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Further posts of mine at Clio's Psyche, with all other participants snipped out


Psychoclass division leads to tech division. People out of families that impart on their kids that if they grow they are worthy of apocalyptic punishment, don't thrive in the new environment. This is primary. We could literally foist thriving jobs on them, terrific prosperity, and they'd still vote to annihilate it... knowing exactly what they are doing.
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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
The only thing they're trying to conserve is the ability to not be devoured by their mothers for having the temerity to individuate. But still, what you're articulating here, to me, elides the fact that one of the principle stories over the last 40 yrs has been that of liberal minded people (i.e., those of higher psychoclass) leaving small towns to find themselves in the like of coastal cities. Haven't we just seen a enormous amount of places made into what Lloyd articulates as psychogenic cul-de-sacs, owing to this? Those that are into tech for autism (escape) purposes aren't really the digital people this article is addressing... gamer gate people aren't usually the ones finding themselves working at facebook/apple/google. And if we could expand the opportunities in small towns by a gigantic margin, we'd still find ourselves dismayed that they're somehow using the tech to inhibit or destroy a society bent on ongoing legitimate growth... we'd have just made small American towns into very able Russian bots. Congratulations! Town vs. city... does not feed into psychoanalytic probing, but of commonplace psychological assumptions. Digital divides, economic divides = commonplace. Give more money and more opportunities... like really give it, and voila! Not so: a lot of well-off people voted for Trump.

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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
I'm happy to see Franken go, if he goes. I'm tired of this past tradition where if you're someone doing powerful things for Democratic causes, we'll overlook it if you were a predator to women. Guys like this cause humiliations which last for years. Time to go.

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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
About the not being a monster bit... numbers 4 and 5. And one is a charming story about him doing his firm butt-grasp thing and then asking her to go the bathroom with him, which is almost as charming as his doing the boob grab thing to a sleeping woman, exhausted after working to provide moral support to troopers, and thereafter ensuring she'd learn of how she'd been understood only as a mockery of a person.

And this human anomaly should have visited a psychologist, so she could be on record as an actual human possibility: I felt violated all over again. Embarrassed. Belittled. Humiliated.
How dare anyone grab my breasts like this and think it’s funny?
I told my husband everything that happened and showed him the picture.
I wanted to shout my story to the world with a megaphone to anyone who would listen, but even as angry as I was, I was worried about the potential backlash and damage going public might have on my career as a broadcaster.

“He came at me, put his hand on the back of my head, mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth,” she wrote.
“I immediately pushed him away with both of my hands against his chest and told him if he ever did that to me again I wouldn’t be so nice about it the next time,” Tweeden wrote. “I walked away. All I could think about was getting to a bathroom as fast as possible to rinse the taste of him out of my mouth.”
“I felt disgusted and violated,” she added.

No dear, you didn't, for Trevor Pederson the psychologist has confirmed that never in his history has any client ever felt all that bad about some guy assaulting them, unless they'd had their clothes torn off and been full-on raped.

Adios, Al Franken.
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Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
This person too reminds me of exactly the kind of person who would never visit a psychologist for what happened to her, owing... not to psychologists' tendency to automatically belittle such things, but to it being objectively no big thing really -- not "real" assault. (And think of her clear hysteria at guessing that Franken would use his advantages over her [including her colour!] if she ever tattled on him, to make her feel even worse than she already did.)

