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Recents comments (I'm "Emporium") at Salon.com (as of June 25 2016)

susan sunflower Emporium Good point about the similarity between this case and the scapegoating of Jews as child-abductors. Referring specifically to Jews, this was a minority actually leaps ahead in terms of childrearing, true child care, than the rest of Germans -- they were the most progressive group in the country.
Society will miss an uninhibited Gawker. 
Come on. Hillary is not some exempla of absolute human rationality. We just almost never elect in those people. She, like Obama, can actually unconsciously want war. Innocents punished, and all the worst. But their impulses are still much better than so much of the rest of the population. 
If she gets in, I'm not quite sure she'll be the war hawk that many expect her to be -- operating under the belief that not that many of us are entirely immune to whatever turn in psychology is driving so many of our countrymen into nationalists, I actually expect her to turn a bit isolationist -- but I think she's going to do other unconscionable things -- like putting weight on the "radical left." There will be no good reason for doing so. It won't simply be strategy, but rather, pathology. And yet it'll still mean overall for a good progressive run by a candidate, many leaps of psychological health over her opponent.  
susan sunflower Emporium We don't have a left who can look at refugees and say, these individuals need to be welcomed into our country, and given the full chance of a rich life they deserve, but they do come from areas where the amount of love in families is abysmal, so we can't assume they'll get to the contributive stage any sooner than we'd expect some generational chain that's been here for a century and rightwing and xenophobic the entirety of the time, to suddenly just now become one, given the right pamphleteering.
We'll look at many families within our country and say, they're entrenched: these people keep on re-inflicting the same traumas upon their children and they never seem to become other than societal retardants. Society moves on, essentially only by forgetting about them and focusing on the advances of the cosmopolitan, educated, liberal elite. The particular irony of our current form of progressive thought -- the best to date out there, mind you -- is that refugees, for us, simply by being amongst peoples the rightwingers in our own country tend to project upon and hate, magically become exempt from this way of thinking. For them, surely, after a little bit of careful guidance and a grand measure of respect and support, they'll bypass this generation-after-generation-stuck-in-the-mud rule, and start inculcating our own society with a wonderful dalliance of their own cultural contributions, as they've caught up with our modern contemporary standards of behaviour in every way we could expect to hope for. Take the bullies off of them (we know what it like to be picked on too!), and give them a little bit of support and love, they'll thrive. It's too bad we've rejected psychoanalytic talk therapy, because therapists in those circles understood that when the abuse has been bad it can take decades to shape people into normal.     
You mentioned before that many of our immigrants are actually highly educated. Progressive for their own countries, very likely. These may well be in advance of what constitutes the American average, and simply by coming here, are weighing our country towards the left, towards sanity. As much as possible, this ought to be the idea. 
What liberal doesn't hear of Syrian refugees and want to apply a "Rousseauian image makeover" (Steven Pinker)? What lover of Dave Eggers' wonderful fiction -- Zeitoun, What is the What? The left is best defined as being those who are more sane that its opponents, but what is good about the current refugee program may be more that it is part of our current generation of progressive's world vision, than the degree to which the refugees somehow function to keep our world somehow intrinsically cosmopolitan and progressive.
We may actually be letting in people who have come out of childhoods more traumatic than the ones that lead people to being rightwing, American-style. This means hate. This means rage. This means parochial attitudes, that stretch over generations. This is not a problem, but only in a sort of complicated way: the only alternative vision of our times will lead to mass bigotry and a great furthering of pain. 
If the American populace wants to chastise the left, its (the left's) inclination to romanticize will be part of how it goes. The other avenue is already currently being exploited: the American left has not evolved beyond needing a group to irrationally hate, namely the American right (or downscale, white, working class Americans). Irrationally? Insanely? -- yes. For if they were looking at people outside their culture rather than within it, their tone would be much more tempered, and they'd be much less inclined to mock... they'd talk instead, rather respectfully -- not to besmirch the totality of their whole cultural background -- of a still necessary re-education. They'd deal with them as educated, tolerant employees of European governments do the refugees they're respectfully helping settle in. 
There is still something irrational in the American left, a need to project an inner worldview onto outer reality, even if vastly less the case than their opponents. I don't think this is an achilles heel, but if the whole nation goes sorta Trumpish ( which, believe it or not, I think it can kinda manage even with Hillary), if we close in on the 51% of the population who are in the same mind as Brexit even if not quite for a tantrumy head-of-state, the left is going to have to be really, really smart to minimize the damage, and keep our subsequent years the best under the circumstances. 
Yes, the right is truly, deeply mad. But they need to consider their own psychic weak spots, and what it might have made them perhaps overlook. 
LynnRobb Globalization can be seen as a sort of reaching out for your own. You're educated, broadminded, and you seek the same wherever they are in the world. Someone tells you that, "no, the people you left behind in your hometown are actually TRULY your kin, and that it's time you reminded yourself of that." And you look at them and say to yourself, "what, those neanderthals? Please... no thank you! I'm doing everything I can to escape them!"
I doubt a single one of them truly believes they are of exactly the same "nature" as those who think the world is disintegrating into some kind of polygot mess; that something pure is being endlessly climbed over by dark and fearful beings. That is, I think they believe they are psychologically different, more evolved. And the reason they don't see the world as in some kind of chaos but rather becoming more peaceful (which, it is) and, overall, more integrated and communicative, is because they have evolved into the temperament where a changing world doesn't scare them, nor feels like a forbidden trespass. 
What does it mean when we say we want people to assimilate? Shouldn't we prefer that newcomers, rather, scintillate -- challenge, with their human uniqueness, our traditional, roundabout way of doing things? Isn't it for this that we'd want to invite them in? And do we trust people saying they want assimilation? Are they thinking rationally, sanely, demanding we consider the heartland something forgotten but somehow still absolutely essential to our collective identity? Or are they in some way worthy of being forgotten -- not humiliated and preyed upon, as they have been, but still forgotten? 
Why not correct course by instituting a living wage and providing meaningful jobs for everyone -- go vastly more Scandinavian socialist -- and as well de-emphasize Wall Street and put significant taxes on the super-affluent so there is no great financial divide, but otherwise keep those clamouring for loyalty to currently besmirched, old-day America, out of the news? Don't you sense the madness in them? 


