The Last Psychiatrist

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.

Book 1





“I'm thankful to those who defend me, and I'm not
surprised by those who hate me, but either way you are
missing the point. I don't matter. It's debatable whether
my ideas matter, but for sure they matter much more
than I do.


I am "Alone." What does that mean? It means that no
other characteristic should matter to you, the reader,
except that there's only me, whatever that is.”




Compiled by zenarcade3

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Who Bullies The Bullies?

The Maintenance Of Certification Exam As Fetish

Ten Extra Seconds Would Have Saved True Detective's Finale

True Detective's Detective

Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth?

Randi Zuckerberg Thinks We Should Untangle Our Wired Lives

Hunger Games Catching Fire: Badass Body Count

How Does The Shutdown Relate To Me?

Real Men Want To Drink Guinness, But Don't Expect Them To Pay For It

Still Alive

The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam

Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful

No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up

Product Review: Panasonic PT AX200U (Hipsters On Food Stamps Part 3)

Funeral

Temper Tantrums In The DSM

Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 2

Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1

The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus

Who's Afraid Of Lil Wayne?

Fox & Friends punked by Obama supporter

The Harvard Cheating Scandal Is Stupid

Paul Ryan vs. Rage Against The Machine

Just Because You See It, Doesn't Mean It's Gone

The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus - Audio

Amy Schumer Offers You A Look Into Your Soul

5 Signs Your Child Is a Psychopath, According To The NYT

Are You Mom Enough? The Question Is For What

Thank God The 'Heart Attack Grill' Is A Great Name; Also, How To Learn French
Why We Love Sociopaths

The Hunger Games Is A Sexist Fairy Tale. Sorry.

What's Wrong With The Hunger Games Is What No One Noticed

Shame Is The Desired Outcome

Shame

The Father That Shot His Daughter's Computer

"My fiancee is pushing me away and I've lost hope"

Pedophilia Is Normal, Because Otherwise It's Abnormal

Another Honor Killing That Isn't About Honor, And Even Less About Nietzsche

What Would You Do If Your Fiance Gave You a Ring That Wasn't Good Enough?

What Would You Do If Your Fiancee Rejected The Ring As Not Good Enough?

Superman's A Baby, But He's Still Superman

Couple Reveals Child's Gender Five Years Too Late

Greece To Pay Disability Benefits To Pedophiles: America To Report On It

Sara Ackerman Is Both a Nut, and X

Ocean Marketing Supports Obama

Penelope Trunk, Abuser

Wolf Dad, Tiger Mom, And Why Trying To Be A Good Parent Is A Bad Idea

The Fundamental Error Of Parenting: What's The Difference Between a Tiger Mom and A Wolf
Dad?

Short Film: Bad At Math

If You Liked The Descendants, You Are A Terrible Person

Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World

White People Think Black People Are Dirty

Joe Paterno Fired For A Crime He Didn't Commit

Judge Beats His Daughter

The Plan Will Always Fail Catastrophically

How To Draw (This Is Not An Article About How To Draw)

You Are The 98%

Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children

Marc Maron's Mid-Life Crisis

Finding Existential Solace In A Pink Tied Psycho

The Contagion Is The Solution

We Are All Skyscrapers Now

How To Be Mean To Your Kids

"What should I say/do to my son after this happened to him?"

The Wisdom Of Crowds Turns Into Madness

Can The Court Force Treatment on Jared Loughner?

What To Do About Sexy High School Girls Having A Slumber Party

Grade Inflation

MAY 3, 2014
Who Bullies The Bullies?

but they're welcome to buy an iphone

Pacific Standard. Get it? It's like The Atlantic, but it's Pacific. Totally different. So unlike The
Atlantic, it will "attack the conventional wisdom from a west coast perspective." That's a
quote. "But didn't the editors come from The Atlantic?" Yes. "So what's the diff? Does west
coast imply the writers will be better looking?" The women will be, unless they write about
gender issues, then they will appear gendered. The men will look wise if they're crushing on
social science, or tough and no-nonsense if they're hating on Republicans. Don't worry, pics
of the writers will be included to suggest an appeal to authority. "Hold on, is the owner of
this magazine Sara Miller McCune? The same woman who is responsible for those atrocious
SAGE journals like Psychological Science and Evolutionary Perspectives On Human
Development that charge CV padding post-docs a few hundred dollars to publish linkbait like
"Ovulating Women Prefer Men With Large Sneakers", that Malcolm Gladwell and media
outlets like Pacific Standard then cross promote as valid science?" Yes, but I'm sure it's a
coincidence. "This magazine sounds terrible." Duh.
This cover story details #young #vulnerable #feminist writer Amanda Hess's frustration
with disinterested male law enforcement when, after writing an article about receiving rape
threats from a troll, she received rape threats from a troll. I sympathize, though in my
experience what's even more frightening than a guy telling you he's going to rape you is a
guy not telling you he's going to rape you.
There's a big push for "women's safety" online, for getting rid of trolls and cyberbullies and
cyberstalkers, not coincidentally another one of Randi Zuckerberg's pet causes; and while
these are all legitimate worries someone should take a minute and ask why, when
mustached men have been stalking women since the days of Whitecastle yet no systemic
changes have been effected, the moment women feel threatened from the safety of their
LCD screens America opens the nuclear briefcase. No one finds that suspicious?

In fact, regular stalking is barely ever mentioned in media, no matter how many times the
guy was laying under her new boyfriend's front porch on Wednesday nights after Organic
Chemistry class, what drives the article is "and then he stalked her on Facebook!"

Here's just a sampling of the noxious online commentary directed at other women in recent years. To
Alyssa Royse, a sex and relationships blogger, for saying that she hated The Dark Knight: "you are
clearly retarded, i hope someone shoots then rapes you." To Kathy Sierra, a technology writer, for
blogging about software, coding, and design: "i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your
gob." To Lindy West, a writer at the women's website Jezebel, for critiquing a comedian's rape joke: "I
just want to rape her with a traffic cone." To Rebecca Watson, an atheist commentator, for blogging
about sexism in the skeptic community: "If I lived in Boston I'd put a bullet in your brain." To Catherine
Mayer, a journalist at Time magazine, for no particular reason: "A BOMB HAS BEEN PLACED
OUTSIDE YOUR HOME. IT WILL GO OFF AT EXACTLY 10:47 PM ON A TIMER AND TRIGGER
DESTROYING EVERYTHING."

As the recipient of not zero decapitation emails I admit it does make you curious about
whether or not you can buy an alligator, but while you're arming your windows like a Saw
movie you should contemplate the difference between what should be done and why it
appears something should be done.

I.

The force for this change isn't coming from safety or ethics. Neither is it activism. If you see
any group advocating influentially for change in a media they don't own or control, you can
double down and split the 10s, the dealer is holding status and quo. No change is possible
on someone else's dime, and if what looks like a supermodel approaches you with a
microphone and a camera crew, you should run like she's Johnny Carcosa. On occasion what
the activists think they want may happen coincidentally to align with what the system
wants, and from that moment on they will be lead to believe they are making a difference,
which means they're making money for someone else. "Your writing is so muddled." Sorry.
Were you better persuaded by the concise prose of Amanda Hess?

Her article seems to be about what could be done to stop anonymous trolls from terrorizing
and threatening women. How about prosecuting them, since terroristic threats is already a
crime? Unfortunately, as Hess discovers, the police don't care much about online stalking,
which is consistent since they don't care about IRL stalking either. But never mind, it's not
the problem: misogyny is the problem, amplified 1000x by online anonymity. Anonymity
makes the internet mean and gives trolls= men too much power. This is the subtle shift:
what starts out as "misogyny is bad" becomes "anonymity facilitates misogyny."

Keeping in mind that actual stalking has never been dealt with in any significant way ever,
the desire of a few female writers to curb online anonymity wouldn't be enough to get an @
mention, except that this happens to coincide with what the media wants, and now we have
the two vectors summing to form a public health crisis. "Cyberbullying is a huge problem!"
Yes, but not because it is hurtful, HA! no one cares about your feelings-- but because
criticism makes women want to be more private-- and the privacy of the women is bad. The
women have to be online, they do most of the clicking and receive most of the clicks.
Anonymous cyberbullying is a barrier to increasing consumption, it's gotta go.

II.

You may at this point roll your eyes epileptically and retort, "well, who cares 'what the
system wants', the fact is anonymity does embolden the lunatics, shouldn't we try to restrict
it?" Great question, too bad it's irrelevant. You've taken the bait and put all your energy
into accepting the form of the argument. The issue isn't whether we should abolish online
anonymity, since this will never happen. For every American senator trying to curb
anonymity there's going to be a Scandinavian cyberpirate who will come up with a
workaround, and only one of them knows how to code. Besides, there's no power in
abolishing anonymity, the power is in giving everyone the pretense of anonymity while
secretly retaining the PGP keys to the kingdom.

To understand what's really happening, start from basics: if you're reading it, it's for you. I
assume you're not a cyberbully or a stalker. So do you have any power to abolish
anonymity?

If Hess has made you wonder, hmm, maybe unrestricted anonymity is bad because it gives
trolls too much power, then the system has successfully used her for its true purpose: brand
it as bad, to you. She is unwittinglyteaching the demo of this article, e.g. women in their
20s with no actual power looking to establish themselves, who are the very people who
should embrace anonymity, not to want this: only rapists and too-weak-to-try rapists want
to be anonymous. Smart women write clickable articles about their sexuality for nothing,
because what good are you if you can't make someone else money? Interesting to observe
that the article's single suggested solution to cyberharassment is to reframe a criminal
problem into a civil rights issue using a logic so preposterously adolescent that if you laid
this on your Dad when you were 16 he'd backhand slap you right out of the glee club: "it
discourages women from writing and earning a living online." Earning a living? From who,
Gawker? Most of the women writing on the internet are writing for someone else who pays
them next to nothing. None of them control the capital, none of them get paid 1/1000 of
what they bring in for the media company. You know what they do get? They get to be
valued by work, and in gratitude they are going to the front lines to fight for the media
company's right to pay them less.
And the indoctrination has worked, the less Asperger's a woman is, the more she'll hate
writing anonymously. Don't get angry at me, they did a study, and I think it explains why
women don't want to write for The Economist. In the reverse, put a pic in your byline and
you improve your female audience; put a pic of a female in your byline and you've
maximized ROI, everyone will click on a pic of a chick. This is economic and psychologic
universe in which Hess finds herself.

"But you can't use a pen name at places like The New Yorker. You know they pay their top
staff writers $100k a year?" Jesus. a) yes you can; b) listen to me: if those swindlers are
willing to pay you $100k, then you could probably get $200k yourself, and if you can't get
$200k yourself then you aren't worth their $100k either and they will eventually notice.
When they pay you that much they're not paying you to write for them, they're paying you
not to write for anyone else, that's called controlling the capital.

"So your solution is that she should use pseudonym? Isn't that blaming the victim?" No, not
her-- you. You should use a pseudonym. You aren't writing for Gawker, you just use the
internet, comment on things, etc. Why should you use your real name? "Why shouldn't I?"
I'm sorry, I wasn't precise: why are you being encouraged to use your real name? Again,
the question of whether anonymity emboldens trolls is not the force of that article, it isn't
about their behavior, it is about yours.

"But merely 'branding anonymity as bad' isn't going to stop the cyberbullying misogynists."
You are correct, which is why the spokesperson for this crisis is Amanda Hess. No one is
trying to stop cyberbullies, there's no point, they don't shop and no one wants to look at
them. Hess has entirely misunderstood what the medium wants. The whole game is to get
women-- not the cyberbullies, not criminals, but the consumers-- to voluntarily give up all
of their privacy, while paying lip service to privacy at home-- knowing full well women that
women will pay money not to have the kind of privacy they have at home. Voluntarily
exposing yourself makes you a targetable consumer and targetable consumable. Is it worth
it?

III.
All of this is for the benefit of the media, which is why I know with 100% certainty that
nothing will change. Because she wrote that article, because some people camped in
Zuccotti Park, the energy for activity was discharged. And the media got all the profits.
What Hess didn't realize is that while she was fumbling impotently with the cops, the media
company that she worked for could have crushed the troll if it was worth it to them. Did you
have this thought? If not, it's not your fault, some people are trained not to have it while
others were trained to have it immediately. Which are you? If the founder of Religions For
New Atheists Sara Miller McCune herself had received an electronic rape threat from some
Fox News stenographer in a Kentucky man cave, you think she's dialing 911? From her
apartment? She would have waited until she got to the office, waved her hands like in
Minority Report and her lawyers would have midnight Seal Team Sixed him while he was
overhand jacking it to interracial porn. Do you know what Hess's employers did for her? No,
I'm serious do you know? It can't be nothing, right? That would be Bananastown. It was
nothing? Really?

Maybe hypotheticals aren't your bag, ok, here's a true story: "Amy" received a couple of
voice messages from a "customer" she met at work who wanted to put something in her
vagina. These messages were not violent, in so far as forcing your fantasies of consensual
sex into an unwilling girl's ear is considered not violent, but of course they creeped her out.
There's one other crucial piece of information needed to understand this story: her harasser
probably had large sneakers. I'll give you all a minute to catch up.
Every woman has some version of this story, with one important difference: Amy was a
medical student, which meant a lot of money went into her and a lot of money was
expected of her. One (1) phone call from the Dean to a phone number that was not 911 and
that guy was evaporated. Two cops located him minding his own business, and because he
defended himself with the magic words-- and you should write these down, they're gold--
"it's a public street, I have a right to be here"-- he was jailed for eight months for
harassment and resisting arrest-- pre-trial. Pre means without. Of course his case was
ultimately dismissed. Does that matter? Please observe a) Amy herself didn't have to do
anything to effect any of this, she was mostly unaware of the results, the system was on
autopilot; b) he was jailed not for what he did but for whom he did it to, had Amy been a
1040EZ at the Footlocker we'd say she was asking for it. "But it isn't fair that her protection
money should get her concierge policing while the rest of us have to make due with
socialized law enforcement." Was it fair that he did eight months because he couldn't afford
bail, is it fair that he didn't know that it wasn't fair? On the other hand, was he a dangerous
nut, should he have been punished? Of course. Was he operating from a perspective of
institutionalized sexism, patriarchal thinking, misogyny? Sure, #whatevs. Sometimes the
structural imbalances go your way, and sometimes they don't, better figure out who makes
the scales.

After Hess got the runaround, she spent a lot of time trying to get a protection order, a
force slightly less compelling than wind. Why didn't she just call the Mayor? "Hi. I work for
the city paper, the one that caters to voting Democrats and men looking for Russian
companionship. I'm doing a story about police apathy regarding sexual violence from a first
person perspective, by which I mean your perspective. Comment?" That would have solved
her problem, but more importantly it would have forced her to think about WHY that solved
her problem. What is the difference between a "woman" who is threatened and a "reporter"
or "medical student" who is threatened? Why is it more bad to attack a journalist than a
woman? Think about that, it has not always been so. The former is an attack on the system,
so the system must respond; the latter is an attack on a woman, so
-------------------------------------. And so it goes.

But Hess preferred to see misogyny on the internet, so instead we get another trending
article about how the problem has a penis. This coincides perfectly with the media's desire
to frame it as a gender war because that makes for good clicking. Let's summarize the
media's thesis via unwitting Hess: 1. cyberharassment is a women's issue, never mind the
men who are harassed. 2. The appropriate way to handle women's issues is not necessarily
to solve them but to discuss them in the media. "It's called awareness." We are all aware.
Are you aware of how much you made for Pacific Standard at your expense and to no avail?
IV.

Hess is fighting the battles of 50 years ago because she was told to fight them by people
who profit from the fight, and as a bonus it gets her out of any self-criticism. Oh, Sheryl
Sandberg thinks Silicon Valley can be a boys' club? Was that why she manned up and sold
us out to the NSA? Curious that she didn't accuse the NSA of being a boys' club. Perhaps
real power transcends gender? More curious/on purpose is that she and the boosters at
Wired are more horrified about NSA spying, despite there being an explicit terms of service
agreement with them that what it finds without a warrant is inadmissible, but Google
monitoring my sexts for their commercial benefit is SAGE approved behavioral economics.
Google buying Boston Dynamics is better than DARPA having it, is that the game we're
playing now? If I had to put my chips and my children against an 8 year rotation of civil
service nincompoops vs. some nerd with an open marriage who spent $15M on a "bachelor
pad" so he could score chicks of questionable emotional stability, I'm going with the group
my private sector lawyers have an outside chance of pwoning. "But how cool is that guy that
he could spend $15M on scoring chicks!" You're looking at it backwards, the only way he
could score chicks was by spending $15M, and now that guy owns cybernauts. Power
corrupts, but absolute power doesn't exist, so for everything else, there's Mastercard.
What Hess and others fail to see is that this kind of postgraduate sexismology-- Hess's
"ability" to see it-- is encouraged because it favors the status quo. It is a tool for
maintaining an economic and psychological disavowal favorable to Gen X and older-- men
and women. Their collective psychology has caused to be a machine that is calibrated to
ensure their life is not disrupted-- at the expense of everyone under 30, you guys waste
your life Banning Bossy and make sure you pay back all of your student loans, sorry about
the future but the SLEEP/CONSUME machine from They Live has to keep running.
Here's a "class struggle" example: name one Wall Street type who went to jail post 2008,
everyone picks Bernie Madoff. Now name one person you know who was harmed by Bernie
Madoff. That's weird. Note he didn't causethe crash, his criminal empire was a "victim" of
the crash. What got him jailed was stealing from the wrong people-- that the media coded
as either "celebrities" or "pension funds". Look carefully at the result: you got a distraction
to label as evil so you don't have to feel any guilt about overusing your credit card; the rich
guys get (some of) their money back; and the media makes millions of dollars engaging you
in a "conversation." "But he was symptomatic of Wall Street excesses." Way to treat the
symptoms. Hence the most important result: nothing changed. The whole thing is a defense
against change, for the system and for you. Still have that credit card at max?
Radical political action, radical as in "outside the frame" radical, the kind self-aggrandizing
#OWS is incapable of, would be to demand Bernie Madoff be released, so that everyone
would have to watch him in restaurants and hookers, an unignorable signal to the system
and to yourself that things are not right. Not to settle for symbolism and scapegoats. But
the media won't let this happen, they thrive on symbolism and scapegoats; and you won't
let it happen as long as you can get an iphone.
So the system encourages women like Hess to "critique the patriarchy" or "bring awareness"
because it stands no chance of moving the money, let alone the power, and also the media
gets a cut. Meanwhile men all over the place are left questioning why their opportunities are
just as limited but their answer can't be a glass ceiling. "Maybe it's reverse sexism!" Maybe
your media is no different than her media, we'll see what kind of sexism there is when the
robots replace all of you. What is both obscene and astonishing in its power is that this
distraction is foisted on Millennials by other Millennials, they're fighting for the other team,
precisely because the immensely hard work of work can be avoided by hoping the problem
is sexism. Hess is frantically fighting against-- whom? Cyberbullies? Frat guys? Stand up
comedians? What are the results she expects from this fight? The fight is a symptom of
neurosis, frantic energy as a defense against impotence, frantic energy as a defense against
change. "Why am I in the top 20% of intelligence but I'm running the register at a store
whose products I can't afford?" Because trolls are preventing women from earning a living
online? "So it's Reddit's fault!"

V.
There should be no controversy: a guy should never tell a girl he's going to rape her, online
or not, kidding or not. I get that he's probably not serious, but there should be no instinct at
all to defend such a jerk, and yet----- and yet that is precisely the instinct many people get.
Men who have never wanted to threaten anyone read Hess's story and side with the troll.
And Hess will agree: it is a massive number of people. So they're all misogynist jerks, too?
No other explanation?

Yet a typical such "misogynist" probably has a wife and daughters whom he loves in a more
equal way than sexists in the Whig party did. He is aware his daughter is a girl, he wants
the best for her, he'd be thrilled if she became President, do you think he doesn't want her
to have power/money/influence, more than any man? And of course he wouldn't want his
daughter to receive such rape threats, but what's important is that he believes she
wouldn't-- she wouldn't deserve them.
There is plenty of existing sexism and [insert lip service here]. I do not deny or minimize it,
the point here is to identify the self-imposed kind of oppression, instead of top down it is
bottom up: impotence. All of these choices, all of these products, all of that sex, all of that
power-- why not me?

The troll and Hess have this feeling of impotence, which Hess easily finds to be the fault of
patriarchy, which she uses interchangeably with class, except when that class is Sarah Miller
McCune, then it's just patriarchy. The troll thinks the source of his impotence is "militant
feminism", which also explains why he's not worrying about his daughter. She's not a
woman, she's a person, i.e. like all American parents, he's raising her like a boy: school x
16, sports x 12, violin x 6, and for everything else there's LCDs. I don't know why he thinks
his daughter will fare any better through the same machine that is failing his son, but I
guess it's worth a shot. Of course, he probably won't be too happy if she becomes a
"feminist"; e.g. living with a teenage Zosia Mamet drove David Mamet to the Republican
Party. I'm going to go ahead and protect myself by saying that's a joke.
So in order to explain their otherwise irrational feeling of impotence, they pull from any of
the media-approved categories of blame, depending on your news network: sexism, racism,
feminism. The central importance of the media in soliciting their anger is totally lost on the
older "activists" who still believe that the -ism is the primary force. They're enraged that a
white Princeton student would dare to write that white privledge doesn't exist; they never
wonder why they read it. They are at a loss to explain why the very same trolls who want to
"rape" feminist bloggers are even more enraged that women in Saudi Arabia are forced to
wear burqas. So do misogynists hate Arab men more than American women? Is there a
hate hierarchy? Yet the media is unsurprisingly ambivalent about the burqa, the feminism
risks an assertion of cultural priviledge so they'd just as soon not get involved. And to hell
with George Bush who made us have to.

There was a time not long ago when the dumbest people in the world were polacks. Do you
see any dumb polacks around today? What happened? "Awareness?" Do you think we all
just learned "poles are just like us?" You think it was... education? Pole empowerment?
Tolerance? The question is not how did we learn to get over that prejudice, but rather what
purpose did it serve in the first place, why was it the preferred expression of hate of that
time?

VI.

Hess had a chance to wonder about this, but the media's keyword list and her own personal
psychology converge to make her prefer to see sexism. Against these force vectors she is
powerless. The medium is the message, she just puts her byline at the top. Hess even
looked for a "woman problem" at The Economist which I thought was going to be that there
weren't enough women there because she cited the statistic that 77% of the writers are
men, except that she then lamented that since there are no bylines you couldn't tell which
ones were the men and the women, which was also bad. But she had something else in
mind:

In many ways, the magazine suffers from the same woman problem that plagues libertarianism more
widely. The Economist's central belief in "free trade and free markets" informs its one-size-fits all
approach to its readership--the idea that women might actually want to consume news differently than
men doesn't fit into this theoretically level global playing field.

Women consume news differently. True? Let's find out:

When I lived with a boyfriend who subscribed to The Economist, I'd pick up the magazine occasionally,
scanning the table of contents for the odd piece that appealed to me--a dissection of the racial dynamics
of American marriage, for example, or a takedown of U.S. sex offender laws. Typically, though, I'd flip
straight to the book reviews, a space I discerned as a little more inclusive than the front of the book. I
recently asked that guy whether the contents of the magazine ever struck him as particularly masculine,
too. "It's called The Economist," he replied. "It's like Maxim for nerds."

Lord have mercy.

First of all, Maxim is already for nerds, who else would want to look at glamour shots of still
dressed women only women have heard of? This month is Sophia Bush and Olympic figure
skater Tara Lipinski, yum, time to get your hard on. "Oh I loved her with Johnny Weir
covering Sochi!" Can't say Maxim doesn't know its demographic.

this is what women are told men want; this is how women are told how to want

So for him to think Maxim isn't for nerds means he thinks it's for Dude-Bros, i.e. large
genitaled males who get to rape all the drunk chicks at the Delta house. Which means he's
an easy mark for branding, and which, I am willing to bet $10M, is why he tells his guy
friends about Maxim but shows his girlfriend he subscribes to The Economist. Don't worry,
Amanda, he only reads the book reviews, too. Stab in the dark, here's a guess at his
character sketch: a smart underachiever, proud he's "not some frat jerk", he knows he's
supposed to be interested in topics not related to him but finds his concentration isn't up to
the task-- so he reassures himself with the trappings/magazines of intelligence. "Would
Adderall help me do more work and less porn?" No, but it will help you write a book of porn
and you will be terrified at what you learn. His favorite way to consume news is to forgo
primary sources in favor of skimming two paragraph dissections written by others who also
forwent the primary sources. Unmotivated, unthreatening and unrelevant, publicly not
drawing from the system according to his need but privately disavowing a lack of
contribution back to the system according to his ability. "But the system is corrupt." $100M
says there's a vaporizer nearby.

Second of all: hell yeah, dissections and takedowns, thank you for your consideration.
Third of all: observe that she asked him about The Economist after they had broken up. Her
ex was her go-to guy when she had a question about masculinity, and magazines. Does she
know any other men? Has she interacted with any men without the polarized glasses of
stereotype, prejudice and fear? Is every guy only either a love interest or a Dude-Bro?
Fourth: she misunderstood/completely understood his answer about whether the magazine
was particularly masculine: "It's called The Economist." Uh oh. If I ask, "Is Cosmo Magazine
particularly feminine?" and you reply, "Duh, stupid, it's called Cosmo, any more feminine
and it would have a tailbone tattoo," then you are implying not only that the magazine is
feminine, but that I should have been able to infer that because cosmos are feminine. To
him, The Economist is masculine is because economics is intrinsically masculine-- and she
implicitly accepts this. Now who's the sexist? Whose theoretical daughters have a better
chance of learning economics? Of course she'd say any women can learn economics, yay
women, but her daughters would be learning a masculine discipline, see also math, which I
predict she's bad at. The barrier is in herself, sexism is merely her projection of it.
So while she pretends that it is the male perspective she doesn't like, it is evident that it's
the contents themselves that she objects to. They're boring, but that can't be related to
intellectual curiosity because she's a thinker. So it has to be the "male perspective". But
didn't the same male perspective write the takedowns and dissections? Books, sex,
relationships; those are "inclusive to women". What happens when you don't sign up for
NATO-- that's masculine. But is it? Really? I agree that most of the articles in The Economist
are boring and don't "relate" to my lifestyle as an alcoholic, but I force myself to go through
them like social studies homework, and most of the women who do the same are doing it as
the same. The articles aren't supposed to be interesting to me, they are supposed to be
important and I force myself to be interested.
However, the point isn't that she should read The Economist, the point here is that she saw
sexism, which means she didn't notice this:
UNWITTINGLY, perhaps, Vladimir Putin is playing Cupid to America's Mars and Europe's Venus. ... "I
have not felt this good about transatlantic relations in a long time," whispers one senior European
politician.
WTF, why would anyone whisper this? Is Putin standing right there? The Economist does this
all the time, citing unnamed sources while alluding to their power and significance. Of
course the easy critique to make, and even this one Hess was not allowed to formulate, is
that in this way The Economist conveys the impression that it has personal access to the
levers of power, the way Us Weekly recasts publicists as "sources close to Kim Kardashian",
shrinking the gap between the magazine and the sources and artificially widening the
distance between Kardashian and us. She becomes more important and less accessible--
except through Us Weekly.
But this critique is backwards, it assumes the magazine is trying to trick its audience, this is
wrong, the audience is using the magazine to trick itself. The audience wants this distance.
It wants heroes, celebrities, people with power-- it wants an upper class-- and it wants
them inaccessible. Envy? No, that's advertising, this is the "news." This is what happens
when a whole generation's narcissism is threatened with injury-- since everything is
possible, why aren't you enjoying everything?-- the personality structure becomes
overwhelmingly defensive. "If I were Kim Kardashian, then I would be able to do X!" is NOT
envy, flip it over and read the redacted obverse: "Only Kim Kardsahians can do X --
therefore it's not my fault that I can't!"
The Economist demo appears to want this same defense. The real trick of The Economist is
that as a magazine of "libertarianism" [sic], its belief in "free trade and free markets"
requires as axiomatic that these are not real. The Invisible Hand is actually attached to a
benevolent class of gentlemen capitalists who have the money, the connections, and the
information to best mold the world. You don't know these people, but fortunately The
Economist does. Their motto, inscribed in runes over a blue moongate on Jekyll Island, is,
"Be content to bind them by laws of trade. You have always done it. And let this be your
reason."
Why would the The Economist's rich and powerful demo want to be ruled? Because they
aren't powerful, only rich, all that time getting rich did not translate to any power, only the
trappings of power. So they've postulated a fantasy power structure/NBA owners that
explains why they can't enjoy their lives as they think they should-- to absolve themselves
of the guilt they feel for having money/intellect/opportunities and NOT being able to do
anything with it except spend it on the system-wide approved gimmicks: Trading Up, college
educations, the National Bank of S&P 500.
And you say, boo hoo for the rich. That's your media approved classism talking. Does
$200k/yr have more in common with $50k/yr or $1M/yr? What do your TV commercials tell
you? Don't think about where the lines are drawn, think about who draws the lines.
Hess yells about a world of masculine power because she has the power to yell at it. But of
course her power is limited only to yelling, she is impotent against a troll who yells at her.
But her mistake is in thinking he has the power. No one has it, the system doesn't allow it.
Even the mighty Economist demo feels impotent. Are they all delusional? This is the true
critique of the system, not simply that one group reliably oppresses another; but that the
entire system is based on creating a lack. This lack is not a bottomless hole that nothing
could ever fill, but a tiny, strangely shaped divot in your soul into which nothing could ever
fit: not money, not sex, not stuff, not relationships. Nothing "takes." Nothing counts.
Nothing is ever right. Only novelty works, until it wears off.
This lack of power-- not power to rule the world, but existential power-- what is the purpose
of my life? What is this all for? I get that I'm supposed to use my Visa a lot, but is that it?
Shouldn't I be able to do more than this? Everything is possible, but nothing is attainable.
Nothing tells them what is valuable; worse, everything assures them that nothing could be
more valuable. That the media is the primary way the system teaches you how to want
should have been obvious to Hess, she works for it, but for that same reason it was invisible
to her.
You shouldn't be surprised that the only sane response to this impotence is neurosis, for
which of course the system provides a psychiatric treatment that couldn't possibly work. "I
need an Ambien, I can't sleep." But where did you hear that you needed to sleep?
VII.
If you're a guy, you probably don't realize the awesome pressure on women to let
themselves get looked at: to reveal themselves online, to post a pic, to give everyone your
attention, to stop what you're doing and give the other your self, even if they want to yell at
you. "Hey lady, I hate you!" And yet that same pressure tells women they are valueless
unless they are public. Madness.
The system is illogical, the things you want cannot actually coexist, but you dare not attack
the system that promises everything, therefore something else must be blamed. As a basic
example, Hess probably wants all the benefits of socialism and all the brand products of
capitalism. When she can't have it, obviously the problem is misogyny.
Another example: Donald Sterling.
everyone hates two of these: fat cats, america, virgins
Here's a transcript of an illegal recording not done by the NSA that therefore everyone is ok
with, consistent with our new standard of conduct: it is not illegal to make an illegal
recording as long as it is given to the media and they profit from it and we can use it to
rationalize our lives. Got it. Now I know you think you know what he said, but this time pay
attention because he leaked a state secret:
You can sleep with them, you can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is
not to promote it on [Instagram] and not to bring them to my games.... Don't put him [Magic Johnson]
on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me... Yeah, it bothers me a lot that you
want to broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to?...You're supposed to be a
delicate white or a delicate Latina girl.
Here's a question: who is THEY who have to call him? Why is a gazillionaire 3 years from
God's judgment worried about They? And why would They care what his girlfriend does? The
implication is that They are even more racist than he is, which should blow your mind when
you consider They are about to pretend to try to take his team away from him and give him
$600M.
But the other possibility-- which coexists with the first-- is that They don't exist, not in any
coordinated way: They are you, the public, far more dangerously racist than he is because
his racism is overt and yours is disavowed. What he is worried about is that you will see a
picture of "a delicate white or Latina" girl next to a guy with large sneakers and... film your
own conclusions.
Some clueless TV types have deduced that she set him up. Duh. Then they tried to figure
out why he hooked up with such a manipulative harpy, and I therefore know with 100%
certainty that to them having a hot young girlfriend is an unattainable fantasy. But he didn't
have a choice: his superego required it, as a condition of his identity he is obligated to have
a mistress, a miss-stress-- a girlfriend who is way more headache than any wife he was
"bored" with. Since everything is possible, he is obligated to enjoy-- and if it isn't enjoyable
there must be something preventing it, and that obstruction has to be her fault, or They's
fault, what it can't be is his fault. He's 80, his sexuality is... on the decline. If he can't enjoy
sex someone else has to enjoy it for him, in his place: no, not the black guy, but her-- she
is doing the enjoying for him. Being cuckolded-- that's what this is, right?-- is fine, it works
for him, as long as he isn't humiliated in public. "It's ok if They see me as a racist because I
AM a racist, I accept it as part of my identity, there's no shame in it; but if They think I'm
not satisfying her, or worse-- if they think I'm a cuckold-- if they don't see me the way I
want to be seen----"
"If only you were the girl I thought you were!" he said, paraphrased. But of course she was
the girl you thought she was-- she picked you. When you pick a woman for certain reasons,
you are also picking the kind of woman who wants to be picked for those reasons. You may
even have succeeded in tricking her that you like her for other reasons, but this is
irrelevant: you like the kind of girl who likes the kind of guy who pretends to like women for
other reasons....... But in any event, his desires were illogical, they can't actually coexist, so
it must be They's fault.
It is heartwarming to think of the backlash against Sterling as a new intolerance of racism,
and I'm told his case is important to society because he's famous and rich, but his money
doesn't come with any power. So while you are all glowing in self-righteousness because you
outed another racist rich guy, consider that you will never hear a recording of the head of
Goldman Sachs making racist statements. "Maybe he's more progressive?" Hmm. Or maybe
power won't allow it, power won't even allow you to think about it. The more likely
explanation-- remember, basketball is a TV show on The Disney Channel the outcome of
which couldn't be less relevant to humanity-- is that it is projection, it represents frantic
activity as a defense against change. "I'm not a racist-- because THAT's a racist!"
---
1Bbu9uvaNMWmAGj6sPF3edaA4u1wY2DLtZ

APRIL 29, 2014

The Maintenance Of Certification Exam As Fetish
no need to wait for the receipt

(I had reworked an old post for a psychiatry trade journal, which I would happily have
linked you to, except that page 2 is behind a login wall. So here is the version I submitted
before the editors edited it, slightly longer with more typos. I am posting this because of the
new lawsuit against the American Board of Medical Specialties.)
The mission of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology's Maintenance of
Certification (MOC) Program is
to advance the clinical practice of psychiatry and neurology by promoting the highest evidence-based
guidelines and standards to ensure excellence in all areas of care and practice improvement.
That's what the website says, I have no reason to believe they are not earnest. But far from
succeeding, the program does the exact opposite. We have come to a moment of truth in
psychiatry, and we are all going to fail. By which I mean pass.
We can start with the 200 question certification exam. The most obvious clue that there was
something suspicious going on with the test was that there were no questions about Xanax.
How do you measure "excellence in all areas of care and practice" without asking about the
most commonly prescribed medication in America, let alone psychiatry? Meanwhile there
were several questions about pimozide, a medication which appears to be prescribed
exclusively by psychiatrists who want to brag about prescribing it. I was repeatedly
assessed on my competence in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, but was not asked to display
my knowledge of SSI. You might retort that SSI isn't really psychiatry, but then why is so
much of my time spent on it? The only thing I spend more time on is Xanax.
But though the missing Xanax was a clue, the insidious problem with the exam was not the
content. To see the bad faith obscured by the questions, put aside the usual college
freshman complaints of, "why do we need to know about pimozide?" and ask instead, "what
happens if I get the question wrong? What happens if I get them all wrong?" The answer is
nothing. There are no consequences for failing this test, at all. First, 99% of the applicants
pass, I assume the other 1% forgot to bring two forms of ID. Second, even if you fail, you
can take it again and again, as many times as you feel it's worth the $1500. Third: there
were a thousand easy ways to cheat, here are three: I could have walked out of the building
on an unsupervised "break"; I could have Godfathered an ipad to the back of a toilet; or I
could just picked up the phone and called everyone. Who was going to stop me? There is
more security at a pregnancy test, which made me wonder if how easy it was to cheat
wasn't... on purpose. The retort is that doctors are expected to behave honorably, but the
honorable ones were going to pass anyway. Those in danger of failing-- the very people the
test should detect-- would be most tempted to cheat. Doesn't the ease of cheating render
the test unreliable? If the test is unreliable and 99% pass, why have a test at all? Which
reveals the gimmick: the point of the test isn't to measure competence, but to convey the
impression that competence was measured. The point of the test is to say that a test was
given-- and nothing else.
The question is, to whom are we saying this? It is as if psychiatry was in denial about its
ordinary reality and was trying to create a different identity through the test itself. A
psychiatry where there are right and wrong answers. Where pimozide and Dialectical
Behavioral Therapy happens, a lot. Let me anticipate your retorts: that the questions are
carefully constructed for their validity; that the test itself "incentivizes" learning; that not
everyone prescribes Xanax; that if I'm such a smartypants, what system would I use? If
these are your replies, you have missed my point: a flawed system isn't better than no
system at all, it is worse than no system at all, because at least with no system we are
forced to be accountable to ourselves for our education. "Not everyone will be so
dedicated." Correct, but now those same undedicated people get an official blessing of their
ignorance. Who doesn't walk out of even this ridiculously meaningless exam not feeling
smart, accomplished, up to date? And who would dare, after passing, to criticize the exam
that warmed his ego?
In addition to the test, the Board also requires a nauseating number of CME credits, but
these CMEs are an even worse affront to learning. The only thing that CMEs guarantee is
that money was spent on buying them, $80 and no questions asked is all it takes, which is
even sillier than it sounds since I could go to a number of websites which offer instant and
unlimited free CMEs, so long as I skip the long text and just take the post-test, which I can
take as many times as I want. I can get 1 CME every 25-50 seconds, depending on my
ability to click "b".
The retort is that the system is predicated on a certain level of honor, that physicians
shouldn't cheat. Fair enough, but if you're trusting them to be honest in revealing what they
learn, why not simply trust that they're going to learn it? Because the point isn't the
education. The CME exists to say that there is CME; the CME exists to say there is oversight.
To clarify: the important criticism here is not that the multimillion dollar CME industry is a
gigantic money making scam, something on the level of the 15th century sale of
indulgences, because to say that would be actually to defend that very system: the money
is a diversion, a patsy, what is corrupt about CME isn't the money but, as the default
mechanism for continuing education, it subverts its own purpose. It reduces the interest in
actual education so that it can pretend that it explicitly monitors it. If you have a minute to
spend on your "education," the system pushes you towards CME. "Why not do both?" Why
do both, who can do both? There are only 24 hours in a day. In other words, the system
doesn't just fail, it forces failure.
Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were
accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing
criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an
introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong
answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As
anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren't cheating to get the right answer, there
was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor
wanted-- because that's the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time
"cheating", what real learning could be done? None. So--- why bother with an exam at all?
Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the
test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning
occurred-- and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not
the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of
that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own
identity. "Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college." First of all, they weren't.
Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system
to this?
Seen this way, these tests, whether Harvard government exams or MOC exams, are nothing
more than fetishes: a substitute for something missing which saves us from confronting the
full impact of its absence. In less abstract terms, these tests allow us to believe NOT that we
learned something, NOT that we know something-- but that there is something to know.
Since there is nothing new to learn, therefore there must be a test. The logic of a 10 year
MOC exam is to keep us up to date, so it's fair to ask: what in psychiatry has changed in ten
years, what are the major advances? Depakote was discovered to be the default
maintenance mood stabilizer despite no evidence supporting this, but that fell into disuse at
a time oddly coinciding with its patent expiration, which is suspicious but I'm no
epidemiologist. Anyway, it wasn't on the test. Anything else? A few new medicines have
come out, though none of them appeared on the test either. There's money to be made on
the west coast using giant magnets, (fortunately) also not on the test. So? Was the ABPN
worried I'd forget how to use MAOIs? I'm never going to use them, I have enough problems
monitoring Xanax. The astonishing truth is that despite millions of dollars and hundreds of
academic careers psychiatry has made no progress in almost 20 years, let alone ten, a
claim no other medical specialty can make, and the truth which cannot be spoken out loud.
Hence an exam.
Are you prepared to look inside yourself? When a nurse practitioner asks you what about
your board exam is difficult, what will you say? Take a minute, it's important. "Well, it has
neurology in it." Note carefully that the psychiatry questions aren't "harder," the appeal here
isn't to a higher level of expertise in psychiatry, but an expertise in something else,
something "more" than psychiatry, and it is this link that symbolizes our status as "experts."
Older psychiatrists will be quick to assert that "clinical judgment" counts for a lot, and I
don't disagree, but it's probably not testable, and it most certainly wasn't tested. So what
does $1500 buy you? "Existential support." I hope it was worth it.
What makes the MOC not just a bad exam but evidence of a pathology is that though
college kids have no idea what they're up against, that the system works against their
education, psychiatry is the very discipline that articulated these defense mechanisms. It
should know better, it is supposed to know better; which means that we are either unable to
see what we are doing or believe that we are somehow exempt from this. But here we are,
spending time and money on cosmetics and pageantry to pretend that we are learning, to
pretend that we are being measured, all the while slinging random neurochemicals + Xanax
based on an a suspect but billable logic in the hope that something sticks and no one
notices. Frantic activity as a defense against impotence. There is a term for that, but you
can bet your career it won't be on the test. Pass.

MARCH 10, 2014

Ten Extra Seconds Would Have Saved True Detective's Finale
what could it mean?
You just watched a historical TV moment: never before has the audience for a show been
smarter than its writer. I submit as second evidence the season finale for The Bachelor
that was on yesterday, for three hours, drawing ten million "people". Just remember that
the next time some dummy from The New Yorker complains that TV has a woman problem.
The Whitman's Sampler that was True Detective's finale is beyond discussion, literally,
because what we now know is that no discussion was necessary. All the references, all the
philosophical subtext, all the weirdness-- turns out it was topping after topping, "does this
make you watch? How about this?" Remember when the one character who turns out
to be irrelevant says, "YOU'RE IN CARCOSA NOW," do you know what that meant?
Nothing. The writer once read a story that had the word Carcosa in it but since his cat
was already named Chuckles he used it in a TV script. "It's a reference to--" I know what
it's a reference to. Why is it a reference? Does it mean anything? Did "acolyte" or
"metapsychotic"?
We see Errol shifting fluidly between several accents. Here is the show I thought I was
watching: is this is a 1 Corinthians 14 "speaking in tongues"? Maybe coupled with the
aluminum and ash reference it suggests Errol is Baal and Carcosa is Hell?
Here is the show I was actually watching: though not mentioned ever in the show ever, he
did that because the accident that caused his scars also made it hard for him to talk in his
normal voice.
Meditate on that.
The writer googled Chekhov's Gun, laughed mightily and roared, "you're not the boss of
me!" I'm confused, so the killer's ears were green because he painted houses with his ears?
The point isn't that this explanation is stupid, the point is he didn't need to have green ears.
I don't care about "tying up loose ends" or sterile Judeo-Christian undercurrents, I have ABC
for that. I care only about internal consistency. If you're going to make a show about, for
example, zombies that is worth watching, at some point a character must say, "look, the
only thing we know with 100% certainty is that every single one of us will eventually but
unpredictably become a zombie, so we probably need to devote, oh, I don't know, 100% of
our energy to dealing with that certainty." Once you ask that question you are lead, for
example, towards a sci-fi show about forced physical isolation where the only contact we
have with each other is digital, but because of the lack of physical contact paranoia sets in,
and suddenly every interaction becomes an implied Turing Test. Would you watch that
show? Because without that question you have four seasons of Denial Lets Us Pretend The
Old Rules Still Apply.
A show about applied philosophy in the form of a crime drama sounded intriguing. All of
True Detective's existential despair, posed as, "how do you solve a series of murders when
humans are a mistake anyway?" -- well? It's finally solved incoherently with an appeal to
the Old Testament. Oh, so God exists after all? That would have been helpful to know up
front, because I thought we were in Schopenhauer's "time is a flat circle" universe. But
whirlwinds are cool, too.
So through some kind of faith, Cohle loses both his nihilism and... his interest in pursuing
child killers? "We got ours." Oh, we're done then. Time for a sandwhich.
"I don't sleep, I just dream." Turns out that doesn't mean anything either, but if you're 16
feel free to lay it on the artsy girls. You'll think they'll think you're mysterious.

II.
I'm sure everyone has their own idea of how it should have ended. But as an exercise how
could you take the finale that was aired and fix it using only an additional 10 seconds? You
can't change anything else.
Could you have kept it true to the show's original promise, such that "pessimist" Cohle is
both redeemed AND still true to who he is? Could you have rendered a closing scene so
diabolically duplicitous that, on the one hand, most of the characters are saved/happy, while
the world's bleak necessity of a tragic hero (since that's all he was, after all) becomes
unescapable? That we all live semi-peacefully only because of the sacrifice of a few loners
in a garden, coming out one by one to allow their own crucifixion?
"Compassion is ethics." Yes it is. How do you take Nietzsche's nihilism and make it
compassionate? Yet not sappy? If you accept that the theme of the show is that life has
absolutely no meaning and therefore it is up to you to give it meaning, how do you take the
mess that is episode 8 and say that?
Could it be done in ten extra seconds?
At the end they optimistically talk about stars and daughters and life energies, and Marty
smiles upon Cohle and Cohle smiles upon the universe, and Marty, having learned the true
meaning of Christmas, skips off to go get the car.
Cohle sits alone in the wheelchair, watching him. The emotion in his face disappears. His
face hardens. He takes a long drag from the cigarette.
"But I lied for your salvation."
Cut to black.
Credits.

MARCH 8, 2014
True Detective's Detective
taking part in a particular pleasure

[Pastabagel and I have emailed about the show. Some excerpts of his]:
In Episode 3, the preacher says to Cohle, "Compassion is ethics, detective" when he departs
the trailer leaving the reformed pedophile Burt in distress. Cohle replies "Yes, it is."

But if Time was created so things could become, and if acting out of the interest of others is
compassion, then we should assume that Cohle is "becoming", changing into something
else. But what?

Cohle asks in Ep. 5 "Why should I live on in history?" It's an odd line, especially when in
episode 1 he tells Marty that he "lacks the constitution for suicide." But he also meditates
on the cross (as an atheist), "contemplates that moment in the garden, of allowing your
own crucifixion." But by 2012, Cohle has changed. He's resigned himself to ending his own
life, but only after settling this debt- doing what he owes. One last act of compassion
before giving up the only thing he has. His life. And once he's willing to do that, then he
can do all the things in his life that require selflessness, courage, etc (i.e. things that require
faith). You have to accept the infinite so you can make the right moves in the finite.

And when he does this, when he resigns himself not to his fate but to his eternity of
endlessly repeating, at that moment he will actually have faith, because that's when he
proves he believes in the eternal. Only after doing this last good thing does he believe that
he could stand the idea of an eternity of rerunning his life, because he knows at the end,
he's fulfilled it. "Nothing is fulfilled--until the end."

According to Kierkegaard, this resignation to the eternal is crucial. Kierkegaard was not an
atheist but a diehard Christian. He believed that when a man resigns himself to the eternal,
to existing in eternity, and gives up everything that ties him to this world then he becomes
a "knight of faith" capable of great Christian acts (like the self-sacrifice that is almost
certainly coming in ep. 8). When Kierkegaard wrote about a Knight of Faith, he contrasted
the Knight of Faith to the mere Knight of Infinite, the "God botherer"--a phrase used twice
in the show. What did Kierkegaard say the Knight of Faith looked like? Like this:

Why, he looks like a tax-collector!" However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his
least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic
message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the
infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might
not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through. His
tread? It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to
Fresberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no
Philistine more so. One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes
the knight of the infinite. He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a
particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is
absorbed in such things. He tends to his work. So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was
a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he.
[Here I said that the reference was clear, but that Cohle did not look like this at all, that he
appeared much more like the knight of inifinite resignation, the "tragic hero."]

The point is that the writer is taking the concept and running with it. If we've already
spotted Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, then we are firmly entrenched in the
existential project, and we should expect to find references from other existentialists also.
And we do. The preacher in 2002 tells us that God is dead ("only nearness is silence"). Ep 3
Marty asks Cohle the question from Dostoyevsky, "You know what people would do without
God, it would be an orgy of murder and debauchery." Would it? Existentialists say no. Do
we have Sartre? Why yes, we do. There's angst and despair all over the place. And the
angst is brought on by the burden of freedom, not the absence of it.

Think how often Cohle ruminations on suicide echo Camus's formulation of suicide as the
fundamental question of philosophy in the Myth of Sisyphus (a guy endlessly pushing a rock
up a hill, over and over, repetition, cyclical.) But Camus answers it in the negative, faced
with a meaningless world, you embrace the absurd and revolt, not commit suicide. And
isn't what they are doing now a revolt? Kidnapping cops, burglarizing the houses of the
most powerful figures in the state? If this group has been kidnapping kids, if they held
power for generations in the state, if they are plugged in all all levels, then isn't acting
against them so deliberately a revolt against power?

And if they are embracing revolt, if they are not embracing suicide (but are willing to make
a sacrifice, is there a difference?) then they have embraced the absurd, and are on their
way to the teleological moment ("Teleos de Lorca, Franciscan mystic"--a made-up guy that
invokes Francis of Assisi a second time, reminds us of the teleological stakes, and re-
invokes mysticism to bridge us from the ethical paradigm of the characters to the
Continental philosophy started by Bataille (who was derogatorily called a mystic by Sartre,
all in one shot, how is that for economy of storytelling, take that Cormac McCarthy)).

Revolt: "Fuck this world," Cohle says. Remember how he says it? Not in anger, almost off-
handedly, like he's passing on the offer of a free lunch. No anger, no big explosion.
Just...resignation. But he only gets around to trying to screw it 10 years after he says it.
And in 2012, it's jumper cable time. No institutional rules. And no masked perversion of
the established rules. (I'm a cop who's job is to uphold the law, and therefore I'm the one
who can break it). Rather than commit literal suicide, they commit it metaphorically, by
giving up and saying goodbye to everything to take on the very institution that defined their
identity.
And if it is a revolt, then we invoke all the ideas of consistent with revolution? Do we push
out of the existential angst of the 50's into the revolution of the 60's and beyond? The
"present" in the show is 2012? Will we get a postmodern postmortem, an aftermath 2
years later set in 2014? And by then, how much more of the landscape will be swallowed by
Carcosa, the corrupting refinery towers that loom in the back of every scene in the show?

MARCH 1, 2014
Who Can Know How Much Randi Zuckerberg Is Worth?
cue hatred

Part 1 here
IV.

Off topic: Randi strongly believes Facebook has a legitimate place in the business world, and
this makes me think Facebook is finished. I realize this is a speculative trade to make. The
usual anxiety about Facebook's future is that teenagers aren't interested in it, but the more
relevant demo here is adult men, especially the ones in suits. Facebook runs 60/40 women
to men. In the language of self-aggrandizing social media, that's a tipping point. 5% more
estrogen and Facebook will be perceived as a women's site and no guy will want any part of
it except for guys you will want no part of. Hush yourself, you have your sexism backwards:
The instant a womannotices a man flipping through Facebook and one eyebrow goes up,
you can head to your car and beat the stadium traffic, the game is as good as over. That's
what happened to Myspace. It tipping pointed into "unemployed/some high school" and The
Ruling Class had to sell it to Ima Holla Achoo for 20x less than they bought it. Now it looks
like Windows Mobile, which is demographically appropriate.

Lose the men and you've lost Big Business, and at some size point a technology needs Big
Business to want it, which makes Pinterest more valuable than Instagram and WhatsApp
completely worthless. This is the story of Blackberry. The conventional wisdom is that
people didn't like their emails in monochrome and preferred the sleek and sexy iphones, but
you probably remember all the business casual salarymen proudly carrying around two
phones like some bourgeois Frenchman with a dignified wife and a touch sensitive mistress,
a couple years in a guy's going to get to thinking, "what am I, a Mormon, how did I end up
with two wives?" When Business was henpecked into supporting the iphone, Blackberry
went sadly into menopause and defiantly into Africa. Plausible deniability requires that I do
not explain how layered a joke that is.

V.
I want to believe that Randi Zuckerberg is delusional, that because she is so wealthy and
famous she sincerely believes if you take a MacBook Pro to a Panera and start a mommy
blog or a particle accelerator, follow your passion, you should be a TEDx speaker in no time,
but don't forget it's hard work, money isn't everything, and take time out to unplug!
But this person was at Davos. Now I'm confused, was the invite Mark + 1? That's the easy
criticism to make, that she's famous only because of her brother, but nepotism only gets
you so far, Mark has a much more intelligent wife who just graduated medical school and
no one is interested in her, and when the media has no other choice but to acknowledge her
they do this:
I know, I know, it's probably photoshopped. Still.
So on the one hand the media has no idea what to do with an Asian physician except depict
her as a borderline psychopath on Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand they are excited to
interview a lunatic who broadcasts the appearance of excessive action-- frantic activity as a
defense against impotence-- that's what the demo wants, and if you've been paying
attention you will understand the translation: since the target demo has no idea what to
learn from the experience of an Asian woman who despite marrying the Powerball became a
physician anyway, you get Davos updates from a woman who plurals adjectives. This isn't a
criticism of her, it's a criticism of you: what do you expect to gain from all the haste, the
energy, the "finding ways to be creative?" Unlocking creativity is the third biggest swindle
perpetrated by managment consultants, after open floor plans and managment consulting.
Creativity was never the problem, the problem was always the math.
Randi probably read her book herself and I don't doubt that it took months to come up with
the phrase "dot complicated", after which she needed a vacation, but she doesn't
understand why she wrote the words she did, what forces were acting on her, and what
these forces wanted from her that she was elevated to celebrity status. Consequently, her
demo doesn't understand either: they think she's an idiot. This woman went to the World
Economic Forum, which you probably think is irrelevant and you'd be right, but grant that
they are at least pretending they are relevant; yet they still allowed her in, knowing full well
if anyone found out it could completely obliterate their legitimacy. Why take such a gamble,
to what possible benefit? Look, if Scarlett Johansson is going then at least you can say
Scarlett Johansson is coming, I totally get it, but putting Randi Zuckerberg on the brochure
should be brand annihilation.
for the sake of this premise, pretend she came to the 2014 Davos
"I'm pretty sure that's Charlize Theron, not Scarlett Johansson." And I'm pretty sure
they're the same person, and just because now she's Rachel Maddow doesn't mean she's
serious. "But she did actually do serious humanitarian work." Yes, great, how about that.
Is there a blonder picture we can use for the flier?
It's probably very frustrating for whoever that woman is to try being anything other than
whatever she is because no one will see her as anything but that, but this is the nature of
the trade off: you spend your life trying to be seen as something, then if you happen to
succeed then you will not want to be only that anymore, you are really something else. But
the world and/or your girlfriend won't listen. This is especially hard if you simply age out of
it, you want to move on with new ideas but the jerk in the supermarket wants you to be the
person from '99, which means that the jerk in the supermarket still is the person from '99
and can't understand how calendars work. "You changed!" he hisses with disgust because
you fail to normalize his cortical sclerosis. Sigh. You can't punch him, there are witnesses.
There are always witnesses, and they will all be from '99.
VI.
You would be forgiven for thinking Randi was at Davos merely because she's rich, but
consider that Warren Buffett was not there. He's a capitalist, not a globalizer, so his brand
doesn't synergize, in fact, he is the competition. "No, he knows Davos is irrelevant!" So
why does he go on CNBC? Buffett is a CNBC favorite, but what's so remarkable about his
appearances is that while he is branded as a sober "buy and hold" investor, he is only ever
asked about short term trends: are we at a bottom, what will the Fed do tomorrow, etc.
Why? You know what he's going to say: "You want to buy good companies when they're
undervalued," he'll intone over a cheeseburger, callously unaware that there are only 7
minutes until the close. --What about Facebook?! Buy at 57?! "Oh, I don't know anything
about those new fangled tech stocks, I liked Wrigley's as a child, I understand the company,
it offers durable competitive advantage." --Oh, Uncle Warren, you're so out of touch! (But
the rest of you understand Facebook, you liked it as a child, doesn't it offer competitive
advantage...?)
What does Watch Us With The Sound Down And Feel Like You're Active need him for? It's
not his words, it's him, he's the draw, he is the aspirational image of the demo of 35-54yo
hopefuls: "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market."
So keep trading.
And here I have to go back over something. The harder part of the psychology is that the
demo doesn't want to become full time traders, either at home all day or on Wall Street--
that part must remain a fantasy-- because then it would be a job and it wouldn't count; it
has to be a side gig, then their success wasn't their "work self" but their "real" self; no one
else can claim a sliver of that success-- not the liberals with their "'entrepreneurs' just
pretend they don't benefit from public services!" or the wives with their "behind every good
man...!" or the echoes of their father yelling, "you need to apply to Sperry Rand, now
there's a company you can put in forty years with!" It all happened in their head, no one
else can share the credit, it is 100% a consequence of their personal value. Bonus: if they
fail, it can be quickly discounted as merely a hobby-- that wasn't, after all, their real self.
The mistake is in thinking this has anything to do with the money. It's said that most at
home traders fail, but this is incorrect: they fail at making money, but they are successful at
feeling like a trader. That is the goal; the money is secondary, which is why they fail at
making it. The buy/hold/reinvest the dividends strategy of Buffet is totally opposite to
what's desired, because the strategy does not involve market timing or status updates, it is
on autopilot, and there's no "i" in autopilot. Well, there's one, but it doesn't stand out.
The trading activity itself-- the frantic activity-- keeps the rest of reality away. You're not
your job-- you're something else. You're not your family, you're more than that. Things
have the potential of possibly happening someday, and no work will have been necessary to
accomplish it. Just you wait.
But even that's not true. The hardest part of the psychology is that feeling like a trader
isn't the final goal. Turn CNBC back on, there's Buffett, and oh, look, there's Peter Schiff.
Peter Schiff is another CNBC favorite, and his presence is even more incongruous until you
understand it isn't. Whatever your opinion of his opinions-- debt/inflation/government/
armageddon-- his are more political than financial or macroeconomic rather than technical
and anyway they are 100% long term opinions. He may tell you to buy gold for the coming
collapse, but you have a few years to open a position. So why is he there? "Because he's
right!" No-- why is he on Fast Money?
Here is the unspoken fantasy that explains the presence of Warren Buffett and Peter Schiff
on CNBC: "Someday I'll be old, but when I am, I'll have become rich through the market.
And then people will want to interview me."
VII.
Swap out the demo, and this is Randi Zuckerberg. She believes she is worth all her money,
she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions. Anyone
who disagrees is a hater. You're just jealous. "No, she's a fool!" Then how come she's so
rich?
Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is, which is
why her target demo as seen by Davos includesher haters. The standard criticism of her is
that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her
brother"-- but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing--
even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid
in stock options. What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because
that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them. She timed the market the
way you're supposed to; what she did that makes her hatable, therefore, is that she had
inside information.
I don't begrudge anyone the good fortune of right place/right time, take your money and
run, but first drop a knee and be humbled before God reflecting soberly on the knowledge
that you didn't deserve it. I love getting paid, do whatever you can do to get paid, but do
not let the money whisper to you that you are worth it, it will be lying and you will believe
it. You hold a fetish of value and not actual value. But even her haters want the money to
mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed
reality testing and instead creates a new reality, it uses the truth in order to lie: of course
I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value
based on his labor. I'm rich because that's what I'm worth. "Isn't that specious reasoning?"
Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense. To her haters Randi is a
buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money;
Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self
worth. She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else. So she's disparaged in a specific way:
she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother.
VIII.
Not coincidentally, this is the narrative of Davos to the demo that, unlike Randi, will never,
ever, ever be rich; but to whom Randi represents a possibility of it: with globalism comes
the possibility of a lifestyle independent of your work product, and, more deeply, that your
self-worth will finally be recognized by the world that is happy to pay you just for your
individuality. Why wouldn't it? Your baby pictures are adorable.
To be clear, it's not a lifestyle that could be independent of your work product-- it has to
specifically be independent of your work product, otherwise its based on something other
than you and thus wouldn't count. This is why one cannot profit from "nepotism" and
"inside information". Those are bad. That they are, in fact, actually bad is besides the
point: they are the exemptions which prove you are worth your money.
It's probably unnecessary to point out that this increase in lifestyle is built on the increased
work product of whoever will do it for 30 cents an hour, and anyway it is a red herring. The
real attraction for us isn't just the lifestyle, but that it systematizes-- it makes normal-- not
ever wondering: how come we have more lifestyle when we didn't do more work? How did
that happen? In 2008 it was 1933 and six years later it's 1999, what kind of bananastown
calendar is this?
no caption is possible
Confused, I run through my checklist: was there a war? No. Did they invent a new
technology? No. Was cold fusion discovered? No. Did the aliens come? Don't look at me
like that, did they come? Then nothing could possibly explain how we are all worth twice
what we were worth in 2009, or even 30% more than we were worth in 2007. "But stock
prices aren't based on our worth." Then what do they reflect? Our productivity? Our
innovation? A bet on our future prospects? I ask you again: Did the aliens come?
And hence Globalism-- the brand, not the particulars-- is attractive because it is the physical
manifestation of the logic of disavowal we already use for everything else. "I don't know
how it happened, but it makes sense. After all, I am worth it." Economics mirrors
psychology, as it always must.
So Randi goes to Davos, never once asking why they would want her there? Convincing her
demo of underproducing hyperconsumers that capitalism-- controlling capital-- is pointless
and mean, but globalism-- doublespoken as "progress", "human rights", "everything is
connected"-- that is a noble cause. Remember that the "culture" she thinks she speaks for,
including those that hate her-- "the startup culture"-- is premised on starting a business in
order to sell the business to someone else. Of course the idea is to get rich-- which sounds
like capitalism, if you're retarded, but observe the message that is being taught: that the
necessary correlate to getting rich is to give all the capital to someone else. The power is
traded for the fetish of power. That's not capitalism, it is madness, and apparently Davos
and Randi think women especially will heart it. It'll work for a handful of well publicized
people pictured above the caption, "$100 billion! You could be next!"-- followed
immediately by a story about how worthless the business turned out to be, so of course the
goal for you is to sell out ASAP; but the vast majority who have aligned their psychology
with this vector will pursue an impossible fantasy at the expense of their labor and their
lives. If you don't believe me, believe Lori Gottlieb. This logic recommended to her to drop
out of Stanford medical school to join [Link], and now she's a relationship expert.
"But capitalism exploits the worker." I'll take my chances, because when you get a taste of
the money but no access to the capital, you are easily seduced by Globalism-- the brand,
not the particulars. Hence the Hollywood stars, hence Buffett's grandson, hence Randi
Zuckerberg, all who act like they belong there. They do.
Every time you hear the word globalism, you should hear three things: 1. wealth uncoupled
from work product. 2. Lifestyle as a reflection of your personal self-worth. 3. You give up
control of the capital, and by capital I mean you. "Do I still get paid?" Sure, but you have
to promise to spend more than what we pay. "How will that work?" Don't worry, Visa will
explain it all to you.
IX.
It is no coincidence that social media, "everything is connected" (the default is plugged), is
a vivid metaphor for globalism, even as so many social media vaginalists think they are
against globalism if it is defined as Wall Street. Propaganda doesn't care about your
motivations, so long as you act in the required direction.
When social media is branded to men as a positive, the gimmick is that it magnifies their
power, e.g. "the hive mind." This brand is reinforced even when it is depicted as bad, e.g.
men's increased power to stalk, harass, or bully people. On the other hand, when social
media is branded to women with interests and passions but no math skills it's for "finding
support" or "community"; nothing powerful is expected to occur there, it's a place to feel
safe, "connect" and "have a conversation." Those are not accidents, and they have nothing
to do with biology, they are the result of market research and 50 years of very, very bad
parenting.
But my generation came of age in a world with social networks... we understand that the
business leaders of the future will be three-dimensional personalities whose lives, interests,
hobbies and passions outside of work are documented and on display.
We should embrace this new world. The answer isn't fewer baby pictures; it's more baby
pictures. It's not that I should post less; it's that everyone else should post more.
Let's change what it means to be professional in the Internet age. The time when your personal
identity was a secret to your colleagues is over and done. And that is a good thing.

This is a woman who hates everything. I know that seems unbelievable given that she
adorbs baby pics and is always shown smiling in lipstick three shades too bright for her
hematocrit, but don't be fooled, her hate is transmogrified by money and fame and class
buffers so it doesn't action the same way it does for Al Qaeda, but if she had a commercial
pilot's license she would hit you with it.

Think seriously about what she (thinks she) wants: acceptance of her individuality-- by
work. Not for her work product-- there is none; but for her individuality, by work.
First question: which work? Not the job you have, it's real, and it's boring. It is a future
"career", the fantasy environment seen on TV dramas where all of life takes place.
Second question: why work? Men are not being taught to want their job to value them, in
fact, men want as little to do with their jobs as possible. Randi and the globalism party bus
are teaching women to want "careers"-- more precisely, to want to draw more of their
identity from their careers. The perk of taking your work home with you isn't more money,
it's acceptance of your individuality. Also you get to have to shop at Ann Taylor. Before you
seize on this as a biological flaw in women's character, let me remind you that they want
work to accept their individuality because their family and relationships have failed them in
this regard. The only place they feel... happy?-- is when they are at work or plugged in. "I
know The Bachelor is mindless TV, but I just like it." Keeps your husband out of the room,
anyway. How great is it to be alone?
Third question: what are the consequences of Randi's utopian fantasy of your job valuing
you as an individual for everyone else at work?
She believes her authentic self, via Facebook, should be accepted everywhere, home and
work, so the suits should just shut their greed vacuums and embrace her baby pictures, her
individuality-- after all, that's why they hired her, right?
That sounds laudable-- except that she's lying. Ok, I have to pretend not to be sickened by
her baby pictures, will she Like me live-posting My Summertime Threesomes? Huh. So
now individuality has an asterisk: since Facebook should be on at work, everyone's
Facebook should be nonthreatening, not mean, safe-- work appropriate.
"Well, stupid, just don't put naked pics on Facebook." Fair enough, but whereas before it
was my poorly thought out choice, now it is not allowed by work.
"Well, Facebook shouldn't be on at work." Duh, of course it won't be on at work, no
company would allow Facebook to be on at work, there's work to be done. So "ok at work"
really means "if work saw it" and "Facebook" really means "the internet."
"Well don't put naked pics--" You're focused on the wrong side of the equation. Why should
I be careful of my internet behavior? It's not because it can hurt me, it's because it can
hurt the company. What Randi doesn't realize she was used to say is that your internet life
better be work acceptable since there's much more at stake there than at home.
If threesomes are't your thing, try a 2nd Amendment Fan Page or 10 Things I Hate About
Senators and see if your job supports your individuality. See how close to the edge you can
get before Facebook itself censors you. It is tempting to see this as a "war on men"
because Randi tests as a genetic female, or a war on conservatives because Randi sounds
like a "capitalism with a human face"-progressive who ran pass interference for the DNC in
2008, but I hope you can see that the force would equally oppose anything that was slightly
outside of the mainstream. Randi needs the job to tell her she is valuable, and the job
wants frictionless employees. The war isn't on men or women, it is on individual freedom, it
is regression to the mean by suppressing the mean, where mean is defined by its deviation
from SFW, according to W.
Since work has encroached on your home life at your request, since you've conflated
plugged/unplugged with work/home, then
"The time when your personal identity is a secret to your colleagues is over and done. And that's a good
thing."
It's good for the company, anyway. You may be surprised to discover that the more
replaceable you are to the company, the higher standards you are held to, that's what
happens when you don't control the capital. Rather than fostering individuality and
creativity, Randi is telling the organ donors to sanitize their internet presence so that it
doesn't affect the people who are profiting from your work. Consolation is you get to post
your baby pics and work has to accept it.
X.
In the absence of a big payday, the only things left that can value us are the job, and the
media. Regularly someone says something "offensive" in the media and the media
punishes or fires him, and we debate whether that was justified or not. The debate entirely
avoids the most important point: the media company punished the guy in media. They
could have fired him privately, the way you would have gotten fired from your job if you
started YZing all your coworkers. Not only do they publicly fire him, they force the guy to
make a public apology first-- and then fire him anyway. Who benefits? The offended
victim?

But as much as we say we hate their power to judge us, we want them to have this power--
who else is going to have it? If they have this much power to destroy a person, then how
much more significant is a RT? How great would it be if they acknowledged my worth?
With no power, what other chance do I have? In the fantastical words of Marshall McLuhan,
"there is no sweeter praise than the gaze of a tyrant, especially if it's in HD."
This is what we want judging us, this is the calendar we're using. Something external that
can value us at 1999 levels while the real world is pricing us at 2008 levels. My face is in
my hands and I wonder how anyone could be asked to raise a girl in such a world? Recently
a female cardiologist with a "difficult" 10 year old daughter who had been well trained to
want things but not control things asked me if I had read "the study in the New York
Times"-- !?!?!?!?!?-- that said that people with the same surname, over generations,
continued to achieve the same level of wealth, showing "therefore" that genetic factors were
more important than the home environment in determining social mobility, isn't that
probably true? Having to do this sober I asked her, "But didn't you change your surname 11
years ago? Or are you betting she can just upgrade hers?" What else could I say? If you
read it, it's for you?

JANUARY 25, 2014

Randi Zuckerberg Thinks We Should Untangle Our Wired Lives

how hard could it be, none of those circles are actually connected

Randi Zuckerberg is CEO of Zuckerberg Media, which, according to its 10-K, is an iphone. If
you have no idea who she is, and you shouldn't, then the answer to your one and only
question is yes.

In her considerable free time she wrote a book about social media. Here's a question: why
does a woman who epitomizes the online world need to write a hardback book? Could it be
there's no money in the online unless you actually own the online? I'm guessing that wasn't
in the book. Ok.

I understand she gives a lot of interviews too, I'm sure they're TEDy optimistic and
unactionable, but she's apparently an expert, shrug, here is her insight from six years of
watching people work at Facebook: social media is a bad thing, unless it's used responsibly,
then it's a good thing. Settle in for nuance and shades of grey, all 50 of them.

She thinks it's important to "find a balance" between plugged and unplugged life, a phrase
you hear all over the plugged place but has suspiciously avoided scrutiny and is an example
of media allowing you to debate the conclusions but forcing you to accept the form of the
argument, in this case that a balance is what is desirable.

I'm definitely not advocating a complete disconnect or complete unplug, that's not realistic... But what I
am thinking is that people, we've reached this point where we feel like we just need to be always on.
Always answering emails 24/7 connected, and the pendulum needs to swing back a little bit for us to
reclaim a bit of our own time...

Someone is lying, time to figure out why. While she misdirected us with "pendulum" and
"thinking" and "little bit" which are words vicious ideologues use to sound nonideological
and "realistic", she substituted the plugged/unplugged balance with work/home balance,
don't think I didn't see it. Consequently, when someone/Randi tells you about the negatives
of being too plugged in, they almost always blame work emails, as if the things that pay for
your dinner are what distract you from dinner. Really? If I had to make a sexist yet 100%
accurate prediction I'd say that it isn't hers but her husband's work emails that she can't
stand at dinner, I'm pretty sure that no husband has ever gotten away with telling his still
Anne Taylored wife to put her phone away, "the senior partner will just have to wait, we're
about to say grace." I'll cover myself by saying that, indeed, wives do sometimes answer
work emails at dinner, however and importantly if this is occurring you can be sure the wife
is extremely, extremely bored with everything that happens after 5pm, and this is compared
to everything that happened before 5pm which was also *yawns*. "Huh," she soundboards
as she one thumbs a text to anyone else, "Obama said that, you don't say, pandering to
the flavor profile demo, what are you gonna do." I'll be first to observe Obama has failed
in every imaginable way, but Jesus, if that's your dinner conversation, just Jesus. One of
you should cheat just to force the eye contact.

Email is a convenient scapegoat not just because "family time should be protected" but
because it gets us out of inquiring what went wrong with our home life that we could ever
be tempted by work emails, and the avoidance of this inquiry is highly suspicious, i.e. on
purpose. "Honey," she says putting down her Trader Joe's summer salad, "I gotta take
this." Only in America does gotta substitute for wanna so we can avoid the guilt.
#behavioralgenetics. You may recall industrialization/capitalism/Carousel of Progress's
great promise of fewer working hours, and for the most part this has come true, please
observe what we have done with our increased leisure time: filled it back up with work.
There was some consternation that evil capitalism had forced Target's employees to work all
day on Thanksgiving, "no respect for tradition or family time!" But how many of them
wanted to be home on Thanksgiving? The customers sure didn't, they were willing to camp
out/throw down to get in a store what they coulda got easier/cheaper/faster from their
Zuckerberg Medias. "But the store itself has the responsibility to respect tradition!" And
only in America do we want the system to force us to do the right thing so we can take the
credit. #behavioraleconomics
One of our time's great sociological questions is why we filled downtime back up with work,
and the reason is it's better than alcoholism. At some point during the Truman
Administration home life became more stressful than work life, where stressful is defined
either as hysterical drama or rheumatismy boredom, and by Reagan II the home was no
longer a respite from modern society's incessant demands to produce or at the very least a
place to get a nap. Home became work, it became a work, and not coincidentally this
parallels precisely the history of homework. ("But don't you think kids get too much
homework nowadays?" Sure, if you're doing it for them, you have become so myopic about
your kids' possible trajectories that not only do you think faking their grades is their only
hope, you think that will work.) Neither is there home cooking at home, Trader Joe's does it
cheesier and anyway it's on TV. The XYs have long been resigned to this, hence their desire
to "get an early start" or eat their lunch in their cars, while little girls were hooked on the
potential of a fulfilling work and home life, or at least work or home life, now women are in
on the reveal... and it is shaking their very souls. WTF. If home is stressful for adults,
think about how bad it is for teens, all they want to do is hang out and talk about how
phony everything is and instead they're stuck upstairs with Snapchat while listening to their
parents masturbate in separate rooms. Better than listening to them divorce, I guess.

Part of the reason work and home keep mixing despite our professed desires is that that's
how Americans were taught to see an aspirational adult life. In every TV show and movie
after Leave It To Beaver the gimmick has always been that the protagonist's job and
personal life overlap-- doctors in love, CIA agents defending their family, late nights at the
office trading zingers or abuse stories. While we no longer think we want the overlap, the
shows reinforced the false psychology that a person is something, all the time and
everywhere, and the backdrop world "sees" it, accepts it. This applies just as much to
negative depictions of work/life overlap, e.g. the obsessed cop whose wife is now divorcing
him because of the job: the point isn't that the overlap is "good", that's not the aspiration;
the point is that the structure of these depictions represents the fundamental narcissistic
fantasy: a fixed and clear identity-- a character-- seen by a potential audience. This is why
home is not relaxing: we are working to not let it be all that we are.

Work, email, and Target's hours, expand to fill the time available, by request. We took one
look at the void and lack of interesting 5pm TV and started texting to anyone as fast as we
could. The truth is we're not overwhelmed by work emails, we just laid them on top to
make it seem like we're buried in work. Here's your #OWS update: work doesn't bleed over
into home because capitalism is evil, work bleeds over to home because we have no idea
what else to do at home, and thank God we can blame it on work. "But capitalism reduces
human relations to market relationships." Oh my god, feed Bobby for a second, I have to
totally tweet that.

II.

Together with work emails, the social media evangelists will lump in porn and gaming,
because those are seen by the person in the doorway as "bad." Their inclusion in the
plugged/unplugged balance is to get you to accept the form of the argument--that there is a
moral balance: work emails, porn, gaming= time away from human relations= bad; while
things like Facebook and texting are "used responsibly can connect us all", these require a
balance. "Balance" means "not at dinner", though even this is nuanced, because while you
shouldn't check your Instagram during dinner, it's perfectly acceptable to post to your
Instagram during dinner, pretty sure that's what it's for. Here's a foodie tip: the secret
ingredient in every Instagramed delicacy is salt, and blowing the whites.

The false dichotomy of "the balance" starts even earlier with reversing the direction of the
vector of plugged/unplugged. "You need to unplug" assumes the default is plugged, but
the vast majority of our response to the blinking blue light is a volitional search for anything
else but now. It's worth recalling that the phrase, "you need to unplug" came from The
Matrix, and the phrase was important because it had an ironic second meaning: not "you
need to stop drawing from the Matrix" but "you need to stop feeding it at the expense of
your life."

"But the internet is soooooo distracting." No, it's not. A headline like, "When It Comes To
Pubes, You Have The Following Options" feels like totallies but after ten thousand or so
similar headlines, aren't you wise to the bait and switch? I frequently get emails informing
me that there are sexy singles available to chat right now, and I never click on them
anymore. On some site I saw a story to the effect, "You're not going to believe what a
kitten and Miley Cyrus did at the AMAs!" Not believe what? That a Disney approved
character-actor "won the internet" by pretending to sing a song written by the middle aged
white guy who writes all of the 3:40s in front of a stage background of the hackest internet
meme of all time-- and together they cried like girls? "This. Is. Everything." Yeah, I believe
it.

tell HarperCollins that women will like what you tell them to like, just get a boob to promote
it

Haters beware, clicking on a link because "I can't believe a stupid person actually wrote
such a a stupid article about a stupid thing" is 100% the exact same mental process, and
anyway, the system doesn't care about your motivations, so long as you act in the required
direction.
"OMG, you're referencing something that happened like, three months ago?" But it was the
top story at the time-- so it wasn't that important? You think you've forgotten about it
because it's pop culture stuff, but this is wrong, you've forgotten about it because you are
conditioned for novelty, so all topics become forgettable, which, in the logic of the system, is
sort of the point of the technology. "Come on, that's just a bunch of BS, of course we can
distinguish between pop crap and things that matter." Yes, but when the dopamine falls,
you won't care. #SandyHook
"So because social media is mostly a waste of time, we should shut it off and be more
present in our offline relationships?" No, that's what the internet paid Randi to tell you so
that the default=plugged. This standard criticism of social media and texting is backwards:
it doesn't detract from real life relationships, it represents a much desired break from them.
Having to be with someone, especially someone you're not having sex with, especially
someone you're not having sex with anymore, is very, very hard; having people see you,
especially when you're not amidst the symbols that you believe form your "real" identity--
say, a hedge fund trader who has to be home with the kids or a pretty girl in a sweats at a
supermarket-- this is a kind of exposure far more embarassing than any selfie. What if they
confuse that as the real you? You can see a version of this in married couples who talk to
each other, joke, eat, raise kids, do couples stuff, but don't make eye contact. Avoiding eye
contact is a way of keeping reserved a part of yourself, to yourself. "I'm here," you whisper
to yourself, "but I'm not going to let this all overtake me, I'm more than this." This
message is strictly internal, after all, you may not be looking at them but they can still see
you. Avoiding eye contact is avoiding a full on Sartre moment, the "scrutinous gaze" of the
other. "Umm, first of all, scrutinous isn't a word, second of all, Sartre called it 'the look'."
Um, hello? My eyes are up here.
What the couple should have done to avoid this calamity is formed a shared identity, "this is
us". But how were they going to do this? Everything conspires to drive them apart, hell,
even a big tent TV show would be a shared hour but media loves multiple Nielsen boxes so
just go buy yourself another flatscreen and watch your own targeted ads. On the other
hand, when TV ignores demography and tries to make a show for all audiences, you get
Laverne & Shirley, and you get it for eight seasons, so I admit there's no easy solution.
"What about not watching TV?" Hush your crazy mouth, telling America not to watch a
Disney network is a non-starter, and for clarification ESPN= (0.5)Disney; the Princesses,
Thors, ABC, the theme parks-- all that combined is merely the other half. Now you know
what's a stake. The NFL's been handing out traumatic brain injuries for decades, but the
moment Disney decided it needed the women that was the end of lockerroom hijinx. But
until it completes the NFL's rebranding as a kinder, bully-free, concussionless game,
complete with engagement rings and Us Weekly's "Ten Hunkiest White Or Articulate
Quarterbacks", it's going to have to keep broadcasting Nashville. Please don't make the
mistake of assuming that the NFL wants female viewers, it couldn't care less, the ad dollars
from beer and trans fats and cars are plenty. What the NFL/Disney needs is to reduce the
tension between females and males over all that's spent on it: merchandise, tickets, time,
men would gladly watch all the commercials on Sundays if women didn't drag them to baby
showers and home repairs. Sports are male expenses that women reluctantly accept, but
there's always a ceiling and if women were more into the experience then that ceiling could
go up, way up. The key is to rebrand the NFL not as a man's game but as America's game,
thus reducing the barriers to consumption.
("You know, you could use an editor." You could use some free association, it may help you
see unconscious connections which drive your life. "I find that weed helps." Amateur.)
The only shared identity these couples pull off nowadays is "the kids", which is why they can
make eye contact easily when they talk about them. But relationship experts have analyzed
today's marital difficulties completely backwards: rather than trying to find some common
connection amidst the the turbulent waters of life, they are actually struggling against the
current of the relationship to keep themselves private. This is what they practiced for two
or three decades, how can they unlearn the skills? They fought so many years to be seen
as individuals, "be true to yourself", a few years past the exploratory segment of the
relationship and a shared mental space becomes suffocating. So for them, plugging in gives
them some privacy, a micro-break from shared reality, under the rhetorical cover of
"connecting with others."
But why do we need "the balance?" What does it replace, what went missing? The very
thing Holden Caufield hated: "phoniness", protocol and ritual for seemingly no purpose.
Politeness is fine, but why do I have to make small talk? Why do I have to pretend to care
about the weather? Why, after a decade of marriage, should dinner be a regular review of
the somewhat boring goings-ons of "the day"? Because that formality is freeing, it allows
self-conscious physical bodies to get used to standing next to each other without having to
be acting, this includes husbands and wives. When dinner is a controlled process with
"manners" and expected topics of shared conversation and start and end times, as boring as
it may get, it is boring, not you. Women are especially sensitive to this absence of
convention, this is one reason for the popularity of Downton Abbey, not to mention alcohol
and iphones at dinner. It is against this background of "phony" convention that teens can
productively "rebel" and find their own individuality against a status quo; fighting against an
emotionally illogical, arbitrary, unpredictable structure results in learning the opposite
lesson, "whatever gets me through the day..." Without this structure to social activities,
when the "natural" conversation stops being interesting-- and it will, even if most of you
weren't bad at it-- it would be a judgment about your relationship, about you. And you'll
beg St. Jobs to blink a path to safety because otherwise you have to sit there with no
existential support.
Texting and social media's slowness gives them their power for this purpose. You read a
text, and it lingers, it keeps your attention because it's all there is; and then you respond
with a piece of your real self, and wait for a response... what's happening is time travel--
while you are on pause, the rest of not-your life goes faster. It is far more efficient at killing
time than a phone call.

III.

What no one will ever say out loud for fear of being labeled -ist is that "finding a balance" is
something only women are encouraged to do. For men it is supposed to be binary, on or
off. "Honey," the wife says without making eye contact, "please put your phone away." --
But it's the senior partner. "He can wait, we're about to say grace."
Unlike men, women, as a group, are constantly being reminded by the media that social
media is a necessary use of time-- just find a balance. To be precise: it is not marketed as
a diversion, or useful, or helpful or fun-- it's necessary to their existence. The danger is
branded as "excess." And this coincides their role as the primary consumers and
consumables, which is why Randi's stupendously uninsightful book is being heralded
wherever online women congregate. The book itself isn't meant to be read, it can't be
read, it can only be hurled. It is a MacGuffin; her interviews aren't promotions for the book,
the book is an excuse for the interviews. No, of course she doesn't know this. I'm sure she
thinks she's talented and smart and fiercely independent (two fingers to the sky!), but
getting her to televangelize about finding a balance (=the default is plugged) to her demo of
underachieving credit card applicants is what suits the suits. "How come Facebook's board
has so few women?" ask the very women who would rather use it than run it. Randi also
wrote a children's picture book about a child who is obsessed with her ipad but "learns to
unplug once in a while", tellingly even though Randi has a son she wrote the book about a
girl-- a girl she named after the internet. Get it? Because she can't. However, not all
women are the target demo of Randi's lip synching, the CEO of General Dynamics is a
woman, I think she has a higher security clearance than the entire Senate, and I know for a
fact she builds alien spaceships, why not interview her about how she uses social media to
promote her brand and make connections and break ceilings? Because there's no Like
button for hard work or triple integrals, which is doubly interesting because calculus was
invented to make hard work easier. "I just don't get math." Can't do math if you weren't
taught to think logically, and logic is tough on kids' self esteems and makes them way less
submissive, easier just to put on a video. "They're obsessed with the Wiggles." And apple
juice, whose fault is that? So instead of "if you do the same amount of hard work as
everyone else, you should end up in the exact same boat as everyone else, and it will sink
because none of you know anything about boats," we get Randi Zuckerberg, a lot, who tells
us about the occupational hazards of posting baby pictures:

First yawn? Adorbs. Facebook it. First hiccups? Obviously all my friends want to see that. Snoozing in a
park? OMG, soooo cute! Who wouldn't want to see baby photos 50 times a day?

I soon found out. I had some pretty honest co-workers, and one day one of them decided to give it to me
straight. "Randi," she said, "Asher is adorable, but you can't keep posting a zillion baby photos. You
have a professional reputation to uphold."
I just got the bends. What the hell kind of profession could she have had that she's on
Facebook all day and then the only criticism she gets is that her pics are of babies? Observe
that the discussants are both women. Who does woman B believe will judge Randi harshly
for her baby pictures? Men?
All this worry about baby pictures vs professionalism exists in the minds of women, not
men, which is why this was in HuffPo, using the atemporal logic of narcissism: if baby
pictures can sabotage a woman's professional reputation, therefore she has a professional
reputation. Men are irrelevant to this discussion, a man would never bother to tell Randi
anything because the minute a professional man sees a professional woman's baby pictures,
she's moved from Bcc: to cc:. A Cosmo-feminist will hashtag this as evidence of inherent
sexism, but you may want to wait a few paragraphs before you hit RT.
The easy "male" criticism is to say that too many baby pictures reveals her head isn't in the
game, she's not focused on capitalism and destroying the competition so her boss can make
more money. "Wait, what?" Don't overthink it, it's a magic trick, you're being permitted to
debate the consequences because you've unknowingly accepted the form of the argument.

It's not that babies are more interesting to women than men, it is that baby pictures are
more interesting to women than men. Men would rather look at a picture of a used condom
than a baby, this is a scientific fact. They get that the baby is precious to you, but there is
nothing otherwise in a picture to connect to. Furthermore, showing a baby picture to a man
is an aggressive act because it demands a reaction, you showing him a picture of your baby
is entirely for your benefit and not at all for his, it is a dare, in much the same way as a
woman on a first date telling you she doesn't play games is a dare, a dare you shouldn't
take, trust me on this, overpay the check in cash and run. I'll grant that there is some level
of bonding that occurs between women over baby pictures, worth exploring later, but not for
men: men will only (and rarely) show photos of their children doing something, the activity
is what represents the kid as kid and them as a parent. Showing a man a baby picture is
equivalent to showing a woman a picture of his car. "A #baby is more important than a car,
dontcha think?" Yes, but a picture of a baby isn't more important than a picture of a car.
"Yeah, but--" I know. Logic is mean.

