WelcomeTrouble and its makers: Troublemakers
| Three kinds of people that cause unnecessary trouble |
|
|---|---|
| THE ENTITLED | Brittney Griner |
| THE FOOLISH | Jamal Khashoggi |
| THE MARTYRS | Alexei Navalny◎ |
A few days before +2022 ThanXgiving HolYday, I wrote a version of this page which was a theoretical rant about troublemakers: people who cause me trouble by getting all sentimental and trying to make the world safe for their sob stories by any means necessary, including cooking up unnecessary wars potentially leading to thermonuclear apocalypse, and wrecking the global economy. I have previously written a webpage here about one of them, Jamal Khashoggi💗 and his true love💗: here.
The page also dealt with Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Hence the picture above. Mr. Navalny has a burr up his anus about overthrowing the government of the current President of The Russian Federation, Dr. Vladimir Putin. His main weapon is his own living body. He baits Dr. Putin into punishing him and then he loudly cries that Dr. Putin is evil for hurting him, i.e.: for taking the bait. Mr. Navalny hopes that all the bleeding heart liberals💗 here in The West will be so overcome with sentimentality about how bad Dr. Putin (not himelf!) is that they will overthrow Dr. Putin's government and then they will all celebate that Mr. Navalny no longer hurts himself. I do not want the world, and my life in it, to be messed up for these people's bleeding hearts💗, hence the original name of the present webpage: "Troublemakers". The bleeding hearts💗 are legion
Aside (+2024.02.28): Since writing this page I have read Mr. Navalny is not the pure hero for democratic freedom propaganda presents him as. He apparently started off courting untra-nationalists, as a base to start building on, and expressed racist views, including calling some people "cockroaches". So maybe he just wants power for himself or is some kind of CIA asset or who knows what. (End of aside)
The old page included a cynical fantasy about the Reverend Martin luther King Jr.'s "March on Washington" (+1963.08.28), which I have copied immediately below. But I have thrown out the rest of what I wrote because reality intervened and my fnatasy turned real. Hence, the rest of this page below I have reproduced what, at the time, was mere fantasy. Reality bites. Please, my reader, either read on here or go do some place else; its your time and energy → it's your life.
Why do people protest?
Surely some of it is real, as if you work in the XYZ factory and all the workers is the XYZ factory go out on strike at the factory gate for safer working conditions and better pay.
But 200,000+ people at The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "March on Washington"? Their problems were not on the DC Mall, were they? I think a lot of it is herd behavior: Frustrated people who can't creatively shape their lives being handed something entertaining to do. Let's march, Baaa!
The damned thing was in August, in the hot sweaty August sun and heat. Another all hands meeting; do I really have to attend? So goddamned boring [squirm], mostly just waiting around [squirm] and then hear that guy loud speakering that he had a dream. Well, good for him. Or did I come to try to pick up a hot chick (I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]) would have flunked Pick Up Women 101)? And the damned long bus ride to this place and then it will have to be back home again where I don't like being either but why all this effort just to be headcount? Can we go home already? Dammit, this person next to me just now coughed; I don't want to get sick from these people! Everybody's packed so close together. I'm bored. [squirm] Why did I come here? I got hyped up by all the hype, like TV ads for boring toys where they show the boring toy in an exciting stage set. [squirm] I wish I didn't come here. Shit! ....
The Thanksgiving dinner from Purgatory
Facts
I made the grievous mistake of going along with the social conditioning in the semiotic air in my house. Family thanksgiving Dinner at my mother-in-law's house and one is supposed do go and also supposed to enjoy the what they call "celebration", or at leaat put up with it without doing anything "embarrassing", i.e.: anything that might make anybody uncomfortable. I should have [to borrow Nancy Reagsan's famous words out of context:] just said: "No!". But I was childreared and I'm still not cured from that very serious semiotic infection. "All social custome are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses." (Wilfred Bion) I'm still partly psychotic, while the people around me have the sickness full-blown. So, first the facts as best I an recall them, and then my interpretation:
- I get in the car with my daughter driving and we proceed to mother-in-law's house for the event du jour: Thankgiving dinner.
- Arrival at target destination and some period of miscellaneouc superficialities which I tolerate pretty well because I like my mother-in-law's upper middle class house (condominium).