The way you describe disgruntled downscale voters at the end of the piece makes it hard to believe that the biggest problem is the particular state of the E.U. itself. If they like white Americans are operating under some kind of conscious or unconscious death instinct, mightn't it just distract to delineate its problems? 
Maybe if their desire to re-stage early childhood humiliations but no longer to suffer but to triumph over the oppressor -- here in the guise of snobby Oxford Londoners -- is strong enough; maybe if the drive to start a course that will ultimately lead to some kind of mass suicide that will please because it would acknowledge ultimately how "sinful" "you" really are, is strong enough; maybe if the need to create some out-group into which one projects all one's badness into is strong enough -- in this case, immigrants  -- it wouldn't matter one bit if the E.U. was actually functioning as it was envisioned, a monumentally beautiful edifice of human social creation that people two centuries ahead in time will mark as a significant signpost of evolutionary progress. These same regressing people would look at and see it in exactly the same fashion they do now. An unctuous, appalling monstrosity, even though in reality, a true beauty. 
The real problem for these people with the E.U. is not what it is doing wrong but what it is doing right. At some conscious or unconscious level, these downscale voters know that they are being incrementally brought into a more progressive world that will ultimately increase the opportunities available to them. The problem however in coming out of families, still, that are like many of our own were but way back in our grandma's or great-grandma's time, is that burned early on in their brains is that too much self-activation and self-realization makes you spoiled, makes you rotten: your own growth means you're ignoring the multitudinous pains of your deprived parents, who bore you to ameliorate them -- for psychic equilibrium. And these people, like regular harshly-reared Germans in liberal Weimar Germany, need for a stop to be put on growth, have all the "bad boys and girls" punished, and commit to a Fatherland or Mudderland, because otherwise a complete psychic apocalypse for them is guaranteed. 
Frank Knarf Emporium The need to imagine themselves as under threat is what is paramount in Europe. It is true that many refugees are from countries where the level of childrearing is abhorrent. And it is true that liberals romanticize cultures their conservative "peers" projected upon and despised, where if they were themselves even more emotionally healthy, they could have just seen them straight. But if the recent millions into Germany -- for example -- were actually more emotionally evolved than Germans were, less violence-inclined, such is the need for many Germans to imagine their country as vulnerable and under threat, they would have made their actually in this case very evolved and progressive refugees, into villains. 
Many people are rejecting progress for a nationalistic mindset. This is what is most important about our time. Thereafter we made do with what the world offers us to "justify" it. And it certainly helps but actually ultimately doesn't matter, if there are powerful entities out there who really do want to cripple us. 
freebird Emporium The concern of this article was how the nation was likely going to process this event given the facts. What I was trying to get at is the obvious real facts -- that this guy needed a psychiatrist and institutionalization, and was only very tenuously related to "radical Islam" -- won't matter. (Regressing) Mainstream America identifies muslims as outsiders because they were amongst the immigrant groups prioritized when America "drifted" away from 1950s values to our progressive, contemporary ones. As belief in globalism/cosmopolitanism/righteousness of a professional society shakes -- and it is evidently shaking, here and elsewhere -- muslims increasingly intrinsically become the dangerous outside other. Citizenship becomes an allowance handed them, when Americans were lead by liberal professionals who ostensibly were willing to wreck a country they had no respect for while they gloated in their coastal city enclaves. 
