Author Archives: oinsketta

Political pundits often suck ass

I sent this email to a friend just now, in response to a couple of political opinion pieces he’d sent me.

These are all good points that you raise. The US has the lowest rate of social mobility, people born in poverty becoming middle-class, of any wealthy country.  Privilege is perpetuated by law (as you say, they killed the Death Tax) and elite institutions, like Harvard, that are not available to any but the top recipients of an excellent education (and funds for public education are constantly being hijacked by Christians and others to pay for their private schools), or those whose families have a connection or are generous donors.  (Example, Jared Kushner, C yeshiva student, Harvard alum after felon dad Charles gives the school a few million shekels)

There are a lot of factors about why things are so fucked up and so demonically divided right now. Of course Fox is a huge and horrible one, for the reasons you describe.  It’s really grotesque how much influence one ninety year-old billionaire reptile can have on the media for the entire world.  Neither of these big picture articles about our current crisis (Mother Jones or Stephens) even so much as mentioned one of the scariest elephants in the partisan divided room:  the many-headed nightmare emanating from climate change, global warming, increasing deadly storms, sea level and ocean temperatures rising and ocean ecosystems desalinating as ice caps melt, drought, floods, wildfires and famine and eventually no food or living space for tens of millions, and then billions, displaced by rising sea levels and unlivable heat and turned into roving hordes of hungry on-the-move cannibals, and a final world war caused by scarcity of things like now monetized water.  Talk about a refugee crisis, they’ll probably decide to nuke these ravenous cannibal migrants. Talk about elites.

My problem with Bret Stephens is really the same problem I have with Mother Jones. They are pushing a thesis, motivated by an ideological position, so Stephens talks about these corrupt, cancelling, illiberal  radical left elites out of touch with the person who’s lost his job in middle America, completely disconnected from the millions of deaths of despair, and the murders, and the hopeless lives of millions of abused Americans, but he is also one of the same corrupt , out of touch elites, being a respected opinion writer for the New York Times.  Both he and the Mother Jones writer resort to simplified arguments that leave out nuance and tremendously important details to advance the particular case they are making.

The Mother Jones guy dismissed the idea of any kind of conspiracy at play in the crisis that our country has come to, pointing out, irrelevantly but at length, that belief in conspiracy theories is about the same as it’s always been, even if the wife of history’s most corrupt Supreme Court justice is a far right Christian political operative, on the board of the influential, secret nonprofit Council for National Policy, who brokered the deal between Donald Trump and the evangelical leaders in 2016, was in and out of the West Wing regularly during 45’s administration (and heads would always roll when she left) and also was in a religious frenzy in the Jesus-invoking texts to the Chief of Staff as Trump’s January 6 coup was sputtering, in the hours and days after she attended the Big Guy’s rousing speech in the freezing cold earlier that day.    Then all White House phone logs, texts, secret service texts and calls, irretrievably deleted, all Homeland Security heads’ communications also gone, from the hours before, during and after the riot at the Capitol for which hundreds are being, eh, vengefully held hostage.  There are complex right wing conspiracies at work all around us (for example, the association of Republican state attorneys’ general that met to work out how to limit drop boxes and things like that prior to the 2020 election, are probably meeting right now, the fake electors, election deniers overseeing upcoming elections, continual destruction of evidence, lies about the existence of evidence never produced, etc). and it doesn’t take Oliver Stone to tell you that.

Stephens does something similar when he focuses on the corrupt idiot asshole privileged  heads of elite institutions (accurate enough)  and uses them to prove his larger points that misguided, hypocritical, often tyrannical liberals suck and only sober conservatives like him see the world as it actually is and are prepared to lead it (debatable, like all political positions).  

The worst one in this category, for my money, is fucking David Brooks, who also writes for the New York Times.  I avoid his stuff the last few years, too aggravating to read that know-it-all’s confident conclusions about his opinions.   The insidious thing about Brooks is that he can make very reasonable points while he hides his ideological agenda most of the time but then sometimes it just pops out in a grotesque, tell-tale aside, like nonchalantly dropping in a gutter formulation of what’s wrong with poor people in terms of their moral character.

Anyway, it’s occasionally interesting to read some of this stuff, but I don’t put any more stock in the opinions of these folks that I do in my own reading, thinking and talking to people whose opinions I respect. Political commentators are in the business of simplifying things, convincing readers of their astuteness and expertise, and making difficult, complicated, scary things seem to make sense, but the version of reality they give you is always missing essential ingredients that you need to have a nuanced, really intelligent conversation about the subject. That’s just one reason I resent these fucking pantloads. 

