Original
Article: EXCLUSIVE: Bill Maher on Islam spat with Ben Affleck:
“We’re liberals! We’re not crazy tea-baggers”
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014 5:35 PM
@MyRealName, sure! I would hope
perhaps we'd consider that being educated on the subject isn't necessarily so
much the thing as is one's state of mental health. If Affleck reads a desire
for righteous war amongst some liberals, even as much as they say they don't
want to kill muslims, I'm glad he doesn't abash himself and not speak up.
What's frustrating for Affleck is
that liberals have poorly placed themselves to be able to defuse the influence
of Maher and Harris. It is very possible that good numbers of cultures out
there that historically have been conservative but which have begun to rapidly
modernize, evolve, will end up feeling guilty for all that's been trespassed
and accrued and suddenly turn puritanical in mass ... what happened to Germany
in the 30s. Become a warrior culture of "knights" who've renounced
their spoiled ways, now ready to die for their beloved mutterland.
But liberals have had no way of
admitting this to themselves, for they've only associated it with the rightwing
perspective. So they insist it's "only extremists" ... when they
ought to know that whole societies can suddenly turn extreme, especially when
some within (the more emotionally evolved; the less abused/better raised) have
successfully been pushing reforms, social/economic/political advances.
I think Maher and Harris are
aware of other liberals' deliberate ignorance, and are glorying in the fact
that there is now no prepared way to show that those who are actually factually
more correct are still possessed of the more perverse mindset. Good portions of
the world might suddenly turn very conservative -- it was the change we knew in
the 1930s from the Jazz Age 1920s. And someone pointing out in the late 20s
what could possible develop in Germany is
not necessarily more to be saluted than the liberal who wasn't as
concerned.
What's key is that one truly
wants peace and ongoing growth. And the liberal in the 20s might have been one
of the exceptional who could be truly favoring this, while still able to point
out evidence that makes another culture you're actually rooting for seem
barbaric. But s/he'd probably be one of those hoping for the growth to end by popularizing an opponent we'll
all need to shed a sane culture for war trance, war preparedness.
Original Article: Ebola, the “heart of darkness” and the epidemic of fear
MONDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2014 2:57 PM
dkelly5352 Reparations and the loss of territory greatly affected the German psyche.
More about this German psyche … I
think it takes a particularly nasty childhood, full of shaming and humiliation,
to feel so shamed by anything later on that'd you'd go down a course that have
you want to kill millions of people and take pleasure in the hypermasculine
possibility of world dominance.
They were getting revenge for
childhood humiliations, sexual abuse; the treaty was a just flashback.
Everything in our childhoods gets played out in the external social
sphere.
Economic growth -- and accrued
guilt -- leads to war. Major wars aren't fought during depressions, because the
point of war -- mass sacrifice -- is being handled internally.
Original Article: Ebola, the “heart of darkness” and the epidemic of fear
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2014 4:36 PM
@Amity Maybe that's just too much work.
So we're not tribal animals -- but we are lazy shits!
Won't you come over to my side
and say we're just traumatized children, ruled over by (the like of) parents
who'll abandon us if we choose just to fart away all the advantages they've so
graciously and selflessly given us?
Original Article: Ebola, the “heart of darkness” and the epidemic of fear
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2014 4:12 PM
Andrew, note, believes it's
pretty usual to freak out about things that are not actually genuine threats,
saying we're all at core still tribal people possessed of primal fears. I think
historians might allow for this because if they stop insisting humankind as
rational, it's only to suggest how fallen we are, how base we are -- they like
thinking of human beings as intrinsically greedy and self-interested, for
example. Take that you presumptuous assholes, believing yourselves better!
My way is sort of akin to
Andrew's, in suggesting that past terrors determine how we see our world, not
"realities." But because it's not a safe zone of imagining some
distant anthropological tribe really far removed from the scholar who casually
(arrogantly? angrily? retaliatorily?) ascribes the rest of the human family as
similar to them, but the dangerous one of imaging one's own self once again as
we were when in absolute terror before our mommies and daddies as they
abandoned or ferociously attacked us, it's off the table.