In the world where the media postulates social media as an absolute requirement of the
modern era-- the era where everything is fetishized-- no one is permitted to make the
distinction between a value and the picture of a value, they are made equivalent, so daring
to criticize Randi's baby pictures is made to sound like misogyny or misobaby. It's not. I
love food but if you ask me to look at a picture of a food I will poison your toothpaste. Be
careful: the point is not that a woman shouldn't post her baby pictures, the point is that the
system cannot profit from her baby except as a photo, so that in order to get them to do it
more-- to be online more-- the system teaches them to overvalue the photo; and this must
necessarily be at the expense of the object itself. #porn.
And here again you glimpse the long con: a power struggle packaged as a gender war.
Usually you imagine "sexism" as a pervasive institutional power directed top down against
you, oppressing you with sexist jokes or heels at work, but it's much more illuminating to
understand sexism as just another tool to increase consumption. An obvious example: it
costs women more to dress professionally, even though they get paid less. But sexism can
be run in the reverse, too, for women's "benefit." Example: We say things like "the public
has a ravenous hunger for celebrity photos," but this is demonstrably untrue, paparazzi pics
are almost entirely a product for the female demo, no man wants to see a picture of any of
the Kates or their babies or their homes. However you will never hear this said out loud in
the media, they will tell you (and you will parrot) that the greedy force that creates the
paparazzi is "America" or "the public's obsession with celebrity"-- men are lumped in with
women. Men's relationship to celebrity after teenage years is completely different, the
pictures matter much less than "information"-- a pic of Lebron is worth way less than his
stats. But the easy money is in digital photos, monetizing envy has very low fixed costs and
great margins, and nothing can be permitted to threaten the money, so when Princess Di is
driven off the road we blame the paparazzi; but then, in a surprising admission of guilt, the
media comes out and accepts some responsibility-- although in a very specific way: "the
media has succumbed to the ravenous demands of the public's infatuation with glamour and
wealth." Because if everyone-- not just women, but everyone-- wants this, then women
have less guilt about wanting it and men get the sense nothing can really be done to change
it. Do you understand the infrastructure that is necessary to cause people to disavow
something that they know with total clarity, just to keep the money flowing? The moment
male America decides out loud that we're harassing actors and actresses not for "our"
prurient interest but for women's prurient interest only, to the media's financial benefit, they
will require an open carry permit for telephoto lenses; tell them gays also like Us Weeklyand
they will repeal the First Amendment. Believe it. The system repackages a female product
as a "public" product to get it past the hairy misogynists who hate women's media because
it doesn't wisely use a ball, and if a couple of celebrities have to be harassed or die for their
ballless entertainment, whatevs, there's no reasonable right to privacy on the street or on a
beach. The consumers are women, the rest of you pad the numbers. "It's hard for me to
tell what side you're on here." Sides: the form of the argument you've been trained to
accept. Still not convinced? Swap out "America's celebrity culture" with "America's gun
culture" and "male America" with "Senator" and see which Amendment gets repealed. "Now
I'm totally confused what side you're on." Jesus. Just Jesus.
It's right about here that I should again remind everyone that for five decades we've been
repeatedly assured that men are visual creatures. Time to rewrite the evo psych texts to
support the new economy.

---
Part 2 here

NOVEMBER 30, 2013

Hunger Games Catching Fire: Badass Body Count
sorry old man, I have a dress fitting to go to
Number of people killed: 15
Number of people Katniss kills: 1
Number of times she is saved by someone else: 6
Number of times she saves someone else: 0

But boy oh boy, wasn't she spectacular at practice, 9 targets in 30 seconds, and then she
strings up a mannequin. Take a bow. Badass.

I.

For context, here is why THG is a sexist fairy tale. It anticipates most of the criticisms.

Except one. An insightful, even optimistic retort is that at least she's not killing, at least
she's made the ethical choice to not kill anyone.

But this insight is exactly what you are supposed to think, it is an illusion, and it is why my
tally above is also a lie. She kills one person, but she is responsible for all of their deaths.
From the very beginning of the Game it was immediately true that everyone but one got
killed. From the very beginning, before anyone dies, you are guilty of everyone's death.

That's the Game. It's not like they went in there thinking, "I'm not going to kill anyone
because I am planning to escape this Game." No one backed up their pacifism with suicide.
Katniss's thinking is basically, "I'm not butcher, but I am going to try and survive." The
movie elevates her passivity into a moral act, which it isn't, that's the trick. This is a closed
system. Whether she shoots them down herself or waits for the psychopath in the group to
do it for her, it's the same.

What's important is that this "choice" not to kill, and the personal feeling of morality it
(falsely) gives you is how the system survives. Because you feel good about your choice,
"at least I'm a good person," you fight the system much less. You are less of a threat to the
system because you are allowed to believe you're a good person and they're not. But
you're not. You killed 15 people. I counted them.

The true criticism of the movie isn't that it is too violent, but that it is not violent enough-- it
is Disney violence, and whenever you see the word Disney you should instead see "100% in
the service of the existing social structure." The movie presents "not murdering anyone" as
if it were a moral option, as if it were true; so that you are not revolted by the fact that you
did kill 15 people; so that you do not fight to change the system that forces you to kill 15
people.

Just because the system tells you, "the other tributes are your enemy," doesn't mean it's a
factual statement, you have to answer the Thin Red Line question: "who's doing this? Who's
killing us?"

The Game is rigged to prevent all choice but allow the illusion of choice. There are Good
Samaritan laws in place which protect you from liability if you give someone CPR in good
faith but inadvertently crack a rib. But this is nonsense. The person motivated to offer CPR
NEVER thinks about a future lawsuit, he just acts; or, in the reverse, the person who is
nervous about lawsuits was never going to help anyway, and thank goodness he can blame
it on lawyers. These laws have the perverse effect of allowing the us passive aggressive
techonauts to observe events rather than intervene in events. "Come on, what am I going
to do, you know the litigious world we live in, besides, we have paramedics for that." So
you're telling me that, i.e. for example, my child got hit by a car on the street and instead
of Airway-Breathing-Circulation your plan was to shift to Landscape mode? "Well..." You
better burn off your fingerprints and move to Siberia.

There's going to be some who will respond with the obvious: "yes, but the fact is, not killing
is better than killing-- or do you think putting a gun to someone's head is really the exact
same as not doing that?" And some will counter-retort that it's like war, if you send soldiers
to fight you are responsible for their killings. Both arguments miss the point completely:
NOT killing is better FOR HER, because then SHE doesn't have to feel any guilt. But
everyone dies ANYWAY. Not killing is entirely a selfish act, not a moral one, if my kid gets
hit by a bus the driver at least did it by accident, you CHOSE to not help, you are WORSE,
see also Steubenville. "But they did the rape!" But they did it for you to see, do you not
get it?

It looks like Katniss is free to make personal decisions, but no matter what her free brain
decides, everyone around her dies as planned, huh, that's odd. The only "free" choice, the
only way to beat the Game, is not to play. If you really wanted to be a moral agent in such
a terrible environment, you'd have to convince the other tributes to all agree not to fight
each other, knowing full well that the soldiers will therefore come-- that is the point of the
maneuver, to expose the evil of the system instead of allowing them their deniability, "oh,
we don't kill anyone, the kids kill each other!" You have to sit there and Prisoner's Dilemna
the hell out of this and hope none of the other tributes breaks ranks and opens fire. It is
the only anti-system choice short of revolution.

The response that this maneuver puts the individual Districts in danger, too, is,
unfortunately, part of the deal. The genius of the system is that it never puts everyone at
risk, it presents them with a lie: only these Tributes are at risk. If the Districts themselves
don't want blowback, "we don't want trouble", if they "want" to maintain the status quo,
they have to send people to participate. You don't send a Theseus, you send a Katniss,
which they did, hence another round of Hunger Games. She'll look heroic, she'll perform
badassly, and nothing will change, which it didn't, which is why even though she won the
first movie there was a second movie.

There's going to be some of you who will be confused, "are you saying Suzanne Collins
planned this? No way! You've totally misinterpreted--" No, no. Collins wrote the story, yet
she is not aware herself of what she wrote; she couldn't have written the story any other
way than from a narcissistic perspective because that's all she knows living in this world; or,
to reverse it, had she known, had she written a different kind of story with a different kind
of hero, it would never have been published, let alone made into movies, we'd be on
Twilight 7.

It's here that I should SPOIL that the revolutionaries who do finally fight the system DON'T
EVEN TELL HER ABOUT IT. Everyone around her is extraordinarily heroic and self-
sacrificing, they literally drag her bad ass to the finish line at the cost of their own lives, so
that she can survive as a symbol, and the rest of you dummies think she is the hero. Only
a taught narcissistic psychology would SEE her as heroic when right in front of you and your
eyeballs you can observe she is the least heroic of all. I'm not blaming you, this is the
training we all got. The sleight of hand of such movies is that it presents an entirely
different society (full totalitarianism) in the context of TODAY, in the context of narcissism
as expected, as ok, so meaningless acts become exciting and meaningful acts are obscured.
Huh, Mags blew herself up with poisoned gas. Ah well, she was old.
But in totalitarianism, there are no individual acts-- that's the whole point of the totalitarian
structure, that's what it wants, what it wants you to become. Your acts appear personal and
individualized but conform beautifully, they are no threat. It would NEVER occur to a real
Hunger Games hero to show off for upper management, which is why no one else did it,
that would be a meaningless act, only we today would applaud this, which we did, loudly.
Badass. Not to go ancient history on you, but Achilles was the equivalent of a comic book
superhero to young boys for two thousand years, it would never have occurred to any of
them to applaud him for his trick shots. It wouldn't have made sense. It doesn't make
sense. It is madness.

There are some earnest attempts to apply Game Theory to the Hunger Games, what is the
optimal solution? But unfortunately the people who do this are bad at math. Let me try to
explain. If 2 tributes are to be randomly selected from a District of, say, 1000 people, then
the probability of you being killed is...... 100%. You can double check me if you want, but
the math is correct. And-- and this is the point-- the math becomes correct if and only if
you think it isn't.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2013

How Does The Shutdown Relate To Me?

!
is Obama there?
Everyone knows ads are propaganda, but what happens when you have an ad for
propaganda? While you sip your first Guinness and try to figure out why China's
government can only ever shut down once, you can ponder this ad:

The only reason you haven't spit nitrogen bubbles on your screen is I haven't shown you the
other half of this outstandingly accurate abomination. You should get yourself a towel and
another drink.

I.
Intelligent people like to tell each other that they aren't liberal or conservative but
independent; that Fox and MSNBC are biased and can't be trusted, that partisanship,
"special interests" and "lobbyists" have destroyed America; in essence, that they are not
ideologues but practical, reasonable people who just want the system to do what's right.
Then you ask them what exactly "right" is, and the yelling starts.

Intelligent people, like racists, are fluent in describing themselves in opposition to what they
are not, but ask them to define themselves by what they are, tell you what they do believe
in, and they're lost. They have opinions on issues, sure, but ask for an overarching ideology
and their face botoxes. Overarching ideology? Only people with manifestos have
ideologies, not having an ideology is the whole point of being independent, the only thing
they deal in is "facts" or "reality", and gun to head if they believe in anything it's "science."
Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. You know, whatever ideologues hate.

I phrase it this way not to insult a group, but to show you how very easy it is to brand
identify a group, because when a group becomes a demo it loses most of its freedom of
action and becomes baa baa black sheep. Do you want to see the consequence? Turn on
CNN.

II.

"The government shut down just shows that our government doesn't function correctly!"
That's one interpretation, the other is that when a car starts to smoke, you pull over and fix
it, you don't keep going till it explodes, though I recognize the explosion makes for better
TV. What you're seeing is the ordinary back room realigning of interests and powers, but
this time trying desperately to hide from a voyeuristic media that caters to a demographic,
i.e. you, that believes that never more than three at a time colorful but poorly understood
#issues will eventually get us to Mars. "We shouldn't go to Mars." You got your wish. Off
topic, speaking of Mars, here's an interesting thought: if things proceed as per y=mx+b,
then the entire human race of the future interstellar diaspora will all be Chinese. Huh.
What do you know, Star Trek was way off.

Americans, by which I mean a populace propagandized to the Left or Right or Middle,

cynically believe that "wanting to get re-elected" or arrogance or ideology is what's to
blame, as if 500+ career Machiavellians are too stupid to know what an underemployed
theater grad knows. "They should just do the right thing!" Who will let them? You?

The shut down was the inevitable consequence of a government not permitted to
compromise, smothered by the oppressive gaze of a kamikaze media that will kill itself and
your country just to get a headline today. I'm starting to wonder if the reason it is always
pretty white girls who get kidnapped is that the media is the one kidnapping them. And you
blamed Bear Stearns for being too focused on short term profits? CNN's time horizon is
your next micturition. The media demands partisanship, conflict, opposing sides, but
despite having 24 hours to fill will never, ever explain the interplay between complex issues,
preferring to feature them in segments while hyping them to a crisis. Imagine trying to
have sex always on camera, and always with a goat, and always with some know-it-all
screaming at you, "get hard now! NOW! 8 seconds left! NOW! What's wrong with you?!"
Jesus, can I take a minute and do this privately? "Transparency!"

If Senator X "makes a concession" the relevant media will proclaim him a loser and a
coward, they don't want representatives, they want cage fighters. There's no reward for
compromise and there's no safe place to attempt it, either. This is 100% your fault, "I can't
believe how stupid these people are!" It's great how you can't find employment but have
time to micromanage the U.S. Senate. #outrage

If you want to know what political career disaster looks like, have an infinitely leggy ex-
sorority girl in flesh toned Manolos sitting behind a glass table in perfect lighting announce
to 50% of America that you were beat by an old woman from California or an old man from
Ohio. "Ha ha, what a cuckold! Back to you, Kent." You blame Congress? They are the
ones who "don't get it"? When a representative democracy gets crippled by what amounts
to a 3x3 magic square, it's not that they can't figure out the solution, the solution is easy,
the answer is 15 and the five is a gimme, we just need someone to dare allow himself to be
filmed putting the 1 on the left or the right or the center so we can finish the other 13
numbers and go bomb Syria. "Wait, what? I don't understand." Yes, that's my point
exactly.

III.

I'm not saying the shutdown isn't a real problem, only that if the news came out only in
weekly format, this particular shutdown wouldn't have happened. Or, said differently, if
there was a government shut down at a time when the news came out only weekly, it would
mean we were getting a new flag.

All of what is now being subverted by the media has been detailed in The Process Of
Government, you should read it. But you won't, it has too many characters, and this is
accurate no matter how you define characters. Come on, at least read Chapter XX, it's
online. Jesus, here. "Umm, It's pretty boring." I know, I know, you want to know how the
news relates to you, and boy oh boy do I have the news network for you.

"But that book was written in 1908. Based on what I've seen on Downton Abbey, things
were a lot different then."

Well, yes, obviously, there had just been a massive leap forward in technology and
industrialization, a booming economy fueling a wealth gap, temporarily course corrected by
a financial panic "precipitated" by the failure of two overspeculating brokerage houses.
There were also, simultaneously, great advances in progressive causes like worker's rights
and food quality, all on the background of decreasing importance of religion among
educated whites in favor of science. Not physics or chemistry, but evolution. Tabloids were
incomprehensibly popular, partisan media the norm. A loosening of conventional morality
manifested as bored promiscuity, female bisexuality, and a flood of new porn the likes of
which never existed before.

"That does sound different. And awesome. What did their Millennial kids inherit, what did
they experience over their adult lives, say 1929-1945?"

I totally don't know, Boardwalk Empire only goes up to 1924 and Mad Menstarts 1960.

IV.

The problem with blaming the shutdown on Congressional partisans is that the partisans on
either side know exactly what they want. When there are specific things you want,
compromise is usually possible.
The public in the middle, however, don't understand politics, only emotions given to them by
TV, and so their beliefs are cobbled together in real time, improvised, as they get "more
information." One trending topic at a time, each vacuum sealed to prevent cross
contamination. They don't look at things historically, culturally, humanistically, or even
selfishly, there exists no system for interpreting "the facts." Compromise becomes
impossible, as a simple example, when a "moderate" "thinks" there should be more
restrictions on guns, they want gun owners to give up something they want very much-- in
exchange for nothing. "But it's the right thing to do!" And the yelling starts, in HD.

Worse, they proudly announce their lack of ideology by branding themselves as

Independents-- capital I, a thing, a demo. He willingly lessens his independence to become
part of a group.

The "independent" demo actually has all the textbook characteristics of a group most
susceptible to propaganda, more correctly "pre-propaganda", and by textbook I mean
literally Propaganda.

They consider themselves leaderless. They can have representatives, they can have
"evangelists" but they have to believe that their conclusions are all their own, through
individual reflection and objective consideration. Interestingly, and on purpose, they believe
their brains can handle such an analysis, any analysis. This isn't arrogance. They are told,
by universities and the media, that their mind is prepared to do this heavy lifting as long as
they are given just the right facts, filtered from the "noise." "Where can we get the right
facts, in a world of liars?" Good question, maybe the news?

Commonly, independents have a single personal issue, say gun rights or abortion, but no
personal experience with other issues, and lacking any subjective starting point, they
therefore believe that ONLY objectivity will give them the truth. The less life experience they
have the better; the less they've seen of the world, the fewer people they've argued with (in
person, where it is real and has real consequences like punches), the less frequently their
water balloon worldview is tested by people with pins, the more they will cling to the
premise that "facts" are what's important. In this way the one personal issue serves as a
reference point which the propaganda exploits: "hey, gun advocates, did you know you like
low corporate taxes?" I do? "Yes, because the people you hate are for raising them."
Consequently, raising corporate taxes is felt like an attack on the Second Amendment.
"Liberals! Taking away our rights!"

But sometimes the complexity of issues is just overwhelming, once in a while reality creeps
in, and issues are discovered to be massively complicated, and anyway he has no power to
do anything.

No doubt this sounds depressing, he's going to start drinking heavily, or become a cynic, or
go the Hemingway. So the media=propaganda fosters his regression towards a much
desired solution: total alienation. The media explains how things relate to him, and as long
as he understands what's going on, he feels empowered. He is given an ideology without
even knowing it. Now he doesn't actually have to do anything, indeed, it's way the hell
better if he does nothing. All that's required is support, and through his support not only
will "the right things" happen but he'll share in the credit.

You'll counter that there are right leaning and left leaning independents, isn't there a
difference? but this misses the point: propaganda doesn't try to get you to believe
something, but to do something, and in this case it is to do nothing-- it doesn't matter what
you choose to believe, as long as your outrage is done from inside your house.
This is the whole gimmick of media, not polar but triangular, right, left, middle, mobilizing
an army of assonauts to feel strongly enough about something that they don't do anything.

I already knew that "independent" was a group looking for representation, what I was
surprised by is how fast "independent" became a mainstream brand demo. Here is page 2,
and 3, of Time Magazine:

The first and most immediate observation is that Al Jazeera assumes its American target
demo is stupid, very stupid, because here we have what is most certainly a college graduate
who considers herself in need of unbiased, objective, independent news-- yet she is still
reading Time Magazine, as her main source of in depth news. Rana Foroohar balanced by
Fareed Zakaria, two wrongs can make a right, and "it's somewhere in the middle." She has
decided that the problem with her understanding of the world is that she just needs better
intel. Yes, she will say intel, it sounds more objective.

In order for the Time reader to have formed the quoted thought two other thoughts had to
have occurred already, which in itself is astonishing, here they are: 1. She's figured out that
all American news is biased, she's sick of the partisanship, after all, it doesn't brand identify
her. 2. She thinks that more objectivity is to be found at Al-Jazeera America.

Why would she think this? Because she's stupid? Actually, yes: the culture you know least
about has all the answers, which is also why the Guinness ad hypermale in pre-season
Special Olympics has chosen to tattoo gigantic Chinese characters on his arm to explain his
ennui to himself. "It's a chinese proverb, 'That what doesn't kill me make me stronger.'" I
hope to God a bus tries to make you stronger. Off topic, as a sociological metric, you can
track a chinese person's first level of alienation from his culture by his branding himself with
English-word tattoos; but you will know that all the chinese has been media powerwashed
out of him when the he starts getting Chinese character tattoos. "It's because I'm Chinese,"
he'd explain, to which you would not dare reply, "yeah, I kinda figured." To which he will
then not reply, "I mean, I know I'm genetically Chinese, but I don't really feel Chinese, but
this signals that I'm part of a symbolic China more authentic than the actual China of my
parents which I feel no real connection to, yet I know I'm supposed to feel the connection,
it's not like I can go around pretending I grew up on Waltzing Matilda." To which you will
not add, "It's not entirely your fault, you didn't live through a war like your parents and
grandparents did, and anyway modern China resembles the U.S. far more than it does
symbolic China. Technically, you're alienated from your parents alienation, but neither are
you connected to Americana either, the white girls/boys seem out of reach, there's a frivolity
you can't really empathize with, jobs other than Law, Medicine, Science are unreal, and you
feel like you're always looking at everything from an outside that itself has no firm location."
And he'll blink, confused, "truth be told, my only real association to chinese culture is my
parents screaming at me that I'm not as good as 'real' Chinese. What can be done?" I
don't have an answer for you, the good news is that when you finally find the answer that
works for you, your kids will be too old to care.

Al-Jazeera America is trying to call itself "objective", but right in the ad is the brand reveal:
she doesn't want objectivity, she wants subjectivity explained to her, she wants to know how
the news relates to her. She wants to know: how can I, an organ donor in Sector 3, be part
of the global community now that my husband is boring and my kids prefer their individual
LCD screens? The media wants her to have an answer, after all, do you know how many
Nielsen ratings that family generates, how individualized is the data? It's not the quality of
the news at AJA she likes, but how watching it makes her feel smart, unique. She's not
going to watch Fox, MSNBC and AJA, right? Only one of those, but AJA brands her as out of
the mainstream, unique, open to other opinions. "I like to get my information from
different sources." I assume that includes twitter, 140 characters and an appeal to authority
and you're good to go at the Starbucks.

V.

To be clear, I'm not at all worried Al Jazeera is going to secretly convert this woman into a
jihadist or spread misinformation and disinformation. I have no doubt Al Jazeera will be as
objective as CNN, after all they took Soledad O'Brien from them to signal that very point.

So when I say AJA is (pre-)propaganda, I don't mean it won't be accurate, I mean that it's
purpose is to prepare its demo for a certain way of life. Of course everything I've said
applies to any American media-- except that Al Jazeera offers something else the American
networks don't or can't. If you want to know what Al Jazeera is really offering, take a look
at its aspirational target demo:
!
!
!

Not pictured is a white guy in a suit, because he already has media that's for him, and it's
probably Fox, and the above four people hate it. That's powerful branding in America: in
opposition to what you hate.

Women and minorities may not seem like an aspirational demo, but it is-- not for actual
women and minorities necessarily, but for people suffering from tremendous ennui who
want to be part of a struggle, something bigger than themselves.

They feel, without fully comprehending this to be true, that the only reason the American
media is so partisan and loud and angry and urgent is because nothing really important is
happening. Yes, there's a countdown clock on CNN for Debt Ceiling Armageddon and I
guess Kanye West is headed for the asylum but it's all boy who cried wolf blitzer at this
point. She heard, like you heard, that the NSA is monitoring us, and you know what? Meh.
Though it was interesting when it was on The Good Wife. This isn't to say things are going
well, it is to say they are degrading boringly. Like the above woman's marriage.

This is what Al Jazeera promises her, not objectivity, but a connection to history. Our big
crisis is... whether or we aren't going to pay our short term debts. You think either of the
four people above can get hyped about that? But over in the middle east history is
happening, racial equality, women's lib, the right to get an education, riots, ideological
clashes-- all that stuff is happening over there. Women are being stoned to death for
seeing a penis, gay men, too, if you assume that at some point in some future these things
will no longer be true, then you are saying that historical changes are afoot as the old ways
are replaced, and by ways I mean men. The #OWS demo wants to see powerful men
humbled before the t-shirted, tweeting masses, it allows them the fantasy that it could
some day happen here, which it won't because the propaganda worked.

Propaganda doesn't succeed because it is manipulative, it works because people WANT it,
NEED it, it gives their life a direction and meaning and guards against change.

Fans of AJA will probably attack me for being biased, but this accusation is silly. The whole
point here is that the target demo for AJA is not smart, and I know this because no one
smart would watch TV news. If you are watching TV news, then you're not smart, this isn't
me saying this, this is TV news predicting this: no one smart would ever ask another
person, let alone the news, to explain to them how the news relates to them. TV news
thinks you're as stupid as Time Magazine.

If anything, Al-Jazeera isn't the "Islamification" of the west, it is the westernization of the
middle east. Al Jazeera reports in English, they have western values, and, most
importantly, accept ads-- western style ads, i.e aspirational, not representational. The
neocons couldn't have planned this better, someone should check to see if they didn't. Two
months of Al Jazeera and this woman will turn to her then deceased husband in a moment
of big picture clarity and say, "you know, they're not so different from us, they want the
same things we want." Yes. Why do you think that is? Evolution?

The news for Americans, especially Independents, lacks meaning, direction, ideology-- and
they miss it, just like economically, they've been left behind. Now the news is artificial
drama, just local crime stories blown up nationally, a natural disaster, the occasional
Youtube video-- where's the Change, where are the upheavals, where are the riot police?
We don't have political riots here, we have high end sit ins near the Broadway Starbucks,
and occasionally 20 motorcycles will attack a minivan. "Is 'motorcycle' code?" That's where
we are right now, this is what the media has trained you for, detecting racism or hypocrisy
or some other character flaw in the speaker as a proxy for the complexities of the issues so
you don't have to think. It is under these conditions that you expect John Boehner to
"compromise" on something you don't at all understand, and scream for his beheading if he
doesn't, all to the thrill of the media. "See! TLP is a right wing zealot!" See, you're stupid.
And boy oh boy do I have the news network for you.

SEPTEMBER 25, 2013

Real Men Want To Drink Guinness, But Don't Expect Them To Pay For It
! the reason the bubbles go down is because
of the drag created by the bubbles rising up the center.
yeah, like a metaphor.

Click this ad. It's great, the internet told me so, it says it represents something good about
humanity. You're going to cry and feel good about the future and then consider ordering a
Guinness. That is, unless you already like Guinness and then you're going to have a totally
different reaction, like switching to Belhaven.

"The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character."

Yeah, we're sheep. Message received. That wasn't the message? Are you sure?

According to social critics around the internet this ad is "such a refreshing change", "great
to see sensitivity and strength combined", "promotes a new kind of masculinity." I'd like to
know what was wrong with the old masculinity? The one featured on Game Of Thrones?
Was it too masculine?

Before you applaud this ad for "breaking the mold of beer adverts" you would do well to
remember that all ads are aspirational, not representational, and for sure not inspirational,
i.e. the ad thinks this will work on the target demo because it describes an aspirational
image for the demo, i.e. i.e. the ad has made several important assumptions about the kind
of person who would like this ad-- not the product, the ad-- and you're not going to like
them. Still don't see it? Take yourself back to 1990. What would this ad have looked like?

In 1990, the ad would have shown the masculinity and heroism of the crippled guy: him, in
his chair, keeping up with the bipeds, both physically and mentally, taking shots and landing
zingers.

Wheels (laughing):

You still throwing bricks? What is this, a Masons' convention? I got an idea, let's just
gather up all these bricks and build a shelter for the homeless so your mom has a place to
live.

Group (laughing):

Oh no he didn't just bring up your momma!

Biped (laughing):

Can someone sub in for Mr. Motherfucking March Of Dimes? He needs to take off for two
hours to watch 60 Minutes.

Group (laughing):

Ooooohhhhhh! Snap! His momma looks like Morley Safer!

Wheels (laughing, fouling a tree ent):

Sorry, you either smoke or you get smoked. And you got SMOKED!

Biped (laughing):

Tree ent! Oh, that's funny on two levels!!

(Wheels shoots but is blocked by Biped)

Biped (laughing):

It's true, white men can't jump!

("good game", high fives all around.)

 Voice Over:

A real man doesn't see limits. He doesn't see disability. He takes on whatever life throws
his way, sets up, and shoots for 3. It's not about the best trick shot, it's about points on
the board. And the way he handles the rebounds will define him as a man. Life is a team
sport, and most people play to lose. For the winners, there's Guinness.

Then we'd pass the bong around and watch Simon & Simon reruns. I may not be
remembering everything accurately, it was a long time ago.

But this ad does the exact opposite: it shows a bunch of "men"-- signaled by the modern
exterrnal cues of tricep tattoos, wide gaits and carefully managed stubble-- playing down to
Davros's level, not as a one time offering, but as a regular weekly game.

That's very sensitive, but, just curious, do these guys who grab a shower in the locker room
have another weekly basketball game where they play standing up, or is this all it takes to
satisfy their interest in recreational athletics? Because I can't imagine anyone who actually
likes playing basketball to be able to do it only this way. Perhaps their Cosmo girlfriends
give them two evenings off a week for bro-ing?

Get ready for a super-sexist comment that is nevertheless 100% true, good thing my rum
makes me impervious to your idiotic criticisms: reducing yourself because you think it's a
show of solidarity is a straight up chick thing to do, see also Slut Walks and crying
excessively for the deceased. It was super-brave that Kellie Pickler shaved her head to
support her friend with breast cancer, but what the hell was the point? "Breast cancer
awareness!" Isn't that what the implants are for?
 ! getting the message out

The most generous interpretation of her "look at me" behavior would be, "I'm supporting
my friend, showing that people can be beautiful even without hair, especially if they have a
spectacular body and a national dance show, and a glam squad, and a wig, and are not on
chemo." Message received, oncology can bite me, I'm calling a stylist.

I can hear the grumbling, so I'll make a slight modification: only a woman would allow
another person to reduce themselves in a show of support. When Joseph Gordon-Levitt
improvised the head shaving scene in 50/50, Seth Rogen didn't then grab the hedge
clippers and say, "I'm not going to let my BFF feel bad about himself" because that would
be, you know, ___________________. "Is it gay?" "No, no, is it retarded?" You're both
right. Everyone's a winner!

I could use this ad as a commentary about the wussification of America, "the guilt of
privilege", the Land Of Sensitivity Training, etc, etc, but that would be wrong and anyway I
don't have that kind of time. I started writing a porn book, this book has become my own
personal nightmarish Hamlet, a scary real life example of what the "return of the repressed"
looks like, and FYI it looks horrifying. Remember the scene in Ju-On where whatever the
hell that ghost thing is materializes in the window, not to look at anyone specifically, but...
only to reveal that it is watching?

!
According to psychoanalysis, this is what turns me on.

II.

All of the psychologically necessary praise for this ad can be attributed to two things: 1) It's
for Guinness, which is already a kind of masculine product; 2) the woefully deluded
premise that ads try to sell you on a product. Oh my God, what year is this? Stop it, this is
WRONG.

Ads do not try to sell you a product, is Mad Men canceled yet? On that now unwatchable
soap opera Creative stays up all night eating chinese and trading tag lines, trying to capture
the essence of the product. Essence of the product-- for whom? In fairness, back then
there was only one TV and one wallet per household, so demos tended to be a little more
broad, by which I mean women. Fair enough, and not anymore. Now ads target a specific
demographic, and tailor an aspirational message/image for that demo on which is
piggybacked whatever product paid for the take out. THE PRODUCT IS IRRELEVANT. Write
it down on a sticky note next to A-B-C, it will help.

If the ad works you will consequently want the product no matter what it is, baaaaa, this is
what I mean when I say ads teach you not what to want but how to want. You could use
this exact same Guinness ad to sell something as unmasculine as guar gum flavored ice
cream and it would work just as well, and I know this because
While you wonder who copied what and why they bothered let me observe a key difference
between this Indian ad and the American: in the Indian ad, everyone is handicapped, and
the one biped joins in. His innate importance is signaled by his Iverson jersey, keep in mind
this is 2006. That's your metaphor for an aspirational, westernized, privileged but still
socially conscious young man in India surrounded by... the rest of India.

III.

My interest here is not the tricks the ad uses to get you to like Guinness, but what the fact
of the existence of such an ad says about American men today. It's bad. It's really, really
bad.

Let's go back to the assumptions the ad makes about its target demo. What is the target
demo? Think about this. Not who drinks Guinness already, this is not a "brand
reinforcement" ad. Who are the people the ad is trying to attract? The ad doesn't
comment on Guinness drinkers, it is making assumptions about people who like the ad.
Who is the ad trying to attract?

"Is it paraplegics?" That's a weird guess. "Is it basketball players?" I'm going to assume
that's code, no. "Is it 30 something guys who play basketball and then go to bars to meet
women?" No, that's Heineken's gimmick. Aspirational-- look at the ad: who is not those
men, but considers them masculine, sees something more masculine than themselves?

It's beta males. The best of men, except for actual men. What is a beta male? He is the
kind of man who anxiously looks for something to identify him as a man, while doing
nothing to become a man. For him, there's Guinness.

"Hold on. You're saying that Guinness assumes if I like this ad I'm like, a... loser?" Yes. Or
a girl. Tagline:

Dedication.

Loyalty.

Friendship.

I'm sorry, is this an ad for beer or golden retrievers? Why not "good nutrition" or "isn't
always yapping about her frenemies"? Just because the guy saying them sounds like a man
doesn't mean these words are branding for men. Usually "male" values are the things you
have to teach or encourage people to do, like bravery, or sacrifice, or stoicism, where the
default, the easier thing, is to not do those things. Dedication and friendship don't code for
men, they are too basic for men, they code simply for person, although women get
associated with them because... not much more is expected of women. For whatever
reason society has made the observation that women seem to be worse at friendship then
men, and that reason is called TV, way to set the bar really really low, Shonda. "You're...
my... person." Ugh, Jesus, someone Silkwood me. It's not that these values are inferior,
it's that you can't imagine someone else needs to praise them-- or that any person alive or
dead would feel good about themselves for having them-- or would seek to be described
this way. "I'm a good friend." Of course you are, there's no sacrifice involved, plus it gives
you someone to talk at. This Guinness ad is for the demographic that aspires to positive
experiences and pretend challenges buried in rhetorical cover so to avoid the guilt about its
meaninglessness. "The cedar roasted asparagus has good chew. I don't know how to enjoy
it, so I'll Instagram it."

Wheelchair b-ball is nice but it has nothing to do with being a man or masculinity, or
females and femininity, or anything, and the point here is that the public's desire to link it to
masculinity is a sign of three very bad things: a) a pervasive sense of insecurity and
inadequacy in many men which has a precise psychoanalytic characterization that I will not
elaborate on here and which the ad reassures you is soooo not true, you loyal friend, you--
you're a real man; b) another example of the media teaching people how to want, how to
think, in this case about themselves; c) the general public's exhaustion with masculine men
who don't deliver on their masculinity, i.e. and e.g. getting the check.

"I think your interpretation of the ad is wrong." Maybe this is the Dexedrine talking, but I
think you liked the ad. Do a system check: did you like the ad? "Well, I kinda liked the
song." Yeah. That's why it was also in Grey's Anatomy.

IV.

You may have heard that it's hard to be a modern woman because of "the impossible
expectations media sets", but you should try it from the penis side. Not measuring up in
America generates a distinct response in men, let's see if I can elicit it in you. No? Wanna
bet?

Here's an ad that is female analogue of the Guinness ad, i.e. it played on the same show
and time. Let's run the experiment.

Storyboard: Raining. Pretty brunette in Iris & Ink trench and skirt sufficiently above the
knee comes out of a Lean In and, oopsy, she has no umbrella. Oh my God, that's so
hysterical. So she runs to a passing salaryman and huddles underneath his. He's
surprised, obviously, the last half-Asian to come up on a white guy in the rain was The Ring
and we all know how that ended. (Code for "Asian" by walking by a Chinese restaurant.)
She gazes into his eyes. "We're headed the same way, right?" she NLPs. "Yeah!" he
responds, but five steps later you can see his pacemaker go off as she blue balls him for
another umbrella that crosses their path, this time a basketball player's. (Everybody still
with me? Let's keep going.) A few steps later, she froggers off towards the next passing
guy, and when she settles in their eye contact lingers for longer than this married guy has
had in a decade. "After you," she says in some kind of way that means some kind of thing.
Three more steps, and she dumps him and his thrifty tote bag for a luxury SUV. She closes
the door, a sigh of relief. She made it.

So? How do you feel? Here's the tag line: "it's all in how you get there." Well, how did she
get there?

Here's one interpretation: she's a cunt, by which I mean a woman. The commercial
represents a reality about women, hopping from guy to guy, taking, taking, taking. And
that sigh at the end was what she really thinks of men. =choads.
You'll observe that this harpy never said thank you, she never even said excuse me. She
just assumed it was ok, she was entitled, the world belongs to women, and when she got as
far as his five and a half inches could take her, she was off to the next guy, black guys and
homewrecking. Even better, she is proud of how she pulled it off, because getting to her car
isn't the only goal, learning how to manipulate emasculated men is just as important, note
she never used a woman. The tag line reminds women that they shouldn't feel to guilty
about it, men are dispensable. As an aside, buy a Cadillac.

That's one interpretation, but the striking thing about the ad is how she explicitly did not
slut her way from man to man. All she did was ask to use their umbrella-- and got it. That's
the Female Power. What's enraging isn't that women are sluts, but that they are not sluts--
that they are able to manipulate men, get what they want, without paying for it. That
message to female viewers is what gets men angry.

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes the message is for women only, as if
women are the ones who buy themselves Cadillacs, and as if men would not be exposed to
this commercial except by a wife who drags her husband over to it, "oooh, look at this great
ad! I want a car!" But this ad was on at 4pm on ESPN, same time as the Guinness ad, for
the specific male demographic that... is home watching ESPN at 4pm, e.g. guys home at 2.
What's the aspirational message to those men? She's exactly the kind of woman they wish
was in love with them. "I want the kind of woman with max female power, that can get
anything she wants, and that everyone wants, but no one can get-- and she picked me."
See also female superheroes.

Ok, but why does she need to manipulate men? What does the ad assume that women
assume about men?

There's a gigantic error in the ad, yet to most people the ad is totally believable, like this is
a hidden camera vid, this error is invisible to them; and if this error was corrected this ad
would have never been possible. Do you see it? Why didn't one of these "men" just walk
her to her car? Three guys, not one thought of this? She's under your umbrella and your
natural instinct was not to protect, to help? So wrapped up in what it all means and power
imbalances that you couldn't just... behave? Ok, forget about chivalry-- out of sheer
selfishness, a hail mary longshot? Sure, no expectations, but what the hell, let's see where
it goes, maybe she'll ask you out for a Guinness? Were you so insulted by her "entitlement"
that you couldn't just try? Or so flustered because a woman that you have stripped of her
ordinary humanity and forced her to be a symbol of value chose to be near you, your brain
couldn't figure out what to do next? In which case her decision to leave you for another
umbrella was astutely correct, odd how she and the commercial knew that. All men are
good for is an umbrella because she cannot rely on men to act like... men.

The point is not simply that those men should have walked her to her car, the point is that
the ad knew with 100% certainty that it would not occur to any man watching to do this;
that it would not occur to any woman watching that it's weird no man thought to do this.
Meanwhile, what did occur to men was that she's a jerk.

Look at it from your daughter's perspective: should she date the guy who walks her to her
car, or the guy who doesn't walk her to her car? "You can't judge based on that!" What
else can I judge on? Didn't you judge her based on her wanting to stay dry?

"Hold on. You're saying that Cadillac assumes if I hate this ad I'm like, a... loser?" Etc, and
so forth. Love and hate are opposites for lovers, not ads, for ads the goal is to stimulate
want through any emotion convenient.
Tagline: Ladies, it's all in how you get there, because you're on your own.

This is what the ad is telling women, and you, its foundational assumption: the public's
exhaustion with men who don't deliver on their masculinity, their general loss of ambition,
drive, respectfulness... and purpose; coupled with men's haunting suspicion that their true
worth-- "in other people's minds"-- is signaled by women's opinions of them, after all,
money, jobs-- all that is fake. Hence the need for something to redefine masculinity, to
make it real.

"Well, feminism has emasculated men." Really? A girl did that to you?

V.

The Guinness ad proposes that what makes men men is that they don't act like
stereotypical men, if and only if they look like stereotypical men, otherwise they're not men.
That sentence is 100% correct, but it could only have been written by a madman. Reshoot
that commercial using the cast of The Big Bang Theory and the entire aspirational message
is obliterated. The mere fact that they took stereotypical-looking men to use as contrasts to
"stereotypical men" means they themselves assume that "stereotypical men" are indeed the
real men, everyone else is waiting to be labeled, by some other omnipotent entity, that they
are close. And if this is confusing, just change "men" to "women."

It's confusing because the Guinness ad is a mess of signals and symbols that you usually
only see purposely mixed together for parody, like a Hooters waitress who also turns out to
be really smart.

Ok, she's only smart at mixology and football, but to a guy watching ESPN at 4 in the
afternoon, not coincidentally the same place/time the Guinness ad and Rainy Run were
running, this signals as genius. The question is, why would the demo watching this want
her to be smart ALSO? Look at her, what more do you want? Which is the same question
as, why would the demo watching this want the Guinness guys to be "a new kind of
masculinity"? What is the precise origin of the want?

Look at the guy in the chair, gentlemen of 4pm football, that guy is aspirational you. I'm
told Vitamin E is some kind of battalion leader, but the only reason she is talking to him is
because she is smart, i.e. the fantasy for the viewer is that to talk to a girl like her he
doesn't have to be interesting, engaging, witty or cool, let alone young or attractive; she's
"smart" and likes "smart guys" so she's happy to stick around and talk to "smart" guys
about the things that interest them. Again, "smart" here carries the loosest possible
definition so it can apply to 4pm Disney affiliates, but the point is no different than if she
was solving for x. You don't have to woo her on her terms (whatever they may be), she's
ready to meet you on yours.
At this point you will no doubt think that the fantasy here is to be able to score a Hooters
waitress or a 36-24-30 but this is neither true for you nor for the ad. The point for the ad
isn't her as physically attractive but her as a type-- a Hooters Waitress-- if she was thirty
pounds heavier but still had the same attention to her appearance (makeup, etc), and
adopted the style and mannerisms of hot girls then she would still cause that kind of
approach anxiety, she would still be such a symbol, I'm pretty sure this is the entire
gimmick of the Kardashians. I know this is going to sound like madness, but 8/10 that
approach anxiety is defensive, you think you want something you really do not want, that
person is not for you, I don't mean not good for you, I mean you do not really want this;
but anyway the point here is that the ad mixes up the symbols as humor, to fool you into
thinking that what's humorous is that this type could play against type; but the horrifying,
Ju-On reality is that the symbol ceases to be a symbol for you the moment she violates her
own symbolism-- the moment you get to know her-- and then the want DISAPPEARS. Just
like fear. If that ghost in the window so much as coughs like reality you will scale the wall
and beat it the fuck out.

And I know all this is true because the ads told me so, in order. You're going to be
infuriated at this blonde Hooters Waitress for only being attracted to chiseled abs and a
commanding phallus, but even if she miraculously chose to come under your umbrella,
you'd see suddenly she was only a brunette, huh, and you still wouldn't do anything about
it. And off she goes, a missed opportunity. And before that ignites your amygdala into a
blinding self-hatred, you will remember that it's all the cunt's fault, and besides, never mind
all these girls, the fact that you're a good friend to your less fortunate friend is what makes
you a man; but since you are not actually a good friend, indeed, you don't even have any
friends, well, this ad will signal to yourself that you are. Message received.

As an aside, drink Guinness.

JULY 6, 2013
Still Alive
WHERE DID YOU GO?

I flatter myself by thinking you are asking this question. I am writing a book of and about
porn.

IS IT ANY GOOD?

Not sure. I am trying my best. It's a lot of work, complicated by relentless self-doubt. The
good news is I am drinking more.

ALMOST DONE?
Yes, guy who asks all the right questions.

WILL YOU THEN RETURN TO THE BLOG?

Yes. The blog is very good practice.

IN THE MEANTIME, DO YOU RECOMMEND ANY OF YOUR OLD POSTS?

No. Read at your own risk/tolerance, I distance myself from everything older than, say, the
last four or five posts. Everything else is thinking out loud, work in progress. I could go
back and try to revise the old posts, but there's no point. Life is change, have to keep
moving forward.

IF YOU HAD TO PICK ONE OR TWO...?

The Second Story of Echo and Narcissus and The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

WHY A BOOK?

I didn't want to put a porn story on the blog, I felt there should be a buffer. Wait-- are you
asking me why I didn't just shoot a sex tape? Huh.

SO YOU WROTE AN ACTUAL PORN STORY?

Yes.

HARDCORE PORN?

Yes.

IS IT HETERONORMATIVE?

Sigh.

The book is in two parts. The first part is a straight up porn short story. There's penis and
vagina and lots of cum/ming. I have deliberately not written the story "well", whatever that
means, I am imitating the flow and style of that kind of story. I didn't try to make it sensual
or unusual; while it is hard core pornography it is a fairly vanilla story-- boy vs. girl, no
vampires, no one dies-- obvious in its language and plot and etc. My goal wasn't to elevate
the genre but to photograph it. I did this so that you could assure yourself that there is
nothing meaningful there, no symbolism-- just explicit porn. And then to business.

DO YOU TRY TO EXPLAIN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MECHANISMS OF PORN?

No. It's not the deconstruction of a text, it is the interpretation of a dream. I make no
attempt to explain what porn means in general, only what it means to you.
HOW CAN YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO ME?

The important thing is to say whatever comes to mind.

MAY 8, 2013
The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam

! the only way

to win is not to play

"Dude, are you doing the Dove ad now? That was so April 15th...?" Yes, I realize I missed
the meme train, but it's better to be right than part of the debate, especially when there is
no debate, this is all a short con inside a 50+ year long con. Remember House Of Games?
"It's called a confidence game. Why, because you give me your confidence? No: because I
give you mine."

"What's with you and fin-de-Reagan David Mamet?" It's not my fault Dove cast Joe
Mantegna as the sketch artist, and anyway if you want to understand the world today, you
have to understand how the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists In The History Of The World
was educated. See also: 9 1/2 Weeks.

Here's how you run a short con, pay attention:

Everyone likes to know the secrets of the game, and this scene certainly satisfies. Joe
Mantagena shows a famous psychiatrist (played, tellingly, by David Mamet's future ex-wife)
how a short con is done, how it's improvised, and he makes it look so easy. Really easy,
except for the part where you have to connect with a perfect stranger and make them like
you. Did you find yourself wondering if you had the skills to pull it off? Better watch it
again, sucker.

Quick test for a con: what questions does it not occur to you to ask? While you were
memorizing the language and the pacing of the scam, you didn't ask yourself, why didn't
Mantegna take that guy's money at the end? Why did he let him off the hook? "He was
just doing it as an example." Oh, like when a guy says he'll put in just the tip, "I want to see
if it fits"? It's not like the psychiatrist doesn't know he's a thief-- that's why they were
there in the first place. So he purposely didn't steal the money to make the psychiatrist
feel at ease, feel closer to him. To earn her confidence by first giving her his. She's the
mark. The aborted short con is part of an unseen long con.

But the genius of the scene is that while you, the viewer, are criticizing the stilted dialogue
or the improbability of the success, "dude, that would never work in real life!" if you search
your sclerotic heart you will find that you yourself felt good that Mantegna didn't take that
guy's money, that he let him go. It endeared you to Joe, it made you feel more sympathetic
to him, like he's an ethical thief, like he's Lawful Neutral. In other words, he's given you his
confidence.... which means that the true mark is you.

Women are their own worst beauty critics.... At Dove, we are committed to creating a world where
beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety... That's why we decided to conduct a compelling social
experiment that proves to women something very important: You are more beautiful than you think.

"Oh my God," you might say, "I know it's just an ad, but it's such a positive message."

If some street hustler challenges you to a game of three card monte you don't need to
bother to play, just hand him the money, not because you're going to lose but because you
owe him for the insight: he selected you. Whatever he saw in you everyone sees in you,
from the dumb blonde at the bar to your elderly father you've dismissed as out of touch, the
only person who doesn't see it is you, which is why you fell for it. Even mirrors fail you.
Hence a sketch.

II.

The gimmick that propels the Dove ad is a comparison between subjectivity and objectivity,
though in this case objectivity is defined as however well Mantegna can use a charcoal
pencil. Why not just use a photograph?

Because when it comes to beauty, we all know photographs can be manipulated, especially
in ads, especially by Dove. So the ad frees you from your cynicism and goes with a new
standard of beauty, one that, like yoga or genetics, has been around for a long time AND
you know very little about it; it hasn't been over-critiqued, you haven't watched it fail over
and over, and thus seems pure, fantastical, true. The artist's sketch. How can anything
this lovingly and precisely created not be the real thing? And nothing makes a middle aged
neurotic happier than 45 minutes alone in a loft with a good looking man who requires no
sexual contact and just wants to listen to you talk about yourself, unless he's also sketching
you attentively in natural light. "Can I offer you a Pinot Grigio?" Slow down, Christian,
you're making me woozy. There is not enough quantitative easing in the universe to prop
up this fantasy, but at $3000000000000 you can't say America's not committed to the
attempt.

The mistake in interpreting this ad is in assuming the ad is selling based on the women and
their beauty. If that were true, it would be counterproductive: if they are naturally
beautiful, if the problem is actually a psychological one, then they certainly don't need any
beauty products. A beauty ad operates by creating a gap between you and an ideal: by
creating an anxiety that can only be mitigated by the product. But this ad reduces anxiety
and avoids cynicism. Therefore, it is not a beauty products ad. It is selling something else.
This is why there aren't any products in the ad.

Dove is telling you you don't need to do anything to be beautiful, but it knows full well
women must do something to themselves to feel good about themselves, and if they don't
need makeup then at least a moisturizing soap. All Dove needs to solidify this is to be
recognized as an authority on beauty-- real beauty, not fake, Photoshopped, eyeliner and
pushup bras beauty.

It is the sketch artist who is the most important character in the ad, the ad is selling him.
That's why he doesn't just draw the sketches, he sticks around to chaperone these women
to self-awareness. By the way he is depicted you understand that he knows beauty, inner
and outer; he is part father, part lover, expert in what makes a woman valuable. For you to
accept him, he can't be married; but since in real life he is, they only show you the right
hand-- the part of him that almost autonomously draws beauty. He is an authority on
appearance, he is the "other omnipotent entity" that decides whether "you are beautiful."

The ad lets the women become beautiful without selling them anything. It lets them win.
It lets them win. It endears them and you to Dove, it makes you feel more sympathetic to
Dove, like it's an ethical beauty products company, like it's Lawful Neutral. It gave these
women its confidence; it gave you, the viewer, its confidence.

And then-- spoiler alert-- it will screw you and take your money.

III.

That Dove wants you to think of it as the authority on beauty so it can sell you stuff makes
sense, there's nothing underhanded about it and hardly worth the exposition. The question
is, why do they think this will work? What do they know about us that makes them think
we want an authority on beauty-- especially in an age where we loudly proclaim that we
don't want an authority on beauty, we don't like authorities of any kind, we resist and resent
being told what's beautiful (or good or moral or worthwhile) and what's not?

You may feel your brain start trying to piece this together, but you should stop, there's a
twist: where did you see this ad? It wasn't during an episode of The Mentalist on the
assumption that you're a 55 year old woman whose husband is "working late." In fact... it's
not even playing anywhere. You didn't stumble on it, you were sent to it, it was sent to
you-- it was selected for you to see. How did they know? Because if you're watching it, it's
for you.

Here you have an ad that was released into the Matrix, it is not selling a product but its own
authority, and it is not targeting a physical demo, age/race/class, it is targeting something
else that operates not on demography but virality. Are you susceptible? So while you are
sure you most certainly don't want an authority on beauty, the system decided that you, in
fact, do very much want an authority on beauty. The question is, which of you is the rube?

"But I hated the ad!" Oh, I know, for all the middlebrow acceptable reasons you think you
came up with yourself. Not relevant. The con artists at Dove didn't select these women to
represent you because you are beautiful or ugly, any more than the street hustler selected
you for your nice smile. They were selected because they represent a psychological type
that transcends age/race/class, it is characterized by a kind of psychological laziness: on the
one hand, they don't want to have to conform to society's impossible standards, but on the
other hand they don't want the existential terror of NOT conforming to some kind of
standard. They want an objective bar to be changed to fit them-- they want "some other
omnipotent entity" to change it so that it remains both entirely valid yet still true for them,
so that others have to accept it, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about look at your
GPA: you know, and I know, that if college graded you based on the actual number of
correct answers you generated, no curve, then you would have gotten an R. Somehow that
R became an A. The question is, why bother? Why not either make grades rigorous and
valid so we know exactly what they mean, or else do away with them entirely? Because in
either case society and your head would implode from the existential vacuum. Instead,
everyone has to get As AND the As have to be "valid" so you feel good enough to pay next
year's tuition, unfortunately leaving employers with no other choice but to look for other
more reliable proxies of learning like race, gender, and physical appearance. Oh. Did you
assume employers would be more influenced by the fixed grades than their own personal
prejudices? "Wait a second, I graduated 4.0 from State, and the guy you hired had a 3.2
from State-- the only reason you didn't hire me is because I'm a woman!" Ok, this is going
to sound really, really weird: yeah. The part that's going to really have you scratching your
head is why did either of you need college when the job only requires a 9th grade
education?

Which is why those that yelled "Unilever owns Dove and Axe!" like it was an Alex Jones
tweet, those who felt tricked/used/violated that Unilever has a sexist side to it, those who
thought the ad was hypocritical or "anti-feminist" are still being duped, detecting hypocrisy
is 100% the play of the rube, go ahead and yell indignantly as you continue to be fleeced.
Figuring out the short con is part of the long con, see also House Of Games, for a non-
spoiler example if the street hustler is shifting the cards and you think you're able to follow
them, then you're still going to lose AND your pocket is being picked. "Can't bluff someone
who isn't paying attention," Mantegna told the shrink helpfully-- he's telling her the scam,
no, she didn't listen either. So let's go to the places where people pay attention, go to the
"intelligent" media outlets where all the suckers hang out, and observe the most common
criticism about this Dove ad: it has no black women in it. Never mind it does, that's a very
telling criticism: why would you want black women in it? It's not the Senate, it's an ad, no,
don't you hang up on me, why do you want blacks in the ad? Because it would represent
the diversity of beauty? Because without them, it sends black women the wrong message
about society's standards? Your answer is irrelevant, the important part is that whatever
your answer, it is founded on the assumption that ads have the authority to set standards.
Which is why, in your broken brain, the reflex is to complain about the contents of the ad,
not assert the insignificance of ads. The con worked. Of course it worked: they selected
you.
"Well, not authority-- power. You can't deny their power is massive, but of course I'm not a
stupid, I don't think it's legitimate." I'm sorry, no, you are stupid. You'll let it have power
over you in exchange for the right to brag that you know its not legitimate.

This is the same problem with people who want to ban Photoshopping in magazines or want
bigger women to be featured in ads. You all have the internet, right? It seems crazy to
worry about how beauty is portrayed on TV and ads when there are blonde billions (rated on
a scale of one to ten) getting double penetrated literally underneath your gmail window, but
that obsessive worry about what's on TV or what's in an ad is completely predicated on the
assumption that the ad, the media, has all the power to decide what's desirable. And
therefore, of course, it does. But the important point is not that you believe this to be true,
the point is that you want this to be true. You want it to be true that advertising sets the
standard of beauty because in the insane calculus of your psychology you have a better
chance of changing Dove than you have of changing yourself, turns out that's true as well.

Dove, et al sympathize with your powerlessness, so since you can't get anywhere near
those impossible standards, ads give you a chance of making some kind of progress: a little
moisturizing soap and a positive message and maybe you get closer to the aspirational
images of the women in the ad. "Those women are aspirational?" Of course: they're
happy, Dad told them they're good. It feels like improvement, it feels like change, and I
hope by now you understand it's only a defense against change.

The obvious retort is that ads are everywhere, you can't ignore them. But there are rats in
the ceiling of your favorite restaurant, and you ignore them no problem, you don't even look
up. That's the real Matrix you make for yourself continuously, in analog, not digital--
overestimate this, disavow that, a constant transduction of reality into a safe hue of green,
until by the time you get to bed you're physically exhausted but your brain can't downshift.
"I have insomnia." Time for a Xanax. Yes, it's Blue.

"Everybody gets something out of every transaction," said Joe, explaining why people want
to be conned. That's what ads do for you. They'll let you complain that they are telling you
what to want, as long as you let them tell you how to want.

"Shouldn't my parents have taught me how to want, instead of yelling at me about what to
want?" You'd think that, let's check in: have you shown this ad to your 14 year old
daughter yet? Oh, you sent it to her on Facebook, that was helpful. What did you tell her
about the ad? "Well, even though it's an ad and they're trying to sell you Dove soap,
there's a positive message in it." No other ways to deliver positive messages? "Well, the ad
is really well made, and it communicates the message more powerfully than I ever could."
But if the medium is the message, shouldn't you NOT show her this ad?

David Mamet has some excellent insights, but for practice what you preach wisdom you
have to defer to a Wachowski sister: stop letting the Matrix tell you who you are.

IV

Did the way the sketching sessions were conducted remind you of anything? The women
aren't in yoga casual, no one's wearing sneakers-- they got a little dressed up for the
appointment. Observe the way they talk about themselves, trying to find just the right
words because, you know, their inner experience is very complicated; and the unfinished,
hesitating haste with which they take their handbags and walk out at the end leaving the
artist behind. The loft is certainly an inviting, comfortable setting, warm and safe, but it
doesn't belong to them. They know they are merely visitors in a shared space. That setting
is exactly like therapy.

You may think this is merely my (a psychiatrist's/House Of Games viewer's) biased

perception of this, except that a) they're in San Francisco, where the main output is
crematorium roast coffee and cash-only psychiatry, and b):

My father was emotionally very distant-- and so was my mom. And I didn't get the emotional comfort I
needed...

It's been really clear to me over my life that I've made really bad choices, and that's a reflection of my
self esteem. I chose the wrong jobs, the wrong husbands...

I use a toolbox of things I tell myself.... whenever I hear negative thoughts about myself, I remind myself
I have to use what's inside me, my authentic self, to feel good about how I am.

This isn't every woman I've ever been stuck next to on the A train who spotted me with a
psych journal or a flask, this monologue is in the ad. Let's find out why: anybody watching
this ad in therapy? Anybody watching this ad ever fantasize about what it would be like
being in therapy? What a coincidence.

This woman is roots deep in therapy, she thinks about herself in the language of "insight
oriented therapy," how has this strategy worked out for her?
!

Yikes, an Oscar Wilde novel. But the thing to notice here is not that this thinking has failed
but that this thinking has BOTH failed AND she thinks it has worked amazingly well for
everything else EXCEPT her perception of her physical appearance, her self-esteem; only in
that one single area does she "have more work to do on myself." If you ask her about her
capacity for empathy or her social/political beliefs or her "values"-- those aren't evolving,
those are evolved, they are unassailable. "I have a lot of love to give." How do you know?

I'm not picking on her, any woman who has to raise two kids on her own or with a husband
has my unconditional support, but truth hurts, that's how you know it's true. The confidence
with which she knows how her perception of self-esteem affects everything in life, "it
couldn't be more crucial" is not an insight, it is not wisdom gained from years of therapy:
she has been conned, it is society's long con so her pocket can be picked.

The ad's association to therapy here was probably not planned but it was inevitable, just as
Mantegna selecting a psychiatrist and not an engineer or a cook or a stripper as the mark in
House Of Games was inevitable. It is the only system of rules based on self-deception, it
encourages the illusion of "self" separate from behavior. And as long as psychiatry
uncritically elevates identity over behavior, it makes it-- not the patients, it-- an easy mark
for con men with their own agenda: SSI, the justice system, gun control, schools, whatever.
"It's called a confidence game. Why, because you give me your confidence? No: because I
give you mine." Take a minute, think it through.

Self esteem is sold to you as an inalienable right, not something to be earned; and if you
don't have self-esteem it's because fake society made you feel bad about yourself. But fake
society also made you feel good about yourself, it propped you up. The reason you got an A
and not an R and believed it is because you actually believe you are an A kind of guy, Math,
English, History, Science, PE, and Lunch notwithstanding. A, not R. But if everyone
deserves it, it has no value. Which is why getting it is unsatisfying.

Self-esteem is relative, advertising knows this, which is why it operates on comparisons

between you and the aspirational people in the ad that seem better because they own the
product. The Dove ad dispenses with the aspirational people and actually compares you to
you. But that's not you, it's aspirational you, "wouldn't it be great if people saw me in an
idealized, sketchy kind of way?" But even as it does this, it pretends self-esteem is innate.

One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only
want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and
work hard to reach it. You won't. That's not just okay, that's the point. It's ok if you
fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will
understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been
worth it.

You can't see it, but since this is America, the problem here is debt. Not credit card debt,
though I suspect that's substantial too, but self-esteem debt. They're borrowing against
their future accomplishments to feel good about themselves today, hoping they'll be able to
pay it back. Melinda's 26, at that age some self-esteem debt is reasonable as long as you
use it to hustle. But what happens if you overspend now and can't pay it back by the time
you're 40? Look above. Time for therapy or a moisturizing soap. There's not enough
quantitative easing in the universe to prop up this fantasy, but you can't say America's not
committed to the attempt.

[Link]

Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World

MARCH 22, 2013

Don't Hate Her Because She's Successful
!
the first thing you noticed is her great outfit
and the first thing I noticed is she's covering her wedding ring
this is why you are anxious and I am Alone

Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before. But the
blunt truth is that men still run the world...

It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled. A truly equal world would be one where
women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our homes. The laws of economics
and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our
performance would improve.

I.

Sheryl Sandberg is the future ex-COO of Facebook, and while that sounds like enough of a
resume to speak on women in the workplace, note that her advice on how to get ahead
appears in Time Magazine. Oh, you thought that Sandberg's book is news worthy in itself,
how could you not do a story on this magnificence? No, this is a setup, the Time Magazine
demo is never going to be COO of anything, as evidenced by the fact that they read Time
Magazine. Much more importantly, they are not raising daughters who are going to be COO
of anything. So why is this here?

The first level breakdown is that this is what Time readers want, they want a warm glow and
to be reassured that the reason they're stuck living in Central Time is sexism. This demo
likes to see a smart, pretty woman succeed in a man's world, as long as "pretty" isn't too
pretty but "wearing a great outfit" and that man's world isn't overly manly, like IBM or
General Dynamics, yawn, but an aspirational, Aeron chair "creative" place that doesn't
involve calculus or yelling, somewhere they suspect they could have worked had it not been
for sexism and biological clocks. We all know Pinterest is for idiots. Hence Facebook.

II.

If you are still suspicious that Sandberg's appearance in Time has nothing to do with her
book or with women becoming COOs but is about something else, look through the
newsstand for the other magazine in which Sandberg is prominently featured: Cosmo.

! the first thing you noticed is her

great outfit
and the first thing I noticed is she's showing her wedding ring

This is the mag she felt compelled to guest edit, an issue that also has "The Money, The
Man, The Baby: Get What You Want," by future Labor Secretary Kim Kardashian. No one
reads Cosmo to become a COO, no one who reads Cosmo could become a COO, because--
and I'm just guessing-- they think the the secret formula for success is Dream Job + The
Right Partner + Great Wardrobe = Yes I Can! Well, you can't, not with those priorities.
Each of those may be desirable, but when placed together as an equation it is revealed to
be nothing but outward branding, and the consequence is that even if you get all three you
will still be unsatisfied.

For the past two weeks Sandberg was anywhere nothing useful is happening, and I'm going
to include Facebook in that. Some cry-baby over at Jezebel was thrilled that Sandberg was
featured all week on Access Hollywood, holy Christ, she thought this was a good thing.
"Feminism is back in the mainstream in a big way," she wrote, I assume in between
quaaludes, "the women's movement is actually moving." How can you work in media and
not understand media? The fact that feminism is in the mainstream means that it doesn't
exist, it is no longer real, in the same way that when you hear "gun control debate" it's a lie
and "fiscal cliff" is an easy to market, safe distraction from the structural problems that can
never be named, here's one: for any heterogeneous population, the expansion of a "welfare
class" is logically inseparable from the entrenchment of an aristocracy, can't have one
without the other once you get bigger than 20M, ask Bismarck. "Does he write for Time?"
No. But keep this in mind every time you hear how great it is Bill Gates is curing malaria
after leaving us all with Windows.

You might ask, well, how do we get women who read Cosmo and Jezebel to aspire to
something greater? Your question is illogical. It's not because Cosmo and Jezebel attract
dumb women, no, not exactly, it's that they teach their readers to want certain things over
other things. They teach them how to want. What resists them? Nothing. Then who can
unbrainwash them? No one. The person that should have was their mother, and they read
Time.

III.

But other than getting them to buy magazines, why bother with making women feel good
about themselves? Are they going to riot because men won't let them be COOs? Placating
the TV demographic whose only act of political violence was to Like the Kony video hardly
seems urgently necessary.

It's not to make them feel good, and it certainly isn't to inspire them to become COOs. It is
what we drunks call "unconscious" and Sandberg herself is not aware of it. Don't equate
what Sandberg wants with what the system wants to use her for. If they did not overlap,
you would never know the name Sheryl Sandberg; or, said the other, more scary way, the
only reason you know the name of Sheryl Sandberg is because it represents a defense
against change. Off topic, not really, a short joke by comic Greg Giraldo: "It's so great that
Americans will still vote for a white guy even if he's a little black." Defense against change.

One of Sandberg's three Time-approved points is that women "leave before they leave,"
which means that instead of planning early to advance in their career, they plan early to
leave their career. Here's a very revealing excerpt, read it closely:

But women rarely make one big decision to leave the workforce. Instead, they make a lot of small
decisions along the way. A law associate might decide not to shoot for partner because someday she
hopes to have a family. A sales rep might take a smaller territory or not apply for a management role...

"So true!" Slow down. The trick is most employable women are at best at the "sales rep"
level, not the lawyer level, but because of the juxtaposition you never think: why the hell
would a sales rep want to be a manager? "Oh, because it's a lot more work." Is it a lot
more money? "Well, no, it's a little more money." So you want me to work a lot more now
for the possibility of eventually getting a job that pays only a little more money? "Yes,
stupid, it's called a promotion." It sounds like a scam. "No, it's a stepping stone to Nominal
Vice President In Charge of Situations And Scenarios." Does that pay more? "What are
you, a communist? 401k matches 50% of the first 6%." In other words 3%, ok, am I on a
prank show? "Free GPS tracker in your phone and laptop." Thank you Yaz, my forties are
going to be great.

Sandberg's book is heralded as "the next great feminist manifesto", by this logic the first
one was TV Guide. Just because there's a woman near it, doesn't mean it's about women.
The feminism debate, labeled equivalently as "gender discrimination" or "women sabotage
themselves", is not about women, it is about LABOR COSTS, making working for something
other than money admirable. If some women rise to COO that's unintended consequences,
what the system really wants is people, especially the still not maxed out women, to want to
work harder for it, to be a producer/consumer for it, by making noble and desirable the long
hours, "a seat at the table"-- the kind of things that give away the majority of your high
heeled, productive life in exchange for the trappings of power. This is one reason why while
people think it's cool if Zuckerberg wears a hoodie, women's work attire is tightly controlled
by women-- being able to dress up for work is signaled to you as part of the appeal of work,
a perk, which is why every picture of Sandberg is in a "great outfit." It doesn't matter that
Sandberg does or doesn't dress this way ordinarily, it only matters how her image can be
repackaged to convey the correct message to you. Whatever Sandberg wants to say,
whatever she thinks she means, is totally irrelevant to this process. The ability to run
Facebook is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

If you doubt this, observe that of all the advice Sandberg via Time gives to women, the
single piece (in)conspicuously absent from the Time article is the most important: ask for
more money. Duh. Ask for less hours. Ask for something real, that can affect your life,
instead of the cosmetic, "trappings of power" gimmicks like titles or prestige-- the very
things that would appeal most to a narcissistic culture obsessed with broadcasting identity,
requiring not just external but visible to others validations of their worth. NB: it's not that
Sandberg herself didn't say ask for more money-- she did, e.g. in her book and in the
British "Americans are money hungry pigs" Guardian. But that advice cannot appear in
Time. What the Time article made a big deal about was that she fought for pregnancy
parking spots, that's the progress, you go girl, Sandberg is also fighting for the right to cry
at work, Jezebel was right, feminism is moving.

Employers take note, Americans, especially American women, can be easily convinced to
forgo money if it's not enough money to be flaunted or if something else can be.

The same should apply to men, the difference is working men have an Act I backstory: two
generations ago and back the whole game for men was the money, the lifestyle, the house/
wife/car-- getting rich. I'm no fan of unions but they played it straight: if you're going to
sacrifice your whole life and lower back for the benefit of a faceless corporation then you've
got to get paid. But young, aspirational women can be convinced that working longer, "a
seat at the table", "promotions" to management-- these are worthy goals: Sandberg said
so.

Just because my posts have lots of typos doesn't mean I'm lazy. I am not saying not to
work hard, I am not saying not to run out the clock, I'm saying it has to be meaningful, it
has to lead somewhere, it has to be for something, and if it doesn't then at least it has to
pay. Amazingly on purpose, in the cacophony of economic debates, it's no longer
acceptable to talk money. You can talk about unemployment vs. employment, class, titles,
debt, growth, seats at table-- but not money, unless they are actors or sports stars. If I
told you Katniss was making $10M or $90M you wouldn't know the difference, but try to get
$1/hr more from your manager and you find out what a dollar is worth. "I'd like to see you
take on more initiative," says your manager, "then maybe we can come up with some
solutions that are right for both of us." I'm sorry, is a guy with a Blackberry and a Fox News
app telling me I need to stay until 7 but I'm not worth $1/hr more?

None of this has anything to do with feminism, stop saying that word, it's meaningless. This
trick applies to men, too, let's go back to Zuckerberg and his hoodie: off of half a century of
"the clothes make the man" and "don't dress for the job you have, dress for the job you
want", the right to NOT have to get dressed up is sold to men as a perk, but look at the
alchemy: it is 100% certain that if you think it's wicked that your job has casual everydays,
then you are smart, get paid way less than you are worth and, most importantly, you will
never dare ask for more money. Eventually dressing down will be sold as aspirational for
women, but don't sweat it, wearing sneakers is a pro-feminist act, after all, they're made
almost exclusively by women.

IV.

"Ladies, conference room in ten minutes! We need to strategize!"

This is a picture of a "Lean In," which I assume is why they're all wearing low cut tops.
ZING. I can only imagine they are talking about the season finale of The Bachelor, because
no legitimate business can be happening with blue pens and MacBook Pros, one of which
isn't even open. Unless this is a PR meeting? HR? Erotica book club? I give up. Some
other observations: pretty women love beverages and smiling.
My personal vote for Lean In valedictorian is the woman at the bottom left, I don't know her
life or her medication history but she has the diagnostic sign of her cuff pulled up over her
wrist in what I call "the borderline sleeve," that girl will have endlessly whipsawing emotions
and a lot of enthusiastic ideas that will ultimately result in a something borrowed/something
blue. Hope her future ex enjoys drama, he's in for seven years of it.

You're going to try and counter that this is a staged publicity photo, but my rum makes me
fearless against your rebuttals. During my two months of radio silence I've been writing a
book of/on pornography, so I know it when I see it, and I see it. Main thing to observe
about this girl-girl feature: all the chicks are white.

Back up, wildman, the easy criticism to make is that there are no blacks in the picture,
which is why you made it. Everyone knows that the presence of blacks in such pics is
staged, yet we still notice it, still want it. Why? Even though we roll our eyes if a black
woman is artificially included in the pic, why are we still satisfied by her presence, or
uncomfortable her absence? Because we have no power to change the underlying reality.
"Better than nothing."

This is a porno of a white woman's workplace, no room for blacks in this fantasy, they don't
watch The Bachelor. Don't confuse aspirational with desirable, Halle Berry is ass-slappingly
hot, no one wants to be her. "If I worked at a female-friendly place like Facebook," says
anyone masturbating to this picture, "I'd totally have time to get my nails done."

No, the insightful criticism isn't that they didn't artificially include a black woman, it is that
they artificially excluded Asian women-- that this photo could only be made by actively
denying a reality: among women, Asian women are proportionally overrepresented in
successful positions, especially tech jobs, especially Silicon Valley, and yes, Apple Maps,
India is in Asia. Putting this shot together is like staging an NBA publicity photo without any
neck tattoos or handguns. "What?" When I was in my 3rd year of medical school and we
all had to select our tax bracket, the Asian women went into surgery, ophthalmology, or the
last two years of a PhD program, you know where the borderline sleeves went? Pediatrics,
which I think is technically sublimation but I'm no psychiatrist. The logic was
straightforward: they wanted kids, and, unlike surgery, pediatrics offered future doctor-
moms a bit of flexibility, while the Asian women apparently didn't worry about working late
because their kids would be at violin till 9:30.

This porno, for the Time et al demographic, cannot allow this bit of reality to be shown,
because the moment you see Padmakshi or "Megan" at the table it is too real, it
undermines the entire sexism thesis and suggests that something else may be going on, it's
like watching an awesome gangbang and suddenly noticing all the empty Oxycontin bottles
and that they're speaking Serbian. "That just makes it hotter!" I just logged your ip
address. This doesn't mean Asian women don't experience sexual discrimination, it means
that when an Asian woman succeeds, the other women in the office don't get to experience
sexual discrimination, so they're left only with sexual harassment. Read it a couple of
times, it'll make sense and you won't like it.

V.

Still not sold on the thesis that the system wants you to be a battery? Then you're going to
have a lot of trouble with this next part...... for the rest of your short life.
The most important-- her words-- advice Sandberg has to offer women is... to choose your
husband carefully. Think about this for a minute. I've fallen in love with some
catastrophes in my life, I've drank a lot of rum, and I'm sure a lot of/all people say the
same about me, but how on earth could I choose whom I fell in love with? The heart wants
what it wants, even when what it wants is on Prozac. How could I select my love based on
my career concerns, or is the logic that my soulless zombie skull would love anyone who
agreed to do half the chores? The only person who can pull that off is a psychopath, and
sure, you may indeed succeed in life, but at what cost? What are you good for? But the
Time Magazine force vector doesn't care about your human happiness, it most certainly
doesn't care about your caring about your partner's happiness, it cares about your role as
producer, and by producer I mean consumer. Eat up, it will have corn in it.

Perhaps the logic is that I shouldn't marry anyone except one who is compatible with my
goals, good advice-- except why, a priori, is one's middle management career at General
Motors more important than one's marriage?

"Half of all marriages end in divorce." Yes, stupid, everyone says that, half of all marriages
under 25 end in divorce, but wait till thirty and the deck is way more favorable, you have to
learn how to count cards. But this isn't some kind of failing of marriage itself, some
structural defect in a system that's been running for thousands of years, the problem isn't
marriage, the problem is you. You think the string of butcheries in your past are the fault of
monogamy? As they say everywhere, the single commonality in all of your failed
relationships is you. Time to get a cat.

"No, she just means when you get married, to pick someone who supports your goals." In
other words, a business relationship? Arranged marriage, only this time by [Link]'s
algorithm? "No, a marriage based not on passion but on mutual respect and shared
values--" Stop, listen to what you are saying. Why would you want a man who agreed to
this? Why would a man want a woman who thought like this?

Keep in mind, her message is not for future COOs, her message is for the rest of you organ
donors who need to be transitioned from 9 to 5 to 8 to 6, e.g. the Cosmo demo. The Time
Magazine demo already gave up on love, after a decade and a half of a narcissistic marriage
they only need to be convinced to work Saturdays or spend more. Either will do.

The single greatest obstacle to turning women into fully productive members of the
workforce, i.e. batteries, is not men obstructing them but their persistent belief in
metaphysics. If the thing that is keeping women out of the underpaid labor force is "family",
then family must go, and if what pulls them towards family is love then love has to be a
fantasy.

I know what you're thinking. You're worldly, you're cynical, your skeptical. You don't go for
all this love crap.... You've figured out that love was a construct pushed by the patriarchy
to keep women tied to the home, to deny them orgasms with multiple penises and vaginas;
to prevent them from getting jobs, money, power. Am I right? Ok, then let's play by your
rules, let's say you're right that love was used to keep women down-- then what does
today's suppression of love signify? Could it be that the abandonment of love doesn't also
serve the system's purpose? Or is only the former the trick, the latter a discovery made by
your genius + sophistication + expert reading of human emotions?

You think you've figured out that true love doesn't exist, that it's all been a kind of romantic
lie sold by TV and the media, that real life isn't like that; but what I am telling you is that
you didn't figure this out, you were TOLD this. Now, constantly, by every modern TV show,
by Lori Gottlieb and the zombies at The Atlantic, by your friends, by your parents-- the trick
was to get you to think you figured it out on your own. Grey's Anatomy is a terrible show
but at least season one had the decency to be about having careless sex along the road to
finding The One. You know where their passions lie now? Running a hospital. Yesterday's
episode featured eleven minutes of two young, superhot doctors orgasming over the new X-
ray machine and how great it is for both efficiency and patient care, it's almost as if the
Disney Corp is doing its part to convince America that hospitals aren't in it for the money,
they're warm and fuzzy places that are committed to helping patients with their fertility.

The system's ideal woman is the single mother, she's produced with her uterus and is willing
to go all in on production/consumption, she has no choice. I'm not saying she wants to be a
single mother, I'm saying that's what the system wants her to be. That's feminism. You can
get married too, as long as he'll make it so you get in at 8.

Unfortunately-- and this is exactly the trick of it all-- it sounds crazy to say, "wait for true
love!"-- it sounds regressive to say that pushing yourself at work might not be worth trading
your family, but that's the trick, the system has framed that question as binary, as if there
were no other possibilities, no middle ground. The system has made it so that you can only
choose one side, "aspire to be a COO!" or "don't be a COO-- you should be home with your
kids!" It is a classic double bind, and you can't ask: for the entirety of my life, these are the
only two choices?

Love is dying, the system is killing it. The only acceptable portrayal of fulfilled love is with
vampires and BDSM billionaires, not because those men are great but because there's no
worry you'll meet one, enjoy your little fantasy. Now back to work, whore, you need
fulfillment.

JANUARY 14, 2013

No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up
!

For some reason, one of the most emailed articles from the NYT was an article about
whether women should or should not wear make up. "New York Times? Sounds
progressive." Yes.

Seven people were asked their opinion in a column called "Room For Debate," liars, there
was no debate, all of them said "I guess so", their main contribution was the hedge: "it's a
woman's choice." So while pretending this was some kind of debate with contrasting
opinions, all of them had the same opinion, which should automatically signal to you it is the
wrong one.

When they say, "it's a woman's choice" what they mean is "it's not a man's choice, it is
thoroughly stupid to wear make up just for men, the only acceptable reason is if you do it
for yourself, if it makes you feel better about yourself."

Let me offer a contrary position, unpalatable but worth considering: the only appropriate
time to wear make up is to look attractive to men. Or women, depending on which genitals
you want to lick, hopefully it's both. "Ugh, women are not objects." Then why are you
painting them? I'm not saying you have to look good for men, I'm saying that if wearing
makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don't have a strong self, and
no, yelling won't change this. Everyone knows you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, now
you're saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

I am not doubting that in fact you do feel better about yourself, I am saying that that fact is
both pathological and totally on purpose. Since this cognitive trick does help you feel better
about yourself, by all means go ahead, but at what point will you stop pressuring other
women to go along with it? When will you stop "requiring" it, like when you say, "oh, she's
so pretty even without makeup" as if the default was makeup?
The fraud women now believe is that it is wrong to look good for men only, as an end in
itself; the progressive delusion is that looking good for men is synonymous with
submissiveness, so while you're allowed to look good tomen, it should always be secondary
to looking good for yourself. This is madness. You are enhancing your outward appearance,
which is great, but then you pretend it's for internal reasons?

How would you like to live in a world where men had to wear make up? "Oh, I love make
up on a guy, especially eyeliner." Of course you do, you're having a stroke. Ask it this way:
how would you like to be in a world where men said," oh, I feel so much better about myself
when I'm wearing makeup." You'd run for the nearest totalitarian regime.

The trick to the makeup debate is that it pretends to want to be free of male pressure, yet
the pressure to look a certain way is actually much worse from women. So this result is
that a "patriarchical", controlling force, unacceptable if coming directly from men, is
maintained by giving the whip to other women. No boss man would survive if he said, "ugh,
you should put on some makeup, doll yourself up a little bit" but women say this to other
women all the time-- especially at work. "You look really tired," says a woman in MAC
Greensmoke to another who isn't. Just once I wish the reply would be, "I am, your husband
kept me up all night." Not very progressive, but hilarious.

The evolution from "enhances sexual attractiveness" to "doing it for yourself" is definitely a
regressive step, and by regressive I here mean "regressing to age two", but it's the next
step which reveals the presence of a neurosis: recruiting science as a justification for
behavior: "Study finds makeup makes you appear more competent." Can't wait to read
about that study in a Jonah Lehrer book. Ugh. So here's the evolution of feminist theory,
take notes: "I want to look better" to "I want to feel better about myself" to "I want people
to think I am better." Madness.

The further clue that the problem is not gender but... you... is that you find this
pseudoscience while you are browsing the internet, i.e. it is your entertainment, your free
time; your leisure time is spent justifying a behavior you can't not do. "But I wasn't looking
for those articles, I just stumbled on them." Exactly.

The reason the makeup debate is insoluble is that it's not yours to solute. The choice to
wear makeup is no choice at all, I know you think you came to it on your own but you live in
America, you don't make free choices here, freedom is a brand. Makeup is an $8B/yr
industry, that's face makeup alone, no way is it going to allow you to make a choice that
doesn't involve a credit card, fine, if you don't like makeup here's a remover for $30, just
remember that you're not doing it for men, you're doing it for yourself.

II.

I had used all the porn on the internet, so I turn on the TV, and there's a marionette called
Diane Sawyer interviewing 20 female Senators, the most in history, applauding and giggling
as if cold fusion had finally been discovered. Of course it's a "good thing" that women are
Senators in as much as not allowing them to be Senators is the bad thing, but other than
that, what does it mean? That women are finally brave enough to run, or America is brave
enough to hire them? It's not like the Capitol Building was turning them away, so why is
this important? I knew I was being scammed because I was being told this was a historic
accomplishment by the ABC Network. The ABC demo is not ever going to be a Senator, I
would bet ten bazillion dollars they couldn't even name one of their Senators and a gazillion
bazillion dollars they have no real idea what Senators do, so why is this on prime time ABC?
I think the answer is supposed to be, "it's empowering to women", but you should wonder:
when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there,
where did they go? Why did they leave? I assume they aren't home with the kids, right?

I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment
in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be
pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless, and I'll risk the blowback and say
that those are all stereotypes of women. Easy, HuffPo, I know it's not causal, I am saying
the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women
enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the
question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go? Meanwhile all
the lobbyists and Wall Street bankers are men, isn't that odd? "Women aren't as corrupt or
money hungry." Yes, that's been my experience with women as well.

This works in reverse, too, take a field traditionally XX-only, like nursing, and, huh, what do
you know-- at the time where nursing is more powerful than it has ever been, there are also
more XY in it than ever. But who made it more powerful? It wasn't nurses. And if you're
playing that game, ask if the reason "sexy nurses" as a fetish dropped out somewhere
around the 90s had nothing to do with females finally getting control over their
sexualization but exactly the opposite, men came in and unsexualized the joint. "I'm not
gay." Easy, Focker, no one was implying anything.

I know to a woman it must feel good, "yay, I'm a Senator!" and I do not minimize the
individual accomplishment of a woman becoming a Senator. But for everyone else, what is
the significance? One of the Yay-Women senators suggested that the government would
benefit from all the makeup because "women's styles tend to be more collaborative," and at
the exact same moment she repeated the conventional wisdom's horrendous banality she
simultaneously got married to the head of a lobbying firm. That's progress, I guess.

The problem isn't with women in the Senate, but rather its celebration, which these
dummies blindly participate in. Is it putting on a face for the American public, the way the
first face I see on Goldman Sachs's website is a black woman? Is it cosmetic? She's
probably proud, she should be proud, that she made it to GS, but for the rest of blacks and
women, what is the significance? It may be regressive to ask this, but it is illuminating:
"hey.... why did they let so many of us in?"

This is part of a larger, systemic problem with the way power has shifted not from Group A
to Group B, but from ground up to top down, and top down works in a very specific way: it
concedes the trappings of power while it retains the actual power.

III.

In this case, you are seeing a shift of power be repackaged as a gender battle. And it's
quite apparent that power is a generation or so ahead of you, so in 1990 a 40 year old who
grew up around successful lawyers then says to his 5 year old, "daughter, you should
become a lawyer!" and she probably at one point collaborates to decry the lack of female
role models, and then by the time she graduates law school she discovers she's a dime a
dozen, power has been withdrawn, one step ahead; and at this rate I fully expect 2013's
Aspirational 14% to nudge their 5 year old daughters towards investment banking so they
can be part of the big Women In Investment Banking conference of 2033. Don't bother, it'll
be in Newark.

I can't predict the next field of power, I'm happy to hear your projections, the point for now
is that while power moves ahead of you and your family, it leaves behind the appearance of
a gender (or racial) struggle; and the immediate result of this is that people consider it a
societal achievement that they are merely playing, even if what they are doing is ultimately
meaningless. So while women (appropriately) fought for, and got, equal access to college
educations-- and now women even outnumber men in colleges-- today we find that college
is irrelevant. Huh. NB: what women did not fight for, and this is to my point, is the specific
power of being taken seriously without a college education. "But how will the world know
we're equal?"

The focus here, again, is why did/do women fight so much for what became irrelevant?
Why does this happen all the time? More specifically, did they pursue it because they
thought it had power, or did they pursue it because it had the trappings of power? I'm not
being a jerk, it is a deadly serious question. If some dentist fires his hygenist because she's
too pretty the United States Of America goes to Defcon 1, but if Goldman Sachs doesn't hire
enough women some idiot at The Atlantic writes a fluff piece. "They apparently have a
sexist culture there." You know they rule the world, right?

I know, I know, women get paid less then men. Sigh. There are a million reasons for this,
but the most important is the simplest: some people want to get more money from the job,
and some other people want the job to offer them more money, and they are not the same
people. Typically the former is men and the latter is women, but the point isn't gender but
the mindset: the latter group wants the job to want to pay them more, they don't want to
have to have any input in deciding their own reimbursement. I have this conversation with
women a lot, every time it goes exactly like this:

Her: They only offered me $X.

Me: Why didn't you ask for more?
Her: I don't know... I was just happy to get the job.

And I throw up my hands, nothing I say will convince this senator to try harder for herself.
I have this same conversation with men as well, less frequently but not never, though the
conversation is slightly different:

Him: They only offered me $X.

Me: Why didn't you ask for more?
Him: I don't know... I was just happy to get the job.
Me: What are you, a girl?

Works every time.

IV.

Everything you need to know about how the system sees you is expressed in its purest way
in ads. So, completely off topic, here's an ad, relax, this has nothing to do with guns:
!

I had never seen this ad, because the ad was not for me. The ad targets men who need a
gun to feel like a real man, the gun validates their masculinity-- or so the ordinary, pseudo-
feminist deconstruction would go. Except that's not what the ad says. It says, quite
clearly, that the highest validator of masculinity isn't the gun, it is the card.