A Narcissist can never be wrong

You will learn this in your personal life when you have a conflict where a loved one suddenly becomes inflexible, implacable, impervious to nuance, and grimly determined to win at any cost. You will wonder where this monstrous willfulness comes from and then come to understand that it happened to them very early, disabling the faculties most people have to take responsibility when in the wrong and compromise in order to restore trust and peace. This type is capable of any kind of destructiveness to avoid the terrifyingly soul crushing feeling of being wrong, ever, about anything. Being wrong, to this type, is a kind of soul death, a loss of self-esteem that makes a them a “loser”, a “fate” too horrifying for them to contemplate.

Check the news today and you will hear the insane former president’s lawyer argue to the DC appeals court that unless there is a political decision to remove a president from office for a crime, conviction after impeachment, something that has never happened to a president in the history of this great nation, that he is free to order the murder of his political opponents while in office.  A ridiculous argument, to be sure, but not an unusual one for a narcissist to make. Their style of argument boils down to “I know you are, but what am I?” and “make me”. They don’t need arguments, they only need power. 

With power you can do anything you want, without power you are alone, weak, contemptible, powerless and despicable. Especially if you are articulate, have a decent memory and are able to keep your focus while under attack.

The unreliable narrator

Some people, when they hear a story, assume that it’s a mosaic of strategically placed lies and omissions deployed to benefit the storyteller. The storyteller, they assume, is a salesman, like everybody else, giving only details that will help them sell their product. Isn’t this what all politicians do, with their research teams and spin doctors, speechwriters, donors, advisors, pollsters, surrogates and influencers? Isn’t that what everyone does to try to close the deal? Since everybody will say whatever they need to say to get over on somebody else, truth skeptics reason, why would you even hold lying against someone, as long as it’s done with style and a touch of humor?

Creating reflexive skepticism about knowable, objective facts, cause and effect and common sense, has been the long, deliberate, generously funded, meticulously engineered project of the far right. It is at the center of the far right’s eternally angry focus. Guns, for example, don’t kill people — lying, insane libtard cucks do, radical left corporate media does, those who call for the mass murder of fetuses, defenders of rigged elections do!

The idea that facts are infinitely malleable and that all conversation is 100% transactional is a staple of narcissism, the inability to ever be wrong about anything. If nobody believes anything but what I say right now, if faith in the existence of discoverable truth itself is destroyed, well, every kind of irrational monster can be released, nobody can ever work out any disagreement, conflict will inevitably be fatal and those entitled to keep every privilege for themselves will be the sole beneficiaries of this war of each against all. 

When you hear two opposing stories and one makes much more sense than the other, you believe one narrator is more reliable than the other. Compare these two stories about a long, combative, nightmare marriage.  

One: The wife always, mercilessly and without any cause at all, tortured the poor husband for thirty years. She was ruthless and never let up on the poor devil, who hung in there valiantly for the sake of the children, but was eventually forced to ask for a divorce.

Two: The marriage was doomed from the start — they fought from their first date until the finalization of their divorce. The engagement was called off before the wedding, the wedding had some tense moments, the honeymoon was fraught, fighting was continual until they both finally threw in the towel — after the husband was forced by his wife and the marriage counselor to confront his best friend and accuse him of deliberately trying to destroy their marriage.

I don’t know about you, but the first story makes much less sense to me than the second, though they are both pretty insane stories. We evaluate sense and buillshit through the lens of our experiences. How many conflicts have you experienced in which only one side was completely to blame for all the ugliness? It makes little sense to describe a hellish marriage as entirely the fault of one party. It takes two to Lambada, after all.

When evaluating the reliability of a narrator, use the test that fucking Boof Kavanaugh’s mother taught young Boof: use common sense. What does the person telling the story stand to gain, what do they stand to lose? What smells funny about the story? What makes no sense, in light of your lived experience, what has the ring of reasonableness? Which story is a more complete explanation of the thing being described?

Guys like Boof, of course, always reason backwards from the outcome they desire to the argument they need to achieve that outcome. There are liars out there, plenty of them, and an individualized curse on each one of these cynical motherfuckers. There are also more and less reliable narrators, as life teaches us over and over. This is just a simple fact of life here on this ball of confusion.

What perversely determined parents teach their offspring

On Passover, when Jewish families gather to retell the story of the long journey from slavery to freedom, we are instructed to remember that we were once slaves — and to identify with those who are oppressed. We’re supposed to take humility and compassion from our history, but you can be taught,  at any age, by a willful parent, hurt and eternally angry, that personal history can be erased in a single broad stroke, along with humility and compassion. 

On Yom Kippur, the holiday of repentance and forgiveness, these same pious teachers will instruct you that certain people who love you and have never harmed you don’t deserve to be forgiven for what it is said they did to a willful, eternally angry hanging judge with the right to never be questioned.  