Original Article: Ebola, the “heart of darkness” and the epidemic of fear
SUNDAY,
OCTOBER 5, 2014 3:27 PM
@Amity Germany in the 1920s was
still Jazz Age, though, it encouraged all the artists and new thoughts the
Nazis, that Germans in the 30s, wanted dead as soon as possible. The way of
seeing the decade as simply crazily disrupting, rattling, perhaps shows how
anyone from a family that crucified/brutally abandoned their children when they
did anything deemed spoiled or selfish, would experience any period of
innovation -- where one artistic/social advance was followed so quickly by
something unimagined before; by something even better.
What the Nazis did was ensure
people that psychic disintegration caused by unpermitted growth would be put to
an end. I understand that Nazism ebbed for a short while, but took off again in
spades during the 30s economic recovery. The Nazis halted women's rights,
halted social, political, sexual freedoms, and the nation felt relieved; the
inner sense of disintegration stopped.
The question is, what was going through
the average person's mind when they feared "communism"? Could it not
be that every outside perpetrator by that point carried every aspect of their
own punitive parents? That every child they killed in war, carried every aspect
of their own terribly guilty childhood selves? That Germany itself so saintly,
because every bad parental aspect had been projected outside; and the Volk also
so good, because it was composed of puritanical good boys and girls ready in
mass to die for Her?
Original Article: Ebola, the “heart of darkness” and the epidemic of fear
SUNDAY,
OCTOBER 5, 2014 1:37 AM
Maybe I can be corrected
otherwise, but I really doubt that Germans in the Weimar 1920s believed that
they were surrounded by enemies about to attack; but by 1939 they certainly
did. If we all possess the same evolutionary history, if we're all afraid of
monsters, why does it seem to speak out so loud at certain times and so
shallowly at others?
I'm one who thinks that who we
are is most usefully explored not by DNA but by the specific nature of our
childhoods, how well loved we were. If we grew up under parents who often
terrorized us -- Tiger Moms; patriarchal fathers; fear of the lash or more of devourment -- then if we end up in a
society which is actually very empowered, like we are now, and Germany
certainly was in the 30s, at no risk at all from neighbors, but still believes
itself terribly vulnerable, then it's a sign we've regressed into our childhood
mindsets, our childhood selves. It's a sign that we're engaging once again with
very real childhood "monsters" we had to engage with everyday as
children.
What precipitates this paranoid
state is simply growth panic: peoples who've exceeded what they believed they
were allowed in life, are guilty of hubris, feel like they're disintegrating --
and so by the wayside goes their normal selves. You take note of this by
watching media images, but the media
doesn't precipitate it.
We go to war for defense and
re-enactment. The aspect of initiation
is pleasing; empowering against a demonic force that is always out there
circling. And the takedown -- so long as it means not just killing monsters but
the sacrifice of children (our own guilty childhood selves, who're surely
sinful; deserved their mistreatment) -- immensely satisfying.
Original Article: Bill Maher: Islam’s “the only religion that acts like the
mafia, that will f**king kill you if you say the wrong thing”
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2014 2:44 PM
@5easypieces @bigrafx @joe
jones I think Maher is arguing that liberals refuse to acknowledge how
conservative almost all Muslims are. Liberals do this because they understand
that this rarely turns out to be a discussion of fact -- as Maher and Harris
insist it is -- and just pretext to find a people of "dangerous
people" to satisfy our need to annihilate without guilt.
We develop the fantasy need first
-- to find a dangerous, terrible other and war against it -- then we go about establishing
how this is simply the truth of the world: some bad people need to be bombed,
attacked first before they attack us. Affleck should have argued that Maher and
Harris have an unconscious need for war right now, to annihilate a lot
innocents, and have to wake up to this fact.
They would deny it, and point out
more statistical fact. But Ben should have said he feels it in them -- you want
war, guys. If the stats showed something different, they wouldn't be brought up
or would have been ignored.
Original
Article: Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s behind the
misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3,
2014 4:41 PM
Lissie You're a fun writer.