- This is the biggie: My college senior (age 21 years) daughter is sitting on the floor with a mask on and nobody else including mea culpa doing the really right thing, i.e.: nobody else is wearing masks. I assume daughter is being Covid-conscientious, which would be a highly admiratble thing. But then a comment I cannot verbatim recall: (a) Somebody says something about immunocompromised persons in the room and the need to protect them from infectious diseases; so far so good. But then (b) daughter says she is not wearing the mask to protect anybody against Covid, since she had a recent negative test, but: BECAUSE SHE HAS COLD. I had just driven in the car next to her for half an hour and she did not have a mask on there. Had I been exposed to her coronavirus germs and was I going to get sick?
- Then: I ask daughter why she was weearing a mask now and not before? "We're family" I think: So I get to be exposed to infectious disease because i am in a less protected sociological category than these people who do not live in the same house (Maybe she ideates: "I've probably already infected daddy, so why bother about him; but I can look out for the safety of these irrelevant people and get kudos from them?")? My childrearing kicks in and I pretty much suppress what should have been my response that she had been at best thoughtless to expose me to "cold germs" when I am very afraid of any illness. And I later find out she doesn't just "have a cold" but also: a sore throat. For me to get the gift of a sore throat crosses a red line.
- IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL FOR ME FROM THERE (it still would have been bad for me for another reason to be explained below, but this was already too much for me).
- Dinner proceeds. I don't like the food (see example, immediately above, but please for the word "different" substitute: "impolite", "killjoy", "party pooper"...) and I am bored. Fortunately nobody else at the table seems infectious. Daughter is maybe 4 feet to myleft, but I try to not keep thinking about her germs. Note: she almost always coughs a lot like a person who has an infectious disease but this is due to OCD, Tourette's syndrome, ADHD, etc. which are not communicable dieseases so I am used to her sounding infectious but not being so. I had little reason to suspect she was a threat to my health. Everybody goes around the table saying what they are thankful for in 2022; I dare not say truth, so I say something "polite". One o the relaties says something that immediately gets my attention: He says he is thankful for all the good things that have been going on with one of his two sons but also, and here I do not have the vebaim words, but they sounded to me like his other eenage son was fighting for his life, and he [the father] was thankful the boy was still alive. I am curious about this, I choose to be "polite" and to not ask a potentially unwelcome question. So, here I was being polite about something that interested me about somebody other than my self → being considerated of others. (I am later reprimanded that I did not eat enough of the food.)
- I was bored and restless. I quietly left the table, and having had the foresight to being my new book to read, actually reread, from 1994, Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis" which ab ovo looks both more difficult and also much more rewarding to read than I anticipated → having brought my defensive weapon, I retreated to the bathroom, to sit on the toilet and read. I was getting huge rewards from the book, unlike the saste of the "celebration".
- I return to the table but dessert never seems to come and it dragged on and I was getting tired (It was probably already past my betdtime which starts around 16:00 each afternoon of a standard issues day). So I absent myself permanently. Of course I should have apologized to everybody, to keep from possibly upsetting anybody.
- I go to mother-in-law's bedroom and try to sleep fully clothed which is uncomfortable for me, on the bed, hoping the fetivities will end soon and I will be able to resume cofortable living.
- Now, here's where my second big mistake comes in: I had forgotten that the relatives, who come from several hours drive away, all like to stay latee and play "family games". Well, OK. I don't. Fortunately, I uncomfortably sleep for a couple hours. When I was younge I would not have been able to sleep at all and would have been extremely frustrated.
- Daughter comes in to use mother-in-law's bathroom and I foolishly ask her in a pointed way if there is any hope of us leaving soon? Selfish me! I am very hot, itchy, throat dry breathing feeling constriced, claustrophobic and afraid I'm getting sick.... I proceeded to dig myself further into the hole by getting myself organized and going downstairs into the fastivity area.
- There everybody is enjoying themleves (It's getting to be around 21:00; lunch was around 14:30) and am told I have been rude but wife puts up with it and we leave and I get home and try to get my life back in order despite feeling unfairly judged and fearing retribution. But not before being told I have no feelings because I have inappropriately judged my daughter (sore throat is not a concern for me, and I do have pulmonary issues so any respiratory infecion may afffect me even worse than normal people who can take a licking an keep on ticking. And that I even was presumed to know she "had a cold" and not be judgmental etcetera and so forth.
