Author Archives: oinsketta

What emotionally immature parents teach their children

I pose the following for the consideration of the brother of a young man who is suffering from an episode of depression. His father believes the condition is purely the bad luck of genetics, unrelated to any environmental factors (like competitive, judgmental parents who can never be wrong) and apparently beyond the reach of human intervention. This belief is preferred to understanding that a child judged by emotionally immature parents since birth, love conditioned on not making problems, will often grow up with certain morbid sensitivities.

Consider what your parents are teaching you and your suffering brother.

In every conflict, your parents are absolutely right, and blameless, no matter what actually took place.

The world is zero-sum, black and white, without nuance or the possibility of compromise.

Anyone who challenges our need to be right, defies our family. Defiance is a capital offense.

Defamation is permissible, if the stubbornly defiant party keeps insisting on “fairness” and “compromise.”

Being raised by immature assholes is a heavy burden on the soul. It will take years, with insight and luck, to begin to emerge from the endless layers of manure that have been heaped on you since before you had any inkling of what manure is. Immature parents have every opportunity, during the years you are a helpless infant, to do infinite harm to your brand new soul. As children, they may have had it even worse than what they are doing to you, but still.

Consider, my friend, if these lessons have anything to do with a good life or are only iron guidelines required by rigid people who can never be wrong.

Nice indictment

Technical problems (internet and phone service dead for a couple of days, thanks T-Mobile) prevented posting this the other day, but here you are.

The second federal indictment against Donald Trump contained many familiar elements: the continuing lies (which are not charged, so goodbye first amendment defenses) that were weaponized to fuel a conspiracy to deprive millions of voters of their right to vote and have that vote counted, as a hoard descended to violently take the Capitol, some intent on hanging Mike Pence, others calling for Pelosi, the now familiar horror of that day only happened because of lies the US does not contest Trump had every right to peddle. The lies are not the issue, the far-reaching conspiracy to use those lies to illegally cling to power is. There’s some good new stuff in the indictment. Here are a few:

With respect to the persistent false claim regarding State Farm Arena, on December 8, the Senior
Campaign Advisor wrote in an email, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up
any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our  cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”

And, the old chestnut, the perfect call to Georgia’s Brad Rafesnsberger:

The Defendant said that he needed to “find” 11,780 votes, and insinuated that the Georgia Secretary of State and his Counsel could be subject to criminal prosecution if they failed to find election fraud as he demanded, stating, “And you are going to find that they are-which is totally illegal- it’s, it’s, it’s more illegal for you than it is for them because you know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, you know, that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to [the Georgia Secretary of State’s Counsel], your lawyer.” 

Ouch

Co-conspirator 4 is apparently Jeffery Clarke, American Eichmann. 2 is Eastman, 1 is Rudy,

The Deputy White House Counsel reiterated
to Co-Conspirator 4 that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that
if the Defendant remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the
United States.” Conspirator 4 responded, “Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why
there’s an Insurrection Act.”

I was gratified to see one of my favorite lines from Trumpie’s pep talk at the Ellipse right before he sent his angry mob off to peacefully protest the steal of the election.

The Defendant also said that regular rules no longer applied, stating, “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a. fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules.” 

Finally, after exhorting that ”we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” the Defendant directed the people in front of him to head to the Capitol, suggested he was going with them, and told them to give Members of Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Then there’s this curious bit where the quote could only have come from one of the most spineless homophobes in government, the man with the fly on his head during the Vice Presidential debate with Kamala Harris:

On January 1, the Defendant called the Vice President and berated him because he had learned that the Vice President had opposed a lawsuit seeking a judicial decision that, at the certification, the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution. The Vice President responded that he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper. In response, the Defendant told the Vice President, “You’re too honest.” Within hours of the conversation, the Defendant reminded his supporters to meet in Washington before the certification proceeding, tweeting, “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational. details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

read the whole thing

Living in the Age of Narcissism

What do you call a prosperous society where it is perfect, even praiseworthy, for a highly successful winner to relieve himself in a gold toilet bowl costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while, miles away, newborn babies, born to losers, die at “third world” rates because of poverty? Not a trick question. Say it with me, USA! USA!!!

If an individual prioritizes his own luxury and limitless appetite for acquisition over the lives of people he deems worth far less than him, you’d call that asshole a narcissist. It would be the most polite thing you could call him, actually. What do you call a society that prioritizes the values of a handful of these supremely entitled, socially venerated, insatiably covetous assholes over everything else? Exceptional. Unless we are living in the Age of Narcissism. A pretty good case can be made for calling the age we live in the Age of Narcissism.

It wearies me to make that case at the moment, a case so obvious and in-your-face that it hardly needs to be made. I will get at it in the future, on another day like this, when all I can see, and smell, are the evils done by these toxically virtuous pieces of shit. Some days, literally everything you see, hear and smell confirms this horrific fact: fucking narcissists rule, and they always have.

Back to hell, devils!

Clear, objective analysis and patient exposition are very important to healing from wounds that were inflicted by others. Intellectually, you can come to understand the harm done to you, the mechanism, the hows, the whys and all that other stuff. The much harder part is the emotions you are left holding, like a bag of rotting flesh.

So to those pathetic, determined devils who have done such damage to my life, out of their own damage and their undigested, unslakable rage toward parents alive and dead, I say back to hell with you, you fucking devils.

Context is crucial

Without context, the most idiotic, lying claim can fly, since there is nothing to really measure it against. Every single legal proceeding against the insane former president is a hoax, a witch hunt, a political hit job, yea, illegal partisan election interference, motivated by irrational hatred of the greatest man ever to be president of the smoldering carnage of this once great nation.