The second woman, who said she was groped at a fundraiser, told HuffPost it took place in the fall of 2008 at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She was excited about attending the event and meeting someone she wanted to support.
“I had never attended anything like that,” she said.
She and her friends found themselves introduced to him.
“I shook his hand, and he put his arm around my waist and held it there,” the second woman said. “Then he moved it lower and cupped my butt.”
“I was completely mortified,” she added.
In order to escape the situation, the woman excused herself to go to the bathroom. At that point, she said, Franken leaned in and suggested that he accompany her. She grabbed her friend and fled to the bathroom without him.
The second woman told several people ― including one of the reporters for this story, Zachary Roth ― about the incident some years ago, but didn’t want it reported then. She said she didn’t tell anyone at the time of the incident because inappropriate behavior from men was not that unusual to her or her friends.
“Sexual harassment happens so often, you have to learn how to move on,” she said, describing her thinking at the time.
Several other factors also left her feeling powerless.
“I felt like I didn’t have a voice,” she said. “This man had all of the power, all of the authority. In addition, he is a white man and I am a woman of color. I was 21 years old. And I was afraid that he would use all of those privileges to discredit me, to make me feel even smaller than I already felt.”
Today, she said, she feels more confident, in part thanks to the flood of women who have come forward over the last month to share stories of sexual harassment by powerful men.
“I couldn’t see all these other women come forward and not walk the walk myself,” she said. “I wanted my report to be a way for other women to say, ‘Yes, that happened to me and I don’t have to be afraid.’”
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Nov 24
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
The spirit of metoo isn't about creepy guys, but criminal predators... there's a massive conception switch. Old Hollywood thought Weinstein creepy, even when it was common knowledge he was a rapist... used power over young people to force sex. So in any forum the term should no longer carry authority... its history is of it enabling predators. Al Franken isn't being revealed merely as creepy (... he was just creepy? well then, stop being such a wimp/thin-skinned/sensitive and brush him off = old think), but as a predator, whose behaviour would already be judged criminal in many states. The philosophy of deMausian psychohistory is that through time things that become unacceptable and criminalized started off as everyday, essentially expected, occurrences; abuse we criminalize now was once accepted behaviour: but it was always a big deal. I'm amazed that anyone could read Tweeden's account and think, no biggie there... wonder what this is all about?... the problem must be with people who have a problem. This isn't any longer 1990 and the Clintons... we've entered a new era where thought isn't first on what could happen to someone's career, but on what occurred to the people that were humiliated and used. You want to know all about that, how that felt, then you think on what to do with the abuser. Personally I don't believe in jails or prisons, but certainly on reform centres for the mentally sick.

I'm also fed up with the way he has responded. To gain my respect he would have admitted automatically that what he did to Tweeden wasn't really a once-only. He would not have said he was a guy who liked to hug, either... I'm just a hugger, and sometimes I get that might be misunderstood by people. He would have tried to explain the truth, regardless of what it would lead to, which is that though he deserves credit for being someone whose inclination is to find Republican policies revolting and to supports bills which will empower the American public, very much including women, he has used this long period where powerful Democrat men who support women's issues have been given a pass on their own predatory behaviour towards women, to in fact do.... what all it will come out that he has done. He should have said that this is a moment where what woman need are men who will not show that the preferred response of anyone who has been a predator remains to damage-control... and then only if the first option of not confessing to anything, of hiding, proves unavailable, but to lift the full redemption of their victims as genuinely harmed people to the forefront and to work away at means of portraying their activity that benefits from the old sense of it as no big deal; basically the way things are... so get a grip already. You don't do this by making it so that they'll have to fight through your cover as a "hugger" (his latest foray) or a guy who sometimes makes inappropriate jokes... even as it might prove to work for him politically. You admit that you intended to humiliate Tweeden. That you intended to make women you knew felt honoured to be by your side feel like spoils of the powerful: like people who if they raised a stir would find out what happens to people whom the Democratic establishment count amongst their most promising members if they speak up.

Brian, you're a populist. This whole past age has been about a few people really benefiting while the humiliations of those out of the limelight were ignored, and it makes you very angry. Why isn't your instant reaction to Franken one where finally people who could never of had their voice heard before are finally feeling safe and empowered to rise up and do so now? Why the calm? I just don't feel this from you, but rather your wondering what the heck this uprising is about, anyway... everything's being taken care of. Out of the kind of reaction you're having #metoo would never have happened. It's about people finding their way automatically into the victims, and not being able to pull away, in a way they just weren't before. Why in this case aren't you more in the victims? Delighted to know they won't have to suppress anymore... carry the humiliation? You seem so much so when it's people vs. rich. There's no, relax, there's a tribunal going on about that now, in that.