You've been trained to look at these things in terms of gender, forget it, the pathology of the
generation is narcissism, the ad knows about, and works only on, a society eyeballs deep in
narcissism, that requires its identity broadcast by branded objects but validated by other
people. Because what this ad says, explicitly, is that owning the gun doesn't make you a
man; when you own the gun, some other omnipotent entity will declare you a man.
I'm not saying that gun owners need to show their guns off, I'm saying this ad assumes
that. There was a time where merely possessing the fetishized object was enough to self-
identify ("I'm awesome, I'm having sex with a blonde"; "just having my 9mm inside my
jacket makes me feel bad ass"), but this is no longer sufficient, it is no longer powerful
enough to penetrate your thick skull, you have to be able to show it to someone else, to
watch their eyes light up in recognition for you to know you have convinced them of who
you are.

Is it cosmetic? Note the logic has evolved from "you'll feel better about yourself" to "other
people will see you as more competent."

Forget about the gun/masculinity interaction, it is a red herring; the problem is the cycle of
wanting outsiders to tell you who you are, which is why empty celebrity works just as well
as accomplished celebrity, which is why you can't tell if Kanye West is downgrading to Kim
Kardashian or she is downgrading to him.

But right on cue, the most deluded of women, not just a feminist but a self-proclaimed
"feminist evangelist," showed up and completely missed the point, so she changed what
was a clear example of the generational pathology of narcissism, and repackaged it as a
gender issue:
!

"We?" As in, "we at Feministing?"

If you follow that the consumer unconsciously understands that his masculinity is approved
from the outside, by other people, then Valenti is the very person that the ad is arguing
against: "these bitches think you're not a man. We at Busmaster tell you differently. Who
are you going to believe?" Hell, I'lI believe a Sleestak before I listen to Jessica Valenti,
really, those are my only two choices? The ad had no effect on me; her tweet makes me
want to join a militia.

Note she doesn't really want to discuss it, she assumes it's self-explanatory, as if the very
fact that masculinity and guns are related is itself bad, as if the solution was to uncouple the
two. But what would happen next? The problem, as above, isn't the gun but the need for
external validation, which means if you take the gun away something else must replace it,
and it won't be what works for her, e.g. exposed brick and that great show Girls. "It's
great!" It's horrendous.

V.

To understand exactly why "feminism" or whatever Valenti thinks she has re-invented has
not only stalled, but is damaging to all humanity, all you need to do is go to the source.
Totally at random, I went to Huffington Post Women. Let's see what the feminists are up to,
here are the top five articles:

1. The Reason The Academy Passed On Kathryn Bigelow (answer: sexism.)

2. Confessions Of A Mistress (protip: "Here's the wisdom I can offer to mistresses out there:
do not get too attached.")

3. Why You Should Be Nervous-- And Yet Not-- About Sunday Night (since the Golden
Globes conflict with Girls, just DVR Girls, and anyway Lena Dunham will be at the Globes.)

4. 'Girls' Star Talks Nudity And Season 2 (I refused to even click it)

5. Meet The Woman Who's Only Eating From Starbucks

Look, it's easy to make fun of these articles, my point isn't that sometimes women read
nonsense. The point here is that they are branded as for women, this is what the
Huffington Post Women thinks of women, they suspect, apparently rightly, that women will
respond better to these articles if they are told they are "For Women."

Here's a quote from #5, the woman who is eating Starbucks for a year:

So how can eating only one company's products impact me, anybody? Well Mr. McDonald's already
proved that question years ago with his documentary and Mr. Subway did his take on the loosing
weight portion of the food challenges too. But when I watched those guys doing their thing I asked
myself "where are the WOMEN challenging themselves in the world?" "Where are the effects being
shown on a woman's culture? A woman's family & children? A woman's diet, weight, fashion,
checkbook, community and world through challenges?" "Where is HER VOICE on how an international
company is directly or indirectly impacting everything from her waistline to her bottom line and every
other woman's, man's, child's, societies and planets world with their presence?"

What's crazy about this crazy person is that she's crazy, if she did this in the name of her
own psychopathology we could happily ignore her, but she's doing this for women, she's
saying it's for women, when what you want to say is, "you know this makes people hate
women, right?" Mr. McDonalds didn't do it for men, or even as a man, he just did it, why do
you have to drag the rest of the women into your delusions?

But this is the kind of solidarity popularized by Lori Gottlieb and the rest-- and I am asking,
at what expense? Sites like Jezebel and Feministing are much, much worse than
pornography, every article they write sets women back a week, do the math, they do such a
disservice to women because they take their narcissism and repackage it as gender issues,
and you're locked into it. What if I don't think gun control is a gender issue? What if
watching Girls makes me want to make a snuff film? To use your impossible language,
"where is my safe space to challenge your privilege?"
My point isn't that women don't have legitimate gripes with the system, or that there isn't
sexism still around, my point is that most of what you think is "feminism" is really a work, a
gimmick, a marketing scheme. It is straight up consumerism, repackaged as a gender
issue. Case in point: season 1 and 2 of Girls.

And most importantly of all: if this is what women's solidarity is made of, how much support
can they really expect from each other? Is this solidarity power, or the trappings of power?
"Did you see Girls last night?" No, I'm sorry, I was being raped. "Oh, too bad. It was a
good one."

VI.

In Django Unchained, evil slaveowner Leonardo DiCaprio asks a question. Sorry, back up:
why does everyone call him an evil slaveowner? As far as I can tell, he was a pretty
average slaveowner, I'd even say he was "kind", in the sense that all his slaves "like" him,
and he rarely "tortures" anyone and by the use of quotes you can see I'm hedging, my point
here is how quickly people have to broadcast their indignancy. "He's evil." So what you're
saying is you're against slavery? Thanks for clarifying.

This explains the near-universal anxiety over the movie's frequent use of the word nigger,
and someone asked Tarantino if he thought he had used it too much in the movie, and his
response was perfect: "too much, in comparison to how much it was used back then?"
Nigger, and the violence, was all anyone was upset about. Terry Gross, NPR's mental
Fleshlight, asked Tarantino her typically insightful and nuanced questions: "do you enjoy
violent movies less after what happened at Sandy Hook?" Sigh. So there's the Terry Gross
checklist for reviewing Django: gun=bad and saying nigger=bad. Check and check. You
know what no one thought badworthy? When the white guy asked to have a certain slave
sent to his room to try out her ample vagina, and the prim white lady of the house happily
escorted her up. "Go on, do what you're told, girl."

I'd venture that Terry Gross and and the gang at HuffPoWo would rather be whipped than
be-- that's rape, right?-- but that scene didn't light up their amygdalas, only hearing
"nigger" did. I find that highly suspicious, or astoundingly obtuse, or both.

Anyway, perfectly ordinary slaveowner DiCaprio asks a rhetorical question, a fundamental

question, that has occurred to every 7th grade white boy and about 10% of 7th grade white
girls, and the profound question he asked was: "Why don't they just rise up?"

Kneel down, Quentin Tarantino is a genius. That question should properly come from the
mouth of the German dentist: this isn't his country, he doesn't really have an instinctive feel
for the system, so it's completely legitimate for a guy who doesn't know the score to ask
this question, which is why 7th grade boys ask it; they themselves haven't yet felt the
crushing weight of the system, so immediately you should ask, how early have girls been
crushed that they don't think to ask this? But Tarantino puts this question in the mouth of
the power, it is spoken by the very lips of that system; because of course the reason they
don't rise up is that he-- that system-- taught them not to. When the system tells you what
to do, you have no choice but to obey.

If "the system tells you what to do" doesn't seem very compelling, remember that the
movie you are watching is Django UNCHAINED. Why did Django rise up? He went from
whipped slave to stylish gunman in 15 minutes. How come Django was so quickly freed not
just from physical slavery, but from the 40 years of repeated psychological oppression that
still keeps every other slave in self-check? Did he swallow the Red Pill? How did he
suddenly acquire the emotional courage to kill white people?

"The dentist freed him." So? Lots of free blacks in the South, no uprisings. "He's 'one in
ten thousand'?" Everybody is 1 in 10000, check a chart. "He got a gun?" Doesn't help,
even today there are gun owners all over America who feel that they aren't free. No. You
should read this next sentence, get yourself a drink, and consider your own slavery: the
system told Django that he was allowed to. He was given a document that said he was a
bounty hunter, and as an agent of the system, he was allowed to kill white people. That his
new job happened to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident, the system
decided what he was worth and what he could do with his life. His powers were on loan, he
wasn't even a vassal, he was a tool.

This is not to minimize the individual accomplishment of a Django becoming a free man.
But for the other slaves, what is the significance?

Of course Tarantino knew that the evil slaveowner's question has a hidden, repressed dark
side: DiCaprio is a third generation slave owner, he doesn't own slaves because he hates
blacks, he owns them because that's the system; so powerful is that system that he spends
his free time not on coke or hookers but on researching scientific justifications for the
slavery-- trying to rationalize what he is doing. That is not the behavior of a man at peace
with himself, regardless of how much he thinks he likes white cake, it is the behavior of a
man in conflict, who suspects he is not free; who realizes, somehow, that the fact that his
job happens to coincide with the trappings of power is 100% an accident... do you see?
"Why don't they just rise up?" is revealed to be a symptom of the question that has been
repressed: "why do the whites own slaves? Why don't they just... stop?" And it never
occurs to 7th graders to ask this question because they are too young, yet every adult
thinks if he lived back then, he would have been the exception. 1 in 10000, I guess. And
here we see how repression always leaves behind a signal of what's been repressed-- how
else do you explain the modern need to add the qualifier "evil" to "slaveowner" if not for the
deeply buried suspicion that, in fact, you would have been a slaveowner back then? "But at
least I wouldn't be evil." Keep telling yourself that. And if some guy in a Tardis showed up
and asked, what's up with you and all the slaves, seems like a lot? You'd say what
everybody says, "look wildman, don't ask me, that's just the system. Can't change it.
Want to rape a black chick?"

IV.

Speaking of no one being upset about rape, here's a story, starts out bad and gets even
worse in ways you won't expect: a 16 year old girl is passed out drunk at a party, she is
then allegedly raped by a/two high school football players, and carried unconscious to other
parties and displayed and/or raped, and apparently because the town has a "football
culture" no arrests are made, it's hushed up, the boys are protected, and I think to myself,
oh, that's weird, is that town still in 1986? True story: in 1986, at a mixer at the Delta
Gamma sorority house, Lacoste Football Guy gets hard for 16 year old sister of Benetton
Girl, and in order to get her jeans off he hits her in the head with a lamp, so in order to
keep her jeans on she kicks him in the mouth, and through the blood and fury he's
screaming he'll sue her, do you know who my father is? NB: he went on to become a lawyer
and no I am not making that up.

"Ugh, even now, 25 years later, it's still a hypermasculine rape culture." Ha! No.
Hypermasculine? Where are you, the Dominican? No, what's amazing/obvious is how after
25 years of Diane Sawyer and makeup debates, not one other girl at this party came to the
victim's aid; not one girl saw what was happening at the party and simultaneously called
911 and Facetimed the crime; not one girl called all the women she knew and brought the
wrath of Athena down on that town. Nope. Nothing. A lot of laughing and giggling
though, turns out rape is funny, someone owes Daniel Tosh a huge apology. "Women's
styles tend to be more collaborative." I can tell, they collaborated to keep their mouth shut.
In 1986 the sorority girls also collaborated to blame the victim for for being so rough with
Lacoste Guy: "How could you do that to him? His face is like, totally corroded." Hey, come
on, look how he was dressed, he was asking for it.

"We need more women in power." Wrong preposition, dummy, but anyway you have them.
You have judges and prosecutors and twenty female senators, what has it gotten you? Your
own ground floor women don't protect each other, you know who had to come to this teen's
aid? Anonymous. Men.

Of course I don't know if the boys really did these things or not, ok? But if the reason the
boys were protected was the "football culture," that means people in the town were taught
to protect them. And if the girls did nothing, it means they were taught to do nothing, and
the people most responsible for that lesson was other women.

"No, the town was corrupt, they swept these kinds of things under the rug for years." If
you've known for years the town isn't going to help women, if you've known for years it's a
"hypermasculine rape culture," wouldn't that make women want to stick together more?

It's not like these teen girls were denied an education or had to endure sexual harrassment
at work or had to go to Sweden to get abortions, if there was ever a generation that should
feel most empowered it would be them, yet they-- not just one of them; all of them--
"knew", somehow, that they could/should do nothing. Which means that they were taught
that from somewhere, and the only place that it could have come was older women. "The
other lesson is: makeup is a choice." Today I learned nothing.

There's your female empowerment, there's you feminist progress, catastrophically

subverted from the top down, like it's in an abusive relationship, satisfied with the house
and the car and the 4/7 good days and simply doesn't want to rock the boat so it expends
frantic energy on what is ultimately nonsense. Every stupid parent teaches their girls not
to get raped, duh, but have any mothers spent any time indoctrinating their daughters what
to do if another woman is being raped? Have they made it a reflex to defend, to attack?
"Isn't that obvious?" Ask the town. "We need to support each other!" sure, as long as it's
from the safety of a computer monitor or a 5K, yay women. Have you explicitly told your
daughters that if a woman is passed out drunk and you see a Notre Dame Hat climbing over
her couch, it is your responsibility to grab an aerosol can and a lighter and threaten
Armageddon, or at the very least yell stop? "Well, that's kind of dangerous." Yeah,
that's kind of the point, but I grant you that it's safer to giggle and let boys be boys. Do
you want power, or the trappings of power? Somebody's going to have it, you can't make it
vanish. I wasn't at this particular rape, the town's defense amazingly appears to be she
was a slut and she was asking for it, and my point is: so what? Why didn't the other
women stop it anyway? Why didn't they just rise up?

[Link]
!

DECEMBER 14, 2012

Product Review: Panasonic PT AX200U (Hipsters On Food Stamps Part 3)

!
but how will you afford a steak?

Part 2 here

Three questions, open book:

1. Did Hipster Gerry get his money's worth from the University of Chicago, either $100k in
future income or knowledge? No.

2. Did society get their money's worth in sending him, i.e. by permitting/facilitating the
diversion of his intellect into whatever it was he majored in? No.

Neither of those questions have the force to change reality. This one does:

3. Did the University of Chicago get their money's worth out of him, was $100k worth the
dilution to their brand? No.

Universities are going to need to differentiate themselves as something more than a

processing plant for future consumers of Chinese textiles, local produce, and California
pornography. But that time is a long, long way off. What can universities do in the
meantime, to keep up their brand in the face of thousands of product recalls every year?

Time for the go team: The New York Times.

II.

The NYT has an article criticizing hipsters. How much would you pay for such an article?
(NB: you paid zero for mine.) That's a legit question, not "you get what you pay for." Ten
cents? A dollar? Remember that figure, we'll come back to it.
This is how the article begins:

If irony is the ethos of our age -- and it is -- then the hipster is our archetype of ironic living.

If your reservoir for archetypes goes back only one generation, you need your eyeball
scanned, you're probably a replicant. Keep that in mind, we'll come back to it, too.

The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the
most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic
and otherwise.

So this is true, but that's the secondary purpose of irony, not the primary purpose: in
exchange for this self-defense, it puts all of the ironist's energy in the service of the thing it
is defending against; that while he affects a distance from "all this", he participates 100% in
it. However much the "not corporate" hip coffeehouse needs the barista's extensive roasting
knowledge or values the ambiance he creates with his MFA and thoughts about 2666, it is
way more than the $7/hr no benefits it is paying him, but they got him, making skinny
lattes for an organ donor in a light blue North Face coat while he and his Julliard buddy Garf
roll their eyes disdainfully when she asks for two Splendas. "You're saying he's underpaid?"
Yeah, but not the point, the point is why does he accept it? It's only because he can roll his
eyes about how mainstream she is that he stays, it offers him a perch from which he is
better than her, while simultaneously and no less ironically, this woman thinks she is better
than him because she's on the correct side of the counter and her husband works on Wall
Street. In math terms, the difference between what he is actually worth and the amount he
is paid is how much he values feeling superior to MILFs.

Or, if I can be permitted a judicious use of psychoanalytic jargon: it's the rationalization that
allows you to blow a guy you can't stand, "I hate him but I'm going to make him cum so
hard he'll just want more of me, which will be his punishment." Let that analogy sink in for
a moment. From his perspective, not only did he still get blown, he liked it even more. NB:
in this analogy, the guy is capitalism and you're not.

III.

Christy Wampole is an assistant professor of French at Princeton University, so right away

you should be suspicious of her allegiances, so I figured this was just another NYT hit piece
for its overeducated and overpaid demo. But then this happened:

[The hipster] is merely a symptom and the most extreme manifestation of ironic living.

Hold on, something is amiss. There's a gigantic difference between an "archetype" and
"merely a symptom", e.g. one is cause and the other is effect, and for a Professor of
Confusing Words it's a big mistake to make-- especially when it's been reviewed by the
editor at the NYT. It's about as big as missing the primary purpose of irony. Cause, or
effect? They are almost opposites, which means she's wants them to be the same, which
makes this evidence of a defense. So this article isn't simply "kids today are lazy." There's
something else happening:

For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s -- members of Generation Y, or Millennials --
particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt. One need
only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become.
Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every category of contemporary reality exhibits this will
to irony.
"Will to irony" may mean she's an idiot, and if this were true I could happily close my
computer and buckle down to another night of alcoholic hallucinosis, but she's not an idiot,
she's probably smarter than me, which means something far more sinister is going on:
conflating the irony of the kids with the irony of the "public space." Who does she think
made the public space? 20 somethings? Who is running the advertising agencies? Who is
running for politics? How old is every legit fashion designer? Who is responsible for the
human rights violations of the ABC Network? She's not decrying the hipster generation,
she's describing hers.

IV.

Here is a paragraph so preposterous I was sure this was a McSweeny's gag. But she didn't
mean this to be ironic, which is itself ironic, good luck not laughing:

Born in 1977, at the tail end of Generation X, I came of age in the 1990s, a decade that, bracketed neatly
by two architectural crumblings -- of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Twin Towers in 2001 -- now seems
relatively irony-free. The grunge movement was serious in its aesthetics and its attitude, with a
combative stance against authority, which the punk movement had also embraced. In my perhaps over-
nostalgic memory, feminism reached an unprecedented peak, environmentalist concerns gained
widespread attention, questions of race were more openly addressed......

"Relatively irony-free! Architectural crumblings! Socially conscious! Bosnia Herzigova or

whatever!" I realize Aspirational 14% wants their beloved 90s to be about something more
than just bicuriosity and JDSU, but I was there, it wasn't. Anyone who thinks the grunge
movement was "serious" and "combative" and who thinks feminism "reached a peak" also
thinks The Hunger Games was a step forward for women and 50 Shades is poorly written
"but still hot." Just because you call yourself a progressive or a feminist, doesn't make it
true, your progressive passions may end up setting women back five hundred years-- that's
right, 500 years. Even 200 years ago Catherine took power away from her husband and
became something great, Walpole's is the generation that admires Hillary Clinton as a
female role model, not because she became Secretary of State, but because she stayed with
her husband so that she could become Secretary of State. Read it again if you didn't get it
the first time, it's important. I forbid you from having daughters. Or oxygen. I know, I
know, I don't have any real power, but maybe someday a man will give me some.

V.

When someone hates something that to outside observers looks exactly like themselves in
every way, you should quickly consult a French book to see if they don't have a word for
that phenomenon, and they do, it's called projection.

Before you nod and use it to hate on her, you should understand what projection is. It
sounds like you project unwanted feelings onto another person, which is both wrong and
impossible. It's not an action, it's a problem of perception. The unwanted feelings don't
make sense coming from someone like you, so you conclude they must be coming from the
other person.
To use the frequent example of "homophobia": a guy feels gay impulses and can't "handle
it" but he doesn't get rid of them by putting them onto someone else, he confuses them as
coming from someone else. He smells gayness, "Where is it coming from? Me?
Impossible! Jesus washed my feet. Must be that guy." Sorry, wildman, whoever smelt it
dealt it. Projection is the most primitive of defenses, circa age 2, and the description should
make it clear it is a narcissistic defense: one's perception of the world is inextricably,
concretely the result of one's inner states. There is no "objectivity" possible.

The purpose of projection is not to get rid of the feelings, but to explain their presence, to
defend the self against a label: "I'm not gay..... even if I have gay sex once in a while." The
point isn't to avoid gay sex, the gayness isn't intolerable to them-- e.g. observe the high hat
Christians caught in various rest stops across our land-- but even thought they've
committed the act, it doesn't affect their identity.

My use of gay as an example is unfortunate because half of you will see "gay" as "bad," but
the projected impulse doesn't have to be "bad", merely incongruous to the desired identity
that you are trying to solidify. If you doubt this, consider the sullen engineering student at
a party, "I'm not like these superficial sorority girls with perfect smiles and condomless sex"
who then perceives great happiness in these people.

!
You could be happy, too, dude, if you weren't so invested in not being happy. If you want a
partial understanding of why 19-21 Saudi/Egyptian terrorists could live in America and
enjoy our strip clubs but still want to crumble our architecture, there you go.

The article continues with a "nuanced" criticism of irony and the hipster mindset, and then
towards the end she tries a reversal, but it's a trick, not because it's not genuine, it is, but
precisely because it is genuine:

Obviously, hipsters (male or female) produce a distinct irritation in me, one that until recently I could
not explain. They provoke me, I realized, because they are, despite the distance from which I observe
them, an amplified version of me.

So true; totally wrong. When people "figure themselves out" and then applaud themselves
for their "brutal self-honesty", you can be sure it is further defense. The easiest way for a
self-aware person to protect himself is to "figure out" something that is actually correct so
that he stops there and doesn't go any further, which is also the problem with most
therapies. "I'm learning a lot about myself and my motivations." No you're not. "Figuring
yourself out" not only fails, but is the defense itself. Stop doing it.

She thinks she "realizes" hipsters are an amplified version of her, i.e. that she is projecting--
which is in fact/duh correct, but never asks the question, "Why am I projecting? What do I
benefit from this madness? How does the system benefit?"

There are so many ways, let's just take one. Is the result of her work product ironic? Yes.
Then it's in the service of the system, while she is able to affect a distance from "all this"
she participates 100% in it.

However much the NYT values her PhD, however much they value her intellect and opinions,
it's way more than what they paid her, which is nothing. The question is, why didn't she
demand to be paid? I'm not saying you have to do everything for money, god knows I write
a lot of blog and drink very long rums and neither one have delivered profits commensurate
with the labor. If she was promoting something of course I'd understand writing for free,
but what can she do after writing for the Times except write for the Times again? See also
Princeton, where you will pay them more to get the degree that they will then pay you less
to use for them, in no other profession is learning how to do something more valuable than
actually doing it. Is that ironic? Then she is able to affect a distance from "all this" while
she participates 100% in it. Undoubtedly she's thinking, "well, hell, I got an article in the
Times!" as if that has some incalculable value, but that's the trick. It doesn't. It's a scam.

"I'm not a vicious capitalist, I don't always have to get paid for what I do. I like to
participate in the public debate." I. I. I. Stop it, look around! This isn't charity, the Times
is a billion dollar corporation and Princeton is in actuality a gigantic hedge fund-- why are
you giving them your work for free? "That's the system, I can't change it." Exactly.

No different than the person who doesn't ask for a raise because they're nervous, "should I
ask for 5% more?" and they agonize about it for a month, ten months. The point isn't
whether you deserve the extra money, the point is whether you deserve it more than the
company, because if you don't take the extra money home to your kids, the company takes
it to theirs. Note that no one ever frames it this way, it is always about "making a case" or
"explaining how you can both benefit." Note also that in most cases the person you'd ask
for a raise is a manager, one who has no investment in that money, it doesn't come out of
his pocket. Yet he is the biggest obstacle, he will put sugar in your gas tank to stop you
from getting that raise. Is that ironic? Or totally the point?

Glengarry Glen Ross is on Netflix, you should watch it a lot. The easy "critique of
capitalism" is that "second prize is a set of steak knives" because that's how little it costs to
motivate you to work harder for them, and if that doesn't work there's always "third prize is
you're fired." But the real wisdom which is not about capitalism but which is about
narcissism comes from understanding that first prize isn't a Cadillac Eldorado, you think Alec
Baldwin needs a car? There is no first prize. Real closers don't want the prize, they want
to be the best, that's why they will practice practice practice and don't play the lottery. The
car is a temptation only for people who do not know their own value, the value of their own
work, who won't lift a finger to advance themselves, who are motivated only by threats or
by rewards, who would rather have the appearance of success than actual success. "I got an
article in the Times!" celebrates the person whose brain is broken. "Alec Baldwin's
character is a raging narcissist!" Jesus are you stupid, Alec's name is MacGuffin, that's why
he's in Act I and never again yet propels the story forward. It is irrelevant whether Alec
Baldwin has metal testicles or pathological grandiosity, what matters is that after years of C
minus work, what finally gets those dummies fired up is First Prize or Third Prize, left to
themselves they meander in mediocrity while deluding themselves that they are more than
what they do. "I was number one in '87!" So was Alf. And the system knows this, which is
why it lets Wampole call herself a professor but pays her like a TA----- and she's upset at
hipsters. Is that ironic?

She's criticizing-- sorry, critiquing-- hipsters for their defensive posture against society, and
for not working, but, look, at least they are not working for free, like a Matrix battery
propping up the very system that sucks the life out of them. "Well, it's cool that I got an
article in the Times, maybe I'll get to write another one." I know, I know, the temptation of
a moment of celebrity was too great to resist, only a fool would pass it up. Meanwhile
Princeton is happy to use her to market their anti-hipster brand to the demo that has the
money to send their batteries to Princeton one day. However much Princeton values her
article to the NYT, it is way more than they... never mind.

The thing is, if I tie her to a chair and shine the heat lamp on her and ask her whose fault
"all this" is, she'll answer the Republicans. Since she's a nuanced thinker she'll probably say
George Bush. And when she has to get a job at Rutgers because Princeton won't give her
tenure, she'll blame the tax cuts or "an undercurrent of sexism in academia." But she will
save and save and save to send her own daughters to college one day, hey, if you send
them to Rutgers they'll generously give a 10% employee discount. Sweet!

You gave the system you don't like a spectacular blowjob, and then try to punish it by
making it want you more. From the system's perspective, not only did it still get blown, it
liked it even more. In this analogy, the system is the system and you're not.

[Link]

DECEMBER 10, 2012

Funeral
!
do you have a better system?

The funeral is attended by 30 people. It's a military funeral because he was in Korea, and in
the front chairs are his wife and two grown children, and they are quietly crying.

When it ends, people disperse hesitatingly, after all, they themselves aren't sad, they didn't
know him, they knew his kids. So they are unsure of what they're supposed to do next, but
the answer is you keep going, there's nothing else to do but that. That's the point of a
funeral.

The deceased's wife has mourned her part, for now, and accompanied by her adult son
walks away. The adult daughter approaches the coffin, sobbing. She is pretty, which
unfortunately is relevant. Her husband hugs her, and then takes their two little girls away
from her, down towards the road, giving the woman the required freedom to be someone's
daughter one last time.

She kneels at the coffin. She cries. Everyone can hear it. It is sad.

II.

But some people are unsatisfied with a system that's been in place for more millennia than
years they've been alive. They don't trust that it's effective because when the funeral is over
people are still sad. What kind of stupid ritual is that? These people want to change the
system, they believe they know a better way.
Most people instinctively turn away and give her some kind of privacy, but about ten of
them move forward to surround her: what's this? A woman crying? At a funeral?? They
huddle around her in a semi-circle, hyenas waiting for a signal. One hyena steps forward,
tries to hug her from behind; and you can see the surprise in that dummy's face when he
doesn't get the expected hug back, when it doesn't seem to help, the grieving daughter
doesn't stop crying, she doesn't even get up. The hyena is caught awkwardly, so he rests
his paws on the woman's shoulders, and now the sobbing woman must associate her last
chance to be with what is left of her father with the stale breath of a sycophant waiting for
his moment to be relevant.

And while that's going on others are whispering to the quivering back of her coat, "oh, I'm
so sorry", "I'm sure he really loved you", "are you ok?"

Why did any one of them think they had the power, the right, to interfere with another
person's mourning? This was between her and her father and God and no one else. Did no
one notice that even the husband had given her space? Did they just think he was being a
jerk? "I just wanted to comfort her." No, you didn't know what else to do, so you did that.
"I didn't want her to be alone." That's because you are a terrible person.

They do not know how to stand in the presence of grief because they can't help but make it
immediately a judgment of themselves-- how can you see a woman crying and not do
anything? Purposeless hyperactivity to cover up one's impotence and lack of empathy.
"But I'm not the one grieving, I can't fake being sad." Don't fake it, just be silently and
unobtrusively available. I know you don't think you're the most important person there, but
you are also not the second most important. Or the third or tenth. Get out of the way.

But they can't, they think it has suddenly become their responsibility to save you. Look
around, all those other people-- yours? Do you think you can? Do you think that anything
you say is going to bring the dead back? Ease her suffering?

She's supposed to be sad, she needs to be sad, if she wasn't crying enough I'd kick her in
the shins to make her, otherwise she will hold all of that emotion and let it out piecemeal
over three decades and she will be lost.

These animals suffer from a deep existential pathology for which there is no cure, in
ordinary times they will be the most ordinary people but when the ship goes down they will
kill each other to make sure they get a lifeboat all for themselves. Medicine won't help this,
religion won't help this. On the one hand they don't know how to be real, on the other hand
they they think protocol and formality is dishonest and insensitive. They can't say, "my
condolences" because it sounds fake. So they improvise, catastrophically.

We should all be so lucky that as adults we get to attend our father's funeral, doesn't make
it easier but that's a fact, because the alternative is that it happens the other way around,
and I can think of nothing worse than the other way around. But even then the system is in
place, if you blindly follow the steps-- if people let you blindly follow the steps-- then when
you are finished you can begin to go back to your life. Death creates a hole in your heart
that is unfillable, but if you follow the steps you can at least fence it off so you don't keep
falling in.

There is no shortcut to mourning, the shortcut leads to madness. When you subvert the
system and offer a mourner a shortcut, you are leading them to madness.
But how can she let go, how can she do what needs to be done, under the oppressive gaze
of self-conscious people who need her to know they came? "I just want to support her!"
Then you'd go back to your car, connect a hose from the exhaust pipe to a slightly opened
window, and wait it out.

When she first told people about her father's death it came with a gift to others, a qualifier:
"I won't be there on Wednesday, my father passed away and I'll be at the funeral-- it's ok,
I'm fine" but nevertheless grown neophytes went to Defcon 5. This is one such text
message: "OH MY GOD, ARE YOU SERIOUS! OH MY GOD, I AM SO SORRY, WHAT
HAPPENED?? PLEASE CALL ME IMMEDIATELY!!" The text message ends there because I
smashed it.

One man, either a friend or a blastoma, came to the funeral luncheon mostly to ask the
daughter what was up with her girlfriend he was trying to date. He's 50. I know he didn't
think he was being selfish or insensitive, he truly believed she'd welcome the chance to talk
about his relationship, she'd want him to be happy, she'd use this sad day to tell him how
love was the most important thing in the world and he should seize it because life is so
short. That's how it happened in Four Weddings And A Funeral, anyway. I will bet you all of
your money that as he got dressed in his black suit and lavender shirt, inside his head was
playing, "going to the chapel and we're....." Did he come to support her? No, he came to
destroy the world.

Six different psychopaths called her to demand they come to the the funeral to "show their
support." Who do you think you are fooling? Each of them wanted to be the best friend
that would accompany her through the terrible day. Each of them believed that they were
the best friend that would do this. But just because she's on the phone with you all the
time solving your crises, it doesn't make you a best friend, it makes you a patient. A real
best friend wouldn't use a funeral as a way of solidify their own place as "best friend." A real
best friend wouldn't feel jealous that some other friend got to sit closer, got more attention.

One psychophant who came to the luncheon to "show support" didn't get the extra
acknowledgement she expected, so she decided instead to perform unsolicited grief therapy
on the woman's five year old daughter. "Since we didn't get a chance to connect at the
funeral," she said later, "[your daughter] and I had a good talk about what happens when
you die." If I had seen this happen I'd be in prison now. The only thing this woman can
connect with is a phone charger, the battery is always dying. "Hi, I just texted you, I
wanted to see if you were free to talk about me, but I only have two hours."

It's not your day, your method sadness is irrelevant, your pseudo-concern transparent and
you are forcing mourners to divert their attention to you. "I had Christ in my mouth for
over an hour!" was a post funeral text from a woman who... what? I'm not a Catholic so it
took me a few minutes to piece together that this lunatic meant she had kept the Eucharist
from the funeral mass in her mouth without swallowing it for an hour-- as if that meant
something. Woman, you are insane, your personal relationship with Jesus is pathological,
I'll guess you voted for Romney but you are the reason Obama won. It's bad enough you
think your God wants you to be an hysterical neurotic, but why would you then tell this to a
woman mourning her father? Why would you think she'd derive comfort from what you did?

It's no surprise that the new DSM removes the bereavement exception from the diagnosis of
depression-- no one allows normal bereavement to occur. How can ordinary bereavement
ever occur when it is subverted, worsened, at every turn by people who were never taught
how to act around other people, who just don't know? "I just want to help." You are
destroying the world.
I understand funerals can be awkward for those not directly grieving, but over-exaggerating
your pretend sadness is of no benefit to anyone, it merely obligates the survivors to manage
your fake concern. If you feel compelled to speak in all caps or explain how terrible this all
is to a person who knows first hand and way better than you how terrible it all is, don't.
Stay home. When you find yourself in the presence of mourning, simply say, "I'm sorry for
your loss. If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know," and if he happened
also to have been a great man you can add, "he was a great man," then bow your head and
fade to back. That's all that's necessary. The system will take care of the rest.

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

Temper Tantrums In The DSM

! let me guess

From BoingBoing, only slightly more valid than any of the journals I read:

The American Psychiatric Association is set to add "disruptive mood dysregulation disorder" to the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), the bible of psychiatric disorders. A kid has "DMDD" if she or he
has "severe recurrent temper outbursts that are grossly out of proportion in intensity or duration to the
situation... at least three times a week."

Easy, everybody, if you're enraged about the wussification of America you can assume you
watch too much TV and like Blue Pills.

1. Diagnosis is not the same as disease. This just coordinates the language, "from now on
we're going to call this this." "Then why is it called a disorder?" Ah, you must have no
insurance or the best insurance. Healthcare policy is set by Medicaid/Medicare, you Blue
Cross suckers are merely collateral damage.
In Medicaid America, i.e. America, if you come through the door and I ask you all the
questions and I determine there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, two things will
happen at the exact same time: 1. You will punch me. 2. I won't get paid, can't get paid for
no diagnosis, no matter how hard I work.

Can't order any tests without a diagnosis code, either.

Someone stupid will ask me this: "then why doesn't Medicaid just offer a billing code for
"need three evaluations, but likely no diagnosis?" Because if Fox News got wind that
Obama was paying for black people to get "no diagnosis" they'd blow up an abortion clinic.
Paying for "temper tantrums" is just the right amount of enraging, TV and internet enraging,
no violence will occur. "Isn't this why we need universal healthcare?" Well, lieutenant,
pronounced like I'm a British naval commander, if we had a system of healthcare in which
doctors were paid the exact same regardless of diagnosis or severity, then there'd be little
attention paid to "correct" diagnosis, all of our epidemiological data would be totally invalid,
and the number one drug in America would be Xanax. "Wait, isn't that the situation now?"
Huh, nailed it.

2. "Is this is an attempt at preventing the erroneous diagnosis of "pediatric bipolar

disorder?" No. Come on, stop it. Not to go full Popper, but how can diagnoses be "wrong"
while simultaneously "not exist?" You guys have to decide whether you're materialists or
idealists, then we can cross blades.

In other words, regardless of what you call it, assuming the MD thinks it is "a problem fit for
a pill," will the pills offered be any different in either diagnosis? I'm closing my eyes, don't
tell me which diagnosis it is... I'm sensing something, a presence.... is it Concerta?
Concerta, is that you? And.... Depakote? Are you here too?

3. "DMDD is "severe recurrent temper outbursts that are grossly out of proportion in
intensity or duration to the situation." I'd like someone to explain what behavior is "grossly
out of proportion" for a situation characterized by physical/sexual abuse, parental drug
abuse, and visibly swarming roaches, every day, while you sleep, while you eat....

"But not all kids are raised in poverty." True, many are raised by nannies who alive in
poverty. So what kind of temper tantrum is out of proportion for a situation characterized
by marital infidelity/swinging, overparenting, spoiling them materially and depriving them
emotionally? "I love my kid, I got him a Wii." You should get them some weed, they'll get
it eventually.

"So then it's not really a disorder, it's just caused a response to the social environment?"
Isn't that what a psychiatric disorder is? "No, a real disease." Like diabetes?

4. It's all very simple, you have it mostly right but the direction of the force vector is
wrong. In order to create a living wage, the system deploys its social services through the
least offensive department, healthcare. e.g. people are furious about Social Security, but
not as furious about Medicare. As long as it can pretend it's about "health" or "compassion"
or "disability" it doesn't have to worry about politics or race or "need".

But in order for this to work, the doctor has to get paid. Not much, but paid. If he is to get
paid, the patient must have insurance, i.e Medicaid. In order to get Medicaid, the patient
must be temporarily disabled, for which he needs to have a diagnosis, so he must see a
doctor, who will need to get paid, so the patient needs to have Medicaid. Ouroboros. The
system has won.
 !

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 2

!
gross margin 35%. Damn right we voted for food stamps

part 1 here

IV.

"I can't tell if you're defending hipsters or hating on them." They're ridiculous. Feel better?
They're not the problem.

It's a simple thesis and no one wants to hear it: hipsters may lack drive, but the world they
live in wasn't set up by them, it was set up by their parents, i.e. the Dumbest Generation Of
Narcissists In The History Of The World, the ones who magnified the importance and cost of
college without having any idea of what should be its purpose, let alone its content.

If you want to tell me a 30 year old hipster should be lashed for not trying to better himself,
I'll bring the whip, but the 30 year old chose his pointless major when he was 17 and you
think the outcome is all his fault? A 17 year old can kill two people and still be considered
too young to be criminally responsible, and anyway in that case you think the problem was
video games and bullying. Of course Gerry The Hipster is made of soy and ennui, but
there's plenty of blame to go around. When he was 17 the system incentivized him to
destroy his life, tempted him with beer, babes, and BS-- and the promise of an upper middle
class lifestyle provided he went to "a good school" (read: gave the system $100k of his post
tax, pre-interest money), never mind for what. Like a good American, he did what he was
told.

The society that taught people to want a defective college degree is, unfortunately, going to
be expected to support those that bought it, it's still under warranty. At the very minimum,
it owes them their money back, and if they don't pay you should sue for breach of contract.
"At the conclusion of this course, students will show a proficiency in...." The plaintiff rests.

"They should have studied more." Agreed. But then you shouldn't have admitted them, you
shouldn't have passed them. Inflate the grade, Gresham's Law the society.

All along you've said "you need to go to college so you can get a good job" but the system
was not designed to raise producers, it was designed to raise consumers. Well, here we
are. Why are you surprised that they need consumer stamps? Why are you surprised they
moved back in with you? "We did the best we could." No you did not, I was there, I saw
it. You borrowed against their future, and they can't pay it back. And now you're yelling at
them.

!
...A Hobbit's Tale

V.

While the idea of a Metafilter post-doc receiving food stamps AND telling me they're entitled
to it makes my eyes go Sauronic, it's that rage that requires some examination. Why rage?
Why not just roll my eyes and go back to drinking rum and soldering op amps? What is the
social importance of my rage?

Society is nothing more than individual psychology multiplied by too many to count. If
narcissism is what drives this society, then only narcissism will explain it.

So start with an interesting hypothetical: does everybody need to work anymore? I

understand work from an ethical/character perspective, this is not here my point. Since we
no longer need e.g. manufacturing jobs-- cheaper elsewhere or with robots-- since those
labor costs have evaporated, could that surplus go towards paying people simply to stay out
of trouble? Is there a natural economic equilibrium price where, say, a U Chicago grad can
do no economically productive work at all but still be paid to use Instagram? Let me be
explicit: my question is not should we do this, my question is that since this is precisely
what's happening already, is it sustainable? What is the cost? I don't have to run the
numbers, someone already has: it's $150/mo for a college grads, i.e. the price of food
stamps. Other correct responses would be $700/mo for "some high school" (SSI) or $1500/
mo for "previous work experience" (unemployment). I would have accepted $2000/mo for
"minorities" (jail) for partial credit.

VI.

While all those monies have different names and different "requirements" they are all
exactly the same thing: paying people who are off the grid, whether by choice or
circumstance, indefinitely. i.e. Living Wages. However, they can never be called that. They
have to pretend to be something else: this is for food, this is because of a medical problem
we just made up, this is because you were caught with weed so we'll leave you in here for 6
months until we sentence you to probation. And they have to have these fake reasons to
give taxpayers a little emotional distance, deniability, otherwise they'd go John Galt, after
all, they have all the guns. If they can invade Iraq, how hard is it going to be to take the
Whole Foods on 3rd?

That "emotional distance" is not hyperbole, it's not me being a lefty deconstructicon, it is an
absolute requirement of a psychic defense of identity, of self-worth. The point is not to get
you to accept that hipsters deserve food stamps, the point is the opposite: to enrage you,
infuriate you, so that you will resist-- because then and only then will you pay for it.

If this seems implausible to you, which it must-- that's exactly the point of it-- consider the
following extreme analogy, which surprisingly will be easier to understand, which is also the
whole point: Say your father raped you repeatedly for a decade. Hold on, slow down, it
gets worse: now you're 40, and he shows up asking you for $2400 because, and I quote,
"you have a responsibility to take care of me." There he is in your living room, eyeballing
the nice things in your home. If it is a fact that you will inevitably give him the money, is
it easier to for you to pair it with your venom or your sympathy? Though it's enraging,
there is a perverse pleasure in giving that bastard the money. It tells you that you showed
him that you are better than him.

That's how America works. The system needs you to be willing, not wanting, to pay for
this, and getting the existing (narcissistic) society to believe that it is their
"responsibility" (Left's word) to pay for "laziness" (Right's word)-- to WANT to pay for this--
is absolutely impossible. Why can't we just all agree on what a fair share might be, take
care of each other? Didn't you major in English Lit? "Homo economicus" is not reality,
envy is an immutable characteristic of our consciousness, it is practically Kantian, some of
you will get a minor hold of it but even your priests are chock full o' it. If the porn isn't
high res you can't get horny, but you can hate a guy at 1000 paces without a scope. That's
human nature. Envy, rage. It's not all we are, but you cannot discount it.

The only way to get them to agree to pay is to give them a way of rationalizing the
"responsibility" as, in some way, for them: you'll get a tax break, you'll be rewarded in
heaven, you are a better person for it, thanks, this means a lot. Can you imagine a hipster
looking at a salesman and saying thanks for your service? So that's out, use the default:
rage. Just like how you get people motivated to go to war. No, no, no, no, not the people
already waving flags, I mean the people who don't want war. Said every liberal in Congress
one magical day in 2003: "I'm not going to let those oil bastards Cheney and Bush get away
with their racist imperialist plan, which is why I'm going to scream obscenities at them as I
vote Attack."

The system isn't thinking short term, it needs this to work long term, those hipsters are
going to be getting food stamps forever, or do you think if the economy rebounds, old liberal
arts majors will suddenly become appealing? Like a woman who squandered her youth on
fun but disreputable men, she will find herself at 45 wanting to marry, but alone. "That is
such a disgusting, sexist, archaic thing to say." I feel your rage, and you are right. Alone
nevertheless.

VII.

You might retort that there's no money to pay for 25 more years of hipster apathy.
Admittedly, this is a compelling argument. But the total cost of food stamps is $80B. The
annual budget deficit is over ten times that. America's economy is one big gigantic retail
sales event. Is the economy back to like it never happened?

!
why Obama won

The underemployed econ majors will recognize that this isn't "real", inflation adjusted sales
and the last few years are based on overpriced high-end goods that only Aspirational 14%
can afford, and that for the other 85% of America purchasing power has dropped to 1997
levels, but as Whole Foods says, whatever.

$80B is a lot, but how much is actually going to hipsters, how many hipsters are there,
really? 73? 74? What purpose does this rage serve? If you Rage Against The Hipsters,
you will be that much more likely to "allow" food stamps for everyone else. The hipsters are
diversions. They are sacrifices. How much hate have you focused on Gerry since you heard
about him? All of it.

To clarify, this is not some kind of socialist ploy, it is a function of the way America (read:
narcissism) works, it doesn't need to be centralized, it is the sum of individual vectors
pointing in different directions. Here's the other side's example: when they talk about
raising taxes on the rich, why do they pick a "low" point and push it higher? Should the
highest rates be at $250k/yr? $300k? Another way of doing it, which is precisely why they
cannot do it, is start at the top and move down. "We need $1T. Ok, top five guys pay 90%.
Not enough? How about top ten guys pay 90%. Not enough? Top...." I'm not advocating
this or any other policy, not my place, I am pointing out that doing it the way it's done
protects the 1% by letting the Aspirational 14%-- who crave recognition and are easily
identifiable and hatable because they are poseurs, just of a different kind-- act as human
shields. They take the bullets, the unknown mega-rich take tinted window rides to the
Hamptons. During those tumultuous 80 seconds of OWS-- and BTW, those people gave up
hanging out after only a trimester, do you really think they're ready for 40 hour work
weeks?-- the majority of the personal attacks were against people who made <$300k, not
>$50M. It's easy to hate, and so the media nudges you in the wrong direction.

VIII.

You might think that the rage is the spark for a transformation of America, a full scale
Dagny Taggart meltdown or Bolshevik revolution, depending on your hat. That's not how it
works. If this is narcissism, then its purpose is protecting identity, defending against
change. Doesn't matter what side you think you're on, unless you are unplugged you are for
the status quo.

Here's an example: in the "radical left" (their words) magazine Jacobin, the editor writes a
defense of Gerry and Sarah as a way of arguing for the abolishment of, well, everything
Randian. He's against the "work ethic", he wants a paradigm shift away from American
producerism-- the idea that your value is based only on what you can produce for the
economy-- towards social rights, e.g. Living Wages. I disagree with everything in it, so
what? but it is very well written and reasoned, and if I played the same game as him I'd
want him on my team.

The point here is that he wants CHANGE. Here is the last paragraph of the article, tell me if
you can find anything supporting the status quo:

Rather than the "deserving" or "working" poor, with its connotations of moral judgment and
authoritarian social control, it is time to begin speaking the language of economic and social rights. For
instance, the right to a Universal Basic Income, a means of living at a basic level that would be provided
to everyone, no questions asked. Against the invidious politics of the work ethic, it's time to argue that
some things should be granted to everyone, simply by virtue of their humanity. Even hipsters.

Sounds sublime. But Gerry already had a living wage-- he spent it on the University of
Chicago, 41 years of food stamps in 4 years. If everybody knew in advance the outcome
was going to be unemployment and living wages, then why doesn't Frase challenge the
capitalist assumption that college is money well spent-- could have been used differently?
He can't. This thought cannot occur to him, not because he is dumb, he clearly isn't, or
because he is paid by a college-- money is irrelevant to him. He can't because his entire
identity is built on college, academia. He is college. Take that away, he disintegrates. So in
the utopia he imagines, college still exists AND people get living wages. Call me a Marxist,
that's what we have now.

Second, and more importantly, he thinks he's a radical progressive, that he wants a
paradigm shift away from capitalism towards social rights-- but he wants to keep everything
else about capitalism completely intact. He is explicitly against producerism, but he wants
to replace it with consumerism. He wants to make sure people can get what they want, not
teach them how to want. In his utopia of no questions asked Universal Basic Income, do
retail sales go up or down? The system has won.

IX.

If rage is necessary to keep this all going, how is it elicited efficiently?

Peter Frase, defending Gerry and Sarah:

But what the [Salon] article seemed to call forth in its readers was unending bile and rage directed at
people deemed insufficiently deserving of a public benefit.

Let's do this right. If it is rage, then the rage is because of a threat to identity. What
possible threat to identity could Gerry and Sarah pose to hardworking Americans? The
answer is that someone wrote an article about how great Gerry and Sarah are, e.g. Peter
Frase.

Frase again:

But they aren't the only people who react to stories like this with rage or contempt rather than empathy.
Consider the following comment, left under [Gerry's] response to the article about him:

I'm sorry but you are a selfish, whiny leach. I can say this because I a middle-aged woman and have
been trying to find work for two years without success though I have a masters degree in a fairly
desirable field. I have dwindling savings and two kids. Because I stayed home with them for a few years
I don't qualify for unemployment and that has also damaged my marketability in the job world. Despite
all of this I have never resorted to public assistance and will not. In addition, I have a back problem that
surgery did not correct so I am in physical pain 24 hrs a day. Still I have taken temp jobs and we have
cut back in many ways. I am proud of my fortitude and resourcefulness, because we will make it
through this time and my kids will learn valuable lessons from me about self-reliance.
Here we have a person who has been marginally employed for two years and suffers physical pain 24
hours a day--and rather than demanding something better for herself, she demands that other people
suffer more!

Wrong, read her words, they are right in front of you. Before that article in Salon, this
mother was allowed to believe that her staying off the dole had some honor in itself-- some
validation of her identity-- and it allowed her to survive her hardships. Now she is forced to
swallow that these people are not merely as good as her, but more valuable-- they get an
article, they get defenders like you, they are praised for their intrinsic human value, and all
she gets is mocked, belittled, "she's too stupid to know what's good for her!"-- all she can
do is comment on their life-- and her small act of rebellion is to at least use the space to tell
the world she exists. Rage is her defense that keeps her intact while the world seemingly
ignores her.
Husband hates that his wife reads about the faux-celebrities in magazines. They say words
to each other. What do they actually hear?
She hears this: "Anyone who likes that is lazy and stupid. You're stupid."
He hears this: "I know they don't actually do anything, but they're more interesting than
you."
This is the surprising result: since they wall off into psychic cocoons, therefore the marriage
remains intact, for a while longer.

X.
Back to college. Since the problem is college, does college accept any responsibility? I
went to The Chronicle of Higher Education to find out. Surprise, no.
!

What did I expect? They apparently intended this picture to evoke sympathy, isn't it a
crime that 33000 PhDs are on food stamps?

You can imagine how the other side reads it, some highlights: hyphenated name; stupid
thing to get a PhD in; fat; what's an "adjunct"; why so much cheese; tattoos; place is a
mess.

Nowhere does the article address the fact that it should not have allowed her to get a PhD
in medieval history, let alone help her pay for it. Do you know what The Chronicle does
focus on? That she's not black. First sentence of the article which is entirely about
branding:

"I am not a welfare queen," says Melissa.

For a lefty loosy publication like The Chronicle, what difference does it make if she's white?
Why does her PhD make her more deserving that a welfare queen? Because to The
Chronicle, the PhD has value. It doesn't. I'm not saying she isn't smart, I'm saying the PhD
in no way communicates to me she knows medieval history better than any D&D player.
She may know more, but how do I know? I don't even find "MD" particularly valid, but at
least you can sue a doctor.

But my reason for showing you her is to highlight the perverse logic of the university which
will doom us all: since the only maniacs who would ever hire these PhDs are universities,
then the solution to their unemployment is more money for universities:

Ms. Bruninga-Matteau does not blame Yavapai College for her situation but rather the "systematic
defunding of higher education." In Arizona last year, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed a budget
that cut the state's allocation to Yavapai's operating budget
Why would you expect her to answer differently?

All the system had to do, starting around 1965, is not incentivize this madness. If there
were not guaranteed student loans, up to any amount, available equally across majors and
across colleges, independent of skills or promise or societal need, none of this would have
happened. Easy money got us into this mess, and easy money will keep us sailing until we
go right off the edge of the map.

part 3

---

[Link]

NOVEMBER 10, 2012

Hipsters On Food Stamps, Part 1

!
who wants Haterade

In the John Waters-esque sector of northwest Baltimore -- equal parts kitschy, sketchy, artsy and weird
-- Gerry Mak and Sarah Magida sauntered through a small ethnic market stocked with Japanese
eggplant, mint chutney and fresh turmeric. After gathering ingredients for that evening's dinner, they
walked to the cash register and awaited their moments of truth.

Those are two "hipsters", and the punchline is that they pay for their foodie porn with foodie
stamps, which sounds like it should be a terrible thing, except it's in [Link], which
means they're going to try and tell you how it's a good thing, which they don't, because
they can't. It's madness.

It's very easy and satisfying to hate these two, and nothing would make me happier than to
hit them square in the back with a jack-o-lantern. But I also recognize that I am being told
to hate them, so I have to take a step back and find out why it is so important that I hate
them. I did. I should have just reached for the pumpkin.

No one but the state and psychiatry can profit from another's misery, and they are the same
thing, so let's see why Election Day doesn't matter.

I.

First, the obvious: what's wrong with hipsters on food stamps is that these are college
educated people who should be able to get jobs, not live off the state. They're not black,
after all. Hell, one of the two in the article is even Asian. "What, like Russian Asian?" No,
like Asian Asian. "Whaaaaaaat?"

"It's the economy, stupid!" Thanks guy from 1992, but the economy did not tell you to go
to college for something you knew in advance would make you unemployable, especially
when that unemployable choice cost exactly the same as the employable choice, i.e. too
much. Lesson one at the academia should be the importance of separating vocation from
avocation, as character actor Fred Thompson and electrical contractor Benjamin Franklin
both understood. When I was six I wanted to be in Playboy. Just because it's your dream,
doesn't mean you should pursue it.

So what makes them hatable is the seeming choice they have made: they could work, yes
at jobs they don't like but hey, that's America; but instead they choose to feel entitled to
$200/month from the rest of us salarymen.

However, secondly:

Before we blame them for their choice, we should ask why they felt they could make that
choice. I'm not trying to start trouble, but let's choose something I'm familiar with, i.e.
women: why would a smart high school junior, 4.0 and AP Everything, think that going to
Hampshire College for English Literature was a good idea? Why would her parents allow
this madness, other than the fact that they were divorcing? What did she think would
happen given that she knew in advance there were no jobs for English majors? Serious
answers, please, I'll offer four I had personal experience with: law school; academia; non-
profits; marriage. Don't roll your eyes at me, young lady: let's say you are the daughter of
a lawyer and you major in English. When you were 17 and you imagined your life at your
Dad's age-- not the starving poetess fantasy you wrote about in your spiral notebook, but a
glimpse of the bourgeois future you then thought you didn't want-- what kind of a house did
you imagine in the "if that happens to me I'll Anne Sexton myself" scenario? A lawyer's
house or an English major's house? In other words, the choice to major in English was
predicated on information she received from multiple sources like schools and TV-- sources I
will collectively call the Matrix-- that every generation does better than the last, that there
was a safety net of sorts, a bailout at the end, that future happiness was inevitable, and so
we return to economics: the general name for that safety net is credit. America was the
land of the minimum monthly payment. And if this analogy isn't clear enough for you, let
me reverse it: the ability of the economy to offer English as a major required a massive
subsidy to make you feel like $20k/yr was the same as free. If you had to pay it up front,
you'd either be an engineer or $80k richer. That subsidy is now worthless, not because the
money doesn't exist but because the bailout at the end, e.g the four options I suggested
were operational 1977-1999 which guaranteed the payments would be made, won't help.

Imagine a large corporate machine mobilized to get you to buy something you don't need at
a tremendously inflated cost, complete with advertising, marketing, and branding that says
you're not hip if you don't have one, but when you get one you discover it's of poor quality
and obsolete in ten months. That's a BA.

II.

When we see a welfare mom we assume she can't find work, but when we see a hipster we
become infuriated because we assume he doesn't want to work but could easily do so-- on
account of the fact that he can speak well-- that he went to college. But now suddenly
we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the
disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the
skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant
forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know,
merely what you can produce for it. The only thing the English grad is "qualified" for in this
economy is the very things s/he is already doing: coffeehouse agitator, Trader Joe's
associate, Apple customer.................................................. and spouse of a capitalist.

Of course I'm not happy about this, I like smart people, but that's the new reality. There
was a time where women went to college to get an MRS degree, and I am telling you that
that time is today, there is nothing else of value in there. Sure, some college women go on
to become doctors and CEOs, and some go on to become child pornographers and Salon
writers, none of those things have anything to do with what happened in college. If you are
going to college to get an education and not to meet guys, you are insane, literally insane,
delusional, in reality one is never going to happen and the other is going to happen anyway,
and you could have gotten both for free at a bookstore. Worked for me. The only question
for the future single mom is whether it's worth $XXXXXX a year to meet guys, and the
answer is of course it's not, even nightclubs let ladies in for free.

It's hard to accept that the University of Chicago grad described in the article isn't
employable, that the economy doesn't need him, but it is absolutely true, but my point here
is that not only is he not contributing, the economy doesn't need him to contribute. Which
is good, because there's nothing he can do for it. 1. Anything requiring science is out. 2.
"He can work manual labor!" I love how people assume economics doesn't apply to
construction. The demand for those jobs is very high AND hipsters suck at them. At any
wage, Gerry the hipster will always be outworked by Vinnie the son of a longshoreman, who
will always be outworked by a Mexican illegal, i.e. the system will always be able to find
someone who can do the job better AND with lower labor costs. Bonus: no need to pay
Jose's insurance, everyone knows Hispanics never get sick, except fake psychiatrically. 3.
Hipsters are not good at retail or sales unless detached irony is required, which it is not,
which is why they're on food stamps. Here's a quick test, watch this video:
Is Baldwin's character a jerk or a savior? The genius of the story is that half of you will
have completely misunderstood it, and you like mint chutney and food stamps. The secret is
at the beginning, at 0:15, where it is revealed that Alec Baldwin doesn't feel any of this, the
whole speech is a work. If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a
work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach's cursing at you,
"this guy is awesome!"; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you
have no right to talk to me like that, or-- the standard maneuver when narcissism is
confronted with a greater power-- quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information
that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying.

That same person will retort that the film is a critique of evil American capitalism, but then
why, in a job sector with 50% more women than men, is Alec Baldwin yelling at a room in
which there is not a single woman? Are there no female capitalists? Why does he have to
teach them a mnemonic that is already posted on the bulletin board behind the chalkboard?
Same reason Pacino isn't present: because sales isn't about the product, it's about the
relationship, and women and alpha males are better at relationships, while everyone else is
busy outing hypocrisy. Go get 'em. "The leads are weak." Oh, the leads are weak. In this
example, leads=economy.

This is where the two mentalities separate. One group of people sees the man behind the
job, and judges him as an identity; and the other group of people sees the symbolic
importance of the person, what he represents, a judge, a doctor, a bank teller, whatever;
and that first group of people find it difficult to operate in society because they cannot see
that the person is more than he "is" simply by virtue of his position, because that would
doubly reinforce their own marginalization.

The hipsters want to believe that because they are not obsessed with money/capitalism that
they are better people, opting out of "materialism", but that's an after the fact
rationalization. There's simply no drive for anything except existing. "I'm a good
father." Go home and play with your kids. "I believe in social causes." For which the
minimum exertion is required, yes they'll have wifi at OWS. There's plenty of attention to
style, to identity, and regression to our most primitive instinct: eating, fetishized. The next
thing that should happen in this chain is the fetishization of the bathroom, "how pooping
can be luxurious and how to make it more decadent." Louis CK made a joke about this:

and in case you think "it's so true!" note that he was talking about how terrible being old is,
how life was basically over for him. And then, IRL, he went on to make two TV shows. In
other words, he was kidding about the pooping. He wasn't talking about himself, he was
saying it because he knew you'd relate.

"We're artists, not producers." Then make some art! "No one will buy it." Are you insane?
The point isn't the money yet, it is the drive. Go to the Whole Foods and ask if you can
hang it for free, and if they say no, hang it anyway. I'd rather look at the most horrendous
art than subway tiles or "Lose Weight Fast" ads. I'm no artist, yet here I sit, clickity
clackety clack, applying King's 2000 words a day to write you the best book of pornography
I'm able to pull off (by Christmas). The natural human instinct is to create things,
beginning with the toddler who is amazed that he was able to create such a fascinating
product out of his butt, the difference is most toddlers grow up and sublimate that drive and
create other things. You have not gotten past the poop, strike that, you have regressed to
the oral stage, hence the emphasis on organic foods. Yes, the anal stage comes after the
oral stage.

"I have a degree." No one assumes you're smart because of it, so what was the point? You
were tricked, your parents were tricked, your peers were tricked, your employers were not
tricked at all. "There's more to a college education than employability." No there isn't. I
am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don't think there's any
possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college
course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube. Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the
equivalent class at State? Name me one contemporary fiction writer who required his
college training to be a writer, and if you say David Foster Wallace I swear to god I'm going
to pumpkin your house. I think the only reason The New Yorker keeps shoving him down
my throat is because he-- the guy, not his work-- is an academic's aspirational fantasy, a
compromise between two worlds: mild mannered writing professor by day, brooding and
non-balding antihero by night, a last chance at "I can be cool, too" for the late 30s associate
professor who thinks that intelligence alone is insufficient reason to be labeled a man. My
university is full of them, all reasonably smart, all pretending at cool through the hiding in
plain site of cultural irony and political cynicism and pretend alcoholism. "I may be drunk,
but why was my polling station filled with rednecks trying to take away a female's somatic
autonomy?" says the endocrinology patient wearing a blazer with jeans as he nurses his
second microbrew, trying to impress me with what kind of a man he could be in the Matrix.
Come on, stop breathing. Obviously I'm not telling you to become an alcoholic, but don't
tell me you are one and then go home at 10:30 because otherwise your wife will cheat on
you. Man up or stand down, I don't care which, just don't backwash into a perfectly good
beer if I'm going to have to finish half of it.

III.

Fact: college is a waste, but we haven't yet hit that point in society where we can bypass it.
So we have to pass through another generation of massive college debt. How to pull in the
suckers in? Answer: these articles. By getting you to say, "these hipsters should be able to
get jobs because they are college graduates!" you are saying, "college is worth something."
It isn't. But by directing your hate towards hipsters, you are protecting the system against
change.

part 2

OCTOBER 29, 2012

The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus
!
fixed it for you

Are you listening closely?

I.

This is the story you know:

"Narcissus was a man who was so in love with himself that he fell in love with his own
reflection. No one else was good enough for him. He stared into the pool, and eventually
wasted away."

But that's not the whole story.

When Narcissus was born his mother, Liriope, took him to the blind seer Tiresias and asked
him for a prophecy: "will he have a long life?"

Before Tiresias became a prophet he had spent seven confusing years as a woman, and
made two important discoveries about women. First, that women get more pleasure from
love making than men. When he told this discovery to Hera and Zeus, Hera, in a rage,
struck him blind, which lead to his second discovery: not all women want to hear this.

Zeus tried to make up for his blindness by giving him the power to know the future.
So Tiresias gave Liriope his cryptic prophecy:

"He'll have a long life as long as he never knows himself."

Now what could that mean?

II.

The story you know is that Narcissus was so beautiful that everyone wanted to be with him,
but he rejected them all: no, no, no, no, no, not good enough.

One rejected lover was furious and begged Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance, for
retribution. "If Narcissus ever falls in love, don't let the love be returned!"

Nemesis heard the prayer and caused Narcissus to fall in love with himself: he was lead to
a pool of water, and when he looked into it, he fell in love with what he saw. And what he
saw wasn't real, so of course it couldn't love him back. But Narcissus sat patiently, forever,
hoping that one day that beautiful person in the bottom of the pool was going to come out
and love him.

You should take note of this first, easy lesson: if no one ever seems right for you, and then
the one person who does seem right doesn't want you, then the problem isn't the person,
the problem is you.

III.

What have you learned so far? Do you think you've understood?

You heard the story, you heard the words, but your mind unheard it and replaced it with
something else. Even after I tell you this, you'll have trouble remembering it.

You think Narcissus was so in love with himself that he couldn't love anyone else. But that's
not what happened, the story clearly tells it in the reverse: he never loved anyone and then
he fell in love with himself. Do you see? Because he never loved anyone, he fell in love
with himself. That was Narcissus's punishment.
You thought Narcissus rejected all those people because he was in love with himself, but he
rejected them all before he loved himself. Loved himself? Do you think Narcissus rejected
them because he thought he was better than them? Or better looking? How would he have
known he was so beautiful? He didn't even recognize his own reflection! He rejected all
those people because they loved him.

IV.

You thought nemesis meant enemy, you thought it meant the person who always opposes
you, the one you struggle most against. A person who is something like you, but the
opposite.

But all of those explanations are your lies working to hide the truth: a nemesis is the one
who makes you fall in love with yourself. Without Nemesis, there'd be no story of Narcissus.
Without your nemesis, you don't have a story.

V.

Some people have tried to say that the pool Narcissus stared into was magical, that it
tricked him, put a spell on him, made it impossible for him to look away. But that's wishful
thinking. It would be wonderful to be able to blame the pool the way a man blames a
woman for tempting him. The truth is that no magic was necessary, Nemesis had only to
lead Narcissus to an ordinary pool and Narcissus would punish himself.

What did Narcissus do when he saw something beautiful in that pool? He fantasized and
dreamed all the different possibilities of that person, all the things that person could be to
him. He didn't stay there for years because the reflection had pretty hair. He stayed
because daydreaming takes a lot of time.

And, as Ovid described about someone else:

"But his great love increases with neglect; his miserable body wastes away, wakeful with
sorrows; leanness shrivels up his skin, and all his lovely features melt, as if dissolved upon
the wafting winds--nothing remains except--"

except what? What do you think remains? Maybe the answer is different for everyone, but
I know what you hope is the answer: anything else besides nothing.

VI.

This is a strange story. You know the main character is Narcissus, yet the title is "Echo and
Narcissus." Why do we think Echo is only a minor character? Who made Echo a minor
character?

Echo was nymph with a beautiful voice, but she talked too much, so Hera cursed her to be
able to only repeat the words someone else said first. "Oh!" I can hear you say. "That's
where the word Echo comes from." Grow up! Do you think these are children's stories, like
how the leopard got his spots? These aren't fairy tales, these are warnings.

Echo fell madly in love with Narcissus. She followed him, chased him, pined for him, but he
wanted no part of her, rejecting her cruelly. Even after Narcissus died she longed for him,
losing herself to that love, eventually wasting away into nothing but a voice.
He probably was right to reject her: what kind of a woman loves a man based entirely on
how he looks? What kind of a woman still loves a man no matter how badly he treats her?
Why would Narcissus want that kind of a person? She wasn't a woman with a beautiful
voice; there was nothing else inside her except a voice.

But let's go back to the beginning of her story, no, the true beginning of the story, or do you
think this is a dream that starts in the middle? If it was, we'd have to interpret it as a wish
fulfillment and not as a warning.

At the beginning, Echo was watching him, hidden, but Narcissus sensed someone was there,
and he was excited by it. "Come!" he called. "Come," she could only echo, and stayed
hidden, which only made him want her more. What mystery is this? He couldn't see her
but he could hear her voice, and in that unfathomable voice was incarnated all the possible
loves he could imagine. It helped that this mysterious woman knew just what to say to
him. She was perfect for him in every way, she was the cause of his desire.

And then she came out from hiding, and he saw her.

Was she beautiful? Undoubtedly. But the moment he saw her he wretched, "Blech-- better
death than should you have all of me!"

What was so wrong with her? It wasn't just that she may have been shorter or heavier than
he had imagined. What was wrong was in that instant he experienced her, she stopped
being anything else.

But if Echo was no longer a projection, she was still a reflection. Echo, like all women,
offered her man a peek inside his soul, all he had to do look: What kind of a man am I, that
attracts this kind of woman? What kind of a man am I that attracts the kind of woman who
only likes me for how I look? Despite how I treat her? What kind of a man am I that only
attracts the kind of women who like me for X? Is it because there is nothing else of value
inside me except X? But he was never taught to ask questions like this. In fact, he was
taught never to ask questions like that. What kind of a man attracts a woman who can only
echo him? There must be a name for that kind of person, and he already had it.

If he had considered this, he might have tried to change himself, or at least recognized how
similar they were.

And just as Echo wasted away to her X, a voice, he wasted away to a pretty flower-- his X.

Nothing besides remained.

VII.

How is it that centuries later, Tiresias's prophecy is still not understood?

Tiresias's prophecy was: He will have a long life, if he never knows himself.

Now, what could that mean?

Oh, he was right: Narcissus did live a long life-- though not a happy one. He spent his life
alone, dreaming, and gazing into a pool, waiting to die.
But Tiresisias's prophecy seems... wrong, counter to the Greek spirit, an affront to logic;
shouldn't "knowing thyself" be the highest virtue?

He will have a long life, if he never knows himself.

But it's so simple, the explanation. It's so simple that no one has ever thought of it, and
the reason no one has thought of it is that it is too terrible to think about.

Forget about whether the prophecy is true. Ask instead, "what would the parents have
done once they heard it?"

When Laius and Jocasta were told that Oedipus would eventually destroy them, they pinned
his ankles and abandoned him in the woods, ensuring that he'd someday have cause to do
it. And so when Narcissus's parents heard the requirements for their child's long life...
they would have done everything possible to ensure that he didn't know himself.

No one knows what Liriope and Cephisus did, but whatever they did, it worked: he didn't
even recognize his own reflection. That's a man who doesn't know himself. That's a man
who never had to look at himself from the outside.

How do you make a child know himself? You surround him with mirrors. "This is what
everyone else sees when you do what you do. This is who everyone thinks you are."

You cause him to be tested: this is the kind of person you are, you are good at this but not
that. This other person is better than you at this, but not better than you at that. These are
the limits by which you are defined. Narcissus was never allowed to meet real danger,
glory, struggle, honor, success, failure; only artificial versions manipulated by his parents.
He was never allowed to ask, "am I a coward? Am I a fool?" To ensure his boring longevity
his parents wouldn't have wanted a definite answer in either direction.

He was allowed to live in a world of speculation, of fantasy, of "someday" and "what if". He
never had to hear "too bad", "too little" and "too late."

When you want a child to become something-- you first teach him how to master his
impulses, how to live with frustration. But when a temptation arose Narcissus's parents
either let him have it or hid it from him so he wouldn't be tempted, so they wouldn't have to
tell him no. They didn't teach him how to resist temptation, how to deal with lack. And
they most certainly didn't teach him how NOT to want what he couldn't have. They didn't
teach him how to want.

The result was that he stopped having desires and instead desired the feeling of desire.

Nemesis had an easy job, she only had to work backwards: show him something that didn't
return his love, and he'd be hooked.

Narcissus's parents were demi-gods-- didn't they know how to raise a good son, what a
proper parent needs to do? Yet they listened to a charlatan anyway. They were given
meaningless information by a supposed expert and abandoned all common sense, and so
created a monster who brought death to at least one person and misery to all.

VIII.
I know what you're thinking. You're worldly, you're cynical, your skeptical. You don't go for
all this fate crap. You're thinking whether it is true that not loving others comes before
loving only yourself--it seems backwards to you. You're thinking, what does this little girl
know, really? She didn't write this, after all. (Did I?)

You're thinking whether it is true that parents create the narcissism that plagues their
children for the rest of their lives. Does that match your own experiences? You're trying to
remember back to your own childhood.

Am I right?

Which means you haven't learned the lesson. There you go again, thinking about yourself.
Your impulse wasn't to say, "am I doing this to my kids?" or "how will I act differently?" It
was to wonder about your own nature.

The moral of the story of Narcissus, told as a warning for the very people who refuse to
hear it as such, is that how Narcissus came to be is irrelevant. What was important was
what he did, and what he did---- was nothing.

IX.

I'm being told that I should stop here, that you've had enough. But let me tell you one
more thing: there's a secret to the story. Can you guess what it is?

Close your eyes.

Imagine the scene as a large painting on the wall. There's Narcissus, sitting by the pool,
head tilted downwards, arm idly twirling the water, his mind lost in daydreams. Around him
are the trees, the grass, the sky. Nemesis is behind him, arms crossed, watching the
punishment.

Now look closely at the expression on Nemesis's face. There's something odd there. Look
closely at her eyes.

She's not actually looking at Narcissus, it only looks like she's looking at Narcissus. She's
actually looking-- right back at you.

That's right, the story isn't about Narcissus, it was always about you. There never was an
objective distance for you to watch from.

It was all a kind of charade.

The ancients didn't tell these stories to pass the time or teach children a lesson or tell you
where the word Echo came from. Do you think we took their pop culture and made it into
our literature? These stories were meditations, case studies: what do you see in them?

The secret to the story of Narcissus is that the story is the pool, it is your pool. What do
you see in it? It's a reflection and a projection.

But you know the old saying, when you stare into the pool, the pool stares also into you.
What does the pool see when it stares into you? How does it judge you?

Look behind you. Nemesis is there. Can you guess what your punishment will be?
Open your eyes.

You've been given a second chance.

None of this is real.

----

Audio file here.

Clarifications:

1. The Carvaggio is inverted: the reflection is gazing back at Narcissus.

2. Though the girl, age 8, is reading from a script, inflections and pacing are hers.
Interesting to see how she emphasized certain passages and not others.

3. The background music of the audio file is Hymn To Nemesis, by Mesomedes (1 AD). It is
one of the only surviving pieces of music from the old days. The relevance of the music is
its lyrics:

Winged goddess, Nemesis, who tilts the balance of our lives, dark-eyed goddess, daughter of Justice,
who curbs with iron bit the foolish brayings of mortals, and who through hatred of man's destructive
arrogance drives out black envy. Beneath your relentless and trackless wheel men's fortunes turn and
twist; unseen you walk beside them, and bend low the proud man's neck. Beneath your arm you
measure out his life-span, and stoop to gaze into the depths of his heart, your scales held firmly in your
hand. Be benevolent to us, you who dispense justice, singed goddess Nemesis, who tilts the balance of
our lives.

We sing in honor of Nemesis, immortal goddess, formidable Victory with wings outspread, joint
counselor with Justice, who makes no mistakes, who punishes the arrogance of men, and bears it to the
depths of Hades.
Nemesis preceded even Zeus. Is she really the goddess of vengeance?

4. At the end of the audio you can here a (male) voice say, "...At least you will still look like
you." This sentence does double duty. It sounds like a coda to the main theme, asking the
reader to consider the implications to his own identity. But it's also the last sentence of an
entirely different story, buried under the final music: The Second Story Of Medusa, which is
connected to the story of Echo and Narcissus in a specific way. I'm working on a video.

!
 OCTOBER 5, 2012
Who's Afraid Of Lil Wayne?

boo

This is a video of Lil Wayne's deposition about some nonsense that is beside the point here.
Big surprise: Lil Wayne doesn't take the proceedings seriously. I know, I had to make sure
it was really him, too.
I'm no judge, but he looks like he's in contempt, certainly contemptuous, and at 2:45
makes some serious threats against the lawyer: "you know he [the judge] can't protect you
in the real world?"
Watch that part, empathize with the lawyer. How did you feel? Did you feel intimidated?
Note that no one reigns him in, no one stands up to him, no one ends the interview, no one
demands nothing. Part of this is deposition theatrics, but even the attorney's demeanor
changes, he starts acting the way a person who doesn't want to show he's intimidated starts
acting. He gets flustered, he pauses, he backs up. Wayne is 5'4" and by all accounts has
chronic bronchitis, but everyone is intimidated by him. Why?

II.
If you met Lil Wayne in a dark alley and he said, "He can't protect you," you would probably
wonder who this maniac was talking about and run. But if you were a lawyer at a
deposition, you'd be way less scared, and that's because not only are you in a safe
environment, but it's your environment, your "frame"-- you have all the power, and he has
no power except some assorted Constitutional rights which we all know don't apply to black
people anyway. (NB: "black people" is code for "rappers.") If you follow this, then the
question simply is, why would you be scared at all? What exists inside you that still
surfaces even in the safety of infinite power?
"He might slap you with a bag of weed." There is that.
The first fear is an instinctual one: the lawyer could physically fight back if he had to, but
when he looks into those cold eyes, he has a sense that there are no limits, everything is on
the table-- from insults to decapitation, anything could happen. That's the fear of the
uncanny, which we experience outside of a horror movie when we face: masks, artificial
faces, psychopaths, and even ordinary objects which we are told are uncanny (mirrors,
basement freezers.) "I don't know what he's capable of" means "I know very well what he's
capable of, and it's everything."
That's the kind of fear that fits a street fight, but it has no place in a court; he may want to
decapitate you, but he won't be able to. So why are you afraid?

III.

The interesting thing about being taught that violence is wrong is that of all the lessons we
were taught-- no means no, all men are created equal, a bird in the hand is something
something-- that lesson actually stuck, it became part of our core identity. Most "normal"
people aren't afraid of the consequences of violence (pain) as much as of the violence itself.
Fighting itself is bad. The lawyer isn't afraid of getting hurt, he is afraid of there being a
fight. Wayne may be the aggressor but the voice inside asks, "what did you do to provoke
him? Why didn't you stay away from him?" This fear is so primary that the lawyer backs
down from Wayne for Wayne's sake, not to avoid getting hit but so Wayne doesn't have to
hit him. Wayne is feared not because he's good at winning fights but because he's good at
starting fights, and its oddly been indoctrinated in us that it is everyone else's job not to
provoke fights with those you know will fight, even if you're in the right.
I want to point out how this dichotomy is very much predicated on a difference between
people, not a sameness, and it's felt to be part of the hardware, not the software. There's
you, who "knows better", and there's him, who "fights", and that's just the way it is. And
since you "know better" it's your responsibility to not let this get out of hand. Pro-gun
proponents can be seen as the logical consequence of this position: ok, I'll accept your
societal commandment not to fight, but I want to preserve my right not to have to back
down, either. The sad, logical retort to this, and I'm going to term it the "liberal" position
not because I'm slamming liberals but because it comes from a place of compassion,
though, when I write this out explicitly, is really just a kind of kind of classism: "it's best
just to back down from them... because that's they way thems are."
There's your analogy for America's ((silently) passive-) (loudly lamented (but secretly
feared)) aggressive post Cold War approach to all other countries. The nested parentheses
aren't because I'm a terrible writer, but because those kind of modifications and redoublings
are how we unconsciously justify doing things we know we shouldn't-- we modify our
positions not to do something but after we have done them. Narcissism can be confusing,
the hint is that it operates outside of time.
If you think this fear/foreign policy explains our reticence to attack other countries, you've
misunderstood: it just means we don't like being in fights, it doesn't mean we don't like
other people being in fights for us. Hence: "allies in the region"; volunteer army; UN
Peacekeepers; "adverserial legal system"; talking heads yelling at each other on TV.
That's how we work. Chechnyans are violent; Americans are violent by proxy.
But the specific point is the premise upon which this all rests: guy A may be afraid of guy
B, but he is more deeply afraid of the existence of a fight; and the only reason he'd be more
afraid of "the fight" is if he felt on some level that fighting was wrong, and he could only
have learned that from somewhere, was taught it.
To get people to be more afraid of fighting, even in self-defense, than the physical pain of
an assault takes a lot of years of training, good thing we jump on it early.
First off: associate getting hit with guilt. Even if it's not your fault, it is still felt like it's your
fault, and this can be verified by every woman in a domestic relationship, which is why they
stay. This isn't innate, we learn this: your parents hit you only when you do something
"wrong"; parents separate their fighting kids, "both of you go to your rooms!"; a schoolyard
fight is never judged according to fault, the school punishes both people equally; "zero
tolerance" says the institution that cares nothing about justice, only the preservation of
power. "Nothing gives you the right to hit another person!" Nothing? Seriously?
The only people who learn that getting hit isn't synonymous with guilt are those who get hit
inconsistently, randomly-- having older brothers, abusive parents, constant fights with other
kids in the neighborhood, etc.
You'll observe a certain characteristic true of all bullying: the victim never fights back at all.
He takes his beating, as if to show that he can take it, his strength is in not being broken.
Why not at least throw a few weak punches? This is why the terrible father's typical advice
to his bullied son, over the protestations of his useless wife-- "stand up for yourself! Just
punch him back, and he won't bother you again!"-- is absolutely correct yet impossible to
execute. The problem isn't that the kid is afraid of the bully only, he's (more) afraid of the
system-- that he'll get in trouble if he fights back, or that he doesn't trust that system to
protect him if he fights back and the bully escalates. The parents and school raised the kid
to instinctively be ruled by the system, and now suddenly they are advising him to rebel?
The bully's doesn't have this fear, he has already opted out of the system. And so the
victim, after getting beat up, hears how it was his fault: "You know he's a jerk, why did you
go near him? Just stay away from him." (6)
This is why, on the day that the victim does, finally, "fight back", it isn't by squaring off and
throwing an uppercut-- it's overly violent, vicious, excessive, and that's not because he
needs to overcome the bully but the bully and the system that in effect was protecting the
bully, the system that controls the way he sees the world.
It's very difficult/impossible to raise a kid to be in the system, yet teach him also to fight
against that system "sometimes." That was one of the problems with OWS, you can't shut
down Wall Street if you have two credit cards in your back pocket. The only way to do this
is if you try, on purpose, to raise your kid to be a little bit sociopathic. I realize that this
seems like strange advice coming from a psychiatrist, but I'm not a very good psychiatrist.
Also, I drink.
The only way to make kids understand that there are legitimate times when they must
operate outside the prevailing system is by teaching them that there are even higher
systems. (1) I don't specifically mean religion, but some kind of higher ethical duty; for
lack of a better term I'll call it a strong superego; which says, without needing to explicitly
define every case, "there's a right and a wrong, and you know what it is." (2)

IV.

Somewhat off topic: why do so many "nice" (read: white) teenage girls get horned up over
Lil Wayne? "Rebellion against the father?" Assuming she even lived with a father, most
fathers aren't rebellion worthy, there are very few staid, formal men with fixed rules
requiring breaking. The likely explanation is more instinctual: extremes in appearance
signify "the man underneath"-- a secret vulnerability, a tenderness, that will be given only
to the one person who "sees" it (never mind a million other girls are seeing it). This is an
idea that young women instinctively believe in, that the "ugly" (though to them it's hot)
exterior is a mask that must necessarily cover a beautiful interior, in the same way that a
"good" young girl, aware that how she looks and acts is a put on hiding her own secret
"darkness" (specifically: unlike every other girl in the world, she likes penis), so she
assumes that what's on the outside must be the opposite of the inside, until you're over 40
and then inside=outside=soot. Teen boys, with their own identity confusion, meet the girls
half way ("you don't know the real me... my secret darkness..." A man with one side tough
and one side tender is pretty much a female fantasy, i.e. it no longer exists, except in
rappers (rappers is code for black people) and serial killers (and s2 of Dexter is the male
version of this adolescent fantasy acted out with knives.)

V.
What's makes this video an example of the consequences of American (=debt based
capitalism) parenting is that the lawyer has the advantage of years as a lawyer--AS the
system, with all its power-- and yet has that momentary lapse back into a childhood
position of scared kid facing a bully. Think Narcissus: nothing before age 26 made that kind
of a kid strong, he never earned his power-- he went through the motions, gravity carried
him towards the power that was literally handed to him upon graduation, and he believed in
it because he had no reason not to. But in that moment with Wayne, we see that his
identity as lawyer is put on, a role, which lies on top of the kind of person who still gets
intimidated by physical strength, by bullies-- i.e., a kid who was raised in Nicetown, America
by otherwise good parents, completely free of any tests that would teach him what kind of a
man he was. "I'm a good student." Oh, you should tell Wayne that.
That power of being a lawyer isn't inherent in being a lawyer, it only exists if everyone else
believes you have it, and Wayne chose not to believe it, so the lawyer didn't have it.
The whole fight is taking place inside both men's heads, which is why Wayne is winning. So
how could the lawyer get over his fear, what would he have to do to not be intimidated?
Flip the question: how is it possible for someone with no power (Wayne) to be able to scare
those with more power? The answer is to do what Wayne does instinctively: make the fight
into a different kind of fight. He doesn't accept his "role" as defendant, as someone at the
mercy of the court's rules. Wayne doesn't just not let himself be intimidated by the lawyer,
he doesn't see him as a lawyer, as an agent of a larger, massively powerful structure that
could crush him into oblivion. He sees him as a bad of soot he could easily punch. And
because the lawyer's power was given to him by the court-- the lawyer doesn't see it as
really who he is (he doesn't believe in roles, but identity)-- it is, essentially, paper mache,
and Wayne's blows right through it. Wayne makes him doubt himself and his power, and so
he responds as a powerless man.
If that seems too theoretical to you, think about it this way: the reason the lawyer chuckles,
pauses, his inflection changes, and he asks silly questions (3) isn't just because he is
intimidated, but also because the lawyer doesn't want to appear intimidated of Wayne. As if
to show he's a man, he tries to meet Wayne halfway, on his terms, he defers to Wayne's
power but tries to laugh it off. He tries to pretend that, as a man, he's not afraid of Wayne.
That's why it fails. As a man, he is afraid of Wayne, but as a lawyer, he has nothing to fear.
Where's the shame in getting beat up by Lil Wayne (never mind the pain)? But that's the
lawyer's instinct: not to be seen as weak.
What the lawyer should have done is take control of the context, retreat deeper into the role
of agent of the court with all the power. "It doesn't matter if you can beat me up, it doesn't
matter if you don't recognize the strength of the court, it exists, and I have it." In other
words, to take his physical weakness as a given but irrelevant: so you can beat me up, so
what? (4)
-----

1. Note that the message to overthrow a prevailing system, e.g. the government, is in the
Declaration Of Independence (following Locke) not just as a right but as an obligation; and
it is only able to do this by appealing to "fundamental" rights, "natural law." The point here
isn't to argue whether there is a natural laws, only to show a higher system was explicitly
codified to facilitate being (from the system's perspective) "sociopathic."
2. The danger, of course, is in the balance between defining and not defining, i.e. if this
higher system or superego is not well defined enough, does not possess its own rigid rules
or internal logic, then one runs the risk of creating an Enslaved God-- a narcissistic excuse
for breaking the lower order rules because it benefits you. ("Stealing is wrong, but in this
case...")

3. Either this lawyer isn't very good, or he really was intimidated. Protip: never ask "do
you recall..." because a legitimate answer is "no." It should have been straight facts ("did
you... is this...?") This is a deposition, not a trial, so as long as this lawyer gets all the facts
out and forces Wayne to admit to whatever it is this case is about, he can move for
summary judgment and that's the game. But instead of focusing on facts and forcing Wayne
to declare his position relative to those facts, he's meandered into the nebulous world of
"identity", and has inadvertently made Wayne look interesting, legitimate, authentic--
Wayne is just being Wayne, after all-- thereby helping Wayne's case. You will observe how
many comments on the video are pro-Wayne, even though Wayne is unimaginably hatable
in this (and all other) videos.

And, continuing from "I am an agent of the court, I have all the power" it is his
responsibility to ask the judge to deal with Wayne-- in not doing so, he showed considerable
weakness. If you want a TV analogy, here's two: when they depict a psychiatric hospital,
the doctor says, "please give the patient this injection" and then the big orderlies/techs
have to do the nasty business of restraint, but this doesn't make the doctor appear weak, it
makes him appear even more powerful. In this analogy, the judge is the orderly. Second
example: the woman who manages to get a gun during the scuffle and points it at the
nasty serial killer, only to panic, "stop right there or I'll shoot! I mean it!"-- which serves
only to reveal that she is not going to shoot, not intentionally; so as long as the murderer
makes no sudden moves he can calmly walk up to her and take the gun, using her
ambivalence and fear against her. In this analogy, the judge is the gun. Shoot, stupid.(5)

4. Strategy: Wayne would have lost all his ground if the lawyer had been a woman.

5. The rule for ambivalence (as distinct from questions/decisions/problems) is that it is

never resolved by thought, only by action, and that the action chosen is irrelevant.

