WelcomeI am so discouraged
I am so discouraged. I had a picture here of [fill in the blank] parents who claim the exclusive right (along with their fellow travelers, of course) to brainwash/indoctrinate their children any way their own brainwashing indoctrinaton (social conditioning; childrearing) jerks them around. But I decided that was as not as good propaganda as this new picture which should really play on the heartstrings of bleeding heart liberals who themselves usually brainwash and indoctrinate their kids just less openly because in less for-the-time-being contentious ways. My father as a parent (not as a businessman!) was not up to the job, but he did help me not to end up coming back from Vietnam in a body bag.
As of +2022.06.06, we have seen the power of propaganda: A television comedian in a second-rate country has been able to so far only bring the whole world close to a repeat of World War I but this time with thermonuclear bombs, with his sob story PR campaign. ( He has not yet dragged us all acoss the finish line.) The tail wagging the dog: Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, TV Comando Z. ~ Who can not feel sorry for the man in the above picture?
....the New York State Assembly took up a measure to legalize abortion until 24 weeks of pregnancy. "Nobody expected the bill to pass," said Diane Schulder Abrams, another feminist lawyer who worked on the Abramowicz case. At the time, the Legislature included only four women; Republicans controlled both houses and the governor's office, and in each of the three previous years, bills failed that would have allowed abortion only in very limited circumstances.
To everyone's surprise, the State Senate had passed the bill providing for full legalization. In the State Assembly, though members of both parties supported it, the measure fell short by one vote. But then an assemblyman, George M. Michaels, a Democrat from a heavily Catholic district in the central part of the state, rose to speak. He said that his two sons urged him not to let his vote be the one that defeated the bill. He changed from no to yes. "His hands were trembling, and there were tears in his eyes," Abrams said. "He lost his next election." (NYT, "America Almost Took a Different Path Toward Abortion Rights", Published May 20, 2022 Updated May 26, 2022, Emily Bazelon)
I personally know a man who got fired from his job at the AVP level in an FDIC bank for doing too good (functionally excellent, not sentimentally uplifting) work. Everybody's favorite big mouth with a Rolex watch (except-for-PR-purposes) Southern Baptist Preacher, the philanderer and possible plagiarist on his doctoral dissertation, The Reverend Martin King Junior, once said he had been to the mountain top and seen the promised land. I have been there too. It's the light at the end of the tunnel: a Vietcong with flashlight.
In the land of the blind, they surgically remove the one-eyed man's eye to make him healthy, whole and most important of all: normal like everybody else.
"All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses." (Wilfred Bion)*
Dr. Bion forgot to add that the sometime one-eyed man must pass one final test to prove that his birth defect has been fixed: To sincerely thank them for removing his eye.
As that man who got fired from the bank for doing too high quality work said of himself, MeToo:
They put me off at the wrong stop when I was born.
Somebody recently replied to a Quora response I posted that I sounded like a bitter person. They probably expected me to back off and apologize. I replied to them with the GPS coordinates for St. Paul's Illiberal Day Carcel for Pubescent Male Virgins except-for-omerta-sanitary-services-for-jocks and asked them if they had a spare B-52 in the air to have the weapons officer target a JDAM there: [39.4324433, -76.6766731].
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Abortion
Your Comment on Poland Shows the Risks for Women When Abortion Is Banned
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8:35 AM (2 hours ago) [+2022.06.12; emphasis added]
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Bradford McCormick | New York
"A woman is like an incubator."
I always put it that the anti-abortionists believe women should be baby factories, but this is even more "graphic". Imagine the incubator ward with living women's bodies, not machines.
This story of a woman dying and knowing she will die unless they get the toxic thing out of her but the doctors are only busy waiting for the fetal heartbeat to stop is surely material for something even more morbid than a Kafka story of Brecht play, or maybe The Three Stooges (not the old American comedy group)
Now for "freedom". I quote from a New York Times article exactly 20 years ago this day, 12 June 2002:
In Poland... the very notion that Western-style capitalism will work in the eastern nation that embraced it perhaps most heartily is under attack.... [E]conomist... Krzysztof Bledowski... said... "There is an apropos graffiti[:] 'Free market, enslaved people' ....The mood has shifted. Capitalism is not seen by many people as a system for justice, growth, better times for kids and so on." (Ian Fisher, "As Poland Endures Hard Times, Capitalism Comes Under Attack", NYT, 12Jun02, p.A1)
Dads
No wonder males put up with getting themselves jerked around in military barracks and subjecting themselves to filthy wretchedness on the battlefield (taking Sugerloaf Hill....): It's Father's Day. A "real man" does not put up with some person in the street – literally – calling him a piece of shit to hjs face, right? Then why does he grovel to a drill Sergeant barking orders at him as a military conscript? And that Sergeant may indeed call him a piece of shit, a worm, scum.... Why doesn't he stand up like a man grab that bully by the shoulders and slam his body into a wall and then finish him off with a knock out punch to bust his jaw on the rebound of hi head from the wall? Why is he, as the Sergeant rightly predicated, a worm? Oh, maybe he boasts after being humiliated by that drill Sergeant, he "took it like a man". Then why didn't h "take it like a man" when that jerk in the street called him exactly the same thing? An advertisement shows a crapy necktie and the voiceover says Dad doesn't really want that for Father's Day, and then they show a bunch of bacon wrapped steaks – just what he wants!