I said last week that what the powerful did to create victims was inevitable during the last period. I want people to understand why this was so... and I see means of encouraging some people to actually think on it in their having to come to grips with the fact that so many of the heroes they have loved could at the same time have been horrifying predators. They'll feel like it's right they are criminalized, but also wonder how it could be that men who are still clearly so good could at the same time be so brutal. Some will just fall for platitudes about human nature, but some will work further on the conundrum. I also think that deMausian psychohistorical understanding goes nowhere out a generation that is able to stifle accounts of victims' pain, especially that of the weak. If you're responsive to that... and #metoo suggests people are becoming that, then to me you're a person who could see a parent victimizing their children and not immediately find a way to rationalize it so that your own mother and father don't have the finger too squarely pointed at them, and also not to any longer decide that the collective effects of such abuse couldn't be so gross and massive to mean the shaping of the entirety of a subsequent society. You would see the effects of poor childrearing for what it is, and almost immediately decide that the form society takes of course owes to that. My response is about caught sight of a more self-aware and grown-up world, even as, yes, I think it inevitable that populists will win out over progressives for the next ten years or so and will use whatever they can get to shape our past liberal society, which couldn't ever not be an empowering but also a predatory one, so that it seems only a corrupt "Weimar" that requires cleansing. I hope here I've thought enough about your challenge. It is possible I haven't.  
- show quoted text -

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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Nov 25
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Some technological determinism
I'll say too once again about Frederick Crews, if you don't mind, that one of the things I new immediately about #metoo was that the long overlordship of Crews (whom, as I said before, I still overall do like) over official opinion on the matter of Freud and psychoanalysis was now over (or at least very much positioned to be over; a lot will depend on how many Freudians really feel the spirit of #metoo, or if they're still left wondering how people could say such mean things about Woody Allen). He was the leading voice in arguing that the recovered memory movement was bogus... and associated both this and Freud's assessment that so many children in 19th-century Vienna had been sexually molested by their parents as doing incalculable damage to a great deal of actually innocent parents. As I remember it at least, his voice on this matter was taken seriously because he cooperated with the current spirit to mostly keep attention away from the wreckage powerful people were doing to the vulnerable, a spirit that owing to #metoo and to arising populist movements is now breaking. Now if someone were to argue that so many children ... so, so, so many children actually recalled real experiences of their parents molesting them, there will be loads more people automatically willing to accept that it was in fact as prevalent as that than would have been true during our just-passed period, where the role of the vulnerable was to suffer... carry the helplessness, carry the sins for growth, that everyone in society felt. Now if one labels a movement like this a witch hunt, you're not the voice of the NYRB, Frederick Crews, but Woody Allen... and you're very much part of the problem.

I'll expand a little bit more on what I said to Brian last night regarding how my "current turn" is consistent with my belief in growth panic. To believe in growth panic, that a whole society would turn away from growth... in believing fascism (mother country subservience) a remedy for it (!), one has to be able to imagine that the overall childrearing experiences of people in America is so bad, that they experience fears and terrors at the hands of their mothers (fathers are a dodge) that are so awesome and overpowering, that they will come to see their own individuation as worthy of some kind of total, apocalyptic punishment they'll do anything to escape. When people begin to hear instances, particularly relating to Tweeden (who seems to be the one people want to waylay, blow off), where she says the way Franken manoeuvred himself into forcing his way into her mouth, into making use of her, was so deeply humiliating she could never see him on television and not think of it again, but also with versions of the same being said by so many women of the men who accosted them... that this experiences lasted with them for decades, so that it remains so joyous to them, such a relief to them, that they can finally bring the matter up and not feel afraid, I think we're at the cusp of understanding once again that ostensibly innocuous experiences that one should be expected to get past if one isn't weak or thin-skinned, AREN'T that at all. The average experience... was actually horrible, and will historically find itself on the out just like every child's guaranteed previous experience of brutal beatings, stark abandonment, and sexual molestation was.

For me, deMausian psychohistory, to flourish, requires, not people who are the most historically literate (indeed, the very fact that you spent so much time in periods filled with less emotionally evolved people will be increasingly be seen as a bizarre desire), or psychologically literate, but the most emotionally healthy. They can't have maternal altars in their heads whom they'll ultimately pay heed to. #metoo might show me whom exactly is out there, and where they mostly are. Naomi Wolf strikes me for example as someone who is now essentially a deMausian (especially with her recent comment the average experience of women through history was to be raped repeatedly [and what kinds of mothers are born out of experiences like these?]), and though I know she's out of Yale literature studies I haven't a clue if she's read Freud.  

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