HaShem looks down and shakes His head, thinking “It’s on me, I gave these motherfuckers free will, after all…”

Happy turd anniversary, patriotic traitors

Time flies during a prolonged, tireless fascist takeover attempt. Already three years since some of the best people overran outnumbered police and sacked the Capitol, in the name of democracy. Of course, team MAGA blamed the government for staging this riot (never mind that they controlled the government) as well as lying woke cucks, who, they insist, dressed up in MAGA gear (on behalf of George Soros and Barbra Streisand) to make the big guy look bad by injuring 140 officers and urinating and moving their bowels in the corridors of Congress while their fellow patriots chanted for Chrumpie’s enemies to come out and be lynched. They fought like hell, or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. 

A team of MAGA lawyers is now ready to convince the Supreme Court that these fighters never disrupted an official proceeding just because they stopped the official Electoral College certification of the president-elect’s victory that was going on in both houses of Congress. Disrupting an official proceeding involves messing with official documents, according to these far right “originalist” sticklers, and few of the convicted rioters did much of that. So, according to this legal theory, they are improperly imprisoned after being convicted on shaky legal grounds.

Voltaire had the right take on all this, as we wait, during an ongoing monsoon of angry death threats to the countless targets Chrump selects, for the wave of political murders to begin:

The painter Goya had it right too: the sleep of Reason produces monsters.

“We love you…never forget this day.”

Cherub-faced Jesus intoxicated defender of a rapist’s right to see his fetus born

Pictured above, face flushed from his amorous exertions, his master
looking very satisfied with the recent rim job from his boy.

The slimy little motherfucker is down on the southern border right now, with sixty of his fellow MAGA lick spittles, pretending the worst and most pressing problem America, this nation of immigrants, faces is the immigration that his fellow Republicans have done nothing to address, except by staging aggrieved photo ops and demanding capitulation from Democrats before they will release money to our allies, and desperately needed humanitarian aid to the victims of war criminals, including the victims of some of our allies. Same with aid to farmers, same with everything else, aside from campaigning for a demented criminal.

USA! USA!!!

Positions for the mediator

Party one:

I got my back up after he was very threatening and aggressive to me. He claimed that I hurt him very badly, traumatized him, in fact, the way his father used to, so we were suddenly talking about his traumatic childhood, and not anything that actually happened but after I got my back up, I apologized to him. I told him I was sorry that he made me feel threatened, and that I had acted incorrectly by getting my back up when his defiance reminded me of terrible battles with my daughter, which was very upsetting to me. 

Even after I apologized, and months later, even a year later, he couldn’t let it go, he kept obsessively insisting on talking about what he claimed I did to him. He wouldn’t let it go. He kept trying to make it my problem that he had a bad childhood and he tortured my husband for supporting me. He wouldn’t forgive us, no matter how many times we apologized, even though he kept saying he did forgive us, that he would “always” forgive me. He can’t forgive anybody.

Party Two:

After she flew into a rage during a minor disagreement, she glared at me steadily and did not respond to anything that I said. She literally just stared at me, tight-lipped and beaming hostility, as if I was a defiant child and she was my overwhelmed mother, trying her best to hold it together in the face of such disobedience.  I later accepted her apology, pathetic and blame shifting as it was.  I told her I had more to say about this but that I didn’t want to speak while I was still upset (after having not slept a minute the previous night) because I didn’t want to say anything that might damage our long friendship. 

Although she told me she’d be happy to hear what I had to say, she never let me say what I needed to say, the two times I tried she had temper tantrums.  My calls, texts and letters were ignored.   They began accusing me of being mean to them. Her silence, and her husband’s, went on for weeks and months at a time, complete with angry threats and false accusations against me, libels they’d later spread to our mutual friends and their children, their indignant claim that I was an enraged child irrationally trying to blame them for my obvious problems.

Mediation was the only possibility for fixing things, they finally said, after refusing to talk to me without a mediator present, but would not agree about anything — the conflict that sparked the end of our 50 year friendship, the tensions that mounted during that troubling holiday, the extreme coldness by the end, the angry fallout afterwards — claiming that the mediator would know what to do, without any input from the parties.  When they insisted that no agreement was needed, or possible, I understood that mediation was a ruse, a facially generous offer I would have to turn down, once they heaped impossible conditions on it. The beauty was that I could then be plausibly blamed for blowing up their desperate, endearing peace talks.  The one thing my friends can never forgive is someone who can never forgive.

Surviving betrayal

I was lynched recently by a small group of my oldest friends. It was not the traditional necktie party of places like Texas and Louisiana where a worked up crowd grabs you, puts a rope around your neck, tortures you a bit and lets you hang, sometimes burning you afterwards, sometimes before. My lynching was conducted in slow motion, over the course of months, with many a twist and turn as the rope was tightened, and loosened, and I managed to forget about it for days at a time, hoping for the best. Fortunately for me, when these righteously aroused fucks finally pulled the rope tight I survived.

