Author Archives: oinsketta

Chapter 53 negotiating with terrorists

There are people, imbued with righteousness forged in unbearable injustice, who believe that their suffering allows them to do unspeakable things.   They inspire terror by their willingness to behave viciously, in the name of never being wrong.  When someone in your life makes it clear that they will behead someone you love and force you to watch the video, your prospect of reaching a mutually acceptable compromise with them is pretty much done.   

“If you don’t accept what I tell you to accept, my personalized version of history, and accept all blame, then I will rain holy hell down upon you and everyone you love, I will fucking destroy your world,” is an inauspicious starting point for a productive conversation.

If someone is truly willing to kill you, destroy your good name, your friendships, trust, throw away years of loving mutuality, in the name of never being in the wrong, accept that there is no fixing that.  You are dealing with a damaged, destructive soul, too desperate and determined to make peace with.  You cannot make peace with someone willing to kill anyone who makes them feel in any way bad about themselves.  These people are terrorists and are absolute in their demands.

This impossibility of solving problems with someone who cannot be wrong is a painful, but important, thing to digest.   If your best efforts to be patient, kind, fair and honest are met with dismissal, anger, recriminations, you’re not going to find a way to fix things with that person.  

It may seem impossible to imagine that someone you love, someone who loved you, can become an implacable enemy, but it sometimes happens.  When it does, you need to look at it without sentimentality, realize you are no longer dealing with any form of love, and get away from it.

The therapist asks “what do you think your role in these recurrent situations is?”   It is an important question.

In my case, maybe it is no more than my infuriating insistence, in the face of irrefutable evidence of incapacity in the other, that an old friend must be as vulnerable as needed to feel somebody else’s pain.  And my belief that empathy, and the ability to put yourself in a hurt person’s shoes, always leads to a desire to help heal that pain.   This belief turns out to be tragically, masochistically misplaced when dealing with someone who cannot be wrong.

My insistence in the face of their inability must be fucking maddening to the point of violence to them.  I suppose it is that stubbornness in the face of implacability that marks me for the violent endings, the displays of rage and idiotic denial I sometimes have had to face at the end of long relationships.

A person who reserves the right to rage, with or without reason, and never to concede fault or responsibility for harm they may cause, who needs to control others and be viewed as perfect, especially when they act destructively, is not a good partner for peace talks.   

Over time you can understand how badly they are damaged, how violently they feel compelled to react when criticized, but, sadly, that understanding gives you no tool to help fix anything broken in them.   

No amount of patience, kindness or understanding can help them change anything about themselves.   The only change possible is your own point of view, and learning to make yourself scarce as soon as you see that you are locked in a conflict with this type.   Any conflict with this type, no matter how seemingly easy to resolve, must end in death, as it is written.   Save your own life by learning when it is time to walk away.

Chaos favors Nazis

A dangerous, threatening climate favors the extremist. When order breaks down, chaos agents ostentatiously flout rules, laws and norms, the population is forced to take angry sides against each other, moderates are attacked and vilified, lawmakers, law enforcement, judges and witnesses are threatened, death threats and violence proliferate and the extremist cause flourishes. It isn’t surprising that MAGA world is gaga for anything that increases chaos, division, anger and hatred.

Coincidentally, and also because authoritarianism is narcissism on a mass scale, the deliberate chaos that Nazi types unleash increases their ability to spread their emotionally resonant message. Their righteous story, of course, is that everything is out of control, dangerous, humiliating, that evil is running wild, we’re all going to hell in yer proverbial handbasket because of godless traitors, and only their leader’s iron will can save the people who deserve saving.

How Putin is smirking over there, at the end of his 60 foot long dining table, at the adorable antics of the American Chaos Caucus, who supports ending military and humanitarian aid to the country that Putin invaded and has been committing war crimes in. Hamas created another wonderful worldwide wedge by slaughtering 1,400 in particularly brutal and sadistic ways and provoking the current war in Gaza. Now in the US, and worldwide, you have deep fractures in the party that opposes American Nazism, huge marches condemning the Israeli (far right extremist) government’s deadly, baby slaughtering reaction to the atrocity.

Now there are two sides, five sides to every story, and every story is also a lie, though the lies told by Christian Nationalists are not lies because they were imparted directly by God and Jesus. This truth is simple for the truly faithful to understand.