6. You'll also observe something that you learned completely backwards. If a bully beats
you up, it's even worse if you tell on him, if you're a tattle tale, it reveals you to be less of a
man (or kid.) But think about this for a second: where did you learn that you'd be less of a
man? From the bully. In other words, that threat is entirely for the bully's benefit, it in no
way reflects anyone else's reality, yet you bought into it completely. Why? And the answer
is that, in the bully's system, in the bully's "frame", telling is a sign of weakness, worse than
getting beat up; and since you have agreedto operate in his system, since you have agreed
to operate by his rules (say, a fist fight you could never win), in those rules if you don't tell,
you at least retain your dignity. Which of course you don't, the whole thing is madness-- to
anyone not inside that system. I take this diversion to show you the immense power of
"the system" on: how you act, what you want, what you value, what you fear. If narcissism
can be spun into something positive-- let's call it stoicism-- the lesson is that your fears and
desires have nothing to do with the object before you and everything to do with the
"system" you've chosen to be in. (I'd make a pornography reference here, but I'll save it for
the book.) My advice to everyone smaller than me (the higher order system) is to always
fight back and always defend your neighbors, regardless of the cost.

[Link]

SEPTEMBER 24, 2012

Fox & Friends punked by Obama supporter

!
definitely going to vote for Obama
Oh, look:

This is a video of SEO marketer Fox & Friends getting "punked." Other headlines read
"Gloriously Punked", "Pranked", "Owned", and "Pwned."

Right wing marionette Gretchen Carlson thought she was interviewing a former Obama
supporter turned Romnomaniac, but no:

the man who pranked Fox News said he's always believed "Fox News is a fake news organization," and
explained that he wanted to shame the conservative television channel for being "stupid" and looking for
interview subjects as if they were "casting a part in a show.

Pwonage.

I.

The thing is, your brain has to be full of prions to think that this "Punked By Obama
Supporter" video shows Fox being punked, either that or you're in first grade where the
following exchange is considered an awesome practical joke: "I told you my name's Bill, but
it's not, it's Will! All this time you thought it was Bill! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" I'd
warn that kid he's going to get himself beat up at recess if I wasn't helping collect the dirt
bombs.

Imagine you are in the target demo for Fox & Friends (i.e. your ex-husband drives an F150
and your daughter's Nokia is bedazzled), would you feel punked? What would you see in
the video? You'd see a wise ass, a self-aggrandizing cynic, a douchebag. So if he's pro-
Obama, then the point is obvious: pro-Obama people are idiots. Thanks, Max, you helped
the cause.

Imagine Gretchen Carlson doing what she should have done if she was smart: kept the
interview going longer. "Oh, I'm sorry, Max, we must all be dummies here at Fox because
when you told us you were pro-Romney we... just believed it. We do that with the Bible and
pre-war intelligence, too, gosh golly. Well, you have a Columbia education and I'm giving
you a national platform, why don't you tell us why we're all stupid here for supporting
Romney? Why should we want Obama for a second term? Please, no soundbites you got
from twitter." As the kid's head melts like he was staring into the Ark of the Covenant we'd
see clearly that he isn't an Obama supporter at all. He may be voting for Obama, I have no
idea, but he wasn't there for Obama, he was there for himself under the pretense
antagonizing Fox, which is why his main argument was "s'up." Advice for aspiring comics
like Max: if you get to go on TV, you should probably prepare some material.

Note, however, that the key antagonism here isn't between Romney's ideas and Obama's
ideas, or even Romney and Obama, but Romney supporters and Obama supporters. This is
textbook contemporary political debate: attack people you hate. The college kid doesn't like
Obama, he just hates Romney supporters. And Gretchen Carlson doesn't like Romney, she
hates Obama supporters. The debate isn't the point-- indeed, you are not supposed to see
how similar they are-- the hate is the point. The candidates themselves are
interchangeable.

We typically think of, say, Fox and MSNBC as opposites, as enemies, but everything else
about them, from their paychecks to their zip code to their terrible, terrible, just plain awful
hairstyles are identical. It's expedient to say Obama and Romney are opposites and color
code them red and blue or black and white depending on whether you drink sugar water or
rice beer, but those distinctions make it really hard to make sense of the world, here are 3
simple questions you will be unable to answer:

1. Who is more likely to oversee the end of war in Afghanistan?

2. Who is more likely to raise taxes on the rich?
3. Who is less likely to send covert paramilitary troops into Iran, and more likely to sell
them weapons?

The answer to all of those is Reagan. History is confusing, and colors aren't going to help.

II.

It's easy to guess that the target demo for Fox & Friends is white women over 55 who have
to get their teenage kids off to the methadone clinic and are perfectly content with a flip
phone. "I don't need a touchscreen to fellowship with the Lord." Fair point. Gretchen
Carlson is a standard example of what that demo calls a "well put together woman"-- heavy
foundation, dresses that fit easily over Spanx and the hypercoiffed hairdo preferred by men
who first ejaculated in the 1970s. I just got the shivers. Fun fact: Michele Bachmann was
her babysitter back in the day. "Michele who?" Exactly. Remember how you were told she
mattered, and you believed it? Kept you out of the game for 2 years 11 months, well done.
Assange was right, the internet does make it easier for us to think for ourselves.

What's not easy to guess, yet importantly true, is that the other target demo for Fox &
Friends is everyone who viscerally hates that first demo. Do you think it upsets Fox that
their footage is making The Huffington Post a lot of money? All part of the plan. The battle
isn't Red v. Blue, but Purple v. You. You lose.

She is thoroughly hated, not for legitimate reasons like having hair in the shape of a Death
Squad Commander but for silly reasons like her regressive politics. I know, I know, she's a
conservative ideologue wingnut that covertly serves the 1% by.... serving as an easy target
for the left? Hmm.

As #50ShadesOnKindle as she appears to be, as sure as you are she is irredeemable,

here's a thought experiment to show you how much you are being fooled: what would it
take to get her to convert to Obamanism? Say Fox closed and MSNBC offered her a $500k/
yr gig going pro-B.O. Could she do it?

Of course you could say, "everyone has a price, and $500k seems close," which is true but
misses a very important nuance. In theory, she could put on a happy face and banter
pleasantly with Rachel Maddow every morning ("we both went to Oxford and like lesbian
haircuts!") then use her large paycheck to Gattaca scrub away the icky feeling under 45
minutes of scalding water. But that doesn't happen, that can't happen, not anymore--
there are no hypocrites, there are no shills; and cynicism only works looking out a window,
never through a looking glass. No, she was born in 1966, which puts her firmly in the
Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World, the one that values
authenticity over anything else, so she couldn't just lie for the money, she'd have to make
herself believe it. And it would be easy for her to do. She'd start out with some "I'm a
fiscal conservative, but socially liberal" stances, "gay marriage seems fine, I guess, of
course civil and women's rights" an hour or so later she's figured out that social security
may be a mess but she's not against the idea of a government backed social safety net..."
Nine seconds after that she'd understand that taxing the super-rich is demonstrably ethical
and, in retrospect, maybe we should not have gone into Iraq... After a month of
reprogramming, all of her hate will be for the 22nd Amendment because it single handedly
prevents Bill Clinton from being President a third time. "God," she'd lament, "if we could
just have gotten that wonderful man a live-in concubine, we'd be in much better shape
today."

The point isn't that she doesn't have political beliefs, but that they are founded on an
artificial premise supplied to you by the media, of which ironically she is both supplier and
victim. If you look at Presidents without the filter of an LCD screen, they don't really play
by the Red/Blue color scheme. (Congressmen do, which is why they are useless.) In fact if
you really follow their actions, Presidents all appear to be.... doing the same things.
Quoting Homer Simpson, as he presses the button for Romney: "I'm voting for the guy who
invented Obamacare."

Their supporters, however, will stab you in the throat for driving the wrong bumper sticker.
How do you generate that kind of rage without filming his wife blowing the neighbor?
("Woah!" Sorry, it's the porn book again.) In the age of authenticity and identity an easy
way is for the media to "expose" people, e.g. show that what the candidate believes and
what he says are different, i.e. that at best they "just say stuff to get elected" and at worst
they are hypocritical ideologues, but this way of thinking is a media template, this is not
how individual psychology works, not today. Do you think that when everyone in Congress
voted to invade Iraq, they were saying to themselves, "I really think this is a bad idea, but
the stupid rednecks in my zipcode all want it, and I want to get re-elected, but I feel a little
guilty for doing it"? WRONG. Each of them created an explanation for why voting for war
was right. NO GUILT. Some truly wanted it, sure; others... figured out how to want it. The
important thing is to stay true to yourself.

Ours is a narcissistic society, i.e. each of us has never experienced hypocrisy because we
are constantly amending our moral code so that we don't ever do something against our
conscience, "this situation is different"; but since each of us has never committed the sin of
hypocrisy, it must, therefore, be the worst of all sins. So on a societal scale, who will find
and "punish" hypocrisy? The answer is the media. If you consider the media is, for all
intents and purposes, society's "maternal superego"-- the one that makes you feel b/m/sad
for not being as fulfilled as you're supposed to be-- then the media's job is to pretend to
have uncovered the REAL motivations for things. Now you feel better.

This explains the furor over the "leaked" Romney speech in which he was cleverly but
dangerously, secretly, recorded saying... what? Talking on his flip phone to the chairman of
the Illuminati, telling them to open the moongate and let commence the demon invasion?

"Eat the gay babies first!"

No, he was recorded saying the exact same thing he has always said, in the exact same
words, not to a clandestine polycephalic conspirator but a room full of Viagra addicts. "I'm
just going to say a few spontaneous, off the cuff remarks I've prepared on colored index
cards, Ann, can you pass me my bifocals?" I'm not endorsing his message, only observing
that he was stupendously on message. I want to meet the one person in America who was
surprised by this speech so I can harvest his liver for a transplant. It's laughable for the
Huffington Post to be appalled at Romney for saying that 47% of the population is
dependent on the government and will vote for Obama no matter what. First of all, the
correct dependency figure is 95%, and second, duh, that's why they're called swing states.
Don't you have a map of this on your site?

So what made this video so astonishing and newsworthy isn't what he said but the very fact
of its existence-- that it was a "leak". If he had said those exact same words to Gretchen
Carlson at 7am standing on his mark it wouldn't have even made her own show: too boring,
Mitt is droning again. But the video conveys the impression of the "real" feelings of Mitt
Romney as opposed to "what he says just to get elected" even though those are the same
thing.

If your personal politics are making it difficult to understand this, let's try it the other way.
The Right's main criticism of Obama is that he is... secretly more liberal than he appears to
be. Hence their obsession with his former weatherman or imam or whatever he was and
alleged recordings of him saying he hates whitey. I'm no Obamaton, but so what? I've
observed him daily for four years pretending to be George Bush. What is he waiting for?
The last day of his last term so he can call Russia on his flip phone and tell them we
surrender? "I use a Blackberry." Very progressive. So we learn today that what a person
does is less important than what he says, and what he says is less important than what he
truly believes, and this rule holds even if they're the same thing. I'm not one to throw
stones, but I blame the parents.

III.

Remember Wikileaks? The hot video back in 2010 was the recording of the helicopter
attack that killed civilians and/or Iraqis.

Thanks Bradley! The video was supposed to change the world, hope it was worth it

This is the kind of stuff Wikileaks thought would affect change in policy. Well, they did help
get us a new President, but a change in policy? What was the debate this video inspired?
The discussion went very quickly from being about what was in the video-- and forcing us to
decide what we want to do with our helicopters-- to being about the video itself-- its
existence, the leak. In this way, the exact same video was used to fuel your hate for the
other side. Meanwhile... anyone else find it interesting/duh that if you whistleblow for the
U.S. government you get $104M, but if you whistleblow against the government you get two
years solitary confinement without trial, in both cases under Obama? "Suicide risk." You
don't say.

IV.

Back to Fox & Friends, hey, what do you know, none of us watch Fox & Friends, yet here we
are.
The standard media constructed bipolar political conflict is a cash cow for sure but it's not
real, please stop yelling at each other, it is madness. The real battle is depicted perfectly in
the above video, you just can't see it because the Lefty-Loosey title is, "Punked By Obama
Supporter." If the Righty-Tighty title was used, it would say: "See This Unemployed Jerk?
Why Does He Deserve Free Healthcare?" But the true, Bilderberg/Area 51 title cannot be
spoken aloud: "Pick Whatever Side You Want, As Long As You Vote To Reduce Corporate
Labor Costs."

SEPTEMBER 1, 2012
The Harvard Cheating Scandal Is Stupid

!
discussing it with people in government is fine because it won't help. good luck

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Harvard University is investigating what it calls an "unprecedented" case of

cheating. College officials say around 125 students may have shared answers and plagiarized on a
[Introduction To Congress] final exam.

What a scandal that such a thing would happen at Harvard! "Academic integrity issues are
a bedrock of the educational mission." And etc.
Before everyone rushes to their predetermined sides, can we ask why, when there are
cheating scandals, they are almost always in introductory classes? When the stakes are
lowest?

75% of the students in these kind of courses get As and Bs because of Grade Inflation. I'd
put big money down that if I used a crayon to draw an elephant and a donkey I'd get at
least a B+ with the margin comment, "Interesting take, could you elaborate?"

And yet the students here felt compelled to cheat. Take a minute away from your self-
righteousness and put yourself in their shoes. Did they not think they could get an A on
their own? Or.... is "cheating" the only way to create the kind of answer that the professor
wants?

Let's find out. Here's the test:

!
!

"Using in-text citations to support your answer" is the standard way academics pretend at
knowledge, and it is always a trick, it doesn't allow the reader "a better understanding of
your thought process," it is an appeal to authority (Salmon 2006) masquerading as critical
thinking (Ennis 1987). But it sure makes grading easier, here is the answer key: >5
references: A. 3-4 references: B Etc.

If I gave this test to other government professors not affiliated with the course, I'm sure
they'd have good answers-- but would it be "what the professor is looking for?" That's the
phrase that alerts you to the fact that the class isn't designed for you to learn but for him to
teach. All for the fair market price of $2000.

II.

You know what's funny? If 125 American soldiers all simultaneously broke some military
rule of conduct, the noise that would blow out your eardrums would be Harvard professors
yelling about how the administration was to blame for creating a culture that facilitated that
misconduct. "This is not the random acts of a few bad apples, this is a natural consequence
of the policies of Rumsfeld and Cheney!" Short memories, everyone? Not me, I drink to
remember, and I drink a lot.

There's your hypocrisy, and it is magnificent in its conscious blindness and unconscious
rationalization. I defy you to find me one single professor that is now asking, "seriously,
gang, what the hell kind of operation are we running here where 125 of theoretically the
brightest kids in the country-- who can all pass physics and organic chemistry and write
novels and play music without ever cheating-- then do it in a $2000 Intro To Gov class we
probably shouldn't even be offering?" Any soul searching? Deconstruction of the system?
Sleepless night over destroying the lives of 125 kids? Anything?
Harvard says that it noticed students used similar phrasing and strings of words, which
could signal cheating but let me offer a more uncomfortable alternative: the gated
community of academic jargon.

On a hunch, by which I mean a complete and utter certainty, I hit up some of the course
professor's academic papers. Here is the very first sentence in the very first paper I read:

Context is the frontier of participation research.

Right. 7 simple words, have any idea what the hell they mean? Don't think too hard about
it: they don't mean anything. Professor Platt is eyeballs deep in academiaitis, the
jargonization of the meaninglessness of the work. The move is to make you feel stupid so
you don't see this meaninglessness, for example when you're confronted with a paper titled
in the following format: X, Y, And Z: 15 To 20 Syllables About Something No One Gives A
Damn About, where X and Y are linked rhythmically if not semantically and Z is an abrupt
non-sequitor indicative of the writer's atrophied left cerebral hemisphere (Gray 1918). For
example:

Boons, Banes, and Neutrals: Contest and Disparities in Political Participation

and

Innovation, Inevitability, and Credibility: Tracking The Origins of Black Civil Rights Issues

Those are both his, I knew they would be there before I looked for them, and I knew this
because 125 people simultaneously understood that there was no way out except to "cheat"
on a final they were all going to get As on anyway. I don't blame him for writing like this,
for thinking like this: that's how he was taught to think and write (which is why his final
exam questions are incomprehensible), and he would never have gotten his PhD unless he
wrote like this, because either you are part of the system, or you are an enemy of the
system. There are no other choices, and he chose a. Please note a= Assistant Professor.

So the point here isn't a critique of Professor Platt's academic career, but that he is now paid
to teach his sleight of hand illusions to students who find themselves... at a bit of a
disadvantage. "This is how intelligent people think," they're told. Granted, it does seem
complicated. But the whole thing is a carnival trick, because what the students do not
know, what they have not been told, is that it is completely impossible to summarize jargon
without appealing to that very jargon; that the moment you try to explain, in simple
ordinary English the meaning of the jargon, your whole paper ends up being three
sentences. So what can you do when the question asks for 2-4 pages, other than copy
"similar strings of words?" You could run a po-mo generator, I guess.

Because I know that some of you over 40 are stupid, I will state explicitly that of course
cheating is wrong and it shows a lack of moral character, but I am forcing you to ask
whether 125 people simultaneously cheating might be indicative not of a sudden resurgence
of Satanism but an outbreak of encephalitis, with Professor Platt as Patient Zero?

This is why I am able to say, controversially but with absolute certainty, that everyone in
that class cheated: if they didn't copy off of each other, they copied off of the professor, with
no internalization of the "knowledge" because that was never the point of the class. If you
want to try and tell me how those are any different, I'll be at the bar.

So let me make my own counter-allegation: the students aren't guilty of cheating, the
university is guilty of entrapment. Here's what you're not allowed to do: ask a basic
question, "Do interest groups make Congress more or less representative as an institution?"
and then threaten that "the response will be judged on how well it draws from the course
materials to make an argument." NO. You could evaluate the answer on its merits or the
rigor of the thinking, but whether and how it draws on the course materials is exactly what
you do not want-- it facilitates the grading of the essays, sure, keeps everything inside the
gates, but it derails learning. When you write that, you force 125 people to collaborate on
the real final exam question: "What does the professor want?" Apparently, what he wants is
an easy way to grade, and you all got caught accommodating him.

Since this is a government course, let me give you an important lesson in government, one
which, unsurprisingly, is never taught: "It is not the young people that degenerate. They
are not spoiled until those of mature age are already sunk into corruption." That's
Montesquieu. Don't worry, it won't be on the test.

[Link]

--

Are Law Schools Lying To Their Applicants?

AUGUST 24, 2012

Paul Ryan vs. Rage Against The Machine
!
i got you babe

Here's a prediction: This will be the least attended Presidential election in history. Over
50% of the voting age population will not even bother to find out who won, let alone vote.
Unless you have money on it when you wake up the next morning at 6am the first sound
you hear will be a clock radio playing the counterculture anthem "...then put your little hand
in mine..." and you will want to kill yourself. Or marry Andie McDowell, which is only
slightly worse. "She was great in Sex, Lies, And Videotape." No she wasn't. Ativan is not
method acting.

Paul Ryan says he likes Rage Against The Machine, which everyone thinks is ironic since
Ryan is "the very machine they are raging against." Get it? You're going to read that
statement a lot.

I'm not political at all, not only am I not going to vote in the coming election I'm going to
hide in the bushes outside my local polling station in a full Raiders uniform and clothesline
the highly dangerous people who are only there to vote for Jesus. But while I don't know
much about Paul Ryan and even less about Rage Against The Machine, I do know a media
set up when I see one.

Ok, so we know Ryan is an idiot for not knowing he's not supposed to like Rage Against The
Machine, but did it occur to anyone to ask how we know Ryan likes them, why we know this
utterly useless and meaningless and distractionary and prejudicial piece of miscellany? "It
was on Ryan's facebook page." Come on, pants on fire, don't act like you even knew he had
a facebook page, next your going to tell me you've read the Constitution "several times."
You learned it the same way we all did: someone told you it was in a profile about him in
The New York Times, and that someone was the only group to have read that profile: other
media.

The structure of political reporting is 100% identical to the structure of celebrity reporting:
the double act. Straight man delivers the softball pitch:
Yet even if he is viewed as politically pure by the modern-day standards of his party's base, he is not
without contradictions. The nation's first Generation X vice-presidential candidate, he is an avowed
proponent of free markets whose family has interests in oil leases. But he counts Rage Against the
Machine, which sings about the greed of oil companies and whose Web site praises the anti-corporate
Occupy Wall Street movement, among his favorite bands.

and the rest of the media hit the punchline. Over and over and over, five nights a week.
"He's the very machine they're raging against!" We get it, Rockbrain. Was funny once.

II.

The real irony of this story is that the clueless one is Rage Against The Machine, not Paul
Ryan. This isn't a partisan statement, it is simply a fact.

Ryan's main sin is not paying attention to the lyrics, believing he can listen to music without
caring about the band's message.

The thing is, Ryan and the rest of the Gen-X coven were taught not to pay attention to
lyrics, not just by the mumblings of Nirvana and the distracting Cleveland accent of
Rammstein, but by our chief connection to all pop culture in America: commercials.

The title says "Songs Ruined By Commercials" but imagine those ads playing in a different
country: their only connection to the songs is those ads. (1)

You may counter that these songs were already meaningless pop songs, but this happens all
the time:

This is an ad of nearly genius creativity if your metric is brand identification, brand

enhancement. It almost convinces you that "Dude, the media has conditioned us to think
the world is a bad place, but most of the time, humans beings are awesome" and the only
thing that will stop you from falling into that spiral of propaganda is if you say out loud that
the person trying to convince you of that fact is Coca Cola. Did you feel a little bit of global
community? Well, I've been pretty much everywhere, and no. Play the video with the
sound off and don't look at the words-- a kind of voiceover, right?-- and what you see is a
world with crumbling infrastructure, appallingly terrible safety standards, what I assume are
drunk drivers, and lots and lots of people not working. There's a guy defacing public
property at 0:59, but it's all good.

You know what else I see that deserves mention, by which I mean is completely obfuscated
by the ad? There are cameras everywhere.

Ryan listened to the Rage Against The Machine in the precise way it was produced to be
heard: as soundtrack to your own movie, stripped of its intended meaning. It is not an
accident that it found it's way as an actual soundtrack to an actual movie.
I'm sure Rage is earnest in their core belief system, I do not dispute this, I do not claim
they are sell outs at all, but you can't argue that you're part of the counterculture if you've
been #8 on TRL in between Destiny's Child and Lou Vega's Mambo No. 5. You aren't the
counterculture, you are the culture.

check out the militant poetry, yo. Brought to you by MTV

In this respect Paul Ryan didn't misunderstand Rage's message, he simply heard the music
exactly as he and everyone else were directed to hear it. If the song that changed your life
is played on a radio station that begins with a K or whose symbol is a bee, you are a bah
bah black sheep. "This is good," FM program directors said to you in 1999. "Eat it."

I don't begrudge anyone making a fortune from their art, but if you allow the system to
make you rich from your art, well, there's a trade off.

Tom Morello may want to do a bit of soul searching: did his art really bring awareness to the
public, or did it serve the system's function of keeping everyone in line, i.e. a safe way to let
off steam so that the kind of changes he was earnestly demanding were negated? This is
the exact same question one must ask about the now safely defuncted OccupyWallSt, and
even Obama himself. You know why you don't hear about Ron Paul anymore? Because you
heard about him back when it was safe. Now that you have two candidates who couldn't
possibly be more similar-- not in "ideology", but in action-- you are given no third option.
Strike that, no second option.

Here's the rule, may as well learn it before it's your head in the scope: when you give
yourself to the media to do with what they will, they will. You can't go crying about it later,
because by then you will have ceased to exist.

Instead of condemning Paul Ryan for not being cool enough to get it, Tom Morello might
want to ask how it is possible that "the embodiment of the machine we are raging against"
ended up liking him. What was the precise mechanism that caused that to happen? Do you
think-- everyone take a moment-- that Paul Ryan liked it on his own free will? That if we
dropped those beats on some 10th century viking marauders, they'd be all in?

And why, when Tom Morello wants to rage against Paul Ryan, he does it through the
subversive, iconoclastic, angry medium of.... Rolling Stone? That'll get him. Let me be
clear: I don't blame Morello for writing in Rolling Stone, I blame him for not asking himself
what kind of a man is he that attracts Rolling Stone. (2)

Paul Ryan and Tom Morello are 100% the exact same person. I realize they and you may
think they are different, but they are more closely a product of their immediate environment
and generation than any of their incidental differences. If Morello and Ryan went back in
time and sideways in geography to the November after the October Revolution, they would
totally lock the door to their shared apartment. "I don't know what the hell is going on
outside," it doesn't matter which one would say to the other, "but I'm pretty sure I don't
want any part of it." The partisanship that everyone desperately clings to is a media
construction serving the necessary function of letting you self-identify, in the absence of
anything in your life more substantive. In other words, Fox & Friends are doing you a
favor.
Both Ryan and Morello have some influence on society, please observe what has become of
them as individuals, it is quintessentially what defines post WWII America: if there is
something legitimately dangerous to the system-- and Morello and Ryan both fit this
description-- rather than send in the secret police, it absorbs them by hyperpopularity, edits
them into TV soundbites, buries them in plain sight. Problem solved. Put on your special
sunglasses:

[Link]
---

1.

The straightforward deconstruction: the ad presents not representational images but

aspirational images, in this case it's not targeting the demo that likes Oberhofer, but shows
you that you can be like the five people with the phones who, by virtue of their phones,
stand apart from the masses. Anyone can listen to a concert, these people are, in some
way, part of that concert experience. NB: they are the only people you remember from the
ad, other than the band itself. Those people let other people in on the big secret, e.g.
Oberhofer is great.

But observe that when they decide to share the video of the concert, they share it with
other people who are also at that very concert-- who then divert their attention away from
the live performance so that they can gaze in wonder at the broadcast of the concert. You
may think this is an accident but it is one of the best representations of consumerist
capitalism, i.e. branding, so pay attention: there is no expectation that people can enjoy,
engage, or value something directly, especially art, religion, politics-- the expectation is that
we need an intermediary, an "expert", someone who really understands these things. T-
Mobile is offering you the chance not to experience art more directly-- which they know is
impossible and anyway not that important to anyone-- but to become that intermediary, to
derive identity from that role.

2. An interesting take on this is the British series Black Mirror, three separate stories of "our
unease with the modern world." Spoilers coming: In the second story, the youth are put on
stationary bikes to create energy for the world, and are paid in, essentially, Facebook credits
that serve also as money. The only way out of this enslavement is to get on Hot Spot-- i.e.
to become famous. One young black man rises up against the system with the only
violence he has available: he goes on Hot Spot and threatens to stab himself in the neck
with a shard of glass unless he's allowed to rage against the machine. But rather than gas
the theatre or send in the snipers-- they give him his own weekly talk show where he is
safely allowed to rage against the system, in between commercials.

However, the true import of that episode is only revealed when considered with the first
episode, in which the Princess (e.g. of Wales) is kidnapped, with a single ransom demand:
the Prime Minister must have sex with a pig, on live TV. Is the Princess's life wirth it?
Should they negotiate with terrorists? But all of this is cover for the real conflict: if he does
it, he'll be disgraced, most certainly not re-elected.

He does it: it takes over an hour, some tranquilizers and some Viagra. It is moving,
because as he cries through the sex act, all of England is watching from pubs, cheering and
jeering. However, the final post-credits scene reveals the secondary consequence of the
always-on, broadcast world: after a year, the Prime Minister is happily re-elected. No one
even remembers the pig incident.
Together, the two episodes suggest that not only does appearing on TV trivialize events, but
it temporizes them. When everything is recorded, nothing is remembered.

---

AUGUST 16, 2012

Just Because You See It, Doesn't Mean It's Gone

! This is a post for psychiatrists/

psychologists who do long term psychotherapy, sorry everybody else. Pandering to my base.
It's an election year.

This is the email I got:

Dear Alone:

You wrote a while ago:

No one ever asks me, ever, "I think I'm a narcissist, and I'm worried I'm hurting my family." No one
ever asks me, "I think I'm too controlling, I'm trying to subtly manipulate my girlfriend not to notice
other people's qualities." No one ever, ever, ever asks me, "I am often consumed by irrational rage, I am
unable to feel guilt, only shame, and when I am caught, found out, exposed, I try to break down those
around me so they feel worse than I do, so they are too miserable to look down on me."
If that was what they asked, I would tell them them change is within grasp. But.

I might be asking myself something like that. If I tell you a story would you tell me what
you think?

II.

Imagine a crowded subway, and a beautiful woman gets on. Hyper-beautiful, the kind of
woman who can wear no makeup, a parka, earmuffs and a bulky scarf and that somehow
makes her look even prettier. A handsome man about her age in an expensive suit gets up
and says, "please, take my seat." She smiles, and hastily sits down.

What happened? Raise your hand if you think this is a sexually motivated act, i.e. Christian
Grey isn't so delusional that he assumes she's going to have sex with him, but in a Hail
Mary, longshot kind of way it's worth the price of standing for three stops.

Now raise your hand if you think he was just being nice-- he would have done it for any
woman. Huh. Really? Then why was he sitting at all?

But why does the woman think she got the seat? Does she think, "the only reason he gave
me his seat is because the Hail Mary is worth the price of standing for three stops?" Or does
she think, "no, come on, he was just being nice."

We can't be certain why Hugo Boss gave up his seat. But if the woman picked b, we know
something about her: she sees the world as intrinsically nice, it's a place where random
kindness exists and hence must be a reflection on the physics of the world, not her
specifically-- "New Yorkers are so nice!" she says, and she actually believes it.

In other words: the goodness is in him, not in her.

III.

One of the frustrating things for therapists is a patient who is unable to see reality. Maybe
it's a guy who takes every little thing his ex does as a sign she wants him back; or it's a
college kid who is failing his classes because he thinks it's more important to "help Jen with
the crisis she is going through"; or maybe it's a woman who thinks men aren't interested in
her.

In the course of therapy she explains she wishes she could meet a good guy, nice, with a
good job, someone like the guy on the subway. And you're stumped, didn't she meet a guy
on the subway who was exactly like the guy on the subway? "Oh, no, he wasn't interested in
me, he was just being nice."

You can guess the backstory: father left when she was 8, mom was always telling her she
was too fat and too skinny, an "overly critical maternal superego" which is different than a
paternal superego because it yells at you not when you sin but when you fail. This is the
mom who doesn't want you to have premarital sex, of course, but a girl like you should be
dating the captain of the football team. So the men who do ask her out, the ones she ends
up dating-- fearless, calf tattooed men who make their attraction to her explicit, even
vulgar, so she can't help but know that they want her and what they want from her.
Meanwhile, these guys then treat her like crap. So she lives her life thinking that the only
people who like her-- the people she has to settle for-- are... not great.

Genetics took care of her body but the upbringing affected her vision: the childhood of
never good enough filters her present reality, obscures it, she can't see what is plain to
everyone else, e.g. she's beautiful. So the process is to uncover the reasons why her view of
reality is distorted and help her realign with reality. Use insight to strengthen her damaged
ego, or, if you want a ten step approach, block automatic thoughts. In short, to understand
that she is good, that men do find her attractive, not just the brazen ones, not just jerks.

IV.

If you think of narcissism as grandiosity you miss the nuances, e.g. in her case the problem
is narcissism without any grandiosity: she is so consumed with her identity (as not pretty)
that she is not able to read, to empathize with, other people's feelings. She doesn't care to
try because it conflicts with how she sees herself. Ergo: Giorgio Armani was just being nice.

I recognize, of course, the countertransference: that I am attracted to her, it is impossible

not to be. Of course I'm also in full control of myself, I don't break the boundaries of
treatment. But I also see that she doesn't see I'm attracted to her, in fact I often observe
how little attention she pays to my "feelings." She treats me as if I am a voice only. Once I
had a cast on my forearm and she made no mention of it. What does this suggest?

Two or three years later, nothing has changed except-- she drinks more. Huh. Things did not
go according to plan.

What happened? What happened is my analysis of the countertransference was purposefully

self-serving, "see, I'm a good therapist in detecting this" which defended me against the
truth: yes I was able to admit to myself that I was attracted to her, but what I was unwilling
to admit to myself-- that anyone outside of me would see immediately-- was that part/all of
my eagerness to help her was that she was beautiful; and the way in which I know to
impress beautiful women is by giving gifts, helping-- as it was with my own mother. Not that
I was so delusional as to assume she'd have sex with me, but in a Hail Mary, longshot kind
of way....

And since I was having those feelings, and those feelings are BAD, "inappropriate" as we
say in therapy, then it is entirely likely that rather than not correctly seeing reality, she saw
it and guarded against it: by deciding that men--me-- don't want to have sex with her, they
are just being nice.

What I didn't consider is that her blindness to the desires of men is necessary to her
sanity-- that she doesn't want to believe that every man's interaction with her is sexual; she
doesn't want to have to live in a world that only sees her naked. She wants the world to
be... nice. Take as the origins anything you want, maybe abuse, maybe she started noticing
at 15 how all the neighborhood fathers looked at her a little differently than they looked at
the other girls; too many date rape close calls, jealous girlfriends, whatever you want.

Which means that my push to get her to see reality is interpreted by her as yet another
sexual advance-- because it is. When she walked in she was able to block out the possibility
I was attracted to her, but through diligent application of reality testing I forced her to see
my erection-- "look, I really want to help you understand what you do to me!"
Fortunately for her she doesn't exist, I made this story up, but it serves to illustrate an
important point: rather than assume people are too damaged to interpret reality, the default
assumption should be: all of this is a defense against change. (1)

V.

Here's a story I didn't make up, though I've altered it to simplify a complicated situation and
protect his anonymity.

Joe had a girlfriend, and though they were happy the relationship seemed to run it's course,
and she took up with another man. Despite this, she couldn't fully let go of Joe, so they still
talked and texted and met once in a while.

During talks some things came up, notably things about Joe, notably Joe's apparent
indifference in the relationship. For example: "I was also hurt," she said, "that when we
broke up, it didn't seem to bother you."

Joe told me it did bother him, perhaps more in retrospect (now realizing how much he liked
her), but he wondered if his lack of emotion wasn't a signal of a larger problem- an inability
to connect.

So: multiple texts, chats, and, at one meeting:

We met and we cried very much, she said she was sad that we weren't together, but it still made sense
for her to be with that other guy. We ended up kissing and crying at the same time. After that I didn't see
her for about two weeks. But we continued to talk, she'd said that she missed me, and I missed her too.
She said she'd been crying everyday since she that last meeting, wondering if....

Because of that I arranged to see her again, but this time she said she had made up her mind and
decided to be with the guy. She also said very quickly that she fantasized about us getting back together
someday, but not now. In this kind of situation I always try to be strong and say that the person is not
responsible for me, but this time I collapsed and cried. I asked her if she still loved me, she said "Yes, but
it can't be right now". (2)

Eventually they meet again, and on the way home... things get murky. He says he badly
wanted to kiss her, but she did not want to.

"She stopped me. I said "Ok, then I'll leave", but then she asked me to stay. She said she was divided, and
very anguished, she thought she was doing something wrong. I said it was not wrong, because she loved
me and love can't be wrong (or some similar catchphrase). I tried to kiss her again, this time she didn't
resist but she wasn't very passionate either. I noticed she was very sad. I said I loved her. She said "stop
it", and ran off.

So I'm trying to think what I did wrong, and what I'm asking myself is:

- How could I not pay attention to her feelings, making her anguished just because I needed that kiss? I
see that I was extremely selfish that day-- here she was crying and ambivalent, and all I felt was
horny-- and throughout the whole process I could only think that I wanted her for my own needs and
forgot about how she felt.

Even though I always asked her if she wanted me out of her life and she said no, why do I even need to
ask? Why couldn't I just see that she was crying and tried to comfort her instead of trying to kiss her?
So:

How do I stop hurting people?

I know that I'm only thinking about that because I had a loss and I miss her a lot and I want to be a
better person so I'll have a better life, but still it's good to become a better person and stop hurting
people.

This time I really want to change who I am because who I am is not working.

I wrote a reply about their relationship, which highlighted her ambivalence and how such
ambivalence in women is often resolved. However, he wasn't really asking for advice about
the relationship, but rather advice about being a better person. Was he wrong for pressuring
her when she was so conflicted? Did he ignore her feelings? How can he change?

He wrote back (excerpts):

1. I see her ambivalence and her conflict. Maybe I'd have an easier time if I just said "I want you, dump
the guy"....

2. I feel jealous now that she accepted the "no more texts or dates or anything". Because at first the fact
that she fell in love with someone else didn't stop her from expressing love towards me. Now it did. Now
I'm jealous....

4. Yes, I feel guilty for the day when she was crying and all I could think of was trying to kiss her. I
didn't use strength, didn't hold her or anything, she accepted my kiss but very sadly. Sometimes I think
about it and it feels almost like I raped her. This fact specifically is what made me write to you: I
wouldn't share that thought with anyone who's close to me. Is that shame or guilt? Or both? I know that
she didn't see it that way because later that day we talked and she told me she didn't want me to leave
her life and she couldn't forget me. Which is consistent with your interpretation.

4.a. I had noticed narcissistic behavior in me before several times and I've been trying to change. For
instance, somehow I thought I'd look ridiculous giving someone a gift so I didn't usually did that, no
matter the circumstance. I originally thought giving a gift was about me, a reflection on me, not about
the person receiving the gift. When I came back from Denver I brought a Broncos jersey for my little
brother, but I was worried about what my father would think of me and about my choice of a gift, and
stuff like that, but I focused on how my brother would feel receiving the gift. It may sound silly but for
me that was a big deal. It pisses me off that I forgot to pay attention to her feelings in this situation.

My reply:

I now understand that this kiss is what prompted your email, this specific incident. I
recognize you feel guilty for pressuring her into a kiss. And she was crying, which should
have stopped you (you believe) but it didn't. If you were blind to her feelings you could say,
in retrospect, you are a selfish person without empathy who doesn't notice other people's
feelings, who only does what he wants. But it wasn't blindness (you tell me), you knew full
well she didn't want to kiss you, yet you proceeded anyway. This makes you even more of a
narcissistic monster. Is this a correct hearing of your story as you intended it to tell me?

The problem is that you are telling me two stories.

On the one hand, you are telling me a story about your "guilt" over taking advantage of her
vulnerability and kissing her when she didn't want it. Which is odd, because apparently
kissing her wasn't really an example of taking advantage of her-- she didn't think so, right?
She told you so herself later. So then it was a kind of dialogue: her ambivalence wanted a
firm response, and you (against your ordinary nature) were surprised to find yourself
compelled to give it to her.

You kissed her; you say-- your words-- that she didn't see it as any kind of "rape"-- but did
she feel any guilt for kissing you? For cheating on her boyfriend? I'm not saying she should
or should not, merely that one would expect her to be wrestling with her guilt. But instead
on the phone later she is discussing yours, making you feel like you did nothing wrong. If
you follow me so far, then talking to you and easing your guilt isn't primarily because she
cares about your suffering, but because it allows her to avoid looking at her own. If you
"forced" the kiss-- and by saying you didn't force it she is saying it's okay that you did--- in
forgiving you she would be benevolently implying the fault was yours and she was
blameless. This isn't malicious or intentional, this is all unconscious, it is performance: can I
trick my superego? Since I was crying, how much could I really have wanted it?

But none of that is important, because there's a second story.

Your next paragraph to me describes narcissism-- my "specialty"-- and worrying about how
a gift would be seen by your father, and (ultimately) doing the right thing and focusing not
on your feelings but on your brother's. But how can I not read that paragraph and think:

father=TLP
brother=ex
gift=kiss

and

"I thought giving a gift was about me, not about the person receiving the gift" which is,
"what will you, TLP, think about this, now that I am thinking about other people's feelings?
Will you be critical like my father, or will I get your approval?"

I know you'll counter that you in fact did give a gift to your brother, but the juxtaposition of
the example you chose from 10 million other possibles cannot be a coincidence. Which is
why it is important to focus on the words.

So what is the right interpretation of that paragraph, 4a? Why does it follow so logically
from 4? Why are you telling it to me? Like all these things, it's a defense against change:
"see? I think about other people's feelings." But that's the narcissism. The narcissism isn't
forcing a kiss on her; the narcissism is the thinking that all of these events with your ex are
entirely yours to decide, to bear the responsibility of. She is merely a supporting cast
member that wasn't nearly as sophisticated, insightful, intuitive as you. You want to bear
the guilt because it shows you-- and me-- you are a better person.
Please understand that this is not a judgment of you, it is (my opinion) of how you see
yourself.

Your first story is the age old story of unresolved feelings for each other, oozing out
between the clenched fingers of a tightening fist that thinks it can will emotions into control.
But the insight for you is that your "narcissism" isn't a lack of empathy but the opposite:
other people are all little brothers, ex-girlfriends, supporting cast, who are less able to make
good decisions, so the world needs you to do it.

I would say that ethically you are still supposed to act as if you had unilateral responsibility;
but simultaneously you have to be able to see the other as a fully autonomous, free, aware
person.

In summary: you could feel (a little) guilty for kissing her when you knew it was wrong; but
the real problem for you is that you naturally reduced her to a person with less agency than
yourself.

VI.

The problem with therapy-- include self help and mind hacks-- is its amazing failure rate.
People do it for years and come out of it and feel like they understand themselves better but
they do not change. If it failed to produce both insights and change it would make sense,
but it is almost always one without the other.

In Joe's case, it is supremely tempting for both patient and therapist to focus on the
problem he is describing-- "I feel guilt over pressuring the girl, does this make me a
narcissist?" And the therapist can generate a series of insights which the patient accepts,
which although correct lead nowhere.

What's missing is an analysis of the transference. Joe added an entire paragraph 4a which
was-- superfluous? It served only to stroke my ego, i.e. "you've helped me, here is an
example where I was able to apply your lessons." It's that paragraph in its seeming
uselessness that reveals his real motivation in writing me and hence his actual problem.
He's offering ME a story about how he forced himself on a girl- and was legitimately
bothered by doing it-- but telling it to me is basically saying, as in 4a, "here's an example
where I did something bad but I also feel guilt about it-- if I feel guilt, I must be changing--
see, I learned the lessons!" He specifically references the difference between guilt and
shame because he knows I know that narcissists never feel guilt, only shame. So rather
than that guilt being evidence of self-awareness, that guilt is a trick for my approval. He
sounds like he's asking for advice, "how can I change?" but what he wants is in the
transference: "Dad, did I do good?" It is that seeking of approval that is the heart of his
problem, not his relationship with women, not his "narcissism" of kissing her when she
didn't want to.

A really good therapist will be able to get to this kind of depth; someone who will not take
the chief complaint at face value, but will focus on the words.

And yet: still this will fail to produce any meaningful change. Insights plenty, but no change.
Is it because I am wrong? No, it's because I am not Alone.

VII.
It's a cliche in psychiatry to "analyze the transference" but never mind no one bothers to do
this much anymore; it is completely impossible to do this.

I may have been quite clever in telling him the interpretation of the transference in 4a, but
the problem is that when I told him "you are seeing me as a kind of father" I was saying it
AS his father. Not: I stopped being me and became his father; but from the very moment I
responded to him, every single word I wrote was coming from his father. You can't step
outside the transference, there is no objective place for me to stand and tell him my
thoughts, and there's no safe distance for him to stand and hear them. So if I say, for
example, that I do or don't think he handled his ex correctly, I am saying that as his
father-- i.e. critical, judgmental, kind, forgiving, whatever.

If I think that by explaining the transference to Joe I somehow dispel it, as if it were an
illusion that once explained could never fool him again-- then I won't understand that while
I offer further insights or interpretations, while my lips are moving, all he is hearing is:
angry at me; love too easily obtained therefore of no value; thinks I'm a fool; thinks I'm a
genius.

Then what Joe will do to me, his therapist, is exactly what he does to his own father: try
and fool me into giving my approval. And if he doesn't get it one way he'll trick me another.
His email can be understood as just this kind of a trick; the focus on the guilt over the kiss
is a way of saying got me, "see? I'm changing! Validate me!"

Here is another danger: if I (TLP) think that when I explain things to him, that he and I step
outside of the transference and speak objectively-- as if we are talking about Joe while he is
sitting in the other room-- if I think this objective stance is not only possible but desirable--
then what I am teaching him to do is to self-observation, I am training him to examine his
own actions and thoughts as if he were a neutral person inside his own mind. But that other
person would be me. Grant me 50% of the time I'm awesome. What about the rest? Would
that person have helped the beautiful woman on the train, or driven her to alcoholism?

Given that the problem here is a kind of narcissism (a description and not a judgement)
then by fostering self-observation I am actually worsening his narcissism. And he will
inevitably say, "I know myself better, but I'm still doing the same things."

VIII.

So it becomes important not to fall into that trap, to foster change and not just insight. If I
was actually his therapist then the correct thing to do would be NOT to tell him all this, but
rather to note it to myself as information: "this is the nature of the transference." It's
hopefully of some use in an email because since we don't have any kind of relationship;
since I am not likely to meet him, it's better that he understands how this works than. But
in therapy there is no value in it to the patient.

In fact, as his therapist, my urge to explain it to him would be my own unKantian

narcissism: using him as a means to show off. Telling him my great insight is the same as
my desire to help a beautiful patient: it is for me, not for them. In therapy we see a reversal
of my often repeated maxim: if you're saying it, it's for you.

And so what? What's wrong with giving advice? Because (in his case) he doesn't want
advice, he wants validation. And if he doesn't get it from me, he'll do what he already told
me he would do: "...I was worried about what my father would think of me... but I focused
on how my brother would feel receiving the gift." In other words, he'll find someone who
does. This is his real problem: the constant search for approval from Dad, women,
wherever. And of course it will never be enough, because that's the nature of the pathology:
if he gets validation he'll be temporarily appeased, but eventually devalue it because if it
was obtainable by him, it must be valueless.

I can infer from this that he sees his father as generally right but overly critical, and Joe
says to himself, "I'm a good person, everyone else thinks I'm a good person, but no matter
what I do I can't convince my father of this." This is self-doubt, and it quickly becomes:
"I've fooled everyone else, but my usual tactics don't fool my father" and so Joe is trapped
between hating his Dad for being so mean but still/therefore suspects he's the best judge of
character out there, which means Joe suffers not from high self-esteem, but low self-
esteem. This is why my approval (if I were his therapist) is so important to him and
simultaneously so damaging: "TLP is equivalent to my father. I may not be able to get my
father's approval, but if I can get TLP's then it confirms that I am good." And change is thus
unnecessary. The point there is that he doesn't want to change, he wants a reason not to
change, he wants to be seen as good without having to earn (whatever it is he believes is
necessary to get) his father's approval.

IX.

Therapists should understand the imaginary transference but not play into it, and instead
stay outside, an abstraction, an inexplicable mind that already knows all the answers but
doesn't tell them (because telling them is inside the transference.) Whose silence is taken
by the patient to mean something-- and the answer to the patient's problem is how they
interpreted that silence.

This is why I know that though Joe will "like" my email to him very much, think it helpful, it
is this post that he won't like that will actually help him more. He can't say anything to me
here, there's no dialogue, the post just is: all he has is what I've written here and his
feelings about it; and it is those feelings, not my post, that hold the answer for him.

The moment the therapist speaks, he stops being a symbol of knowledge and becomes a
person to be fooled (or loved or devalued or punished or whatever the nature of that
particular transference is.) A post, a story, and the (mostly) silent therapist are the
opposite: a screen to project on so that patient or reader can then ask, why does this make
me feel like that? (Or, more rigorously: "what do you want from me?")

This is why readers probably find the my posts about other readers' problems so powerful.
When you read a post about my interaction with someone else, you are assuming the role of
that outside neutral observer that is impossible inside the dialogue. Not completely, of
course, there is always some fantasy about who I am and who Joe is, what we are like, but
clearly you are more outside our transferential situation than we are.

For these reasons, I am becoming convinced that the only real way to "personal growth"
outside of direct action is through careful study of fiction. Of course stories may have an
intended meaning, but a well written story allows you to ask not just "what does the story
mean?" but "why do I think that this is what the story means?" As in The Second Story Of
Echo And Narcissus: "The story is the pool... what do you see in it? It's a reflection and a
projection..." (3)
---

1. If you want to observe the extent to which you are not in control of your
countertransferential feelings (women included), get a swimsuit model as a patient-- and let
someone else watch you do the therapy. Do you dare? I once had the magical opportunity
to watch as a resident was told in rounds that the patient being transferred to him by the
graduating resident was "gorgeous, a model". Someone threw a switch, he changed
immediately: more professional; softer, more articulated speaking; more mature-- all before
he ever saw her. It was as if some part of him said, "yes, it makes sense I would be
chosen." But even more impressive was how the rest of the residents treated him over the
course of the year. There was some envy but his patient elevated him in their eyes, as if he
was a better person, a better therapist. (Similarly: all on-call psychiatrists have had the
secret feeling that a doctor's chaotic patient is a reflection on the doctor.) They asked his
opinion on matters when it was neither necessary nor even... a good idea. His proximity to
a beautiful woman who came to see him made him more of a man-- and of course he
wasn't dating her, it was random chance he was picked-- but it gave him a kind of merit as
if he had had something to do with it, which was in retrospect silently justified, "he must be
good if she stayed with him." This was true of the female residents as well, and, most
importantly, the attendings. (I wonder how they would have interpreted it if she stopped
coming.) The simple fact that he was appropriate in the sessions was enough to indicate his
talent. It should be no surprise that with this amount of unexplored countertransference
from him (and all of his colleagues) that no progress was made in her therapy.

2. Though this post isn't about the woman, please observe that she is running a kind of
story here, the theme of which is, "I desire the feeling of desire." She likes emotional
energy. She breaks up so that there is a deep sadness (Act III) so that there's back and
forth resulting in the climax of reconciliation. "We're in love!" Importantly, in order for her to
get what she needs from this narrative, they don't actually have to get together in Act IV, it
is only necessary that she sees her life as a story with these four acts-- so the breakup is
only possible (or easy) because she anticipates that at some point in the future there is an
Act IV. NB: no mention of Act V. She isn't aware there is one, which is her life's problem,
which is why this story will repeat with her other relationships, including the one she's
cheating on now.

3. It would be an interesting experiment to read a story and write down your feelings and
interpretations of it, and then return to the story a decade later.

JULY 18, 2012

The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus - Audio
!

Buy Now-- mp3 format

Buy Now-- m4a format

m4a for Apple products, everyone else mp3 unless you know what you're doing.

18 minute story. $2.00. After you pay, you'll receive an email with a link to the download.

In a few months I will make this into a free video, and I will post the freetext of the audio as
well. So it's up to you whether you value... whatever this site is.
Don't tell me I shouldn't use a Blackberry mic. I know that now.

[Link]

JUNE 18, 2012

Amy Schumer Offers You A Look Into Your Soul

!
the most crucial thing to understand is that the arrow drawn above is exactly 180 degrees
off course

On the Opie & Anthony radio show, comic Amy Schumer told a sexy story.

She was 18, and was out with friends in NYC wearing "a miniskirt and a tube top-- my
uniform back then." At the end of the night they pile into a cab. Amy sits in the front.

The cab driver was "gross, like the cab driver on MTV." "This was back when I used to do
dangerous things, sexually," and littered throughout the story were exasperated sighs, like,
"I can't believe I did those things." I sympathize, believe me I do.

So what does a drunk 18 year old coed do in the front seat of a cab that's worth sharing on
the radio? She extends her leg over towards the cabbie...

At this point I should tell you that the title of this Opie & Anthony segment is "Amy Schumer
Gets Fingered In A Cab" so of course I already know what's going to happen, which is why
I'm parked behind a church. But this surprises me nonetheless:
GUY: So you let the cab driver touch your vagina?
AMY: No-- I took his hand and made him touch my vagina.

That's right, she didn't let this all happen, she made it all happen, on purpose. She wanted
to get fingered by this filthy, ugly, dangerous cab driver.

So while her drunk friends are passed out in the back, she's riding his "disgusting finger"
towards an orgasm and trying not to moan too loudly. 10 or so blocks later she climaxes,
immediately feels horrified by herself, gets out of the cab, pays, and runs into her
apartment.

At the end of this story, everyone, including Amy, started to play the popular game Why
Would She Do That?-- was she molested as a child, was it self-punishment? But according
to the Textbook Of Psychoanalysis, every event in your life is reprocessed as a story, and
every story has five Acts. Acts II- IV are the rising action, climax, and falling action; Act V
is the denouement: what was the result of all this? Taking this literally, Amy's orgasm is Act
III. Getting out of the cab and feeling disgusted is Act IV. What's missing from her story is
Act V. So if you're brave enough we're going to play a different game, a game with real
winners and real losers, and that game is Guess What Happens Next.

I.

There's a criticism among male comics about female comics, that they only have to look
good in a skirt and talk about blowjobs and they can get away with not being funny, and I
want to be clear that when comics make this criticism they are talking about Amy Poehler,
not Amy Schumer. Amy Schumer is very funny and very quick. The funniest thing about
Amy Poehler is nothing.

But why is there even a market for sexy but unfunny female comics? The answer is that it's
hot to hear a sexy girl talk openly about sex, and the only safe way a woman can talk
openly about sex is..... as a joke, as parody.

If you heard this as a feminist criticism you have missed 50% of the fun: men can't safely
hear about sex from a woman except as a joke, or else they are labeled as perverts by
women, who are still unsure of their (sexual) place in this free for all we call Nowadays. "I
want to tell you about last night but I don't want you to judge me or appear interested."
Huh? Nowadays can be exhausting, but they were also inevitable.

In America, everything is a commodity, everything has a price. So when post-gold standard

capitalism gets access to everything except the secret desires of women, it will necessarily
create a mechanism to get them, too, i.e. some media to take the bullet as pervert so
women can be free to talk in exchange for men quietly listening in. It took a decade but the
system worked: Howard Stern was the inevitable synthesis of feminism and Reaganomics,
which is a sentence you will never read anywhere else.
Which is why as Amy is describing putting the cabbie's hand on her vagina, this happens:

DAN: So, were you... prepared to receive him?

AMY: What do you mean?
DAN: I mean.... were all systems a go?
AMY: You mean was I wet? How wet do you have to be to slide a finger in?

Thing is, this is satellite radio, Dan can be as vulgar and explicit as he wants, no FCC. And
he knows this, he works there. You could say it's a hold over from the broadcast radio days,
except Dan was never in broadcast radio, which means one of two things happened, both of
which are the same: 1. He was reflexively imitating the style and language he learned was
allowable for sexy talk with female strangers, e.g. FM radio Howard Stern; 2. his own mind
had used a distancing language-- sound like someone else-- so as not to appear to be the
pervy guy wanting to know if her box was wet enough to penetrate. Feminists, note
carefully that the female is allowed to be graphic, but the males in the room still feel they
have to censor themselves around her. Where do you think that censorship is coming from?
Amy?

There is a group of you who will read this and feel enraged by a double standard, in front of
men women get to be sexy, talk about sex, flaunt it, but men can't introduce the topic, can't
ask questions, can't pursue-- can't even look-- because then they're labeled as predators.
If you're in this group you don't get it. The censorship doesn't come from women, it comes
from you. If you feel like you can't ask her about her sex because you'll sound like a
repressed stalker, you are, in fact, a repressed stalker. You're not going to kill her, ok, fair
enough, but you aren't going to leave her alone, ever. If Trina rolls bleary eyed into the
cubicle and says, "wow, I got totally plowed by this guy last night" not only are you not
going to get any coding done that day, but you will make it impossible for her to ever get
any coding done or keep her cell number because of your subtle pushes for more stories
and passive aggressive inquiries about her relationship status and near constant innuendo.
"Cubicles. Blech. You know what job I'd be good at? Riding a backhoe."

So, radio fans, if you hear a woman tell you she got fingered in a cab, you're being offered a
chance to see inside your soul: what do you think next?

If you think, "I sooooooo want to come on her tits," you're normal. Also a pig, but a
normal, 21st century pig. Sigh. We've been trained to be aroused by imitation. "Well, men
are visual creatures." Let me guess, you heard that on TV, big surprise. Your deepest
desires come out of a box, against your nature. Tell me, which is more arousing: watching a
porno with the sound off, or listening to a porno without the video? Yeah. I love staying in
hotels, too.

Men aren't visual, they are trained. Back when men were the labor force TV told them to be
visual so they could buy some crap, but when women started taking over the labor pool
they told women to be visual, too, or did genetics suddenly decide male chest hair was out
starting exactly 1989, the year the Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The
World graduated college? People don't think visually, the system has trained them to think
visually. Most of the world uses computers for words, right? Yet it seems never to occur to
anyone to do what is the most obvious thing in the world, ever:
!

Duh. But now that I've told you you still won't do it, the infrastructure is against you. So
even though the world is coded in 8.5:11 it is experienced in 9:4, and the system facilitates
the sheeping, not the shepherding. You want to change that? Good luck, you're not cool
enough to have a following and the moment it occurred to Steve Jobs his pancreas was
detonated.

Back to Amy: so normal= "come on her tits"; abnormal, unhealthy but sadly the norm
Nowadays would be to turn Naughty Amy's Barely Legal Ride Along into something
masochistic and think: why not me? Why does this slut allow herself to get fingered by
some ugly cab driver yet I can't even ask about it? Which is the answer to your own
question. You are operating from a position of self-loathing which you then project as a
judgment onto everyone else, and she can sense it. And you can sense it, which is why you
self-censor. See? You're not all bad.

II.

That women can't talk as openly about sex is really a subset of a larger difference, which is
that while both are allowed to do anything they want, only a man can identify with it.
Women must distance themselves from it, more or less depending on situation. When a man
has sex it is a reflection of who he is; for women it has to be something that happened.

Say you're lucky enough to have the most wonderful of all experiences, the menage a trois.
Right on. "Umm, dude, I've had threesomes and they're not that great. They're actually
pretty awkward." Um, dude, you're not doing them right, they have to be sisters. So
afterwards the guy will tell... everybody. And for the rest of his life. Any future girlfriend will
hear about it within the first month of dating: Things That Make Me Cool. The woman may
tell her friends, but she's not going to tell guy friends, and certainly not bring it up to
potential boyfriends, and it sure as hell never reflects on her character. "It happened, but
it's not who I am."

The thing is, in any MFF, there are three people who could be telling you the story, yet the
narrator is always a penis. He had a threesome, the supporting cast say they "were in a
threesome once." Assuming you live in a town where X number of threesomes happen every
year and there's no repeats, then there are twice as many women with a history of
menages than men. Yet despite being the majority, it's the man's story to own and the
woman's to disavow.

You could play it the other way and say, well, some women do repeat, but then in that case
those individual women have had more threesome than guys, more experience with them,
but they're still not allowed to own it, and if they do it's still at a distance: "I don't know, it
just kind of happened." The only time you'll hear a guy says those words is if you're his
girlfriend and he just cheated or you're the police and he's holding a head, and that's not a
joke but a description of the motivator: shame.

But the point isn't simply that women do it but disavow it. I just told you a fact which, as a
man, you must disavow yourself in order to continue dating. In order to see the world as
ordered, you have to pretend that very few women as compared to men have had
threesomes.

There are, of course, an unusual few women who "own" it, talk freely about their sex
without shame, but unless they are comics they run the risk of inviting stalkers and
anyways, no matter how much they are otherwise liked or respected, people will still
whisper quietly to each other: "what happened to her in her life that made her do these
things?" Sexy women, you have a choice: you're either a slut, or broken.

III.

Someone in the studio suggested that Amy's behavior was the result of childhood
molestation. Jim Norton, a comic, explained it as "self-punishment." Jim's perspective is
unique because he is a recovering alcoholic and a current sex-addict, frequently detailing his
relations with hookers, transsexuals, etc. He would know, right?

The problem with this kind of backwards analysis is that it tries to universalize a behavior
into its cause. But the fact is that people get fingered by ugly men in cabs for all kinds of
reasons, including they just like it. Last Tango In Paris was about a beautiful young woman
who was inexplicably drawn to a billy goat. It happens. No, you're thinking of Streetcar
Brando. This is 1972 Godfather Brando.
!
baaaaaah

"Aww, older men can be sexy." I guess, if you're even older than them.

Modern and pop psychology spend a lot of time taking a behavior and tracing it back to a
single source-- genetics, trauma, whatever-- but there's no money there, the money is in
the meaning, what they do with it. So Norton's an addict. Do you want to know how he got
that way or what he does with it?

Before, the experience of addiction was entirely subjective, is it messing up your life? Now,
it's been objectified, the subject's relationship with the drug is is no longer relevant, it is the
fact of the drug that is relevant. The obvious example of this sleight of hand is that there's
alcohol use and alcohol abuse, but there's no such category as cocaine use, even though the
vast majority of its ingestion has nothing to do with addiction. The reinforcement is from the
outside to comply with this idiocy: say you party down one weekend, then a random drug
test at work, oops! So two things can happen, Guess What Happens Next: you could tell
the truth that the coke was on her ass and how could you not? doesn't make you a bad
person; or pretend/admit you're an addict and agree to go to rehab. So it's unanimous?
You keep your job at McDonalds and the system gets another data point confirming it is
right. I hope the parallel between this and anything written by Solzhenitsyn is immediately
obvious, if not, read anything by Solzhenitsyn. The Matrix doesn't need you, but it will offer
you a free pass if you help get the other batteries in line.

Note that when scienticians talk about, say, the increase in alcoholism, they never go back
before WWII, otherwise they'd have to label most ancient Greeks, all Vikings and everyone
in colonial America as alcoholics. "Well," they'll explain, "it wasn't until then we started
rigorously treating people as data points." While I'll accept that an amount of alcohol does
the same damage to your innards regardless of what kingdom you're born in, there's
something sneaky about the current kingdom getting to be the sole judge of what is
addiction and what isn't, but we rarely complain unless the addiction is the internet and the
kingdom is China; and the reason we don't complain is that the system has cleverly made it
very easy for us to abuse it selfishly when we want to, which was the plan all along. But it
doesn't make it right. Sorry, wildman, you can't judge a person based on two generations
of observation of a single culture that happens to be driven by TV.

The interesting thing about addictions-- include gambling and sex and internet and
"dangerous behaviors" and whatever else you want-- is that they all share something in
common. Allegedly this thing is dopaminergic pathways to the striatum and etc, but saying
that gets you nothing. It's astounding that the layperson chooses to think in these terms
which though they are true are utterly meaningless, utterly unactionable, until you
remember, oh, of course, in narcissism believing something is preferable to doing something
because the former is about you and the latter is about everyone else.

Slightly off topic but here's an important example: say you yell every day at an/your eight
year old girl for sloppy homework, admittedly a terrible thing to do but not uncommon, and
eventually she thinks, "I'm terrible at everything" and gives up, so the standard
interpretation of this is that she has lost self-confidence, she's been demoralized, and case
by case you may be right, but there's another possibility which you should consider: she
chooses to focus on "I'm terrible at everything" so that she can give up. "If I agree to hate
myself I only need a 60? I'll be done in 10 minutes. "

It is precisely at this instant that a parent fails or succeeds, i.e. fails: do they teach the kid
to prefer (find reinforcement in) the drudgery of boring, difficult work with little daily
evidence of improvement, or do they teach the kid to prefer (find reinforcement in) about
20 minutes of sobbing hysterically and then off to Facebook and a sandwich? Each human
being is only able to learn to prefer one of those at a time. Which one does the parent
incentivize?

If you read this as laziness you have utterly missed the point. It's not laziness, because
you're still working hard, but you are working purposelessly on purpose. The goal of your
work is to be done the work, not to be better at work.

For a great many people this leads to an unconscious, default hierarchy in the mind, I'm not
an epidemiologist but you got it in you sometime between the ages of 5 and 10:

<doing awesome>

is better than

<feeling terrible about yourself>

is better than

<the mental work of change>

You should memorize this, it is running your life. "I'm constantly thinking about ways to
improve myself." No, you're gunning the engine while you're up on blocks. Obsessing and
ruminating is a skill at which we are all tremendously accomplished, and admittedly that
feels like mental work because it's exhausting and unrewarding, but you can no more
ruminate your way through a life crisis than a differential equation. So the parents
unknowingly teach you to opt for <b>, and after a few years of childhood insecurity, you'll
choose the Blue Pill and begin the dreaming: someday and someplace you'll show someone
how great you somehow are. And after a few months with that someone they will
eventually turn to you, look deep into your eyes, and say, "look, I don't have a swimming
pool, but if I did I'd drown myself in it. Holy Christ are you toxic."
"Well, my parents were really strict, they made me--" Keep telling yourself that. Chances
are if your parents are between 50 and 90 they were simply terrible. Great expectations;
epic fail. Your parents were dutifully strict about their arbitrary and expedient rules, not
about making you a better person. "Clean your plate! Go to college!" Words fail me.
They weren't tough, they were rigidly self-aggrandizing. "They made me practice piano an
hour every day!" as if the fact of practice was the whole point; what they did not teach you
is to try and sound better every practice. They meant well, they loved you, but the
generation that invented grade inflation is not also going to know about self-monitoring and
paedeia, which is roughly translated, "making yourself better at piano."

"You don't know how hard it is to raise kids," says someone whose main cultural influence in
life was the Beatles. The fact that you will inevitably fail in creating Superman is not a
reason not to try. Oh: I bet I know what you chose when you were 8.

The mistake is in thinking that misery and self-loathing are the "bad" things you are trying
to get away from with Ambien and Abilify or drinking or therapy or whatever, but you have
this completely backwards. Self-loathing is the defense against change, self-loathing is
preferable to <mental work.> You choose misery so that nothing changes, and the Ambien
and the drinking and the therapy placate the misery so that you can go on not changing.
That's why when you look in the mirror and don't like what you see, you don't immediately
crank out 30 pushups, you open a bag of chips. You don't even try, you only plan to try. The
appearance of mental work, aka masturbation. The goal of your ego is not to change, but
what you don't realize is that time is moving on regardless. Ian Anderson wrote a poem
about this, you should study it carefully.

Coincidentally, four days after Amy told her story I heard Howard Stern railing about an
uncle who liked to play golf. "It infuriated me that he never took a lesson, never tried to get
better. He was happy just playing, he didn't care if he got any better. It made no sense to
me. How can you enjoy something and not want to get better at it?" Answer: some people
are happy with par. He isn't, which is why he succeeded. The retort is, "well, I don't want to
have to improve on everything, some things I just want to mindlessly enjoy." I sympathize,
but I also own a clock, and there are only 24hrs in a day. Look on how many of those hours
go to true self-improvement vs. mindless enjoyment, and despair.

That hierarchy you learned-- and yes, it was learned in childhood-- applies to everything,
including addictions. Addiction may be biological, but no one ever claims that getting clean
is biological. "When I hit 45, my testosterone levels fell which also lowered the
dopaminergic activity in the reinforcement pathways of the brain, so I was able to get off
dope." Wait, is that true? HA! No. It's a decision, made at that time in those
circumstances. I know it's a hard decision, but like every other decision in life it is
ultimately a binary one. Biology is pulling you towards 0, learning pulls you towards 1.

"All this happens at age 8?!" Think of how many years you've since practiced that
hierarchy. "So after childhood, you're screwed? You can't change?" Oh, no, people change
all the time, once they figure out how they're sabotaging themselves. Now it's your turn.

IV.

So the thing that addictions-- drugs, internet, sex, etc-- all have in common is that they
displace and replace something else. If you think of yourself as containing an amount of
stuff, or energy, or emotion, addiction isn't in addition to that, the total amount of emotion
and energy stays constant. The nature of the emotions change, but the overall quantity of
anger+sadness+happiness+ etc is the same. The addiction replaced something, and you
can't get rid of an addiction unless something replaces it.

Broadly speaking, addiction replaces one of two things: human connection or change. Jim
Norton frequently complains that his sex addiction prevents him from pursuing a show or
writing scripts, but the verb is wrong: the sex addiction allows him not to work on scripts.
Doesn't he want a pilot? Sure. But this way he doesn't have to do the mental work of
change and eventually he can die. "Is he afraid of success?" No, why would he be? The
more invested you are in your "self"-- not happy with, but invested in-- the more you will
resist the potential of change. "Self"-loathing means there is a strong "self" that you
loathe, and that self doesn't want to disintegrate.

In the other category is human connection. What I don't mean is that a person lacking
human connections turns to addiction, ha, you don't get off that easily: what I mean is that
the addiction satisfies the same needs as human connection, but better. It bypasses the
<mental work> of maintaining human connections. Say a married guy becomes an
alcoholic, and this pushes his wife away, which of course makes him drink more. The
problem now is that if he stops drinking, his wife doesn't automatically come back, right?
She's pulled away as much as he's pushed. I'm sure she wants him to get clean and etc, but
the energy math doesn't balance: he goes sober, the relationship may improve, but there's
still a gap, still some emotional connection lost. Ergo: he cannot give up drinking.

More optimistically, the only way he is going to stop is: a) they split up; b) they double
down on each other and talk MORE to each other, more than they do now, maybe that
means that he skips rehab in order to go to couples therapy. "But the problem isn't the
marriage." It is now.

This idea of having a finite "amount" of emotion seems preposterous, and weirdly it's
usually most preposterous to the people who don't believe in soul or God or whatever yet
also don't want to believe we are finite human beings with finite capacities.

Anyway, here's a very real example of it. Two wives are talking, "after ten years of
marriage, we don't cuddle anymore. He used to always hug and kiss me, and now...." And
the standard interpretation is kids + work + age = lost a connection, took it for granted,
relationship is worse than it was. And then she sees her newlywed friends or anyone on ABC
and they're constantly touching each other. Sigh. So maybe you misread one of my posts or
studied Deepak Chopra for a decade and think, "ok, I'll just DO it, I'll just force myself to
touch/kiss/cuddle and then behavior will lead emotion and we'll connect again." You try it
and---- it feels fake.

Eventually the marriage ends, and you tell your friends: "when he stops touching you, it's
the first sign."

That may be the interpretation, and if you're merely dating it probably is the interpretation,
but there's another to consider: all that touching/cuddlying is now more appropriately given
to the kids, it is more correct for them, and so doing it to an adult seems fake because it IS
fake. You can't touch a 5 year old the same way you touch a 40 year old, not unless you're
a [TBD priest/football joke here]. The point isn't that your relationship is worse, the point is
that it is different because it has to be different because otherwise you would explode. What
remains is for you to figure out some new, adult way to "touch", whether that's backrubs or
a bondage mask I have no idea, but your love has to grow up or else you will think you've
fallen out of love. "How can you incorrectly think you've fallen out of love?" How many
times have you incorrectly thought you were in love?
V.

I'm not judging Amy, at all, but her story is so representative of what countless women go
through, the "I can't believe I did that" repeated 1000 times, so I hope she won't mind my
using her story to make a point about how we frame our experiences for the very specific
purpose of NOT changing.

It's not possible to overstate the importance of interpreting everything as a story-- by which
I mean, you don't know the full story unless you know all of the acts. If one is missing, it is
on purpose.

To be clear, as Amy was getting fingered in the cab, it wasn't happening as a story; but
she's telling it to us as a story, with a beginning and an end. But the beginning and ending
she chose are arbitrary, she chose them for a reason. She said the beginning was when she
got in the cab and the end was when she got out of the cab, which sounds expedient, but
you should be very, very suspicious of the way you frame a story because the goal is almost
never to help you understand it but to make you be able to live with it. The goal is identity
preservation. Make sure you stay the main character in your own movie.

So even though I have no idea why she wanted to get fingered by a cab driver, I have heard
this type of story before, I know the structure, and I know the payoff is in Act V, which she
conveniently forgot to mention.

There are people who like doing dangerous sexual stuff, and people who don't, and those
who don't are divided into those who never tell anyone and those who do tell someone. I
already knew Amy was in the latter category because she was telling the story on the radio,
and people usually tell stories about things they are ashamed of for one reason: absolution.

The thing is, we are ten years later, and according to Amy herself not much has changed--
i.e. she still finds herself doing things she wish she didn't. Again, I am not judging her, I
am only explaining a very common phenomenon. So in order for more stories like that one
to occur in her life, there had to be an Act V in that story that allowed future repetition; and
that Act V would be hidden-- she would always tell and remember the story without that
part.

Which is why Guess What Happens Next is a rigged game, I knew exactly what was going to
happen next at the beginning of the story: she'd run and tell the story to the one person in
her life who had, simultaneously, full power of absolution and zero power of punishment,
and if she was 28 that would be a therapist but at 18 it could only be one person: her
mother.

Psychological detectives take note: Amy would not have mentioned that she told her mom,
she thought the story was finished, except that someone accidentally asked what she did
next explicitly. Yet it is the key to the whole story.

Telling mom may seem like madness but remember, the goal is always NOT to change.
Imagine what would happen if she didn't tell mom: she'd either repeat these behaviors in a
death spiral until she discovered meth and flamed out; or would be so guilty she never did it
again. Mom recites the necessary spell to protect against future change and allow for
repetition:

MOM
 What were you thinking? You're not like that! You're not that kind of person! You're so
much better than that!

AMY

Thanks, mom, I feel a lot better.

END SCENE.

Every time you crowdsource the superego a piece of you is split off as bad keeping the rest
of you intact as good. "I'm not a bad person, I just did a bad thing."

Women who engage in "dangerous behaviors" (NB: for gays and women this ALWAYS refers
to sex, for hetero men NEVER) and then tell people about them are not punishing
themselves, at all. "But it makes me feel so bad about myself." That's the hierarchy, that's
the point. Two hours of sobbing hysterically and then off to Facebook and a sandwich.
Thanks, mom.

People will do whatever has worked for them since childhood, which in this case is split off
unpalatable pieces of themselves and disown them, protecting the rest. "I did that, but it's
not who I am." When "it" is really bad you move to Step 2: find someone who can
substitute for your atrophied superego to confirm "you're not like that", and you're good for
a decade of emotional stagnation and the following crazy sentence: "I've changed a lot in
ten years." Ha, yeah-- wait, you're serious? Dude, no one who is not you agrees. No one.
Ask anyone. Not even your therapist. "That's not fair, my job isn't to judge." You're hired.

The downside of this, apart from candida, is that you train yourself to think of all events and
behaviors as happening to separate parts of yourself-- you don't fully own them-- which
means that when something good does happen you can't own that, either. Everything will
come with self-doubt. "That was good, but I was lucky/right place/other guy died/
connections, otherwise it wouldn't have worked."

VI.

I know what you're thinking, you're thinking, "ok, all this is fine.... but why did she do it?
Why did she get fingered in a cab if she didn't want to?"

You're thinking, "I don't want to hear about how everything is interpretable through the
artificial paradigm of narrative structure--" as if it was me and not your god who made it
this way, as if I was better able to invent a convenient fiction that happened to apply to you
rather than describe a process that's been used for millennia. You think you're the first?
You think no one but you has lived your life? Do you think you are so unique? Do you
think I just took a guess? This isn't the first time this game has been played, there've been
over 100 generations of Guess What Happens Next and it is the exact same answer every
single time. All of this has happened before and it will happen again.

But you want "why", you're drawn to "why" like you're drawn to a pretty girl in the rain. Let
me guess: she has black hair, big eyes, and is dressed like an ingenue. "Why?" is the most
seductive of questions because it is innocent, childlike, infinite in possibilities, and utterly
devoted to you.

"Why am I this way? Why do I do what I do?" But what will you do with that information?
What good is it? If you were an android, would it change you to know why you were
programmed the way you were? "Why" is masturbation, "why" is the enemy, the only
question that matters is, now what?

But you want "why". Ok, here we go.

The clue is that she did this at the end of the night. "Is it because she was drunk?" I'm
drunk now, and I'm in an air taxi, and no one is fingering me. No.

You will observe that most of your "I can't believe I did that" behaviors are at the end of the
night, the end of the day, the end of the party, the end of the story, which means the
narrative has less in common with a porno than with the last chip in the bag or the last swig
out of the bottle-- there are a billion possible reasons why you started the bottle or plowed
through the bags, but that very last one has only one unique motivation, and it is in
understanding that last one that you will or will not change your future.

When you're in a casino and you blow $50 on the slot machine, pull, pull, pull, pull, pull,
pull, each and every time you're hoping that this will be the one that hits, and once in a
while you get a little something-- it is the randomness, the suddenness, the unpredictability
of that even tiny reward which keeps you pulling through your bankroll. "Variable ratio
schedule." Sound right? Well, none of those $50 have anything to do with the cab ride.

But then you're done, tapped out, and you turn to go but.... wait a
minute............................ you have one token left. Stop now, look at that one, look
carefully at it, it is your contract with the Devil, it is the selling of your soul. What is its
value? Look at it, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters what you think-- which means
what you are about to do has already been decided.

You could pocket that last one. Go home with something other than nothing. Or, you could
play that last one with superstitious hope, praying and bargaining that if you hit you'll X/Y/
Z. But neither of those are what you think, right? Instead you think, "whatever" and you
put it in the machine-- NOT because you think this time it will pay off-- be honest with
yourself, you know that that initial optimism of game play is gone-- you do it precisely
because you know it will fail-- you are throwing it away, on purpose, so you can walk away
from the machine "clean", finished, so you can play-act at catharsis. "This is the last one!"
you cry, like you're yelling out "it is accomplished!" The final suffering, look for a brand new
me in a few days. And unlike Amy's cab ride, you are turning this experience into a story in
real time, you are writing the ending as if someone else is watching, as if it were a reality
show or you were offering a voice over, you are constructing that experience, saying your
lines, as the last Act of a story being told to an imaginary audience, a god, your future self,
the balance of energy in the universe-- The Big Other.

And you think you're done but what you don't realize is you're only done Act III.

That's the last chip in the bag-- "whatever, might as well." That's the last swig, "I'm never
drinking again." That's selling your stocks into a downturn, that's your sexual history,
throwing it away one more time not because this time the guy is going to be great but
because it's not going to be great, it's a sacrifice to the volcano.

You throw it away, on purpose, because it's not worth holding on to it, you've already
disavowed it as useless, evil, pointless, hopeless-- it is the last remnant of a part of you you
want gone. You play that last coin, drink that last drink, eat that last chip and throw your
vagina at a billy goat-- all of those are the splitting off of a piece of yourself that you then
can leave behind. The act is the "physical expression of an intrapsychic process"-- you are
acting out what you wish were true, like a rape victim scrubbing herself clean. "That's not
me--- anymore." If only it were that easy. I sympathize, you have no idea.

What's most sad about it is that you might have been right-- it might have worked-- except
that instead of making that be the end of the story you drag it out for one more Act, and
ensure that the pattern repeats, ad nauseam. You don't want the story to end. It's not a
great story, but it's the one you know, the one you understand, and you'd rather have 500
pages of repetition compulsion than take a chance on Once Upon A Time. Writing is hard, I
know. I know.

"How can any of this even be real?" you ask, hoping that since I drink and since I don't
sleep therefore I must be insane. Never mind that: focus on the words. Since you
reinterpret your life as a story, then your entire book has already been written, give me Acts
I-III and the beginning of IV I can tell you the ending. Ok, maybe in your story you it's a
job and not a whale, or you choose a car not a train, or maybe it's "Reader, I married him"
or "there's something we need to do as soon as possible"-- minor details, the ending always
flows logically from the beginning-- and if you're young enough you'll even think you'd be
satisfied with a tragedy as long as it's dramatic enough. Don't sweat it, it's the age. But if
I'm permitted I'll offer you one final prediction, you'll either take this as a warning or
remember that you don't believe in all this crap: if you are looking for the perfect climax but
have no knowledge of the resolution, if you do not write your story towards an ending, then
your life will default to the one ending that will terrify you more than any other possible:
"He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here."
It is inevitable.

-----

[Link]

MAY 22, 2012

5 Signs Your Child Is a Psychopath, According To The NYT
!
HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, WTF

The New York Times Magazine has a story describing a 9 year old boy who has been
diagnosed as a psychopath. "Oh my God, that was such a moving article." Shut it.

Strangely/not strangely, they spend very little time describing the kid's psychopathy, and a
lot of time on describing everything else from which you are to infer his psychopathy. It's
like badly written female erotica, which is exactly what the New York Times Magazine is,
penis never goes in vagina, it's all innuendo and mood and words words words words...

Here are the 5 signs of a child's psychopathy, according to the New York Times.

1. Ethnicity

You know how at the beginning of these profiles they always write, "In order to protect the
privacy of the subjects, the names have been changed"? They don't have that here.
Instead, to protect their privacy, they use the real first names. And where they live. And
the name of their doctor.

Why would they use the real names? Employers/suitors already look at your drunken bikini
pics and judge you hopefully favorably, shouldn't this kid's story be a little better protected?

Maybe the real names are important: there's Anne, the mom. Boleyn? No. Oh. Michael's
the psychopath. Myers?! No. Dammit. Dad is Miguel.... oh.
As there are 10 million psychopaths living within 60 blocks of the NYT offices and another
200 inside the NYT offices, it's odd they needed to travel all the way to Florida to interview
one. Maybe this psychopath is really interesting? Nope. Kill anyone? Nope. Cosplays The
Ring? Nope. Started a hedge fund? Nope. Weird. Long way to go for boring.

2. Feet

If this kid had a swastika carved in his forehead or a tooth ring you can bet they'd
photograph it, privacy be damned. No such luck, Michael refuses to look disfigured or
appear black. So instead of his face you're getting a picture of his feet. Yikes.

Feet? I suppose kids' feet are interesting to some readers (e.g. psychopaths) but there's
probably another reason for the photo. "It shows he's standing separate from everyone."
Yes, but you put him separate, right? To tell us that he's separate? You also told everyone
to take off their shoes.

So other than obvious staging of this crime scene, the NYT wants you to know either a)
they're gypsies; b) mom's got 3 tattoos on her feet. One's a star. Do you know what a star
tattoo means? It means what you are about to read is her fault.
3. Hands:

Well, that could be a picture telling us he has reddish hair and no swastika on his forehead;
or it could be a picture telling us his mom has a thumb ring and Lee Press On Nails.

"Hey, no one's saying she's a bad mother!" No. You're just saying it all makes sense.

4. This:
!

This is a picture of a blue dragon breathing blue fire. If the TSA saw this laying on a
flaming bag of plastic explosives they would all go on break, so compellingly normal and
safe and ordinary this drawing is. It is so normal that I've given it to babies in the NICU for
comfort. They giggle. Here, I made it more scary:
!

and even now Downy wants to make it the new symbol of freshness. I don't know how the
hell this implies Michael is a psychopath. Does the Times now include a blotter acid insert?
Should I lick this?

5. Science:

The New York Times loves science, LOVES it, especially the kind with no numbers and
frequent appeals to authority, especially ESPECIALLY if those authorities are from the cast of
Freakonomics. Here are the seven most important sciences according to the NYT:

1. Sociology
2. Political science
4. Climate science
5. Science fiction
7. NPR
8. Law

So when you see this:

Michael was almost two standard deviations outside the normal range for callous-
unemotional behavior

and
One study calculated the heritability of callous-unemotional traits at 80%

you can be sure they have no idea what it means and have no expectation their readers do
either, which is why they wrote it like that, in those words. NB: "One study"= it must be
true. The readers think of genes as cluster bombs, if the father drops it into the mother her
vagina explodes with untoward consequences. If you try to explain gene expression and
interaction they start to glaze over, and by the time you hit imprinting all they hear is the
theme to Dancing With The Stars. Whenever you read the word "genetics" or "heritability"
in the popular press as it relates to kids, it means one of two things:

a) It's not your fault.

or

b) it's your ex's fault.

To reinforce this to the target demo, the genetic link of psychopathy, in Michael's case, is
through the hispanic guy.

BUT DOESN'T MICHAEL SOUND LIKE A PSYCHOPATH?

In fairness to the Times, I will admit they list, explicitly, several psychopathic behaviors that
Michael exhibits:

he threatens his brother with a chair

he says he hates his brother
he watches Pokemon
he can go from perfectly calm to full rage, and then calm again
rages include punching toilets, though not people
his mom is exhausted
his dad is exhausted, but less so
he erases the dumb reporter's digital recorder
he goes to psychopath summer camp, and doesn't like it

Because these aren't terribly diagnostic by themselves, the article is quick to mention the
horrendous accomplishments of other child psychopaths. One kid chopped up a cat's tail.
Another kid named Jeffrey Bailey drowned a toddler in the pool just because he was curious.
Therefore, Michael is crazy. "Dude, that makes no sense." Dude, I'm just telling you what
the article says. "Some, including Michael, were actually worse; one had begun biting the
counselors." Wait, what?

Is Michael a psychopath? I have no idea, but I do know that the purpose of the story isn't
to describe psychopathy, but to entertain a demographic that has nothing else to do on
Sundays now that Desperate Housewives has been canceled. Have you learned anything
you didn't already know from this article? "Don't let Michael date my daughter." Check.
"Or my son! You never know, it's wrong to assume!" Double check. And mate. And I'm
moving.

Scroll through the 631 deranged comments in the article, the two themes are "they need to
remove the kid from the home for the family's safety!" which is totally ok when it's
suggested by a deranged Manhattanite with no understanding of who "they" is, but
everyone gets all Founding Fathers when George Bush tries it. "What gives him the right?!"
Duh, you did. The other popular theme is "My heart goes out to these parents, what they
must be going through!" but you only ever say such things when you're not at risk; and
since the article lets you know it only happens to certain kinds of other people, your
patronizing condescension is encouraged. "It is terrible, isn't it, but I guess it's true that
other people are different from me." I will observe that no one feels bad for Michael even
though this is supposed to be genetic= "not your fault" and he hasn't actually hurt anyone,
which is precisely the kind of psychopathic prejudice I expect from the NYT and its deranged
readers. Does anyone have any other suggestions besides extraordinary rendition or
military academy? No? Then shut it. The kid is nine. You derangetons are 40 and still
shamelessly retain the fantasy that your decaying mind and body will someday pull
something off, meanwhile you're wrapping up shooting on his movie before puberty even
hits.

Of course there are 9 yo psychopaths and of course you intervene early if you feel
something's amiss and maybe Michael after all is one; but they sure haven't made a great
case for it or the predictions for his future which, of course, are only implied, but you know.

Here's one explicit prediction-- and it is the Hail Mary of psychiatric predictions, offered
without the benefit of conclusive research but you meet me at the bus stop at 3:30 if you
want to fight about it-- one of the most significant causes of psychopathy is being told, at
age 9, that you are a psychopath, and that the New York Times Magazine wants to do a ten
page story about you. Yeah. Oops.

---

[Link] --- live tweeting the butchery that is Fifty Shades Of Grey
tonight (May 22) during the finale of Dancing With The Stars.

MAY 13, 2012

Are You Mom Enough? The Question Is For What
!
at what age does it become incest?

"Has Time Gone To Far?" "Time Cover Causes Controversy." I heard people are actually
offended by this cover. Which is worse, seeing this or a picture of two gays kissing? No,
two gay women, of course, come on, don't be stupid. Alright, fine, but what if one's named
Loshanda and the other one may as well be? Yeah, graphic design is hard.

I'll leave the discussion of the merits of attachment parenting to people who actually have
parents and attachments, but it's kind of a moot point, I've seen more Taliban snipers than
I've seen boob sucking kindergarteners.

So forget what Time is showing you, ask instead: what does the magazine want to be true?

Postulate: Time doesn't like breast feeding. If you disagree at least grant me that no one at
Time thinks four years of it is admirable. Right? So you are supposed to hate her. Ok,
how?

