guilt is all a function of cultural and religious beliefs just like how "It is human to to deprive other humans freedom so as to give other superior beings their freedom".#afganstan

Jennifer Frances Armstrong I just don't go along with that cultural relativism. How I treat others is a feature and expression of my own humanity for better or worse, not limited to my cultural values.

Freeman Chari I think it takes another man for another man to realise that he too is human, man in isolation is a mere animal

Jennifer Frances Armstrong Well maybe you can stop tearing at your flesh if you go to church and meet a fellow male?

being a victim of cultural beliefs is pathological idiocy is "agency" in some quarters

If you can't tackle an issue because it seems too hot to handle, then you can pretend everything is as it's supposed to be. Like the young boys being molested by priests were really expressing their own agency in accepting priestly domination. As I said yesterday, this was Freud's mode of analysis as well -- you are a totally free agent, with no social forces to limit or obstruct you, so if he end up in harm's way, you must have chosen that out of pathological idiocy -- or, as some feminists might term it, "agency".

THE CONCEPT OF THE SHAMANISTIC BUDDY

There was a bush fire, so there was a bit of wood smoke in my eyes.  Please forgive.

WE ALL NEED A SHAMANISTIC DOUBLE

More depth on Marechera's "definitive buddy" ... and how one can oppose one's internal authoritarianism with an open-mind.

MARECHERA: THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY

A brief introduction to the traumatic-realism of Marechera's last book, MINDBLAST, OR THE DEFINITIVE BUDDY.

Dambudzo didn't have that

A Room of One's Own (Annotated): Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey, Susan Gubar: Amazon.com: Books

This must be why I haven't become a beneficiary of bourgeois ideas. Whereas I agree that it would be nice to have a fixed income, in order to create, and one certain can benefit from privacy, Dambudzo had neither of these and still created.

In particular consider his MINDBLAST.

The sheer audacity of the circumstances under which the book was written is three-quarters what makes it so appealing.  I may do a video on this at some point.

Organic nature viewed as "madness"

The ideology of the 1950s was along the lines that if anything was natural, it was probably suspect.  The imposition of science as a kind of straitjacket, and cultural mores as a kind of straitjacket, along with religion as a kind of straitjacket, were considered imperative.  You can see this ideology reflected in Jacques Lacan's writings, whereby the infant is considered "mad" until a straitjacket of convention is imposed on it.

The question is: Isn't that mad?

African originating feminism!

India Gang-Rape Victim Dies In Singapore Hospital

India Gang-Rape Victim Dies In Singapore Hospital

BLACK SUNLIGHT in terms of its genre

Modernism III | Clarissa's Blog

I'm not that much fixated on realism, but like very dense poetic prose.  Marechera's work, BLACK SUNLIGHT, makes me laugh because it is so multi-layered.  There's an autobiographical layer, layers of political critique, a layer of  Greek mythology and references to other literature, and yet another layer, being the narrative line itself.  I think there is also a strong influence of Bataille's VISIONS OF EXCESS in the writing.

In terms of the interrelating meanings,  if we understand that Marechera had been threatened to be "sent down" from Oxford if he did not take psychiatric drugs, we can read the narrative of BLACK SUNLIGHT as his exploration of what it would mean to take these when he didn't consider himself ill.

In the narrative line, he splits from himself into "Chris" a photographer, and "Christian" or Pilgrim's Progress, who also descends into the underworld as a black Orpheus.  He wreaks anarchistic havoc on the world, but then repents of his actions, which he attributes to "having taken Chris's drugs".

The whole book wonderfully subverts John Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, because the protagonist and his double take a journey that does not end with enlightenment, but with certain knowledge that one has been trapped in "Devil's End".   The devil eventually excretes the pilgrim and he looks back on his anarchist mayhem in a more balanced and experienced way.   He had not been himself, because he had taken drugs belonging to another.

The final passages of the novel are particularly evocative, philosophical and beautiful.  They reflect on the meaning of life  -- our differences and interconnectivity.

African feminism versus the biological turn in the gender debates

I just felt like gesticulating into the camera for a while.

Dambudzo Marechera's madness

The Wilson Quarterly: Beyond the Brain by Tanya Marie Luhrmann
QUOTE:

Epidemiologists have now homed in on a series of factors that increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, including being migrant, being male, living in an urban environment, and being born poor. One of the more disconcerting findings is that if you have dark skin, your risk of falling victim to schizophrenia increases as your neighborhood whitens. Your level of risk also rises if you were beaten, taunted, bullied, sexually abused, or neglected when you were a child. In fact, how badly a child is treated may predict how severe the case of an adult person with schizophrenia becomes—and particularly, whether the adult hears harsh, hallucinatory voices that comment or command. The psychiatrist Jean-Paul Selten was the first to call this collection of risk factors an experience of “social defeat,” a term commonly used to describe the actual physical besting of one animal by another. Selten argued that the chronic sense of feeling beaten down by other people could activate someone’s underlying genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia.

ALSO:

The pushback is also a return to an older, wiser understanding of mind and body. In his Second Discourse (1754), Jean Jacques Rousseau describes human beings as made up out of each other through their interactions, their shared language, their intense responsiveness. “The social man, always outside of himself, knows only how to live in the opinions of others; and it is, so to speak, from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence.” We are deeply social creatures. Our bodies constrain us, but our social interactions make us who we are. The new more socially complex approach to human suffering simply takes that fact seriously again.

I wouldn't go so far as Jean Jacques Rousseau in seeing our existence as being rooted in the social, but you get the point.  My view is that we can exist quite easily apart from conventional social life -- so long as society does not project qualities into us that it wishes to disown about itself.

I would add that the real burden of social engagement occurs when others project their shadow side into you    -- thus blacks in a white society bear the weight of the evaluation that they are animalistic, whereas women who go against patriarchal mores often have to tolerate the impact of those who continue with conventional views viewing them as 'hysterical'.