This said, the effort to say that the most accurate way to identify this attacker is with all others who grew up in family environments of massive lack of love and ample supplies of insanity (i.e. in with Christian fundamentalists), is of course correct. 
I'm not sure how much the facts matter. ISIS, viewed rationally, is hardly a titanic threat to the world, but in the minds of the mainstream, it has become so. People changed from being enthusiastic or mildly accepting of increased social progress to beginning to want to cloister into a bordered nation, imagined as being surrounded by dark, predatory villains. If ISIS didn't exist, any other group would do... truly, if all they had were peashooters, our imaginations would admittedly be stretched but somehow we'd be convinced of their absolute threat. 
Muslims are associated with the cultural progress of the 1960s on -- the victory of the cultural left. They are increasingly viewed suspiciously, not just because of ostensible capacity for violence but because they are seen as part of the equation of a leftwing professional elite that has been driven to increase opportunity in the world and to decrease "legitimate" avenues in which to express your hate. They were amongst the groups principally brought into the U.S. and Europe when both where rejecting the parochial members of their society and branching off into cosmopolitanism/globalism -- something actually enlightened. The rightwing talk about them as liberals' "pets." That is, as much as the Right is identifying them as medieval cultures, they're hated perhaps principally because of their associations with the most progressive of our own times. 
As such, there is no victory based on facts for the left here. All mainstream Americans need to know is that a muslim was involved (one of the outsiders, brought in by Kennedy and the left) in creating an apocalyptic event in their country. Yes, many mainstream Americans are still homophobic, and certainly are developing a lot of hatred for their millennial young, but they don't feel self-implicated in this attack -- see their own wishes horribly expressed -- because they feel too strong a need to categorize the dead just as carnage... as further evidence that the outer-world is full of attackers who are succeeding in busting giant bomb holes within America's vulnerable, corporeal body. 
Patricia Schwarz Too much emphasis on fathers. These boys spend most of their time with their mothers, and it is their abuse of them that causes shame. Mothers cheer when their sons become suicide bombers. It means their boys will never grow up and away from them. They'll always be with them. And boys feel in suiciding themselves, they'll finally be loved. 
JamesRT We don't yet know how powerful the NRA will be if our nation becomes nationalist. The government is no longer a threat in this case, but truly part of the beloved body you're co-habiting. Remember, just a number of months ago, the Republican establishment was all-powerful... and then suddenly, it wasn't; at all. People had shed something they had psychically wanted for decades. A need to be humiliated, readily assumed; to be misrepresented and betrayed. Could Hitler have reigned in all the loose guns, if he wanted to... saying that in order to own one, you had to be one of his soldiers? And the possibility that you could come up with one, that *just anyone* could come up with one -- a vulgar affront to the leader's power of control and the dignity overall of the nation? I kinda actually suspect that the NRA won't have the power it has now for long. I mean this even if Hillary gets in, because I suspect that we're going to make whomever gets in, our next nationalist leader, our next Roosevelt. Anyway, late at night and just thinking bold. 
Benthead Emporium Freedame Lester Phinney The only families where the fathers are anywhere near as involved as the mothers are, can be found, like, in Brooklyn, or Scandinavia. Everywhere else, there is not a chance that a father has anywhere near the influence of the mother upon the development of the child's psyche. Sources... well, I know for instance that Margaret Mahler argued this point. You could start there. 