- I apologied for making a bad decision to go to the Thanksgiving dinner, which, of course, was not the correct thing to apologize for: I should have apoogized for being "insensitive" (cf.: here) and never thinking about anybody except myself, including that I selfishly discreetly did notask that one person about his ailing child,.... ("You don't get points for doing what you are supposed to [want to] do.")
- Then wife says she is going Friday to a dinner with some other relativves she doesn't really nat to go to. When I ask why people do things they don't want to do and don't need to do, that is not helpful. Also my rudeness at dinner came on top of (a) an absent cousin who may truly be by far the rudest most selfish most anipulative most not just offensive but wilfully offending person anybody knows of, but that's not releant, not that (b) another cousin who is there is almost entirely withdrawn from the "f" but entierly quietly so he does not arouse any nevatie judgemnts. (i get told by a licensed mental health professiona that I am "insane" and "psychotic". As Ludwig Wittgenstein says: The meaning is the use. And I offend people by talking down to them about ideas above them when I should be part of the family.)
i have learned a lesson. But it will surely not win me any points: I will neve aggin attend a family "celebration" where I think there is risk of it making me miserable because I do not do well at pretending to be happy when I am not enjoying myself. (The lesson I should have learned is to apologize for my selishness and mend nmy selfish ways and shape up and be a "good sport" or something like that.) How selfish am I! "All social customs are shared hallucinoses aka social psychoses" (Wilfred Bion) none of tem aught me that. Nor at the psychoanalytic traning pinstitute where they froze me out for ideological deviance and wanting to take rsponsibility for my training not let myself be jerked around by the faculty (they wanted my "training analysis and "supervisoion" to be intrusiely monitored by them, not respecctfully handled by disinstersted third parties).
Commentary
Troublemakers come in many flvors, none i=of which either taste good or have good taste. There are all the different fo=lavors of hotheads: (a) The proactive martyrs, their poster child in 2022 being Alexei Navalny. (b) The bear baiting fools – Navalnys who chicken out –, their poster child being Galileo Galilei. (c) the naive fools, their poster child being Jamal Khashoggi💗. (d) The bellicose potentates, their poster child being Mr. Joe Biden. (e) The opportunists, their poster child being Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy. (f) Others not otherwise specified, including lots of different ckinds of flag-wavers without much social power, from fearless warriors who never served e.g.: Tail-gunner Joe McCarthy) to generals who want another star as any price (as in Stanley Kubrick's film "Paths of Glory").
There are also inadvertent martyrs: persons who become poster children for Good Causes but did not ask to be, and either just wanted a free lunch or got one without even asing for it. Brittney Griner (also: here) is the first kind, and Elián Gonzáles the second. [Aside: How to lessen the problem of slam-dunk unnaturally tall freaks-of-nature like Ms. Griner in the sport of basketball: Make a new semi-cicruar line on the court, maybe 7(8?) feet from the basket and nobody would be allowed to put the ball into the basket if the last place their feet touched was inside this line.]
Then there are all the bleeding hearts💗. They are far less differentiated. They all want the same thing: "justice". If the Saudi goernment killed lover boy, they want the head of the King of Saudi Arabia, even if it means the price of oil for the whole world goes through the roof. If Putin kills Navalny, they want his government overthrown. They are all members of the public who have transmuted like grasshoppers into a plague of locusts, into a a kind of messianic fanatical apocalyptic [non-gastrointestnal...] movement who destroy everything in their path in their quest for their "justice".
At the bottom of the barrel are all the Simpsons (or at the thigher SES end of the scale, Seinfeld and Friends...): all the ordinary people – people who need people and are consequently the luckiest people in the world (the members of the audience: Cher's amis, not to be confused with Cher ami the pigeon) – who just endlessly obligatorily enjoy their obligatory holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, which latter 'tis the season to be stupid and wear Santa hats, and the former I (BMcC[18-11-46-503]), as I wrote these present words (+2022.11.26) had just undergone an instance of: above. These are all the many-all-too-many whose idle hands are proverbially the devil's workshop and whose behavior Hermann Göring summarily described: here.