Embracing "nothing" whilst seeing oneself from the outside

Identity politics is primeval -- rooted in the pre-Oedipal*. It always evokes a "metaphysics of presence" (term from Derrida); the "good breast versus the bad breast" (terms from Melanie Klein).

Those who say that they are postmodern, and yet invoke identity politics at every turn are engaging in primeval sorcery, because they believe that they see more at hand than is actually capable of presenting itself to them.

A "metaphysics of presence" is fundamentally an wrong or "magical" way of seeing. It is erroneous because it oversimplifies what is actually there to be seen and understood. It is "magical" because this mode of seeing is creative and inventive, actively constructing what it claims to perceive, and not detachedly observing it.

The "metaphysics of presence" is unavoidably postmodern despite assertions that precisely the opposite is true, since the postmodernist must make initial reference to presences that "seem" to him or her, before deconstructing these appearances through clashing them against other "appearances". The postmodernist, then, is involved in masking as well as unmasking, and plays the role of a magician. This is not a good thing, for what is lost -- psychologically and ontologically -- though the mutual clashing and splintering of opposed identities is not the firmness of reality as such, but the firmness of the boundaries of identity. It is these that shatter and fragment, leaving only the core of a vulnerable human essence (Note: not as an "absence" but fundamentally as a "presence" of core humanity, stripped of its identity postulates. This is the nakedness of the human soul that we encounter at the end of Black Sunlight.)

Shamanism resolves the crisis of identity, through a strategic restructuring of one's knowledge, whereas postmodernist thinking leaves it fragmented. Both approaches understand something of the illusory as well as fabricated nature of identity. In Marechera's shamanistic writing, the pure essence of human experience is on display, with the other signifiers of presence (such as race and gender) shattered and gone.

We are thus "wrecked out of our wounds", according to Marechera.  In this particular case, which is far from being postmodern, what wrecks us is also what redeems us. We rediscover our true humanity in the most solid form only after first experiencing the overwhelming imposition of the metaphysics of presence through a visceral meeting with our most potent image of ourselves. It is this encounter that wrecks us "out of our wounds".

The postmodernist, who retreats periodically to his or her island of skepticism, cannot lay claim to the same sort of shamanistic experience of reading.

*NOTE: Jungians see the early childhood level of consciousness as being  a realm of transformation and mystical consciousness.  Even as adults, we all have tendencies toward this, including the ability to see ourselves as part of life's  great oneness.

The failure of American princesses

Proof that International Adoptions Are Deeply Problematic | Clarissa's Blog


Maybe this spam guy's message about the alleged desire of all girls to become princesses is becoming commonly accepted.

He says:

American women are living in their own pathetic little fantasy world, where they think they are a perfect little princess. Sorry, but you are NOT a perfect little princess.
Give American women the husband they deserve- NONE!
BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!

Now, the thing is I’ve written a great deal about transgression on my blog and I have demonstrated in other ways — for instance when I did my Bataille videos, I was not in the mood to apply lipstick elegantly because I thought it had to be “in excess” — that I am by no means “a princess”. I’m a monster of some proportions, but there’s nothing resembling a princess about me.

The normal way out for people who push a dogmatic line is to insist that I still want to be a princess but I’m failing miserably. That’s because everyone wants to be a princess. Some can be, and some can’t be princesses. But being a princess is the ideal.

Actually the thing I’d like to be, if the opportunity ever arose, would be a war journalist. I probably wouldn’t like it, but it would be good for me. I’d probably be a moderate success.

In the mean time, I have to combat the American male’s propensity to view all women as failed or inadequate princesses.

Simple madness

Proof that International Adoptions Are Deeply Problematic | Clarissa's Blog


America seems like a very bad society to me, purely because of its religiosity. Even those professing atheism or skepticism will often see the world through a very religious lens. It’s metaphysics, dichotomies, the notion of good versus evil, solipsism, narcissism and outrage, all marketed for your viewing pleasure.

The writer of the blog seems absolutely nutty. I wish people had dignity rather than displaying their extreme emotional states in that way. It sets up a defensive emotional screen, so that the real personality, if there is one, doesn’t come through.

Americans also need to grow up and come to terms with the fact that not everyone thinks as they do. Many of them simply won’t accept that others don’t automatically see the world in the ways they do. For instance, just today, I received a message from a spambot telling me that I’m not the perfect princess that I — as an allegedly American woman — believe myself to be. A few days before, Americans on another site were demanding I accept that Disney princesses are not cultural artifacts, but products of our genetic urges. I was told I wanted to be one, and I would see that in myself if I read Richard Dawkins.

And, finally today, I see that a crazy, religious lunatic, who also happens to be insane and mad to boot, is behaving in an overwrought manner about some Russian kid, whom she calls “a princess”.

It’s barbaric!

Understanding how character is formed

I'm able to make sense of some of my character in relation to how actual events occurred.  For instance, I consider how I was my mother's strong support system whilst my father was at war.  He was often away on call up from the time I was born.

So I learned to see the ability to have the correct emotional response to every situation as a matter of life and death.  I consider emotions very, very important -- but also, and above all, the non-expression of emotions if someone looks like they are flaking out.  I can distance myself very, very quickly when that happens -- and always do so.   I don't experience my emotions, using that method -- but, above all, this is an act of charity, trying to prevent another person from experiencing their negative emotions.

So, stoicism is very deep in me, and it is also deep in Mike, who must have learned the same technique when he was five and his father died, crossing a road.

We both consider emotional management very important because it limits the damage that we could have caused our parents if we had not had strict control over our emotions.