With context, well, that kind of broad, moronic claim can be easily seen as the idiotic manipulation it is.

I love the context for the superseding indictment in the documents case that former FBI agent Pete Strozk provided in about a minute. The day after a draft subpoena is sent to Trumpie’s attorney the obstructive frenzy begins: attempts to hide requested documents, destroy servers, delete surveillance video of lackeys hiding documents, deceiving his own lawyers, causing one to sign a false statement about retained documents. All starting right before (and after) the subpoena for the surveillance video was served on the Orange Polyp.

How’s that for context (and consciousness of guilt), Trumpie? Well, done, Pete.

A rage to be right

There are some people, you’ll discover, if you ever have a conflict with them, who are incapable of ever being wrong. These can be close and loving friends, it turns out, and everything will be fine as long as you are always conciliatory and never make a fuss about the occasional mistreatment you may experience. Their tragic, aggravating flaw is that they cannot compromise because such weakness is intolerable to them.

When real conflict arises, and you don’t pretend not to be irritated, you will suddenly see that you are up against a monster, because to them the stakes are not the human ones of sometimes feeling bad about being wrong, but utter humiliation for them. They simply cannot tolerate being wrong and they will kill you, if necessary, to prove that they are the most loving and perfect people ever created.

It’s tempting to call these kind of people psychos but I prefer to think of them as extremely damaged. The problem comes when these damaged people become destructive, as they always do when they feel threatened. They are hypervigilant about threats.

They act with no regard for the brutal harm they inflict because they are always justified in their rage. Their only interest is in being above reproach, being right, being superior. They cannot control their fury to “win” and will do whatever it takes to prove themselves perfect and beyond reproach. They are some of the most dangerous motherfuckers in the world. They tend to write, and rewrite, history.

My two closest friends, for literally decades, turned out to be people who cannot be wrong, people who, if they are wrong, will prove themselves right by any means necessary. After a nightmarishly tense long weekend in a rented vacation house they barely made eye contact as we said goodbye. The anger I had witnessed between them in that house required the end of our relationship and my removal from our circle of friends. They made it very clear to me that unless I admitted that I was the cause of all anger and bad feeling in that house, we were not going to be friends.

Somebody else would have told them to go fuck themselves, and would not have been wrong to do so, but, out of love for them, and valuing our long friendship, I spent over a year trying to make peace with them. It was possibly the most difficult year of my life. I did learn a few important, painful things. One is that you can’t make peace with people who can never be wrong.

Long periods of angry silence did not cure me of the need to talk about the hurtful events of that vacation from hell. Threats to walk away from our friendship, for the unforgivable things I had done (unspecified) did not deter me. I sent letters they claimed never to have received. They got angry whenever I tried to talk about healing our friendship. They began lying.

After a joyous wedding we attended with a group of longtime friends I got a text saying we could only talk to each other in front of a mediator. When I suggested a meeting to agree on facts to present to the mediator they agreed. Covid was still raging so we sat outside to talk, as the temperature dropped. It was literally cold as hell as they squared off with me. They both were angry during the conversation, resisting everything I said. There was no fact they’d agree to, facts would be left up to the mediator.

This type sees people like mediators as tools to prove themselves right. Why not let the professional decide who is right and who is wrong, that’s what mediators do — according to people who cannot be wrong.

If two parties go to a mediator with no agreement about the nature of the conflict, or what their respective interests and positions are, the mediator cannot possibly help mediate any kind of compromise. That’s not the point for people who can never be wrong.

These two would present reasonable, successful, normal faces to the mediator, complain that I, an unreasonable, unsuccessful, abnormal and tormented person simply refused to accept responsibility for being an asshole, and that they greatly loved me in spite of that. The mediator might be convinced. Then, in their mind, I’d finally have to shut the fuck up. Set and match.

When it became clear they would fight every attempt to heal, except for their fail safe mediator ploy, I told them it was useless to go to a mediator. A month of silence followed.

During that month they got busy, working on all of our mutual friends. The story all of our mutual friends heard was that Eliot sadistically tortured them for over a year trying to bend them to his will. Not only that, his rage was unappeasable. He refused their desperate last ditch attempt to heal with a professional mediator. They had apologized to him over and over and over but it was never enough. So Eliot was also unforgiving, inhumanly so. Eliot was so enraged at them, because of his childish childhood pain, that he simply could not recognize how much they loved him, how hard they were trying to convince him of their love. Eliot had made it literally impossible for them to live. Eliot had killed them, Eliot was a murderer and a lawyer specializing in denial, distorting the plain facts to make other people look like liars. Eliot had laughed as he slashed them to death, laughed and joked as he was slaughtering them. You think Eliot is an easygoing, philosophical guy with a quick wit, but that’s his mask. Eliot is a cruel, vicious, venomous monster. Once you are determined to “win” at all costs, trifles like truth and lies be damned.

I’d like to say that these long-time mutual friends all called me and asked me what the hell was going on. None did.

In fact, they all told me that I had nothing to say, that they were not prepared to listen to my longwinded protests about what I claimed actually happened. They spoke in one voice: unless I was ready to do the hard work to heal from my irrational childhood pain, and honestly forgive people who loved me dearly, I was as good as dead to the rest of them.

And so it was, and so I am.

One could say I’m better off, not having these brittle friendships in my life anymore. I’m not so sure. We shared a lot of love and many laughs for 50 years, and none of us is perfect (outside of the two assholes who smeared my good name).

But if you can’t be wrong, and you’ve lived your life acquiring the power and the manipulative skills to do so, you will kill anybody who threatens the image of you as a perfect being. Such is the treacherous world we make our way through on our journey toward death.