Author Archives: oinsketta

Lost photo

This picture was taken in August of 2020. After years of watching so many beautiful feral kittens living their short, adorable lives, we decided we had to save this litter. A smart mother cat had dropped this batch off in Sekhnet’s garden, site of the neighborhood’s best cat buffet. Sekhnet was clever, these five never knew they were being turned into adoptable pets. They were all very willing and all five were quickly adopted. This is my favorite photo from that period, lost until a few moments ago.

The Terror of Shame

A fear of shame being revealed drives desperation. Feel desperate enough and you will lie, commit violence, do anything necessary. The terror of having your shame revealed is behind most unreasonable demands, contempt and much of the violence in the world. Shame is the engine of abuse.

My father, according to my sister, led a shame-based life. She reached this astute conclusion shortly after he died. He wished for peace and justice, admired peacemakers and those with the courage to fight for justice, was a friend of the underdog — yet his shame made him maniacally oppress and abuse those closest to him. He couldn’t help it.

I don’t excuse his actions, everyone in pain who hurts others is responsible for their own healing, but I understand that the humiliation he suffered as a baby disabled him in a fundamental way. He lived his life in terror of ever feeling as helpless, and ashamed, as he did when his mother terrorized him as an infant. That his children had no intention of humiliating him never seemed to have occurred to him.

The need to dominate others arises in people with deep shame. As any despot or bully knows, as soon as you show vulnerability, you’re finished. So you need to ruthlessly dominate anyone you feel challenges your dominance, there can be no compromise with your indomitable will. Your need to be invulnerable blocks out all other human aspirations. The need to dominate others leads to a lonely fucking life, in my observation.

Shameful things, hidden, acquire a terrible power. If I know your shame, and hold it over you like a sword, I can torture you with it at will. How does one liberate oneself from shame? It’s got to be a long and painful process. Imagine your wife is holding some shameful secret of yours as a nuclear option with the kids, if you get too far out of line. Picture a guy who reacts as though whipped in the face when his wife playfully calls him a faggot. In a sense we are all playing poker here in the world, holding our cards close, trying not to tip our hands. Then, there are tells.

Putin v Ukraine v Wagner Group

Just a quick reminder about Putin and his American political allies, the GOP/MAGA party.

There are no good guys in this struggle. Prigozhin [leader of the mercenary Wagner Group], is wanted by the FBI for his involvement in the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He funded the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which flooded social media with messages designed to help Trump win the presidency, and his mercenaries have been committing war crimes in Ukraine and African countries, where they often support dictators. And Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. source

Imagine the horror

A couple you always thought of as your closest friends, a friendship you never questioned, are acting oddly distant to each other during a vacation in a beautiful rented house. After a few days, tensions are turned on you and one of them rages at you, glaring with a laser beam of hostility for long minutes, in a display of anger you haven’t seen since your father was alive. You endure a sleepless night after a door is angrily closed.

In the morning your friend drags his wife out to apologize to you. She is humiliated, apologizes with enough caveats to render the apology meaningless. While she is apologizing your friend coldly observes that you catalogue and remember every offense everybody’s ever committed against you, in spite of your claim to the contrary.

You spend an entire year afterwards, agonizing about why it is so hard to make peace with these two suddenly implacable friends. They are intent on never talking about anything, acting like everything is fine. Everything would be fine, they insist, if you’d only shut up. In the end, after months of silence and ongoing displays of indignation and anger, one of them suggests mediation.

Mediation, of course, can only work when both parties are interested in compromising. Here there can be no compromise: the only solution is that you are a hurt child who cannot accept that people who love you sometimes act in an abusive way. They are planning on the professional, impartial mediator being able to point out to you that you are acting like a hurt child and that you must act like an adult.

The proof of this is that they will agree to nothing prior to mediation. You point out that the mediator can only work with the facts we provide, the things we agree about, the things we disagree about. The mediator must know our respective positions. Although you are clearly in a terrible conflict, you are hard pressed to identify positions beyond “I’m hurt” “No you’re not!”. Instead of agreeing to a set of facts, your friends fight you like devils until you are literally banging your head against the wall.

It becomes clear that mediation will not help. You tell them so. They respond with another month of silence. One rainy Friday afternoon you get a phone call from your one time close friend telling you that his therapist told him he must tell you that he is not willing to be responsible for fixing things. He wants to be friends, he says, but he’s not going to take responsibility for fixing a broken friendship. After a moment of honesty on your part he tells you he’s going to hang up the phone now.

Now comes the horror: everybody you know in common accepts the story that you are an unreasonable, childish, unforgiving sadist with a pathological need to upset people by acting like an immature, self-righteous asshole. Not only did you refuse to accept numerous apologies, not only did you keep venting the same babyish anger over and over, you rejected a good faith offer for mediation and, in the end, when your friend gave one last effort to make you understand how much you were loved, in spite of being such a difficult person, you used the f-word and the c-word. What kind of fucking cunt does that make you, pal?

Can you spot any media bias?

According to this local news report, Lauren Boebert “refuted” the scurrilous claims, made by a liberal super PAC, that she had two abortions and had worked as an escort.

She didn’t sue these liberal haters for defamation, she “refuted” their lies by calling them liars. Now they’re suing her for defamation! Fucking cucktards! We’ll see who wins in court! USA! USA!!!