I'm suited for a crisis -- as is Mike.   But I'm not suited for everyday situations.  If a child cries, and it is not a matter of life and death, that doesn't interest me.  I'll wait until it is one, or I'll let someone else take care of it.  I don't have a subtle variation of emotional nurturing patterns.   It's kind of boring.  But life and death issues pull me in.

To understand this is important, because I know I just react to emotional input differently from people who were not brought up in similarly pressing circumstances.  I don't diagnose myself as having a problem I ought to set out to fix.  Rather, I see myself as having the capacity to adapt to extreme circumstances, but not to those where subtle and measured responses are required.   I have a character, not a pathology.

And, I think that is useful to know.

Nice lines

I very much like the aesthetics of this ledge walk. It's what my dreams are made of.

A REFLECTION ON POSTMODERNISM

Female rapists pounce, soldier latest victim

Female rapists pounce, soldier latest victim

You better watch out
You better not shout
You better not sigh
I'm telling you why...

The unconscious as the right side of the brain

I much prefer the unconscious being the relational side of the brain, rather than it being seen as the repressed vestige of the mind's suppressed aggression and rage.  It just makes more sense not to condemn and vilify emotional experiences as such.  It's the condemnation of emotion, common in certain cultures, that produces the repressed unconscious.   In reality, though, we can't have any relationships without emotion.  The emotion we experience in relation to the other is, actually, the relationship itself.  Apart from this, there is no relationship, although there can be a formal agreement in place.

All relationships must be regularly fine-tuned, if they are to be maintained, and this is done by the relational side of the brain. If we are unable to maintain relationships through this fine-tuning, we end up with repressed aggression and repressed rage.  These, however, do not constitute the authentic nature of the unconscious.

The indelible effect on the psyche of real events

An interview with Allan Shore

QUOTE:
His training as a psychoanalyst was critical in highlighting the importance of the relationship between the mother and the infant. But there was a struggle within psychoanalysis - in particular between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein - about how much was really a creation of the infants mind., a phantasy. Bowlby began to fervently argue and bring in data from other disciplines to show that the real relationship, that the real events, not only were there but they were indelibly and permanently shaped there in a way that would affect the way that the personality would develop over the lifespan.  [EMPHASIS MINE]

1.  This is precisely what I was interested in studying when I wrote my memoir!


2. If I had any use for some kind of analysis, my fundamental use for it would be to know what had came from me and what had came from another, to avoid being collapsed into the psychical processes of those around me. One aims for individuation through self-knowledge. Otherwise, one is collapsed into the psychical processes of those others, and becomes part of the gluggly conglomeration of their unclear ideas and emotions. That is not for me -- and I hope it is not for you, either.

You need to be able to hinge the imagination onto something, and the ideal thing to hinge it to is reality.  Otherwise, any ape can come along and hypnotise you into believing that something is true, and why the hell not?  Let us all join a cult and be done with it.

I'm not at all comfortable with the idea that imagination and reality ought not to be separated when considering developmental processes.  I understand that information that is processed by an undeveloped brain could have a huge impact on it, even whilst the facts are distorted by that immature brain. No doubt this can occur, although perhaps the distortions of an adult's acculturated brain are often more extreme that those of a perceptive infant.  The literature I've read seems not to take that into account.

But, certainly, on the interpretation side, the separation of what is real from what is not real is the necessary process of what I think should be psychoanalysis, if it has not lost its way.

Joy, not anxiety

Identity politics corrupts all

Zimbabwe hasn't quite betrayed its revolution, although some people might wish to argue that point.  The war for independence was fought for real things, not some feeling of self-esteem or feeling of self-determination (without the substance of it).   To the degree that the revolution has been sent of course more recently, that has been because of identity politics.  In particular the redistribution of land was almost entirely an identity politics ploy -- which corrupted the economy.

From Clarissa's Blog

Clarissa's Blog


It’s interesting how some people seem to embrace their oppression. When the Egyptian protests were going on, a highly educated Egyptian woman appeared on Australian TV to say that it didn’t really matter who got into power in Egypt, even if it was the Muslim Brotherhood, so long as the West kept out and Egyptians determined their own direction.

It looks like identity politics has produced its usual fruit of arch-conservatism.

Review of Speculum of the Other Woman, by Luce Irigaray

Review.

I had a bit of hayfever, so please excuse that.

Interesting speculations on the mind

Some interesting speculations and concepts appear in the link below.

Mental Illness - Its Metabolic Energy Shifts?

  It is notable that Nietzsche was also very concerned with understanding himself on the basis of energy shifts, particularly toward the end of his life when his health was ailing.  I think this method could be quite productive.

There is also an echo of psychoanalysis and its mother-child dyad.

I particularly like the ideas that the triune brain is still a very relevant paradigm and that the left part of the brain is concerned with self-mastery, whereas the right side of the brain is effectively the unconscious, defining the boundaries of the self in relation to the other.  I was very concerned with studying how this right side of the brain functions through literature, when I wrote my thesis on DAMBUDZO MARECHERA.

New Year's resolutions

I've decided not to try to change much.  If something isn't broken, don't try to fix it, as the old cliche goes.

My goals for that rabid number, 2013, are to develop further with my fitness and my training.  I'll probably do a grading (martial arts test) in June, as it is going, since I slightly injured my left knee again.  Also, it is much easier to do the grading in the middle of winter, than when the heat presses in on you.

Whatever I am doing, I will just do more of it.

As I am writing and editing, I will do more of that.

I will increase my amount of training, be consistent, and get into some sparring.

I will continue to assist others and to teach.

Small changes:

I will try to eat less meat, during the summer.

I will start a new project to meticulously produce at least one small book.

I will brush up and improve on:

1.  Formal logic

2.  French

3.  Shona

CT shooter Adam Lanza was a victim of misandry

This guy speaks well and edges rather in my direction -- against identity politics. I'm not sure how far he would go in that (correct!) direction, though.