NorEastern Jack Burroughs The old cliche is that America was attacked because it represented earthly indulgence... a happy, sunny place. If attacks keep occurring predominantly against the young, and in their happy places, perhaps the U.S. could have done absolutely nothing abroad, and still been a prime target of terrorist attacks. Its crime, just being ostensibly a place where dreams might be realized. 
Maybe what we do when we express our sadism through war crimes is not get deserved "feedback" -- maybe we just kill people; people who did not need to be killed. The fact of ostensibly obvious "feedback" may just reflect a wish. A wish for Bush to be even more evil. A wish that a lash has already been applied, gloriously showing up our guilt and sin. 
Jack Burroughs No one in the left really trusts that the mood in the country is rational right now towards immigrants. 
We have two groups. The most sane, who can rightly be made to seem insane in that they seem incapable of accepting that many immigrants coming into Europe are from regions with absolutely abhorrent childrearing traditions, who vent the hate that was vented upon them readily upon other people. And we have the much less sane, who recognize this, but who in their talk of assimilation and being reasonable, really are just preparing themselves with the beginning of a dialogue which will end in isolating outgroups for a deluge of hate and destruction. 
So the human beings that are going around all abstracted... may be just the best kind of human heroes we've got this time around. The ideal... the left that doesn't romanticize or themselves require some group they can be enfranchised to hate (the best of the left will eventually not hate the right, even as much they'll totally regret them, because they'll never not see in them the kind of neglect required to make them so much hate themselves when they and the nation progress), doesn't quite exist yet. But they'll come. The superego's gone in most of them, and the need to project, soon also.  
Freedame Lester Phinney They're men... who had fathers who spent little time with them, and so they were almost entirely raised by their mothers. Women ARE, in a sense, just as much front and centre, if you're looking to childhood influences for the reason why. 
Benthead Emporium You don't think it's at useful to point out that that our primary problem is with those who seem irritated if we DON'T think America is a cesspool of intractable badness which requires a complete and total cleansing? Hey, make a bold statement about how awesome our students, boldly insisting on applying "trigger warnings" all through the curriculum, and see how many extremists, conservatives, liberals -- all -- want to see you strangled. 
balitwilight Whichever has the worst childrearing. That's where the hatred of hubris comes out of... the total belief in sin; fear of pleasure. Not taught. Not instructions. But basically being coldly abandoned and brutally punished every time you as a kid, as a young child, did anything self-actualizing and kinda fun. Later you shortchange your life possibilities and also project your "bad" version of yourself into others, discriminate against them, and feel, now purified, like you might just be the good boy or girl your God parents might finally love. 
Many families, many countries, really have not evolved much through time: each one just repeats the same crimes upon their children. It is true: compared with the most progressive families/nations of the world, they're essentially medieval in psychic state. Though also true: people from the most loving families are the ones who are saying it's not time to link any culture right-wingers are trying to target as medieval. Hell, with these folk, Andrew might even get in trouble for bringing up the 16th! 
The guilty are those who'd try and cast a pall of darkness upon our nation. Some Hillary supporters were beginning to see the Bernie bros this way. Bill's "they want to kill one out of three on Wall Street!" for instance. Krugman's "these lunatics with their plans that don't add up, will wipe out all our hard-fought-for progress"! Is it possible that with Hillary beating Bernie, we have for a moment escaped those who see America in the gloomiest of terms... those who have a kind of perverse hatred of those who find themselves still actually happy. 
Rapproachment Emporium In our current sagacity we were all caught off guard by Trump. 
People are noting that this man was an underachiever in life. A loser. And because he was a loser he went hyper-masculine to save face. Perhaps these things interconnect differently. That is, maybe he shortchanged his personal development -- like borderlines do -- so as to not be guilty of individuating so much and thereby avoid what is called the abandonment depression: he doesn't have to deal with the six horsemen (depression, panic, rage, guilt, helplessness, emptiness) of the psychic apocalypse that come riding to engage you when you ambition a truly self-fulfilling life for yourself. So sales clerk not lawyer. So security guard not police man.
Noting a culture that continues to present him with opportunities to self-activate and have fun, to ease his distress, he had to ambition further, as inner voices inside his head -- i.e. his parents -- told him that the guilty young, desiring growth and fun so badly, deserved to die. 
Of note, if you came out of a family environment where the father wasn't around much and your environment was largely being around your mother -- that is, one of maternal engulfment -- when you start regressing for feeling abandoned because your nation still tempts you, you can feel feel part of her again, maybe her prop, again -- that is, feminized. This is where the fact that it was gay youth who were targeted is important. They were as he physically felt he was: immersed in female "poisons." Killing them, he becomes hyper masculine: gloriously free of his previously compromised, feminized self. 
TomJohnson Emporium You're welcome. And I hope so as well. 
Just as important is the fact that it was the young who were killed, youth who were having fun. Basically, men who kill like this come out of families where they pretty much existed to maintain the psychic equilibrium of mothers who have been the recipients of very little respect and love in life. When they made efforts to individuate, their mothers understood them as rejecting them -- just like everyone else has in life -- and emotionally abandoned them for it. This was felt as so intolerable to the child, he installed in his mind a superego... a superego that goes into overdrive in his own young adulthood when the possibilities of the world are open to him. He alleviates his sense of intolerable hard self-judgment by projecting his own "guilty" self onto others, and attacks. The mother and father inside of him -- psychic alters -- rejoice, and he feels a good boy who now can be loved.
The fact that he was going after gay men may not be as important as one thinks here. That is, if we're going to increase security, do it in any venue where young people are enjoying themselves. Like Disney World, like someone just below just posted. 
TomJohnson Yep. Lloyd DeMause