That's the image Dad is supposed to have of himself. As for neckties, they could have shown a Countess Mara like my father wore, which probably also Presidents of nation states wear, not that crappy thing. Neckties are not great, but a fine silk Countess Mara is fit to dress a political leader or CEO not an office jerk. CEOs and Presidents of nation states do not populate military barracks, do they? And those steaks. Bacon – that's from pigs but isn't it also for "pigs": stupid ignorant men who slouch on their two couch potatoes on a couch cheering for Monday nite football players who make a lot mor money than they do on the HDTV while drinking cheap beer? How about maybe almond croissants from an authentic French bakery, with expresso? Or if he is not an alcoholic, a bottle of at least Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch which I understood when I was in Japan in the 1980s was de rigeur for visiting corporate executives to bring as token gifts for the exceutives they were to workwith in The Land of the Rising Sun.
And teach Dad to respectfully bow to people in social greeting, not maul their right front paw with his manly right side mit. Treat Dad like cannon fodder and even give him sex for doing it and you have cannon fodder: Dad. Man up! Grin and bear it! Take it like a man! Don't be a sissy! And as for son: a chip off the old block of base metal. Like father like son. The next generation of cannon fodder – Dad did his manly duty to produce more of the same. Like male dogs hump bitches. Bulldog, bulldog, bow, wow, wow, E-li Yale! What a disgusting thing to be anyway: a Dad. A beast of burden that commutes to the office 5 days a week to obey orders from a boss Dad.
America's split personality
I have recalled a "Dad" song from the days of my wasted childhood. The words are worth repeating precisely for how little they are worth. Let me repeat that I remember them exactly from my childrearing. It's what my childrearers subjected me to, not Wanda Landowska playing the harpsichord:
"I want a girl, just like the girl, that marred dear old Dad. She was a pearl[1], and the only girl, that Daddy ever had[2]. A good old fashioned girl with heart so true, one who could love nobody else but you. Oh, I want a girl, just like the girl, that dear old Daddy had." (1911)
Contrast:
"Crossing the highway late last night, He shoulda looked left and he shoulda looked right. He didn't see the station wagon car. The skunk got squashed and there you are. You got your dead skunk in the middle of the road, Dead skunk in the middle of the road, Dead skunk in the middle of the road, Stinking to high heaven." (1972)
Who were singing that inanity about the pearl of a girl? Veterans of the slaughter of World War II. I recently watched some of the real war footage on The Smithsonian Channel. All I could think of was that this was not appropriate to have been done to human beings. Blood and guts, indeed. All over the place. And what did these men come back to after the cheering crowds?
"What men are willing to put up with depends on what they are able to look forward to." (Arnold Hauser)
Politeness again
A person has a serious problem. There is nothing I can do about it. I am not supposed to say I can't do anything about it and do something useful with my time. I am supposed to act as if I could do something and then just stand there and do nothing useful for anybody to prove how concerned I am. If I had been born stupider things would work out better because then I would not anaylze the situation but just be part of the social behavioral pattern everybody else was [re]enacting.
And that's another thing. People get upset that I cut them off when they are tunning the mouths off or I just walk away. They are not really saying anything unpredictable, just [re]enacting a pre-defined behavior pattern, so what's the point of puting up with the whole pattern when I have determined wha tthe pattern is? What's the point of them carring out the whole pattern? If they want my atention, all they have to do is keep feeding me new and meaningful information that I cannot pattern match. What's therir problem? I am not a mind reader; I just pattern match. But then they expect me to guess what they want without them telling me because if I was one of them I would always be [re]enacting behavior patterns without having to pattern match. Bu twhen I come in in the middle of their long running behavior pattern I need to figure out the pattern since I am not just part of it.
Then they ask me questions and expect a yes or no answer when the context may shade the answer or even the quetsion may not be appropriate to the situation, and I am trying to figure out what they are doing, since, as Ludwig Wittgenstein argued: the meaning is the use, not just matching character strings in the sentence to charcter strings in the dictionary according to predefined English language parsts of speech patterns. Slthough that would, to continue with tie Wittgensteinean way of thinking, be a legitimate language game, just not the one they want to play so why don' tthey givve me the rules but then, further, there is no rule which connot be misinterpreted and any clarifying interpretative material can in its turn be misinterpreted etcetera and so forth but people don't like to play that game and since they have coercivve social power thay can make credible threats which are a reather different kind of game which, if I had power, I would tell them I wsa not going to play. The powerful get to take what they want, and the powerless have to take what they want to give them. The powerful have selfless needs and the powerless have selfish wishes. Generals are more valuable living than dying; privates are more valuable dying than living: Click here.
People drinking the Zelensky Kool-Ade
I go walking in my meighborhood and see an odd looking little wood panel hanging from a person's address post. I'm used to the "Black lives matter" stuff, which may be harmless. But this is odd and it is the colors of the Ukrainian flag but more like a little Clyfford Still painting. I ask the owner about it. He explains he was "getting a little creative with the Ukrainian flag". A little creative? I politely tell him I am aginst the war but will be leaving and thank him for the information. A little creative? People expect to be complimented for drinking the Zelensky Kool-Ade and even spicing it up a bit? Compliment me, I'm believing my government's propaganda and even abetting it! Bad enough people who are showing Ukrainian flags but "being a little creative about it"? Is this man otherwise an artist, or just another middle class suburban mortgage owner who contributes nothing to "the life of the mind" (Oops! I must be be embarrassed to speak such words, right? OK: Black lives matter! Is that better?)?
Footnotes
- ↑ Given the pruditarian social context of the time, i.e.: bsck in the Dark Age of "in loco parentis" (translate: parents are insane), "pearl" surely cannot here refer to the young lady's organ of pleasure, her clitoris, true?
- ↑ Again, given the pruditarian social context of the time, i.e.: back in the Dark Age of "in loco parentis" (translate: parents are insane), "had" surely cannot cannot refer to sexual intercourse (copulation), true?