He does see a lot of problems with USA culture.  It is very likely some feminists are using the terms, "gaslighting" and "mansplaining" in an opportunistic way  --  I don't know.

What is certain is that USA-dominated YouTube is full of people advising each other on how to speak and asking "on whose authority" you have to say anything.   This reflects a very authoritarian culture, where people treat communication as if it were property rights.

Americans, as a whole, don't understand dialectics, in any of its manifestations, even the most basic, which is the to-and-fro of conversational speech. Culturally, they drive to dominate through their speech. After that,   other people tear chunks out of it, which is permitted. There's often no expectation of conversation -- and no resolution through this medium either.

Is it any wonder some people go mad and shoot each other?

Jennifer Armstrong - YouTube

ASK APE

Sharing the gender burden

A married couple went to the
hospital to have their baby
delivered.
Upon their arrival, the doctor
said he had invented a new
machine that would transfer a portion of the
mothers pain to
the baby's father. He asked if
they we're willing to try it out,
they both very much in favor of
it. The doctor set the pain transfer
to 10% for starters, explaining
that even 10% was probably
more pain the father had never
exprienced before. However, as
the labor progressed, the husband felt fine
and asked the
doctor to go ahead and "kick it
up
notch". The doctor then adjusted the
machine to 20% pain transfer.
The husband still feeling fine.
The doctor checked the
husband's blood pressure and
was amazed at how well he was doing at this
point, they decided
to try for 50%.
The husband continued to feel
quite well.
Since the pain transfer was
obviously helping out the wife considerably,
the husband
encouraged the doctor to
transfer ALL the pain to him. The wife
delivered a healthy
baby boy with virtually no pain.
She and her husband were
ecstatic. When they got home,
their gate man (Johnny) had
died from pain

Calling (Out) Westboro Baptist Church

XMAS 2012

It's rare that I spend time with my family of origin........

Once a jolly apehead swung by the billibong

Under the shade of a nutty-fut tree!

Review: Casting with a Fragile Thread

A memoir concerning what we all feel drawn to.

Mental muscles

This video on neuroplasticity is also relevant to those who believe that they can look at brain scans and determine 'innate' propensities or come up with biological explanations for gendered minds.

The most advanced philosophers embrace 'dialectics' rather than the notion that everything has an 'innate nature'.  That means, how you interact with your environment, and what sort of environment you have to interact with, plays a large part in the kind of mind you develop.

Current neuroscience backs this up.  Our minds are more dynamic than we may have previously imagined.

I'm sorry....

(I'm sorry) I'm sorry
(So sorry) So sorry
Please accept my APEology
But love is blind
And I was to blind to see
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Uh-oh
Oh, yes

In American, "logic" is a synonym for "male"

Many young American males don't understand that you simply can't apply logical criteria to a conversation where somebody is not asserting an argument, but they want to do this, and in the absence of evidence, they assert that somebody's perspective or statement is "illogical". But, everyday conversational statements are neither logical or illogical, and cannot be deemed to be one or the other. One of these young boys asserted that since I had made a statement he disagreed with, I ought to do a basic course in logical fallacies. Thing is, I did do that sort of course, way back in 1989. I also went on to study logic at a deeper level.

From this, I know that debating them is futile. These American guys keep throwing up assertions that they have encountered something illogical, and then they give the formal name for whatever "fallacy" (i.e. point of contention) they think they have noticed, but they haven't understood the content.

SEE MORE

Heaven's Gates

I am "Adam Lanza's Doctor" - Rima E. Laibow, MD

This is a very American video, with all of the right-wing scare-mongering about vaccines, which demands that one should enter an indignant state about drugs being imposed on you from the outside.

At the same time, one should perhaps pay attention to what she says, in order to counteract one's authoritarian tendencies to submit unquestioningly to the demands of Big Pharma.

The video needs the linked addendum.

AND THIS.

It's my party and I'd cry, but I can't do.

Identity politics is a form of “pain for gain”. You cry very much about your hard luck because you think society owes you big — particularly people whom you identify as having the opposite identity. I’m not into “pain for gain”, but, so far, it has been the only game in town. You have to wonder why that is.

People can’t feel the full range of emotions  and simply acknowledge they are there. Does one need to be a Buddhist monk to have been able to master this? It’s just human, but more: It’s the ability of a human to recognize that one is human. It’s very little. But it seems to require so much.

I think people who can’t feel may therefore resort to stressing. If you feel, then every feeling itself is a lived act — a state of self-acknowledgement of what one is feeling. But if one cannot feel, then one only has the ability to intellectualize or to stress.

I’m starting to make sense of some of the discourses posted in commentary about American popular culture recently. I’m thinking of The Last Psychiatrist and a recent, similar article on Cracked, which advises people who are unhappy with their lives how to stop hating themselves. They hate themselves because they are passive. They’ve been told they are great just the way they are, but being great just for doing nothing doesn’t feel like anything. Consequently, the self-hatred. If they started to do something, they might acquire a real identity.

Interestingly, both The Last Psychiatrist article and the associated one at Cracked go off track around this point, insisting that one must create a culturally male identity. In the first instance, one does that by eschewing the “narcissism” culturally associated with investing one’s time and money in the humanities. In the second instance, one must actively pursue social status, though making oneself socially useful, in order to attract “girls”. Both of these solutions seem to lead away from the narcissistic bubble one might seem to generate by seeming to “do nothing”, but their answer is to try to gain social approval in what is deemed to be a more substantive sense, by doing something that isn’t artsy or associated with one’s feelings.

It seems to me that so long as one is running away from what one actually feels, which is to embrace the ‘masculinist’ answer to the problem of identity, one is still doing nothing for oneself in any way that matters. You will still end up with a hollow core, despite all your busy activity in a realm of reality that necessitates a purely instrumental consciousness. Your narcissistic core remains because you haven’t attended to your true self, but have run away from it into being busy and occupying yourself with activity. In particular, your hatred for the humanities and for what they represent to you — “feeling” — will make you hollow.