"Umm, 'how?' Well... there's a kid sucking on a boob..." Come on, man, that's weird but
it's not hatable, hating her doesn't somehow reinforce who you are-- unless you're a woman
who didn't breast feed. What if you're a guy? "Well, she's hot..." Right. The secret fear of
marriage is that the kid wins the Oedipal drama.

At some point someone needs to notice that the intensity of the emotions about this issue
are way out of proportion to the... prevalence of the issue. I'm pretty confident breast
feeding on the way home from Webelos is a terrible idea but is it worse on your kid than
getting divorced? Or staying together, depending? Extra year of boob or lifetime without a
father. Hmm. Is this open book?

Other than the volume of your voice, do you have any reason to be sure of what you think?

So since Time has created a controversy out of thin air, we should consider that the
controversy is a proxy for something else.

She's a billion, so either Time was writing a story on Attachment Parenting and found the
hottest subject they could find to make it be ok, or they chose the hottest subject they
could find to make it NOT be okay. So hot= shallow egomaniac using her boobs and then
her kid to get noticed.
!

That's what Time wants you to think, anyway. But there are things you don't see that I
can't unsee, which is why I've been at the bottle stashed behind the big rock at the creek's
bend since I was a pre-teen. She's 26 and the kid is 3, subtraction= 23, so you have a
super hot well manicured blonde having kids way the hell too early for a super hot well
manicured blonde.................... and there are only two reasons why such a person would
be pictured in American media: she's from Utah or Jesus is her co-pilot. Amen. The fastest
way to get Time's Hatable Person Of The Week cover is to a) work for Goldman Sachs or b)
praise the Lord. I guess it's possible she works on a trading desk but my money says this is
a story about why religious people are insane.

So while the rest of you bah bah black sheep are led to complain that she's hatable because
she breast feeds, when the Time comes-- and praise be to Jesus, it is coming-- for you to
learn she's nipples deep in the Lord Is My Shepherd maybe you'll then remember which
candidate you're supposed to hate.

There's hate in them there pictures, the worst kind of hate, the kind that makes you hate
without knowing why, without knowing that you hate. The kind of hate that ends up
defining you as a person in opposition to something else. And then you disappear.
Once you've made this prediction everything else is downhill. She'll homeschool the kid,
which is hatable. She'll be wealthy for no identifiable reason: hatable. She'll be carrying
around that kid 24/7 with no nanny yet still weirdly find time for mani/pedis and barre class.
So hatable. And co-sleeping doesn't mess up her sex life or her sex interest because her
husband plows her on the deck, in the car, in the pool, in elevators. Sigh hatable. You can't
make a right on red but this woman is forcing the world to accommodate her, bend to her
way, her life, and she appears to be succeeding and happy. Bitch.

Look at the comments as people struggle to explain why breast feeding a 3 year old is bad:
they sense it's bad, but can't come up with a concrete reason to explain it. Well, Time is the
magazine for you. They offer you a blonde cypher trusting that you'll solve it: she co-sleeps
because she's a religious nut. Phew.

"When you think of breast-feeding, you think of mothers holding their children, which was impossible
with some of these older kids," Schoeller says. "I liked the idea of having the kids standing up to
underline the point that this was an uncommon situation."

That's Time's photographer explaining that simply having her breast feed wasn't good
enough to make his point, he needed to stage the scene to "underline the point." This is
why the sentence before that one is this:

Using religious images of the Madonna and Child as reference, Schoeller captured each mother breast-
feeding her child or children.

If you have the urge to email me complaining that I'm defending religion or attachment
parenting, please don't, your brain is broken. The point is to show you how the media e.g.
Time manipulates you to hate some things by linking them to other things: it polarizes you,
which means it makes you irrelevant. E.g. when an election "is determined by" one
particular group of "swing" voters-- whom you deride for being too stupid to have made up
their minds yet-- it doesn't mean your vote has been factored in but that you are so
predictable that you don't count. Power never thinks of you as an individual. Power never
thinks of you at all.

Maybe attachment parenting is good? Bad? Time doesn't care to find out. It could easily
have PubMeded the story and found a hundred scientific articles to discuss. Nope. It
needed space to tell me that Dr. Bill Sears was a Catholic, converted to evangelicalism, and
back to Catholicism, and his wife goes to Mass every day. Oh, I get it, they're crazy people.
This is a typical media trick, rather than exploring an issue it explores a person, describes
him, his background and his faults, this is the kind of person who believes this, this
complicated issue that is too difficult to understand on its merits. You're free to choose.

Do you think Time cares about breast feeding? Do you think Time cares about you? Time
hates you. It hates everyone, especially its readers, it thinks of them as credit card
numbers, as registered voters, as organ donors. It wants what it wants and if we have to
throw a kid under a boob, so be it. Like Marshall McLuhan once yelled, there's a war going
on out there, and it isn't between liberals and conservatives or atheists and believers or
attachment parents and detachment parents, it's between us and them, where them is
defined as everyone who is not us and us is defined as me. You lose.

---
[Link]

MAY 11, 2012

Thank God The 'Heart Attack Grill' Is A Great Name; Also, How To Learn French

!
The Son Of Man will watch over you

Did you hear about the restaurant called "The Heart Attack Grill?"
For the second time in two months, a customer at Las Vegas' Heart Attack Grill collapsed mid-meal and
was carted off to a hospital.
Yummy. Here's another:
The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, Nev., has come under scrutiny since one of its patrons suffered an
actual heart attack while eating a Triple Bypass Burger there earlier this week.
Or:
(CBS News) Another patron of the Heart Attack Grill has reportedly fallen ill during a meal at the
hospital-themed Las Vegas restaurant.
Seems like such a frivolous story couldn't possibly be of any value to anyone. And yet, I'm
about to make a mountain out of a molehill. Who wants to see something ugly about
themselves?

I.

You might guess that this news story is itself a kind of advertising for the Grill. This cynical
view places not just two heart attack victims but all of CBS News at the service of a
company's self-promotion. And you'd be right, another branding piece pretending to be a
news story.
But we know what the author wants to be true, the question is what you want to be true:
how does this story, like all pop-culture and pop-news, represent a wish fulfillment? The
story does not exist as information, in fact it is deliberately misleading-- the patron didn't
have a heart attack. There is no information there. It is there in order for you to talk about
it-- so you have something to talk to others about, through a screen darkly or face to face,
because if it weren't for these meaningless media stories which includes all partisan politics
people would have nothing to say to each other, and society's collapse into hikikomori
narcissism would be total. Which is why it is correct to say that pop culture isn't a symptom
of our dying society, it is its heroic measures. So take your medicine: what do you want to
say about some dummy who had a heart attack at the Heart Attack Grill?
First interesting observation: the reflex position is to defend the corporation, in the guise of
pseudo-libertarianism: "No one forced her to eat there!" and, "no one takes responsibility
for their own actions!" and "hey, dummy, how could you go to a place called the Heart
Attack Grill and not know you'd have a heart attack, what did you expect?"
This position isn't necessarily wrong, but it is very much a mark of our time that the
reflexive emotional position isn't, "those corporate scum shouldn't be allowed to serve that
poison, do they feel no responsibility for this?"
Which leads to the second interesting observation: this position is delivered as if it were a
minority opinion, full of wisdom, against an uneducated crowd-- as if everyone else blamed
the Grill. And yet a glance at the comments reveals that no one blames the Grill, everyone
blames the dummy. The only blame they get is for using the story as marketing.
If you consider how ready we are to blame corporate scum for everything else, giving them
immunity to this obvious blame seems paradoxical.
So the question for the individual is, why is it so important to be allowed to eat at the Heart
Attack Grill yet accepted that there's a good chance you're going to get exactly what you
paid for? I'm going to hide under the bed and wait for your answer. "Is it freedom of
choice?" Here's a hint: that's never the answer.

II.
You can run the list of "defense mechanisms" and try to link each one to specific personality
disorders, which will help you understand the spouse who left you or the spouse you're
never going to leave but the point for now is that what makes them defenses is not that
they protect you from pain-- they don't, clearly. They suck at doing this, look around.
The purpose of defense mechanisms is to stop you from changing. So that after the trauma
or the break-up or the loss you are still you. More sad/ashamed/impotent/enraged/
depressed is fine as long as you're the same guy.
This is what makes treating narcissism particularly difficult: the pathology's Number 1
characteristic is identity preservation. "I want to change." Nope. You want to be happier,
sure, more successful, feel love, drink less, but you want to remain you. But that won't
work. The identity you've chosen blows, ask anyone. Change is only possible when you
say, "I want to stop making everyone cry." The first step isn't admitting you have a problem
but identifying precisely how you are a problem for other people. But I'll save you the
trouble, you'll fail at this, too, because of the Number 2 characteristic of narcissism: inability
to see things from the other's perspective. "This isn't really therapeutic, jerk. You call
yourself a psychiatrist?" Mother's Day is Sunday, get her anything? I know, I know, she's a
jerk, too.

III.
If you want to watch these invisible unconscious defenses play out right in front of you, in
real time, in a real way, watch an adult American try to learn a second language.
Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like
speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no
thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you
lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED?
Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adults, are they all using
different science? An American describes another American who is fluent in French as "oh
my God, he's so smart, he speaks French and everything" but this statement is easily
unmasked as a defense by getting him to describe a Frenchman who speaks English: "well,
they all speak English over there." The bilingualism is robbed of the "intelligence"
signification because it's seen as customary.... who they are. America is a branded-identity
nation, which means hearing yourself speak in not-your accent, with not-your vocabulary
sounds very not-you, which is why when an American tries to speak French he feels self-
conscious, but the Frenchman hearing it feels you aren't even trying. He'd be wrong, you
are trying: trying not to become French.
"Ugh, I hate psychobabble, why can't you be more like Malcolm Gladwell and give me
practical neuroscience based tips like 'get up before dawn' or 'play basketball annoyingly'?"
Fine, here's your concrete advice that you won't take for shaving 6 months off your second
language acquisition: master the accent first. Before even one word of vocabulary. The
accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-- it will make it okay for
you to learn the vocabulary. And you will think differently. American exceptiono-
isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when
we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else.
Which teaches us that a German is more similar to an Italian than a Texan to a New Yorker,
and I can predict with 100% accuracy that if that made you pause you only speak English.
Can't wait to hear your foreign policy ideas over drinks. You should work for NPR.
Once you have the accent down, pick a foreign language actor or actress you admire, and
learn the language as if you were them. Talk like them. This trick works because you are
thinking like someone else, acting like someone else, yet simultaneously distancing yourself
from this change-- I'm doing this, but it's not me, I'm just pretending. The self-
consciousness is removed because it's not "you" who is doing it. Yet it is; and after a time,
you'll become it-- and the positive benefit for society is you'll hate the guy you used to be.
C'est la vie.
Which brings us back to the Heart Attack Grill. All psychological defenses have a common
structure: that two legitimate but contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously, one
consciously, one unconsciously, alternating variously. That way all possibilities are covered.
Change is neutralized.

IV.

"Hey dummy, what did you expect would happen if you ate at the Heart Attack Grill?"
Why did you expect it? Be careful. It isn't because you knew the food is unhealthy, and I
know this because you don't actually know what the food is. You have no idea if a "Triple
Bypass Burger" is in any way worse than a Big Mac except that it is branded as worse. If it
said "Double Healthy Burger," would you believe that, or does your cynicism only run in one
direction? (Let me check the calendar: it only runs in one direction.) "Well, there's a picture
of the giant burger right there at the top." Run all you like, Gingerbread Man, I'm still
going to catch you. The truth is you assumed the burger was extra-unhealthy as soon as
you read the title, before you knew anything else. So why are you trying to pretend
otherwise?
Take an alternative headline and meditate: "Man Has Heart Attack At Hooters." Hooters
food is poison but there the implication is that the waitresses' boobs were to blame. But the
Heart Attack Grill has equally sexy waitresses and no one blames their boobs.
So the expectation is exclusively the result of the names "Hooters" or "Heart Attack" and
the connotations they carry. Not the reality-- the connotations of the words. But
connotation is the purpose of branding. So "hey dummy, how could you go to the Heart
Attack Grill and not know you'd have a heart attack?" reveals our secret hope about
branding: that it is true, that it has power to affect reality.
I sense the resistance to this idea. The simple act of naming doesn't give it power, right?
The restaurant has to live up to its name. Well, now it has. Still think you should be
allowed to eat there?

V.
Is the name 'Heart Attack Grill' meant ironically? The waitstaff are dressed like sexy nurses
and doctors, which is meant ironically, i.e. what they provide (fatty food) runs counter to
the sartorial expectations. But the name is... not ironic, it's literally correct-- right?
Wrong. The name Heart Attack Grill is ironic, because the expectation is that you won't get
a heart attack there, and the reason you know you won't get a heart attack at the Heart
Attack Grill is -- and this is where you need to judge the strength of your soul-- exactly
that it is called Heart Attack Grill. That's why it is safe to eat there.
This will sound confusing, because if you actually have a heart attack at the Heart Attack
Grill, inevitably someone who thinks Kristen Wiig is funny will say: "umm, hel-lo? Mayor
McCheese? What did you expect would happen?" Well, not this.... I thought the name was
ironic.
God may be dead, but we're not yet ready to shine a flashlight into the abyss to see just
how abyssy it is; so we put a distance between ourselves and the dark abyssiness of reality,
and by "distance" I mean literally "some other omnipotent entity." And we make that entity
exert its power-- prove it has power-- through language. If something is called the Heart
Attack Grill, then it could not possibly actually cause heart attacks because no onewould
ever allow such a thing, any more than they would allow a Vegas brothel called "Syphilis
House"-- unless it was actually free of syphilis. The final step is the trickiest to understand
but the most natural to execute-- it is the atemporal logic of narcissism, aka magical
thinking: the naming of it prevents it from being true. Saying it is ironic is protective.
This is why blaming the dummy is pseudo-libertarianism. It seems that we don't want any
restrictions on our freedom, we want to be free to do things even if they are harmful; but
that freedom is always predicated on "some other omnipotent entity"'s supervision. We
want our freedom to eat unhealthily as long as it is "USDA Grade A" meat from a "Board Of
Health" restaurant, cooked not by Mexican illegals with no training in handwashing but by
chefs-- sorry, not precise enough: "...cooked by Mexican illegals as long as they are called
chefs." We want things to be as regulated as possible with two absolute conditions: 1.
there must be symbols of the omnipotent entity's existence showing we are being cared for,
like a Grade A seal or the absence of the 13th floor or the word "chefs"; 2. the
implementation of the power must be invisible so we can disavow it. And at the very last
step of a carefully managed outcome we can bask in the freedom of our pretend choice.
In other words, the fact that we are allowed to choose something dangerous must mean
that it isn't really that dangerous, which is more accurately but confusingly translated: the
fact that we are allowed to choose something dangerous causes it to be safe. And thank
God. "There is no God." Oh, that explains all the passive voice.

-----

[Link]

----

Notes:

Two simple examples of this process.

1. In normal people who did not grow up on a farm, drinking milk from a cow will seem
more disgusting than drinking it from a milk carton. The explanation will be that it isn't
"pasteurized and homogenized," which is both true and simultaneously a lie, because you
know milk is dispensed after pasteurization from an industrial vat into a carton

but if you had to pick between drinking from that carton at the supermarket vs. from that
industrial vat, you'd still pick the carton. The carton clearly displays symbols of regulation
and control, but the vat is too real to drink from.
2. Even if we agree that "taxes are too high" the psychological importance of lowering them
is that the regulations that we know to exist will still continue to exist but we are distanced
from them; to the point that the person who pays no taxes, or the man who pulls off the
grid feels he is no longer affected by those controls; but of course everything he touches is
still the result of those forces-- his Cabela's hat and camo jacket are flammability regulated,
certain dyes prohibited, factories free of glass shards; all things that he knows are true, but
blocks from his consciousness. "I'm totally self-sufficient." Ok. So on the one hand he
knows (unconsciously) he enjoys the protection of the regulations, on the other hand
knows (consciously) he is entirely free of their influence. This will alternate on the day he
e.g. catches fire. This is not a criticism but an explanation: since this disavowal/magical
thinking is a narcissistic defense, it's easy to predict that he will have other narcissistic
problems, e.g. alcohol, rage, misogyny, etc.
To be clear: what makes this a defense is not that he is wrong, but that he is right, he has a
legitimate point-- taxes may indeed be too high, the government too large, too many
regulations, etc. If he believed something that was not true he'd be delusional. The
defense is effective only if two incompatible truths are held simultaneously, alternating
variously depending on what's going on, so that change is neutralized.

APRIL 24, 2012

Why We Love Sociopaths

!
 according to this, it's sociopaths that we love

"My greatest regret is I'm not a sociopath," starts an article written by....... well, I reserve
judgment. "Are you suggesting...?" No, not at all. That's where the truth lies. "Wait-- 'lies'
as in----"

This article is important for a specific reason. If you follow the thesis that The Atlantic and
The New Yorker set the default ways which we understand social issues, e.g. sex, money
and politics-- and they do this even if you don't read those magazines-- then Kotsko and
others like him set the default understanding for academic types. This doesn't mean
everyone agrees with him, no no no-- it means that he sets the frame. The trick is you will
argue his conclusions but it will be impossible for it to occur to you to argue the form of the
question. So "why do we love sociopaths?" is literally understood: "since it is a fact that we
love sociopaths, why?"

II.

Kotsko's thesis is that we love sociopaths because sociopathy is opposed to social

awkwardness. Say you're in line at the store and some jerk cuts in front of you, on
purpose, and for the sake of clarification let me observe he has a Celtic cross tattooed to his
shoulder and he just had sex with your girlfriend. He's a different kind of person than you.
He can do things you can't, do women you can't, he sees the world's rules differently, which
specifically means he understands that there are no "world's rules," that rules are decided
by those with power for their own benefit. After he cuts in line, he pockets a Milky Way bar
because, well, because he got away with it. My grammar is correct: he can do it since he
got away with it.
Ultimately, the only thing you have over him, as you seethe expressionlessly with your 15
items or less, is sleeves and the feeling that you're not a jerk.
The media offers us our wish fulfillment by creating characters who are "good" sociopaths
that we can safely envy, and "good" is defined by The Atlantic as "has an internal code of
ethics" and by anyone else as "makes it up as he goes along." TV sociopaths-- Don Draper,
Tony Soprano-- seem to be like that guy. They do what they want and aren't bothered that
you, a loser, think they're a jerk. The difference between you and them, according to
Kotsko, is that they manipulate the social connections whereas you are mired in them. They
can detach, you can't. Your only compensation is that you have moral superiority.
But at some point in the breakdown of capitalist society-- it says it right on the cover of his
book-- that moral superiority isn't enough. Are you not a person who works hard and plays
by the rules? You still want to have nice things, you still want to get nice women, you still
want to feel some power, which in a normally functioning society you would be able to get in
your own natural way. But when there's unemployment and debt and your wife leaves you,
and it looks like these are happening because the social contract has failed, because jerks
are taking from you, those real losses aren't sufficiently compensated by "at least I'm not a
jerk." Extend that to Wall Street stealing your savings and feeling no shame, having no
punishment, and all we can do is pretend that our moral superiority is enough
compensation, and of course it isn't.
Hence the aspirational images of TV sociopaths. How great would it be to just...
If only I didn't give a fuck about anyone or anything, we think--then I would be powerful and free. Then
I would be the one with millions of dollars, with the powerful and prestigious job, with more sexual
opportunities than I know what to do with.
III.

Kotsko has it backwards.

"If only....." Look deep. There is no if only. They already don't "give a fuck." No one who
wishes they could be like Tony Soprano or Don Draper actually cares about anyone. "I care
about my mom." No you don't. You'd be sad if she died, of course, but you do not care
about her, and I don't need to provide any examples for you to know this is true.
The "social contract has failed" argument is a rationalization. What's troubling them is that
they already don't care at all, but they still aren't able to manipulate people the way Tony
does. This is reinforced by the sentences that immediately precede "If only...":
If we feel very acutely the force of social pressure, they feel nothing. If we are bound by guilt and
obligation, they are completely amoral.

Point to the guy who is both "bound by guilt"-- not shame, but guilt-- and also wants to be
Tony Soprano and I'll show you a person who doesn't exist.
To be correct, Kotsko's sentences should be revised: "what the hell is wrong with me that I
am exactly like Tony Soprano in every single way, except on execution?" Amoral and
impotent is different than amoral and potent, but you're a jerk both ways.
This is how I know that anyone who says, "If only I could live in Mad Mentime where you
could pinch a girl's ass and not get in trouble for it" is going to be way disappointed if a
TARDIS shows up, because they wouldn't pinch them back then, either, not because they
are afraid of trouble but because they are afraid of girls. Exhibit A: you know what a
TARDIS is.
In a sentence, the problem with his Kotsko's analysis is that it isn't a description of the
pathology, it itself is the defense against a hidden pathology. Not: because Wall Street
steals and we have no justice, we begin to admire sociopaths. But: because we admire
sociopaths, therefore Wall Street is able to steal. Not: because the social contract has
unraveled, therefore we wish to be sociopaths. But: because we are sociopaths, therefore
the social contract has unraveled. I know this is a very unpopular thing to say, but if you
find yourself wanting to be bad because everyone else gets away with it, then the problem
isn't everyone else, the problem is you.
No, yelling at me won't make this less true.

IV.

I should point out that Kotsko uses the word "sociopath" incorrectly.
The contemporary fantasy of sociopathy picks and chooses from those characteristics, emphasizing the
lack of moral intuition, human empathy, and emotional connection. Far from being the obstacles they
would be in real life, these characteristics are what enable the fantasy sociopath to be so amazingly
successful.

Everywhere Kotsko uses the word "sociopath" he is more accurately describing "narcissist."
He calls them sociopaths because of the way they relate to society, but that would mean
that the ebola virus is also a sociopath. Society is the collateral damage of me me me.

Kotsko focuses on this a la carte sociopathy because he admits no one envies actual real life
sociopaths. We only envy TV sociopaths-- so he infers that it must be a special selection of
sociopathic characteristics we actually admire.

But this the wrong inference to make. The reason TV sociopaths are admired is that they
are on TV. They have a story.
Do you really admire Tony Soprano? Which part? His loveless marriage to a crazy person? A
mistress who is even crazier? His gigantic belly and panic attacks? The fact that no one
actually likes him? That his daughter was dating a black guy? ("I wouldn't have a problem
with that." Yes you would if you were Tony.) What part do you admire?
The answer you tell yourself is you admire his power, that he can do whatever he wants. No
he can't. The whole show was nothing but repeated examples of how limited his options
were. The things you think you admire-- having hot sex with the other crazy woman at his
psychiatrist's office, eating microwaved Sysco at Italian restaurants, avoiding his wife-- can
be done by anyone, you don't need to be Tony to do it. But when you do it.... it just doesn't
feel the same. I know.
What people admire about Tony isn't his freedom; that thing you think is freedom is actually
the lack of freedom. His story. His identity-- that he has one, an obvious one, a clear one.
Tony Soprano is not free, his behavior is completely tethered to what makes sense for his
character. He acts exactly like Tony Soprano would act. That's what people want: the
limitations of that identity: if I know who I am, I know what I am capable of, I know my
strengths and my limits, I know how I'd react to unknown dangers. And I want other
people to know this. If other people know who I am, I wouldn't have to keep proving
myself. Strike that: I wouldn't have to prove myself in the first place.
Kotsko makes another mistake in thinking that our admiration of TV sociopaths like Don
Draper and Tony Soprano reflects a universal psychology. It doesn't. It only reflects the
psychology of the people who like those shows, which isn't a lot of people but is a very
specific and vocal group of people: Aspirational 14%. Those people have the unique
problem of too much freedom, too much money (which is to say they are still living
paycheck to paycheck, but only because they are spending it all on keeping up the identity),
too many options and, most importantly, nothing to define them.
The admiration of TV sociopaths is related to this desire of self-identification, and not to a
lack of power or a failure of the social contract. The social contract is working just fine for
the AMC/Netflix demographic. It does not explain a desire for more power; envy explains it.
Not knowing who I am, not knowing what I am supposed to do next and what I am not
supposed to bother doing next-- makes us long for characters who know precisely what to
do next even if it is the wrong things. They may be flawed, but they are definite. They
exist.

V.

Telling a modern American that what they really want is less freedom seems like some
dangerous talk, but it is true nonetheless. Cynicism, irony has failed you, but you know no
other way to be. Don Draper is an ad man, so going to a "partners' meeting" run formally,
by a secretary, doesn't seem bad at all. It seems great. Neither does wearing a suit and
tie, every day, and a hat. But your job doesn't define you, so going to a meeting seems
stupid, a farce, play acting, so you display a cynical detachment from it. And you're not
going to wear a tie for anybody. You know it's stupid, you're not buying this corporate
bullshit. This cynical posture is a front, a wall, it protects you from being defined by your
actions; but what you don't see is that the very job you think you're undermining still
receives the full power of your productivity. That you're unhappy, or cynical, is irrelevant to
it. It doesn't care about you. Why should it? You don't even care about yourself.
That's what we envy in Don Draper. That he can exist as himself without ironic detachment,
that he can be defined as something. And what they are and what they do match up
perfectly, even if it's "bad." The truth you must face, now, immediately, is that if you were
put in Draper's clothes, in his relationships, in his job, you yourself would immediately affect
that cynical detachment: "A partners' meeting? What for? Come on, I see you guys in the
hallways all the time" and you'd be as miserable as you are now. But until you accept this
truth about yourself, you'll think changing other things could save you. Tell the truth: did
you consider a career in advertising after you watched Mad Men? Then you are lost.
VI.
It's impossible to deconstruct TV shows without considering their complement: advertising.
Ads, especially TV commercials, offer the exact opposite of cynical detachment: pure
aspiration. So while you resist allowing your career or relationship to define you-- "I'm
more than a software engineer!" you beg objects-- cars, clothes, women-- to define you,
and of course not actual cars, clothes, or women, but whatever other people have said
those things represent. Worse, cynicism and aspirational branding aren't two opposite ends
of a pole, they form a cycle: the chasm between your cynical view of real life and the
perfect definition of the aspirational images in ads makes you even more cynical towards
real life; which drives you further into the safety of branding. Which is why you drink.
The only salvation to this existential crisis is less freedom, not more. The only question is
whether you will impose these restrictions on yourself, or you will wait like cattle for
someone else to impose them on you. But they will be imposed. It is inevitable.
---

[Link]

Aspirational 14%, defined

Don Draper Voted "Most Influential Man"

APRIL 10, 2012

The Hunger Games Is A Sexist Fairy Tale. Sorry.
!
this isn't going to have a happy ending

You should probably read this first.

I.

Housekeeping: it's legitimate to accuse me of being drunk or a terrible writer, both are
true. But you can't say I didn't read the book and didn't see the movie. I know I did, I was
there.

When I say Katniss was continuously robbed of agency, that's a simple fact. Let's examine
the commonly cited counterexample that she killed two people by dropping a hornet's nest
on them. Didn't that require her to plan and act, to know the consequences? Isn't that
agency?

Chekov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the
following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" but the flip of that is that if
you don't put a pistol on the wall in the first act, you can't suddenly have the main character
find a pistol on the wall. Unless you're writing a fairy tale.

So when Katniss is desperate, trapped in a tree, and has no recourse-- and suddenly
someone points out that there is this immensely lethal object right next to her, maybe it's a
hornet's nest and maybe it's a thermal detonator-- so the story then has to take a three
minute pause so an omniscient narrator can explain to the audience what it is because we
had no knowledge of this before, "oh, it's magic bees," then there are only two possibilities:
1. Deus ex machina. 2. It's a terribly written story. I favor 1, but I'm open to 2. Oh, and
it kills everyone but Peeta, that's lucky.
II.

The standard adulation for The Hunger Games is that it has a strong female protagonist who
is, and I quote, "a badass." Is she more of a badass than Alice from Resident Evil? Come
the zombie apocalypse, do you go Team Katniss or Team Alice? Not who it's cooler to say
you'd pick; assume you have a 5 year old daughter with one hit point left whose life
depends on your selection. Because I'm arguing that it does.

!
actual badass

Obviously you go with Alice, which is also why she isn't popular among women: There's no
aspiration, no wish fulfillment, it's too fantastic, too impossible because Alice is, in fact, a
superhero. It's not real.

But Katniss isn't a superhero, and "women can identify with her." Ok, which part? She isn't
better than her competitors. Thresh is still tougher, Cato faster, Foxface more ninjalike, etc.
And to reiterate, Katniss is carried through the movie by deus ex machina or continuously
saved by other people. So why is she a badass and not, say, Peeta, who spends the entire
movie sacrificing himself for her?

I want you to pick one single scene that you think best epitomizes her badassness. Got it?
You sure? Take a moment. The one scene you'd show your friends. "Check this out:
badass."

Is it any of the scenes displaying her spectacular inability to hit moving targets at close
range? No? But it has something to do with the bow, right? Otherwise these wouldn't exist:
!

!
I'm not a hater, follow the logic. Nothing she does makes her a badass. What makes her a
badass is that men underestimate her. If you don't believe me, what scene did you pick?
The same one the audience did, the one that made them cheer the loudest,
"wwoooooooohhhh!!!!!!"

There's a banquet and the contestants have to show off their skills, but the overlords are
eating a roast pig and bored with Katniss (because she misses a target) so Katniss turns her
arrow towards them and shoots an apple. Katniss says, "you better recognize,
mothafuckas!", flashes a gang sign, and the audience swoons. That's when she's a badass.
Yes, she was wonderful in the Games, I'm sure, but what got your adrenaline going, what
made her a badass, is showing off her abilities-- to men. That's why more than half of this
movie takes place before the Games-- it's all about showing what you can do, showing your
capabilities. Badass = showing she can compete on a male level. (1)

In the actual Games, Katniss is continuously saved by men-- Haymitch, Peeta, Peeta again,
Thresh-- but you don't notice that she saves no one, including herself, you think she saves
herself all the time. You think this because of the first half of the movie told you she's a
badass, so you don't realize that during the second half she shows less agency than Princess
Jasmine.

And the reason why showing off-- or, as the movie ever so subtly puts it, "showing them
up"-- is so important is that women still secretly believe they are inferior to men. I know
most of you aren't going to want to hear that, and, indeed, the vast majority of you will
woefully willfully misquote me as having said, "women are inferior to men," but that's
because your brain is broken. I read the book. You need to read with a highlighter.

Haymitch, played by a man, says this to a woman, played by Katniss:

You know how you stay alive? You get people to like you. Oh, not what you were expecting?

No, unfortunately it's exactly what I was expecting. Thanks Dad.

II.

If you are angry at me you are not reading your own words. This is bigger than Katniss,
this is the state of human progress. If it helps, imagine you have a five year old daughter
you have to raise in the midst of aspirational images with long legs and no power of agency,
and your worry is no longer "will she grow up and find a job?" or even "will she grow up and
get married?" but "will she be so conflicted about herself that she is unable to choose a
career or pick a nice man from the hundreds of options that present themselves to her
because she is ever anxious that any choice is the wrong choice because she only gets
conflicting messages from everyone on earth?" That's the world I'm stuck in, and though I
haven't burned a bra in years I do somewhat rely on feminists to nudge the bar consistently
higher so my theoretical daughters don't have to rely on penis or Prozac to live happily ever
after. So where my girls at? I found about a million fawning feminist reviews of The Hunger
Games which all contain some version of this paragraph:

Katniss, in this season of woman-hating, is a stunning example of feminism at its finest hour. She is
compassionate, yet strong. She cares deeply about her family. While she is tempted to run away with
Gale, instead of leaving her sister and mother to fend for themselves, she stays to support them.

Lord have mercy on all our souls, I'll take my chances with Alice and a zombie attack. None
of those things are feminism, those aren't even praiseworthy. Those are basic, ordinary,
unremarkable characteristics of every reasonable human being for 6000 years, and all
animals. But that's the bar the reviewer has set for Katniss, for feminism. That's the
fantasy world she'd like to see women eventually get to. So either a) she has an
unconsciously cynical view of women in general; or b) she has been tricked by the system
about what it is to advance as a woman, i.e she's in The Matrix. Here's the problem: she's
a woman. She represents women. She is a feminist, but she does not see that Katniss is
allowed to exist precisely because she isn't a threat to men but women can think she is. If I
was a 15 year old girl, and I'm not saying I'm not, then what is being communicated to me
by the feminist praise of this book is that my future expectations are low. Maybe-- MAYBE--
if I work real hard I might someday surprise a boy, "wow, I never would have guessed!"
Can't wait till I grow up.

III.

The feminists missed this, all of this, and it is their job not to miss this. What they yelled
about is the racism of a small audience, to avoid facing the sexism in themselves. And, by
the way, the racism in themselves: Jezebel jumped on the racism against black actors
because they are stupid. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. Do you know why Thresh
doesn't kill Katniss but instead lets her go? Because Thresh is black.

The boy tribute from District 11, Thresh, has the same dark skin as Rue, but the resemblance stops there.
He's one of the giants, probably six and half feet tall and built like an ox.

Black guy= strength, so his letting her go is a signal of her value as a temporary equal.
This is a repeat of the 1980s trope that a (white) weakling being bullied winds up being
saved by black gang members: "Eugene is a friend o' ours, so we best not hear no mo'
trouble." Thresh doesn't happen to be black, Thresh is intentionally black, a stereotype, for
that scene to occur, because to a white woman, no one knows the value of a person's life
better than a slightly retarded giant homicidal black guy. "He's bad, but he has a internal
code of honor." Oh. You know you're stupid, right? In other words, the racists in Central
Time are less racist than Suzanne Collins. Bet you didn't see that coming. Which is my
whole point: no one saw any of this coming, they saw a woman with a bow and flipped the
hell out. Katniss is a role model for girls like Thresh is a role model for blacks. I look
forward to your deranged responses. (2)

Katniss lives in a patriarchy, sure there are some women but they look completely insane,
which trivializes them. Odd that no feminists noticed that. They are all wicked
stepmothers-- a problem, but not the problem. The problem is all the men with all the
power, and any women who have power have it only because they are hooked up with more
powerful men. Katniss seems like a lone hero, outside all this, but she she always defers to
that patriarchy, and relies on it, operates within the rules of the society but, and this is what
makes her a "badass"-- she tests limits. Postures for the cameras. Says the right things,
but says them with a slightly rebellious inflection. Feels like 15 again.
!

Deconstuctionists like to ask easy questions like, "why is a story for 15 year old girls so
popular among middle aged women?" They asked this about Twilight, too, but it's not at all
surprising that these books are popular among middle aged women who still secretly believe
women are second behind men. Not in terms of theoretical potential, perhaps, but they've
grown up in a world with enough experiences that they can't shake it. It's still a man's
world.

The real question is why it's popular among 15 year old girls? 15 year old girls should, in
theory, have grown up without 1970s sexism. Schools are hypervigilant about fostering
girls development, and there are enough female everythings that it's not remarkable that
there are female anythings.

And yet here we are, teen girls are reading fairy tales. This book should not resonate with
15 year olds, not this much. Which means that these girls are still getting sexist signals
from somewhere, and, follow the trail, those signals came from the 40 year old women who
like the story, i.e. "feminists." This is what I mean when I say the system no longer needs
men to maintain the status quo: it has feminists doing the job for it.

Please, please, don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against The Hunger Games, it's an
entertaining story, I am not criticizing the book, I am criticizing you. If it won an Oscar or
the world declared this the next Star Wars and made action figures and lunchboxes I
wouldn't say a bad word about it, what's it to me if it makes people happy? Enjoy what you
like, it doesn't have to have deep meaning to be worthwhile.

But what makes me reach for the now empty bottle is how women have convinced
themselves and each other that this is a pro-feminist story. Do you not see what is
happening? You are being lied to, by yourselves.

---

[Link]

1. See also Katy Perry's empowerment represented by training with the Marines.

2. Oh boy. Yes, Thresh is retarded. In the movie this is not revealed at all-- probably
because the poor director couldn't take it anymore, but in the book he has stilted speech,
limited vocabulary, one word answers. The alternative interpretation is that English isn't his
native tongue-- i.e., he is a giant, black, cotton picking, immigrant. I'll let you decide which
interpretation is worse. None of this occurred to anyone? Outstanding.

More on the future of feminism here.

APRIL 2, 2012
What's Wrong With The Hunger Games Is What No One Noticed
!
guess what happens next

When a media universally misses the point, it's on purpose.

I.

Rue is a little girl in The Hunger Games, and in the movie she's played by a black girl.
According to Jezebel, Racist Hunger Games Fans Are Disappointed.

!
Well, six people are, anyway.
There's an underlying rage, coming out as overt prejudice and plain old racism. Sternberg is called a
"black bitch," a "nigger" and one person writes that though he pictured Rue with "darker skin," he
"didn't really take it all the way to black." It's as if that is the worst possible thing a person could be.

So there are some racist fans, so what? In itself, why would this be surprising? There are
racists everywhere. I once asked a black guy where I could find some racists and he
punched me in the mouth, turns out I'm a racist. Who knew? Actually, I did, because every
time I see a black guy do anything odd I say to myself for no reason at all, "oh, hell no, oh
no you didn't." This is going on in my head, silently, no audience. Apparently not only do I
see race, I hear it. And god forbid it's a black woman, my neck and skull actually start
moving from side to side as I think, "mmmm hhhmmmmm!" Why do I do this? I don't talk
like that. So much for individuality, so much for free thought, I am so polluted by the world
that my reflex thoughts are someone else's. You don't even want to know whose thoughts I
think when I see boobs.

Of course, if this racism was attached to a Transformers movie you can be sure that Jezebel
would pronounce all of the Transformers audience racist. But in this case, it's only some of
the audience who are racist, because progressive Jezebel likes The Hunger Games, and
they're not racist. How can they be? They're post-feminists, i.e. the racism for Jezebel is
merely an opportunity to criticize the bridge trolls who live in Central Time, just in time for
the elections.

Most of the "racist" comments I've seen about this complain about the race from a anti-
Hollywood, anti-left perspective, i.e. "there goes liberal Hollywood, pushing the liberal
agenda." The complaint appears to be not that they don't like black characters in
general, but that this was some underhanded move to use the story to promote a political
agenda, like making Sherlock Holmes a gay action hero. Now that's just wrong.

If that's the case I don't completely fault them, the story is important to these girls/women,
and they feel betrayed that someone alters it to suit their interests rather than give a
faithful telling of the story, which, as happens to stories, become partly owned by the
audience.

The point here is not whether Rue should be black or not. What's interesting is how Jezebel
seized on the racial controversy, but completely avoided the one bludgeoning them in the
face for two hours: this is a book for females, written by a female, with femalist themes,
gigantically popular among females, yet is more sexist than a rap video.

II.

Everything that's terrible about THG is in this sentence:

Hunger Games was written by a woman and stars a woman (much as we love JK Rowling, her series
isn't named after Hermione) -- making it a true lady-centric blockbuster franchise.

Here's your first point of irony: this true lady-centric blockbuster franchise isn't named after
Katniss, it's named after what happens to Katniss, which is why it is truly a lady-centric
franchise.
How would you classify this book/movie's genre? Is it an action movie with a female twist?
Is it a love story? A drama? Sci-fi?

No. It is a fairy tale.

III.

We can start with the obvious. The book is about 24 kids thrown into an arena to fight to
the death, only the toughest, the most resourceful, the strongest will survive, and it better
be you because your whole village depends on it. It is such a scary premise that there was
some concern it was too violent for kids to watch. Well, big surprise: Katniss wins.

Hmmm, here is a surprise: Katniss never kills anyone. That's weird, what does she do to
win? Take as much time as you want on this, it's an open book test. The answer is nothing.

This is not a criticism about the entertainment value of the story, but about its popularity
and the pretense that it has a strong female character. I like the story of Cinderella, but I
doubt that anyone would consider Cinderella a strong female character, yet Katniss and
Cinderella are identical.

The traditional progressive complaint about fairy tales like Cinderella is that they supposedly
teach girls to want to be princesses and want to live happily ever after. But is that so bad?
The real problem with fairy tales is that the protagonist never actually does anything to
become a princess. Forget about gerrymandering or slaying a dragon or poisoning her
rivals: does she even get a pretty dress, go to the ball and seduce the prince? Those may
be anti-feminist actions, but at least they are actions. No. She is given two dresses,
carried to the ball, and the Prince comes and finds her. Twice. Her only direct and volitional
action is to leave the ball at midnight, and even that isn't so much a choice as because of a
threat. (1) The clear problem with this isn't that girls will want to hold out for a Prince, but
that it might foster the illusion their value is so innately high that even without pretty
clothes or a sense of agency a Prince will come find them. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White
are worse: they don't even have to bother to stay alive to get their Prince.

The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem. Other than the initial volunteering to
replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with
consequence-- but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions.
She has free will, of course, like any five year old with terrible parents, but at every turn is
prevented from acting on the world. She is protected by men-- enemies and allies alike;
directed by others, blessed with lucky accidents and when things get impossible there are
packages from the sky. In philosophical terms, she is continuously robbed of agency. She
is deus ex machinaed all the way to the end. (2)
!
For example, though this is a story about kids killing kids, somehow Katniss never actually
plans and executes any kids, she's never guilty of murder one. She does kill Rue's
murderer, but it was reflexive, a defensive act. Importantly, she does not choose NOT to
kill, she does not choose a pacifist position, she explicitly states twice in the book how
much she wants to kill. But she never does it. She tries to kill big bad Cato at the end,
twice, and fails. Only after he is torn to shreds by mutants does she perform a mercy killing
on him, at his request. In other words, she doesn't choose to kill or not kill-- it doesn't
come up. (3)

The story goes out of its way to prevent her from having to make choices and especially
from bearing their consequences. Events unfold in such a way that it appears she made a
choice, but decisions are actually made for her. At the end she and Peeta, her kinda-
boyfriend, are the last two contestants left. Only one can live. What should happen next?
Does she kill him? Or let him kill her? Think about it, what does she choose? Remember,
this is about a strong female character forced to play a killing game. Wait-- never mind,
they change the rules at the end: everyone's a winner!

"But she chooses to commit suicide at the end!" That would have been a choice, but the
book robs her of that as well, this is the point. The book does not allow her to make
irreversible choices, it lets her believe she is making free choices and then negates them,
again, just like a five year old girl with terrible parents.

She does commit one consciously deliberate act, and it's quite revealing. At the end of the
book, she's ambivalent about whether she loves contestant Peeta. But the Games allowed
two winners only because they appeared to be in love; so all she has to do, for the cameras,
is pretend to be in love with a boy she already likes a lot. But after all she's been through
in the arena, this-- what is coincidentally called ACTING-- is what is described, in the
shocking last sentence of the chapter, as "the most dangerous part of The Hunger Games."

This is not hyperbole. This is literally correct: for someone who has not ever done it, acting
with agency would indeed be dangerous. But those stories aren't fairy tales, those stories
are legends.

III.

That the book is successful or exciting is not the point here. What's fascinating/horrifying is
that this fairy tale has managed to convince everyone, especially people who consider
themselves feminists, that it represents a form of female empowerment when it is exactly
the opposite. What you should not underestimate is how deliberate this magic trick is. This
is society successfully pretending to change so that nothing changes. The goal is making
the other team contribute to their own oblivion. The goal is status quo.
!

The classic feminist example of "robbed of agency" is the woman who "chooses" to wear
makeup, do her hair, display/hide the right amount of cleavage. Is she choosing this, or is
society imposing this false choice on her? Because if she feels she has to do it in order to
land the account, then it's not really her choice. Hence a controversy about agency.

What makes this such an impossible, lose-lose situation for a woman is that this choice isn't
about "what to do" but about who she is, what society wants a woman to be: while she
must make herself look pretty, if she is observed doing this she is immediately and
simultaneously critiqued for being vain. The decision about whether to be or not to doll
herself up is thus somewhat up to her, but the judgment about whether she is vain is
entirely out of her hands-- it is a judgment imposed on her for doing exactly what is
expected of her. Her only hope is that she is can make herself look pretty enough that it
looks like it was not on purpose, i.e reveal the results but hide the process. (4) This
manipulation of her is all deliberate design-- what society actually wants is that it gets her
to be pretty, demarcates her as an object to be gazed upon-- but not bear any of the guilt/
responsibility for forcing her into this. If it works and you are pretty I guess that's some
consolation, but imagine if you're not pretty but still have to go through all this, suspecting
but never admitting that everyone is going to think, "why'd she even bother?" Being pretty
is in many ways worse, because you're not only competing with other pretty women but
with yourself ("you look tired today") and, as the old saying goes, a beautiful woman dies
two deaths. But before you go try some of our Nivea skin care products. That's the
system, it wants you to participate in your own marginalization so you don't dare unplug.
It's exhausting being a chick. I mean girl-- woman. Jesus. (5)

Though this is an example of the feminist agency problem, you should note carefully that
the "society" that forces this false choice on women is actually other women, not men, and
it starts with the overly invested way mothers reproach their daughters to "dress like a
lady." Certainly the original energy for this madness comes from men, from "the
patriarchy", but if every man was executed tonight nothing would change tomorrow. It's on
autopilot. Case in point: this story of a girl robbed of agency was written by a woman.

So this is why we have a book about a post-apocalyptic killing game that spends zero pages
describing how Katniss kills anyone but spends countless pages on how she is dressed, how
everyone is dressed. What will she wear? What kind of jewelry? Hair up? Will the
"sponsors" like her better this way or that? Her chief weapon isn't a bow, it's her
appearance.

This is also a good place to observe that the real life, pre-and post movie release
controversies about The Hunger Games have also been about physical appearances-- not
just race, but is Jennifer Lawrence too tall? Hair too blonde?

That's why The Hunger Games is such a diabolical head fake. Forget about it being
entertaining, which I concede it is. It has managed to convince everyone that a passive
character whose main strength is that she thinks a lot of thoughts and feels a lot of feelings,
but who ultimately lets every decision be made by someone else-- that is a female hero, a
winner. You wouldn't allow yourself to like a story where the woman lacks agency, so it's
clothed in a vampire story or a female Running Man so it sounds like she's making things
happen. Or, if you prefer, in order to allow you to like an anti-feminist story, it is necessary
to brand it as a vampire story or a female Running Man. Regardless of how you phrase it,
the purpose is to get you to like this kind of a story. It wants you to think this is the next
step in female protagonists. But it's a trick: nothing has changed since the royal ball.

That these "adolescent girl" stories-- Twilight and THG-- have women who are essentially
lead by men, circumstance, and fate-- whose main executive decision is "do I love this guy
or that guy"-- is a window on our culture worth discussing. When you have a daughter,
your first question should be, "how is the system going to try to crush her?" and plan
accordingly. This story's answer is, "no matter what happens, just talk a lot and it'll sort
itself out." That Jezebel is distracted by the racial angle here strikes me as an
unconsciously deliberate avoidance of the larger issue. Oh, the audience is racist, that's the
problem.
---

[Link]

-----------------

I. The threat is not that her coach will become a pumpkin. It is "the longer you stay, the
more likely you will be detected to be a fraud." This is a critical childhood anxiety (which is
why it is in a fairy tale), a narcissistic anxiety, and a feminist anxiety. The only thing she
has to offer are her looks, and those are artificial (makeup and clothes) and transient.
Eventually, the botox wears off. Tellingly, it cannot occur to Cinderella to even anti-
feministly use her boobs to seduce the Prince and then win him over with her charm/grace/
personality. Ultimate decision and action is always someone else's (godmother, Prince, etc.)

2. To reinforce this point, consider that "deus ex machina" is translated, "god from the
machine" where machine= people who made the story. So not an act of god, but rather the
author putting a god into the story to affect things; the important implication is that it is not
random but deliberate. So when Katniss's potential victim happens to be wearing body
armor, it is not an accident that Katniss couldn't kill him, or dumb luck, it was the deliberate
intention of the author not allow Katniss to kill him.

The purpose of deus ex machina in ancient stories was to place the final reconciliation at the
spiritual level: God saved you, time to commune. But since Nietzsche said there is no god,
"deus ex machina"= man, for the purpose of delivering earthly prizes. This is the essence
of the fairy tale-- as magical as they may be, the end result is always an earthly reward
(marriage, riches, survival) and never a spiritual one. Hence, fairy tales are vital to the
religious and non-religious children alike because they act as a bridge away from spiritual to
earthly ("time to grow up")-- the child's imaginary world directed away from more
imagination and towards the practical; or, in other terms, away from the Imaginary towards
the Symbolic.

3. So if Katniss tries to kill someone, and fails, she has agency; but if I, the reader, can
predict that at no point will she actually kill anyone because I can tell the author doesn't
want to put her into such a position-- and then she tries to kill someone and "fails", then
Katniss lacks agency. Note that the person who is aware that he has free will feels as
though he lacks agency ("it doesn't matter what I do") becomes either depressed or
paranoid, or both.

4. An interesting exception is hair coloring. The brunette who dyes her hair blonde isn't
trying to look Swedish, the point is to make sure everyone knows it's artificial because it's a
signal: I don't want blonde hair, I want to be a <<blonde>>.

5. An example of this and Lacan's partial object is the 40 something woman who looks in
the mirror and decides that her entire sexuality is in a single special part of her, say, her
butt-- so she diets to make the butt look good at the expense of bony shoulders and a
gaunt face. Men sometimes do the same to their spouses, empowering a single body part
of hers with all of the sexuality, e.g. looking at the calf or the hip bone doesn't simply
remind him of the 20 year old version of his wife, but becomes the fetish that replaces the
long gone 20 year old version. But this isn't illusion or delusion, he is not imagining what his
wife looked like, the single body part is enough to generate arousal, in the same way that
any fetish (specific kind of shoe, or a foot, or a piece of lace) is entirely sufficient. The
problem is that this doesn't make the woman look hotter, it replaces the woman, so now
neither the 20 year old version nor the 40 year old version are necessary.

The extreme of this logic is in anorexia, where the whole body is sacrificed in order to get
"thin"- but because the thinness isn't directed in a body part but in an idea, a feeling, they
still wear baggy clothes not to hide their fat but to hide the collateral damage of emaciation
to their body which they are completely aware of. They know other people think they're too
thin, they know "87 lbs" is a small number, but the anorexic is trying to control an idea. "I
can see that my shoulders are sticking out, I know everyone can see my ribs, but yet I
know I am horrifically fat." The control, the act of not eating, is the special body part; it is
the obsessed-over fetish that exists for its own sake.

Addendum: if you don't know how to read, you should probably click this.

MARCH 19, 2012

Shame Is The Desired Outcome
!
do you see?

Part 1 is here. If you're from Metafilter, you should probably stop reading now. There are
a few articles at McSweeney's I'm sure you'd enjoy.

VIII.

If the movie was a straightforward Hollywood docudrama, you'd never hear about it unless
you watch the Lifetime Channel . But-- you heard about it. What did you learn from what
you heard?

IX.

One of the big deals of this movie is the NC-17 rating, which you might expect for a movie
about sex addiction. Except that there is nothing in this movie that would deserve an
NC-17. There is way more nudity and sex in The Hangovers and Brandon's date was never
shown with jizz in her hair like Cameron Diaz.

Maybe it was the penis. In an early scene, Brandon walks naked to the toilet. We see him
from the living room, bathroom door wide open and back/butt to us, and you can see his
penis hanging past his testicles as he is peeing. When he is finished peeing, he then closes
the door to take a shower. This scene isn't an accident: it took three takes.

First question: why didn't he pee in the shower like everyone else in NY? Maybe because
he's not a pig. Ok, second question: why close the door at all? Or, why not close it for both
peeing and showering? In my freshman year of college I lived in a house with both XX and
XY and everyone urinated with the door closed; but everyone then opened the door during a
shower. Freshmen. The exhibitionism was a deliberate boldness, a dare, wrapped in the
hope of sexual maturity that pretended to have forgotten to close the door. By senior year,
however, everyone was showering and urinating with the door open because whatever.

So the answer to why Brandon does it that way is: I don't know. But I know why the movie
did this: it wanted to show Brandon's penis in a way that doesn't make the censors go
bananas. In a movie about sex, even a showering penis would be too sexual. To
unsexualize a penis you have to show it peeing, which is why none of my freshman
roommates ever let that happen.

So the movie wants us to see the penis (voyeurism=tickets) as a source of envy-- this is a
perfect male specimen-- but they want to make sure you don't get too turned on. But there
was a big penis showering itself back in Sex And The City II-- Dante, played by that guy on
Dancing With The Stars, and that was five years ago, and only rated R. So now the
question is, why is Brandon's penis, even peeing, so much worse than Dante's SATC2 rated
R penis?

The answer is: you're supposed to want actor Michael Fassbender's penis, but not character
Brandon's penis. "This penis is very bad."

X.

Take a look at Brandon. When media wants to depict a sex addict they depict the wealthy,
the good looking, the powerful, the well hung. There are plenty of slimy basement dwelling
janitor sex addicts out there, but they are represented as sex offenders. There are also
plenty of gay sex addicts out there, but they are represented as gay. Both of you are
dismissed, the world has no time for your nonsense. The sex addicts we see in movies and
on the news are: rock stars, politicians, sports guys, CEOs. If you think about the demo
primed to receive this depiction of lothario as sex addict-- women over 35, i.e. the demo for
Shame-- sex addiction needs to be seen as terrible because it is terrible for them. It may
also be terrible for the sex addict, but fuck you, we have a society to run.

When you see the word "society" look ahead and to the right, psychiatry is in a window with
its scope on you. Sex addiction rarely breaks laws so it can't be punished, and there's no
God so the immorality of it is debatable, i.e. inconsequential. It must be a disease, that
way other people don't want to catch it. All psychiatric treatment of constructed syndromes
isn't about cure but about regression to the mean, where mean= cubicle drone. In other
words, the point of offering Priapos treatment isn't that the patient gets better-- no one
cares about him-- but that everyone else watching understands what he did is deeply
whacked, so don't get any ideas.

When a politician is exposed for enjoying the kind of penetration that society's media arm
has always promised is available to all-- self-fulfillment, be yourself, she's an adult and can
make her own decisions, as long as it doesn't hurt people it's your choice!-- what other
prohibition does society have against him? Shame, aka psychiatric illness, that's it. You
can't tell him it's "wrong" to do what you've encouraged him and everyone else to do for
three decades, which is why stupid people quickly turn to the default: "well, he lied about it
under oath!" Oh, so that's what makes him a sociopath.

And maybe you're a boring non-sex addicted male with a wife, two kids and a longing for a
Chevy F10 Blazer so you don't buy this sex addiction gimmick, "come on, that's just an
excuse!" and in that complaint you've met them halfway-- the debate is about that guy, is
he or isn't he, and not about the existence of sex addiction. The system is perfectly happy
to give Tiger Woods a doctor's note if he's willing to appear on TV saying he has a doctor's
note. Saying Tiger isn't a sex addict means that there are sex addicts, and so you should
start wondering whether your woman is wondering if you are one. Better erase your cache.

! the condom is there to remind you that it's not

about poor judgment
When you make behaviors a disease, individuals lose and systems win, this is always true,
they benefit in still being able to call something "shameful" without needing to take any
responsibility for its creation. You'll see this in surprising places, for example organized
religion. You would think the church has a ready condemnation for too much casual sex yet
it still calls it an addiction, not because millennia old religions are progressive but because if
sex addiction is a disease then it can strike anyone, and that it seems to be particularly
prevalent among deeply religious people from bin Laden to all of Utah, well, that's just the
bad luck of DNA, there's nothing about religious institutions that both draw, and create, that
pathology. And so you are free to speculate if the vow of celibacy has anything to do
attracting the kinds of genetically predisposed sexual deviants disorder patients who would
never be able to plug into the system normally on their own, but don't you dare wonder if it
is significant that so many Catholic priest molestations occurred not in a hotel or a van or a
Dunkin Donuts but inside the church itself, no one is to ask whether the setting and the
costumes were not incidental but integral to the satisfaction. And even as I write this I
shudder at the possible significance of it. No. Biology and Jesus have no time for Freud's
lies. See you in church.

The point here is not to be anti-religion, nor to claim that people who feel shame (not guilt)
and disgust after their sexual experiences are not suffering. The point is to reveal that any
individual's suffering is secretly nurtured to maintain the integrity of the larger system.
You're expendable. Eat it.

XI.

The point of treatments of "shameful" behaviors isn't to help you (though it might), but to
give the system the right to decide what's pathology and what isn't. "It's based on internal
suffering." No. No it isn't. When they screen you for alcoholism they ask you about guilt,
when they screen you for sex addiction they ask about shame. Do you know why? Because
it's not based on internal suffering.

Here's a backwards example: Tucker Max. His most recent book has more sex in one
chapter than all of Shame. The problem is he seems to enjoy it. Is he a sex addict? Not
yet, but he damn well better be.
 ! the other Radiation King

Right off, Tucker Max, and Brandon, represents a problem for society: Tucker is a reasonably
attractive male with a law degree and money who has not only not plugged into the system
as required, he's circumvented it for his own purposes-- and then publicizes it. If he was an
overweight cart fetcher at the A&P with a cleft palate and a strabismus his sexual exploits
would conceivably be even more amazing, but no one would care because the threat to
society (as distinct from his entertainment value) would be nil. This is also why no one's
made a movie about TyJeezey and the 500 baby mommas he's slept with. TyJeezey and
Cart Fetcher aren't relevant to society-- people like them passing on matrimony and Rocking
The Vote would be a miniscule problem easily handled by giving them SSI. Ta da, now
you're invisible. But Tucker Max can't be fired, and unless people stop buying his books he
won't become invisible. If more people like Tucker-- e.g. educated, attractive, wealthy, and
public-- opt out, the whole thing falls apart.

The typical way sex addiction is packaged by the media is to show all the harm that comes
from it, i.e. self-loathing, i.e. AIDS, i.e. divorces, i.e. suicide, i.e. murder, i.e. heroin, i.e
Shame. Unfortunately for the system, the Tucker Max Trilogy doesn't involve any of these,
but the narrative desperately awaits them, wants them, which is why you can be certain
that if his fall ever comes, no matter how it comes, it will make it to the front page of
Gawker. Then he could be a sex addict (or bipolar, or etc); but without the fall, he cannot
be a sex addict or bipolar or etc. So while America waits for the rape charges or the racist
voice mails to his Russian girlfriend, on to plan B.

Plan B is: instead of shaming him, shame you.

If his only audience was college men no one would have a problem with him because then
he could be dismissed as wishful thinking, i.e. what keeps the college boys from following
his lead is the implicit criticism that if you like Tucker Max, you must be a loser who can't
get girls, or a rapist (reinforced by e.g. a story that is entirely about Tucker Max yet has
nothing to do with him at all.) Unless your identity is already well established, known, you
can't risk someone "misinterpreting" your liking him, so people try to put some distance
between them, which is why every time someone writes anything positive about Tucker Max
there's a disclaimer: "love him or hate him..." "he's a rude, disgusting misogynist, but..."

That's the trick of Shame. "He's an attractive, wealthy, guy with a big penis (did you see it,
ladies?) but he's not using it properly..." Brandon's sex addiction makes him very un-
desirable, no one watches Shame and says, "wow, I want to be Brandon" and no woman
says, "wow, I want to be with Brandon." The opposite is true for Tucker Max, who is popular
with women, especially the very women that he "degrades." Now what does the system do?

There's only one thing it can do: say that these women don't know better, that they're
broken women from broken homes... that they're not realwomen. Note that if this were
true you'd think someone would want to help them, educate them, elevate them, but it
doesn't want to "treat" them, it only wants to "diagnose" them as a warning for everyone
else. In other words, the system sacrifices them. They're expendable. Eat it.

The sad paradox of this system is that on the one hand it hates Tucker Max et al for how
they degrade women, but on the other hand hates those very women even more for liking
him. He's a human you hate, but you hate them as a group. Surprise: your misogyny > his
misogyny. You should hang that above your bed, especially if you are a woman.

I will delicately avoid all jargon: this is understood as a) defining yourself based on who you
hate ("I'm not like those sluts"); and b) secretly believing that only you have-- deserve--
free will, other people (Tucker Max, the women who like Tucker Max) are just too dumb to
handle it. I could say that that a) and b) are causes of totalitarianism or characteristics of
narcissism, but it's more useful to say that a) and b) are why you are not happy, and it's
more useful because that's the only thing you really care about anyway.

X.

Back to Brandon. What Brandon doesn't realize is that his movie is inseparable from the
commentary that comes with it, it relies on it. In fact, the movie itself is less relevant than
the commentary, the movie is an excuse for the commentary. You lose or gain nothing by
knowing that Tree Of Life's brother committed suicide when he was 19, but it is absolutely
vital that you-- you who saw it and especially you who didn't-- know that Brandon is a "sex
addict", i.e. bad, i.e. not the system's fault for demanding you consume but only the right
amount, i.e. don't get any ideas.

If you weren't told he was a sex addict, what would you have thought Brandon's problem
was? That he was mean; that he may have had sex with his sister; that he was cold,
distant, and infinitely narcissistic; that he watches cartoons; that he had a crazy sister. You
would have looked at the sex as a convenient way of escaping those things, as a
consequence of those things, and maybe you would have lingered long enough on his furtive
attempt at a normal relationship to ask whether the pathology wasn't there and not 15
minutes later with the hooker. But you were told you were seeing a movie about sex
addiction, of how sex addiction destroys your life, so the Marianne debacle and the cartoon
watching was to be understood as a consequence of that addiction. But "sex addiction"
wasn't what wrecked his life at all. Do you believe if he refrains from porn he will be happy?

To make sure you never consider this, they tell you upfront the context in which you are to
understand this movie, even and especially if you never actually watch it. Fortunately for
Brandon he's just a fictional character and doesn't care about being used as means of social
control. He's expendable, but, let's not forget, so are you. Eat it.
---

[Link]

MARCH 12, 2012

Shame

!
abre los ojos

Shame is a movie that if you haven't seen by now, you won't, but for damn sure don't
attempt to watch it on a flight to Chicago. What you've probably heard is that it is a bleak
but honest movie about sex addiction and maybe about incest, full of nudity and
uncircumcised penis dangling deliciously between some toned Irish Catholic's legs as he
urinates. Sound like something you want to see? Hold that thought.

How do you feel after three hours on the Pornotron? You're able to focus on the math
homework afterwards, ok, but at the very instant a blast of semen hits you in the neck your
first thought is, "Jesus, I need to kill myself."

That thought-- that instant-- is what the sex addict feels all the time. The question is not
why does he feel that-- shame is what you're supposed to feel after anything that involves
Craigslist. The question is why it doesn't make him stop.

II.

If you want to understand a behavioral disorder, watch the behavior.

One common explanation sex addicts offer is that it is the novelty that they crave, and when
enough people with pathology agree on something you can pretty much guarantee that that
agreement is part of the pathology, i.e. an unconscious defense. Sorry artists, broken
people aren't given greater insight as a consolation prize. The novelty is in fact trivial: yes,
different partners, but the same kinds of sex, with the same kinds of people, in the same
places, in the same ways, bolstered by the same kinds of porn. Repetition compulsion
masquerading as novelty seeking. "You don't understand," says the analogous alcoholic,
"I'm always looking for new drinks."

The important point is that in sex addiction the addict is not satisfied by the sex he just had
because he is self-consciously aware that something unidentified is missing, and that lack
leaves the orgasmer with an abundance of disgust and shame. Just went from being a
made up disease to a typical Friday night. Right ladies?

This is something the movie does depict very accurately: after Brandon has some sex, he
then immediately has some other kind of sex. This isn't an overactive sex drive, it is trying
to get the sex right. That's the dialectic. After he has a quickie with a hottie, he goes
home and masturbates. He climaxed with her, he was done, but it didn't take. It is easier
to get it right with masturbation, not because the hand knows better than the vagina/
mouth/butt/breast but because there are always micro-corrections to the fantasy happening
in real time-- so the movie you're shooting in your head has a woman fellating a guy, but
then she gives a certain look, and then you make her repeat a half-second of that scene
using a different look, then you reverse time by two seconds and make her phone her
husband; then that disappears and they're outside on the deck, and it's not her but another
woman, now it's a whole other scenario with a different cast, and an instant later back to
her again; and impossibly seeing the scene from all possible sides, distances, perspectives--
nudging it this way and that to suit that instant's arousal. In effect, you are not watching a
movie but improvising from a melody, or, in more psychoanalytic terms, playing with
yourself.

III.

There's a possible incest subtext between Brandon and his sister Sissy.
!
If you can't see it, it's in the back: they're watching cartoons.

But if you are looking for a hard link between incest and his sex addiction you are wasting
your time, there's no answer because it isn't the point of the movie.

Take the unexplained backstory as a placeholder: X happened to these characters in the

past, and now they're here; where X= incest, child abuse, murder, cannibalism, school
shooting, war...

So the movie inadvertently makes an important point about your life: yes, that does sound
terrible, but now what?

IV.

I'm going to offer an interpretation. It won't matter whether this interpretation is correct--
none of this actually happened, after all. The point is to ask why no one else thought of this
interpretation that, once you read it, will seem to you an obvious one. Here we go.

The key to understanding Brandon's problem is not just to look at the sex he pursues, but
also his attempt at having a normal relationship. That's behavior, too, right?

For the first half of the movie he's rubbing his penis against anything sufficiently
(com)pliant, and then he's disgusted with his life and decides he needs to become a normal
person. This is your American Psycho/Matrixmoment: he knows he's whacked, and he
knows what normal looks like-- he can fake it-- but he can't feel it inside. What to do?
Patrick Bateman created an alternate universe and then gets confused which one is real--
he becomes psychotic. Brandon tries to create a fake world where he acts like a normal
person and substitute it for the real one where he is not: This would be The Baudrillard
Matrix. This is why he walks around as one who is in a dream.
!
See that guy? What he's looking at isn't an elevator door or a floor or a wall, he may as
well be seeing cascading green characters. Everything he sees is sex. In the staggered
brick pattern of the wall he sees a 69; the rounded elevator button reminds him of a clitoris;
a footstep behind him is a woman sneaking out of her husband's bed. These are
instantaneous and millisecond association flashes that happen all the time.

So with that seeing of a world within a world, Brandon decides to try a normal relationship--
go on a date, connect, love. Of course he runs the date like it's a movie scene, does things
he assumes normal people do in normal relationships: he asks out a nice girl named
Marianne, takes her out to a nice dinner, orders wine, talk about where she's from, etc.

However-- and this is of such importance that no one else has even dared to mention it--
the woman he chose to go on a date with is black. From his job.
!
Slow down, multicultural lemmings, this isn't some dumb TV commercial with a blacks/
asians/whites all inexplicably smiling about a shared taste in fast food. This guy is a porn
addict: all day, every day, constantly, he micro-scrutinizes every aspect of sexuality to find
just the thing that will get him off, and he chose to find love with a black woman.

"Well, she seemed nice, so he asked her out." So run it the other way: Brandon picks up
one night stands in bars, ok, but it's not Mos Eisley, those are nice bars, which means the
women he meets there are probably nice, ordinary people. People he could fall in love with
if he chose to. So Brandon could have attempted a relationship with the hot blonde he
picked up in Act I that he instead used for a quickie-- that was a decision he made.
!

Right? She looks nice enough. The law does not require <<hot blondes>> to only be used
as sex objects, in most states you are still permitted to love them into their old age. And
she was already attracted to him and he to her-- 80% of the way there. So?

Nope, he chose a black woman from Brooklyn. Don't you want to know why? Was this
someone he's had his eye on for a while? Someone whose personality he knows fits with
his? Shared values, common goals, etc, etc? Again, no, he knew nothing about her. He
does a cold approach in the break room.

What's interesting for our culture is that in all the discussion about this film and the nuances
of sex addiction, no film critic has wondered about the significance of Marianne's race,
maybe because they think its normal and probably because they don't want to be thought of
as someone who notices race.

So while everyone pats themselves on the back for their non-judgmental acceptance of the
nature of Brandon's addiction-- "it's not immorality, it's a disease"-- they overlook what
might be of pivotal significance. "You're a racist!" protests the horrifically bad therapist you
should throw your shoe at. "There's nothing wrong with interracial dating!" I happen to
agree, but how do you know Brandon does? Why don't you put down your Mont Blanc and
yellow legal pad and ask him?

What drives Brandon is his sexual addiction. So why would we assume Matrix Brandon's
pursuit of a girlfriend comes from a different power source than his pursuit of other women?
Everything he sees is porn: what is the pornographic significance of black women to white
men? Did he pick her because he's MORE sexually attracted to black women, or because he
was NOT attracted to black women? Because he thought they were "better" than white
chicks? Or because he considered them inferior?

Without understanding that-- without understanding what he sees as a "normal"

relationship-- without believing that there is critical information in everything other than his
sex addiction-- you inevitably make the wrong interpretation about his sex addiction. For
example, the date is awkward but she still goes home with him-- and, surprise, he's
impotent. Here's where you're supposed to think, "oh, sex addicts have difficulty with
intimacy." WRONG. Maybe he didn't try intimacy and fail. Maybe he did everything he
could, upfront, to sabotage his chance for a real relationship. He chose her because he
"knew" it would fail, and when it wasn't failing he hit the failsafe: impotence.

I don't mean interracial relationships fail in general, I mean that there is a good chance this
character would have diminished expectations for the relationship he was attempting
relative to other women, which is why he attempted it. Just to be sure, he tells her on the
first date he doesn't think there's a point to marriage. Glad we got that out of the way,
gives a gal a sense of possibilities. That's him trying to be normal? No. That's him trying
to fail.

Of course this is a movie and of course Brandon didn't pick her, the director picked her. But
if you follow this interpretation, then it may be that he picks women he won't get along with
to reinforce his belief that he isn't normal-- so that he can just throw himself into his sex
addiction. He doesn't want to change.

If this is true, it brings us to a very important conclusion: he was using her. No, he wasn't
going to use her for sex, but he wasn't going to really love her either. He was using her for
his identity. Read this again and understand: when he uses the whores and the quickies to
get off he feels SHAME, but when he uses a very nice girl with a legitimate interest in him
for his pathetic charade at normality, he feels NOTHING for her. "We're not bad people,"
his sister Sissy says to him at one point, "we just come from a bad place." God would
disagree, but fortunately for you he is dead.

V.

I certainly don't begrudge anyone looking to lay some pipe or a woman looking for a
pipelayer, but again, I am neither a film critic nor a therapist, I do not assume normality for
you, I let you decide that for yourself. I may secretly believe that harlots and gays go to H-
E-double toothpicks, but I do not think harlots and gays can't be happy until then.

However, if you tell me you are unhappy, if you tell me you are all mixed up about the life
you are leading, then expect a critique of the life you are leading, not just the pathology you
are projecting it all onto. "I'm a sex addict!" says the guy who can't get it up with black
chicks. You picked your life. You may not think you picked it, you may think you were
forced into it and inescapably tied to it, but I saw Badlands and I know that every moment
is a choice, right up to and including blowing your brains out. So not sleeping with that hill
giant is a choice you chose not to make. Saying, "I had no choice," is itself a choice. Your
choices may be stupid, but they're still choices. And as all choices in life are ultimately
binary, you really have no one else to blame for them but yourself. Flipping a coin should
win you happiness 50% of the time. If you're running less than that.................. consider
getting a coin. Unless you're one of those double-bind mofos, then the key advice here is to
Costanza the situation and do the opposite of every natural impulse you have. NB: same
goes for stock trading.
I get that sex addiction looks like fun taken to excess, but a real addict doesn't think any of
it is fun, he thinks it's all terrible. So that's where we start: why are you doing terrible
things?

"I can't help it, sex is an innate evolutionary drive that I just have set to turbo!" Funny,
that. The popular lie nowadays is evolutionary biology, so that a pursuit of beauty is
somehow hard wired, evolutionary, but curiously no one can explain why it's hard wired
towards 36-24-32 and not the 36-37-38 lassies in the Yoruba tribe. (They like it from
behind.) Oh, maybe natural selection is rendering American white humans more sexually
perfect, a process accelerated by their below replacement level fertility. Or maybe not.
Beauty is a social construction. I'm all in, but it is a construction nevertheless. The reason
I think women are hot today is that they are today, not that they are hot. I watch pornos
from the seventies and I think to myself, "well, it would be better than bestiality, I guess."
Everyone from the cast of Shampoo to the special guest stars on The Love Boat make me
want to be a promisekeeper, meanwhile Wilt Chamberlain had sex with 10000 of these
gorgons. Get it? It's a calendar problem, not an aesthetics problem. So when you say
you're addicted to "sex" or porn, you're actually addicted to the work product of a Madison
Avenue brainstorm run by guys whose names are initials. "Quick, call J.T., the rubes'll eat
this up!" Still feel ashamed? Yeah, you should. I do.

VI.

The problem with sex addiction, unlike the other addictions, it is always framed as harm to
you. No one uses the actual consequences as a reason to stop. Be careful: yes, you get to
feel "shame", but the real problem with sex addiction isn't that it destroys your life but that
it destroys everyone else's life. No wife has ever questioned her self-worth, let alone killed
herself, because she found a vodka bottle in the back of a toilet. Try and "admit you have a
problem"-- this problem-- to your daughter, and see how fast she gets a neck tattoo. And
the risk of sex addiction isn't that you contract a disease, the risk is that you spread the
disease. How can you stand there and pretend that any of your hundreds of partners are
more likely to be infected than you?

Brandon is toxic death, he just cleans up well. Hookers have the savvy to resist him-- after
sex, he asks a pro, "can I get you anything? A drink?" and she just smirks and dismisses
him. But what defense does Marianne have? Imagine he married Marianne: why did he do
this? He wants a normal life with a wife, super, but he's not willing to give up his reckless
sexual pursuits. Is that fair? The analogy to Patrick Bateman is worse than you think:
Bateman only imagined he was killing people. Brandon simply doesn't care if he's killing
anyone.

The incomprehensible thing about Brandon's pathology is that there doesn't need to be
anything wrong with him for him to be addicted. He might have a history of childhood
abuse, of course, but he may just as well have not.

Brandon has a very specific problem, and it is not sex: freedom.

In order to get sexual satisfaction from anything, that thing has to be unattainable, or at the
very least it must come with rules. You can get release and pleasure from the attainable,
but not satisfaction. There has to be a limit, a line, which defines a transgression which
then allows you to bump up against it-- and be satisfied. In America, almost anything you
can imagine is sexually permitted even as limits to "appropriate sexuality" are everywhere.
The awareness of the ubiquity of Photoshop on models serves this same frustrating
purpose: this super hot woman that I take for granted that I get to see almost naked for no
good reason isn't actually her-- the real her is hidden beneath Photoshop. She is still a
mystery. So the Photoshop enhancement only temporarily heightens the sexual interest--
which is why it is paired with products to buy now; the real satisfaction has to be attained
elsewhere-- the Photoshopped model triggers a desire to look for satisfaction elsewhere--
e.g. the products, alternatively other women, porn, etc. Similarly, while porn actresses are
hotter than ever, three hours in all you want is amateurs. Nasty.

Brandon knows he can get any kind of sex any time he wants, so it always fails. Not
sometimes. Always. Watch the movie. But he keeps trying, in the same ways, over and
over. He also tries to simulate the perfect sexual experience, copy what looks like works.
He walks by a couple having sex in a hotel window, so he then rents a room in that same
hotel and has sex with a prostitute in the window in the exact same manner. Does it take?
Of course not-- it was too easy. When you sign a contract with narcissism there's a clause
you should pay attention to: if it's easy, it doesn't count.

If you are a product of your behavior, start wearing a watch again to discover who you
actually are. If the sex addict gets a watch, hell, gets a calendar, what he will discover is
that he has practiced no other skill more diligently than pursuing empty sex that he knows
is unsatisfying to him. That's what he's spent the most time on, that's what he knows how
to do the best. Better than driving, better than speaking, better than Xbox-- he has that
mindset down to a reflex. So why would you expect he'd use any other technique for any
other life problems that come up? If all you are is an expert hammerer, everything gets
hammered.

The solution to your problem-- and of course only 0.3% of you are true sex addicts, so I am
now talking to those who feel a little ashamed at how much porn they use or about the
ringwraiths they've bedded-- is not to refrain-- you can't resist your desires forever. You
must practice a new skill, you must become the kind of person who wouldn't turn to porn
when they are: lonely; horny; boredy. If you practice a new skill enough times, it will
become second first nature, and you will be a different person. Please note that it is that
last part, not the giving up of porn, that makes the change difficult. Giving up porn is easy
squeezy. Becoming the kind of person who doesn't need to use porn on Thursdays at
11:30p because that's when you have a few hours free is hard.

I'm supposed to say porn is bad for you and you shouldn't start, but too late. And
masturbating without porn is probably good practice for your brain, which is odd to say but
in today's world anything that requires more than 15 minutes of focused concentration is
technically Olympic training.

But the practical thing people do wrong with porn is put it in the Matrix: pretend to
themselves it's bad, pretend it's not something they do, yet spend tons of time on it. So it
drags on for hours. Accept it and lock it down to a specific length of time. You won't feel
nearly as ashamed.

Wait, were we talking about Brandon not wanting intimacy?

VII.

There is a single remarkable insight in Shame, unfortunately buried in the midst of all the
penis and vagina. The movie is called Shame, but there is a crucial instance of guilt: when
his sister attempts suicide. (She survives.)
For a man who didn't notice he was dating a black woman, he is remarkably attentive in
other ways; he walks onto a subway platform where police have blocked off a scene and
magically he knows his sister has slit her wrists back in his apartment.

How did he know? Because he feels guilty, and guilt is omniscient. You know it's guilt
because no one else would blame him for what she did, and yet he knows with total
certainty that it was his fault, even though it wasn't. Yet he knows it was.

What he is actually feeling guilty about isn't that he wasn't there for his sister-- that's too
easy to get out of-- but that his commitment to his own life made him not be there for his
sister. Anyone who has ever lost someone to suicide knows this feeling, and everyone else
does not. The guilt, re-framed relentlessly, over the rest of your life: if I hadn't been so into
my work; if I hadn't been so wrapped up in tennis; if I hadn't been cheating on my wife; if I
hadn't been so religious; if I hadn't watched TV every night and instead devoted that time
to him; if I X, if I hadn't Y.

The truth is there is no real answer there, because when you hit the bottom of that
devotional cycle you wind back up the other way: maybe if I had given him more space, if I
had given him more time alone, if I hadn't forced him to spend so much time with the
family, if I had worked longer hours to teach him that life is work, or X...

The only thing I've ever found that works, in the absence of a God who can forgive you, is
to understand your guilt as not coming from the failing but generated by you as self-
punishment, so that you can go on with the rest of your life. Have you suffered enough
today? Then go have a Reuben, they're tasty. You've earned it.

The guilt always stays with you. Always. It never goes away. Never. I'm of course not
saying you deserve it, but I know it is your inevitable tormentor. So either you reach some
kind of stalemate with it or it beats you down. That stalemate is sublimation.

In Brandon's case it is that guilt which motivates him to try and change his life, so when he
sees the married woman from Act I again on the subway he doesn't get up to flirt with her.
He lets her go, he has decided to be the kind of person who sublimates his sex drive to
devote more attention to his whacky sister,. To being a better person.

That's one interpretation, anyway, but I am telling you now, it is the only one that will save
you.

---

[Link]

!
 FEBRUARY 22, 2012
The Father That Shot His Daughter's Computer

!
it succeeded

I. "I'd love for you to write about the dad who shot his daughter's computer
because she posted something nasty on Facebook. "

This one's easy. He's insane. How do you work in IT but it takes you hours, let alone
hundreds of dollars, to upgrade a laptop? Doesn't he know you just pick up an unattended
one at Starbucks? I got a MacBook Pro with a OccupyMyPants bumber sticker on it. Sweet.

He's the Dad, he's held to a higher standard. What was his intention? To change her
behavior? But there were a million ways he could have done this, including reading that
letter and shooting that laptop in front of herand not in front of other people. Would he
have dared? But the very point of the operation was the video.

The mistake is thinking that he was trying to shame her into improving. That never works, it
simply reinforces that outward appearances matter more than what's true, which not
coincidentally is the very purpose of facebook.

But never mind that, look carefully at what Cat-5 Tex revealed about her that was so
shameful: nothing. She never appeared in the video. Her terrible facebook post that he
read was already on facebook for all to see, we learned nothing new about her, all the
information we learned was about him. He was repairing his own image as the kind of
father who'd have the kind of daughter who'd do this-- this being not her goddam behavior
(after all, he had lived with her and her goddam behavior a goodly number of years without
incident) but her publicizing her behavior. He was shamed not by her behavior but
Facebook revealing it, which is why Facebook had to die. If he was Muslim they'd have
called it an honor killing.

Is she going to change? Not likely, and it's not evident what about her needs to change
except her address. No, I don't mean she has to flee, I mean she has to grow up, so does
he, both of the dummies involved violated one of the cardinal rules of family: don't
disparage someone in the family to someone outside the family. If you need me to explain
this you are a terrible person.

II. Uh oh, why is there a II?

Here is a thought experiment: how would you feel if you found out this video was a hoax?

Why were you so passionate about the video? Now that time's passed, it hardly seems like it
was worth the energy. But at the time it was urgent that you expressed either one of the
two approved opinions:

"Kids today are so goddam spoiled. When I was their age I had to work, now all they do is
play video games..."

Who bought them the video game? What did you think they were going to do with it?
Trade it for a calculus tutor?

Who spoils them? Maybe you're not to blame if they turn to meth, but who else could be to
blame if they're spoiled?

"The problem with kids today..." Stop right there, I'll finish: is parents today. Parents today
suck. I've checked. The Illuminati let me see the CCTV from every American household
and in all of them everyone is in separate rooms staring at a glowing lie.

Do you have a child who is like that guy's daughter? Then you're an idiot, not for having
such a child but for diverting energy to support of that guy, in the same way that the reason
your wife left you is the porn. It's not the from-behind action, it's the neglect. I know you
are not going to believe this, but the reason your child is trouble is that you support that
man. "I don't understand kids today." Tell me if I'm close: "You need to study to go to
college, major in business, get a job working for a salary and if something goes wrong let
the government you hate so much cover your medical, disability, and retirement needs.
Saturdays are for yard work. Sundays are for church and football." Sound right? Kinda
surprising that they'd want a different future, and that's why your kid smokes weed but calls
it pot.

"That father is a narcissistic jerk!"

Why so serious? Think about how little rage you feel for the 99% prevalence of incest in an
inner city. Let me check your facebook, see if that sexual abuse didn't prompt an all caps
comment. Hmm. No. "I'm not that angry about the dad..." Rage isn't about quantity, but
about certainty.

"So I can't have an opinion about this?" Of course you can, there's value in that and you've
discussed this video with lots of people, I'm sure. Did you discuss this with your parents or
your kid? That should have been your first thought. Did you sit your Dad or your Mom or
your 15 year old down and say, "I'm going to show you something and I want you to
honestly tell me your thoughts, random, unfiltered, and I swear to you I will treat you like a
human being and listen and not get defensive and angry like I always do every time we talk
about something that reveals you to be something other than what I see in you." Because
that would be an illuminating conversation.

This is the point: it didn't occur to you to do this. It occurred to you to voice your opinion
publicly to anonymous strangers, but not directly to people that matter. That's what you've
been trained to do, that's where your priorities have been taught to be. That's the Matrix.
You're not thinking about your child's development, you're being tricked into thinking about
your identity while the system uses you as a battery. No Red Pill for you. And no Red Pill
for your kids, either.

III.

How do you think you came across this enraging video of a red state psychopath with a .45
and .NET certification? If you're watching it, it's for you.

How do you think you found this video of a decent Father resisting the AP Obama Studies
his disrespectful daughter learned in those liberal public schools? If you're watching it, it's
for you.

It's not completely your fault. The system is much bigger than you, it is a spirit; and you
think you stand defensively because you were taught to think that the deep insight is that
it's selling to you, telling you what to love or what to hate when it is actually telling you how
to love and how to hate, not what to be but how to be. It nudges you towards the binary
extremes so it is easier to control you. It wants you to have opinions, it wants you to "pick
sides", "get involved", "take a stand." It doesn't want you to be indifferent, it wants you to
love or to hate, rage or lust, so you feel alive-- but always your strongest passions focused
on the irrelevant. "That Dad is awesome!" Then you'll vote Romney and the system has
won, not because it wants Romney but because it wants to minimize your political
involvement to voting. That shows you care; and if you really care you'd vote in local
elections, too; and for the really active among you, why not donate your time to the
campaigns? Grass roots! But the only thing that comes from grass roots is grass, and it
doesn't really need your help. It just needs you not to have the time to consider planting
something else.

-------------

[Link]

FEBRUARY 10, 2012

"My fiancee is pushing me away and I've lost hope"
!
my advice can't be worse than his

Here is an Ask Metafilter question, and my reply. Maybe it will do someone else some good.

If you've already read it there, skip to IV, for what I could not include there.

My fiancee and I (both 23) have been together for just over 5 years and living together for
the past 3. There have been ups and downs during that time, including a month-long break
up about 2 years ago, but I love her and want to spend the rest of my life with her. She had
a rough childhood (alcoholic father who left) and I think that this is negatively affecting our
relationship and her self-image.

I had a female best friend from high school, who I knew before I met my fiancée, but I have
largely given up this relationship because my then-girlfriend was jealous. It was a slow and
ugly process and since then my fiancée has thought that I could and should find someone
better suited to me than she herself is. I have tried my best to quell her insecurities, but
they have been around for most of our relationship.

I proposed about a year ago and she said yes. Things seemed to be going well, but a few
months later there was a conflict between my fiancée and sister at a wedding planning
convention. I wasn't there, but my sister was apparently late and then didn't stay for very
long, which my fiancée and her mother took offence to. Since then there has been tension
between my fiancée and sister. This is even more concerning for me, since both of my
parents are deceased and my sister is the only immediate family that I have left.

This past September was a terrible month for my fiancée, as her father died and she was
laid off from her job. I tried to be as emotionally supportive as I could, but she didn't lean
on me as much as I would have expected.

Roughly 2 months ago she started saying that she didn't feel right wearing the ring that I
gave her because the diamond that I used is from my mother's wedding ring, and my
fiancée thinks that the diamond should stay in the family (sister). I talked to my sister
about using the diamond before I got the ring made and she was ok with the plan and the
way I see it, once we get married my fiancée will be in the family anyway.

About the same time she told me that she had started taking anti-depressants. She said
that she had thought about suicide, but had no immediate plans to do it in the future. I
encouraged her to see a therapist, but she only took the pills which were prescribed to her.
My fiancée stopped wearing the ring two weeks ago and a few days later she said that she
really doesn't want to live anymore and that she has been pushing me away intentionally. I
found her a therapist myself this time, and made sure that she went. She said that the
therapist was insightful, but it hasn't made her change her mind. She said that she doesn't
really want to go again.

We've tried talking about this, but she is emotionally distant and insists that I find another
girlfriend so that she can leave me and not be missed. Feeling confused and unsure about
what to do, I asked her best friend if she knew what was going on with my fiancée. She told
me that she didn't know that my fiancée was thinking about suicide but that she did know
that she was having second thoughts about the wedding and that she was stressed out
about money.

So here I am. I'm scare and confused. I've tried my best to show my fiancée that I love her
and that she deserves to be loved, but she is pushing me away. I'm tired of struggling to
keep this relationship going, but now I'm worried that she will hurt herself if we break up.
She seems to want to continue our normal day-to-day routine and act like nothing is wrong,
but I just can't play this charade.

Any thoughts about this situation are welcome. I'm looking for some outside perspective to
help me figure out what to do next. Let me know if I've left out any important details.
Thanks.

II.

Here's my reply:

No. Please take this in the spirit it is intended.