susan sunflower Emporium BlackHeywood I wasn't expecting this. I may have missed what you were getting at originally. 

Original Article: O.J. Simpson, American icon: Why the football star turned accused killer is one of the 20th century’s most important cultural figures
SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2016 6:34 PM
susan sunflower BlackHeywood So if Brexit occurs, will this be because the British people deliberated hard on the facts but simply came to a conclusion we don't like, or really just sad tribalism? If Austria and Germany elect in rightwing nationalists, is this because they deliberated sanely on the problem of loose borders and millions of immigrants who can't be assimilated, or really just sad tribalism? I imagine a lot of liberals wouldn't hesitate to drop down the word "tribalism" on ever-increasing contexts these days, and rightly so (Krugman may well have done so with Bernie Saunders, and maybe not entirely for adverse reasons). But somehow back then, still, there wasn't an ounce of it. Everyone who sees in that trial mostly an emotional response, an irrational response, is a meme-spreading racist. 
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Original Article: O.J. Simpson, American icon: Why the football star turned accused killer is one of the 20th century’s most important cultural figures
SATURDAY, JUNE 11, 2016 5:45 PM
The lasting legacy of the trial may be that many white liberals have learned that some thoughts and judgments of theirs would have to be buried or completely effaced. Very briefly a whole lot of them were Patrick J. Moynihan's "culture of poverty" people, and knew that the progress they wanted in the world could not possibly be made out of this understanding, only cruelty. And so after discussing with their friends how absurd the judgment was, and momentarily being revolted by what they saw with the jury, they would be required to do the regretful task of killing or shortchanging part of their sanity/knowledge of the world. And what their brains left with them afterwards is this "inhabited two different national realities" "realization." 
There is no avenue in their inner-universe to see people they want to respect as being capable of excusing the crimes of a murderer because they were so pathetically open to emotional manipulation. They had to have had reasons. There was smart calculation, a higher purpose. They saw the larger picture... it certainly wasn't a form of heroic-figure "fellatio"! They focused this realization on people they did not feel a need to respect, and the white working class -- aka, trolls -- gobbled down this condescension to satisfy their own psychodrama, their own righteous revolt. 
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Original Article: Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee: Now the left begins to bargain with a painful reality — and a hopeful future
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2016 1:39 AM
Mojoman Emporium samandor1 "actual powers that be... manipulating pawns" sounds like fantasy as well, at least to me. 
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Original Article: Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee: Now the left begins to bargain with a painful reality — and a hopeful future
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2016 1:36 AM
E.L. Deflagrante As is, what smells of illegitimacy, is that she isn't the next generation's candidate. The young did not vote her... and what exactly is the future, but theirs? 
Otherwise, she did win, fairly, democratically. But nevertheless the election went previous-gens... we all saw what the young wanted, but kept it within our own range. 
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Original Article: Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee: Now the left begins to bargain with a painful reality — and a hopeful future
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2016 1:24 AM
Mojoman Emporium samandor1 Sounds like you've forgotten that the key thing that happened this year: all conventional wisdom, turned upside down. That is, what happened this year with Trump and Bernie, was fantasy all but a year ago.
Perhaps not so silly to see an even stranger future? Not so intrinsically suspect, to refuse the just-humiliated way of prognosticating the future, and continue to project the unfathomable? 
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Original Article: Hillary Clinton, Democratic nominee: Now the left begins to bargain with a painful reality — and a hopeful future
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 8, 2016 1:17 AM
samandor1 Yes, if she remains the person as you rightly describe her, the future is as blessed as it could possibly be. I'm expecting, however, the future "evolution" some might see in her in the future, as she becomes the armoured Brienne, thundering reprove, even on or even especially on Wall Street, is actually the end of her genuinely-evolving journey. We'll all be saying, who knew? Wow, what a surprise! What a package! But somewhere the most progressive in America will take note from ample cues, this could go bad for us. Not Trump bad, but along the same lines. 