But for a person who can feel what they feel life is never hollow.

Slip free from language

To maintain a narrative about one's life is initially helpful, but in the long-term it can be too mind-consuming.   You get to the point where you don't need one.   Narratives are a kind of ego-defence.  Also, and I think what sealed this decision for me above all was the understanding that whatever narrative I formed, the mechanics of patriarchal power would always subvert my narrative to make its own story out of my story.   That is how it goes.  In a sense, meaning is patriarchal, at least in our current historical time and place.

What is not patriarchal, and what is hardly expected, is that one can slip the noose by denying one's reliance on patriarchal meaning for sustenance.   In fact, the less meaning one has, the better -- and the easier it is to slip out of  the noose.  You know when someone is grabbing you in a bear hug, and just before they grab you, you inflate your lungs.

Then, as the grab takes hold, you suddenly release all the air from your lungs and your chest becomes narrower.  You can fall out of the hold, if you deliberately make your body go limp.  But, whilst you inflate your chest and struggle, you only make it worse.

Patriarchal power sets us up to struggle against it, but that is the worst thing you can do.  You will lose your energy that way, which is what was happening to me. Far better to let the air out of you body and shrink out of its grasp.

I like Bataille's following formulation, and learned a lot from it.  He reflects, in his book, On Nietzsche, that what is free cannot be defined.   Rather than firming up the narrative and strengthening one's self-definition, which will only tighten the rope of power around your neck, you can seek not to be defined.   Formlessness doesn't mean one doesn't know one's own mind. In fact, from experience, I can say one has to know one's own mind inside and out in order to attain the external appearance of ephemeral smoothness that gives ones enemies nothing to latch onto. One can't do it without a high level of maturity -- and not of the ordinary sort, either, but that which comes from strong self-observation and honesty with oneself.

Those who don't know themselves easily get roped in to conform to others' definitions of them.   That's because their egos are needy; hungry.  Some people even rope themselves in by reading themselves into texts that do not address them personally and are hence not directly related to them.  The desire to see oneself reflected in the mirror of the 'other' can be very strong. But, whilst it seems to offer some benefits to one's ego, placing one's ego in relationship to another also makes one at the mercy of their appetites and desires.  The relationship flows both ways, although one had perhaps only expected it to flow in one direction, toward admiration for oneself and one's 'identity'.

To be "formless" in Bataille's sense is to be free from having to rely on the scaffolding of language to support one's identity.   Language leads one to misunderstand oneself.  At best, it is a crude instrument, which calls out to those who are similar to us, but not the same.  As Nietzsche says, one cannot draw out from a text knowledge that isn't already in us in some way.

To cultivate, then, a tolerance for formlessness, at least in the sense that one doesn't wish to appear to other people in any particular manifestation that they could easily tear apart and devour, is the ultimate goal of intellectual shamanism.  It involves not being needy, so as not to be eaten.   It's path is self-knowledge leading to self-reliance.

It's not that one must reject language altogether as a result of following this path, just that one must realize its limitations and not use it to develop or reinforce an identity.   That way leads to an eternal recurrence of the same pathological interactions.   One must get beyond the point where 'identity' and narrative are the means to make oneself whole.   They cannot do that, and they perpetuate the problem they are trying to solve.  Rather:  let the air out of your lungs, and slip free from the embrace of language and political control.

What is psychological projection?

Chiron: Layered Writing

Chiron: Layered Writing

An awesome post. Please read it.  Layered writing is what I experienced in reading Marechera's stuff -- except for the stuff most appraised by bourgeois cultural critics, which he wrote at the end of his life.

Bourgeois culture doesn't like -- because it doesn't understand -- psychological layering.

It's the social system, stupid

1. Z permalink

   We had this writer visit a few months ago who talked about immigration as a “personal apocalypse” (with reference to this novel http://www.editorialperiferica.com/index.php?s=catalogo&l=42) and I thought of you.

   Somehow connected is this Mailer quotation I have run across, “Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment,” whose origin (in Mailer texts) I do not know. It leads me to think of the distinction between pain for entertainment and real pain. I think much psychotherapy is interested in the former *as a way to evade* the latter.

   Reply

   Edit
2. 
   musteryou permalink

   Ah! That makes a lot of sense…. your last sentence. I don’t really understand the “pain for entertainment”, but I could understand the notion of pain for personal gain, which could be leveled in contradistinction to a deeper sort of pain, which may be hard to speak of.

   Recently, I was watching a documentary of war journalists and wondered whether I may have missed my vocation. I do understand this deeper level of pain, from experience, although it is in a way unspeakable, lending itself to repetitive nightmares, profound guilt and sorrow. The journalists of course, being writers, attempt to put these experiences into words, but I’m sure that unless you’ve had similar experiences you might assume they were merely writing for entertainment. The problem I see here is the cultural milieu, which holds that we all ought to be putting ourselves out there for personal gain and that there is a problem if we do not do so. It was as if, from the current cultural perspective, we are remaining in primary narcissism if we do not communicate — and therefore put ourselves out there — but if we do write, then that is considered to be instrumental narcissism. In either case, and no matter what you do, you are not able to escape the imputation of narcissism, so as to enter genuine communication.

   What puts up a barrier against genuine communication? I think it’s people lifestyle choices. Most people don’t experience much of anything and therefore can’t relate to whatever is beyond their experience. Also there is the issue of the fragility of ego. We are taught to see ourselves in competition with others, rather than in terms of a relationship. That’s not a personal problem, but a problem of the economic system and how it functions or fails to function.