Original Article: Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s behind the
misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 3:06 PM
@esstee @Patrick
McEvoy-Halston I certainly qualified the emotional health bit. But, yes, he is
amongst those people I see targeted where I'm not convinced people taking him
down -- citing very valid stuff -- are in a camp I'd necessarily want to
belong in either.
It is perhaps for this reason I
make sure to argue my own point of view that the source of the woman hate owes
to mistreatment by one's mother -- raised out of an environment that provided
insufficient love and respect for her -- because I'm testing to see if those
taking down Dawkins are themselves open to explanations behind women-hate other
than ones they're comfortable with.
If they're furious, then I'm
wondering if they're actually more comfortable with a foreclosed environment
than Dawkins himself is, and just represent another avenue in our Depression
society where inroads just can't be made.
Original Article: Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s behind the
misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 2:34 PM
Richard Dawkins convinces me that
he got to atheism out of emotional health. I think his fantastically playful
mind came out of the fact that he had parents, had a mother, who encouraged him
to play -- who were permissive, out of love. I sometimes wonder if he gets
targeted so much at Salon because he doesn't seem to admit to any sins at all;
whereas Salon would prefer we're we'd all self-lash at least a little
bit.
So mostly I would want to defend
him. But I know that when he said he was groped by teachers as a child and that
it didn't harm him a bit, he was certainly wrong about that. And I know that
there's more behind his support for Hoff Summers than he realizes. A lot of men
were still raised by women who were insufficiently loved and respected in the
society they were born in, and who therefore made use of their children to
satisfy their own unmet needs. Dawkins obviously had a better-loved mother than
many -- and therefore his lack of a psychological need for gods to defer and
admit sins to. But is obviously still one of those, and thus his being pleased
by the prospect of revenge.
I suppose the other thing for me
is that many of these last of the "great men" that are being heavily
targeted by feminists, still seem to me to be more innovative than
contemporaries -- I'm thinking Updike and Roth. For this I still like seeing
them in the limelight, not because they're towering men amongst a swath of
deferential women. Seeing people decide against reading him would be a bit like
being witness to the 30s generation that let the appallingly-full-of-himself
Jazz Ager, F. Scott Fitzgerald, go out of print.
Original Article: Heinrich Himmler, family man: Why “The Decent One” is the
most haunting documentary I’ve ever seen
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 10:21 AM
CyclingFool About cops/soldiers using
deadly force to "protect" us: I think we may learn better about why
we have soldiers when we consider that they act out sadism we feel, so we can
be dispossessed of it, live ordinary lives (they can also represent sacrificed
youth and youthful potential -- so also the reprieve of first born to angry
"gods"). They're a corollary of our need for homeless people, who we
make feel vulnerability we've known but want the hell away from us. It's all
very useful, but for still quite psychologically damaged people. Many of the
better-loved left know nothing of this. It's not in them. And would on their
own create a society spared all of it.
The reason we let predatory
capitalists go on may not be so much their absolute necessity in the creation
of useful products, but that we are still primitive enough, our period of
sustained "sinful" growth has gone on long enough, that we can only
tolerate useful creation when we make sure it's done nastily; where it'll mean
a lot of destruction as well.
Original Article: Heinrich Himmler, family man: Why “The Decent One” is the
most haunting documentary I’ve ever seen
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 4:05 AM
Frank Knarf Personally, I think
he's right. He could even say that when we want our leaders to bomb the hell
out of people or structure our economy so that it makes destitutes out of a lot
people, our psychological
mechanism is about the same (lots of children are killed, while we go about our
daily business). I disagree when it then spreads to absolutely everyone. If
you're thinking you have some sin in you, you may just be ready to join others
in a "cleanse."
Original Article: Heinrich Himmler, family man: Why “The Decent One” is the
most haunting documentary I’ve ever seen
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 1:40 AM
wardropper
the article points to the truth about the little bad things in us all
and their potential, given the opportunity, to become very big bad things.
Or it substantiates a lie we're
all pretty well prepared to accept. The other way, that it isn't in all of us
but only in those who were abused as children, and set up brain systems to
protect the abandoning/abusive parent and demonize the "bad" child,
requires us to explore our own childhoods in a way that sets off major alarms.