You make it sound like your fiancee is suicidal; that you may be the only thing keeping her
alive. Most of the Mefites' responses are about her depression. Yet your subtitle is: "My
fiancée is pushing me away and after years trying to make things work, I've lost most of
my hope."
"This past September was a terrible month for my fiancée, as her father died and she was laid off from
her job. I tried to be as emotionally supportive as I could, but she didn't lean on me as much as I would
have expected."

Her father dies, and what your radar detects that is amiss is how she treats you.

Do you think you know her better than anyone? I think you believe other people have more
facts about her, but that you can interpret them better than anyone. That's unlikely, but
even if it's true then this--

I asked her best friend if she knew what was going on with my fiancée. She told me that she didn't know
that my fiancée was thinking about suicide but that she did know that she was having second thoughts
about the wedding and that she was stressed out about money.

-- indicates that her best friend's view of the "facts" is that the problem is you/marriage, not
suicide. But instead of considering what that might suggest, you move to:

So here I am. I'm scared and confused.

You wrote that you proposed "about a year ago." I wanted to get a sense of where your
head was at around that time. Fair guess you got engaged in Feb 2011? At that time, you
Asked Metafilter: "The Liberal Education ideal is ruining my life. Please help disabuse me of
it."

It started with Mortimer J Adler and his 'How to Read a Book'. I bought it about two years ago, and
shortly after that time I became fixated on the idea of getting a liberal education and reading the Great
Books.

I also have a tendency to avoid my university studies to look for "something else", some other
activity or field of knowledge which will bring satisfaction to my life. I'm not sure if this is
strictly procrastination, or if its something more. I started with reading books from Adler's list and
other similar lists on the internet... Then I rekindled my learning of French. I've given up on the
idea of learning to play an instrument, but I feel like I ought to, and I occasionally browse the web
for pianos and piano lessons.

This much I could handle reasonably well, but then I found the The Teaching Company and The
Modern Scholar. ...I've downloaded most of the courses that I could find through torrents, and have
since been listening to the lectures for an average of 20 hours each week for the past 7 months.

I also need to find a job as my savings have nearly run dry.

I'm guessing I have a combination of an inferiority complex, a habit of procrastination, and a tad of
neuroticism thrown in for good measure.

Somewhere around this point you asked a woman, "honey, will you marry me?"

And this is worth asking: what does it mean when a college student turns to the Teaching
Company for a liberal education? College has failed you. Demand your money back. But
you didn't really want a liberal education, you wanted to be... smarter.

A month later you Asked: "How can I feel good about finding a job and starting a career?"
Not how can you get a career-- how can you feel good about it?
I'm an economics major who doesn't know what the hell he is going to do for a career after
graduating, and frankly doesn't feel qualified to do very much. I went into university thinking
that I would try for medical school, but I was one of those kids in high school who got good grades
without trying very hard, and my nearly non-existent study habits have left me with a C average,
although even that has been slipping lately. Now that I'm nearing the end of my academic career,
I'm starting to freak out about my career potential, and the related anxiety has me neglecting school
work even further.

Last year in a labour economics class, my prof stated that first jobs after college correlate with lifetime
earnings. This has also added to my worrying, and I have been putting off getting a much needed part
time job (partly) because of it.

The future is indeed terrifyingly unknowable when you can't even focus on the present.

III.

I go through all this not to embarrass you or criticize you but to show you two things: your
life around this time is marked by ambivalence, anxiety, uncertainty, yet you decide to get
married. But of course it makes sense that you would try to lock down at least one aspect of
your life. You chose marriage-- which is typically what girls do when they're looking to be
taken care of, to be defined by someone else. Right?

But what if she's as ambivalent as you about the future, but she wants something else
(other than marriage) to lock down? Now a marriage is one more burden of uncertainty she
has to carry around with her.

The second thing all this shows you is what your words reveal: that you are intelligent,
interested, eclectic, hungry-- AND you are very conflicted, ambivalent, and uncertain.
These aren't psychoanlayses, these are explicitly your words. This is the message you want
people to hear. If I can see all this just from Metafilter posts alone, it is absolutely certain
that your fiancee knows it. Maybe she senses that you're grasping on to her because she's
an anchor, and she doesn't want to be an anchor, she needs an anchor. Most women don't
want to be responsible for their man's stability, and she sounds like she wants some
attention all for herself, of her own. Maybe she doesn't want to be married, maybe she's
depressed, maybe she...

...regardless of the reason, she needs to get help, a therapist, and you need to get focused
and NOT a therapist. Your problem is not unique: too much freedom. If you were stupid you
could plug into the system easy, one talent= one job. But for you there are too many
possibilities.

Your parents being deceased, being in college, being smart... that's the ether in which a
naturally worried, "is this good enough?" young man finds himself. The mistake many with
that problem make is thinking that the problem is "themselves" and they need more
introspection, or more insight, or more "brain hacks." You need less of those things. What
you need are goals with concrete steps that you force yourself to boringly take.

So I think your relationship will end, hopefully you'll both be strong enough and mature
enough to do it without drama and the stickiness that accompanies furtive attempts at
breaking up (this is your third time?) I'm sorry for you, these things are inconsolably painful
for a while. But whatever happens, your future happiness is entirely related to your ability
to impose your own limits on your freedom. The time has come to not be everything you
want to be, but to be one thing you've wanted to be.

I may as well tell you that once you've chosen a specific goal, and begin to legitimately
work towards it, you may then find a different path suits you better; but that kind of insight
is only possible after activity, after doing. Less thinking, more doing.

Good luck. I hope it works out well for you.

IV.

That was what I posted at that time.

But what I did not put in that post, the thing that I deliberately withheld because I didn't
want it to get lost in all the other words; because it is the most important thing, and the
thing most likely to be denied-- is that this guy chose that girl on purpose, for the purpose
of maintaining his ambivalent world so no concrete decisions need to be made.
Concrete=loss of potentialities= no thanks. Math and graduating is very forward looking;
it's much easier to say, "can't study now, my girlfriend needs me, she's in pain." I'd bet it
makes him feel like a good person, too, all that sacrifice, just for her.

I doubt very much if he truly believed she was going to say yes. Her friends didn't think
she'd say yes, apparently. The point was not really to get married, the point was to create a
dramatic event upon which to focus energy and thus delay any kind of physical forward
motion. By engaging in conflict that is impossible to resolve.

This is why I say he chose her to get rejected; to get jealous; to get sad over; to obsess
over. And then to recruit the rest of his world into this problem. Nothing matters more
than ego integrity; nothing matters more than the status quo. Do you see?

All of that is unconscious, and as soon as I say that word a specific group of people goes
bananas. No one likes to think they're not in control of their own lives, that they're saddled
with an Abusive Boyfriend that wants nothing to change; but if they are in control, why are
they anxious all the time? Why so little progress despite resources, opportunities, and
freedom? If they're in control of their own lives, why do they all dress alike?

If you're in control, why do these relationships happen to you? Isn't it more likely you
chose them?

Others/the same people will take issue with my derision of introspection, because they
believe it to be a Socratic ideal. I'm not against introspection, I am against masturbation.
I'm against edging. The critic wants to be able to contemplate, to go to therapy and discuss
and introspect and what he will do there is talk about himself, think about himself, identify
patterns in his life, things that have held him back-- and nothing will change. So then he
will tell me that he has "a really good therapist, she really pushes me!"

The therapy becomes an elaborate narcissistic defense, the promise and appearance of
progress while protecting an at best artificial and at worst non-existent identity. "I want to
learn why I am this way." Then what? Will learning why you made those choices be what
changes your choices? You're still eating junk food, aren't you? You're eating it while you're
learning how bad it is.
"But... why am I this way?" That question is a narcissistic defense. It doesn't want an
answer, it wants you to keep asking the question.

"I'm a good person, I just am making bad choices." Wrong. You're not a good person until
you make good choices. Until then you are chaos.

And you know it.

----

[Link]

FEBRUARY 7, 2012
Pedophilia Is Normal, Because Otherwise It's Abnormal

!
i ain't going out like that

Allen Frances, M.D. is a Duke psychiatrist. If you're not particularly interested in psychiatric
politics, then the only thing you need to know about him is that after he dies, psychiatry
goes full Foucault.

Hebephilia-- the sexual attraction to post-pubescent children, is currently being proposed

for inclusion into the DSM-V as a disorder. Should it be considered a mental disorder? (This
is different than asking if it should be a crime.)
Allen Frances writes that hebephilia shouldn't be in the DSM because hebephilia is normal.

The basic issue is that sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters is not the slightest bit abnormal or
unusual. Until recently, the age of consent was age 13 years in most parts of the world (including the
United States) and it remains 14 in many places. Evolution has programmed humans to lust for
pubescent youngsters--our ancestors did not get to live long enough to have the luxury of delaying
reproduction. For hundreds of thousands of years, sex followed closely behind puberty. Only recently
has society chosen to protect the moratorium of adolescence and to declare as inappropriate and illegal
a sexual interest in the pubescent.

However, he still thinks it is a crime:

It is natural and no sign of mental illness to feel sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters. But to act on
such impulses is, in our society, a reprehensible crime that deserves severe punishment.

II.

If you're surrounded by carpenters, everything becomes about hammers.

Frances and the debate teams are mostly forensic guys, which means their worry about
hebephilia's inclusion in the DSM is that it will be used to involuntarily commit people who
have NEVER committed a crime to psychiatric hospitals, forever. The trick is that if
hebephilia is in the DSM, TO THE LAW it earns the status of a scientifically accepted
diagnosis even if it isn't.

He's probably right about that.

He's wrong about everything else.

III.

The problem with media is that it tricks you into debating the conclusions while accepting
the form of the argument. So you get to ask, "is hebephilia a pathological disorder or is it
normal?" so that no one asks the question, why do we now, today, want to have this
debate?

Pedophilia and hebephilia have always been considered maybe pathological and maybe not;
Psychopathia Sexualis makes clear the distinction of the pedophile who has grown weak of
moral character (not psychiatric, but criminal) vs. those whose urge towards children is a
"pathological perversion" that to him is "quite natural" and is thus "not a criminal, but an
irresponsible insane person." The distinction between criminality and pathology has to this
point been decided on a case by case basis: "To examine not merely the deed, but the
mental condition of the perpetrator."

So why formalize it now? The answer is there in Frances's article, the mistake that is in his
article: "sexual attraction to pubescent youngsters is not the slightest bit abnormal or
unusual." Dr. Frances thinks he's being historically expansive, boy oh boy did he walk into
that one.
If you look closely at your calendar, right after the year you will see, in tiny font, that
interest in pubescent girls may be normal; but interest in pubescent boys is always and
seriously whacked.

She's 14. Anyone disagree she's... what? Hot? Once you "normalize" sexual interest in 14
year old girls, you either normalize the interest in boys or you quietly suggest
homosexuality in general is slightly pathological. You can only pick one, and the rest of us
have to live with the consequences.

If hebephilia-- all of it-- is pathology, however, you avoid having to make that dicey
distinction. Phew. America is safe.

I am not here making a case for what is normal or not; I'm pointing out the very specific
societal approval-- encouragement-- that allows me to keep drooling as long as I ALSO say
out loud, "son of a gun, Ali Lohan's only 14? She looks so much older!" but forbids me
from even putting up a picture of a boy and making any comment-- even if I am gay; even
if I am a woman. Go ahead and try it. And what does it mean that society permits a 14
year old boy to choose to be a girl who is [her]self attracted to males, but in theory lacks
the maturity/intellect/right to seduce a grown man? It means stop asking questions,
wiseguy. We have a society to run.

As evidence for this, Ray Blanchard, the Chair of the Paraphilias Workgroup at the DSM,
wrote a 2800 word justification for hebephilia's inclusion in the DSM in which the words
"boy" and "girl" appear only once:

In the third place, a distinction between pedophilia and hebephilia on the grounds of reproduction
makes no sense when applied to homosexual pedophilia and hebephilia, since neither pubescent nor
prepubescent boys can become pregnant. Lastly, there is no evidence that the arrival of menarche
abruptly demarcates girls' attractiveness to heterosexual pedophiles vs. hebephiles

How can you have a debate about what is normal and what is pathology in sexual desire
and never discuss the gender? He pulls it off. The point here is not science; neither is the
point involuntary commitment. The point is to limit the scope of the debate to manageable,
politically expedient constructs. The point is precisely NOT to answer the question.

In this way, Frances and the DSM workgroup he opposes are actually on the same side, the
side of the system: using psychiatry as the battleground for difficult social questions. This
is how the system defends against change.

The correct way to understand this debate is simply not to have it in this way-- not to be
pro or against the inclusion in the DSM: to declare that you refuse to allow it any authority
in any direction, ever. "Well, it's in the DSM!" The DSM has the scientific and moral
authority of the Monster Manual, I'm not fooled by its popularity or its binding, and at least
that book has the intellectual rigor to base things on a mix of convention and roll of the
dice; and I am most certainly not fooled by the antirigorous arguments of the way above
their pay grade academics who truly believe they could run the world the way Plato
intended them to. Get thee behind me, Satan.

FEBRUARY 3, 2012
Another Honor Killing That Isn't About Honor, And Even Less About Nietzsche
!
what a shame

KINGSTON, Ontario -- A jury on Sunday found three members of an Afghan family guilty of killing
three teenage sisters and another woman in what the judge described as "cold-blooded, shameful
murders" resulting from a "twisted concept of honor," ending a case that shocked and riveted
Canadians.

Another killing that involves the words, "Muslim", "family", "daughters", "honor." And
"Canada." Yikes. Do you really need the details? You do if you want to get it right.
Otherwise, feel free to call it an honor killing and get booked on the Glenn Beck Show and
Al-Jazeera on the same day.

[Canadian] Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally
plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her
father's first wife. [The son] Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the
scene.

The trouble is that Hamed watched the accident from inside a Lexus SUV that happened to
be pushing the Nissan into the canal. Don't worry, the four women were dead long before
they got in the Nissan for their joy ride. The prosecution contends the dad and the son
conspired to do this, but of course prosecutors hate men of color.

In order for this to be an honor killing in the traditional sense-- note the words honor and
traditional-- the purpose of the killing has to be to remove shame from the family. In this
logic, an honor killing is not simply punitive but a selfless act, because it puts the murderer
at risk of punishment (and grief) so that his descendants may live with honor. It is for the
sons so that they can grow up and marry without carrying the shame of their mother or
sister's actions; for the surviving daughters so they won't be thought of as whores like their
sister.

So this would make perfect sense:

Prosecutors said the defendants killed the three teenage sisters because they felt they had dishonoured
the family by defying its strict rules on dress, dating, socialising and using the internet.

The problem is that this isn't why the women were killed, it is the post-hoc rationalization
for why they were killed.
II.

The prosecution said her parents found condoms in [younger daughter] Sahar's room as well as photos
of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret.
[Youngest daughter] Geeti was skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing
clothes and stealing, while declaring to authority figures that she wanted to be placed in foster care,
according to the prosecution.

The daughters had been dressing western, dating, using the internet and disrespecting their
old man [and brother] for a very long time-- across three Western countries-- without ever
being murdered, not even once. The father didn't like these things, thought them
abhorrent, beat the girls, but did not kill them. During all this, this honorable dad had no
problemresigning his son to the fate of "brother of sluts", he wasn't worried his other
daughters would be the "sisters of whores"-- or become corrupted themselves; nor did he
appear mortally wounded by being the father of harlots.

In other words, this had nothing to do with honor. Why did this murder happen when it did?

III.

First, let's dispense with the religion: "He was not religious as some have said. I never saw
him do prayer." You will observe a ubiquitous lack of religiosity in North American "honor
killings" up until they are actually committed. Suddenly everyone finds God. That's the
history of America: come here for the freedom; stay for the cash; and if things get hairy say
only God can judge you.

What's necessary for this kind of a murder isn't a surrounding community that supports
honor killings-- where in Canada are they going to live before some Molsen swilling hockey
enforcer runs them down?-- but a group of people who validate that some behaviors are
shameful; again, even if they abhor honor killings themselves. In other words, someone to
crowdsource the superego. "I don't condone what he did, but I understand."

The family had first moved to Australia, where he would not have been able to commit this
crime because:

[The father]Shafia did not appreciate the local Afghan women's support group reaching out to his
wives.

These Australian Afghan women were supporting the women, not him. His wives were
being "seen" by enough people as individuals, more than a reflection on him. So he left.
When he got to Canada, he found this:

Despite the overwhelming evidence presented at trial, some in Montreal's Afghan community have
trouble accepting that the deaths were murder. "The parents were building a house for the sake of their
children. How could they go and kill them?" asked Victoria Jahesh, who works with an Afghan women's
group in Montreal.
The key difference is that even while the Canadian group would never condone honor
killings, the family is still viewed as his family, the women as his wives, etc. He (to them)
remains the main character, it's his movie, everyone else supporting cast. I'm sure the
group thought they were supporting the women in various ways, but the manner in which
they understood the world-- for brevity let's just call it in this case patriarchal-- reinforced
the very problems they thought they were alleviating. "A father loves his daughters," they
would say. Yes, that's obvious.

IV.

"There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this," Shafia said on one recording.
"Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows ... nothing is more dear to me than my honour."

What could possibly have been so terrible? Such a betrayal? She had already had sex, lots
of sex, condoms in her drawer in her parents house sex. Isn't that dishonorable enough?

No. What got her killed was this: she got married.

In the spring of 2009, Mr. Hyderi learned that [oldest daughter] Zainab was to marry her boyfriend [a
Pakastani-Canadian]... The marriage to the boyfriend was annulled after one day, and another plan
was hatched for Zainab to marry Mr. Hyderi's younger brother. But before that could happen, the
Shafias set off on a summer road trip....
You know what happens next.

Marriage is freedom (weird, I know.) Marriage means she belongs to another man, he has
no power over her-- unless she marries an approved castmember. And if she gets married
to an outsider, then the next thing you know all the daughters get married, and he is
left.......

V.

I can understand (read: smell it from a mile away) the motivation of the father for killing his
family, but in order for the son to have cooperated with this madness his father must have
convinced him that what he was doing was right even though he himself knew it was wrong.
From a theological perspective, that sin is worse than murdering his daughters, because he
did the "devil's work" and corrupted his son's soul, pretending it was God's will.

When Nietzsche said "God is dead" he meant that God is not necessary for our morality
anymore. When he says we killed God, he means that our science, skepticism, education,
have pushed us past the point where believing in miracles is possible; but as a consequence
of this loss we are lost, have no goals, no aspirations, no values. God was made up, but he
gave us a reason to progress.

The resulting nihilism requires us to either despair, return back to medieval religion, or look
deeper within us and find a new source of human values.

Yet... none of those things happened.

The post-modern twist is that we didn't kill God after all: we enslaved him. Instead of
completely abandoning God or taking a leap of faith back to the "mystery" of God; instead
of those opposite choices, God has been kept around as a manservant to the Id. We accept
a "morality" exists but secretly retain the right of exception: "yes, but in this case..."

Atheists do this just as much but pretend they also don't believe in "God". "Murder is
wrong, but in this case...." But of course they're not referring to the penal code, but to an
abstract wrongness that they rationalize as coming from shared collective values or
humanist principles or economics or energy or whatever. It's still god, it's a God behind the
"God", something bigger, something that preserves the individual's ability to appeal to the
symbolic.

"...but in this case..." Those words presuppose an even higher law than the one that says,
"thou shalt not." That God-- which isn't a spiritual God at all but a voice in your head-- the
one that examines things on a case by case basis, always rules in favor of the individual,
which is why he was kept around.

But the crucial mistake is to assume that the retention of this enslaved God is for the
purpose of justifying one's behavior, to assuage the superego. That same absolution could
have been obtained from a traditional Christianity, "God, I'm sorry I committed adultery, I
really enjoyed it and can't undo that, but I am sorry and I'll try not to do it again." Clearly,
Christianity hasn't prevented people from acting on their impulses; nor have atheists
emptied the Viagra supplies.

The absence of guilt is not the result of the justification, it precedesthe

justification. Like a dream that incorporates a real life ringing telephone into it seemingly
before the phone actually rings, the absence of guilt hastily creates an explanation for its
absence that preserves the symbolic morality: I don't feel any guilt...............................

.......because in this case...

VI.

But no one likes to see the consequences of abstract philosophy played out in a submerged
Nissan, so I'll just offer you some advice. Rageful narcissists are the most violent not when
they are insulted or attacked or hated but when they are abandoned to objective reality, the
one that doesn't comply with their mirroring demands. Such a person invariably is backed
by an enslaved God, which means all things are possible.
If you do manage to leave, don't look back.

[Link]

FEBRUARY 1, 2012
What Would You Do If Your Fiance Gave You a Ring That Wasn't Good Enough?

lawyers are standing by

(Part 1 here)
Oh my God, what's he doing...
"Will you marry me?"

You cover your mouth with your hands. In a microsecond you saw the ring wasn't...

But in this moment you have to follow the script. Action.

INT. RESTAURANT - DINNERTIME.

GUY on one knee. GIRL looks shocked.

GIRL:
Oh my God. I can't believe you did this.

[The silence goes on a bit too long. He widens his eyes as a prompt, subtly
motioning to the people watching them.]

GIRL:
Yes!

Around them people in the restaurant clap, say congratulations. Some men smirk
knowingly.

GUY gets up off his knee, they kiss. He sits back down.

GIRL:
It's so beautiful. It's so clear. [She holds it towards the light.] How many karats is
it? Is it 4?

GUY (off screen):

No, it's only 3.

GIRL:
Wow, it looks so much bigger. How much did this cost you? How did you afford
it?

END SCENE

Like any woman wracked by self-doubt, when it feels like a scene you feel compelled to
follow the script. No means no, but yes is what it says on the page. Hence yes to the boss's
extra work; yes to letting your friend vent on the phone even though you're late; yes to
being in a threesome because your boyfriend wanted to.

But later, when you're done shooting for the day and you have a chance to be yourself, you
finally say, "I don't want you to take this the wrong way... I really love it... but.... I was
kind of hoping for something a little... bigger...."
I.

Cue penis jokes. "She looks down and says, 'I was hoping for something bigger.'" But you
wouldn't have said anything if he wasn't walking around like God's gift to women. "Come
on, baby, let's get out of here..." Arrogant prick, if this is what's supporting your bragging
then your BMW probably means you're living with your parents. Wait-- whose house is this?

III.

I was listening to Cosmo Radio-- research-- and the host, Lea, was of the mindset that a
ring is a symbol of what a guy thinks of you, and it's okay for the woman to tell him she
wanted something bigger. Patrick disagreed: "it means she's a vapid bitch." I'm
paraphrasing. So Lea compromised: "maybe he could get her a pair of earrings, too.
Would that be acceptable?" I'm quoting. And Patrick, the co-host, said absolutely, great.

Of course she didn't mean that. If she thinks that the ring is a symbol of what a guy thinks
of her, then the small ring is what he thinks of you. Upgrading the ring after the fact won't
upgrade his feelings towards you. Which is the problem. Which means Lea took a
hypothetical boyfriend who doesn't yet exist and was already covering for him, already
making excuses for not getting what she wants. For settling. For him not loving her.
Rather than committing to her own maxim-- it's a symbol of love-- she downplays it, letting
him off the hook to maintain the appearance that all is well.

Lea was right, he should get her a pair of earrings as well. But not because he doesn't love
you, but because you don't.

IV.

Her co-host, Patrick, was vocal about just how much of a bitch such a hypothetical woman
is, and linked it to the story of Jessica Biel rejecting Justin Timberlake's ring. His insight
was that because Justin had been a voracious cheater in the past, Jessica has him by the
balls. The ring isn't a just a symbol of love, but restitution. He didn't say it, but I will:
Kobe.

I get that there are cheap and jerky guys out there, the point here is not a critique of the
man's logic, the point here is the woman's.

Jessica sounds like she's has Justin whipped-- snap!-- and he has to do whatever she wants
to get her back, using his guilt to dominate him. As if anyone ever feels guilt anymore. Boy
oh boy could that not be more wrong. Prove to me you love me, says HypoJethica. Prove
to me you think I'm worth it. If it sounds bitchy you aren't listening: you prove to me I'm
worth it. Give me something you don't give the other girls, can't give the other girls. You,
who can get any girl he wants, make me know how valuable I am. Because I don't have
any idea, otherwise I wouldn't be shaking you down for a bigger ring and I certainly
wouldn't be trying to get you back.

"Jessica Biel? Doubts her worth? Are you insane? She can get any guy she wants!" No
she can't, she wants Justin. And he's like, "meh. See you Wednesdays." Oh, HELL NO, you
did not just call Jessica Biel weekday pussy. I didn't, but that's the text she got, "not good
enough." Where's she heard that before? Oh yeah, everywhere. Sure she was on VH1's
"100 Hottest Hotties" but she was number 98 and it was VH1. "But she was #1 in Stuff's
'100 Sexiest Women'?" Come on. Hair, makeup, Photoshop, a publicist, it isn't real, it
doesn't count. It never counts. Which is why even though her biggest movies are
Valentine's Day, The A-Team, and New Year's Eve, none of those films appear in her
Wikipedia "Career" blurb. You know what is there? Plays.

New Year's Eve was a vehicle for glamorous actresses to play alongside other starlets, but
she sees a cast meeting where all the hotties are sitting around like, "I play the blossoming
girl" or "I make out with Ashton Kutcher" or "I wear this Herve Leger dress" and Jessica
gets to say, "I play a pregnant girl." Damn, yo. Truth bombs. Sort of puts you in your
place. The only thing worse than that for a hot actress is to be cast as the mom of a hot
actress.

You wish that you had Jesse's life? Why can't you be a woman like that? Maybe because
then your Dad would have to call up this unfaithful and disrespecting boy-man to beg his
trifling ass to marry his daughter. "Please! I'll pay for your wedding!" You think any of the
other "Sexiest Women In Magazine's" fathers would do this? They'd hire a coupe of Russian
guys to disappear him. "But he makes her happy!" I can tell.

Happiness is not the goal, what she's hoping for is affirmation. She wants the kind of guy
who is a symbol of the value she thinks she wishes she had. She doesn't really want Justin
to get her a bigger ring to show off to her friends: Justin is the ring.
!
make sure Scarlett sees me
"Is any of this true?" How the hell would I know, Jessica never calls me back. I only know
that when you break down the media story of Jessica Biel, this is the narrative that comes
out, and it comes out because it's typical of so many women: anything that tells me I'm
worth it cannot tell me who I am. Next.

And so happiness is out, the only objective scale you have to measure value is energy and
emotion. Is there passion? Is there drama-- of any kind? Can you start a recollection
of events with "oh my God!"? If you took all of the world's philosophies and lined them up
end to end, you'd stab stoicism in the neck, stay the hell away from me old man. The only
time you'll go to a secluded beach is if it's with an inappropriate guy like your boss or your
friend's husband or a photographer. "It's complicated." That's a sentence you'll never hear
a guy say because no guy would say it, and any guy who would say it could never get close
enough to you to hear him. Get thee behind me, wuss boy.

Here's a prediction: they won't last. Hmmm. Maybe the ring wasn't good enough.

V.

I don't know if Lea would reject such a ring or not. Her hypothetical position is that a ring is
a symbol and blah blah blah.

She-- you-- aren't asking for a boulder, but it tells you his priorities. Why is it that he can
save all year to rent a beach house in the summer? Or for clothes? He spends almost as
much on hair products as you do, and half of them are for his back. And now his single fling
with frugality is with the lifetime symbol of your love? "You know, diamonds are just a
worthless commodity the media has told us are valuable." So are breast implants. Shut it.

It's not about the ring, Alone; but about his willingness to sacrifice his own interests for you.
If he drank two fewer beers each night out... is that too much to ask?

You know what else is crazy? He puts it on the card, going into debt. Then you get married
and suddenly you're going dutch on your own ring. That's the kind thing that kind of guy
would do.

Some girls are going to call you shallow, "it's the man that matters!" But you know that
every one of those women's profile pics are of their kids or cats or both.

I hear you telling me that it's not even a symbol as much as a test: does he have the ability
to put you first? Can he physically take from his plate and put into yours? Any guy who
gives you a small ring is going to get a gentle push back to Tiffany's or a boot to the ass.

The thing is... hypotheticals like this can only be answered because you're controlling for the
most important and limitless variable, the other person. When you have a real fiance, who
knows what you'd do? Or what he'd do? So the point of these hypotheticals isn't to
determine a code of behavior but to broadcast to others something about yourself. "I'm the
kind of girl that wouldn't tolerate a guy who can't put me first." But in your own
hypothetical, hadn't you already tolerated him for a year?

The kind of man whom you're going to have to nudge towards a bigger ring, to cajole into
being more selfless, to whip into settling for you-- is the kind of guy you are hypothetically
attracted to. And you know who that kind of guy finds attractive? You. And Jessica Biel.
These hypotheticals are dreams. The lesson isn't what you would do; but how did you
construct the fantasy? That tells you who you are, and it's telling you to you think you
should leave your Wednesdays free. He might come over.

VI.

"Are you saying I have to settle for a smaller ring?" No girl watching award shows to see
what they're wearing but hasn't seen any of the movies and who doesn't read the post
before yelling. I'm saying if you refuse a ring from a guy which is less than what you
wanted, thinking it's a symbol of his love but hoping it is not a symbol of his love, then the
problem isn't the ring, the problem is you.

---

[Link]

JANUARY 29, 2012

What Would You Do If Your Fiancee Rejected The Ring As Not Good Enough?

!
now let's see what kind of man you are

"Will you marry me?"

She covers her mouth with her hands and looks shocked. Tears. Oh my God. She can't
believe you did this. (Yes she can.) She says yes. (Not like there was any doubt.) The
other men in the restaurant join their wives in polite fake applause, albeit less
enthusiastically. Congratulations, they say. They don't mean it.

Through dinner she turns her hand every which way. It's so beautiful. It's so clear. How
many karats is it, is it ____? and the number she guesses will be off by one. Of course.

How much did this cost you? she eventually asks. Wow. How did you afford it?

Until finally.... It may happen at dinner, or at home, or... She says:

I don't want you to take this the wrong way

I really love it

But

I was kind of hoping for something a little

.... bigger.....

I.

Cue penis jokes: "She looks down and says, 'I was hoping for something bigger.'" Hack. If
she cancels the sex because it's not to her standards then she's not just a bitch but a slut,
and not just a slut but a psychopath, because she's reduced your existence to a heated
dildo, nothing else matters to her because nothing else can matter to her. Sex is mutual
masturbation.

II.

Assume this is a hypothetical scenario; i.e. imagine it happening.

The most important question for you, the reader, the one that will tell you the truth about
what is happening in the story, is this: what does the hypothetical woman in this story look
like?

III.

I was listening to Cosmo Radio-- what? I'm allowed-- and Patrick, the host, is discussing
this hypothetical story. He had a strong reaction to it: "you dump that vapid bitch." I'm
paraphrasing.

The thing is, this isn't the first time you two have been around each other. You have a prior
history, you have had other insights into her character, you already know what kind of a
woman she is. Which makes you the type of man that is attracted to the kind of woman
who would say that. Uh oh. And guess what type of man that kind of woman is attracted
to. You.

Patrick was right, you should dump her. But not because she's shallow, but because you
are.
IV.

His co-host, Lea, didn't say much, and I got the strong feeling that she felt, hypothetically, it
was totally ok to turn down a ring she didn't think was big enough.

Some women will say the ring is an expression of love, it reveals how much her man thinks
she's worth. It shows to what extent he'd be willing to take care of her. What they mean is
that the ring is a kind of test of his love: does he love me so much that he's willing to
"waste" money, abandon practicality, when it comes to me?

I get that there are more sensible women out there, the point here is not a critique of the
woman's logic, the point here is the man's.

The truth is that you knew when you bought it whether the ring was what she wanted. What
you were banking on is that she'd accept it anyway. It was a kind of test of her love.

That's why this offer of the less than "perfect" ring that she rejects can be understood to be
a defensive maneuver: you don't want to marry her. "You know what, you're absolutely
right." Not so fast. I mean you'd be much happier just dating her, living with her, status
quo. And you know, if she just waited, someday, someday, someday, you'll be rich; and
then you'll buy her a really nice ring.

Yummy. Nothing the kind of woman looking for a perfect ring now wants more than a wait-
and-see guy. You're with her (partly) for her looks, yet you expect she'll gamble those looks
on a single horse race that starts sometime in 2025. "Don't sweat it, baby, I got a system."
Can't wait.

But if your patent/stock/novel/horse comes through and you later do indeed get her that
bigger ring, are you going to spend a greater proportion of your wealth on it, or just more
money? If not, then you haven't properly understood what that ring represents to her--
crazy or not-- which means that you don't understand her, which means, importantly, that
you do not care to try. The point here isn't that she's right, the point is you two are not
connected.

Save your money. You'll lose it in the divorce anyway.

V.

I don't know if Lea would reject such a ring or not. Her hypothetical position is that a ring is
a symbol and blah blah blah. In real life, she might reject such a ring, or circumstances
with her fiance might be that she is perfectly happy with that ring, or any ring, or waiting
for a ring, or who knows what, because the difference between what you would do
hypothetically and what you would do in real life is the other person.

Hypotheticals like this can only be answered because you're controlling for the most
important and limitless variable, the other person. When you have a real fiancee, who
knows what you'd do? If you really knew her, the story wouldn't happen. So the point of
these hypotheticals isn't to determine a code of behavior but to broadcast to others
something about yourself. "I'm the kind of guy that wouldn't tolerate such a gold digging
bitch." Oh, you're a Capricorn. But in your own hypothetical, hadn't you already tolerated
her for a year? 40% of the time from behind?
In the example above, what did she look like? You imagined her to be hot.....ter than you.
You did this because only a really hot chick, a kind of woman, would reject a ring because it
wasn't big enough. And in this way you have justified not being with this woman, "a
bitch!"-- a woman who doesn't exist but serves a a proxy for a type of woman who also
does not exist-- so that you don't have to face rejection. In other words: blame it on the
ring.

When the woman in the joke rejected you because of your penis, do you really believe she
liked you except for the penis?

These hypotheticals are dreams. The lesson isn't what you would do; but how did you
construct the fantasy to allow you to do it? That tells you who you are.

VI.

"Are you saying I have to buy her an expensive ring?" No guy wearing Axe who doesn't
read the post before yelling. I'm saying that if you spring a ring on a woman which you
already know is less than what she wanted, hoping that she'll be satisfied but not sure if
she'll be satisfied, then the problem isn't the ring, the problem is you.

---

Now go here: What Would You Do If Your Fiance Gave You A Ring That Wasn't Good
Enough?

[Link]

Is The Cult Of Self-Esteem Ruining Our Kids?

The Effects Of Too Much Porn

------

Notes:

1.

If you want the history of engagement diamonds, Epstein writes the classic. It reveals the
extent to which our social constructions are.... constructions. Highlights:

"To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would
inhibit the public from ever reselling them."

So began engagement rings for the masses. It all started in September of 1938.
The ad agency of N.W. Ayer started "a well-orchestrated advertising and public-relations
campaign [to] have a significant impact on the "social attitudes of the public at large and
thereby channel American spending toward larger and more expensive diamonds instead of
"competitive luxuries."

...the advertising agency strongly suggested exploiting the relatively new medium of motion pictures.
Movie idols, the paragons of romance for the mass audience, would be given diamonds to use as their
symbols of indestructible love....

Did it work?

Toward the end of the 1950s, N. W. Ayer reported to De Beers that twenty years of advertisements and
publicity had had a pronounced effect on the American psyche. "Since 1939 an entirely new generation
of young people has grown to marriageable age," it said. "To this new generation a diamond ring is
considered a necessity to engagements by virtually everyone." The message had been so successfully
impressed on the minds of this generation that those who could not afford to buy a diamond at the time
of their marriage would "defer the purchase" rather than forgo it.

2.

Off topic, but there's a masturbation competition in the US and Europe, and the world
record holder went 9 hours. Yes in fact, he was Japanese.

But the interesting thing about such a competition is that it exists. No shame in
masturbating, I guess. "Why should there be? We all do it." My mom doesn't. I'll kill you.

But the lack of shame isn't what's really interesting. What's really interesting is that the
purpose of it is to masturbate together. A previously shameful, previously solitary activity
now done with other people proximate to you, but no connection is needed or even desired;
the only goal is the self-pleasure, with the pretense of the camaraderie if the other skin jobs
next to you.

I could say that it's a metaphor for social media, or narcissism, but it isn't a metaphor, it is
the inevitable conclusion.

JANUARY 26, 2012

Superman's A Baby, But He's Still Superman
!
it's so pretty

So this is how you miss the signs. Pay attention, it's a kind of charade.

The boy is at a kid's birthday party and the kids are 7, and they're bowling because nothing
suits 7 year olds better than perfect spheres made of depleted uranium and 45 minutes of
waiting your turn.

A girl wearing a tiara bowls a 71. Superman-shirt bowls a 76. A future parole violator quits
after two gutter balls because this game sucks, an odd assessment since it's his party. His
mom is showing another mom texts from a man who is not his dad. The boy bowls a 101.
Granted, he double underhanded it the whole time, but so what.

Princess says to the boy, "You won!" The boy tries to suppress a hesitant, humble smile
beaming with incredulous pride. Princess gives him a hug and he almost cries.

Superman says, "No you didn't."

"Yes he did," says Princess.

"Yes I did," says the boy.

"No you didn't," says Superman. "You got the highest score, but you didn't win."

I'm not familiar with sports, let alone bowling, so I don't really understand the scoring. Is
bowling scored like blackjack, where you can have more points but still lose? Or is bowling
pretty much like football, where more points= the other team's cheerleaders? Which would
mean either Superman is running a short con or he got into his parents' mushrooms.

The boy says some words, but what he says is irrelevant because the boy's parents are less
like parents and more like Idiots and Idiocy can overwhelm everything but death, and death
can overwhelm everything else but denial. The boy's parents are proud of the boy, they
want him to feel good, so they jump in: you did win! you are the winner! They are patting
him on the back for his win, sure, they may suspect it was a fluke (so he crossed the line a
little) but self-esteem is what's important here, right, at this age, right? This is a big deal for
the boy, he won, f-i-s, come on, let him have his moment. Have some more cake! Have
another juice box! Hey, everyone, come give the boy a high-five! Don't pay any attention
to Superman, he's just a Greenie Meaneenie Jealous Butt Crybeanie, he doesn't like it when
anyone's satisfied.

Yeah, but Superman is telling the Idiots something important. He is telling them that based
on his prior history with the boy, based on what he knows of the boy, telling him he didn't
win might actually work. He wouldn't have tried this on the Princess, or his parents, or
some stranger with a beer gut and an ankle monitor-- no, he tried this on the boy because
he had a feeling he would fall for it.

Which means that the correct lesson the boy's parents could have taught him was what is it
about Superman that makes him act that way? Or more importantly, what is it that the boy
does to make Superman think he can manipulate him? But the one they went with, the one
that will make him neurotic for the rest of his life, is that he's a winner.

But he might not be. Not if Superman has anything to say about it.

JANUARY 23, 2012

Couple Reveals Child's Gender Five Years Too Late
!
oh boy

A story that defies understanding until you realize... how old the parents are.
It's a boy! And he's five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade
concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said.
I'm confused. Is being stereotyped as a boy worse than being stereotyped as a court jester
with an extra chromosome? "Wha--! That is so offensive!" Agreed. So why did she do it?

"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?"

On a hunch I checked out her blog to see how opposed she was to slotting people into
boxes:
!

I may be wrong, but this appears to be a woman whose whole life is boxes.
The premise for this unstory is that the parents wanted to prevent any gender stereotyping,
so hid the child's gender from everyone to let him [sic] grow unstereotyped.
The problem is that the parents already know the sex. They can't unknow it. They aren't
acting from no information, they are acting in reaction to the information. They are saying
they are raising him gender neutral, but what they are actually doing, precisely, is choosing
not to raise him as a boy.

Sasha's gender was almost revealed when he took to running around their garden naked, but Beck was
resolute and encouraged him to play with dolls to hide his masculinity.

Hide it from whom? The kid knows he's a boy. If he wants to play with dolls that's one
thing, but evidently the dolls aren't for him, for his benefit, but as a signal to other people.
Not wanting other people to affect his development is fine, but as parents they are the most
important influence in his early years, and their chief lesson is that who he is is less relevant
than the appearance of who he is. They are telling him reality doesn't exist. Not "boys can
do whatever they want" but "pretend you are not a boy."
As a "radical feminist", would she have encouraged the same denial from a daughter?

II.
Here's where things stop being hilarious:
When Sasha turned five and headed to school, Laxton was forced to make her son's sex public...
This is an extremely revealing sentence, because it shows the hierarchy of power in this
woman's mind: she doesn't believe in God, she can overrule biology; but the school system
is inviolable. The school system! What next, a pet store? A pumpkin?
She could have home schooled him; she could have refused to tell the school. But instead,
she acquiesced to their demand. There's a very specific reason she did this: she is afraid to
break society's rules. That's why she got someone else to be transgressive for her.
She wants to be (thought of as) a progressive, to (appear to) challenge society's rules, but
being a coward she instead forces her kid to bear all of the negative consequences of this
challenge. Is she wearing a man's suit to work? Has she stopped shaving her legs "to hide
her femininity"? Is she willing to risk that someone will punch her in the face at the bus
stop? Is she willing to sacrifice her own carefully managed identity "to make people think a
bit"?
At the risk of me being the kind of sexist she has parenthetically announced she is against,
let me say the father in this story is even worse than she is, because he should know better.
If you need me to explain why this is, I can't. Amazon suggests you'd enjoy The
Descendants.

III.
This story seems like it is about gender roles but it is actually about the deeper generational
pathology that comes out in a million different ways, which are all the same way. This isn't
about a progressive way of raising children, this is about the consequences of narcissism.
What drove her to using her child as a you-go-first skydiving partner is the desire to be
something coupled with the terror of doing anything-- which results in ambivalence and
inertia camouflaged in a consumerist lifestyle full of meaningless choices. This leaves a lot
of unused emotional energy left over for me me me. She's had 46 years to obsess over her
identity, and this is what she came up with, a hail mary pass in the second half of a mid-life
crisis.
According to the astronomical guide Being And Nothingness, infinite freedom is proportional
to infinite terror, which is why the infinite universe is filled not with nothing or even magic
pixie dust but with dark matter. Boo. You may think you want freedom, but the Cenobites
can imagine a whole lot more freedom than you can and are just waiting for you to go first.
That existential terror is itself frustrating, it is the point of the terror. That's why if you
really want a bonerific sex scene you turn off the internet and put on a horror movie. Good
luck trying to masturbate to it, though. Which is why it's so memorably hot.
And so a person who knows not what to do with freedom, a person afraid of power, has a
choice: either the transgressions are filtered through a proxy that has proven it can stand
it-- modeling your bad ass self after someone already bad ass, or projecting your impulses
onto someone else; or you pretend that something else, entirely artificial, is what frustrates
you. Knowing where the boundaries are lets you safely pretend to test them. "I'm terrified
of sex" becomes "I'm terrified of getting pregnant" becomes "my Dad would kill me if I got
pregnant." That's a girl you're guaranteed to get naked every time; but she's given way
more blowjobs than she's had orgasms.

This is why I know that while Beck seems like a hippie-atheist-feminist-freethinker, she is
undoubtedly a completely ordinary middle class housewife, no different than the Kansas PTA
members she would hatefully roll her eyes at for voting Tory instead of Labour. Her life has
been marked by nothing eventful, nothing challenging, nothing unusual, nothing difficult, so
she will have created drama out of ordinary events in order to self-identify. "Oh, God,"
she'd say as she parks her Subaru at the Gymboree. "These mums are all so desperately
conformist. Marry the father of my child? How utterly bourgeois. Did I mention my child is
a court jester?"

IV.

Still, his mom is intervening. While the school requires different uniforms for boys and girls, Sasha
wears a girl's blouse with his pants.

Everyone slow down. This is no longer a gender-neutral child potentially making his own
choices, but a boy dressed like a girl, overtly and on purpose. Beck is raising a transvestite.
If you had asked her if she wanted to raise a transvestite she'd have said no-- she wants a
child free of stereotypes-- because there are stereotypes of boys and girls but not of boys
who dress like girls. That mixed logic reveals the true intent of her "gender-neutral" project.
It isn't for the kid, it is for her. If it wasn't for her, you wouldn't have heard about it. Wasn't
the whole point not to call attention to the gender? Oh, I had it backwards, the whole point
was entirely to focus on the gender. Sigh. The main character in this story is herself. The
kid is supporting cast. He is not a person, he is a blog topic.
Of course she wants the best for him, of course she loves him, I'm not saying she doesn't.
Neo loved Trinity, too, but I hope it is not necessary to explain which way the force vectors
pointed. The purpose of this game show was to be the parent of such a kid, not to benefit
the kid. Amy Chua went on the same game show, but at least in her case the kids won
some prizes for coming in second.
Let me repeat an important quote:
Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who
wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on
purpose - played an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter's lover, so that the
daughter could drop her, without guilt. The daughter could be furious with her and marry the rich guy.
That's a more difficult sacrifice. It's not "I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart." No,
in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good
parent should do this.

The true temptation of education is how to raise your child by sacrificing your reputation. It's not my
son who should admire me as a role model and so on. I'm not saying you should, to be vulgar,
masturbate in front of your son in order to appear as an idiot. But, to avoid this trap - the typical
pedagogical trap, which is, apparently you want to help your son, but the real goal is to remain the
ideal figure for your son - you must sacrifice that.
She is doing the exact opposite: sacrificing her child's reputation, subjecting him to
potential ridicule and god knows what else, not for his benefit but in order to promote her
own identity. It's not the gender neutrality that's going to mess this kid up, though it
might; but being raised by parents who are using their kid as something other than an end
in himself. As was said in a movie I hope has no parallel here: this isn't going to have a
happy ending.

JANUARY 10, 2012

Greece To Pay Disability Benefits To Pedophiles: America To Report On It

!
this story is exactly the opposite of what is happening everywhere else in the world

The Greeks started democracy, let's see what they've come up with since then.
ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- Greek disability groups expressed anger Monday at a government decision to
expand a list of state-recognized disability categories to include pedophiles, exhibitionists and
kleptomaniacs.

The National Confederation of Disabled People called the action "incomprehensible," and said
pedophiles are now awarded a higher government disability pay than some people who have received
organ transplants.

Also included: "pyromaniacs, compulsive gamblers, fetishists and sadomasochists," i.e.

Greeks.

It sounds crazy, it is crazy. Why would they do this?

The government is also battling widespread abuse in the welfare system, forcing tens of thousands of
disabled people to be reassessed.

But this isn't abuse of the system, this is the system abusing you. What the hell is going on
over there?

II.

FYI: The Illuminati have decided that 2012 is the year the Dow is going to 14000.

Politicians threwout [no sic] the world have a single problem, only one: how to convey the
appearance of financial stability until someone discovers cold fusion. Marx was one step off:
all costs boil down to energy costs, i.e. oil costs. Fix that problem and the deficits will
follow.

The problem of the problem is that the cost of oil has to be high enough for someone to
want to discover cold fusion; but if it is high, though not high enough, then simultaneously
it will be too expensive for most economies yet too cheap to replace-- or even to extract
more of it. Hence shortages. And the cycle repeats.

In the meantime, politicians try to kick that ball as hard as they can down the road. A
generation, two, three, far enough out that you don't feel it now.

Social Security and Medicare represent 640% of the U.S. budget. I looked it up. We can
pretend that other things matter, but really, they don't. Cold fusion and Social Security.
Can't have one or the other, it's both, or neither.

2012 will see an American election between Mitt Romney and President Obama, and the
winner will be whichever one of them manages to best avoid questions about Social
Security. Unless by November we are finally at war with Iran, Social Security will be the
only topic worth discussing, which means we'll be discussing gay marriage.

If you want your generational conflict, that's it. The "old" and their 437 elected
representatives will block any attempts to mess with Social Security, or even mention it, and
will use welfare and disability-- e.g. SSI-- as a diversion; but they must present the ills of
SSI in such a repulsive way that it captures the young's disgust, to distract them from the
behemoth that is eating them.
Hence stories about pedophilia. Hence pictures of black people abusing the system.
There's one now. He has an XBox. And weed. There's always weed.

The story that comes out of Greece is a prolegomena to any future diversion that will be
able to present itself as a news story. For the next year, expect to hear how the disability
system is corrupt, corrupting, socialist.

All of those things are true, but irrelevant. The "young" should not fall for this. My track
record on criticizing SSI is unassailable, but what is wrong with it isn't the $, but the way
the $ are dispensed, i.e through the pretense of medical illness. Almost everyone can work,
even a little, at something; imagine if we could get all those SSI recipients to spend 1 hour
a day clicking on Google ads. We could be as rich as astronauts.

No. The real problem, the one after oil, is Social Security. Throw in Medicare.

Without real numbers we are not going to solve real problems, so here they are, memorize
them:

SSI is $50B. That's it. You could double it, triple it, it wouldn't make any difference. I'm
sure the people getting SSI wish the payments were higher, but they aren't not because we
don't have the money, but because people hate you. On principle. And it is that hate that
both Democrats and Republicans will cultivate; because it reflexively produces a delicious
narrative: SSI recipients don't deserve it because they never worked, therefore-- and your
mind cannot help but make this a therefore-- Social Security recipients do because they did.
I am not saying either of these propositions are right or wrong, I am making the link explicit
so you can see what is being done to you. Keep your eye on the black and brown SSI while
the government smuggles the old folks to heaven. "Wouldn't this be easier if we had
euthanasia?" Done.

SSDI is $124B. SSDI is funded from Social Security taxes (1.8% payroll tax) and represents
credits the individual earned while working, i.e. it is disability insurance. But in oral
arguments, whether the ex-worker "deserves" it or not will overshadow the fact that he did
indeed "pay into it" in some capacity. Look for SSI and SSDI to be conflated into a gigantic
"fiscal black hole."

Social Security is $712B. It is funded through FICA, which in 2010 brought in $780B, i.e.
$68B surplus, i.e. more than all of SSI. Of course eventually the ABC demo will turn the
channel to CBS, and the payouts will exceed the income.

Cold fusion, cold fusion. You gotta have hope.

III.

No one is interested in knowing that in Greece pedophilia is a "disability," but not one you
can get any money for. The AP should really talk to some pedophiles before it makes these
crazy statements about how much they can earn. (The correct number is zero.) This
doesn't mean the Greek government put this law there on purpose so that people could get
angry about it; it means the government found it there on purpose so that people could get
angry about it.

And no one is interested in knowing that SSI is but a tiny blip on our budgetary concerns,
the equivalent of penny pinching to 89 octane when you fill your Escalade. Won't that
damage the engine? "What do I care, I'm leasing." That's the most American sentence I
have ever written.

What does interest people is "abuse of the system." That, and gay marriage. Romney and
Obama will never tire of telling you precisely how the SSI system should be reformed to
prevent "fraud and waste", and the press will be happy to report on it. All of those reforms
will be financial, i.e. less; none of them fundamental, i.e. more.

"Look over here, everybody. We're protecting your interests. Don't look over there, we're
protecting someone else's interests."

Distraction, misdirection. Keep it up until November, or cold fusion, whichever comes last.

JANUARY 7, 2012
Sara Ackerman Is Both a Nut, and X

pic removed by administrator

How to summarize a complex story? Start from first principles: what does the author want
to be true?

Sara Ackerman is a student at NYU, and sent a mass email to the "Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis" complaining, inter alia, that a professor forced her to go to OWS and do
an ethnography. Her complaint was not that it is impossible for a college student to do an
ethnography of a fluid movement comprised of people who in, say, November are
completely different than the people there in August, rendering any conclusions not just
moot but misleading, or that the term ethnography is correctly spelled "personal anecdote,"
which would have been my complaint. But then again I didn't go to many of my classes
because I thought they were full of people who didn't care or blindly followed the typical
herd mentality. Was I right? NB: that's an ethnography.

Her rambling, highly fonted emails are the typographic equivalent of an old time ransom
note, and I have every suspicion she's a nut.

Your problem is that the accompanying pic to the NYU article about her is this:
!
Uh oh. Things about to go racial up in this joint.

II.

Gawker's summary of her complaint:

...objected to being "forced," in her words, to interview "criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and
of course, the few competent, mentally stable people"--[Sara] did not like this [assignment].

And the NYU paper continues:

She requested an alternative assignment, but wasn't granted one by CAS Dean Kalb until, she had
already gone down to OWS "with two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don't
look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic,
etc" and felt like she "escaped an extremely dangerous -- and even, life threatening -- situation."
So it is pretty clear that she sounds like she was afraid to go there.

But then there's the picture. That's a picture symbolizing what she is allegedly afraid of. No
picture of her is available, which is weird, as she has 1000 followers on facebook and I
found it in 9 seconds (though it took hours to verify), but if you open the Textbook Of Media
it becomes immediately understandable: her picture is not useful to their narrative. If this
was a story of a sexual indiscretion they would find a pic of her in a bikini, and if she doesn't
fit in a bikini they'll use someone else in a bikini as a symbol.

If you take the phrase, "quite attractive and thin", and juxtapose it with the pic above, or
the picture NYMag used:
!
You've set it up nicely: white girl is afraid of black people.

In fact, her actual complaint is that she disagrees with OWS, on principle: "a movement that
runs entirely against my core values, and principles". I'm not saying she's not a nut; she
may also believe there are drug addicts and rapists down there, she may be afraid of them,
but in her brain the secondary problem is the rapists, the primary problem is OWS.

So that's your second clue: an ideological disagreement-- albeit an insane one-- has been
reframed into something that seems self-explanatory: this crazy girl who thinks all of OWS
are rapists is a racist.

Which isn't entirely wrong:

On a side-note have you ever heard of that mega-university in Cambridge, Mass. called
Harvard?
Long story short, they had a few disputes between a tenured professor, and a big man on
campus, and look what happened in the end:
They swapped him:
[Link]
For him:
[Link]
And got a PR nightmare---does anyone see the parallels? Or do I have to continue to spell it
out for you, as I have been for over 2 months?
Look, neither Summers nor West is perfect, but why don't you do a little research
to see who was more deserving of a prominent position at Harvard?

These are the ramblings of a person whose personality is made of paper mache. But listen
to the words, the words she felt were important enough to underline: highly qualified X guy
was replaced for terribly inadequate Y guy.

You fill in the X and Y.

"Does anyone see the parallels?"

III.

So she's a nut. So what? Why are we reading about this?

Nothing about her story is interesting or unusual. As a psychiatrist in a university hospital, I

have seen hundreds of situations just like this. I'm not saying they all actually had
psychiatric pathology, I am only saying that somehow or other, referral or kicking and
screaming, they have wound up at the door of the university counseling service. Psychiatry
is the tool the system uses when it can't shoot you in the head.

And yes, every year five or so nuts send terabytes of emails to [Link] and every
newspaper within the blast radius about professorial misconduct, conspiracies,
mishandlings, promises broken, he said/she said, with multiple quotes from the Student
Handbook. (Here's a protip: if you ever refer to the Student Handbook, you should take a
semester off or lithium.) You never see these stories in Gawker, let alone the entire emails,
and trust me when I tell you they are more interesting. So why this?

She's a nut, but she's a nut in the required direction: this nut hates OWS, which is to say,
only a nut would hate OWS. A nut, or someone who doesn't like blacks, or.... Her
nuttiness serves a necessary ideological function, which is to set OWS in opposition to her
insanity; OWS is magnified as the voice of reason, the voice of sanity. When the media
points out the idiocies of Sarah Palin, Bachmann, and Perry, it isn't to discredit them-- a
maneuver that overt would be distasteful to intelligent media; Pailinizing them sends a
more subtle but powerful message: anyone who agrees with these nuts is a nut. The point
is not to doubt them, the point is to doubt yourself, nudging you closer to center (i.e.
leftward.) That's how you win an ideological battle.

Thought experiment: you come across a story about an OWS supporterwho is also a nut
trying to get her professors fired. What network are you watching? So then why are you
watching?

IV.

Sara Ackerman threatened to, and then did, the worst thing you can ever do: go to the
press.

The press is not your friend, and when you give them your existence they will use you
however they need to, and you will have no recourse. If you happen also to be a nut,
you're done for.

NYULocal is a student paper, so it's safe to assume they're deeply pro-OWS. That's not
necessarily a bad thing, but the point is that they don't see it that way, they see it is pro-
truth, or pro-uncovering the lies of Wall Street. Again, fine; but it means that when they
use your image for their purposes, like they are using Ackerman's, they think they are doing
a good thing. You can't fight against that.

The essence of an ideological battle is not, "I believe this, but you believe that" but rather,
"You believe that, but I know the truth." Because of this, not only can you not convince
them of their bias, but it is impossible for them to ever be aware of it. It's not bias, it's
reality. Hence "basic" and "fundamental" are attached to the very things that other people
see as anything but.

At around 4pm MST, I wrote a comment on the NYUlocal page: "Look at the picture they
used. THINK!"

Sometime within the next 15 minutes, both my comment and the pics were gone.

You'll either be surprised or not: I knew they were going to do that. Which is why I
screencapped the before and after:

before:

after:
!

The point here is not that I "caught" them, that is not my interest. What's important is that
they took it down in response to my comment. What will they tell themselves is the reason
they took down the picture? Or used it in the first place?

Was it that I misunderstood the picture, or was it that I did not properly understand the
picture?

---

End notes:

1. The scientific problem with ethnographies is that unlike a clinical trial or even a straight
census, the "investigator" cannot be separated from the work. It is simply impossible--
looking forward to some angry comments-- to have an "objective" ethnography because the
process of the investigation requires the investigator to apply his own biases and defenses
to the work. You strive for neutrality, of course, but there is always conscious awareness
that you can't reach it. It mitigates this by weaving within it a narrative about the
investigator, the investigator becomes explicitly part of the research, so the reader can
(conceivably) make some guesses about why this particular investigator saw this particular
thing in this particular way.

I tell you this because Sara Ackerman is thus correct in saying she cannot perform this
study. Her hatred of OWS, misguided and shallow though it may be, would interfere, and
that would inevitably come through in the study. But, and this is an important but, since no
one on the planet would have known who Sara Ackerman was, we wouldn't have had that
needed information to properly interpret her findings should she have forged ahead. Which
means that in refusing to do the research, Sara Ackerman was the only honest ethnologist
in the class.

see also: Why does the media ignore Ron Paul? Not because they disagree

[Link]

JANUARY 4, 2012
Ocean Marketing Supports Obama

!
this better be worth it

What? Another catchy title that doesn't mean what it looks like it means? No, I meant it.
If I had to guess I'd say Ocean Marketing actually supports Romney, but that doesn't
change the truth of it.

For those who don't live on the internet: a customer service dispute ended up on the
internet. The specifics are below, but they aren't relevant:

A guy pre-ordered an Avenger Controller from the manufacturer. It never came, so the
customer complained. Ocean Marketing ran the customer service for the manufacturer, and
Paul Christoforo was the contact person. The general form of Paul's responses to the
customer were, "you're a jerk, I have no time for jerks." That may be a slight
mischaracterization, but not really:

Buddy your asking for free stuff and I am trying to help you , You have no idea what happened to our
ordering system or our old customer service reps that told you they were going to send you a 100%
COUPON AND FREE CONTROLLER but never did . So calm yourself down , be respectful and do as I
say or ask to get your free controller. I DEAD SERIOUS ! Be a little more humble we can refuse the right
to ship out anything to anyone we want , I'm trying to help you. Small claims court for 49 dollars haha ...
that's cute . I'm the President of my company not The Avengers so keep your punk smite ignorant
comments to yourself. If I wasn't trying to help you I wouldn't have emailed you back. Customer service of
old is gone were in a new generation now. Sorry for any inconvenience , this will ship tomorrow I'm putting
in the order now .

The customer is only N=1, so he used the only power he had: he forwarded the emails to
the the Penny Arcade guy, who also happens to own the entire internet. The result: it gets
to Reddit, who send him thousands of emails, phone calls, outing him as a possible steroid
user, discovering a police report of domestic abuse charges, etc.

He's tried to apologize, but his ego keeps getting in the way.

II.

There's one other thing you need to know. Paul Christoforo looks like this:

Paul's an idiot, and a bully. So what?

Paul appears like he's the bully because in that interaction between him and the gamer, he
is. Additionally, he is pictured, in the mind and on camera, like a bully, and a jerk, and once
you know what he looks like you can't unknow it. So it becomes impossible to judge him in
any other way, which is bad for him and necessary for everyone else.

Here's what no one on Reddit seems to understand. To anyone not in the demo for an
Avenger Controller, the Avenger Controller is a joystick. Which means that thousands of
people ganged up on this guy, got him fired, harassed him, and potentially ruined his
career-- over a joystick. I can see you want to interrupt me and say something about the
principle of it, let me just say one more thing and I'll give you your time: to the United
States government, it looks like the dangerous party is the internet.

Paul's a bully, but bullies can get bullied, right? Reddit just went Dylan Klebold on Paul
Christoforo. Who is the state going to side with?

I say this is narcissistic rage, but how I see it isn't as important as how The Big Other sees
it. Did the guy steal billions of dollars? Kill his followers with Kool-Aid? No, he was a lousy
businessman in a "meaningless" business. So a bunch of 4 year olds, arguing over a toy,
rage like 4 year olds, i.e. use maximum force for every single sleight, because anything less
than maximum is barely felt.

The trouble here is that it's not one 4 year old, it's thousands.

You can't argue this point because I am not telling you what is reality, I am telling you how
it "looks" to the suits and ties who generate your world. The Law doesn't see Paul
Christoforo's hair plugs or legal blindness or broken spellchecker. It sees a businessman, it
agrees to believe he is a businessman so that it can believe he is under attack. It is
fortunate for Reddit that this picture existed, because they'd have to invent it if it didn't,
because if Paul was pictured in a suit and tie, if he was in his sixties, if he looked like the
symbol of businessman that the Law already sees him as-- Reddit would cease to exist.

The government's claim is that we need increased security on the net to protect us from
criminals, hackers, and terrorists, but that is the lie we all agree to believe. The real threat
to the system, the one that will eventually result in the abolition of anonymity is the deepest
fear of all Americans, it is so deep that it shaped the Constitution: tyranny of the majority.

The internet community thinks it exposed a bad dealer, gave him what's coming to him. I
won't disagree. I'm only telling you that that's not what the government sees. It sees this,
and only this:

I spent my childhood moving from school to school and I got made fun of everyplace I landed," [Penny
Arcade's Gabe Krahulik] says. "When these assholes threaten me or Penny Arcade I just laugh. I will
personally burn everything I've made to the fucking ground if I think I can catch them in the flames.

Don't yell at me, I love Penny Arcade. But the government sees only this, and it sees this
written by someone who has way too much power for an internet cartoonist.

China requires all internet users to register their real names. So does Google+. They're not
afraid of criminals. They're afraid of ____________.

[Link]

!
 JANUARY 2, 2012
Penelope Trunk, Abuser

!
I am accustoming myself to the idea of regarding every sexual act as a process in which
four persons are involved. We shall have a lot to discuss about that

Catchy title, no? I put it there for the stupid people. If you think I support domestic
abuse-- if you think my not explicitly writing, ad nauseum, "NO TOLERANCE" or "IT'S NOT
THE VICTIM'S FAULT" is evidence that I think that "sometimes the bitch deserves it," then I
can tell you without error that 2012 is going to be way too complicated a year for you to
endure, and you are seeing a psychiatrist, and it isn't helping. Stop being you. The world
does not have to validate your prejudices. Take a minute, you may learn from people you
disagree with.

I tried my best to read through the comments on Trunk's blog relating to her domestic
abuse post, written by people who don't keep diaries about their own abuse history. "YOU
NEED TO LEAVE!!!!!" Assuming you had a similar experience, how long did it take you to
leave that earns you the right to a caps lock?

But the title is deadly correct, DEADLY-- see, I earned the right to a caps lock. Here's why,
and I expect almost no one to agree with it but hear it once in your life anyway, maybe you
make a left instead of a right or you take two more seconds at the light.

II.
Penelope Trunk is a blogger/entrepreneur who is notorious for being "too much information"
honest about her life. She recently posted about (yet another) fight with her husband, and
posted the pic you see above.
I'm pretty sure she doesn't want my advice, but in the spirit of putting herself out there, I
hope she won't mind my using her story to explain something that may help other people.
And if I end up being wrong about her specifically, or if it turns out she made the whole
thing up, it won't have any effect on the message.

The adage in psychiatry is you can't make a diagnosis without evaluating someone. That's
fine, except that personality disorders aren't diagnoses, they are descriptions of behaviors.
So stand down.
Penelope Trunk has a history of sexual abuse by her father. She has a pattern of intense,
unstable relationships; a history of self-cutting, bulimia; is emotionally labile and reactive;
and her primary defense mechanism is pretty obviously splitting, i.e. things are all good or
they are all bad.
Trunk says she has Asperger's, and maybe she does, but what I've described is "borderline
personality disorder." BPD is not a description of behavior exactly, it is a description of an
adaptive coping strategy. In other words, people persist with BPD because it works.

"Works" has a limited definition for borderline: prevention of abandonment. Narcissism

protects the identity at the expense of everything else, Borderline will do whatever it takes
to avoid abandonment, including giving up one's identity. Abandonment isn't loneliness or
isolation, a person can run away to the woods for a year if it preserves the connection to the
other person, even in a terrible way: "I'm hiding out because he's out there looking for me
to kill me."

The currency of borderline is affect. Energy. The analogy is the kid who doesn't get enough
attention, so acts out: he would rather have hugs and kisses, but he'll settle for the same
amount of affect in any other form of attention, including anger and yelling. Negative affect
has long term consequences, duh, but short term no affect is completely intolerable.
Observe (start at 25s):

The temptation is to view the baby as upset, but in fact what he is doing is trying anything
to get her attention, including screaming. This is why what he is is frustrated, and why it is
called acting out.

That plays out into adulthood. Knock down fights and great make up sex is psychologically
more fulfilling than a normal, calm, low-affect marriage. Mind numbing jealousy is
preferable to being 100% sure of their fidelity, to the point that the brain becomes paranoid
to keep things interesting. "Are you just looking for things to be upset about?" The answer
is yes. You think Megan Fox's character in the Rihanna video is ever going to settle down
with someone who doesn't wear a tank top to facilitate punching?

Why are borderlines attracted to broken men? To alcoholics? To rageful narcissists? Affect.
"I never know what mood he'll be in." The range, the energy means you are connected. No
abandonment is conceivable if the guy is beating you. "But he cheats on her as well!" He'll
be back. Right?

This is set up in childhood 100% of the time. The kid learns what works, learns what gets
him the affect he needs. If the parents are loving all the time not much "work" is
necessary. But if Dad is distant, or interested in chasing skirts (such daughters grow up
trying to look like the kind of girl Dad is attracted to), or mom's always drunk, then "work"
happens, and the kid starts to try new ways of getting the affect, and unfortunately the
easiest way to get sucky parents to give you affect is to enrage them. That works
awesomely. The best is when the parent beats you mercilessly, and then does a 180 and
apologizes profusely, hugs you, buys you gifts, "oh, baby, I am so sorry I did that, Daddy
was just upset..." Nothing in life will ever match up to that, except maybe a boyfriend who
does that. If you are doing that to your daughter, for god's sake join an infantry battalion
or become a test pilot.
Remember: the goal of this strategy is not happiness, it is avoiding abandonment. Hence a
blog.
The thing is, BPD "works" when you are young, there are always people around to tolerate
it. Parents, boyfriend/girlfriend, employers, etc-- and being pretty, which Trunk obviously
is, helps a lot. This doesn't mean people are necessarily nice to her, or that she's happy;
only that "crazy" behavior is more tolerable to other people when you are young.
The problem for her is she's not getting any younger, and like it or not the only one who will
put up with a 60 year old borderline is no one. Except maybe the kids, which we will get
back to.

III.

Telling Trunk to leave her husband is just plain stupid, and if that was your recommendation
you should stop making recommendations, you're stupid. You can't reduce the complexity
of a marriage to "he hit you, so you should leave." I know stupid people, I know, domestic
violence shouldn't be tolerated, god are you dumb.

If she chooses to leave, fine, but trying to convince her to leave pushes her towards her
worst fear: abandonment. She either decides to leave, or she doesn't, it must be 260% her
decision or else it feels like it isn't all her decision, which means the split is felt like
abandonment even though she "did" it. She'll go insane. You advising her to leave means
she can't.
It also betrays a gigantic amount of arrogance. This woman who may possibly be a nut has,
at least, raised kids, managed businesses, and even survived moving to Wisconsin. And
you're going surprise her with "domestic violence is not okay?" But the truth is you don't
actually want her to leave, you just want a forum where you can take credit for telling her
to do it.

She wants this relationship. She's not a bad or good person for wanting it, it is what it is.
I can say I have my own opinions about what to do and blah blah blah, but the starting
point has to be what she wants, not what you think is best for her; otherwise at best what
will happen is she ignores your advice, and at worst is she takes it.
Nothing is to be gained by saying her husband abuses her, which he does. The real story is
that she is abusing herself. I'm not judging her, I'm not saying she is bad or that I don't
understand it, but she's setting up, well, a pattern of intense, unstable relationships
because she needs the intensity and will thus tolerate the unstability. A relationship isn't
one sided, or bi-directional, it's a dialectic. They are very much in it together.
If you wanted to help (someone like) her, you have to take the focus away from her, put
some objectivity into it. So start with her strengths. What is she good at? Raising her
kids, for one thing. She may have doubts about her methods or her attention span, but
ultimately she takes it all into account and creates an environment that is best for them.
Okay, so a good place to start is: how she runs her life, how she runs her relationship, will
be inevitably mirrored by her kids. She probably knows this.
What she may not know, however, is that the mirroring doesn't mean her boys will grow up
likely to hit their women, but that it is more likely her boys will grow up falling for women
like her. Or picking someone in reaction to her.

part 2 soon

[Link]

!
 DECEMBER 31, 2011
Wolf Dad, Tiger Mom, And Why Trying To Be A Good Parent Is A Bad Idea

!
best mom ever

Part 1 here

The people who read books like Chuas hoping to learn something start from a wrong
motivation: they aren't looking to raise better kids, they are looking to be better parents. If
you don't see how those are different, your kids do.

By example: the NYT's "Motherlode" section has a year-end summary, 2011: Stories That
Changed The Way We Parent. Sounds important. Let's see how many are for the
advancement of children versus the pretense of parenting:

Amy Chua
Jerry Sandusky
Gender-Neutral Parenting
HPV Vaccines For Boys
The Digital Classroom
The actual sacrifice of parenting, the one that happens anyway but is resisted bitterly to the
dismay of all, I've only really seen described once. I hate quoting famous thinkers explicitly
because it puts a distance between the reader and the ideas, it makes them less personal,
but sometimes it can't be helped:

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who
wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on
purpose - played an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter's lover, so that the
daughter could drop her, without guilt. The daughter could be furious with her and marry the rich guy.
That's a more difficult sacrifice. It's not "I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart." No,
in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good
parent should do this.
The true temptation of education is how to raise your child by sacrificing your reputation. It's not my
son who should admire me as a role model and so on. I'm not saying you should, to be vulgar,
masturbate in front of your son in order to appear as an idiot. But, to avoid this trap - the typical
pedagogical trap, which is, apparently you want to help your son, but the real goal is to remain the
ideal figure for your son - you must sacrifice that.

II.

The book title says he beat his kids into Peking U, but actually he did something else:

"From 3 to 12, kids are mainly animals," he says. "Their humanity and social nature still aren't
complete. So you have to use Pavlovian methods to educate them."

This is where all the enlightened humanists in the audience are supposed to freak-out. Kids
aren't animals, individuality is important, blah blah, but what's important is the word
Pavlovian: his violence is not random, it is not surprising.

I could be wrong, but it appears from these articles that Xiao doesn't beat his kids into
Peking U out of anger, but out of a system. Not saying corporal punishment is the way to
go, but I am 100% positive it isn't the beating itself that molded the kids, but the very clear
rules and consequences, which requires an awesome level of energy, vigilance, and self-
control on the parent's part, which is why most people who beat their kids only get high
school dropouts. Parenting requires consistency. Protip: this is even more important for
The Autistic Child.

This is very similar to the mechanism of (preventing) PTSD: you can be the drunkest parent
imaginable, and the kid will make it as long as your terribleness is a known quantity, your
immensely violent behavior predictable, and the kid has some control over the
consequences, e.g. if he does X he'll get his hand put in a microwave, but if he doesn't do X
he won't. As long as the kid can make sense of the story of his life, if he understands its
narrative structure-- even if it is made up (Life Is Beautiful)-- he can make it.

Remember the judge who beat his teen daughter? What made the beating worse is that
it made no sense. The amount of beating had no relationship to her behavior, it was
entirely dependent on how he was feeling that day, not what she did. As a judge he had
sentencing guidelines for different crimes; as a father he freelanced, and terribly. That's
what made it particularly damaging. This is the phrase that accompanies all abusive
relationships: "I never know what kind of mood he'll be in." The beatings come from rage,
which makes them sound like hate. Xiao beat his kids more than the judge did, but you
don't get the feeling that Xiao hates his kids.

III.

Wolf Dad is Chinese, actual Chinese, and his main audience is other Chinese. Well, sort of.

The fact that he attributes, publicly, his children's success to his method suggests that he is
not behaving like a Chinese Dad, but a Westernized Dad. Real Chinese dads may tell you
that they beat their kids, but they do not go around bragging about their childrens'
successes, let alone as a consequence of their awesome parenting. Hence, this is for a very
specific Chinese audience, i.e. ones interested in taking credit for their kids' successes, i.e.
westernized. Xiao may not let his kids watch TV and Youtube, but I will bet every cent I
have his readers do.

Xiao's oldest child, 22-year-old Xiao Yao, has his doubts about his father's methods. "Though Dad likes
using traditional educational methods, he may not fully understand the exact forms and he chose his
own way...

Not just apply the traditional methods-- understand the methods. Even though he is full-on
Chinese, these aren't his methods, he is pretending at them, adopting them. In America,
kids of immigrant parents get caught in this fatal loop, too. They partially speak their
parents' language, have a fair grasp of the traditions but spent most of their American lives
trying to be American. But when they grow up and have their own kids, they try to make
their kids more like their parents-- they put them in language classes, they try to saturate
them in their heritage, but it's fake and it doesn't stick. How can you expect to make your
kid more Chinese than you are? We're back to the fundamental error: why, if the parent
got through life without much of the old ways, do they think their kids desperately need
what they didn't? And the answer surfaces: it's not for the kids, it's for them. You can
make up for the fact you know little of your heritage by having your kid do all the work of
adopting it.

The delicate line I'm walking is that teaching them traditions is in itself positive; but they
are utter wastes of time when it is for the parent. Amy Chua's kids are being raised
"Chinese," but really they're being raised Jewish-- which is also a pretense, they're being
raised American. I'm sure they like "authentic" Chinese food from restaurants and know
how to spell Hannukah, but the way they think is American. The way she thinks is
American. All I need to know is that she identifies Chinese and married a white guy to know
that one of her daughters is going to be named Emily or Sophia. Note: not Chinese names,
but predictably the names affluent Americanized Asians give their kids. She is oblivious to
those forces, yet those are in fact what control her.

I'm not at all criticizing her, Sophia is a beautiful name no matter how common, but when
you look at the forces that make "you" you, all of the manufacturing and alchemy you try
are weaker than reality. And, if that reality includes a substantial dose of American media,
you don't stand a chance.

Americans fear the rise of the China, but that China that you see risen was made by
Chinese over 50. Their kids, confused by conflicting cultures pictured on the internet
versus outside the window are in no position to "take it from here, Dad, we got this." Those
kids who are growing up with money, the young college grads and urbanites who are in
possession of the few, but nonetheless inflated employment positions are going to be
frustrated when they try to balance their own desire for wealth branding with the minimal
opportunities for advancement. America may have been destroyed by its 50 year olds, but
it will be resurrected by its 20 year olds. China has the exact opposite demographic
problem. China appears to be one generation behind the U.S. in terms of personality
disorders, and if the rise of psychiatry over there is any indicator, i.e. the single best
indicator ever, boy oh boy are they in for it in 2025.

That's Wolf Dad. His beatings are trivial in comparison to the other, now unrepeatable
factors he had going for him and his kids: real estate rich; private tutors and lessons; an
expensive "international" high school that was taught in English. That's not Chinese
parenting, that's WSJ America parenting.

If he or anyone else want to brand themselves as a "parent," that's their business, I guess,
though the Chinese media is now attacking Xiao for finding a loophole in the Chinese
system: because his kids were born in the U.S., they get to take an easier entrance exam to
Peking U.

But that is the least of China's problems: the real problem for China is that they'll probably
go back.

---
[Link]

See also: Why Parents Hate Parenting

DECEMBER 29, 2011

The Fundamental Error Of Parenting: What's The Difference Between a Tiger Mom and A
Wolf Dad?

!
apparently, the secret to success is single parents

From NPR:

Tiger Mom Amy Chua... became an overnight sensation in the U.S. this year when she wrote about her
tough parenting style. But she looks like a pussy cat next to her
mainland Chinese equivalent, "Wolf Dad" Xiao Baiyou.

"Wolf Dad" wrote a book called Beat Them Into Peking University.
Xiao, 47, describes himself as the emperor of his family. As such, he's laid down an extraordinary
system of rules for his children.
"I have more than a thousand rules: specific detailed rules about how to hold your chopsticks and your
bowl, how to pick up food, how to hold a cup, how to sleep, how to cover yourself with a quilt," Xiao
says. "If you don't follow the rules, then I must beat you."

The last parenting book I read was The Road. I'm not sure that counts. I only got a
quarter through it, but its principle advice appears to be to take all of your instincts and the
collected wisdom of every movie ever made and do the exact opposite. This is terrible
advice.

For my money: this Xiao Baiyou is a nut. But whether this guy is a nut or not is not as
important to you as what the media constructicons want you to think he is.

I.

What you noticed first about this story is that he beats his kids and they go to Peking
University. You did this because you assumed the story was a news story and were looking
for information, and not a media construction showing you a facade. What does the
journalist want to be true?

Instead, what you should have noticed first, right off the bat, is that the story explicitly
juxtaposes this man with Amy Chua. That's the fulcrum of the story, it tells you what your
frame of reference is supposed to be. The point is NOT that he beat his kids into Peking
University, the point is for you to compare him to Amy Chua and no one else.

Amy Chua was called a terrible mom for being hard on her kids, but if she had been a dad
the state would have sent in the police and Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Dad would not exist.
It doesn't exist, which is my point. She was able to publish because her audience-- e.g. the
readers of the WSJ where she first and exclusively published an excerpt of her book-- like to
hear the words "college" and "success" and "how", but to soften it from mean parenting to
tough parenting you have to make it all come from a woman, especially a non-American
one. Rule #1 of stupid people trying to make sense of the world: the culture you know
nothing about has all the answers.

Then to reinforce Amy Chua's methods as the gold standard for all the other demos who
previously hated her, an alternative standard that goes too far must be created to appall
everyone into agreement. One year after Chua went platinum, here it is. "Well bless my
heart, beatings?! I know I don't like that method of Chinese parenting! And Amy's
daughters are all so poised and pretty, not like those porphyria drones he has solving
Hamiltonians in the basement."

Note the four key differences in the story:

1. He's physically abusive, so the audience understands him to be hatable.

2. Not American, but Chinese, in China. China = uncivilized. Hatable.
3. His story appears on NPR, Slate, mommy blogs, not on the WSJ. This is not an audience
weighing the merits of a yardstick to the knuckles, they prefer passive techniques like
evolutionary psychology and chemical coercion. Man acting like a man, father like a father?
Hatable.
4. Amy Chua is a Harvard law professor, while Xiao Baiyou is a real estate mogul. Hatable.

With this information, the reader is now invited to choose which of the two images
represents an American success story:
a.

b.
!

II.

Question: what kind of a person reads parenting books? I'm not being critical, I'm asking.
Do the readers feel they are failing and need some advice? Or are they just looking to hate
someone and are willing to pay $23.95 for the ammunition? I can see that someone might
see the book and say, "hmm, I'd like my child to get into Peking University, let's see what he
has to say," but that thinking betrays a cognitive error that both makes these books useless
to you and is the reason you need such books: you don't think there's anything wrong with
your parenting, you think you just need some helpful tricks.

Hence the popular parenting books/blogs aren't for special populations like Raising The
Autistic Child or My Kid Saw A Gorgon, What Now? These are ordinary kids being raised by
parents who are worried about what shows are appropriate for kids, but not about the
commercials. "What? He's 7. It's not like he's actually going to go buy an Acura." You've
failed.

"Good" parenting, apparently, is trying techniques on your kid that were never used on you,
even though you still turned out just fine. "I think TV is bad, I won't let my kids watch it."
Outstanding. But how do you explain how you watched 5 hours of TV a day for thirteen
years straight and still turned out ok? Think it over for a moment. You'll never admit the
answer: because you're different. You succeeded despite the TV.

But look around: everyone you know over 30 also did fine despite the TV, no lawyer ever
says, "Your Honor, my client saw every episode of Bosom Buddies and McHale's Navy, I
move for dismissal." Which is why I am telling you: TV is bad for the kid, but that thinking
is much worse.

So too: sugary cereals, bullying, Playboys. None of those things are good for kids, I am not
saying to expose your kids to them. But thinking that they will be worse for your kids than
they were for you is the fundamental, narcissistic error of parenting. "My kids are weaker
than me." Then humanity is doomed.

I know many white doctors who have their kids in Mandarin classes. Did that help them
become doctors? "I want them to be able to compete." With whom? Mandarins?
Seriously, what world do you envision in which Mandarin is the deciding talent, except
working in Mandaria? Which is great if that's what they want to do, great if the kid is
interested, but otherwise is this really how you're plotting excellence? "It also teaches you
to think logically." So does actual logic. "It looks good on a college application." Everyone
hates you.

Part 2 here.

My Amy Chua post

[Link]

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Short Film: Bad At Math

I wrote a short story called Bad At Math, about me vs. gun vs. Xanax, and Henrique Cartaxo
asked if he could use the idea for a short film.

Some differences: my bad guy was taller, the room was smaller, and my drink was WAY
bigger.

Also, a follow up.

DECEMBER 17, 2011

If You Liked The Descendants, You Are A Terrible Person
 ! i've seen this movie before

The Descendants is not the worst movie ever made, but it may be the most subversive, and
if you think it is one of the best you need to rethink your life choices.

Bring a date. Oh, you don't have one.

I.
The promotional tag line:

A land baron tries to re-connect with his two daughters after his wife suffers a boating accident.

You'll observe that the three women are characterized only by their connection to him, while
he gets an extra identifier-- that happens to be about his wealth. We'll come back to this.
The movie is a pyramid scheme of cliches: you can keep heaping them on as long as no one
ever asks how it pays off, because it can't. Rich but emotionally distant husband.
Complicated wife. Family secrets, summed up by the dumb stoner toolbox improbably
dating Matt's (Clooney) smart but rebellious daughter:
!
That may not read like an insightful exchange between men, but I'll translate: men are
never much worthy of their women.
Cue crying, laughing, yelling-- no sing-a-longs, this isn't a chick flick so male emotional
progress will be symbolized instead by either jujitsu (wrong genre) or by forward physical
motion: driving, walking, running, travel, now we're getting somewhere-- lots of blaming,
reconciliation, "resolving of inner conflicts" and of course Act IV "closure."
Love is complicated, death is complicated, and a movie about both would be, well,
complicated, especially when you throw in infidelity. But despite what you will hear and
read from critics, The Descendants is neither complicated nor about any of those things.
Here's your first hint: it's called The Descendants.

II.

!
just saying

I am not an expert on what makes a good or a bad movie, if it's bad you'll ignore it and
anyway, best case scenario, two minutes after it wins Best Picture it will go the way of Cold
Mountain. The real power of movies that do not involve giant robots is not what they tell
you about yourself, but that they tell you how to think about yourself. You don't think you
learned that from your parents, do you?
This is the "Personal Quote" on director Alexander Payne's IMDb page:

It's my hope that we're getting into an era where the value of a film is based on its proximity to real life
rather than its distance from it.

By "proximity to real life" does he mean "was playing 20 minutes away form my real life"
because the only commonality between the film and my life is that they are both shot in
color. So whose real life is this proximate to and how do they think about themselves?
Let's listen.

III.

Here's what happened about 15 minutes into the movie. I'm sitting three or four rows in
front of two 50ish women. In a key emotional scene teen daughter Alexandra blubbers
through her mixed up adolescent tears that dying mom wasn't happy and was cheating on
him. He is floored, devastated-- he had no idea. So he literally runs down the street to a
couple that was friends with his wife, and they reluctantly admit that it is true-- and that
she was planning on divorcing him. At this moment one of the women seated behind me
says, loudly, as if making an important discovery about human nature and I swear I am not
making this up, "A divorce! And all that money!"

Son of a bitch, am I an idiot. That thought never occurred to me. It's legitimate, it would
be a huge part of divorcing characters' reality, and I missed it because, dumb stupid me, I
was thinking this was about love and infidelity. But of course it isn't. At all. On second
viewing (thanks Sweden) it's obvious. There is no love depicted anywhere in this film and
its target demo knew not to expect it, not to look for it. Yes it's about family and sadness
and betrayal but love? Middle aged people don't love, duh, love is for 20 year olds.
Besides, what does that demographic know about love anyway, where would they have
learned it? The rom-coms all ended right when the relationship begins. There's no
consistent model for love ten years after marriage, except ones based on: infidelity, divorce,
death, finances. Which is exactly why the first two happen so often in response to the
second two.
The few happy movies about mid-life "love" are not about established marriages (those are
always sitcoms) but about new relationships, starting over, new beginnings, play-acting the
story lines of their twenties but with a "mature" take, i.e. some middle aged mother of two
looks in a mirror before her first big date in years and laments how old she is now and how
ugly she's gotten, as played by Nicole Kidman or Jennifer Aniston. Wow, nailed it, I can
completely relate. I'm not knocking these movies for existing or for casting these hairless
nymphomaniacs, I'm simply posing the general question: since the audience has learned
nothing from their own parents, and they don't read 19th century Russian literature, what is
their model for love in the 2nd decade of marriage? They don't have one. Which is why
when this demo finds themselves in the 2nd decade of marriage they feel unfulfilled,
anxious, depressed, is this all there is? They have nothing to guide them except The
Discovery Channel and mommy blogs, and they lack the courage to analyze their ennui, so
these movies serve the important function of pretending that it's normal. "Oh, yeah, that's
exactly what I'm feeling." Fine, but don't you also want to know why you feel that way?
There are, of course, plenty of people with normal marriages who still love each other
despite the absence of windfall inheritances and relentless drama. But they won't be seeing
this movie.
Normal love between two normal people that is not clandestine or inappropriate or
impossible or financial is not revealed here, it is not even imagined here. The couple with
the "best" marriage-- and no whites in this movie have a good marriage-- are the wife's
elderly parents, but don't worry, no love there either: mom has severe dementia, so dad is
her caretaker. That may sound like love but that odd backstory means that no male in this
movie is ever depicted dialoguing meaningfully with a female of his age group, unless they
are arguing. And no one notices this weird feature of the movie's world because that's the
world the audience lives inas well. And what does this grieving but wise old former soldier
say to Clooney about his daughter's infidelity and death? "If only you had let her go on
those shopping sprees women like, maybe she wouldn't have needed to get her thrills
elsewhere." I wish I made that up. Life is priceless, but for everything else, there's
Mastercard.
These depictions of mid-life's relentless pragmatism, isolation, and lack of anything-- what
word can I use that doesn't bring out the psychotics?-- "abstract," dressed up in porno-level
dramatics to mask the banality of it all are no more realistic than a fat guy's second chance
with the girl that got away (Charlize Theron), and yet they resonate with a certain audience
because that's where they live, too.
In fact, the only psychologically realistic thing in this movie, and not coincidentally it will be
the one thing the audience will say is the leastrealistic thing-- is that the older generation is
so emotionally infantile that their children become parentified. Example: Clooney passive-
aggressively calls his wife's lover and leaves a message pretending to be a client, and when
the guy calls back Clooney's paralyzed; so his daughter takes the phone (NB: a Blackberry)
out of his impotent paw and runs the con. Manipulating middle aged men for middle aged
men. Just the right role for a 16 year old girl. It'll be easy to tell her drinking is bad now.
NB: the girl's mother is dying in the same room, but it's the father that needs all the
attention. She has to be strong for him. "Save me Anna Freud, save me!" In fact,
according to the movie, here is how teen girls cope with the loss of their mother: they get
over it. It takes about 15 minutes.
It's supposedly judgmental to say that Matt is a bad father, you're supposed to say, "he's
doing the best he can," which means that it's okay he's a terrible role model because by
golly he gets points for admonishing the kids not to curse. "Watch your language," he says
a lot. HA! That's the movie's comic relief but it's also some BF Skinner 10th dan ninjitsu.
Control of expression-- language, behavior, appearance-- substitutes for parenting, it's not
for the kid but for the parent, it makes the parent think of themselves as a parent because
the outside looks all presentable, and then they are just so surprised that their micro-
parenting didn't prevent their ADHD teen from turning to alcohol. "It's a disease." I'll get
my stethoscope.
"Who are you to blame me my teen's behavior?" I don't even know you or your teen. YOU
ARE PROJECTING. All I'm saying is if your teen is an alcoholic AND you think The
Descendants is a meaningful film, then you need to bring to your therapist of ten years the
possibility that the two may be the same force and that the problem isn't your teen, or your
exes. They weren't Matt's, after all.