   I relate to the bad dreams and the war guilt (brought on by being spectators of war) that is professed by many of these journalists. They’re not exceptional people in the way that contemporary culture views “awesomeness”. I could relate in particular to one guy who said that as a child he was very shy and alone and being in a war zone was one place he found where he felt in control. There was also the sense that you never feel more alive than when you face the proximity of death.

   Anyway — thanks for the author link. Looks like the sort of writing that appeals to me.

Relating without relating

1.  As Theodore L. Dorpat says, primary process thinking deals with the relational aspect of the communication. To use my own words, people are always thinking, "How does this other person relate to me? Am I someone they want to dominate, someone they want to submit to, or am I considered equal?" We can attempt to communicate to others by disregarding this side of communication, but that is unrealistic, because you cannot have a relationship with someone based purely on the exchange of facts.

Despite this, it seems that many people have been taught that an ideal relationship is based purely on factual exchange, and this method is the best for avoiding emotional complications. However, the very same people who believe this also quickly become paranoid if the other party also goes into stealth mode by avoiding signalling his intent.

 This indicates that they expect to experience the emotional side of the relationship, but they don't want to have to pay attention to it or to work on it. They reap their twisted harvest.

2.  Attempting to communicate without relating, many American men fall into a mode of paranoia.  Often this does not take long.  The subtext goes like this:

I was just trying to regale you with "the facts", but I see you are not trying to relate to me as a human being after all.  I can't stand it. "You're a mess".   

Am I wrong in suggesting that a demand that only one party should express themselves in a relational manner (and will be penalized for not doing so) is a gender issue?

I am not mistaken at all, because those who start from that position also go on to condemn those who do not relate to them  for being "a female stereotype" who have perhaps also brought the condemnation on themselves..

A demand that one side of the equation should "relate" whilst the other side should avoid relating is, therefore, a demand that others play a gendered role in the communication process.

Not all mentally ill people are mass murderers

Here's a logical fallacy. You can make an assertion: "If someone commits mass murder, they are necessarily mentally ill."  But to affirm the consequent is a logical fallacy:  It does not thereby follow that if someone is mentally ill they will commit mass murder.

Affirming the consequent - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org

An argument of this form is invalid, i.e., the conclusion can be false even when statements 1 and 2 are true. Since P was never asserted as the only sufficient condition for Q, other factors could account for Q (while P was false).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent

i.e.
A  "If someone is a mass killer, they are mentally ill."

B  "If someone is mentally ill, it does NOT follow that they are a mass killer" -- that would mean 'affirming the consequent'.

Nietzschean creativity and Freudian moderation

Just some general reflections on Freud and Nietzsche. Nietzsche was concerned with creativity, whereas Freud wasn't focused on that.

Amazon.com: My Profile: Reviews

Amazon.com: My Profile: Reviews

Shapeshifting: Shamanic Techniques for Global and Personal Transformatio...

Rainbow's End (by Lauren St John) and white, colonial literature

Civilization and Its Discontents

Amazon.com: My Profile

Amazon.com: My Profile

Avoiding unwarranted help

I’m a Low Class Underachiever | Clarissa's Blog

I avoid the doctors.  I always have tried to avoid medical professionals since a school nurse in Zimbabwe tried to diagnose me as a hemophiliac because I acquired more bruises on my shins than perhaps I had ought to. This was down to clumsiness (hitting myself with the bike pedals every time I mounted) and thin skin. I may also have had a mineral deficiency — my father was found to be low in Vitamin K. Also, the school nurses kept testing my vision, which was found to be less than perfect, which was hugely worrisome since in our kind of physically-oriented redneck society, it implied you were nerdy and defective.

But these days I also now have a more philosophical reluctance to visit the authorities in white coats, which is based on an understanding that a healthy attitude has always improved my health much more quickly and more superbly than pills do, in most cases. So, I prefer to wait it out and see if my body can resolve any difficulties, rather than rush to get assistance. This is the case even with more extreme problems like the dislocation of a ligament in my knee. If the elastic band that keeps the knee together on the outside gets pushed out of place, you can’t walk. This has happened to me through accidents in martial arts training. On one occasion, I had to hobble around for two days, with my husband supporting me when I had to hop to the toilet and back. Then on the second night, I was just sitting on the bed, when I felt a twang in my knee and the ligament has slipped back into place again. I guess it just needed the swelling to go down sufficiently.

So, yes, I avoid doctors unless it’s for something really weird and annoying, like wax in my ears, which I can’t get out.

Petty accounting errors

Political Correctness | Clarissa's Blog

Demands for political correctness make me feel awkward, because it's like the petty accountant who will pull you up on the small calculation errors.   I'm not a precise person and perhaps at times not sensitive enough to questions of identity.  Actually, scratch that.   I'm well aware of matters of identity, but I see them in very different terms from those who take up a politically correct line.   Identity, to me, is roots.  But identity to these other guys is the boundary they wish to draw between themselves and others. I trip over this boundary partly because I see the boundary in geographic and emotional terms, not in political terms and also because I do not like this boundary-line.

Also I despise petty accountants more than I can say.  If they are keeping score of me and my errors, I will work hard to give them a lot of errors to record.  I'm their enemy not for having an identity but for making it a matter of keeping accounts.

My only recourse is to make bigger and bigger accounting errors.   It's not like I have control of this. My subconscious mind takes over and makes them for me.

Zimbabwe My Home My Frustration: Articles of defiance

Zimbabwean writing is underestimated and so rarely gains much attention from the rest of the world. But there remains a quiet heroism in defiance, as political violence continues. Elliot Pfebve's writing is about his struggle against political injustice in the early days of colonial Rhodesia and against the Mugabe regime. I wrote my PhD thesis on Dambudzo Marechera and I relate to his experiences through the lens of my studies.

Policing societies

Was Adam Lanza Mentally Ill? | Clarissa's Blog


Justice ought not to be a matter of subjectivity. Western culture has it back-to-front. Killing people is not a subjective issue. That’s an objective fact. If an act breaks the law, then you ought to be punished.