You just don't go there.
Original Article: Heinrich Himmler, family man: Why “The Decent One” is the
most haunting documentary I’ve ever seen
FRIDAY,
OCTOBER 3, 2014 1:09 AM
The phenomenon is
"switching," and it's "in" a lot of us, but not all of us:
depends on our childhoods; whether it was so bad we had to set up different
brain systems we could switch into, so to fuse with our disassociated
terrifying parent alters and victimize our Bad Selves (guilty simply for being
vulnerable). Switching is what occurred in Milgram's experiments -- it involves
cutting off the empathic mirror neurons in the right insula -- and not everyone switched. The
better loved don't.
So, many feel this need to switch
into persecutory alters they've set up in their brains; they restage early
childhood traumas where they're "the parents" and those gassed are themselves as children; and then
afterwards they're completely out: they can go home calmly for dinner with the
family.
What precipitates this switching?
It's growth panic, guilt, but I won't quite get into that; but I will say that
it occurs after people begin to
coalesce into a group. That is, don't be on the look out for stigmatization so
much as a sense of group identity, of nationalism, building; when it coalesces,
then we'll understand exactly who's to be designated as vermin. Victims aren't
foolish to be caught out; it "flowers" out in a terrible hurry after
fusion is complete.
For a sense of German
childrearing during the early 20th century, perhaps check this out:
THURSDAY,
OCTOBER 2, 2014 2:25 PM
What was key about Paglia, why a
lot of men were excited by what she said, is that it would have felt a bit as
if mommy had authorized the rapes ...
spoiled, over-protected young college women, welcome to the wilderness.
Older women, like Ginsberg and
Paglia, are being experienced now as supreme authorities that cut through all
the blather. They represent our own Terrifying Mothers, and we're both afraid
of and eager to fuse with them.
What's actually frightening is the knowledge that we are monsters of our
own making. That we raise boys to see sex as something that can be taken,
should be taken.
Again, this certainly doesn't
help. But the real problem is that disparaged, unloved mothers end up more
needing their children than loving them. This leads to incestuous use of their
children, followed by abandonment. It's experiences of this sort of contact
with one's mother that makes one want to make use of the guilt-reducing excuses
of an anti-woman culture to go about humiliating (what rape is primarily about)
women.
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY,
OCTOBER 1, 2014 4:52 PM
Graham Clark Yes, unloved mothers
from societies that disrespect women, will end up looking to their children for
love, and will abandon them when they no longer serve this need. This produces
the kind of rage that could fuel something as awful as rape, which will seem
very aberrant to us eventually, as will such things as war.
And yes, anyone from a genuinely
provisioning home will not murder or rape. They weren't sexually abused as
children.
I don't understand your last
paragraph. What I meant is that children who were abused will end up blaming
themselves for the abuse. They set up alters in their heads, in the right
hemisphere -- the Terrifying Mother (or primary caregiver) alter -- that
tells them they deserve humiliation and punishment through life.
I made use of your comment mostly
to expand on what I think, which is a bit rude, but your bent is to humiliate
people who don't even want to be your opponents, so it's tough not to sort of
pass you by.
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2014 3:57 PM
@dkelly5352 @trainsam From
Lloyd DeMause's "Emotional Life of Nations":
Ever since Jeffrey Masson wrote
his book The Assault on the Truth:
Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, there has been a
widespread misconception that Freud backed down from maintaining the
reality of childhood sexual abuse. The truth is exactly the opposite. Freud
continued all his life to state that sexual abuse of children in his society
was widespread, insisting in his final writings that "I cannot admit
[that] I exaggerated the frequency [of] seduction," that "most
analysts will have treated cases in which such [incestuous] events were real
and could be unimpeachably established," that "actual seduction...is
common enough," that "the sexual abuse of children is found with
uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants," and that
"phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often
they are not phantasies but real memories." What he actually
"backed down" from was his initial idea that hysteria could be caused
by sexual abuse, since, he said, "sexual assaults on small children happen
too often for them to have any aetiological importance..." That is, it
was because children were so commonly sexually abused in his society that
Freud thought that seduction could not be the cause of hysteria. Otherwise,
nearly everyone would be a hysteric!