It may seem offensive to describe my sudden and unanimous ostracism by friends of five decades as a lynching. Lynching is offensive, one of the most disgusting things humans do to each other. Perhaps we might better think of it as a pogrom, a worked up crowd comes to your neighborhood, breaking windows, plundering, setting things on fire, beating, killing and showing perfect contempt all around. There is no anodyne image to conjure being put to silence forever by a group of your closest friends.  

You may not speak about it with any of them, which feels like a great betrayal. since these are people you used to have heart to heart talks with. They will not listen, do not care about your feelings, since they’ve already blamed you, convicted you, excommunicated you and felt perfectly righteous doing so. A secret trial is all a despicable criminal deserves when the crime is so hideous, inhuman, unforgivable. 

You will undoubtedly feel a strong urge to defend yourself, set the record straight, correct outright and obvious lies told about you, but let me assure you, as I would have assured myself had I known sooner, nothing you can say will change an outcome that has already been agreed to. You can’t unsee the face of contempt and the firm intent to make you shut up forever if you have a problem being treated the way you are lyingly complaining about being treated.

Human society functions by believing stories, sometimes absurd ones, that explain the world in a way that makes emotional sense. Love is the highest value, and kindness to others, and forgiveness. Makes a lovely story to believe in., to live by. Someone who does not love, is cruel to others and can’t forgive is clearly beyond redemption. Tell that story about someone with enough passion, get a length of sturdy rope, let the guilty party talk his head into the noose and the rest follows naturally.

Live and learn, to me, is a much better formula for a good life than live and be enraged and never take a single lesson from anything painful. Many people are average, many below average, many are emotionally incapable of anything beyond the superficial performance of friendship. As long as everyone is smiling, joking, hugging and laughing, everything is fine in a group of old amigos. As soon as conflict arises and one accuses another (usually behind their back) of being a vicious, sadistic, unloving, unforgiving Nazi the real fun begins, masks come off and you see what your friends are actually made of.

We have a strong need to belong to a group, to be attached to people who love us, think like us, understand and forgive us. This attachment need explains the enthusiasm of sports fans, fans of angry politicians, cults, militias and so on. We are also born with a strong need to be authentic, to be listened to and heard, to be allowed to express things that trouble us, talk about things that need to be fixed going forward.

As I have learned, in my seventh decade of life, there are people who grow up with no tools to resolve conflict, no way to compromise. When you get into any kind of conflict with one of these super-competitive, hierarchy-embracing folks good will, extending the benefit of the doubt, demonstrations of friendship, patience, kindness etc. are of no use. If you have done all these things and are treated like a monster, it is not you, trust me. It is right to extend loving indulgence to friends, until they demand that you shut the fuck up about what you claim is your hurt and accept that they have every right to do the same whenever they want and to shut you up any time you make them feel bad about themselves. Fuck those putos.

And a very happy, productive 2024 to all!

 

Narcissistic rage is not just anger

Anger is a response to something that feels like an attack. When the attack subsides, and the threat is gone, healthy anger, having served its evolutionary purpose, fades away. Rage is a different, deeply rooted, much more destructive creature. When it is unleashed it calls for destruction.

I grew up in a home where outbursts of anger were common. The thing that took me decades to understand was that sometimes this anger was rage. Rage has no end. It can’t be reasoned with or placated, ever. It erupts like a volcano and melts everything in its path.

When you encounter rage, know what you are up against. If a person flies into a rage because they feel defied, and cannot be calmed down, it tells you they lack an adult ability to resolve conflict and operate at an immature emotional age.  Being stuck in the helpless feelings of hurt they had at three years old is a shameful thing, and the humiliation of being seen losing control fuels rage, the desperate cover-up of rage and the reflex to blame someone else, everyone else, for your own inability to control your emotions.

It took me years to understand why telling a person prone to rage that they played a role in causing pain sends them into a rage. Rage is their defense against feeling vulnerable, which they equate with being fatally humiliated. In attacking someone else they feel momentarily powerful. If you tell them they hurt you, they immediately compare your claim of pain to their own much greater claim to much deeper pain. You will never get anywhere in this contest of competitive suffering, truly a game for losers.

A person who becomes enraged believes the unbearable pain they have endured in silence entitles them to tell anyone else in pain to shut up. Solipsism is a feature of a person who cannot be wrong, the fatalistic view that there is no possibility of anyone understanding what someone else thinks or feels — so shut up about your unknowable interior world. The best response to an enraged person is to get away from them.