The timeline for this recent round of chaos is sobering. It has the stink of oligarch/authoritarian conspiracy all over it, though these fuckers never have to meet or coordinate, since their interests are so perfectly aligned that what benefits one benefits all. As Boof Kavanaugh’s mother told young Boofie, “look at who stands to gain by the story you’re being told and use your common sense in assessing it, son” The timeline of recent events is striking, conspiracy or no.

October 3, the spineless McCarthy was removed by Trump’s myrmidon Matt Gaetz, after McCarthy consented to being removed on the motion of a single MAGA rep. On October 7, while current Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson’s wife was down on her knees praying day after day for her husband to be Jesus’s choice for Speaker of the House, Hamas overran southern Israel and videoed themselves torturing, raping and murdering, ISIS-style. Then the massive Israeli response. By Halloween Christ had chosen MAGA Mike, as he himself declared on the floor of Congress (his wife exhausted by weeks of prayer), and his affable, nice guy mask was off. He would not send a bill to the Senate for military aid to Israel, Ukraine or humanitarian aid to Gaza , or Ukraine, or to fund patrols on the southern border, unless the IRS budget was scaled way back, by many billions.

Because, in this moment of international crisis, there is a great opportunity for the wealthiest and most corrupt Americans to make a little more money in the name of Jesus, Whiteness, anti-wokeness, Asleepness, American Credulity, American Exceptionalism, Defense of the Sacred Unborn, Debunking Alarmist Lies about the Climate, making the burning of faggots great again, and so on.

It strikes me how neatly all this ugliness, which benefits the cause of global authoritarianism, fits together when you think of a perfect, plausible phone call from Vladimir to his buddy the beleaguered Hitler-wannabe in Florida. “I can’t tell you what’s going to happen in four days, because of your big, stupid mouth, but make sure the House has no speaker ASAP. Decapitate Congress and you will be very happy, very soon. The degree of chaos and violent distraction, and the rage it will unleash on all sides, will delight even your insatiable lust for violent chaos, my useful idiot friend.”

The world runs on trauma

If you got out of a Nazi death camp, liberated by battle hardened American GIs who puked when they saw the piles of bodies and inhaled the stench of the Nazi death machine, (as Dwight Eisenhower reportedly did) it is hard to imagine you were not severely traumatized.   

The trauma that made ordinary Germans faithfully support a maniac who convinced them that millions of humans needed to be exterminated?  As hard to imagine as the trauma that caused the maniac to come up with his plan of mass murder — and have the will to make it happen.

A year or two after the war, if you were lucky enough in the displaced persons’ camp, you landed in British Palestine, which had been a British possession since 1920, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. You were not welcomed by most of the people who lived there, as floods of impoverished immigrants seldom are welcomed by native populations anywhere.   

Some of the longtime inhabitants of Palestine, Palestinians, could see the writing on the wall as the world organized the United Nations and the international argument was made for a state for the Jewish people.  It was a unique moment in history, after millions of Jews had been killed, in part, because they’d been rendered stateless.  A Jewish state seemed the least the world could do for this decimated, historically despised minority after the horrific genocide of the Holocaust. Well might the Jewish rallying cry be “Never Again!”

Then, because trauma often produces PTSD and harsh reactions in the traumatized, and not everyone who feels pursued by enemies is paranoid, after what was either a War for Independence or a Catastrophe in which many thousands were driven from their homes forever as the new Jewish homeland was created, the fate of those now displaced persons in refugee camps was kicked down the road, left up to other Arab nations to solve.   These other nations had little incentive to help this mass of poor, displaced people who were handy political pawns for international haggling.

Generations of Palestinians were raised in the hopelessness of these crowded, impoverished refugee camps because nobody could solve the humanitarian crisis they presented.  Generational hopelessness in the face of brutal injustice is a crushing thing.

Now we have all the conditions for deep, mutual distrust and hatred.  If you hate me, and tell me you will slit my throat at the first opportunity, I will certainly hate you.  If I hate you, what reason for you to not vow to slit my throat?  And so on.

This is not to oversimplify the horrific situation in Israel/Palestine.  Just to point out the two way arrow of trauma between two populations who have suffered mightily, been despised by people with the power to make them suffer, and had their need to live negated.   

Trauma, it seems, is the wheel that makes the fucking world go around.

Hamas springs eternal war trap

The first thought I had reading about the bloody pogrom staged by Hamas on a recent Jewish holy day was how handy for Putin, and his America First/MAGA allies in and around the US government.