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY,
OCTOBER 1, 2014 3:46 PM
@Benthead @AmusedAmused
every one else rapes because they've been immersed in stories, images
and jokes about worthless women.
That doesn't help, but it's not
sufficient. The boy would have to have underlying experiences of being
dominated and humiliated. And not from spurning from an early grade-school
crush, but as an infant being manipulated and used in such a terrible way that
it results in such a hell-bent desire to revenge.
This is not to say that it isn't
helpful to challenge regressive media images of women -- though what helps may
not just be that the proper message is getting through, but that boys are
simply getting attention from decent people. But real improvement comes with
improvement in conditions before the
child really comes in contact with "media" -- within the mother-child
dyad.
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY,
OCTOBER 1, 2014 3:27 PM
SpudSpudly Biology works both ways and rape is not always about violence or
control. It can be about sexual desire.
Rape is about control and
humiliation. Boys who were dominated and used incestuously by their mothers are
the ones who'll attempt payback against other women. The only way this might be
deemed biological is that the first homo sapiens were much like primates and
were god-awful (mostly abandoning, infanticidal -- as were the ancient Greeks,
btw) parents. But really, anyone who belongs to those generational chains whose
childrearing has improved from generation to generation, as mother finds way to
provide a bit more love to her children, and so on, will not rape.
The idea of women craving rape,
actual physical assault, should be explored in the context of what happens to
women who as girls felt that they were "bad" and deserved sexual
assaults they had suffered. If they were assaulted as children and the
perpetrators were those the child needed to be kept protective, part of their
brains will be installed with the perpetrator's point of view, and will glory
when the "uppity girl" gets taken down a notch again. It's an example
of the terrible results of child abuse, only.
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY,
OCTOBER 1, 2014 1:43 AM
But here we have a piece where a woman is actually saying
that men are intrinsically violent and that can never ever change, and it’s
being heralded as a very serious idea about gender and sexual violence.
For some men this might feel
flattering. The immediate reaction a woman should have towards a man, ergo, is
to be wary. Anyone who grew up under a dominating mother, anyone who knew a lot
of humiliating shrinking before her, would find this appealing, a great
buff.
If she'd of said that since all
boys end up servicing the unmet (love) needs of their mothers, men are
perpetually afraid of her dominion and rape other women foremost to gain some
kind of illusory domination over her,
she'd of been less well received I'm sure.
Original Article: Camille Paglia thinks rape is intrinsic to men’s nature —
and a lot of men are like, “This is awesome!”
WEDNESDAY,
OCTOBER 1, 2014 1:31 AM
Benthead SpudSpudly No society will ever achieve a zero
frequency rate for rape.
Why? Rape isn't inherent in men.
It's not a desire to have sex but to humiliate.
Children who are warmly raised by their parents will have no inclination to
rape at all, and we can get there, eventually.
Original Article: “He didn’t care if he destroyed himself as long as he hurt
you”: The sad, disturbing case of Ed Champion
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2014 9:56 PM
Like many Internet habitués
Lines like this have me sometimes
wondering if perhaps you shouldn't climb totally over to NYRB, or some such.
"Amity," "Susan Sunflower," "Beans and Greens,"
"Aunt Messy," are all habitués. And if they were ever to meet you
would you really want them to see in your face that you still thought them lesser
sorts of people for not doing the proper not-ever, or
only-to-correct-a-research-mistake, commenting on articles?
Somewhere out there I'm sensing
intelligent people reading an article and dying to interact and respond, but
deciding against it to keep their sense of themselves intact ... for the
pleasure of not being one of them.
Sense of self maintained, but democratic discussion loses some.
Salon, start doing more of what
you used to do, and get excited about some of the conversations that ensue on
your website. Don't use them to make yourselves feel superior, please -- everyday a comment adventure,
indeed.
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