The Invisible Counterpoint

me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change ) Feb 10 Hi, I thought I'd introduce myself.  I'm Patrick McEvoy-Halston. I've been reading DeMause's work for years, and its influenced my writings on literature and film. DeMause deals with material that is tough, very tough, to associate with progressives. The  history part of what he's done is being brought up again -- the idea that societies have been progressing -- but those liberals advocating it, like Steven Pinker (whom as a progressive I actually do not trust), are careful not to suggest that human beings have been improving, becoming biologically superior, and this seems to have been sufficient to prevent it from rankling.  This is of course what DeMause asserts, that childrearing has been improving across time, as mothers give their children more love than they received, leading to people who are objectively superior -- in his view, the liberal reader of the New Yorker is a thousand times ...

Jeffrey Taylor just wrote an article about our need to stand up the march of human progress. Here is a good sample of it, followed by my reply. The relentless march of time generally affords humankind, which happens to include folks in the media, the chance to reflect on events and acquire wisdom. But the weeks passing since the massacre in Paris of the highly talented Charlie Hebdo cartoonists for their depictions of the Prophet Muhammad have only granted a good number of commentators the opportunity to bedork themselves time and again, as they pen columns and make on-air statements that both spread confusion and betray commitments to untenable, morally reprehensible extenuative positions concerning Islam. This is tragic, for, if anything, the slaughter of European artists exercising their lawful right to self-expression in the capital of their own country offered us all a “teachable moment” sans pareil about the nature of the threat lurking within – in fact, innate to — the “...

Original Article:  It’s time to fight religion: Toxic drivel, useful media idiots, and the real story about faith and violence MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2015 1:23 AM  Tigriel   Many atheists are people who stopped believing in God because they felt hostility toward their fathers, and toward other father figures or authority figures because of that; and they especially disliked the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing authority figure who would punish them for their sins. So they had a psychological motivation for pretending that God does not exist. Most atheists have less authoritative parents, and thus the idea of an all-powerful God has no emotional appeal. If you mutilate yourself before Him, you can't imagine your own parents thereby being appeased. You just bleed, pointlessly, which ranks rather far behind being a party animal in terms of fun. An all-powerful male God, however, comes in handy when you're really concerned about the enormity of your early...

Critical thinking about the nature of authority might induce us to wonder why those stories are invisible, or spun as dry policy questions for readers of the business pages, while so much bandwidth is occupied with making fun of a few vaccine loons. It might cause us to notice that treating people who feel genuine uncertainty about mainstream medicine as if they were low-achieving children only makes the problem worse, and that it’s absurd to assert that questioning the Catholic Church or the National Football League is good, but questioning the name-brand institutions of the scientific world is bad. (Andrew O'Hehir "Anti-vaxxers are not the enemy" ) Questioning the Catholic Church and the National Football League is done by society's more progressive people. They want to see a reduction in self-flaggelant philosophies and activities. Questioning science is generally done by society's more regressive. Ongoing societal advancement -- which to them is a b...

Original Article:  White male temper tantrums: What the “political correctness” debate completely misses WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2015 7:21 PM Benthead   Patrick McEvoy-Halston  I hear you. Mind you, in presence of chivalric liberal Chait, about to do battle in support of 18th-century liberal ideals(!) it's okay .... perhaps more than okay, to remind that people can be Quixotic, strange, as bizarrely motivated as Freud held all humanity to be.  Different cultures owe entirely to different childrearing. You can make all the fuss you want about reactionaries across different cultures, but if they sound the same in tone ... if they're equally aggressive, then they properly belong grouped with one another, however much their decorating aesthetics may sort out. Historical change owes to gradually improving childrearing. People believe they deserve a better life, and they invent belief systems that help enable it to be so.  The nature of geopolitics...