Blowing up a world hotspot with a horrific slaughter is a great distraction and the perfect way to divide stressed out, angry Americans against each other, Jew against Jew, Muslin against Muslim, Christian versus Christian. Wherever you fall on the political spectrum something about an atrocity like this calculated, humanity-crushing attack is bound to inflame you. News stories about decapitated babies, 85 year-old hostages, babies burned alive, babies dying in hospitals without medicine, water or electricity, bombs and missiles causing mass destruction. Making people too angry to assess the real horror is a time-honored technique to sew distrust, fear, hopelessness and tribal division. I thought that when the news first broke and I still think that. How Putin and his friends must be smiling.

Yuval Noah Harari talks about Israel’s challenge to preserve her humanity and describes the treacherously effective trap Hamas sprung on Israel, and the world, with their hateful attack on their hated enemies.

link to 30 second version

Let the enemies of freedom tremble

Here’s MAGA Mike Johnson celebrating the overturning of Roe v Wade, in the summer of 2022:

“Late yesterday the Louisiana Department of Health informed abortion facilities in our state that the Right to Life has now been restored. Perform an abortion and get imprisoned, at hard labor, for one to ten years and you’re fined $10,000 to $100,000.“

You really have to watch the polite, quietly seething ones, especially if they’re smart. Another zealot handpicked by the orange Hitler wannabe, don’t you know.

New GOP litmus test, passed

When Ginni Thomas and her invitation-only nonprofit Council for National Policy brokered the deal between Trump and the evangelical leaders, prior to him becoming the GOP candidate in 2016, a key provision was that Trump choose federal judges from Leonard Leo’s list of loyal, well-trained right wing ideologues.   The promise to appoint only members of an extremist legal fraternity is one of the few promises Trump ever kept in his life.  The litmus test was judges who believed in their Christian souls that abortion was murder, and in the sanctity of the wealth of America’s greatest citizens.   The pastors threw their full weight behind the Flawed Vessel in their zeal to save fetuses.

Recall the other GOP candidates gathered on stage, at an earlier debate, none able to raise their hand that they agreed with the theory of evolution.  It would have cost them the Big Jesus vote to publicly go against the childish notion of God’s Intelligent Design.  Same with Climate Change, systemic racism, trickle down economics, regulation of polluters, tax breaks for billionaires, affordable health care, opposition to elimination of child poverty, opposition to an ethics code for their 6-3 Supreme Court majority, on down the list of their accursed orthodoxy.

New litmus test for the GOP:  Biden stole the rigged 2020 election, in conspiracy with hundreds of RINOs.  It is an article of faith now, believed fervently by 70% of Republican voters.    The brand new Squeaker of the House has declared that Trump won in 2020, he signed on to the Hail Mary Texas lawsuit (along with Cruz and dozens of other Republican all-stars), to overturn votes, a lawsuit so dumb the 6-3 Supreme Court threw it out, he voted to decertify Biden’s victory when Congress reconvened after the Trump riot on January 6th.  He swears Trump’s ass is delicious.

He passed the new GOP litmus test and was allowed to become Speaker.   A new fucking puto for Chrumpie to manhandle, to make himself feel powerful as his fake world collapses in on him.   God bless these United Shaysh.

the Boss

Cancelled

Like it or not, we are all now living in a black and white world where irreducible moral sides must be immediately taken, to the death. Whose side are you on, freedom or tyranny? Who is good and who is evil, Israel or Palestine? Who is mostly perfect and who is an irredeemably sick fuck with no right to speak who must be silenced forever? Take a view I find hateful, after hearing just the first few words? CANCELLED!

As I recently wrote to a righteous old friend who had no intention of ever talking to me again:

In talking there is always the chance of accidentally rescuing our friendship.  In silence, only the grim certainty of continued death during life, a true shame on both of us, to share the short remainder of this brief moment when we are both alive and waste it in mutual anger.

In righteous anger you instantly, satisfyingly cancel the motherfucker who makes you angry. Boom — dead! Then, that person being dead to you, you have eliminated the risk of being infuriated again by someone who keeps maddeningly insisting there are at least two sides to a story you already wrote the fucking ending to.

The great virtue of buying into a belief system is that you don’t have to be blindsided by so-called facts, cause and effect and the rest of the exhausting, caviling so-called nuances you already firmly believe are bullshit.