IV.
Voice overs are supposed to be an example of bad or lazy writing, but I have a theory:
when a movie has a voice over, it means the character is being dishonest. Not "it wasn't me
who stole the cookies" dishonest, but "it's not as simple as it looks, you don't know the
whole story, let me explain" dishonest. In other words: BS. This can be consciously
manipulative (The Usual Suspects) or unconsciously rationalizing (Sex And The City). The
voice over pulls you into the mind of the character and so you are less able to make an
objective assessment about what you see. What's important about it is that the story would
be impossible to tell without the VO because no one would buy it. I can see why director
Alex Payne needed it for this one.
Here's a bit of human nature for you and you are most certainly not going to like it. Fat
George Clooney discovers his wife has been cheating on him-- and he never suspected.
That's a profound insult, a narcissistic injury, and no, people who complain I talk about it
too much but haven't actually learned the lessons, you don't have to be a narcissist to
experience a narcissistic injury, it's built into the way we relate to other people. It's
jealousy AND an existential beat down: look at the limits of your power, look at the limits of
your reach, she is able to have a whole other existencethat had so little to do with you you
didn't even notice, nor did she feel any need to tell you. At least if she had done it to hurt
you you'd still suffer the jealousy but your place as main character in your own movie would
be secure. Maybe you're only supporting cast in hers? "Screw that. I'm changing the
script."
Three ways humans deal with narcissistic injuries, count them: 1. Rage. But Fat George
Clooney doesn't look like he's up for the physical exertion of attacking his wife, which is why
he is depicted as fat and not fit (viz Sleeping With The Enemy, Unfaithful, The Last
Seduction, To Die For, etc) and anyway the target is in a coma. 2. Displaced rage: go
after yourself (suicide: guarantees the Other remembers you forever) or the lover. But if
Fat George Clooney is too winded to beat up a coma patient, how's he going to fight the
Alpha Penis that stole his wife? Pass. What he might do-- which is both highly realistic
about the target demo and also the problem with the target demo-- is channel his inner 15
year old girl and stalk him, then kinda-sorta confront him, then mess up his stuff. That'll
show him.
The third way is the interesting one, the one that ruins you: 3. Make the cheating be
about yourself, your "fault" (minus any real introspection.) Increase your pain to save
your ego. That's the path the movie chooses: she cheated not because she fell in love, or
lust, but because he neglected her, he was a bad husband, he didn't take her on shopping
sprees. "As long as you don't ask me to change, I'm accepting some blame for her
cheating on me." You'll feel right as rain.
The movie takes this a diabolical step further. Matt finds and confronts the lover, but in an
act of "selflessness" tells the guy he's not there to cause trouble, he just wants to give the
guy the opportunity to say goodbye to her, too. WOW! What a guy! And no one thinks this
is preposterous. The audience sees this as a redemptive act, a kind act, a noble act, and
that's because they are all idiots. No, no, I mean every single one of them. They are
(thanks, VO) starting from a false premise: that he actually really loved his wife in the first
place. He didn't. That's why she was cheating. To illustrate just how inconceivable
"love" is to this audience, I'll explain that this selfless offer is how the scene starts, but the
point of the scene, how it ends, is with Clooney realizing that the guy bedded her for his
money. So not only did she cheat because of him, the lover chose her because of him.
Narcissistic injury averted-- that's what passes as "coming to terms with" infidelity for this
audience.
While the 50 year old women behind me and every critic in America are applauding his
apparent selflessness, they overlook the fact that while he wasn't angry when he confronted
the lover, he became angry when he discovered the true target was his finances. That's
what gets him fuming, and that's what makes sense to the audience. Penis and vagina are
all very well, but if you mess with the inheritance, it's personal.
Also observe that the lover is not better looking than Matt, not richer than him, not more
interesting than him, in every way Clooney is "better" than him. This is a movie so it was
scripted this way, but when your wife cheats on you you'll do the same thing, so remember
what I'm about to tell you. You will "discover" how much better you are than him in every
way so that her cheating is explicable only as a reaction to you. You will cry, you will drink,
you will yell and you will rage, but you won't kill yourself and you won't change and that
was the whole point. The ego doesn't want happiness, it wants status quo. Yes, you will
also simultaneously disparage her as a bitchless cunt, but that's because she did it to you,
against you, towards you. This will help you eventually "come to terms with" her infidelity,
but what then did you learn about yourself? What then will you change about yourself?
Nothing. Hence the sequel will be the same as the first movie, with a different villain.

V.

"This is the first movie review I've ever read that attacks not the movie but the people who
liked the movie." I'm not attacking you you if you liked it, only if you identified with it.
"That's not really fair." American Psycho was an amazing movie, but I wouldn't date anyone
who identifies with it. How is it different? Again, the point isn't that movies tell you who
you are, they tell you how to be.
Here's an example: with 100% certainty I can predict that if you liked The Descendants, if
you think you would like The Descendants, then you thought American Beauty was
"amazing." That movie was, indeed, an outstanding reflection of a kind of a man and a kind
of a life, but at some point before your divorce or rehab you have to consider that if you
identified with the main character there is something wrong with you.

Anyone exhausted? Here's a comedy break (NSFW):

Louis CK:
Kevin Spacey playing the man... he's fantasizing about fucking a cheerleader in high school. And the
way they represent this, in this gay movie, this fucking bunch of cum through a projector-- according to
this movie, when you fantasize about a cheerleader, you lie on your back and rose petals fall all over
your body. Instead of her hot, sweaty ass, and the confused look on her face as you cum in her stupid
eye... No, it's Kevin Spacey with a sweet look on his face, and flower petals, and jazzy music.
[And at the end of the movie, the ex-marine] is the one who's really gay. 'None of us are gay, it's
actually the one hetero guy, he's the gay one.' No one else is gay, Kevin Spacey's not gay. He's straight
as an arrow, he lifts weights, listens to Zeppelin, drives a Firebird-- and thinks about fucking rose
petals. And then when he actually sees her tits he almost vomits....He finally sees the 18 year old tits and
says, what have I been doing all this time? I forgot I like men....

Louis CK takes the gay angle for the comedic effect, but he understands this isn't about
being gay but about a kind of American self-delusion exemplified by the Kevin Spacey
character: everyone else is broken except me. My only problem is I am surrounded by
these people. And everything gets projected onto them as both defense of the ego and as
confirmation that it is, indeed, everyone else who is nuts. "Look, she's a crazy bitch."
When he throws the plate of food against the wall you're supposed to cheer his rising
manliness; you're not supposed to notice that it's infantile narcissistic rage, i.e.
foreshadowing: this isn't going to have a happy ending. The problem for the audience is
that there isn't an American Beauty II, the one where he gets the rose petal girl of his
dreams and inherits a billion dollars and has a perfect life in Hawaii only to discover that
within 5 years everything has regressed to the mean, I mean mean, and everything
happens all over again. "Jeez, why do I attract these crazy bitches?" Because you're crazy,
dummy. The one universal constant in all of your failed relationships is you.
At the end of The Descendants Clooney and his daughters have "overcome" or "moved on"
or "come to terms with" it all. But in fact nothing has changed. And what has at-the-end-
applaud-worthy-Dad taught his kids about human relationships? What kind of a man do you
think Alexandra is going to eventually marry? How soon afterwards will she divorce?
Remember Clooney was going to forgo revenge and instead generously let the lover say
goodbye? Well, at the end he gets his revenge anyway, in the only way meaningful to the
audience: he screws the lover out of money.

Think about this. You'd do it, too, if the opportunity presented itself, but that's not the
point. The point is that this is a movie and hence not random, the movie chose this method
of revenge. It is satisfying to the audience, but the kind of person to whom it makes sense
to punish a wife's lover financially is the kind of person... whose wife has a lover. He will
have revealed to his wife in countless other ways the transactional value of her sex, and
while it may be a lot it's still finite, and so she will get the message and eventually Trade Up
to an equivalent model that costs her more. Indecent Proposal had the decency to put love
over money at the end, but that didn't stop a gazillion women from shamelessly/proudly
announcing how fast they'd "totally go for it", as their whipped boyfriends sat on the bar
stool next to them hiding behind a frozen smiles and pints of Sam Adams. "It's a Winter
Brew." Choke on it, cuckold. Meanwhile none of the giggling women in the bar seemed to
remember that Robert Redford was offering the money for the wife to the husband. The
trick to understanding that movie is that it isn't a female fantasy to have a rich guy offer
you lots of money but a male fantasy to have a rich guy value your woman's sex at $1.57M
inflation adjusted dollars, it makes the mystery of sex/"objet petit a" a concrete and
understandable commodity but also puts it fantastically out of your own reach, like you're
12.

The reason no one remembers that Redford made the deal with Woody and not Demi is that
it is unremarkable to these people that that's who he would make the deal with, nothing
unusual or noteworthy there, Woody is the proper owner of Demi's sex. Yeah, they're
married, that's how it works. I can see you're upset. I know, reality bites. Take a drink,
and consider that in The Descendants Matt's relatives are all waiting for him to sell the land
so they can get their cut, and Matt's hesitant, and then says something the dummies in the
audience didn't appreciate, and what he says is this:
!
Way to figure this all out way too late and about the wrong thing. The land is supposed to
be a metaphor for legacy, for doing the right thing with your inheritance, but I hope it is
obvious that the land is a metaphor for vagina. You may have got it for whatever bullshit
reason 150 years ago, but now as the owner of that landgina you have a responsibility to
tend to it. So yes, it makes sense that the rival thought of it as a means to money, it
makes sense that the Medicare patient's first thought was to alimony, and it makes sense
Woody was willing to sell Demi, it makes sense Matt is more attentive to his finances then
his wife, because if you don't tend to that vagina, to that soul, then all that's left is it's
resale value. And it all makes sense to the audience, because they're psychopaths. Is that
too harsh? Didn't they get choked up when she dies? The Descendants has a sad ending,
and it makes you sad. That's not the sign of a well crafted movie, it's a kind of porno.
That's why they're called tear jerkers. If you bludgeon a puppy or penetrate a vagina you
do not then get to yell, "Ha! Made you look!"

I will concede, however, that the ending of The Descendants couldn't be a more accurate
representation of the generation that is only able to feel rage, sadness, anxiety, and
nothing. The last scene of the movie, symbolizing how one moves on from death and
infidelity, shows Matt and his daughters, inheritance intact, watching TV. Roll credits.
Oscar.

-----

see also: The Strange Ascendance of The Descendants

---

[Link]

NOVEMBER 28, 2011

Luxury Branding The Future Leaders Of The World
!
do you see?

Want to go buy a $10000 watch? "In 2009-14? Hell yeah, let me get my coat."

Watches have the same problem diamond jewelry has; it better be beautiful enough to keep
forever, because if you try and sell it you'll discover there is no secondary market for it. No
one wants the necklace your ex had waiting for you when you got back from Cozumel. "I've
been doing a lot of thinking," he says, "about how easy it would be for you to get all the
penis you want. Let's get married and make sure neither of us are ever happy. No, no,
moving closer to your parents doesn't sound like a bad idea." Turning it into an heirloom
keeps it out of the market and the supply stays regulated by the manufacturers, which I
think is collusion but I'm no lawyer.
These ads can be seen in whatever rich people use to relax on Sunday afternoons, e.g. The
Economist.

This is a brilliant campaign, for technical and artistic reasons. What is the brand that it
conveys? Heirloom quality.
The ads use black and white photos: we've been around for a long time. Even the
advertising campaign self-referentially broadcasts this-- it has been the same since 1996,
i.e. longer than a 40 year old has been in the market for an expensive watch to notice it
wasn't always thus, reinforcing the longevity of the brand.
I know you probably figure this ad isn't for you because you're not a railroad baron or a
Rothschild, but ask yourself a question: have you seen this ad? Then it's for you. Time to
learn why they know you better than you know yourself.

I.

The demo for this ad isn't the Rothschilds or the 1%: they don't buy based on ads. And
they don't need to be told what constitutes quality or authenticity, they can tell, that's what
boarding school was for. Everyone else is going to need to be hit over the head with the
semiotics of quality--

!
i.e. see an ad campaign about those signifiers. Oh, I get it now, this is a fancy watch.

The target demo is not the 1%; the target demo is the Aspirational 14%. They know they
are supposed to like quality and goodness and etiquette and discretion, but no one ever
taught them what those things look like, so when someone does point it out to them they
will go all in. Hence: anything in Trading Up. And they don't care about the next
generation. Not really. They don't want them to be eaten by zombies but anything past
2069 is of no consequence. What they do care about is how a product brands them, what
it says about them now, now that time is running out. Can't afford to be subtle, which is
the same thing as saying I'm willing to pay $10000 to get the message across. There's a
difference between what the brand is and what the brand says about you. You'll pay 10x for
the former and 100x for the latter.
Most products have quick, easy, memorable taglines, because most people are idiots.
However, Patek Philippe's tag line is complicated and unmemorizable:
You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation.
Which is the kind of tagline a person who wants to be a wealthy, complicated, precise man
who doesn't fall for tag lines would fall for. The man in the photo is not a representation of
the target demo; he is the impossible aspiration of the target demo. That explains how the
kid can be in a sweater vest and not trying to murder his family.
The ad is pairing the legacy of the watch with the other imaginary legacy: the heritable
family fortune. I don't know what the Dad in that picture does for a living, but you can be
sure it involves a lot of money and the son will inherit it, along with a boat (below) and the
means of production (not pictured).

!
Also not pictured is $15T in debt and war with Iran, which he will also inherit, though he'll
only be responsible for the former while the bottom 29% will only be responsible for the
latter. Sorry folks, that's how it works, take it up with the Illuminati. Dad is teaching the
son the things a man should know, like how to tie bowlines, which Aspirational 14% didn't
actually teach their own kids, which, and I hope you are appreciating the pattern, is
precisely why this ad works. It's not representational, it's aspirational, i.e. can be done
from the couch. "If I had a yacht, I would definitely teach my kid yachting. Time for a
nap."
Some Patek Philippe owners do indeed know how to tie bowlines but the majority of
potential customers are close-but-no-cuban to these aspirations, they wish they had enough
to start a family legacy and get their name on the backs of orchestra programs because that
would mean that they go to orchestras, that they are sophisticated, they have made it. Not
Hollywood and dotcom made it, which was what they dreamed about twenty years ago, but
the kind of made it where last names matter and "summer" is a verb.
You can't buy into class but people will try anyway, so the watch gets the nouveaux and
nouveauxing rich as close to this lifestyle as they will ever get. Not only is it a visible symbol
of their success but it broadcasts (as per the ad) that they are the kind of person that
reflectively considers the next generation, what they will pass on to them, their legacy. (1)

!
"But don't they already have money to pass on?" It's not the money, but everything else
but the money. Ryan Gosling's character in Drive inherited nothing from his dad except a
Patek Philippe watch, but because it is a Patek Philippe we are to understand that it
symbolizes the real gifts his Dad left him, like masculinity and courage and driving skills.
The watch symbolizes the intangible legacy gifts that came along with it, but in real life
there are no intangibles to pass on, so it is being used instead of those intangibles. It
replaces the intangibles.

If this is confusing, remember that the watch is for the father. The point isn't to give it to
the kid, the point is to convey the impression that he is going to give it to the kid. To convey
the impression that he has other things to leave to the kid as well, just like those other high
class Americans who pass on connections or defense attorneys or the Greek Prime Ministry.
That's the kind of man he is.
It may also help to understand that Patek Philippe is not here competing against Rolex or
Breguet; it is competing against vacations and cars and kitchen renovations. That's where
$10k might have gone, so Patek must brand itself as an important generational necessity, a
marker of European-style class, not a frivolous transient American-style expense.

This is the motivating force of Aspirational 14%: they have some money, wish they had a lot
more, and want an ethical rationalization for their envy: it's for the kids. Keep telling
yourself that. Dynasty is the wish-fulfillment of immortality through your bloodline. But it's
better than nothing.

II.

Then the Great Crash happened. How did the ad campaign change to reflect the new
economic realities?
The answer is in the above ads: there's father and son. What's missing? Mom. Doesn't
she want a watch? Starting in 2009 she does, so tint the B&W to sepia and let's see what
else modern women want.
!
Nothing symbolizes the essence of a woman better than looking at herself in the mirror.
"Something truly precious holds its beauty forever." A tag line even a Wellesley graduate
can remember.

Older woman's left hand conspicuously assures us she's married. The younger woman's
conspicuously hidden in the mother's hand. Mom maintains control of the daughter's sex.
!
In these ads the legacy is quite different: not wealth, or the business, or dynasty, but the
hopefully enduring commodities approved for use by women: beauty, art, joy. It's mom
and daughter and love, packaged in refined ostentationism, which is defined as subtle
quality visible from 1000 yards. Not pictured is Dad, because he's at work or one of those
parties in Eyes Wide Shut.
A Financial Times reporter incorrectly interpreted this as an expansion of the campaign to
target women. This is where my training in neurology is helpful: precisely where in the
brain did the stroke have to occur to cause that kind of deficit in logic? Expansion? In
2009? That makes no sense: expensive jewelery, like a car, is almost always purchased by
or with the husband. The wives of the Aspirational 14%, even if they have good jobs, do
not roll into a jewelry store by themselves and buy $10000 watches, unless they are the
0.5% or it is a present for their man. Hence, this is an ad for men, not women, which is
also why this ladies' ad is prominently featured on the back cover of The Economist, the
journal of record of Aspirational 14%, a magazine with 90% male readers. Through the
triangular magic of Freudian advertising you, the viewer, become the Dad, with the
aspirational images laid out for you: a beautiful and proper wife with culture and delicacy,
taking care of your perfect daughter, while you're in the shower scrubbing the scent of
concubinage off you. So my silly joke was wrong: she's not a Wellesley grad, she's a
Wellesley trophy wife. The Wellesley lets you both pretend you married her because she was
smart.

III.

Something else about these ads: men and women never appear together.

Here we see the explicit pairing of same-sex members, never a family. They both get a
watch but what the son inherits (everything) never overlaps with what the daughter inherits
(a husband). "But that's how the watch will be passed on." Haven't you been listening?
These are brand ads, not product ads, they sell the aspiration, and, if I am reading this
right, that aspiration is to become European. Not Eurozone European, of course, but
Hapsburgs and Romanovs European.

Do these ads appear sexist to you? (2) Shouldn't some "intellectually curious" (the explicit
demo of The Economist) woman somewhere notice the contrasting aspirational message
between the men's ads and the "ladies''"-- and that word itself is a kind of branding-- ads?
But 40 years after women's lib, this isn't such a terrible fantasy to women, either. They
might not want to give up their job as a CT surgeon, but they may happily abandon their
job as employee of MegaCorp if they could afford to. That's the fantasy, and this high class
ad in a high class mag is saying high class women not-so-secretly want this.
Why reveal this desire now, in 20XX? Hmm, isn't it weird how just as soon as women
entered the workforce it became completely impossible for a family to achieve the American
dream without the woman in the workforce? Turns out that part of the drive to get women
into the workforce was driven by... the workforce owners. Get it? Whenever you don't
understand geopolitics just ask yourself where the lowest labor costs are, and wait for the
headlines to read "human rights issues."
Of course women should be paid the same and should do whatever they want, but the point
here is that that is a coincident benefit, the other purpose of it is to have a larger pool of
labor willing to do jobs too good for Mexican illegals and not good enough for American
men, i.e work in retail. Is it really liberating for women to work at Bebe but not be able to
afford to shop at Bebe? Or is it just stupid, except for Bebe, which derives the full value of
their employees' sex for $12/hr?
Here's an example: there's a dwindling but vocal segment of the femalepopulation that
thinks that young women in the office should not have bare legs, that it is too sexualized.
Bare legs are okay if you're a gold-digging whore, but "inappropriate" if you want to be
taken seriously as a professional woman. Simultaneously, however, they believe
professional office attire should be heels and a tight skirt. "It's called a business suit." It
never occurs to them that the requirement of hose/stockings in the office was started way
back when it was stockings, not bare legs, that was sexualized. You can go as far back as a
Bob Hope movie where a sailor gets his best gal a pair of nylons (swell!) all the way to the
1986 scenes of Kim Basinger masturbating to a Kodachrome art show or stripping to the
worst song ever in 9 1/2 Weeks, the intense eroticism depicted not by her naked body but
by close up shots of her stocking covered thighs.

Once upon a time stockings were so fetishized they put them right into movie posters,
nowadays the only place you're going to see them is MILF porn or all of Britain. And so the
prohibition against bare legs has to be rethought-- is the worry that some 20 year old guy is
going to get internet hard if he sees his coworker cross her bare legs? Who cares what 20
year olds think? The non-Lacanian, non-postmodern, super-duh conclusion is that the
(male) office wanted their women all dolled up-- the trick, however, was that it convinced
women to self-enforce this trend, to believe that the stockings helped de-sexualize the
professional women, gave the power back to the women. No one man could pull off that
kind of mass hypnosis, it has to be programmed into the Matrix. The system at one time
wanted the office woman to be a simulacrum of a woman, all silhouettes and shades and
posture, the stockings looking more like an idealized pair of gams than real gams ever
could. Burning the bras wasn't nearly as liberating as getting rid of the pantyhose.
This is why the return of pantyhose is so revealing; hose represents a return to that
sublimated female sexuality; to the more dangerous implicit, not explicit, masculine control
of the sex. It isn't just like the 1960s, it is a retreat to the 1960s.
"Mr. Davis can't trust himself around you if you're naked," says the Human Resources
department for a 50 year old mustachioed small business owner, "so if you don't mind we'd
like you to cover up with this sexy lingerie. Thanks, you're a doll, now he can get some
work done. He's going to need you to work late tonight. No, he'll drive you home after."

IV.

Back to Patek Philippe. That The Economist would want Patek Philippe to buy advertising
space makes sense, it's good money, it decorates the pages of The Economist, and attracts
an important demo that will pay the $130 subscription fee (the higher price is the magazine
equivalent of the Patek Philippe Seal). This demo has made The Economist one of the only
magazines to see a consistent growth in print subscriptions. And it's part owned by the
Rothschilds. How do you like that?
But what is interesting is that Patek Philippe thinks the readers of The Economist are a good
fit for this campaign. Are they insane? Perhaps not. On the one hand The Economist is an
intelligent magazine that does promote free market, free thinking, "liberal" values in a
mostly non-partisan way; but if you imagine a magazine's ads as the unconscious fantasies,
the dreams, of the readers, then the wish fulfillment they depict is not riches or bitches but
a return to the old feudal order.
What you are seeing is the slow acceptance among an important demo, Aspirational 14%, of
rigid class divides. They may have some lingering disapproval about income inequality,
hedge funds and genetic engineering, but it is tired of fighting a losing battle and you know
what? all men aren't created equal, science keeps saying so and we pay our athletes
accordingly, why not everybody else? Aspirational 14% doesn't want a monarchy, but they
sure as hell don't want democracy, not the American kind, not anymore. I know, I know,
you're rolling your eyes, you don't care what the readers of The Economist think or want,
but the trouble is that as compared to the readers of Wired, Time, or The Atlantic, The
Economistreaders are more likely the ones who are shaping the new world order. That's
why the classified ads in The Economist are for CEOs and the ones in The New Yorker are
for mental institutions.

It is a sleight of hand on the American dream, and it's been a decade in the making, the
Great Crash only accelerating it. On The Apprentice the big prize is a Rolex and a job with
Donald Trump, but the person evaluating you for that position are two generations of
Trumps, take that American meritocracy! There's no illusion you can become a Trump, the
best you can do is become a wealthy employee of Trump. And you'll take it. But if The
Apprentice is indeed a metaphor for this European feudalism, then you should observe that
the show's original judges were Donald Trump and his business partners (=American
capitalism); Trump's kids were a lateraddition. The evolution of the show was towards
dynasty, not away from it, just as the Patek Philippe ads have moved, after 172 years in the
branding business, towards this:
!

--towards this, during a time of social and economic upheaval, flattened earths, "student"
revolutions in many Middle East countries and all out wars in many others; towards this,
during the time the most important person in Europe is a woman; towards this in the pages
of higher brow magazines for the "intellectually curious."

Anyone who thinks the profound changes happening in the world now are going to result in
greater democracy or equality is not reading The Economist as carefully as he should.

----

1. This is also why I think college tuition is likely to remain high for another generation.
While government loans are primarily to blame for the complete disconnect between the
value of college and the cost of college, parents represent a significant part of the demand.
Lacking any other inheritance to give them, it promises to get them as far as college with
college prep classes, violin lessons, (unpaid) internships, etc.

2.
If you want to know what an aspirational image for a "ladies'" luxury watch targeted to
actual ladies looks like, i.e. what women who will buy this watch want to think of
themselves, you have to roll back the chronometer to 2003, back when the biggest crises
facing the world were stem cells and Muslims:
!

Forget the watch, why do I suddenly want to buy shoes? (Because nothing says "I can be
someone new" like new shoes.) The campaign was started in 1999 to target 28-35 year
olds, but how many of those women could actually afford a Patek Philippe? Zero, hence the
genius of the ad: build brand awareness. "We'll see you at the store when you're 40 and
rich," the ad proposes, though it tacitly admits that a woman can't think more than 24
hours into the future unless it's to imagine becoming a trophy. Wife. NB: these women
would be 40 now and on their second husband/watch.
Speaking of marriages, note that the single tweak necessary to distinguish the American vs.
European ad campaign is to hide the wedding ring, Inception style, so you aren't sure.
!
In an American ad, if a woman is possibly going to have sex, she better not be single. In
Europe, she better be.
---

See also: If the rich youth can't get jobs, it means socialism has failed.

-----

[Link]

NOVEMBER 16, 2011

White People Think Black People Are Dirty

!
obviously he brought the trash with him

In Science, a study about racial stereotyping. Science, as you know, is read by scientists,
which means they are progressive intellectuals who never racially stereotype. They voted
for Obama to prove it. Though they unanimously subscribe to Evolutionary Psychology Bible
they themselves are not subject to evolutionary forces; but it is helpful and entertaining to
learn what makes the animals in the red states do what they do.

When you're short on time and long on caffeine skip over the study itself and just look at
the Introduction, where you will always find two things.

Unnecessary references:

There is substantial evidence that discrimination has serious negative consequences for those who are
discriminated against, as well as for society in general (1-3). A neglected possible source of stereotyping
and discrimination is physical disorder. The environment can affect the relative accessibility of
important goals (4, 5), and recently it has been found that physical disorder in particular can, through
shifting the relative accessibility of goals, increase littering, trespassing, and even stealing (6).
None of these sentences need referencing, because none of them contain a proposition
worth referencing. They are either definitional (e.g. racial discrimination is negative) or
uselessly vague. Yet we have exhausted 6 out of the 24 references to be told nothing.

Next: references that don't actually support the statements they are supposed to be
supporting.

There is some evidence that stereotyping is goal-driven (7-9), and there is even evidence that when
people's desire for structure and predictability is high, they are more likely to engage in stereotyping
than when it is low (10-13).

Reference 10 is a review article about existentialism.

Reference 11 has the word stereotyping in it, but isn't about the link to predictability.
Reference 12 describes the kinds of responses that occur when expectations (not
stereotypes) are/are not confirmed: "will this taste good?" "If you are told Paul is a kind
man, how will you react when he isn't?")
Reference 13, is about how the goal of interpretation affects the interpretation/stereotyping.

I should also point out that all four of those references happen to have been written by the
same person who wrote the sentence they were all supporting.

II.

For no reason I know, works of philosophy are compromised by even a typo in the
introduction, but in science you can open with a golden shower anecdote and no one
notices. Oh well. To the experiments.

The setting: a Dutch train station. 40 Caucasian men and women were asked to sit in a row
of chairs and fill out a questionnaire about Muslim and gay stereotypes. Chair 1 was
occupied by either a white or a black researcher, which they term a "confederate." Yes, like
they're grifters. Where would the subjects choose to sit?

The experiment was run twice: once on a day when the station was clean (order condition),
and another time a few days into a janitorial strike, i.e. in a dirty train station (disorder
condition.) How did the disorder affect the choices white people make about where to sit?

We predicted that in a dirty train station people stereotype more and would choose to sit further away
from an outgroup confederate than in a (relatively) clean train station.
!
Conclusions:

Importantly, this stronger stereotyping in the disorder condition was accompanied by a significant
increase in the distance the respondents chose to put between themselves and the black confederate..

There are a number of reasons why this study is silly, but, unlike the researchers, subjects,
and striking janitors I am not being paid for my nonsense, so I will only list a lot of them.

The subjects are completing a survey about Muslim and gay stereotypes, yet are sitting
near a black man. Would the results have been the same if the confederate was gay? No?
Then it's only measuring racial stereotyping, which is fine, but then you can't say this:

... In a disordered environment, people are more likely to distance themselves from outgroup members
than in a clean and ordered environment.

Trust me on this: 'outgroup' has a whole different connotation in The Netherlands than in
the U.S. But the sleight of hand is to take a white vs. black racial study and convert it to a
scientific generalization about stereotyping, the kind where some other study can use it to
say, "there is evidence to suggest that people distance themselves from outgroup
members."

Would the results be the same if black subjects were studied? Perhaps this is a study of
prejudice and fear, i.e. white people are afraid to sit near black people but black people are
also afraid to sit near black people, which would produce the same graph. But you'd have
to rewrite the conclusions because it wouldn't be about "outgroups."
Right about here I you want to take a drink, because apparently the only scientist in The
Netherlands that has sex with strangers is me. Think about his study, and the results, and
what you think it means. Now look at these photos:

!
Suddenly the seating choice takes on a different hue. Is she avoiding the black man in the
top picture, or is she looking to get penetrated in the second? BE HONEST LIARS. I will
admit that technically the author remains correct, both interpretations are the result of
"stereotyping," but one happens to be a negative stereotype and the other happens to be a
substantial plot point of every drama on ABC. Here's a revised title for the study: "Clean
Stations, Dirty Minds: How Just The Right Conditions Can Make A Woman Go Black. (But
She'll Be Back.)"

The study assumes that how close whites sit to whites is the default, hence a black
confederate in a dirty station makes them sit "further away"; but why isn't the distance they
sit in the disordered condition the default per race, and other things make them close the
gap? This is especially true if the subjects are used to disorder as the typical state of
affairs, i.e. they're from Rotterdam. ZING! (It is, after all, a train station.)
If you want to go Schrodinger, remember that the subjects in both conditions are
surrounded already by other white people who are observing them (the interviewers).
They are not alone. In ordered environments, does this make people feel safe/horny/cold/
social enough to move closer? (i.e. if the interviewers were not present, perhaps whites
would choose to sit equally far from black people in both ordered and disordered
environments. They'd still be racist, but things couldn't make them more racist, only less
racist.)

Note also that the default condition for the station is clean; the janitorial strike caused an
unusual circumstance. How would the results come out if the station was usually dirty and
one day became unusually clean?

And etc. Instead, the study closes with this:

Thus, the message for policy-makers is clear: One way to fight unwanted stereotyping and
discrimination is to diagnose environmental disorder early and to intervene immediately by cleaning
up and creating physical order.

That's the kind of delicious "broken windows" soundbite that gets you published in Time
Magazine, but why would the effects last more than a day? Wouldn't people become
desensitized to the disorder?

I don't even doubt the conclusions, but you have the moral decency not to overlook the
flaws just because they match your prejudices. This study does not logically lead to those
conclusions, this study is sufficiently vague and flawed that no conclusions can be made, at
all.

The reason this matters is because if the study is published in this way, with these
conclusions, people will assume it is science. This becomes a "known." Next thing you
know it's in a Malcolm Gladwell book and that's the game.

These points seem not to have occurred to the following people: the two authors of the
study; the guy who took this photograph; the four peer reviewers; the editor; everyone
who read the study.

I don't blame them, but as I am not the smartest guy in the universe it should have at least
occurred to someone, and thus we have the fundamental problem of psychological research:
it shouldn't be reviewed by peers. Not because they are stupid, but because they are in the
same "world" and can't see things from the outside. It should be reviewed by physicists;
but if it was, there'd be only one psychology journal left and it would be empty. I reviewed
Justin Timberlake's In Time more closely than anyone reviewed this study.

Two things happen with studies like these: either they enter the Sea Of Publications,
another meaningless ion of sodium that does nothing else at all except contribute to the
rising sea levels that will eventually kill us all; or they get used by government policy guys
to justify, well, it depends: justify making trains stations way cleaner, or way dirtier. Your
city's needs may be different.

III.

So the study is an interesting observation about which no conclusions can be reached.

However, there's a further punch line to this: the study was a fraud.
Diederik Stapel, noted Dutch psychologist, was recently outed for massive scientific fraud,
i.e. he made up all his studies. "All of them?" Does it matter?

The scientific community is aghast at the extent of his fraud-- fraud on "Astonishing Scale",
writes Gretchen Vogel in the same issue of Science; and Bruce Alberts was so furious he
wrote an "Editorial Expression Of Concern." Ooooooooohhh. People's Elbow.

The battle cry now is that science has to be done differently in order to prevent fraud; but
the important truth is that this study should never have been detected as a fraud because it
should never have been published in the first place. The cacophony of self-righteousness
among everyone with "professor" somewhere near their name is a diversion from the reality
that the way the entire field conducts research and draws conclusions is suspect.

Hide behind Stapel, strap some Kevlar to his chest and let it draw fire while you deploy a
few more studies to the journals that are of dubious quality and of no consequence, the
system has to hold just until you make tenure. I know. These studies are useless, worse,
they are perfectly packaged for the media and popular consumption so that in spite of their
meaninglessness they will change the way people think and change the way society acts. I
wouldn't have used this study to win another drink in a bar argument but some minister
somewhere will use it to demand 300M euros or whatever they will use next month for
clean stations or racial purity.

IV.

"Why is Alone lenient on the judge who beats his daughter? Can he really believe Wall
Street is blameless? He thinks the media is creating a straw man of a college kid angry at
Paterno's firing?"

You don't need me to point out the obvious bad guys, there is no point for me to decry
scientific misconduct and pedophilia. But when I don't do it you think there's something
wrong with me, that I'm blind. Why do you want me to say the things you already know are
true? Because that's what you were trained to want.

What you need me for is to untrain you, force you to realize that focusing on the obvious
bad guys is a defense against looking at everything else, because that everything else is
you. You were trained by media which labels hypocrisy as the worst sin imaginable; and
individual instances of corruption-- hey, there's a welfare cheat, hey, there's Bernie Madoff--
as the appropriate target for your wrath. Bernie Madoff is not your problem, he is not your
enemy, and unless you lost money to him he is nothing to you; and as long as you can be
reminded to be angry at him you are not going to ask why the system needs Bernie Madoffs
to survive. Stapel may have invented the data that no one will look at but Science didn't
vet the conclusions that everyone will remember. Which is worse? "Keep your guns trained
on the bullet proof straw man. Look over there, he's a jerk!" If they can drive you to
rage, they've succeeded.

Here's the synthesis: there's an argument against OccupyWallSt, and another about a
beating your daughter, and another about raping some kid in a shower, and this, and etc--
all of these are the same thing. All of these represent the institutionalization, the
mainstream acceptance, of self-serving behavior because that behavior allows everyone else
to be equally self-serving. Or, in more basic yet precise language: individual narcissism is
encouraged to permit the existence of societal narcissism, all of which is at the expense of
your soul. Repent.
---

[Link]

NOVEMBER 11, 2011

Joe Paterno Fired For A Crime He Didn't Commit

!
dressing for the big game

As background for the German and Danish readers who are too busy trying to determine if
come Monday morning milk will be priced in marks and/or krone, over in America
everyone's gone bananas because, allegedly, a Penn State football coach named Jerry
Sandusky was molesting little kids. One day an assistant accidentally stumbled upon
Sandusky "anally raping" a 10 year old boy in the locker room showers, so he went home,
took a nap, and the next day told the head coach Joe Paterno what he saw. What Paterno
did next is subject to some debate, but it seems to fall within the broad category of
"nothing," which he then did spectacularly for the next 11 years.

Then two days ago riots erupted on Penn State's campus, the kind with pepper spray and
armored police, because Joe Paterno was... fired. I think that means they wanted him to
stay, but my eyes won't let me believe it.

OccupyWallSt: no violence. Penn State: violence. Americans are idiots.

I.

Here's a good place to start: if Joe Paterno wasn't just a coach but a Catholic archbishop
he'd be facing the International Criminal Court, and if he was a hedge fund trader someone
would have killed him twice. This tells me that who he is matters way more to people than
what he's done, which is almost always an alarm to flip over the couch and click off the
safety.

Here's the generational problem, and what's significant about it isn't so much that it didn't
happen but that no one has even thought to mention it: the reason Paterno had to be fired
is because if he stayed, if he and the administration thought this was surmountable, then it
would have put the football players in the extremely uncomfortable position of having to
make the ethical decision themselves. "Do I want to keep playing for an organization that
hides this kind of thing?" That's a heavy question to ask a 20 year old. These players are
college kids, which means that what is at stake in making this choice is their entire futures,
whereas what is at stake for Paterno and the school is their legacy. Does some defensive
end have to consider throwing away his entire possible career just to make the choice that
his elders should have made for him? The answer is yes, but it is way unfair of the rest of
us to saddle him with it.
Notwithstanding that the future is demonstrably more valuable than the past, forgetting
about that-- it is the responsibility of the older generation to take the bullet so that the
younger generation has a chance. "I don't know who the hell spilled all these banana peels
and ball bearings, " says Mr. Expanding Waistline And Declining Penile Tumescence, "but I
got to clean it up so the kids don't trip over it."

This is why CEOs step down and generals resign, it isn't simply that "they are ultimately
responsible" but that it is their job is to throw themselves on the grenade so that the area is
cleared for everyone else, and if your CEO or general or father isn't willing to do that, then
you don't actually have a CEO or general or father, you have a politician. Enjoy your
democracy.

II.

I'm somewhat hesitant to admit that the only thing I know about college football is college
cheerleaders, and if you think that makes me less of a man I'll patiently listen to you
concoct some explanation. But thanks to the Fourth Estate I now know who Paterno is, how
revered he is, and what kind of person is doing the revering: this idiot on the top of a news
van jumping in front of a cardboard cut out of Joe Paterno doing exactly what he did when
he was told about the anal sex:
!

!
I'd like to draw your attention to three things, first, that wildman is standing on a van that is
laying unnaturally sideways, second that there are seven hundred and fifty thousand people
cheering him on, and third that he is white. That last bit is fortunate because it avoids
misunderstanding when I say that he looks like a chimpanzee. And moves like one. But I'd
also have to admit that later that night some poor chick from Delta Gamma was on the
receiving end of that simian's semen, and she loved it.

Note that while he is probably just a guy standing on a news van, he has been co-opted by
the media Semioti-Matic and transformed into a symbol of primitive sexuality and moral
idiocy for which he has no recourse or rebuttal. He may in fact be an idiot with a big penis,
all of my intuition tells me he is an idiot with a big penis, but who the hell knows? The
moment he got put on TV he became an image slave. The media can do what they want
with him, and they have.

But surely not all students at Penn State are so unsympathetic to the anal rape of children?

Ah, there they are, couldn't get bus fare to NYC, I guess. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm, maybe
this is the rum talking, but anyone else see heptuplets? So it's not just me. The media has
now successfully changed the narrative from "somethingsomethingsomething anal rape" to
a sports analogy of two opposing teams: Big Dick vs. Hippie Chick. Now it is so easy for
me to pick a side, thank you Jesus, a side which has nothing to do with child molestation
and everything to do with which of these two groups I hate more.

I would be drunk if I did not point out that just as the media symbol for the collapse of
public order is looting-- i.e. the opposite of shopping, the media symbol for a collapse of
civil society is the destruction of a media news van.
!

Show me some broken windows or broken heads and I will wait to be told who is to blame,
but anyone who attacks the media is self-evidently a degenerate. The odd thing is that
while the media are supposed to be impartial and invisible, the most active in terms of
agenda, framing, and activity, is that very media. Their specific function at that riot is to
make money, and they're surprised they became a target? If you start a riot, the very first
thing you should flip over is the news van. Just don't then stand on it.

III.

I had hoped that the younger generation was going to have better priorities than their
highly narcissistic elders, i.e. Sandusky and Paterno and the excellent men and women of
the Board 2002-2011, but it doesn't look good. It looks real bad, in fact. What I see is an
up and coming generation unable to weigh societal goods, let alone moral equivalences,
almost entirely because they have to play Nebraska today. Which scares me to believe that
2012-2035 will be a repeat of 1978-2001. I hope I'm wrong. If you see them bring back
pantyhose, I wasn't.

And there's this, and again, I don't know much about football, but I do know a lot about
human motivation: If Jerry Sandusky was indeed having anal sex with a 10 year old in the
Penn State locker room showers, where anyone could stumble upon him, then it is
impossible to imagine he hadn't already done it there before. He felt safe doing it. At Penn
State. In the locker room.

If this was any other organization but college football, they would have detonated it faster
than Enron. But since no one likes anyone that much, his not being immediately imprisoned
requires some explanation other than "well, Sandusky saved me back in 'Nam, so I owed
him", and all of them, every single one, is going to involve some version of the phrase
"institutionalization of corruption." The only open question is how big you thing the word
"institution" is, campus size or national size. When you wake up tomorrow to the
unbelievable realization that the Zegna suits in Wall Street are the least corrupt of your
generation, remember that the alarm had already been sounded if you had only paused to
hear it. Flip over the couch and click off the safety. None of you are safe.
---

[Link]

NOVEMBER 3, 2011
Judge Beats His Daughter

! oops

A video from 2004 shows a Texas judge beating his daughter with a belt, and America acts
like it's surprised those words are in the same sentence.

Well that was unpleasant.

There's no point in saying what has already been said 678418 times, so let's do something
else. BTW, why are all the "Related Videos" MMA clips?

II.
First, let's double back on our souls. If you want to learn why you think whatever it is you
think, strip away existing context and force it into a new one and see what happens. In this
case, assume this video is a fake.
Which is surprisingly easy to do: the dialogue is terrible-- stock phrases probably indicative
of narcissistic rage (lines appropriate to his movie) but also of amateur screenwriting, and
though the hits are real plenty of actresses would be willing to take them if the movie was
going to open during Oscar season.
So now your reaction does not have the luxury of pretending it is based on actual events;
those feelings are exclusively inside you. So, are you feeling empathy for her, or rage
against him?

III.
It's surprising that "in this day and age" people still look at videos and news stories as if
they are actual representations of reality. Say it's real: since she knows there's a hidden
camera over there, is it possible she decides, oh, I don't know, to play up the damsel in
distress and not throw a chair at him or not blow pot smoke in his face or not reveal that
what she illegally downloaded was lesbian porn? "Oh my God! That's no excuse for him
beating her!" Of course I'm not excusing what he did, I'm not even talking about what he
did, I talking about why America is obsessed with this.
Do me the respect of admitting to whoever is drinking a latte next to you that if these
people were black, you'd have a whole different reaction. If you even had any reaction,
because most probably this video would have sunk to the bottom of the Sea Of Youtube
with only one comment that said, "what's amazing about this video is that the father is
actually still living there."
You want to see superb belt technique go visit a Toys-R-Us in an inner city, and I have a
weird feeling that the reason wannabe gangstas never wear belts is because of negative
reinforcement. Furthermore, after carefully reviewing the data coming from every black
comic ever those kids are getting a beat down from their moms as well, proving my thesis
that if you punch a white girl it becomes a Breaking News, punch a black kid and it's
hilarious. And let me offer without further comment a phrase you will inevitably hear the
first time you try and slap your black girlfriend: "don't you raise your hand to me, you
fucking nigger, you ain't my daddy."
I'm making this point not because I want to be on the Jon Stewart show, but to point out
that our reaction to the video isn't about right and wrong but about identification. And
when the media elicits your identification, it is never about what you like but about what
you hate.

Jim Hopper, a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School and a child abuse expert,
said there is no doubt that the judge's actions crossed the line.
"This is an act of brutal violence," Hopper said. "To beat someone into submission is not discipline. To
beat a child into submission makes it harder for that child to take in rules and the values that the parent
believes they are imposing on the child."

Jim Hopper's a pussy. Can I say that on the internet? Note that the sentences do not
logically follow one another. Is it brutal because it fails as a discipline tool? Does it fail as a
tool because it is brutal? He is not offering any insight into what happened, just repeating
the feel-good non-sequitors that got America into this mess in the first place.
Properly understood, the beating has nothing to do with discipline at all, the discipline is an
excuse for a discharge of rage that was already there and was coming out one kind of way
or another. That's why when he leaves the room after beating her he is relaxed, relieved.
"Finally, now I can sleep!" People have felt compelled to point out that "all she did was
download music" as if they were looking for some level of crime that would fit the
punishment but that's precisely the point, there isn't any, it's not about the crime but the
excuse to hit something, which is why I would advise my clients who appear before him for
sentencing to be as deferential and as respectful as possible, explicitly, verbally, recognize
his authority, because he will most likely be a softie about any kind of crime that does not
reflect badly on himself. Got it? Beat your kid and he'll sentence you to life, rob a bank or
plead psychiatry and you'll be back on the streets in 48 hours. But bump a pretty woman
wearing just the right kind of white heels and just the right shade of red lipstick and you
may as well swallow your fingernail clippings, justice will be done.

IV.

Someone, e.g. the daughter Hillary, is at some point going to note the irony that her father
punished her for using the internet, and she was then able to use the internet to punish him
back. But that's not how it's going to play out, not with narcissism.
Sure, initially he's going to feel very ashamed that everyone sees him this way. But prior to
the premiere, he had to carry around the secret of her beatings, and if there was any
chance he ever felt guilty or perhaps thought that at times he was excessive, what he will
do now is find enough (>1) anonymous (= "objective, they don't even know me") people
who say, "well, it's not that bad" and poof, guilt gone. Crowdsourcing the superego means
never having to say you're sorry. Never mind 99% of the comments and articles want him
registered on a database, those guys are idiots or liberals or the media or whatever, he'll
align himself with the 1% and walk proudly down the sidewalk. "Not only do people know I
didn't do anything wrong, now I know it as well. Thanks, Hillary. I feel a lot better."
Furthermore, there is the very real probability that public is going to go Rebecca Black on
her, finding it first progressive to hate the father, but as soon as the "we have to fight child
abuse" crowd joins in it will be way cooler to turn around and support him. If there is one
thing Americans hate more than a father beating his daughter it's finding themselves in
agreement with people they can't stand.
The other equally likely possibility is that the exposure, the narcissistic injury, is going to be
too much for him and he will kill himself. America may cheer this outcome but I suspect
Hillary will be at least ambivalent.

"I'm very relieved that these things have been brought to light and not because I want to see my father
burn or anything like that. That's a hideous way of thinking and I don't want to inflict that upon
him," [Hillary] said. "I cannot stress enough -- I cannot repeat myself enough, that he just needs help."

Sorry, not buying it. I understand and empathize, believe me I do, but there's only rage in
those words, and I am predicting the future by telling you it is of no consequence to him
and suicide for you. I'm going to be hated by everyone for saying this, but there is an
important difference between what happened to you and how you use what happened to
you, and one of those you have to live with and the other one everyone else has to live
with. And you will never be free.
If all rage comes from narcissism and narcissism is the broadcasting of a chosen identity,
what identity is she broadcasting? Victim. Even if youtubing her abuse is somehow
cathartic, it reinforces victim as an important part of her identity to herself, and this will
infect every single relationship she has forever, from husband to kids to dog to God. Again,
I am making a distinction between the abuse affecting her, and unconsciously defining
herself by the abuse. After a few years of rehearsing you will no more be able to get rid of
that trauma and expect to get on with life than you can pull the power source out of
Megatron and expect he'll be able to turn into a jet. So I am telling her early, and I am
telling you early, you who have nothing to do with these people but still feel not sympathetic
but enraged, as much as you want him to suffer that desire is hurting you. I understand it,
I respect it, I get it. But it will kill you. Forgiveness at any cost is the only way out.
 OCTOBER 29, 2011
The Plan Will Always Fail Catastrophically

!
unsee it

Still light out.

Driving too fast, there's still patches of snow on this road. But you're almost there.

Turn in the driveway. The house is dark. Crap.

Do not look at the upstairs windows.

Garage door opens. Empty. Park.

Still light out.

You have about 15 minutes.

Move.

II.

He opened the door, reached in and turned on the light. The kitchen windows still let in
plenty of light, but this was just in case.

He didn't step inside. He gripped his mobile phone. Breathe. Dial.

Ring. Ring. Ri

"Hi, baby," she said.

Go.

"Hi," he responded, locking the door behind him and wriggling it. The garage is done. He
dropped the bag on the counter, not glancing at the window. "How are things there?" He
reached into the living room and flicked on that light but did not look inside, then doubled
back to the kitchen and headed for the whisky bottle. He took two small gulps, and then a
third, then out of the kitchen towards the stairs. Another light, click.

"I'm so tired from being here, you cannot believe words words words words words words."
At the top of the stairs he had to make a choice: right had more western windows but would
take longer. Last. Go left.

"words words words," his wife said. The phone was in the hand that was turning on the
light. The Checklist: windows, closets, cabinets, bed. Windows, closets, cabinets, bed.
Bathroom had a shower.

Windows: feel them. locked, locked. He pulled the shades down. "Did you guys have
dinner yet?" he inserted.

"No, my mother made words, so we're words words words words"

He opened the closet door. Nothing. It made an unexpectedly noticeable amount of noise
as he closed it, and he reflexively looked over his shoulder. Come on, get a grip. No large
cabinets in this room. He fell to the floor and looked under the bed. Nothing. He
unplugged the phone. He left the light on, and hurried to the next room. Windows, closet,
cabinet, bed. Leaving that light on as well, he left the room and went back down the
hallway. That room is completely fine. That room is completely fine.
Next bedroom: light first. He scanned the windows. Both were clearly locked. These
windows cannot be jimmied. He pulled the shades down. He slid the closet door open,
peeked inside. Nothing. He closed it.

"What are you going to eat tonight?" he heard her say. "Words words words words words."

He lingered at the closet. He had just checked this closet, it was fine. But. But he hadn't
really checked the back right wall behind the coats. But it was clearly empty. Don't be
OCD, or be sure? No room for mistakes. He opened the closet again and moved the coats.
Empty. He closed it. Cabinets, bed. All fine.

The bathroom was tricky to get into, but there was still enough daylight to make it inside.
He placed his back against the hallway wall and reached behind him into the bathroom and
felt for the light switch. Click. He rolled inside and looked at the floor and the walls. The
shower curtain was pulled open already. Nothing. He shook the shower curtain to be sure.

Then: tap tap

Do not look up. It's a trap.

"Hey," he interrupted, "I was meaning to ask you. When is the baby's next immunization?
What has she had already?"

"She has her 9 month well baby visit next week, and words words words words"

Now look.

The medicine cabinet mirror was fine, of course it was fine. He tried to push his finger in
through the glass, but couldn't. Too much light. He opened the medicine cabinet, listened
to his wife say some words, braced himself, and closed it again. The mirror was fine. In
some horror film a woman was washing her face in the bathroom, and when she bent down
into the sink her reflection in the mirror didn't bend down with her, its stayed there and
looked down at her. That was just a movie, but it reflected the deeper truth of it: mirrors
were the most dangerous things in the house because they were the one place you could be
tricked into looking at IT.

Stop. He stepped out and thought about anything else.

You have ten minutes left.

The last thing was the door to the attic stairs. He reached for the handle.

It was locked.

"Jane," he interrupted, "why is the attic door locked?"

"It's always locked. What are you doing up there?"

"Where is the key?"

"I have it with me. Why do you need to get in there?"

"You mean we have no other key?"

"No." Pause. "Honey? There's nothing in there."

The lock was unpickable. He shook it.

"Is it locked from the inside? If I went up there, would I get locked in?" He could suddenly
feel the whisky taking effect, calming him, making reality more vivid.

"Well, no, because you'd have to have used the key to open it. If you magically appeared in
the attic, yes, you'd be locked in."

He shook it but not so vigorously as to attract attention to himself. It would have to suffice.
It was getting dark. Top floor is secure. There is nothing on the top floor.

yet

Eyes widening, he forced himself to focus on his wife. "I feel bad for her that she needs
more shots," he said.

"Me, too, the last time she had a fever words words words"

Downstairs.

Within five minutes and during the recitation of the 9 month well baby visit he had
performed the Checklist on every room in the house. He had lights on in every room and
hallway. Out of the bag he removed a cheesesteak and broccoli, two beers, and with the
whisky bottle headed for the living room couch. On the coffee table sat two flashlights and
two of his wife's scented candles and a 4 gallon Poland Springs jug filled to the top. He lit
one of the candles and placed it on the far end of the coffee table. He turned on the TV.
The moment he saw the local news reporter talking about the real his entire body
involuntarily relaxed. 12 hours to go. He could make it.

"All right, baby," he summarized. "You enjoy your dinner, I'll talk to you before I go to
sleep."

"I love you." Pause. "Are you nervous in there? Did you take out the gun?"

No guns. "No, of course not. What would I need a gun for?" Guns proved you were afraid.
"I'm fine, go have your dinner."

"Ok, I love you. Be safe. Don't burn the house down."

III.

He had known about the Plan since he was 4 or 5. He did not know how he had learned it.
The Plan had two parts, The Checklist and The Escape Hatch.

The Checklist had three rules for survival: Rule 1, Important: check all the rooms. Rule 2,
Very important: leave the lights on in the rooms he couldn't see. Like with roaches. It
prevented them from wanting to come out. Rule 3, Ultra-Important: make sure there was
nothing in the rooms that could be turned on. So: batteries out of all toys. Alarm clocks
double checked, or unplugged. Phones, especially the phones, had to be unplugged. Only
the mobile phone with him was on.
The problem wasn't the unknown, but the lack. In a horror movie the woman would walk
into the unknown house and of course there was something relentless and relentless waiting
for her. In real life it was the opposite: you knew the house, knew there was nothing in the
house. What was supposed to be there-- the kids, the wife, activity-- were absent. So your
mind populated the empty spaces.

If you had a weak mind, your mind populated it with imaginary ghosts.
If you had a strong mind

IV.

The Plan could fail catastrophically in two ways.

One: blackout. All blackouts are attacks. If the power went out he had been detected.
Using the flashlight to see where he was going would only make things worse, but that's not
what it was for. It was for The Escape Hatch.

The other was his bladder.

He could drink himself into unconsciousness. But some point he would have to pee. That
meant he had to walk to the bathroom.

The trick was to not see. He could only be seen if he saw, his gaze was what revealed him.
On the couch he could divert all his attention to the TV, but if he walked to the bathroom
he'd have to unsee the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom mirror, and everything around
him, all while calling attention to himself by his motions, his noise, his thoughts, his fear.

Fear of the dark wasn't that there would be something in the dark, but that you would see
something in the dark, the terror was in the perception and not the reality, and even if it
turned out to be an illusion or a hat or a shadow that brief moment of terror of what could
become possible was too much.

That's what made the long trip to the bathroom so difficult. There were too many things
that he had to unsee. He had once thought about getting a bedside urinal bottle, but it was
too risky. It would be unusual, it was a physical representation of his fear which would lead
to his awareness of what was inside the house. He had to act like everything was normal.

He stood up, took a long look at the TV and tried to empathize with the talk show host as he
feigned interest in a movie's supporting actress. Amazing legs. His mind wandered towards
her vagina-- then stopped. Not tonight.

There was a clear line of sight from the couch through the kitchen into the hallway and
bathroom. Everything was lit. With the interview running in his head, he walked calmly
and assertively to the bathroom. In his mind he was asking her if she did her own stunts.
He passed into the hallway and didn't look up the stairs.

Facing the toilet, he started to pee. The mirror was behind him.

He flushed. He almost never washed his hands after he peed, but this time he had to--
everything had to be done correctly. No shortcuts. No outward display of fear. Another
thought to the interview and he turned to face the mirror. Nothing. He didn't see what he
knew would not be there now: his own reflection but turned completely around, facing
away, its back to him. He had never seen this reflection yet. When he did, if he turned his
head just slightly he would be able to catch a glimpse of the face, his face, proving that it
was aware it was being looked at by not looking back. The glimpse would reveal a sad,
terrified face. It had been crying. The mouth was gone. Someone had taken its mouth.
For minutes it would stare away from him, its sobs barely audible through the ordinarily
impenetrable glass of the mirror. Resigned to its fate, it would walk defeatedly away from
him deeper into the reflection-bathroom that had been telescoped punishingly into a
hallway, and at the end was a wooden door that he should not have in this house. His tiny
reflection, trivialized by the distance, would open that door inwards, hang its head in
surrender, and walk through. Not having a mouth ensured it would not scream.

He glanced at the couch back in the living room. Just get back there.

He started towards the living room but made it only as far as the kitchen when he heard it.

tap tap tap tap

He froze. Think. It was too clear and too obvious to be a danger. It had to be something
real.

tap tap

swish

He took a few steps to the right to get away from the hallway.

tap tap

ah

Yes. Now he was sure he had heard it, it was definitely real so it was defintely nothing. A
squirrell on the roof, the heating system, mice, elephants, it didn't matter.

Relieved, he took another step towards the living room and then froze. Oh no.

Because of the steps he had taken to the right, he was approaching the living room
obliquely which meant that he could no longer see the couch. The couch was hidden from
his view.

He had lost his line of sight. He had been tricked.

He thought about the phone, but that was on the couch. If he ran outside he'd never be
able to get back in. Upstairs was madness.

He tried to concentrate on the actress. Great legs. Implants, too. Had to be implants.
Had to be. He took a step forward but his concentration was momentarily interrupted.

tap tap tap tap tap tap ta

He wasn't sure if he had heard this, which meant he had heard it.
His back muscles tensed so suddenly that his posture straightened. He knew something was
behind him.

He had almost no time. He squeezed all his focus into thinking about the actress curling her
toes and walked arrogantly into the room. He unsaw the couch, looked at the TV and went
right for the Poland Springs jug. In his peripheral vision and in the safety of the TV's talking
he noticed the couch was empty.

He could salvage this, maybe. Sit on the couch. He sat, his foot by the Poland Springs jug.

Do not look up.

Look at the TV, the TV, the TV.

It is above you.

"We'll be right back," the late night host said and it went to a commercial, and in the
millisecond it took to fade to black he realized that TV would become the worst kind of
mirror, a dark mirror, and he was going to be able to see a reflection in that mirror.

God, please.

In the instant of blackness on the TV he saw it move to the left

ah

It was

And it said: shhhhhhhhhh

The TV never went to commercial, it stayed black. Everything was still. Now he could not
help but see what was there all along.

It was peeking around the doorway into the living room. A charcoal grey shape. It is a
broomstick. No, it was a blanket draped over a broomstick, like a huge puppet, and the
broomstick emerged from the corner of the doorway, creeping slowly, until it was standing
fully in the doorway. The handle of the broom poked out from beneath the blanket tapping
on the wooden floor.

The blanket was staring at him, because it had two black ovals painted on it, like eyes, and
the broom turned so it was facing him.

tap tap tap on the wooden floor

He couldn't move, or else he didn't try to move, nothing moved, nothing did anything
except the broom and the blanket which glared at him with big black oval eyes.

"H-h-hi," he whispered to appease it.

Suddenly it withdrew back into the kitchen and the house rebelled against him, from the
upstairs he heard the angry, heavy, stomping sound of the worst thing he could imagine,
and finally heard the voice he had always unheard

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhe
There was no time to get out, and getting out no longer mattered. The Escape Hatch. He
bent towards Poland Springs jug but he was in slow motion, the stomping was coming
downstairs much faster than he was moooovviiiinnngggggggggg

Get to it get to it get to it

The whole house was shaking from the rage of the footsteps

just before IT came around into the kitchen his foot cooonnnneeecccttteeeeddddddddd with
the jug

enough gasoline splashed out of it to reach the candle

fire is real

The explosion blinded and deafened him. It would be surprised. It had never noticed he
had a weapon.

get to the door

Slow motion again, going too slowly, being sucked back in. And his back was on fire but he
knew IT had made it into the living room.

He pulled the front door open, so very slowly but as fast as he could, and just as he felt
something brush at his flaming back he was out of the house and suddenly time resumed.

He collapsed in the snow, arm, back, face still on fire. He looked back at the flaming house.
There IT was, the blanket on the broom standing in the doorway staring at him, enraged
and confused and trapped in a house that would soon be obliterated.

His whole body was in pain but the pain was real and the broom heard him screaming at IT
in his mind

burn

OCTOBER 17, 2011

How To Draw (This Is Not An Article About How To Draw)
!
easier then it looks

"Some people have it, some people don't."

The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and
Artistic Confidence is a famous drawing book which uses the insights of neuroscience to
improve drawing skills. (Here's how recent the insights are: the author's name is Betty
Edwards.)
Nevertheless, this is an outstanding book that everyone should read once, regardless of
your interest in drawing.
Given my awareness of the biases and cognitive shortcuts that make our lives easier yet
sabotage us, I was surprised that I didn't naturally appreciate what makes people/me
terrible at drawing: reliance on cognitive shortcuts, i.e. symbols.

If I were to draw a person, I would draw a circle, then two smaller eye ovals, a triangle
nose, and double line for a mouth, then tubes for arms and legs. Hence, all my drawings
look like they belong on a refrigerator. But that's "how I draw": head= circle, eyes=ovals,
legs=cylinders. An example from a children's book I started a long time ago:
!
And cave=tunnel.
Edwards calls this the "tyranny of the symbol system" because it dictates to us, forces our
hand to draw symbols rather than what we see.
But it isn't simply that we draw using these symbols; we perceive using them as well. I
don't bother to see the actual shape of a head because it was never important to; in order
to see it for what it really is, I need to practice my perception. It is easy for me to see a
news story as a manufactured construct, but it never occurred to me I was seeing every day
objects wrong. My tilted computer monitor isn't a rectangle; it's a trapezoid.

So "draw what you see" requires practice perceiving things correctly: without the aid of your
symbols. So lesson 1: draw something upside down.
! Focus on the lines, not on what you think it is.

Symbolic drawing also impairs depth perception, angles, sizes, overlaps. Hold up your hand
and point your fingers at your face. How would you draw that? Five long tubes? But in 2D,
they're actually irregular stumps.

To relearn perception, Edwards says to hang a piece of glass (or use a window) and place
your hand on the other side, close one eye (finally, being a pirate pays off) and draw the
outlines you see.
!

It will feel weird, because you'll want the pencil to go "in" to the glass. Instead, you'll have
to draw the line in an unnatural direction that will feel wrong. But practice this exercise
enough times and you'll see things differently all the time, you'll be able to switch back and
forth between 3D and 2D and witness the impact of perspective in your every day life.
Edwards includes the following letter from Van Gogh:
I remember quite well, now that you write about it, that at the time when you spoke of my becoming a
painter, I thought it very impractical and would not hear of it. What made me stop doubting was
reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange's Guide to the ABC of Drawing; and a week later I drew
the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window - in their places and on their legs - whereas
before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or
pure chance.

II.

Though this is a book about drawing, Edwards includes the following quote from George
Orwell:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete
object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you
probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something
abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to
prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or
even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get
one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

There is a controversy about whether language expresses thought or creates thought. I

don't know. But I do know that language offers a feeling of certainty and masks ignorance.
Your explanation of why Obama or Bush are terrible Presidents are the equivalent of my
drawing of a person, the difference is that you can see how my symbolic drawing results in
a poor representation of reality, but you are unaware of how your explanations are just as
primitive. Take a look at how many times you use a stock phrase or someone else's words
("in my opinion" "it's long been held", "tax and spend" "war of aggression" "fiscal discipline",
etc). Cut those out and see what's left. But you'll use more words to cover your revealed
ignorance. The problem isn't that you can't express yourself well, the problem, as in
drawing, is that you did not perceive well. You relied on symbols, and they made you feel
knowledgeable.

No surprise that many "geniuses" report seeing their tasks in two modalities, like the
physicist who has a mental image of what the equations represent or the writer who hears
his words as music. And when one is stuck at a thought or an emotion, it is helpful to
translate pictures into words and words into pictures. (1)

III.

Next lesson: negative space. When you draw a chair, your mind is focused on the shape of
the chair, but as this is a 2D drawing the spaces in between the chair are just as real. You
should be able to draw a chair by drawing everything else but the chair:

This forces you to pay attention to the shape of the negative space, and also the contents of
the negative space.

The analogy to media images is to "see" what isn't there: how is the story constructed out
of what is not shown? A typical media maneuver is to show a story without showing you
the media itself, because seeing it tells a different story. So as much as this looks cool and
makes you feel a certain way:
!

it really looks like this:

!

Which doesn't make you feel that kind of way anymore.

You know this, but willingly unknow it to enjoy the movie. But we also willingly unknow that
this same setup exists when they're interviewing the President or getting footage of a
protest. The top picture doesn't just leave some things out, it leaves almost everything out
except one tiny part. The top picture's focus is Indy; what is the bottom picture's focus?

Looking at the bottom picture, try drawing Indy as the product of negative space only. Did
you consequently notice the guy behind the idol?

IV.

I've only covered a third of the book, but the three lessons discussed here-- drawing an
inverted image, drawing a hand on a glass plate, and drawing the negative spaces are
sufficient to improve your drawing immensely.

But I wanted to conduct an experiment.

!
pre-test

An 8 year old girl with Tourette's "copied" the cover of the Junie B. Jones book as part of a
book report. Even the slug and the rabbit are unhappy about how they turned out. My
experiment was: could she draw better after practicing those three exercises (inverted
drawing, hand behind glass, negative spaces)?

This is the first attempt after practicing the exercises:

!
attempt 1
You can already see the improvement. Notably, she is trying to draw what she sees, and
not relying on the default symbolic drawing that gets you slugs and rabbits. But she's not
entirely free of the symbolic: the legs and arms are still spaghetti tubes that bend
unnaturally; Jim's left hand is not bad but his right hand is still a childish heuristic. This
happened not because arms are harder to draw than faces, but because arms are less
important to her than faces and so she fell back on the symbolic.

Back to the exercises. Finally:

!
attempt 2

I realize this looks like the final, polished result, but it is actually only the third time the girl
ever drew this picture; there were no other attempts. Note that it is all free hand pencil
outline, with no mistakes (except one, behind Meanie Jim's head.) It's an amazing
improvement. She is drawing what she sees.
I'd consider this experiment a success, but there is one more thing that makes it all the
more significant and the real point of the experiment. If the problems of drawing are not
technical skill but cognitive-- if it is truly a problem of perception and not manual dexterity
or talent-- then the real work has to be done by the mind, not the hand. In other words, in
order to become a better drawer, she shouldn't need to practice drawing, she needs to
practice seeing.

So I made her practice the three Edwards exercises in her head. She never drew her hand
using a glass pane; she stared at her posed fingers, and imagined how her pencil would
move across an imaginary glass pane.

So what you are seeing is not her third attempt at drawing Junie B Jones and Meanie Jim; it
is the third time she touched the pencil.

I will point out a tremendous secondary benefit to self-esteem, and now that she knows
how to draw, she wants to draw, reinforcing the maxim that the best way to get a child to
like doing something is to make sure they are good at doing it.

I wonder how well someone might learn any skill if they imagine practicing the skill. It
might not be as good as actual practice, but how not as good is it?

1. A common misunderstanding about Freudian dream interpretation is that the dream

images are explained using words, i.e. "I dreamt of a cigar, and a cigar is a symbol for
penis." Dream images may be metaphors and rebuses for unconscious thoughts, but the
descriptions of dreams are themselves metaphors and placeholders. Example:

"In my dream I saw Tom go over to Sally who was wearing a really bright white shirt."
What comes to mind when you think about the shirt?
"Just that it was so bright."
What comes to mind when you think of the word, "bright"?
Bright? 'Smart', I guess....

OCTOBER 11, 2011

You Are The 98%
!
no, they forced you

"We are the 99%."

Rarely does a slogan perfectly capture the zeitgeist, the ethos and the pathos, each word a
passionate announcement of a popular uprising. And neither does this one.

It is, however, an important piece of propaganda. It sounds like the enemy is Wall Street,
but observe that the slogan doesn't point to an enemy, it defines the group. The slogan is a
twist on an old fascist standby: select a minority enemy, and create an impression of
opposing unanimity. Once done, the leaders of the group have the powerbase to do what
they want, making it impossible for anyone in the rest of the 98% to disavow this madness.
When it all goes down you will be too terrified, or too busy, to dissent.

Take a look at the website, see which one you are.

!
I very, very much empathize with this woman, but her aside, what if I don't believe
education is they key? What if I think there should be no such thing as student loans at all?
What if I think that it, not Wall Street, is a far greater enemy of civilization? Do I get to be
in the 99%? Do I get a choice?

Here are some of the demands of #OccupyWallStreet:

● Restoration of the living wage.

● Free college education
● Begin a fast track process to bring the fossil fuel economy to an end
● One trillion dollars in infrastructure
● Open borders migration

Never mind that these demands are internally inconsistent, mathematically impossible and
downright weird. ("Bank to Bank Debt and all Bonds and Margin Call Debt in the stock
market including all Derivatives or Credit Default Swaps, all 65 trillion dollars of them must
also be stricken from the "Books."" Really? You want that?) What's important is that most
of the 99% don't want all those things, or even most of those things.

Grant me that when Naomi Klein is invited to speak for the 99%, at least 45% are looking
at each other like, wtf, who let Linda Tripp in here?
!

Do you think that when the movement becomes powerful they will represent the guy
making $533000 as well as the guy making $0? How about the $250k and the $5k? All the
way to the median income of $30k, but-- surprise-- that $30k guy most definitely does not
want anything to do with an open border policy and guaranteed living wage and abolition of
the death penalty. Oh, your plan is to exclude all of the states that have >2 right angle
borders. Hmm.

They exist in a quantum superposition of multiple eigenstates, but the moment they make
an official demand the whole thing will collapse into a single state and everyone will hate it.

Which is why any demands are quickly disavowed, "There is NO official list of demands,"
they emphasize on the site, and yet the point isn't the demands, the point is the "they."
The point is to pretend that there aren't any official demands, attract the largest possible
base-- who doesn't hate Wall Street?-- and then make demands. "'They?' You mean the
loose affiliation of Trader Joe's shoppers at OccupyWallSt?" No, I mean the guys who can
say this:

This content was not published by the [Link] collective, nor was it ever proposed or agreed
to on a consensus basis with the NYC General Assembly.

They say they have no leader which means it's pointless. If they do get a leader, science
suggests it will naturally be a man with a long ring finger and some psychopathic traits; all I
know is that they will simultaneously count me amongst their numbers even as they ask me
please to die. Or kill, depending on how much power they get.
II.

What you don't realize about those pictured as "the 99%"--what they have in common is
not that they are young or college educated or indebted or white females, but that they
were willing to put a picture of themselves on the internet, fully of the belief that they stand
for something worth being pictured for. Bad move.

You think marching on Wall Street gives you power, a voice; but it is a wholesale surrender
to the media, you have signed a waiver allowing them to use your image any way they
want, and they will tell the rest of us what to think of you and titrate our exposure and
emotional responses, all while feeding us with marketing for the very things that got us into
our predicament. The income disparities, the education pyramid scheme, the personal and
public debt, the anxiety, brought to you by Revlon and the makers of CNN.

Take a guess which side Fox, MSNBC, John Stewart chose. How did you know? Wrong: it
isn't their "bias" because it doesn't matter what the protestors want, it's because they
predictably transmorph the protestors into what they need them to be.

"Marching gets our message out." No it doesn't, it gets CNN's message out. "We don't
watch CNN, we use the internet." Yet given the infinity of the internet you still surf the
same 5 websites, looking for and finding exactly what you want, like a baby playing
peekaboo in a mirror over and over and over and over and over and over and...

You are the 98%, you are totally without any access to the machinery of power and worse,
much worse, you plug yourselves into the machinery of media and become a slave.

"That's why I don't watch television!" Well, a) you mean TV dramas, and 2) it's because
you're not a 45 year old woman, the target demo of TV. But maybe you're proud that you
skip the commercials and avoid the "mainstream media", you don't want to be part of the
corporate consumerist machine and good for you, yet your independence is why Whole
Foods knows you'll buy anything wrapped in brown and you already have a subscription to
The New Yorker, which has a curiously large number of ads for mental institutions. If you're
reading it, it's for you. The New Yorker is also at the checkout counter in Whole Foods,
along with Rolling Stone and Psychology Today and not along with Sports Illustrated and
The Weekly Standard. You think you shop at Whole Foods because it has better quality
food? It's because of those magazines. Even the neocons who shop there-- they don't
shop at Acme-- shop there because of the branding: liberal=organic, so the more left wing
magazines and the more dred locks the more it has reinforced the "liberalism" and therefore
the "quality," and so you go, "reluctantly", shaking your head at the crazy commies
stocking the store as you hand them 3x more than anything is worth. "Would you like to
donate $1 to help Ethiopian refugees?" Son of a bitch, this apple is delicious.

III.

If you hold a protest and you aren't throwing rocks it will fail. I'm not telling you to throw
rocks, I'm explaining why your march won't work.

The reason "peaceful protests" don't work anymore is because now the protests are slower
than the media coverage. When they threw the tea in Boston Harbor it was urgent,
immediate, and by the time the press could interpret it it had already been digested by the
public. But now even before the protest reaches critical mass the media, whose agents
outnumber the protestors 100 to 1, has packaged and produced it, like a reality show, and
by the time Naomi Klein got there I had already been told to expect someone like her. Do
you see? She had already appeared before she got there. Yes, I can take pride in thinking
for myself but if I'm going to be honest, all I'm doing is reacting to what I'm told. I was
once going to write something about what Amanda Knox's innocence revealed about our
earlier media prejudices, and then I realized I still have no idea if she's innocent or guilty,
only that the media tells me she isn't. And then I wondered, why do I even care if she is
guilty or innocent, why do I even know her name, what's that got to do with me? Because
the media decide not just truth and falsehood but existence and non-existence.
#OccupyWallStreet never stood a chance, come one person, come ten million people, it
doesn't matter, the only people who have any power are people like her:

and she is stronger than all of you. Close your eyes: do you remember anyone else?

You can agree or disagree, but you must do it with her, not with the folks holding signs.
And by her I don't mean her, of course, she doesn't get to decide what she thinks, either--
her producer tells her, and so on up the chain.

Late at night as I'm drinking my eyes blind I hear the protesters regularlycomplain that they
are not getting enough media coverage. They are protesting Wall Street, and they want
more Wall Street coverage? You lose.

Those protesters are based in a world that is built on rules. Because of this, they will never
be as strong, or as fast, as the media that exists outside those rules. "Hey, stupid, what's
that? a sign? TOO SLOW, we have a thousand satellites and a harem of reporters, from
beautiful blondes to ugly intellectuals, we control the whole thing. You even put a hashtag
in your official name because your only voice is twitter. Bless my heart-- twitter! How
absolutely precious. Don't forget to rock the vote!"

"We are the 99%. We want to cut the umbilical cord from fossil fuels and consumerism."
Easy, but then what? There are two ends to that cord, something has to nourish you and all
that's left since you can't afford what you were told you needed is the placenta of the
political-media machine. "Get out the vote" is truly terrible advice, the only way to win is
not to play. If you're at the protest and a guy comes around asking you to register and it's
not for a handgun, punch him in the face. He's your enemy.

"We need a third party!" Come on, do you think the media will allow you to have a third
party? John Anderson, Ross Perot, Ralph Nader-- they let them through to "show" third
party candidates aren't any more serious than Howard Stern when he ran for governor.
Poor Ron Paul pulls in more people than porn but he can't get a break, sorry buddy, 100
years too late for your kind. There's a difference between what you need and what you
want, and the media will always, relentlessly give you what you want. Do you know why
you have such poor candidates every single election? Because you want them, you want
someone you can easily judge for some sexual indiscretion or because they called latinos
chicanos. "Well, that matters to us!" Then you got what you asked for.

The media will have data mined the culture and chosen for you two cans of Campbell's
Chicken Soup, and then encouraged a public debate about which can is a better
representation of the spirit of the country, the one on the left or the one on the right. "Well,
that matters to us!" I know.

IV.

The protests will fail. They will eventually be co-opted by the pre-election media orgasmia,
branded as either this team or that and assigned a leader no one would have ever picked,
ever, ever. The Tea Party may have started with Rick Santelli but they soon got Sarah
Palin, figure that out. Half of you will vote, all of you will complain, and nothing will change
until the day we are buying fake iPads with real yuans, hey, who's the balding guy on the
20? And the 50? And the 100...? And the reason it will fail is that you don't want it to
succeed. You are still holding on to the mercantilist, zero-sum economic delusion that tariffs
and gold standards and less money for Wall Street means more money for you, and then
you can go back to living like it's 1999 again. You can't. It's over.

Of course Wall Street has excessive profits, but just as your life has been an inflated
delusion of easy credit, so has theirs; yes, they have received an obscene share of that fake
money, and ten-twenty years ago maybe you could have redistributed that fake money, but
that ship has sailed. Now, the moment you take it away from them it ceases to exist, poof,
it's gone. It's fine if you want to do it to punish them, I get it, it's the right thing to do and
Glass-Steagall and all that, but it won't help your situation one bit.

$3.6T out, $2.4T in, those are the numbers, and in case you want something on letterhead
here's the CBO saying taxing the rich would get us $450B over ten years. Ten years!
Double the taxes, triple the taxes, it makes no difference, it's over. The only way out is a
massive tax on wealth; cold fusion; a war; a new media; or inflation. Inflation has the side
benefit of pushing you into a higher tax bracket and we'll all get to see what a $1000 bill
looks like.

"We are the 99%." Stop it. There is a 1%, fighting another 1%, and while both of those
megalomaniancs dominate the media coverage the other 98% has no recourse, no
representation, no allies, and no savings. If you're over forty 2007 was the best you will
ever have it, make sure you backup your photos, it may not get worse than this but your
only hope for growth is the next generation so you better change your expectations and
your priorities. If you want to eat something other than canned goods and insects when
you're 80 you better prepare your kids now, work them harder in math and get them to
read better books, make some kind of/all kinds of a sacrifice for them, because the only
thing keeping you from the hellacious Medicare funded nursing homes and the Social
Security that will not exist is them, the 17 year olds you are screaming at for drinking too
much of the whisky you are hiding in the bathroom.

And in 2030 don't tell me "the young should respect their elders," in the oldest of days the
elderly were revered not because the young were respectful but because in those days if
you made it to 60 you were a goddamn superhero. "Whatever the hell this guy did in his
life," Johnny said to Timmy, "I'm copying. How in Sutekh's name did he not get eaten by a
hyena?" If the hyenas had slacked off maybe those youth wouldn't have been so respectful.
Pray you don't find out.

Are you listening to me? Or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?

!
You are the 98%, and you are too slow.

---

The Dumbest Economic Collapse In History

[Link]
 OCTOBER 7, 2011
Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children

!
is this a joke?

A study, Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among US Childrenfinds, surprisingly,

that 3.5% of kids under 18 got stimulants, vs. 2.4% in 1996. Holy crap!! The reason this
is surprising is that 3.5% is about 10x smaller than I thought it was. American Journal of
Psychiatry? Did I move to Romania?

Then the article informs me that I am both racist and color blind: most stimulants are going
to white kids (4.4%), not black kids (3%), and about hispanics I was WAY off, I was certain
the number was close to 133% but apparently it's only 2.1%. Huh? Does this study include
the 48 states of America that have Americans in them, or just Guam and parts of the Virgin
Islands?

The article pretends to be shocked by this "steep increase," and then tries to explain it by
putting some nouns and verbs next to each other hoping you'll be impressed:

The significant increase in stimulant utilization in racial and ethnic minorities and low-income families
indicates an increased recognition of ADHD... social and cultural factors continue to play a significant
role in ADHD treatment utilization. Parents of Hispanic and African-American children are less likely
to report ADHD than parents of white children...(15)

That last sentence, referenced with "(15)", sounds like the conventional wisdom I heard in
residency: "African-Americans don't like to admit depression", excluding those in the packed
waiting room. (1) But when I eventually (2) found study "(15)" I was totally not surprised
to find it did not say parents are less likely to report ADHD. "(15)" was a survey of parents
asking them if they had been told by a doctor or school that their kid had ADHD.

The reason that 3.5% of kids are on stimulants is that their doctor neglected to give them
Risperdal. The kid who got Ritalin at age 6 and it helped carried that Ritalin into the teen
years, hence the growth among adolescents; but any new kids coming through the pipe
don't get stimulants, they get something else, by which I mean everything else.

Note the big jump at 6 years old, from 0.1% to 5.1%. Yes, certainly symptoms become
more prominent, but also they become prominent at school; schools have an interest in
medicalizing the problem, both practically (calm that kid the hell down) educationally
(diminished expectations) and economically (schools get more funding.) Stimulants are the
natural first line drugs. Well, they were, anyway.

This ridiculous article pretending to be amazed at the increase in stimulants is there to

prevent the heart attack you'd experience if you looked at another study that has a graph in
it:

Unless you believe bisphenol-A or global warming is changing the genetics of kids born after
1990, then the correct and terrifying way to interpret this graph is that one in every four
kids is considered by adults to be in need of psychiatric treatment; and only 3.5% get put
on stimulants. The other 20% we can assume are receiving psychoanalysis.

Maybe they need the meds, maybe they don't, the question is if these are the same kinds of
organ donors that existed in 1896, what happened to them before psychiatrists? Did they
eat each other? And if they are, in fact, more "psychiatric" than they were in 1896 and
bisphenol-A isn't to blame, then what is the other possibility?

And as that huge number of psychiatric patients grow up to become either unemployed
adults, or at least the children of unemployed parents, will they

a) experience spontaneous and permanent remission of symptoms

b) be treated with psychoanalysis
c) .....

-------

1. The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn't resistant to admitting he
has depression, he is resistant to the white doctor's attempt at labeling him depressed, and
consequently marginalizing him, diverting attention away from the social factors over which
the doctor is nervous to discuss and powerless to change. "You have depression" is the
nimble dance around the question of whether a white doctor can understand a black
patient's life. It is a delicate thing to say to a black woman that perhaps her man isn't
worth a damn, as she just said out loud to you but you're not sure if you're allowed to echo
back, maybe these kind of relationships are culturally appropriate? It's tough to know when
most of your information about black people comes from Martin Luther King quotes and The
New Yorker.

Lacking any common language to bridge racial, economic, or sexual divides, clinicians hide
behind the invented terminology of psychiatry. Medications become the physical
manifestation, the proof, that the language is real.

2. Whenever I see a reference to a statement that seems insane to me, two things will be
true:

1. It will take me as long to get the study as it did to conduct the study, i.e. 45
minutes. No hyperlink. No free access. Then I have to go into the university's
PubMed, which takes me through three windows to Science Direct or some other
outlet. Why, oh why, can't I just click "(15)" in the original paper and immediately
see it? Because:
2. It will turn out to be actually insane, and the only part of the reference that will
support the statement will be the title.

See also: The Rise And Fall Of Atypical Antipsychotics

!
 OCTOBER 3, 2011
Marc Maron's Mid-Life Crisis

!
but the point is to go slower, not faster

Comic Joe Rogan's podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, this week mentioned a speech by
comic Marc Maron.

Marc Maron is a great comic I've referenced before. It's probably not overstepping for me
to say he suffers from narcissism, i.e. not that he is a narcissist, but that he suffers its
consequences.

Rogan said that when he was first starting out in comedy, Maron (who was already well
established) was nice to him and gave him good advice. "I've always tried to be nice back
to him because of what he did for me in the early days," said Rogan.

But over the years, as Rogan got more popular and then became the host of Fear Factor,
Maron apparently resented him. Maron insulted him whenever he came up; he said Rogan
was worse for comedy than Carlos Mencia (the two had a public battle over stolen material),
and one night Maron had to introduce Rogan to the stage, and did so with a dispraging
diatribe.

Rogan is a savvy student of human nature and a well practiced judge of character; and I'd
trust his insight way before any psychologist, let alone the armchair variety they use to
stabilize the chairs at The Atlantic. Rogan's point, therefore, wasn't that Maron was a jerk;
Rogan still believed Maron was a great comic and a nice guy. The point for Rogan was how
some people get caught in a self-hating, self-defeating loop of narcissistic resentment.
Forget about being happy for Rogan's success; or accepting it, or even being jealous of it.
Maron took it personally.

For example, from Maron's speech:

I have been doing standup for 25 years. I've put more than half my life into building my clown. That's
how I see it. Comics keep getting up on stage and in time the part of them that lives and thrives up there
is their clown. My clown was fueled by jealousy and spite for most of my career. I'm the clown who
recently read The War for Late Night and thought it was basically about me not being in show business.
I'm the clown who thought most of Jon Stewart's success was based on his commitment to a haircut. I'm
the clown that thought Louis CK's show Louie should be called Fuck You Marc Maron.

Whether Maron is or is not a narcissist is not the point; this thinking is narcissistic.
Anything that happens he relates back to himself, even if it reveals him to be a loser.
(Hence the statement: the belief that narcissism is synonymous with grandiosity is itself a
narcissistic defense.) So other people's successes don't exist independently, they
necessarily provide a commentary, a value, about oneself. His success reflexively implies
you're less of a success; his failure reflexively means you're more of a success.

The end result of this thinking is this:

Three years ago my clown was broke, on many levels, and according to my manager at the time un-
bookable and without options....I was thinking, "It's over. It's fucking over." Then I thought: "You have
no kids, no wife, no career, certainly no plan B. Why not kill yourself?"
By "the result" I don't mean the suicidality, though of course that option is never flatly
rejected, it is a last chance at immortality. The result of this loop is the first sentence, the
"without options." There are no options not because there are actually no independent
options, but because there are no options which change the balance of worth between you
and the other person. Because your value is measured relative to the other person, and
you've now discovered that you have no control over that other person, you are indeed left
"without options." No obvious way to become more successful, OR no obvious way to make
Joe Rogan less successful.