Western culture makes justice into a subjective issue and personal experiences into an objective one. People are often ready to let a criminal off the hook if he has suffered, but they want to police your private emotions, to determine whether you have the right to feel a certain way. “How dare you feel this way or that way?!” they proclaim. But a big crime deserves our interest and our sympathy.

One day, maybe people will realize that they’ve turned everything back-to-front.

Don't create enemies

Are Mass Shootings a Result of Male Resentment? | Clarissa's Blog


I have noticed that a lot of people, let us say young men in this instance, tend to create the situations they fear.  I told you about my experience on a YouTube site where people were attacking a skeptic woman for making fun of evolutionary science.  These guys immediately began projecting their weird stuff onto me about how assumedly I wasn't "logical". Well, you would have needed to take a much greater sample of my ideas than they had to come up with that conclusion. All they had was my suggestion that perhaps they were, after all, trying to turn skepticism into a religion to keep people out, as one of them had joked about doing.

So, they attack me -- someone they don't know anything about,apart from my gender -- for qualities conventionally associated with stereotypical femininity.

Consequently, they create an enemy out of me, when I only intended to express disagreement.

My view is that perhaps a lot of men are creating enemies out of those whom them perceive as feminists.  Perhaps they fear that feminists will take away their freedom to think.  Therefore they go out of their way to get feminists to oppose them and make their lives miserable, perhaps even to the point of provoking retributive anger.

Something doesn't have to be true for it to develop all the aspects of seeming to be true.  Alternatively, some things are true, whilst seeming to the majority of people not to be.  Mass projections may be more common than individual, isolated projections, because the individual projection involves more risk.  People generally like to encounter the outside world as a group, on the basis of consensus, rather than as lonely, isolated people -- as Nietzsche points out.

What I'm trying to get at is that belief in feminism taking away men's rights can suffice in many instances to make men act out aggressively, even when the majority of feminists have no interest in taking away men's rights.  The fear many people have, about their changing world, can cause feminism to seem more threatening than it is.

Review: Gaslighting, By Dorpat

Carlos Castaneda's shamanism

Review of 2005's WITHOUT APOLOGY by Leah Hager Cohen

Psychological projection from a New Age perspective

Let's Spread the Word: Wetiko | Reality Sandwich:

'via Blog this'

An article, linked to above, is worth reading.  It may come across as New Age, but I also arrived at the same conclusions through my careful, far more academic study and observation.

I also concluded that the patriarchal religions perpetuate this deformed state of consciousness, by encouraging men to project their darkness onto women.

Intellectual shamanism reverses this process by insisting that one develop a relationship with oneself.  As the article says:

[The pathological person's] will becomes dedicated to hiding from the truth of what they are doing, a truth which endlessly pursues them, as they continually avoid relationship with themselves.  [Emphasis mine].

My intellectual shamanism is concerned with the structuring of the human psyche and with remedies through restructuring and forming a relationship with other parts of yourself, that may have become alienated from the whole.  Accepting one's dissociated and split state, one goes looking for them.  This does not involve blind searching, but active and reasoned looking.

The moralistic tone of the article, especially where it suggests that "excess" or boundary-crossing are always "evil" reveals much of the limitations of New Age psychology.  Whether these are "evil", or corrective of pathology depends on how you use them.  Otherwise, it's like saying that dynamite is bad under all circumstances -- because it causes destruction. Few things are intrinsically bad in and of themselves -- and sometimes a degree of destruction is necessary, in order to recover full health.

Mike Ballard I think they're mystifying sado-masochism with the word 'Wetko' in order to appeal to the religiously minded. Trangression is an empty catalyst in and of itself. Transgression can go toward nihilism or acceptance of a new, better authority over the person. It can also go towards strengthening the character of the subject through the realisation that reified abstractions should not be allowed to dominate and destroy our freedom as sovereign individuals.Jennifer Frances Armstrong That's a good way to put it -- sado-maoschism. But I think there is a danger of DE-mystifying it, too, when we assume that we can just name it and see it for what it is. It really does seem more like a black hole that sucks us in through the primitive parts of our brains, which it calls into operation.

ASK APE: INTELLECTUAL SHAMANISM

ASKING APE:  
How did the term [intellectual shamanism] develop? Do you use shamanism as a metaphor or as a signifier? Do u think there is a connection between deconstruction and altered states of consciousness?

17:58
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
The postmodernists took a lot from the originators of this mode of experience that I have termed, "intellectual shamanism". However, what is suited to academia is not the original system of ideas, which necessarily grows wild --and can only grow wild. If you consider that shamanism is the untaming of the human mind, then the postmodernist interpretations of Nietzsche and Bataille are somewhat at odds with themselves, since they are the domestication of theories that by their very nature resist domestication.

17:59
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
As for whether deconstruction can lead to altered states of consciousness, that really depends on how far the academic theoreticians have gone in domesticating the original ideas. If they have domesticated them a lot, it cannot. But if only a little bit, well then, perhaps a little more.

18:02
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
Intellectual shamanism is in some ways a metaphor and in other ways a signifier. It's a metaphor in that one does not actually believe in real spirits that guide one. It's a signifier in that the transformation through ASC is real and the experiences one has are not to be rejected simply as fantasy or fiction.

18:03
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
Anyway, I developed the term to try to explain what I thought was missing from contemporary awareness, especially in academia -- which is that life is not a theoretical proposition unrelated to danger, experiment or the need to promote change.

18:06
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
I was studying the African author, Dambudzo Marechera, and I saw he understood everything in this way. But the academic analyses of him were generally incapable of taking into account the risky nature of his intellectual and artistic enterprise. They acted as if nothing were at stake except the artist's reputation -- whereas that was far from being the case. in fact, his life, his sanity AND his artistic enterprise were all put at stake.