Reading about the recent cancellation of a book-related event by an author who wrote a nuanced book about Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and the firings and forced or protest resignations of others who made points about the horrific conflict in a way that was deemed indelicate, I had a creepy realization. What a cohort of old, dear friends did was cancel me. I’ve been cancelled.

Back to Israel and Palestine, for a flaming example. It is apparently a deadly sin, to some, to observe that Hamas behaved like blood-crazed Nazis, 100%, when they went on a murderous pogrom, and that Israel is behaving now, even if understandably in some ways, not like non-Nazis. To slaughter a Jewish baby is a Nazi-type war crime. To slaughter a Palestinian baby, in revenge for inhuman Nazi atrocities … what do you want to call it, boss?

The conversation is apparently taboo now, you have to be very, very careful how you phrase your opinion on the ongoing civilian slaughter in Gaza as Israel pursues the demons who hellishly rampaged recently. Israel has every right to protect herself, many people believe. But if you justify the murder of children on one side, you justify it on both sides

Got to be so fucking careful these days that you may as well say nothing about raging controversies that make people ready to kill each other. Your silence, of course, is assent. Whatever is going on, whoever is holding the noose, and pitchforks, and spewing hatred with veins popping on their necks, the torch bearers, the ones outside the makeshift jail chanting “bring him out!”, by standing among them silently you are part of the lynch mob, my friend.

That’s my basic problem with the righteously silent. Fuck those putos. You may cancel me now, asshole. And happy birthday, dear.

Guilty as charged, but what’s my crime?

I found myself on the wrong side of a unanimous informal criminal jury verdict almost a year ago.   A dozen friends of fifty years sat in judgment, either silent or indignant at my crime.   My punishment was banishment until death.  

“What is my actual crime?” I was impudent enough to ask one of them, since I had not been at the secret trial.  It was an apparently infuriating question coming from someone as obviously guilty and vicious as I am.

The couple of people who told me to shut up, for my own good, or to grow up, or to begin figuring out a way to heal the terrible harm I’d done to people who love me, were aggravating enough.  But the silent ones were worse.  Their silence was a reminder of how the world actually goes to hell, how lynch mobs always operate, how tyrants rise to power and rule.  Not a peep from these righteous souls, just silence.  Good people on both sides, on all sides, on every side — only you, sir, are the problem, you with your fucking filthy toilet bowl mouth.   We cannot forgive a fucking piece of shit with a fucking mouth like that.

In the end I finally understood my crime.  When you witness the rage, discomfort and dishonesty of people who need to be seen as perfect, it is humiliating to them.   Unless you admit that all the bad feelings were caused by you, that you alone are the angry, aggressive, threatening asshole who caused all the trouble, you have committed the crime of high treason.  You are in position to make them feel unbearably bad about themselves, to make them look bad to others.  There is no crime more serious to someone who must be perfect, on pain of eternal humiliation.  Either submit to their counterfactual accusation and take all blame or face the death penalty.  It really couldn’t be simpler.

So simple, in fact, that the logic of it is impossible to refute.  You live in terror of being seen as imperfect.  An articulate, credible witness is alive and well, loved and respected by people you love and respect.  You must make people believe the potential witness is a child blood drinking liar.  You have been the subject of an unfair, vicious, sneak attack, an operation that is ongoing and without end.   You convince people how hard you tried to make amends, how many times you apologized, how brutally all of your efforts were rebuffed.  You exploit any existing beliefs people have about the former friend who betrayed you so viciously.   You refuse to speak further about the painful, painful rejection by someone you’ve done nothing but love.  Loyal love is the only possible response to this kind of display of vulnerability and the expulsion of such a reprobate from the group of lifelong friends is necessary and proper.

The reason this works is that once people take sides, they get so invested in the belief system that they cease to care what is true.  Facts will not sway them, cause and effect become irrelevant.  They believe with a perfect righteousness that is infectious and undefeatable.   

This mechanism explains why 74,000,000 people who voted for a twice impeached serial liar, later convicted of sexual assault, his fraudulent university and fake charity shut down, his infidelity to all three of his wives well known, his pettiness and cruelty known to all, as well as his disloyalty to every loyal asslicker it has ever become convenient to disown, will probably get most of those 74,000,000 votes in 2024.   Those who love him DO NOT CARE about the so-called truth.  Thus is it always with a charismatic tyrant who will kill as many people as need to die in order to prove that he would never harm a fly.