Emporium
11 days ago


@Christopher1988 I think she'll be a nightmare for Wall Street, only less so than someone else will be. Only the thing is, I'm not even exactly sure that the psychology of Wall Street will be the same, and that if she becomes our era's nationalistic crusader, that they mightn't not not be willing to squander their lot, if only to be more part of a rejuvenated, repentant America. I find it very difficult to see her being a repeat of Obama, only with a bit more give on minimum wage issues, more on worker rights (and of course bombing the hell out of other countries ) -- what we're all thinking she'll be. If she can be that, kudos to her (sorry of course to all the countries bombed, owing to our still immature, demented psyches), because there's going to be strong pull to be the person who, how to say it, rejoins America to something mystical again. Something long lost. 
I personally think that anyone THAT strong, wouldn't even be considered for presidency, this time around... because unconsciously, we all have a sense that a term of collective redemption is near at hand. We all want to slip into a decade-long sleep. Not Scandinavia as in our sights, but America, in a unsullied, virgin form. This even absent Trump, absolutely.  
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Christopher1988
11 days ago


@Emporium @Christopher1988 Do I just post "HAHAHA" for several lines? The woman whose husband's staff was lead by one of the founders of Goldman Sachs, whose other staff members went  to cushy Wall Street jobs after leaving his administration? The woman who at most could muster a "Cut it out, guys!" scolding  to these people because 911, who spoke privately to Goldman Sachs and reuses to share the content of those speeches with the public? This woman will be tough on the banks? Are you a lobbyist?

Emporium
11 days ago


Are we sure Clinton a year from now is the same person? Perhaps it could be that, whomever, the next ten years will do our era's version of the 30s, construct a new deal, sway people towards nationalism (actually, sway along with everyone else), cause a fear we could go fascist, and otherwise be of a culture that a subsequent one will say, hell enough with that rigged, stifled, old left shit? That is to say, my only beef with this article is that it articulates a future where Clinton is as she is now, whereas I fully see her becoming someone different. More heroic to the people, but ultimately historically, less sane. 
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Randy Stone
11 days ago


@Emporium 
Hillary is already turning to the right...I guess that's what you might mean by "...less sane."
I agree.
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