II.

I can't tell you how to be successful, but I can tell you how to successfully get through this
kind of misery. Note that this advice is not for people in their 20s, it will not work for you, it
will only work if you're over 40. (1)

The trick to solving physics problems is to recognize the form of the equation; the trick to
solving your life is to know the form of the conflict.

Maron was having a mid-life crisis, which is always of the form: "will I do anything useful
with the rest of my life?" Note the emphasized "always." There is no alternative question.

Typically, people misinterpret the mid-life crisis as, "I'm 45 years old and I've never done X"
where X equals: blondes; car collecting; skydiving, a book, loved, learned Italian. And while
these things are enjoyable, and will bring the person happiness of varying amounts, they
don't solve the crisis because the crisis isn't about doing things but about running out of
time. "That was fun," you say as she drives back to Wellesley, but then you glance at the
calendar and it says you're still 45. There are only two things that will make that 45 less
painful, and one of them is alcohol.

All the maneuvers indicative of a mid-life crisis-- younger women, sportscars, new hobbies,
new careers, new looks-- are easily interpreted as new beginnings to help you trick yourself
that the clock has been rolled back. (That these things do, in fact, make you slightly
younger is not here the point.)

So other than alcohol, what answers the question, "Will I do anything useful with the rest of
my life?" The key to navigating this stage is to understand that the word "useful" has a
very specific definition and can only be fulfilled through limited ways: it has to serve the
next generation.

I can see you rolling your eyes. (2) This isn't touchy-feely nonsense; this is how humans
were built, no different than they were built to see Roy through Biv or to find the absence of
eyeballs uncanny. It explains why happy people still go through this; why making millions
of dollars doesn't solve this; why having kids, being celebrated or even famous all fail, not
because these are intrinsically "bad" but because they do not specificallyfulfill the human
necessity to believe it is useful to the next generation.

Most people get through this by raising kids (not just having them), teaching them things,
"getting them into college," passing on the culture. The more you feel responsible to this
process the easier mid-life will be. Nor does it require active or even good parenting; it is
an internal conceptualization of your life, rather than any external activity. Not changing
what you do, but how you thinks about it. Though it sounds like a cognitive trick, it is as
simple as not saying, "I want to get rich" and instead saying, "I want to get rich so my
family has a good life." To emphasize, this is not about the comparative morality of wealth
vs. poverty, but the inclusion of the clause "so that" by which the narcissism is dissolved.
(Yes, this means one could fool themselves into thinking they are "useful," thus passing
through the crisis with not having accomplished anything.)

Maron, however, doesn't have kids. Other options:

1. Become someone's "mentor." You can unload a lot of that rage if you feel valuable, and
giving of your wisdom and experience serves the dual function of confirming your identity (I
am the guy who..) and connecting with someone else in some meaningful way. (E.g. the
ex-player who goes into coaching.) (3)

2. Become everyone's "mentor." This is the route that saved Maron's life.

Broke, defeated and career-less, I started doing a podcast in that very garage where I was planning my
own demise... I started to feel better about life, comedy, creativity, community. I started to understand
who I was by talking to other comics and sharing it with you. I started to laugh at things again. I was
excited to be alive. Doing the podcast and listening to comics was saving my life.

The mistake is to think it is the fame that saved his life. Maron might not be sure what,
exactly, he is giving 20 million downloads that is of value, but he knows it must be
something, which is why being more famous isn't helping, say, any of the Real Housewives
from suicide by collagen injection, but an aging ex-football hero can get a patent extension
as a sports commentator. Maybe it's the comedy, or the insight, or the perspective-- what
specifically it is doesn't matter, just that he feels as though it is something he is giving
others. If Maron had simply been given a check for $20 million dollars to perform one last
show and then obligated to disappear, he would have happily taken the money and
eventually killed himself, if not with a gun, then with

with internet porn, booze, pills, weed, blow, hookers, hangers on, sad angry girls we can't get out of our
room, twitter trolls and broken relationships.

III.

Unrelated, but a great: Louis CK, on the Opie and Anthony show, relates this story:
I'm at the Comedy Cellar, and I make this 9/11 joke. Basically, I was talking about how when you're in a
marriage, you always feel like you're doing something wrong, in trouble for something. So the joke is
I'm in a hotel, and my wife calls, crying, and I'm thinking, what the fuck did I do now? Did she find a
sex phone bill? So I say, "what's wrong?" and she just cries, and finally she says, "turn on the TV" and I
see the planes crashing into the towers. And my first thought is, "Yay! Phew! I'm not in trouble, it was
just thousands of people getting killed."

So I tell this joke in the Cellar, and some guy just stands up and says, "that, that is not funny," and he
stomps out.

Later on I'm upstairs talking to Marc Maron, and I tell him this story, and I'm telling him how much I
hate it when people choose their one thing to be offended. All night I'm doing rape jokes and racial jokes
and he has no problem, but this is the one thing he decides goes to far. How narcissistic this guy must be
to think that he's allowed to decide that what offends him is what should be off limits.

So Marc looks at me and says, "dude, are you insane? He's the narcissist? You just told the most
narcissistic joke in history, about how relieved you were that thousands of people died just because it got
you off the hook with your wife..."

--------

1. When a 20 year old says, "why is he famous?! For what? I hate that guy?" It's normal.
As you get older, you learn accept the unrelatedness of people's successes to your own. "I
still hate him, but it's got nothing to do with me." It is a mental disease when a middle
aged man reacts with rage to the success of Kim Kardashian, however underserving she
may actually be.

2. "I hate these 'solutions' because they aren't really solutions," you say. "It's noble and
all, but I need specific advice that can help me." That's the narcissism. You don't want the
solution to be "it's about the next generation" because what you want the answer to be is
about you-- your own fulfillment, your own happiness, your own safety, your own sanity. All
of these are defenses, and none of them will work, viz Marc Maron.

To use an example from The Matrix: The Oracle "lied" to Neo when she said he wasn't the
One, but she had to lie in order for Neo to believe that Morpheus was more important than
he and to risk his life to save him; only by making this sacrifice, by being willing to exist for
someone else, could he actually become the One. Had he "known" he was the One, and
then let Morpheus die so that he, the One, could live, then by the atemporal nature of
existential logic, he wouldn't have been the One after all.

3. This is how you could help someone else with this kind of "mid-life depression:" making
them feel valuable in a consistent way. If this is where, say, your father finds himself--
empty nest or career gone flat-- regularly soliciting his opinion on things he considers
himself an expert in can help remind him of his value. The point is not that he needs to
accomplish something, the point is that he needs to feel he is valuable to you accomplishing
something.

!
 SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
Finding Existential Solace In A Pink Tied Psycho

!
unamerican

Forbes: "Stock Traders Are Psychopaths"--

... a University of St. Gallen study that shows stock market traders display similarities to certified
psychopaths. The study... compares decisions made by 27 equity, derivative and forex traders in a
computer simulation against an existing study of 24 psychopaths in high-security hospitals in Germany.
Not only do the traders match their counterparts, but, as Der Speigel [sic] succinctly puts it, the
"stockbrokers' behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths."
Der Spiegel:

Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor
had the same car, "and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves."

The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.

Hold on. The study compared institutionalized psychopaths to a group of German traders
and found the traders are worse psychopaths, with a "penchant for destruction." Umm, how
about the more obvious explanation" they're German. What? Too soon? Hello? Is this
thing on?

The preposterousness of my comment is only slightly less than the overall idiocy of this
study and the reporting around it. Following a rigorous objective analysis, the fact that the
traders were German is a more plausible explanation for their baseball bat smashing
behavior than their employment as traders. I realize the institutionalized psychopaths were
also German, but the presence of mental illness is itself a greater confounding factor, i.e. in
a study of psychopathy, the general order of important factors can be approximated:

mental illness > species of pet > race > employment > favorite movie > phone number

in other words: this study is stupid, which is also a rigorous objective analysis.

But the existence of confounding factors did not stop nearly everyone from turning up the
volume of their own cognitive noise:

NYMag:

With rogue traders all the rage, a Swiss university study found that brokers "behaved more
egotistically..." The study's co-author Thomas Noll said, "Naturally one can't characterize the traders
as deranged..." Particularly shocking for Noll was the fact that the bankers... Noll said it was as if the
stockbrokersrealize...

Of course I can't find the study anywhere, which is suspicious, but not half as suspicious as
the reporting. Are they "stock market traders" or are they stockbrokers? Why did Forbes
include the above American Psycho poster? Because he's a psycho? But he's not a trader,
he was an investment banker. Do these results extend to everyone in a tie or anyone who
deals with securities? How about the baby in the Etrade ad?

!
German
I'd say this was an example of the media manipulating the study to suit their needs, but it
appears the researchers themselves were pretty liberal with the nomenclature and pretty
conservative with the N=.

I'm fairly confident that a study of comparing 27 idiots to 24 other idiots done by,
apparently, idiots, most likely explicitly done for the mass consumption of more idiots is not
a study worth repeating, but you can be sure it will be repeated many, many more times
and eventually form the foundation for future research not to mention conventional wisdom
for the next 25 years. They don't really care who or why someone is a psycho, so long as
you get the hate pointed in the right general direction.

II.

Interesting how you spin it:

Forbes: "The study, authored by MBA students Pascal Scherrer and Thomas Noll"

HuffPo: "The research, led by forensics expert Pascal Scherrer and prison administrator
Thomas Noll"

III.

Here's a happy video:

I like to watch these kinds of videos when I have to get psyched up to wrestle a crocodile or
storm a castle.
Though narcissism demands the right to self-identify, narcissists are often unable to do so
because they don't know what it is they want to be. Who am I? What are the rules of my
identity? So people look for shortcuts, like modeling oneself after another existing character.
But the considerably more regressive maneuver is to define yourself in opposition to things.
"I can't tell you what I want for dinner," says the toddler, "but I am certain I don't want
that. Or that. Or that. And if you put that slop in front of me I swear to God you will wear
it."
Now you can go through life floating, letting hate, the Dark Side Of The Force, the easy
path, guide your reactions. It seems certain that you have a fully formed identity because
of the magnitude of your passions, emotions, and responses, but you can only operate in
response, never first, never with commitment or vision. I know the young lady with the
mace in her eyes thinks she is driven by love, but that doesn't really come through here,
does it? Her hate defines her. "I'm anti-establishment." We get it.
What do the protestors want? Can they articulate it meaningfully, not in platitudes or
"people over profits" or "more fair income redistribution" soundbites? They can't tell you
because they don't know. They can, however, yell at you what they don't like, and the
louder they yell it the more they hear it themselves.

Nothing is expected to be accomplished, it is all for branding. The enemy of the day is "Wall
Street" but that's not an actual thing, and the cops they are so earnestly hoping will assault
them aren't their enemies either, they are proxies for Wall Street which is a proxy for
something else that I am going to politely refrain from suggesting is their father. This time
they have a camera. None of that matters, so long as they have successfully identified
themselves to themselves, a little cover from the incessant bitter winds of existential
freedom. Marijuana will take care of the rest.

IV.

The protestors didn't realize they were themselves bit players in someone else's movie, the
media's movie, which offers this clip and others like it so that you, the viewer, can easily
define yourself by who you hate. "That's what the ratings said you wanted," studio execs
say, perplexed. "Were we wrong?" No, no, you were right. Carry on.

If I hate the protestors, I'm on Wall Street's side, and vise versa, no further branding, let
alone thought, is necessary. And now you have a quick way to decide if you hate me.

[The market is] going to fall pretty hard.... Investors and the big money, the smart money... they don't
buy this rescue plan.... they know the market is toast. They know the stock market is finished. The Euro,
as far as they're concerned, they don't really care. They're moving their money away to safer assets like
Treasury bonds, 30-year bonds, and the U.S. Dollar. So it's not going to work.

And:

For most traders, we don't really care that much how they're going to fix the economy, how they're
going fix the whole situation. Our job is to make money from it... I have a confession which is: I go to
bed every night and I dream of another recession. I dream of another moment like this. Why? Because
people don't seem to remember but the ['30s depression] wasn't just about a market crash. There were
some people who were prepared to make money from that crash... It's an opportunity.
This is not the time for wishful thinking that the government is going to sort things out. Governments
don't rule the world, Goldman Sachs rules the world.

Wow! Did he really say that?

But what did he say that's so shocking, that we haven't heard a million times before? Why
is he so believable? One lone trader? What does he know that we don't?
America loves to believe information if it comes by an accent, the "otherness" of the
speaker implies they have both impartiality and additional information, hence Nouriel
Roubini.
If you're watching it it's for you, and how many of you watch the financial news of the BBC?
Zero. And yet we have this clip, submitted for your consideration. Submitted everywhere,
from the NYT to Salon, which actually titled its article: "The rogue trader: Crazier than a
psychopath." Wow, wildman, not even close. So while the trader is an American he is the
"other" speaking to a British audience which we get to spy on; and this information carries
greater weight because it is delivered over there, via the BBC, not via Fox News to the
evangelicals of Nebraska.
After the initial panic about what he said, the controversy morphed to whether this is a
hoax, whether this guy is part of a performance art troupe that tries to impersonate and
thus humiliate capitalists. This controversy is wildly besides the point: what's the
difference? The entire theatre of this clip is a hoax. What difference does it make if he is
an actor or a real trader? How do you think the BBC found this guy in the first place? They
don't pre-interview at the BBC? They just wing it?
The media has chosen the easy path because that's what you want, we want to be told that
traders et al are psychopaths and cops are Wall Street heavies and white women are
entitled jerks and this guy's a hoax/for real, all so that the rest of us can decide which side
of that invented controversy we are on so that we remember who we think we are. "I hate
something!" says the person who is out of ideas. About as nuanced as a mace shot to the
face, which happens right in the the first episode. You can't be subtle when the bitter winds
are blowing.

------

Related:
Are conservatives psychopaths?
Protestors Get Maced

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011

The Contagion Is The Solution

!
wait... why can't I talk to anyone?

Seen Contagion yet? Here's a simple question: can you name one character?

Not the actor's name, the character's name. Take your time. Nothing?
A=A, and character driven movies, the kind Soderbergh is famous for, are supposed to be
about characters.

Maybe this isn't a character driven movie. Maybe it's a documentary, aTraffic-style story
about "what would people do if?"

But the movie doesn't depict them doing anything you wouldn't predict (die; panic; kill each
other; attempt to profit; mourn; protect their own at all costs) or in a new way. So
characters you're not emotionally involved in, doing nothing unusual... what's this all about?

I.

This is the opening scene:

Gwyneth is not driving, but is still holding a phone, unnaturally, with her left hand. Is she a
leftie? No. Did she have a stroke? No. Look closely, she's married. Two ways to go with
this: either this is a disaster movie about grief, or a disaster movie about about punishment.
Well, she's calling from an airport and the guy on the phone isn't her husband. The hell you
say?! That's right, she's having-- and this is a quote-- a "layover."

!
Soderbergh obeys the Rule Of Thirds
So maybe this is like a horror movie: sexual sin= horrible punishment; a subtext which is
repeated later as her husband, Matt Damon, tries to protect his pretty-but-not-hot
(=survives) teen daughter from her urges to be with her who-knows-if-he's-infected
boyfriend. (The script which I did not find on The Pirate Bay maybe says her name is Jory,
BTW, but the audience doesn't care.) Is it the virulently contagious virus Damon's worried
about? Sure it is. That's why he pulls out a shotgun when he catches them after 15-900
minutes of close contact frolicking in the back yard. Jory looks flushed. He finally relents to
the inevitability of penis and vagina at the end of the movie when boyfriend shows up at
their house wearing the vaccination bracelet. Safe sex. Matt Damon smiles as they dance
with each other, then walks away, I assume into oblivion. That's what single dads are good
for, cuckolding and pass interference, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Back to the inception. Gwyneth is infected but she doesn't know it, and is shown partying in
a Chinese casino, blowing on men's hands, and forgetting her sin phone at the bar, which a
Ukranian model (=blonde harlot) returns to her, thereby ensuring all sexualized blondes are
punished.

But not before their sins are visited on the son.

And being an American, you say, "wow, they killed a kid in a mainstream movie?" Quite
gruesomely, I might add, but don't worry, you'll feel nothing. He wasn't really a kid, he was
merely an extension of her (he was only Damon's step-kid, making Matt twice a cuckold),
and he needs to die to free Matt Damon to return to his real daughter.

When a disaster strikes, the answer to "why?" is usually of the form, "endocytosis of the
virus into the cell" or "plate tectonics and subduction zones" which is as satisfying as an
imaginary bottle of rum. So we convert it to a narrative, a story, yes like a movie and yes
like 9/11, to which the answer is always 100% the same: punishment for guilt. The only
question is whose.
Gwyneth is Patient Zero, she is the cause of the outbreak, and if this was an ordinary movie
about ordinary sin her backstory would be enough, it says, "this is a story about individual
guilt." Oh, look: her lover was the very first person to die in Chicago.

But it's a "subtle" political piece like the kinds played on TV all day on 9/11/2011, in which
the Towers fell not because terrorists flew planes into them but because of America's
incessant meddling in the Middle East; the same meddling which, educated people all know,
had nothing to do with the Arab Spring at all. So this is a story about collective guilt, about
how we are all responsible.

If that's the story we're going to see, her sins have to be made general enough and
collective enough to justify a global catastrophe. Hence, though she's blonde and an
unrepentant adulteress, she's also an executive for a multinational mining company that
destroys the rainforests. Now it makes sense why 2M people had to die.

Closing the narrative loop, the last scene is the big reveal, how it all happened: we see
Gwyneth's company destroy a rainforest displacing a bat which infects a pig which gets
cooked at the casino Gwyneth is in, infecting her. Justice is served, madame. Chef
recommends.

II.

The ordinary way to read contagion/natural disaster movies is as an expression of collective

guilt, what did we do to deserve this? Those who survive at the end are either those who
don't really share in the collective guilt (e.g. natives, poor, women, minorities, and, in this
movie's case, the CDC janitor's son) or those who "change."

That's the ordinary way. The reason this reading is wrong is that this movie wasn't made in
1376, but in 2011. Look out your window: those bipeds are narcissists. Narcissism wants
no part of individual guilt, so it for sure as hell isn't going to take the fall for collective guilt.
Collective guilt is created as a defense against individual guilt. The individual unconscious
does not want any part of "we", especially if "we" did something and got caught. The
unconscious only cares about "I".

Gwyneth Paltrow presents us with an interesting test of our psychology. Let's see how good
you are at thinking in binary: when Judgment Day comes, will God judge her more harshly
for being an adulteress or an executive in a mining company?

Oh, you're not religious? Then you are superstitious (-- "No I'm not at all, I'm just kind of
OCD." Is that what the kids are calling it now?--) which means you don't deal in
judgments but in root causes. Ok: why did 2M people have to die? Was it because she's an
adulteress, or because she's a mining company executive? Pick one. You sure? Now why
did her son have to die?

III.

Not knowing the characters makes it easy to focus on collective guilt, which is really
someone else's guilt that you're benefiting by pretending to take on. Not knowing "Beth
Emhoff" means you don't have to parse her individual guilt.

This movie could have been a straight "Beth is horny and she is punished" movie, i.e. an
80s slasher film. But this generation demands a defense against that kind of subversive
thinking. So Beth's guilt is minimized in favor of featuring examples of collective guilt.
Who caused 9/11? Nineteen two dimensional characters we don't know the names of. Ah,
so 9/11 is payback for the sins of "The United States Of America" which means no one is
looking to punish you specifically, because it's not yourfault. It's "our" fault. Which means
it's Bush's fault. Which means we're all off the hook now that he's gone.

But maybe taking responsibility for our collective sins is a noble, selfless act? No. The ego
will do anything to protect itself, including publicly accept guilt for something that causes it
to experience very little actual guilt. "We caused global warming!" Really? It was you?
You drink yourself to sleep because you burn too many fossil fuels? You can't look a person
in the eye because you drive an SUV?

IV.

Even before the virus kills a lot of people, people begin to panic. This is facilitated by the
internet, played by Jude Law, who blogs about corporate greed, "the CDC is lying to you",
and a holistic cure (forsythia) that Big Pharma of course doesn't want you to know about.
(Also, it doesn't work.) But people start raiding pharmacies looking for it anyway. (1)

The virus, in theory, does not discriminate; but the movie makes it clear that information
very much does discriminate. When Dr. Laurence Fishburne and his team at the CDC figure
out that Chicago is next, he retreats to his office and secretly calls his girlfriend, "get out of
Chicago, but tell no one."

But wait, there's a janitor standing behind him. "How much of that call did you hear?" asks
Fishburne. "We've all got people," the janitor replies.

Which is further exemplified by what Fishburne's girlfriend does next: she talks to her
people. "You have to promise to keep this a secret..." And then that people posts about it
on facebook. We've all got people, and they all panic.(2)
 ! but
first, some shopping

Information is the parallel virus, but that is not a flippant comparison. Totalitarians of the
world, take note: in the movie, information the public has is always bad for them. I do not
mean the information is wrong. Jude Law's info about forsythia is wrong and thus
troublesome; but the CDC's announcements about the virus are all accurate and stuff you'd
insist you have the right/need to know. Yet that information is irrelevant. Having this
information, are you cured faster? Are you better able to protect yourself than the obvious
intuitive maneuvers?

The single reason to offer official information (and the movie distinguishes between
"official"=valid=useless information disseminated via TV and unofficial=false=dangerous
information traveling via internet) is that it sedates people; it is never to benefit them.
Which is why it is more important to the perception of safety to keep the electricity going
(which they do) than the food going (which they don't.) "We've identified the virus, it is
called MEV-1." Oh, so that's what it is. Now we're getting somewhere.

All media is state run media, especially when it's not.

V.

A case study of individual vs. collective guilt.

Cobb's wife in Inception, Mal, in this movie plays a WHO researcher who travels to China to
identify the source of the outbreak. Because of CCTV camera footage, she is able to
observe Gwyenth infecting various other people, and the outbreak can be tracked.

Because Mal is beautiful, she is most likely be going to die. However, she's a) not American
and b) a brunette with an atrocious haircut; which means she's not part of a) the collective
guilt and b) probably not carrying any individual guilt. She could pull out of this.

Right after she and the Chinese researchers discover how the virus spread, she does
something very, very important: she prepares to leave China. She's done with China, China
is only important as a source of information and now of no consequence. There's no way
those hominids could find the cure, and, anyway, there are dying people in the world she
has to get to.

The Chinese researchers therefore kidnap her to a rural village and send a ransom note: if
the WHO wants to see her alive again, they have send a crate of vaccines.

There are the two guilts: her individual guilt is her aloof cosmopolitanism, and her collective
guilt is the WHO not caring about China. In order for this story to play out correctly,
individual guilt must be minimized and collective guilt maximized. 1. Mal has to repent. 2.
The WHO, as the collective guilt, has to take on her individual guilt, i.e. get more guilty.

1. The next time we see her, 45 minutes later-- she is in a makeshift, open air "classroom"
teaching the Chinese children how to read. She is perfectly happy. I'll remind you that she
has been kidnapped. In case the redemption isn't obvious enough, they club you with it: a
lingering wide shot of the "classroom" reveals a huge cross on the roof. Note that
Soderbergh's name is Soderbergh.

2. When the ransom is paid (crate of vaccines) and Mal is freed, she discovers that the
WHO tricked the Chinese: the vaccines were placebos. Horrified, she runs back to the
village, and the message is clear: no one cares about the little people, especially if they are
Chinese. So a lot of people must die, but none of them Mal.

VI.

Another case study:

Dr. Fishburne gets his vaccine, but instead of giving it to himself he gives it to the janitor's
son. In the language of narcissism, that act makes him a hero, and thus guarantees his
survival. In the language of individual guilt, this is repenting for choosing "his people" over
society.

Collective guilt takes on different meanings in different cultures. In America, collective guilt
is always capitalist guilt.

Fishburne's act is a kind of message to global capitalists, "everyone has people they care
about, your interests aren't more important than the working man's." Not explicit in the
movie is the secret to many vaccines: herd immunity, i.e. unvaccinated Dr. Fishburne can
benefit from other people's vaccinations. This is a metaphor for the popular refrain that
global capitalists actually improve their own position when they help the poor because the
poor will buy the goods that make them rich.
Now this is no longer an ethical question, "what is the moral thing to do?" but a cost/benefit
one: "how can you maximize the benefit?" Which is exactly the way you'd want the question
framed if you were a global capitalist. But in so doing one can avoid the nasty business of
taking a moral stance, it frames everything in terms of consequences, comparisons of
utilitarian benefit-- and consequently including individual guilt, which is the whole point of
doing this. Was Gwyneth wrong to cheat? No, she's not a bad person, it's complicated. Is it
wrong to loot? No, as long as you don't enjoy it.

It's interesting to see which position, moral or utilitarian, the movie chooses, because the
movie is a reflection of it's audience's preference for one over the other. What do we want to
be true in 2011?

The position the movie offers is this: Dr. Fishburne gives the boy the vaccination, but keeps
the vaccination bracelet.

VII.

Implied in every disaster movie is "starting over," but starting over isn't the consequence,
but the premise: "in order to start over and do it right this time, we need a catastrophe."

Now recall what is destroyed in a disaster: the unrepentant sinners and those who share in
the collective guilt. What would starting over look like? It would be some recalibration of
modernity. Where did modernity go wrong?

It went wrong with Patient Zero. Now our original Gwyenth problem is reversed: Gwyenth
is not only an executive of an evil mining company, she's also a modern woman. Which
means she can cheat when she wants and suffer no guilt. Yikes. As much as the image of
a banana tree getting plowed by a bulldozer symbolizes a particular aspect of modernity, a
blonde woman guiltlessly getting plowed by some other bulldozer is another aspect of
modernity-- though not the cheating itself, but what she is able to think while she cheats.
"She made mistakes, but she loved you very much," Matt Damon is told at the funeral
home. That's true, and that's what makes it precisely so terrifying: Gwyneth had the
physical freedom to cheat, and the emotional freedom to cheat and simultaneously still love
her husband. A man understands a woman can be duplicitous, but the expectation is
there's still an objective truth to her cheating: if she cheats, she likes him, not me. How
can it be she likes him and me? How can she be two people simultaneously? What am I
supposed to do with that when she comes home? That kind of existential freedom is to
much to allow women to bear, and in any post-crisis world the first thing society does is
take a few steps back into the safety of conventional roles. It happened after WWII and it
will happen after the Great Recession, and everyone will think they made the individual
choice to do it. After the Contagion has passed, Matt Damon's daughter's first order of
business is to express her happiness and love through the last holdout of happily accepted
gender roles: the high school prom.

VIII.

The preference of collective guilt over individual guilt suggests a comforting narcissistic
arrogance: if this global catastrophe is, after all, our fault, then it is also under our control.
We can stop it. That's why these disaster movies are very rarely about some catastrophe
that isn't our fault: that would be too raw depiction of our existential dread. We need the
defenseof collective guilt to explain inexplicable events and offer a path to immortality on
earth (if we act a certain way all will be well). This is especially important for narcissists
who, not able to feel individual guilt, lack a redemptive path towards immortality after
earth. The belief of control over the earth is all they have left.

It is the same narcissism that says, "we're destroying nature," which is a defense against
being merely another part of nature. That it is a fact that we are destroying nature is
secondary; the point is to believe it so that nature becomes a bit player in the movie of
human exceptionalism. That it is a fact that nature is a bit player in the movie of human
exceptionalism is secondary; the point is to believe it so that... and etc, until you
individually have found meaning in the world.

You might think that individual guilt would be infinitely more amenable to modification than
collective guilt-- if it's "your" fault, all you have to change is you. But try telling Gwyneth
she shouldn't sleep with that guy, that it's wrong. "It's complicated," she'll tell you. Fixing
"you", including the sins-- is nigh impossible, because those sins are you, the only way to
stop doing them isn't to stop doing them but to change who you are. "You just don't
understand the whole story" you'll explain in ten million sentences that say nothing. The
part that I don't understand, of course, is how important it is to do do it to keep your
identity intact. But I do understand. That's why I wrote this.

The trick to understanding disaster movies, and life, is to realize that the reason bad things
happen is that we partly guilty and partly wronged, fully at the mercy of other people who
use us and manipulate us; but that we still retain almost infinite power to alter reality and
prevent bad things from happening. And the reason that that is the reason is that the
alternative is there is no reason.

If 2M people die, you can be 100% certain that someone will find CCTV footage of a
hateable adulteress destroying a rainforest, and that she'll get what's coming to you.

---

1. The media's preferred symbol for the disintegration of public order is looting, i.e the
opposite of shopping. When Matt Damon goes into the looted supermarket, he's distinct
from the other looters because he isn't enjoying it, suggesting he wasn't a big shopper,
either. Consumerism was never in his nature, nor sexuality, as evidenced by two ex-wives,
which is why he is the only person in the entire movie who is naturally immune to the virus.
(Another note: in disaster movies, the ability to loot is what separates us from the animals.
Once there's nothing left to loot, the people are then depicted as marauding cavemen,
unless they are reorganized into a strict proto-capitalist economy. Welcome to Bartertown.)

2. Note that this must be in 2011: it didn't seem odd even to me that 51 year old medical
doctor Fishburne has a girlfriend and no kids. In fact, the only character you see married in
this movie is Gwyneth Paltrow, and you know how that works out.

!
 SEPTEMBER 11, 2011
We Are All Skyscrapers Now

!
which picture can you see?

On September 11, 2001 I was nowhere doing nothing while 2000 people were dying almost
simultaneously.

A week later we had the Anthrax attacks, which, like the 9/11 attacks, have never been
solved. Whoever the Antraxer was, he did manage to infect one of the 9/11 hijackers, and
so he stands as the only person to have at least injured one of the terrorists.

That was also when we got the text scroll at the bottom of CNN and the definitive end of
actionable information from CNN.

This is something I wrote a few weeks after 9/11. It is what it is. A lot has happened since.

If the TV is any guide, 9/11 is a dramatic miniseries about two buildings collapsing on
firefighters, with the premiere being brought to us commercial free. Gotta build an
audience.

There's enormous coverage, but no news. None of this is news, it is drama, portraits of
courage and sadness. Last phone calls between loved ones, "the last time I saw him was
when...", "when I saw the first Tower fall I..."

And firefighters. Lots of firefighters. America wants its real life heroes unarmed and
unthreatening.

Lots of sadness, but no anger. No one on TV is angry? The Towers didn't fall, they were
kicked in the face. How many politicians do I have to watch cry on TV? STOP CRYING. I
already know it's sad. Don't tell me we are resilient, don't tell me we'll go on, are there
people worried they won't go on? Show me the country has some men in it, show me that
we aren't five year olds.

But we are. Cry on TV and people will think you're sensitive, but bang a fist on the podium
and you're unstable. "He can't control his emotions." What?
According to the TV, the real events of 9/11 happened not on the 95th floor, but on the
ground floor. I've been looking in the wrong place.

People tell me that this coverage isn't about the terrorists, it's about the aftermath, the
victims; that there are other shows about the terrorists.

Separating the TV shows this way fosters a separation between the cause and the effect; we
are focusing only on the effect, because it is very hard for us to get our heads around the
cause. In doing this we are repackaging this event into a natural disaster. Something that
we have no power over, no way to prevent, but something that must by necessity bring us
together in our grief and our loss, and something that we must get past. No sense in
describing why earthquakes happen, so let's delve into the victims' stories.
Observe that the media has unilaterally decided that no American will ever again see the
images of the planes being slammed into the Towers. "Come on, you've seen it enough
times, nothing to be gained from that. Here's a firefighter."

I'm told anger serves no useful purpose. But sadness isn't going to prevent this from
happening again, sadness isn't going to restructure the planet so that people don't want to
do these things. You might say anger won't either, but I'll take my chances.

They say the hijackers were armed only with box cutters. If that's true, that tells me a lot
about how they perceive Americans: they expected no resistance. Not even from the pilots.
Would they have brought boxcutters to El-Al or Aeroflot hijacking?

When Timothy Mcveigh and Terry Nichols blew up the OK City Federal building, the media
went right for the throat, it wasn't a natural disaster but an violent attack to which we
immediately ascribed blame. And they were free to speculate: right wingers, militias, neo-
nazis. But 9/11 is different, we don't know what to do with it so we do nothing with it. Say
"they attacked us" and then off to the victims. You know the names of both OKC bombers,
but you can't name one hijacker other than Mohammed Atta, who is the designated
ringleader because his is the only name we can pronounce.

We don't even know what to call the attacks, so we call it by its date: "9/11." Just another
day that we'll remember where we were when. "That was such a sad and scary day."
Yeah.

"We are all Americans now," announced Le Monde, with no understanding at all. How can
they sympathize with how we feel when we ourselves don't know what we feel? This attack
happened because we're not all Americans, not even us Americans. Just a group of
individuals now slowly distancing ourselves. "I mean, I sort of knew him, I'd seen him
around and all, but we weren't close or anything..."

"We are all Americans" means to the writer at Le Monde: "we could be next." That's all he
cares about. He's right on that count, I guess, dead right-- the next attack has to happen in
a different country if it is to have global impact.

If Le Monde wanted accuracy, it would have announced that we are all skyscrapers now,
each of us standing mightily and individually, who is taller? who is greater? Living in
proximity but not in connection. Waiting to be knocked down.

And when it happens to someone, our explanations will really be about why it didn't happen
to us: well, that skyscraper wasn't built right and that skyscraper was too tall, too proud.
What happened to that skyscraper has nothing to do with me, I'm different, I'm better, and
besides, why would anyone hate me?

Because you're a skyscraper, dummy.

When the towers fell and the pulverized remains of people who might have been your
friends poured through the dust into the streets of lower New York, what did you feel?
Which did you blame, America or Israel? Oh, both. When someone asks you now about
9/11, do you answer "I am sad" or "I am angry"? Or do you externalize your answer and
put it in the past tense, as if the emotion was something that came at you from the outside,
"it was sad", or "I felt angry"? Are you not sad or angry anymore? How long did it take you
to get over the worst attack on America in history? A day, a week? How long before
"cooler heads prevailed"? Do you know people who you think "overreacted" to the
slaughter of 3000 Americans? As others dance while the bodies are excavated in NYC, are
you able to connect with the story? How do you dialogue? Maybe you should cope on this
for a while, until your cooler heads prevail. Go shopping. Have a nap.

I don't want to cope. I want to see the videos of the planes being flown into the Towers. If
we allow ourselves to choose the path of sadness, then nothing has been accomplished,
everyone died for nothing. It will have been nothing more than an earthquake.

I don't want to get past this. Nor do I want it to get past me.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2011

!

SEPTEMBER 7, 2011
How To Be Mean To Your Kids
 ! stabilize the price, whatever it takes

A reader sent me a link to an article written by psychiatrist Steve Balt, How To Retire At Age
27, in which he describes a typical patient in his practice, a 27 year old named Keisha:

During the interview, she told me, "I just got my SSDI so I'm retired now." I asked her to elaborate. "I'm
retired now," she said [boldface in the original]. "I get my check every month, I just have to keep
seeing a doctor." When I asked why she's on disability, she replied, "I don't know, whatever they wrote,
bipolar, mood swings, panic attacks, stuff like that." She had been off medications for over two months
(with no apparent symptoms); she said she really "didn't notice" any effect of the drugs, except the
Valium 20 mg per day, which "helped me settle down and relax."

I misspoke when I said "typical patient." She's slightly unusual for his inner city population,
because she actually graduated high school and even took nursing assistant classes.

She dropped out, however, because "I got stressed out." She tried looking for other work but then found
out from a family member that she could "apply for disability."

A psychiatrist and a lawyer later and she's awarded a pension of $700 a month. No
retirement party, though. And she'll have to buy her own watch.

The rest of his post is a thoughtful back and forth about what constitutes disability, and
whether a) giving them this easy way out isn't actually doing a disservice to the human
being in front of you; b) whether these false diagnoses aren't artificially inflating disease
prevalence estimates; c) the extent to which it contributes to bureaucracy (and cost.)

II.

So when he emailed me the link to the article, How To Retire At Age 27," the reader asked
me a tongue-in-cheek question: "Now why didn't I think of that twenty years ago?"

Thing is, he probably did think of that, or some brief fantasy of something like it, but figured
he could make much more money doing something else. Therein we have the problem:
Evidently, this woman Keisha doesn't think she could make substantially more than $700/
month doing something else, so regardless of whether she is truly disabled or not, her
conception of her opportunities is seriously limited. That's social policy problemo numero
uno.

Note that she even took classes to be a certified nursing assistant, and still doesn't think it's
worth it. So either CNAs don't get paid enough (over SSI) to merit giving up all your free
time to work with the belligerent poop machines at the hospital, or else SSI pays too much
to make that decision even worth considering. There are no other possibilities. Choosing
between those without sparking riots is social policy problemo numero dos.

Then there's a subtle semiotic issue. She calls it "retired." Not disabled, but retired, which
means in the language of social policy she has understood that she has somehow "worked"/
contributed to society to merit some retirement benefits, and also tacitly accepts she's not
unable to work, rather that she's done working. So what could she have done to merit
retirement? The answer probably is nothing. Right? But no one has tried to correct her
thinking about this because, well, it just isn't worth arguing with some unemployed black
woman at a psychiatrist's office because you'll be branded uncaring and racist, not just by
her but by some other busybody with a progressive agenda, free time, and a government/
media job. You will also likely get punched. Besides, you and anyone who values work as
a moral good and an end in itself don't have time to explain it to an unwilling Keisha, you
actually have to get back to work. So she's left with her comforting lies that go
unchallenged-- bellay that: they are encouraged. That's social policy problemo numero
tres.

III.

But now we have to take three left turns to get at the truth.

There is a significant misconception of what "disability" means, and I'm not going to say
what you think I might. Dr. Balt, and I'll wager most people, think Keisha is probably able
to work. However, the issue isn't whether she can work, but whether any employer would
be willing to take a chance on her ability to work. Would you hire Keisha to run your office?
Do billing? In the spacious comfort of an internet comment you might hire a woman like
Keisha to work at a hypothetically inefficient McDonalds, but in practice, are you willing to
tolerate "3-4 absences a month due to illness?" McDonalds neither, which is why the SSI
application form asks that exact question.

You will observe the Keisha does not even have the enthusiasm to know what is written on
the most important economic documents of her life. "I don't know, bipolar, panic attacks,
whatever they put on there." She can't be bothered to handle those papers, someone else
is in charge of that. How attentive will she be to the frier? McDonalds doesn't want to find
out.

That specific issue reveals an important bias and misunderstanding America has when it
talks about employment. Yes, there is an issue about people wanting to work but the other
issue is that the global economy is too quick and efficient to tolerate your idiotic car troubles
or your imbecilic grandmother's death or your moronic lack of child care (cue Scandinavia)
or, and mostly, your stupid health. The economy was a Ferrari and now it's only a Honda,
but either way, not much time for absences and no time at all for Keisha's learning curve.
Keisha isn't just unemployed, she is completely unemployable. We can argue whether auto
plants should pay $20/hr or $50/hr, but for certain there is no market for unskilled labor at
all. Let me correct another grand mistake of the politicians and the talking heads in the
media: this problem is likely to get much, much worse, not better, as the economy
improves. There are no typos in that sentence. Read it again.

The jobs employers would be willing to take a gamble on are jobs that pay too little for it to
be worth her showing up at all. Hence SSI. Sure, maybe you could work at Walmart for $7
an hour but they don't offer benefits so ultimately, what's the point? A rich guy may think
he pays his Mexican housekeeper good money, but the fact is if Juanita doesn't show up one
Tuesday morning he doesn't miss a step, which is why he was willing to hire her. You send
the suits to tell him he has to hire her legally, pay her wage taxes and offer her health
benefits and still take the risk she doesn't show up and he'll release the doberman on you
and just hire four high school kids to each work a block of two hours a month. Is that fine
with you? Then go see what Juanita's next step is.

All of this comes down to a very important point: the country's economy understands these
issues on an unconscious level, and it has created a system to absorb 10% of the
unemployment, i.e. pay them off so they don't riot, exactly like Saudi Arabia buys off its
people. Yes, America is a Petrostate, but instead of oil money it's T-bills. However, as is
evident throughout history, rich white people riot too, hell, they'll overthrow a King because
the rum prices fell too much or shoot a President because he wanted a third term; and
they'll for damn sure John Galt the Senate if they think poor people are getting free
handouts, so the system pretends to offer benefits based on medical disability, just as it
pretends on your behalf to be appalled by Mexican illegal immigration even as every
restaurant in Arizona employs illegals, and everyone knows it, including the politicians and
the Minutemen who eat at every restaurant in Arizona, not to mention California, not to
mention America. Dummy, the sign says "Authentic Mexican Food"--oh, never mind.

For fun, let me point that that another 10% of the unemployed in America are relabeled as
"incarcerated", so total you have a real rate of 15-20% unemployment, and this does not
include the unemployable who have been relabeled as "military personnel" thanks to two
endless wars, or those who manage ten hours a week at the Buy-n-Large who are relabeled
as employed and thus are of no consequence; all of which is good because if the
unemployment rate printed higher than "9%" the credit rating of the US would have to fall
to C-. "But you need at least a 3.0 in your major to graduate." There's your grade
inflation.

Psychiatry is the unsuspecting but intentional handmaiden of this process. Never once
thinking it was being pulled into a long con, it self-righteously accepted its grownup label as
"medical specialty" and began ostentatiously fighting for "mental health parity" and the
Medicaid funds that it thinks it deserves, "we care about patients, about people!" And it
comforted itself with the knowledge that 25 medications and nine academic journals must
signify they are scientists, which means that all my Foucaltian ranting couldn't possibly
apply to them. And yet, here we are. Dr. Balt is obviously earnest and even optimistic
when he tries to articulate cause and solution to these social issues, and he's to be
commended for seeing through the Fog Of Prozac; but, lamentably, he is too late for change
to come from within psychiatry. Note that-- and this is neither an exception nor a criticism
of him-- even though he sees this truth he cannot stop, he can't refuse to participate, and
neither can I, or the other psychiatrists who are eyeballs deep in a system none of us
conceived yet all of us are responsible for. The system has been vaccinated against dissent.

I can sense you pulling away from my abstractions, "that's all very clever and all that, but
how does it actually work in real life?" This is what I'm trying to tell you: it doesn't work in
real life. It only works in theory.
He closes, "Using psychiatric labels to help patients obtain taxpayers' money, unless
absolutely necessary and legitimate, is wasteful and dishonest." Maybe, but if you change
the system he will lose 100% of his "patients"; and never mind him, you do not want to
know how the system will relabel the patients when that happens, or who will be in charge
of that relabeling. I am sure he will not believe me. Fortunately for him, he will never
have to find out.

IV.

And this brings us to the essence of the problem, of all of the social policy problems that we
currently face. "How did this happen? How did it get so bad?" The answer is that it has
always been this bad. We didn't care.

Narcissism has been on a steady rise since the end of WWII and went parabolic in the
1980s; all social policies have to be understood in the context of that psychology, that
culture. Hence SSI isn't altruistic but narcissistic, its every (no sic) purpose was not to
serve others but to serve us.

Stop thinking of SSI as money. SSI isn't taxed, and if you recall the First Law of Harbors,
"taxation=representation": not taxing them is the same as not giving them representation.
So for $700/month they don't call you to account for all the rest of the money. "Yeah, but
don't they vote?" HA! You kill me. I meant actual representation: lobbyists.

As long as they-- and the inmates and the etc-- are munching on food stamps, weed, and
Xboxes, nearly illiterate but keeping their nonsense within their neighborhoods, the rest of
us can go on with our lives. Which means that every unconscious force exists to keep this
state of affairs going until we no longer need it. And if that requires printing money or
releasing oil reserves to keep prices down or insisting there's a shortage of psychiatrists,
"how about some NPs?", so be it, because the system must be preserved, including and
especially at the expense of the future. It's a popular political refrain that Social Security
will soon be bankrupt, but that's meaninglessly obfuscating: it won't be around for the kids
when they grow up because it wasn't for them, it was for the people who were around
when it was conceived. There was never any way it could last forever, no credible way
of funding it-- especially the moment productivity went parabolic compared to wages.
 ! you don't have to be a labor theorist to
recall what else went parabolic at the same time

Don't say that taxes needed to be higher because it was never about funding it, it was
always about temporarily buying their apathy. Truth be told, it stayed solvent longer than it
was supposed to-- one of the benefits of having a reserve currency, aka a private meth lab.
But you knew that, didn't you? Temporary measures, just like a psychiatry that is for the
"management of acute symptoms"-- or are you going to tell me you expect/want it to look
like this in 30 years? Then why is it like this now? And so this is the terrible, awful truth of
it all: we created the system only for us, and will last for as long, but only as long, as we
are alive, and that was as far as anyone ever thought it out. That means that any kids
under 10, rich and poor, will be left to make do with rubble-- on purpose. That's what
they will inherit from the Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History of The World,
who say with not the least bit of irony, "may as well spend it because you can't take it with
you!" No kidding. You've created a gigantic Ponzi scheme which is not just morally sketchy
but downright mean to your kids, but what do you care: you'll be dead.

In some Bible story Ford Prefect warns the humans, "two million years you've got and that's
it, at the end of that time your race will be dead" and he meant it as a fait accompli but that
was a guy who took the long view; and when the response came back with a soothing
smile, "well, still time for a few more baths!" that was a guy also taking the long view, the
difference being his long view was exclusively to justify his present frivolity. It should be no
surprise that this second guy's brilliant solution to a fiscal crisis was to call leaves legal
tender and then burn down all the forests. They didn't survive the winter. But the warning
I offer the younger generations who have to clean up our messes even without the benefit
of forests or a functioning psychiatry is what consequently happened to the first guy: he
went mad. It is inevitable.

----

Previously: The Terrible, Awful, Truth About SSI

 !

SEPTEMBER 2, 2011
"What should I say/do to my son after this happened to him?"

count

From Ask Reddit:

I'm a single parent living with my 15 year old son. On Sunday a classmate of his died. (I will
not say how or where as the last thing I want to do is bring the parents more grief by me
posting it all over the internet.) I didn't know the girl personally but she was in most of my
sons classes to my knowledge. He was very shaken when he heard the news, which is to be
presumed but he has not talken to me since the incedent, he has stayed in his room since
sunday night, I leave his dinners at the door.
Today while looking at the girls facebook, which is crowded with messages, I saw a post
made by my son.
I have never told this to anyone but I have had a massive crush on you since the seventh grade. This
was the year I was going to ask you out. I hate myself because I didn't ask you sooner and I miss you so
much. Goodbye.
I had no idea he felt this way about her as he has never told me. I am starting to think he is
depressed. I keep trying to talk to him but he wont reply. Should I get a psychiatrist for
him. I honestly have no idea on how to deal with this. Please help.

Edit
Im sorry to say that he did the same thing as before, he closed the door before I could
speak. Thank you for all the coments but I am really stuck now.
I know people are saying that I am prying into his life too much, but I need to know if he is
going to her burial.
Just for clarity, I am his father
Edit Again
Hes going to the funeral. I heard his door close and there was a note at the door. "I am
going to the funeral, if you are at work, I will bike there. I will not miss it."
Edit Its about 3 am here, I walked into his room about an hour ago. I just wanted to see
him agian to be honest. He was on his bed sleeping. The room was covered in tisues. His
eyes were bright red from rubbing them.
I was going up to tuck him in when he siad "What is it dad" I was taken back that he was
awake and even hearing him was a shock. I told him that I will drive him to the funeral if he
wants and that he should get some sleep. He asked about work, I siad that doesnt matter. I
kissed him goodnight then left.
I think we had a breakthrough.

II.

These are the four "Best" comments:

Time. Too much interference an attention during a normal grieving process can be damaging (see
studies on the negative effects of debriefing therapies post-trauma). Be there, but let him be. I would
only start to worry if his grades drop, and he continues to isolate himself (I'm talking months later). He
will probably benefit greatly from attending the funeral and connecting with peers there.
● PhD student in clinical psych

--

I think sending him to a psychiatrist would make him feel like there is something wrong with him.
Losing someone special always takes time. Whenever you see him give him a good hug. Tell him he can
always come talk to you whenever he needs to, but never force him to talk. He'll come to you when he's
ready, if he ever is.

--

I had a lot of friends die when I was growing up. Between junior high and the end of high school, the
count was closing in on two dozen. I'm not a psychologist or a counselor, but I went through a fair
amount of grief, so take this for what you will.
Everyone deals with grief differently, so it's hard to say how much time your son needs or how this will
affect him long-term. He needs to talk with someone--talking will be like letting poison from a wound--
but he has to decide when and to whom on his own terms. The key is to make sure he has opportunities.
I didn't have a great family growing up, nor did I have many friends. I was the outcast loner because we
moved to the school after cliques had formed and I didn't go to church, so I didn't have an instant social
connection with anybody. School counselors are usually worthless, and several of the people who died
were the ones I would talk with about serious matters. It was my chemistry teacher, late after school
one day when I stayed to make up a test, who decided to forget the test and just spend time talking with
me. We talked for over an hour and a half and then she drove me home, and that conversation did a lot
to get me through. Prior to that, I had spent 4+ months locked in my room, staring at a wall in the
mental equivalent of shock, just totally shut down. She was open to talking, and that was enough.
So be open to your son. Don't ever try to force him to talk, and don't force him to go to counseling if he
doesn't want. Just provide space and time, and maybe even awkward silences, to give him room to talk.
If he's crying, let him cry for as long as he needs. Don't tell him it's OK or that it'll be alright. Don't say a
damned thing. Just let him cry. Crying's like talking--it lets that poison out and can clean the soul a bit.
PM me if you want to Skype or something, as I'd be happy to talk more. After going through so much of
this stuff when I was younger, I really want to do what I can to help others going through the same
stuff. Let me know if I can be of any help.
--
Just let the kid grieve. Everyone needs time to let out all their emotions when someone the loved dies.
--
I lost a friend at about that age and I can tell you that 15 year old boys are primarily going to rely on
their peers to help them come to terms with this. Seeing that OP's son is a 15 year old in 2011, much of
that interaction is going to take place online and via cell phone.
The best thing OP can do is let him know your there to talk if he wants to (he won't, but it's still good to
hear) and make sure he's got enough minutes/texts on his phone.
--
And the "Best" comment (1061 votes):

It's only been two days since the girl died and he's clearly grieving. Just give him some time to come to
terms with it and let him know you're there when he's ready to talk about it.

III.

Here's the problem with that otherwise well intentioned advice: it isn't for the Dad, it is
about themselves.

The majority seem to think that the son is grieving a dead girl he had a crush on as if he
had a relationship with her, but all of this grief is over a girl he did NOT have a relationship
with. I suppose it is possible that he was desperately in love with her from afar, and that
her death has devastated him because he felt she was The One. But it's far more likely she
represented something to him that her death has either obliterated or made very real.

Note the manner of death isn't mentioned. Hmmm. Let's assume, oh, I don't know, it was a
suicide. How would that change our reading of the son's "grief" and his emotional
connection to her?

Furthermore, no one thought it relevant that this is a son being raised by his father ONLY. I
know we live in a post modern, nothing-is-remarkable period, but I'd like to suggest that
that is odd, 3% of kids odd; and that therefore his relationship to women, to certain types
of women, and to the loss of women, is probably of central but clearly unexplored
importance.

And: he posted publicly on facebook. It's not surprising he posted his grief on facebook, it's
surprising that he posted that he had a crush on her from afar on facebook. He's 15, right?
The age where you are too embarrassed to announce unrequited love? Which means he's
not telling her he likes her, he's telling everyone else a message that is encoded, "I was in
love with THIS girl."

"Just let him grieve", "just give him time" is not good advice, because you do not know the
context of this grief and most of what I am seeing tells me this is not normal grief. I could
be wrong.. Do you want to wait to find out?

So, Dad, if you are reading this:

If your wife died, you need to reach out to your son. If it can't be you, or it doesn't
work, you need to find someone else to work through, even if it is a school friend. Even if it
is the parent of a school friend. You cannot leave him to his own.

If your wife is alive (e.g. divorced) get her involved. Maybe there's a good reason not
to get her involved, but if there isn't a good reason not to, bring her in. Any aunts?
grandmothers? Sisters? Female friends of his?
If he's drinking, it's not good.

You're his father, not his friend. This may make a certain kind of conversation impossible,
fine, but you still have to represent a kind of man, a kind of strength and presence and
selflessness, "even if you do not want me I am here, permanently, no surprises" and you
reinforce that by constant, honest, non-contrived connections. You don't approach him as a
peer because you hope it will make a connection, you come at him as Dad. He can reject it,
but he needs you to be a Dad to reject. You don't/maybe can't make him feel better, but you
have to offer a foundation for his sadness-- "any lower than this and I'm here." (Tucking
him in and driving him to the funeral was great.)

And, Jesus, no more food at the door, are you Japanese?

IV.

But there's one more piece of information that makes this all more urgent.

Consider you are a 15 year old boy, grieving a potentiality that you loved, wondering where
that leaves you now. You have no place to express this loss, so you put it on facebook.

Now consider you are the father of such a boy, and you also have nowhere to turn, so you
turn-- to reddit. It may be normal for a boy to go to facebook, or a father to go to reddit,
but it is anything but coincidental that a father who is so out of ideas that he is even able to
have the thought to turn to reddit is raising a boy who who is similarly out of connections
and defaults to the pseudo-anonymity of facebook.

This is not a judgment against them, but you have to understand the context and the only
context we have are the words. The father never mentions any other human being except
his son and the girl. He does not mention talking to family, or teachers, or other kids. The
father is not depressed and yet still operates in a tiny universe of two people. The father
himself is Alone, isolated, struggling for a connection to someone and losing his only real
connection to another person. So how do you expect a depressed 15 year old to act?

Both of their universes used to have at least two extra people: the father used to have a
wife, the son used to have a mother, and now the son used to have a potential love. By my
count, the father lost 33% of the population of the universe, and the son lost 50%. No
wonder he's depressed.

Given this-- and, again, not a judgment, just a statement of fact-- given that they both
operate in universes with very few people in it, the father must force a connection to his
son. He cannot wait it out, he cannot give him his space, he cannot let him grieve alone in
his room for a month and let him come out of it on his own.

If forcing that drives his son in typical teenage fashion away from him into the arms of other
kids, good-- at least there are other people in his universe. But if that kid sadly drifts away
from his father, into isolation, he will have lost 100% of the population of his universe. It
will then be too late.

!
 AUGUST 31, 2011
The Wisdom Of Crowds Turns Into Madness

!
less independent than they think

In PNAS, an article which is intuitively obvious but terrifying to see played out in science.

The "Wisdom Of Crowds" concept is that the average guesses of a crowd will be closer to
the truth than a randomly selected individual guess.

The reason this works is that because the crowd has different individuals with different
types of systematic error, e.g. prejudices. With more individuals, the prejudices negate
each other.

The Swiss study took 144 college students and asked them a series of questions (population
of Switzerland, murder rate, etc). It recorded 5 consecutive guesses, as well as the
confidence for the first and last guess.

I.

The first interesting finding is that the crowd is sometimes so incredibly wrong that the
mean of their responses is just... really wrong. How many assaults were there in
Switzerland in 2006? 10? 100? 1000? 10000? 100000? Those are exponentially different
guesses, so an arithmetic mean could be way off, factors of ten off.

In such cases, a geometric mean is much closer to the correct answer. So, point number
one, when you are crowdsourcing, choose your mean/distribution appropriately.
!
II.

The diversity of guesses is quite large-- everyone comes to the question with their own
prejudices and errors.

But merely by giving the subjects access to the previous round's guesses-- either the mean
of the guesses ("aggregated information") or everyone's individual guess, the diversity
disappears and everyone's guesses begin to converge.
!
The first round the guesses were wildly disparate, but as everyone got to see the other
guesses, they converge remarkably.

Why did having the full information (all 12 people's individual guesses) seem to cause less
convergence than having the mean of their guesses? It didn't, really; but also because the
aggregate is only one number that you converge to; having 12 wildly disparate numbers to
converge to is harder. But by the third round, it hardly mattered-- a systematic bias had
been introduced into the crowd, which is ironic since it is systematic bias that the Wisdom
Of Crowds is supposed to negate. Moo.

III.

People following the herd would be boring but not disastrous, except for the other finding.

Since the guesses converge, since other people are converging with you and you can see
that, the confidence in these guesses goes up: a false belief of collective accuracy with no
increase in actual accuracy. "It's unanimous!" Yikes.

Also remember, these people weren't being given an expert's guess to converge to, just
other (regular) people's. As the authors point out, they didn't even attempt to measure
group leader effects, persuasion, talking heads on TV, or twitter.

This is not a trivial problem. It isn't just saying that the beliefs converge; it is saying that
since the beliefs converge along with greater confidence in their "truthfulness", it becomes
more difficult for any individual to not converge as well-- and feel confident about it.

If you do manage to run from the herd you have to climb a high wall. "Can so many people
be so wrong, yet so close together in their guesses? So wrong, yet so confident? Is
everyone insane?"

You can imagine the social implications of a highly energized crowd, or electorate, or laity,
or polity, or tax base, all converging on a "truth" of which they are supremely confident by
virtue of the fact that others believe the same (which is the result of similar convergence on
their part.) This is probably supercharged when you have a charismatic figurehead leading
convergence, and by "charismatic figurehead" I mean media; no one person came up with
this, everyone just knows it's true.

IV.

So much for the paper. Now consider the more general implications.

"Well, I'm going to be an independent thinker and not be affected by the herd and make my
own educated guess." No, you won't.

The moment you have the other people's guesses, you cannot shake that information. Your
"independent" guess necessarily includes that guess in some way, you can't unlearn it.
Either your guess converges towards the herd, or your guess is characterized as against the
herd. Either way, the herd affected your thinking in ways you don't realize. You're part of
the dialectic and you didn't even want to be. That you don't want to be part of it ensures
you are part of it.

The existence of the convergence of ideas, knowing that a convergence exists, either
attracts further groupthink, or sets up a second groupthink in opposition to the first.
Groupthink certainly reinforces one idea; and it can cause the setting up of a second large
idea in opposition, but it makes a third independent idea highly unlikely (unless, again, it
forms in opposition to ideas 1 or 2.)

In other words, in cases where social influence is impossible to avoid, the wisdom of crowds
becomes the madness of crowds even for those who disagree with the crowd. All it takes is
one idiot with a megaphone.

---

How to use your own inherent narcissism to guess more accurately

The special circumstance which causes the wisdom of crowds to fail

AUGUST 24, 2011

Can The Court Force Treatment on Jared Loughner?

my attorney has advised me to punch you

Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 18 other people, which
immediately suggested that he was a right wing nutjob, but, apparently, he was actually
psychotic, which is ok because Webster's says those are synonyms.

He was found not competent to stand trial. This means his trial is postponed until his
mental illness resolves enough for him to: understand the charges against him; participate
meaningfully in his own defense; control his behavior in court; etc. See that last "etc?"
That's the part that allows courts to do anything they want to you.

Loughner, however is refusing to take antipsychotic medication to get better. A more

accurate restating of that sentence would be, "it is extremely likely that Loughner's attorney
is refusing to allow him to be medicated, with the hope that trial is postponed forever, or at
least until the attorney comes up with a really awesome defense, or people forget who
Loughner is."

Let's Michael Foucault this whole discussion and recall that psychiatry is a medical specialty
that is also used to set social policy.

Practically, this means that if the court wants to medicate Loughner against his will, they
can. There is a legal process to follow, but it is simple and straightforward and completely
not in any kind of dispute.

There should be no issue.

II.

So I was surprised to read that the American Psychiatric Association and the American
Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, through Paul Appelbaum, filed an amicus curiae brief in
support of forced medication. Why? Isn't this a non-issue?

In fact, there are two reasons you can forcibly medicate (only) prisoners. The first is Sell v.
US: you can force antipsychotics for the purpose of restoring the defendant to competency
to stand trial.

The second reason is Washington V. Harper, which allows forced medication of psychotic
prisoners in the situation where they were dangerous to themselves or others.

So, again, I was confused. What's the debate?

The APA's brief had two purposes:

1. "When the courts address issues concerning psychiatric disorders, we want them to have
accurate data on the nature and consequences of those illnesses and on appropriate
treatments." The reason antipsychotics have traditionally been disallowed is because, as in
Sell, there are significant irreversible side effects (tardive dyskinesia) that may outweigh the
benefits. So the APA wants to update the court on the real risks, especially of the atypicals.

2. Sit down:

The second key issue the brief addressed was the importance of permitting authorities who have custody
of a defendant to make decisions of forcible medication without having to go through a time-consuming
judicial hearing on the matter.
The brief pretends that the issue is unscrupulous lawyers keeping their poor psychotic
clients psychotic forever, to their great distress, just to avoid trial. Appelbaum would like
Harper to be the standard; Sell is too bureaucratic.

In addition, we believe psychiatrists working in correctional facilities need the flexibility to deal with
dangerous persons without the delay involved in lengthy court proceedings.
The APA assumes that treatment decisions should fall to psychiatrists, but it seems not to
appreciate that these are psychiatrists in prisons who work for the government. There is
massive, gargantuan pressure on psychiatrists to medicate and commit and diagnose
inmates for all kinds of legal reasons. Harper may seem like the more psychiatrist-friendly
standard, but it isn't. You want the standard to be Sell, because you want a way to avoid
the pressure from the government.

The Loughner case is misleading because he is mentally ill and dangerous, but the APA
wants to massage Harper to focus on the dangerousness. Here's a more typical example:
the defendant is a violent rapist who has significant personality disorder but no clear
psychosis ("no Axis I pathology.") He punched his lawyer. Now what? You commit him to
the psychiatric ward because he's incompetent to stand trial and forcibly medicate him
because he's dangerous. But he's not psychiatric! "Yes he is, it says it right there on the
commitment papers: Psychosis NOS." So you ask how he got that diagnosis, and of course
the answer is: we needed it to be able to forcibly medicate him.

I'm not going soft on rapists-- go ahead and sentence him to life. But don't send him to
psychiatry because you don't know what else to do with him.

Doctors are given considerable deference to use their judgment; they are given greater
latitude to violate a person's rights. The government will use the back door of the doctor's
privilege to get what it wants. It is inevitable.

The issue is not whether psychiatrists should medicate people who are obviously psychotic
and dangerous-- you don't need an APA amicus curiae brief for that. The issue is whether
you want to force all prison psychiatrists to be responsible for the "treatment" of every
violent person out there, simply because they are "dangerous."

The APA has always wanted the answer to be yes. And here, again, they do not understand
the consequences of this. I can thus say, according to the strictest definition of the term,
that the APA is completely insane.

Miscellany:

1. In the Harper case, the American Psychological Association filed an amicus curiae brief
in support of Harper, i.e. that forcible medication without a hearing violated the due process
and equal protection clauses. You are welcome to explore the disparity between the APAs.

2. Harper does not apply to civilians. You can force hospitalization on a guy for being
dangerous and psychiatric, but you cannot force treatment on him without a court order.
You can lock him down, but you cannot touch him.
If a psychotic diabetic patient whose sugar is life threateningly high is refusing insulin
because aliens tell him to, upon psychiatric review you can force insulin on him, but you still
can't force antipsychotics on him because the insulin is necessary to his survival and the
antipsychotics are not.

We know that psychosis takes a few days to improve, even if the right dose/drug is hit on
immediately. The fact that it takes days to work means you can't argue they are life saving,
so you can't get past the need for a court order.

I will point out that even though what I've written is true, psychiatrists still routinely force
medication on people, in jails and in hospitals. They're doing it for noble reasons, and I
don't fault them, but it's important to know where the line is before you cross it. And, as
importantly, it is far preferable that a doctor violate the law in order to do what's best for a
patient, then it is for the government to sneak past people's civil rights by hiding inside
their doctors' white coats.

--

Competency to be executed

Then I change my mind: Competency to be executed II

AUGUST 19, 2011

What To Do About Sexy High School Girls Having A Slumber Party

!
wait, that's not sexy
A case, the summary of which is everywhere:

During another sleepover, T.V. took a picture of M.K. and another girl pretending to kiss each other. At
a final slumber party, more pictures were taken with M.K. wearing lingerie and the other girls in
pajamas. One of these pictures shows M.K. standing talking on the phone while another girl holds one of
her legs up in the air, with T.V. holding a toy trident as if protruding from her crotch and pointing
between M.K.'s legs. In another, T.V. is shown bent over with M.K. poking the trident between her
buttocks. A third picture shows T.V. positioned behind another kneeling girl as if engaging in anal sex.
In another picture, M.K. poses with money stuck into her lingerie - stripper-style.
And up to facebook went the pictures; and the school got involved; and the court got
involved; and now I got involved.

Important to the story, these high school girls were volleyball players. Not important to the
story, but featured in every one anyway, is that they were cheerleaders. We get it. They're
white.

The judge ruled that the pictures were protected under the First Amendment, which is fine,
but then said this, which is weird:

I wish the case involved more important and worthwhile speech on the part of the students, but then of
course a school's well-intentioned but unconstitutional punishment of that speech would be all the more
regrettable.

Why wish that? If it was more important and worthwhile, we wouldn't really have a
controversy. The importance of the law is in these cases that don't have worth or
importance.

II.

The set up is one of free speech, but there's a different game in play.

The judge explained that it isn't true that just any old photo/speech is protected, but speech
that is "intended to convey a particular message" "understood by those" who would view it.
In this case: this is funny(message) to the people on my facebook page who would
understand that it was funny.

The fact that adult school officials may not appreciate the approach to sexual themes the girls displayed
actually supports the determination that the conduct was inherently expressive.
This is where free speech gets really interesting, when it bumps against generational mores.
The only thing "bad" about the speech was that the school officials didn't like it. Nothing
else. Is that enough to allow the school to shut the kids down? No.

But what about the argument that the pictures affected the school or other girls by causing
"divisiveness?" Isn't this kind of like harassment, or bullying, or intimidation, even if it is
not as bad? Wouldn't the "pure" girls feel reluctant to play volleyball with a team of sluts?

Petty disagreements among players on a team... is utterly routine. This type of unremarkable
dissension does not establish disruption with the work or discipline of the team or the school...Consider,
for example. [the case in which] getting a phone call from a disgruntled parent, and evidence that a
student temporarily refused to go to class and that five students missed some undetermined portion of
their classes... did not rise to the level of a substantial disruption.
In other words, get over it. If you don't meet these girls in school you'll meet them in
college or in their 30s in Indianapolis (the whole city is horny.) The fact that you have to
avoid them or deal with them or sleep with them or argue with them is mostly your
problem. I sympathize, sure, and I'm happy to help, but it's still your problem. You can't
change other people, even if they are wrong.

III.

But wait a second: how did the school even see the pictures? Take a moment and come up
with an answer.

...a parent brought printouts of the photographs to the [Superintendent]... The parent reported that the
images... were causing "divisiveness" among the girls on the volleyball team... Separately, but on the
same day... the principal was contacted by a second concerned parent, one who happened to work at the
school as an athletic department secretary.

The school has a problem, and it isn't high schoolers wrestling with their hormones. The
school is infested with rats.

The true social implications of this case aren't about the girls' behavior, but the parents'. To
what extent are they allowed to impose their values on their kids, and, separately, what is
the proper structure to impose these values?

This popular reading of this case is that the school (i.e. government) doesn't have the right
to reach into the private home and control the speech of students, but that evades the
important cause of this case: the parents want the government to control the kids because
they aren't willing to do it. See? It's not just black kids. Parents all over the U.S. have
checked out, can't be bothered and anyway don't really know how to bother. How can I
explain to my daughter that this is bad? I know: Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. School
Dist. Yeah. That'll show her.

The way it should have worked is that one concerned mother calls the other mother, and
she opens up with, "I just want to bring something to your attention" or "Jesus, do you
know what your wenchy daughter is up to?!" and they work it out and stuff gets handled,
and if it doesn't it gets kicked to the fathers, who freak out on their daughters and then
reluctantly agree to talk to the other father about it and settle it once and for all, and if that
doesn't work they can agree to meet in the Woolworth's and Woolco parking lot and punch
each other like girls. I recognize this is all quite sexist, but that's the way it should have
gone down. That's the way it has always gone down.

But the parents couldn't handle this as parents, i.e. as the ultimate arbiter of a controversy,
because they are not practiced at being the ultimate anything. Stripped of all power as
children, and never given either power or responsibility, they drowned in freedom and
looked for a practical solution to their existential crisis: everything always has a higher
authority. Call the school, call the cops, call the government. The joke used to be, "hey,
lady, don't make a federal case out of it!" but that's no longer a joke, it's the preferred
method.

The idiocy of such parents is mind boggling, certainly, but even more compounded by the
message that it sends to their own kids: higher authorities always exist for everything.
Just not God. That's for stupid people.
 !

AUGUST 15, 2011

Grade Inflation

!
speculate on the use of a Tardis

Today we're going to talk about the causes of grade inflation. "Wait, is this going to be on
the test?"

You're a professor and you grade the paper a C. The next day Type A Personality Only Child
comes up on you, "how is this a C? I answered the question correctly, didn't I?" Yes, but
you write like a nine year old, 80% of this is the syntactical equivalent of "umm" and
"ahhh", and many of your sentences are minimally altered passages right from Wikipedia.
"But this is a history class. Why are you grading my writing style?"

There's really no good way for a professor to respond to this nut. The depth of his stupidity
precludes any explanation from being meaningful; he will not be able to understand that the
writing is a reflection of the rigor of the ideas which is a reflection of the knowledge of the
material and etc. So you give him an A and head to a strip bar. I sympathize.

Two explanations are commonly offered for grade inflation-- and let me clarify that the
grade inflation people complain about is the kind that happens in the introductory survey
courses. No one worries about grade inflation in the 400 level thermodynamics class. 1.
Universities don't incentivize teaching, they incentivize research, so the teaching suffers. 2.
Students are drunken idiots. While both have merit, let's see if there isn't another
explanation that shrewdly protects the unconscious of most of the players..

II.

Here's a nice graph:

!
The only surprising thing to me about this graph is nothing. Since no one over 90 is reading
this, let's focus on 1986. What happened in 1986 that changed the grading trend?

Generation X went to college, that's what. Coincidentally, psychological researchers

Twenge et al found that that was the year narcissism on campus began to rise:
!
And by "coincidentally" I mean "not coincidentally." It's hard to tell a growing population of
narcissists that their schoolwork blows, so you don't: A. Makes sense.

Most people stop their analysis right there, but you should really go the extra three steps
and not just pee in the sink: now those students are 40. They grew up to be the Dumbest
Generation of Narcissists In The History of the World, so narcissistic that not only are they
dumb, but they do not know how dumb they are and cannot be told how dumb they are.
They are aware that there are things they don't know, but they are certain that they have at
least heard of everything that's worth knowing. Whenever the upper management guys at
Chronicle Of Higher Education or The National Review pretend to disagree about the
"classics" or "Great Books" or the "value of a liberal education," after five minutes it
becomes clear that even they haven't read all those books, or most of them, or even a
respectable minority, or three. They've read about them, ok, that's what America does, but
when you finally pin them down and they admit they haven't read it-- which would be fine--
their final response is of the form "there's no point in reading Confessions now since we've
all moved beyond that." Oh. And those are supposed to be the smart ones; everyone else
in the generation thinks that the speed at which they can repeat the words they heard on
TV or read on some magazine's website is evidence of their understanding.

II.

Which brings me to the main point, the other cause of grade inflation that no one ever talks
about: in order for a grade to be inflated, a professor has to inflate it. In other words,
grade inflation isn't the student's fault, it is the professor's fault. A kid can complain and
whine/wine all he wants, but unless that professor buckles, there's no grade inflation. So
the starting point has to be: why does a professor inflate a grade?

Yikes. Now that shudder you're feeling is not only why you never thought it, but how it is
possible no one else ever brought it up? The answer is: every discussion about grade
inflation has been dominated by educators.

The "college is a scam" train is one on which I'm all aboard, but that doesn't mean each
individual professor has to be scamming students; there's no reason why he can't do a good
job and teach his students something that they aren't going to get simply by reading the
text. If a student can skip class and still ace the class, the kid is either very bright or the
professor is utterly useless. Right? Either way, the kid's wasting his money.
And I know every generation thinks the one coming up after it is weaker and stupider, that's
normal. But why would a professor who thinks college kids are dumb turn around and
reward the King Of Beers with an A?

The answer is right in the chart and in a book by Allan Bloom that most college professors
have read about. When that professor who was 40 in1986 was back in college in 1966, he
was part of a culture that believed there are no "wrong answers, only wrong questions", like
"you really think we should we stop shaving?" or "should we listen to something other than
CCR?" And meanwhile the rate of As doubled. So now you have to put up your money: if
you believe that grade inflation at that time masks/causes a real shallowness of intellect and
education, then those students, now professors, simply aren't as smart as they think they
are. Unless you also believe that bad 60s music and even worse pot somehow augmented
their intellect.

And if you accept my thesis that narcissism prevents insight because it is urgently and
vigorously self-protecting, then these same professors are not aware of their deficits. They
think they know the material they are teaching simply because they are teaching it.

The problem is they are grading your papers and they do not know how to value a paper.
Of course they can tell an A+ essay and they can tell an F- essay, but they are pretty foggy
on everything in between. But they do not realize they are foggy. They think the problem is
"the students complain." So they judge essays in comparison to others in the class or they
fall back on the usual heuristics: page length, sentence complexity, and "looks like you put
a lot of work into it."

And worse-- much worse, given that they are supposed to be educators-- they have no idea
how to take a so-so student and make him better; what, specifically, they should get him to
do, because they themselves were similarly mediocre students who got inflated As. Do you
think they got their A in freshman analytic philosophy and said to themselves, "Jesus, I
know I really didn't deserve this A, I better go back and try and relearn all this stuff." No:
they went ahead and got jobs in academia, so that when a student comes to them asking,
"how can I do better?" they can respond, "You need to apply yourself." Idiot. The system
is broken. You broke it.

III.

Here's an example. Say your essay question is, "describe the causes of the American Civil
War." Ok, so far everything the kid knows he learned from Prentice Hall, but something
inside him thinks the answer is: LABOR COSTS. Hmmm. Insightful and unexpected, let's
see what he does with it.

But there's not much he can do with it, there aren't many obvious resources to pursue this
"feeling" he has. He does what he can. It's not that good. C. Grade inflation gives him a
B.

Meanwhile, Balboa the el ed major searches carefully in his textbook and discovers the
cause was... SLAVERY. He airlifts two sentences each out of five other books, asks for an
extension because his grandmother died, adds nine hundred filler words including "for all
intensive purposes" and "he could care less", and then waits in the parking lot to threaten
you with "but this is a history class. Why are you grading my writing style?" He gets an A.

The problem is that the first kid is strongly disincentivized from pursuing his idea, from
becoming a better thinker, in very specific ways.
First, and obviously, since the majority of the students are going to get an A, he just has to
do just as well/horrifically as the average student, and if they're all writing about slavery
with the enthusiasm of a photocopier then if he wants an A he better buckle down and learn
the truly useful skill of masking the words of a Wikipedia page.

Second, he is very nervous about offering a professor anything that he didn't hear the
professor explicitly mention, let alone endorse. What if it's "wrong?"

Third, because grading an essay is subjective, all professors try to make it objective by
attributing value to measurable quantities which are actually stupid. For example: in most
undergrad classes, the bibliography counts for 5%, maybe even 10%. How you (that's
right, I said "how you") going to pad a bibliography with six sources when you can't even
find one to support your thesis? So the pursuit of an interesting thesis is blocked by the 5%
of the grade that comes from something that should count for exactly -20% of your grade,
i.e. if you have a bibliography, you're a jerk.(1) This false value has two consequences: it
"pads" the grade (e.g. the student already starts with an easy +5-30%) so it is easier for
him to get an A. But more importantly, it is now easy for the professor to justify giving him
an A. "His content wasn't that great, but the points added up; and besides: what the hell
would I tell him to improve?"

I can't emphasize that last part enough-- the cause of the ridiculous grading is not the
complaining of students but the convenience of the professor.

This is why if you are in a class and you feel the need to ask, "how many pages does this
have to be?" and rather than look at you like you just just sneezed herpes on his face he
instead has a ready answer, you are wasting your money. I get that you need the degree, I
understand the system, but you're wasting your money nevertheless.

IV.

Take a quick scan of what these academics consider the highest level of academic
scholarship: read their own journals. Here are the first three paragraphs of the first article
("Terrorism and The American Experience: A State Of The Field") in the temporally
coincident month's Journal of American History, and I expect you to read none of them:

In 1970, just months before his death, the historian Richard Hofstadter called on U.S. historians to
engage the subject of violence. For a generation, he wrote, the profession had ignored the issue,
assuming that consensus rather than conflict had shaped the American past. By the late 1960s, with
assassinations, riots, and violent crime at the forefront of national anxieties, that assumption was no
longer tenable. Everywhere, Americans seemed to be thinking and talking about violence, except within
the historical profession. Hofstadter urged historians to remedy their "inattention" and construct a
history of violence that would speak to both the present and the past.1
Over the last four decades, the historical profession has responded to that challenge. Studies of racial
conflict, territorial massacres, gendered violence, empire, crime and punishment, and war and memory
make up some of the most esteemed books of the past generation. Yet on the subject of "terrorism," the
form of violence that currently dominates American political discourse, historians have had
comparatively little to say. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, a handful of conferences have
addressed historical aspects of terrorism, from its nineteenth-century origins to its impact on state
building and national identity. Scholarly journals (including the Journal of American History) have
devoted the occasional special issue to examining terrorism's roots and present-day implications.
Within the historical profession, several book-length works have taken up episodes of terrorism,
examining the production of both violence and state repression. Social scientists and journalists have
offered sweeping global histories, tracing the problem of terrorism from antiquity to the present.2
As a result, we have a better understanding of terrorism's history than we did a decade ago, but it
would be hard to classify this surge of work as a flourishing subfield or even a coherent historiography.
Almost a decade out from 9/11, most U.S. historians remain hard-pressed to explain what terrorism is,
how and when it began, or what its impact has been. There is little consensus about how best to
approach the subject or even whether to address it at all. This is partly because the issue poses knotty
political questions: How do we talk about terrorism without reinforcing the "war on terror" or lapsing
into hopeless presentism? It also brings serious methodological problems: Is terrorism a word to be
traced through centuries of semantic permutation? Is it an epithet to be applied to forms of violence we
do not like? Is it a concept to be defined, however loosely, and followed through time?
Like any project that takes its cue from current affairs, constructing a historiography of terrorism
requires caution and a light touch...

If a student wrote this I'd punch him in the bladder and get a good defense lawyer, assault
charges be damned. I've deliberately avoided the easy targets like the po-mo journals; this
is "the leading scholarly publication and the journal of record in the field of American
history" and the author goes on like this for 20 pages. Can you trust this professor to
grade an undergrad paper? The first two paragraphs are filler, meaningless noise in the
guise of a sophisticated introduction. Maybe she can tell an A+ and she can tell an F-, I
have no idea, but is she in any position to know a C from a B? And help you improve? Do
you want to write like her? If you had questions about the history of terrorism, or
terrorism, or history, would you call her?

I picked her because she was at random, but the same forces apply ubiquitously: academic
journals are long, boring, poorly written academic-ese that no one reads because whatever
insights or information they possess are buried in...the syntactical equivalent of "umms" and
"ahhs." Even those who theoretically need journals to do their jobs every day (e.g. lawyers
and doctors) avoid them.

Apart from boycotting any classes taught by these people I don't know what the solution is.
Some professors cleverly include a "class participation" grade, and these professors pride
themselves on using "the Socratic method." Sigh. Asking random students random
questions is not the Socratic method, it's annoying, In order for it to be a true Socratic
method, the professor would have to ask the student to state a thesis, get him to agree to a
number of assumptions, and then masterfully show, through dialogue, how that agreement
undermined his own thesis. In other words, the professor would have to have considerable
fluency with his topic and be interested in each individual student, as an individual. Good
luck with that. (2)

V.

If you reconsider grade inflation not as a function of the quality of the output but rather as
the result of a hesitating lack of confidence about what constitutes good quality-- and again,
I'm talking not about A+ and F- but the differences between the B and C levels where most
"good" students are; and accept that, simply as a numerical reality, these "average"
students are then the ones who (likely with the assistance of grade inflation) go on to
become future academics, then a number of phenomena suddenly make a lot of sense. And
the most important one is the one that students have long suspected but never dared say
out loud: professors do not know the material they are teaching, but they think they do.

An American History professor may be considered somewhat of an expert because he's been
teaching the Civil War for the past 15 years, but he's only been repeating what he knew 15
years ago for 15 years. And every year he forgets a little. How carefully is he keeping up
with it-- especially if his "research interests" happen to lie elsewhere?
I know doctors who have been giving the same receptor pharmacology lectures to students
for a decade. I know they are narcissists, not just because they are too apathetic to keep
up with the field, but because it never occurred to them that receptor pharmacology might
have advanced in ten years. They believe that what they knew ten years ago is enough.
They are bigger than the science. These aren't just some lazy doctors in community
practice, these are Ivy League physicians responsible for educating new doctors with new
information. Yet the Power Point slides say 2001. "Well, I'm just teaching them the basics."
How do you know those are still the basics? Who did you ask?

You think you philosophy professor re-reads Kant every year? The last time he did was in
graduate school-- when his brain was made of graduate student and beer. Think about this.
Hecko, has he even lately read about Kant? Do you think he tries, just to stay sharp, to
take a current event and see what Kant might say about it? No, same notes on a yellow
legal pad from Reagan II. Does he "know" Kant because he's been "teaching Kant" for 20
years? When in his life is he "challenged" by someone else who "knows" Kant? Seriously,
think about this. For two decades the hardest questions he's been asked come from
students, and he's been able to handle them like a Jedi. How could he not think of himself
as an expert?

The sclerosis of imagination and intellect that inevitably happens over time will make it
impossible for him to grade a paper that does not conform to his expectations. I don't
mean it agrees with the professor, I mean his expectations of what a good paper looks like.
Students already have a phrase for this: "What he likes to see in the paper is..."

So when it comes time to write a paper about Kant, it is infinitely less important that he
understand Kant then it is for him to understand what the professor thinks is important
about Kant-- and it is way easier to get through college this way. And if you have the
misfortune of being taught Kant by a guy whose "research interests" are not Kant, forget it.
You're getting an A, and he hates you.

VI.

This stuff matters, it has real consequences. When one narcissistic generation sets up the
pieces for the next generation, and you put the rooks in the middle and leave out the
bishops and hide one of the knights, and then you tell the kids that they lack the
intelligence or concentration to really learn chess, you have to figure they're not going to
want to pay for your Social Security. Just a thought.

Also: TAs are helping grade some of the papers, and some is worse than all. In order to
ensure grading consistency, the essay answer has to be structured in a format that
facilitates grading-- because if the professor can't value a B form a C, how can a TA? So the
answer must mirror the six points in the textbook or the four things mentioned in class.
This, again, means you shouldn't spend any time learning, you should spend it gaming the
essay. So if the essay question is, "Discuss some of the causes of the Iraq War" you can
be dead sure that "some" means specifically the ones the professor thinks are important.
There may be others, but you're taking a big risk mentioning them. The TAs are just
scanning for keywords. As long as they're in there, even in grammatically impossible
constructions, you win. A. (3)

VII.

Here's one solution: abandon grades.

"But we have to have some way of objectively evaluating students!"

Haven't you been listening? You can't just suck the Red Pill like a Jolly Rancher, you have to
swallow it. Grades aren't objectively measuring people, the whole thing is a farce. The
grades are meaningless. Not only do they not measure anything, but the manner in which
they are inflated precludes real learning. Stop it.

"Some grades aren't inflated." But how would anyone on the outside know? Can you tell
them apart? The long term result will be: bad money drives out good money.

"Well, I earned my As." No you didn't, that's the point. I'm not saying you're not smart or
didn't work hard, I'm saying you have no idea how good or bad you are, you only think you
do.

"Just pass/fail? But how will employers know a good student from a bad student?" Again,
you are avoiding the terrible, awful truth because it is too terrible and too awful: when
employers look at a GPA, they don't know anything. The 3.5 they are looking at is
information bias, it not only contains no information, it deludes you into thinking you
possess information. You can't erase that 3.7 from your mind. In what classes, in what
levels, against what curve? Just because employers do it doesn't mean it's useful. They
use sexual harassment videos, too.

Grades do not only offer incorrect evaluations of a student's knowledge, they perpetuate the
fiction that professors are able to evaluate. They can't. Again, they may be able to tell an
A+ and an F-, but a B+ from a B? Really? That's the level of their precision? But a
professor cannot ever admit that he doesn't have that precision, because it cannot enter his
consciousness that he doesn't. "I've been teaching this class for 15 years." And I'm sure it
gets easier every year.

VIII.

Speaking of Iraq: on the eve of the Iraq War many Americans got together to demonstrate.
I'm not in the protest demographic, the only way I'm going to be at a march is if there's
alcohol, but I accept the fact that a protest is sometimes the only way to be heard and the
last resort against a government that has forsaken you. I get it. Ok. So I'm watching the
protests on TV, and a lot of people quite obviously don't want to go to war, and want it
stopped at all costs. And I see a group of people with signs walking behind a long banner,
and the signs and the banner say, basically, "UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS AGAINST THE
WAR."

I've no doubt that there wasn't a little bit of the old Vietnam nostalgia there, but what made
me furious was the signs. They actually believed that identifying themselves as university
professors was helping the cause? Did they think Americans were going to slap their
foreheads, "wow, educated people are against the war, maybe I gots to rethinks this?" Yes,
that is exactly what they thought.

They could not see that they were sabotaging their own cause, that anyone ambivalent
about Iraq would either not think anything or be blinded by white rage, "look at these
mother--" and vote for Bush six more times. These professors were coming from such a
profoundly narcissistic stance that they didn't see this, or they didn't care. They may have
wanted to stop the war, but what was much, much, much, much, much more important was
to be identified as against the war, even if by doing that they were causing other people to
support the war.
Here's what TV didn't show: the next day, those professors went to their classes, taught a
bunch of anxious, restless but bored students stuff that they really had no business
teaching, and later asked them to write essays that could be graded essentially as multiple
choice questions so that they wouldn't really have to read them. If these professors didn't
realize or care that that they were violating their own principles about war merely to self-
identify, do you think they care about you? They have much bigger things to worry about.
A.

---
1. Bibliography, as distinct from references. Anyone who produces a Bibliography without
specific references as some sort of support of the truth of their idiocy is on notice. I'm
talking to you, DSM.

2. An interesting educational experiment would be to come at things form a negative

perspective. "Look, class, Hegel was a complete jerk, and his ideas were infantile pseudo-
buddhism garbage. I'll give 50 points and a candy bar to anyone who can explain to me
why." And see if that doesn't inspire the student to want to understand what Hegel was
trying to say. I don't know if this will work. I know that a disengaged professor saying that
Hegel is a great German philosopher and then reading lecture notes written back in 1986 on
a yellow legal pad very clearly doesn't work.

3. Here's an essay I'd love to read, hell, love to write: "There are numerous "established"
causes of the Iraq War, yet they almost always cite reasons that occurred after 1990.
Please watch the 1975 film Three Days of The Condor. Other than a Tardis, what
explanations could there be for director Sydney Pollack's ability to predict the future with
such accuracy? Please discuss some of the events of the late 1960s to early 1970s that
made the finale's prediction possible."

---

Also: Here is precisely one of these professors