18:07
Jennifer Frances Armstrong
So they didn't understand deliberately taking the risks or the necessity to experiment, which are related to knowledge of the world, as well as to effective communication of what really matters.
I used the term, "facing death", to signify this kind of risk.

My commentary on a new culture of idiots - Salon.com

How Fox News created a new culture of idiots - Salon.com

Quote: It is not just Fox News commentators but Fox News itself that has the appropriate, in-your-face, I’m-entitled-to-do-this, especially-because-you-dislike-it vibe.

Quote 2: Cable news assholes are distinctive for their knowing awareness but willful disregard of how they are perceived by others. They are flush with Frankfurtian “bullshit,” where bullshitting (speaking without regard for the truth) is something that can be done with a tacit understanding among speaker and audience that truth is not being told. A quite different class of asshole, by contrast, is marked by his utter failure to appreciate how he is seen.

This article outlines what has occurred when I have encountered many Americans online.

The asshole behavior is culturally learned.

I should add, though, that even this USA-originating criticism of the culture of narcissism makes me feel on edge, because it accepts a paradigm that some people are deserving, some not, and that everybody has to be morally judged in relation to their talents and whether they are blowing these out of proportion or serving the community with them.

Whilst criticizing assholes, the author tacitly employs a dichotomous set of values, where you are either one thing or another, and perhaps not deserving of recognition unless the community applauds you as being of service, rather than as having "failed".

Isn't this the very sort of bifurcation of thought that leads to the development of assholes in the first place? They are set up to feel insecure because their status and abilities depend on whether the community feels that the artist benefits them.  But, logically, how does one get people to feel that you are benefiting them without flattering them?   The narcissist flatters others in order to reassure himself that his position is secure.  He thereby coaxes morality to his side.

Morality and narcissism are two sides of the same coin -- not worlds apart.

Ian Smith's Rhodesia

The complexity of animal life

If animals can be this idiosyncratic and hard to predict, why do evolutionary psychologists imagine that humans are quite simple and mechanical?

Evolutionary losers

Some apes are remarkably lacking in self awareness, and I think their hostility springs from this. It’s as if they are evolutionary losers in the true sense, people who haven’t figured it out, who are trying to make a religion out of science to bolster their self-confidence.

I went there because I’m tired of the way YouTube seems to be dominated by immature males. I wanted to open up the scope for debate a bit. But, it’s impossible.

Thing about "Evolutionary Psychology" (EP) is, if you know yourself, you’re not going to be looking for someone in authority to explain to you who you are. Now, as I said, had I gone there ten or twenty years ago, these guys would have confused me a great deal. I wouldn’t have had such a clear idea of who I am, back then, so if someone threw a random insult, I might have reflected that perhaps it had some basis in truth.

Now, I have a very thorough idea of who I am, and I had anticipated some projection — but not as much as I got. I had decided right from the start not to be drawn in by any emotional hook. So all of my responses were very formal, giving nothing away about myself, and returning their statements to them in the form of a Socratic dialogue.

As a result of my wholly emotionally-devoid engagement, they concluded that I am “a female stereotype” and must be told to stop acting like one.

So, a virtual algorithm that just returned their statements back to them, whilst probing to see if their hatred of skeptic Rebecca Watson was misogynist, is viewed by them as having the qualities of “a female stereotype”.

This shows that the need to project must have been intense

The biologists, massaging wounded gender identities

I have been studying the lay of the land with contemporary feminism, because there are trends within it that are not so healthy. If that news has finally reached me in my hermit’s hovel, it must be significant. Some really decent men around me have come under attack from some wives, colleagues or girlfriends who are anything but fine people, but who are using feminist levers in order to win petty, personal battles.

The view that gender relations is determined by biological status has been taken up by the left and right, and they are both attacking each other with it. There is one highly notable person who produces YouTube videos along an evolutionary psychology line — girl writes what. She tailors her views to pander to the perspectives of disgruntled MRAs. Her level of popularity is very high, and her perspective is exceedingly biologist.

I find a biologist — or evolutionary psychologist — perspective to be quite pointless, theoretically unfounded, as well as being socially degrading.

It seems people have fallen into this way of looking at the world by default, because they haven’t experienced any strong cultural alternatives, which would make them think of others in more human terms. Seeing the world in terms of biological determinism, for example, the notion that women and men are both looking to trade up all the time, and will stab their partners in the back to do so, only reinforces the cheapening behavior.

I commented on one of the videos that my relationship was not an outcome of biological determinism, since I sought and found a partner whose childhood experiences and upbringing most closely matched mine — it just happened that I had to delve back into history to find him. Our age difference is 23 years apart. To my mind, this indicates that for at least one person, cultural issues are much more significant than maximizing breeding potential.

Of course, one would need a developed intellect to understand what I am saying. The ability to analyse is not innate or biological. It has to be taught. If it is not taught, we can only return to the default, in terms of understanding anything — which is biology or personal appearance.

It’s not that people are simply “apes” and that is all we can do about it. Rather, they’ve been taught not to be anything more than apes. Then they label their apelike gesticulations as “feminism” or “men’s rights”, when all I can see is an ape scratching his hairy buttocks.

Nonetheless, if you want to get in on the debate, it is helpful to know that everyone has made a turn toward biologism, most likely as a way to avoid the more difficult task of developing a mind of their own.

It’s sad when people buy reassuring, ego-massaging rubbish. Just because it makes someone feel temporarily morally vindicated doesn’t mean it isn’t shit.

Check out these people who hate Gillard for her looks

From:  http://theantibogan.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/why-hate-gillard-shes-a-fugly-woman-thats-why-um-right/

They hate her for her looks. Ha.

From:  http://theantibogan.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/why-hate-gillard-shes-a-fugly-woman-thats-why-um-right/