Author Archives: oinsketta

When being conciliatory becomes a problem

A friendly readiness to compromise, be agreeable and conciliatory becomes a handicap only when you find yourself in a conflict with someone who has to win, no matter what.

This type quickly makes a deadly weapon of the benefit of the doubt that you keep extending to them. In this moment, it is very important to listen to what that unsettled feeling in your stomach, in your lungs, your muscles is telling you.

You learn agreeable behavior as a baby, as a matter of survival. You must be easy to get along with, easy to love. It is good to be easy to get along with, until you find yourself locked in a struggle with someone who sees the world only as domination or submission.

These motherfuckers play a game where only one person walks away alive at the end. Learn to see the deadly game as early as you can, learn to get away from them as soon as you can. If necessary, learn not to feel bad if you have to kick them hard or punch them in the face to get away from them. They will do much worse to you if you stick around and keep trying to reason with them.

Clarity v Clarity

Life is complicated, confusing, sometimes maddening in its perplexing complexity. It is natural for a person to search for clarity and simplicity when everything is overwhelming. The feeling of seeing things clearly is a great help for mental health. Clarity is a much better guide than confusion for knowing what to do, how to act, what is right and what is misguided. Clarity is undeniably a good thing.

The most common form of clarity is based on general consensus, shared views on right and wrong. Everyone around you agrees about the basic issues, you agree on the proper authorities and experts to consult for confirmation, and you don’t have to constantly fight your way through painful conflict over every detail of every single aspect of everything in a sometimes aggravating life. This kind of clarity is normal, commendable, and at its heart based on love, trust and faith, the highest reasons to believe anything.

There is another kind of clarity that some insist is more substantial and more useful than the clarity of general consensus, faith, love and absolute loyalty. This kind of clarity requires a little more work, and a little less faith. It is slightly more difficult to get, since it seeks evidence and some kind of reasonable confirmation rather than just general agreement.

This kind of clarity is also often seen as more supremely annoying, abnormal, superiority-based and frankly provocative as fuck, this “so-called” clarity based on doing the work to think things through clearly, reconcile conflicting points of view and reach conclusions that can be explained clearly to others.

Practitioners of faith and love-based clarity find this “reasonableness based” clarity profoundly lacking in the three most important aspects of human life — love, trust and faith. We love each other, trust each other and we have faith in each other. Nothing could be simpler, or more commendable, better or more praiseworthy.

The practitioner of so-called “reasonableness-based clarity” already admits that love and trust are not enough for him, nor faith, absent the so-called reasons he claims allow him to see things more clearly than “normal” people, those he feels pugnaciously superior to.

You see where we’re at here. It is elementally human to want to feel you are right, that you are not wrong, that you are not talking out of your ass, out of a blind need to feel right, not wrong, not talking out of your ass. Love covers all those things, of course, since your motivations and intentions are of necessity spotless, if they come from love.

The cold-hearted person who keeps demanding so-called Reason (and for some reason this type likes to capitalize the word Reason in the context of a principle of thoughtful life derived from fact, evidence, experience, trial and error and so forth) will always be lacking in that most important single thing in life — love (and its close cousin loyalty). They also, those who keep delving, and thinking, and digging in emotionally difficult terrain, lack trust and faith, clearly, as shown by their very actions.

They cannot accept that a deity arranged this miraculous universe in a way humans can never fully understand, and that all human attempts to understand the will of one so omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous and all-loving are merely the vanity of the flawed creations of this perfect being, creations made in his perfect image… so how can you expect them to understand?

It is easy to understand that people who strongly feel they already have perfect clarity would be offended, even angry, at the assertion that they have taken the easy way out of a difficult problem by accepting something less than ideal, for the sake of peace of mind. I’d be offended, as I am, when people attack my notion of clearheaded analysis, often certain of my position before I can even express it. Homo sapiens, the “wise ape”, is also a reflexively self-justifying, warlike ape.

Those who may happen on these opinionated posts of mine, please don’t mistake me for someone who accepts that an all-powerful, all-merciful creator has dreamed up a world perfect beyond my comprehension and overflowing with a divine love I have locked my heart against. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson points out, it is not possible, in the face of acts of God like earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, killer floods, events that kill thousands of innocents, including children, that the same God whose acts these are is all-powerful and all-loving. If he was all-loving, you know, and if he was all-powerful, you know.

Leaving God out of it, those who get clarity through ideology, accepting a belief system without questioning what it is made of, what motivates it, what the likely results of its goals are, God bless. Not for me, though. Getting clarity is the only way through the dim night. It’s often more strenuous than serene acceptance of an explanation that gives maximum comfort, though the serene acceptance method often has unintended consequences.

Believe what you like, I say. I don’t proselytize, it’s against my religion. I say what I have to. You take in what you’d like to and disregard the rest, it’s still a free country. God, it is said, created freewill, the basis of human life and all human misery. Human freewill, of course, is God’s get out of jail card against the blasphemous charge that He is not all-powerful and all-merciful, for any evil that humans encounter is the fault of human freewill, God’s gift to mankind, and no fault of an all-powerful, all-loving Creator. I’ll leave it to more pure minds than my own to fight that one out. I have to go now.

Accepting things we should not accept

The world is, more often than not,  a war zone, a very tragic thing considering the miraculous nature and boundless natural beauty of the besieged place where we spend our fleeting lives.  Think too much about its potential to be a peaceful place where neighbor does not lift up sword against neighbor and your heart will break. 

Right now, worldwide, a violent war is raging over who will own everything – a few people with the power to impose their will on those with less power, even if it comes at the price of destroying the habitat all living creatures depend on to survive — or the rest of us.  The powerful will spend unimaginable sums of their vast fortunes to ensure that their will becomes permanent, inviolable law. 

They will hire huge armies, capable of exerting whatever terrifying force is necessary to silence dissent and all alternatives for the present and future.  They will divide us all and make many angry enough to kill, and make sure they have easy, legal access to the firepower to spray death as easily and terrifyingly as humanly possible.

They will destroy all records of the past, rewrite history by rewriting the laws to prevent the dissemination of history they find repugnant.  They will obliterate all avenues to compromise that could help create a more perfect, more just, more sustainable world.  They want total war because they see the world as a war zone and they have the means to win a total war.  Most of us don’t.

Antisemites call this small group of willful, powerful people with immense wealth, hellbent on destroying morality, controlling governments and imposing their hateful will on the rest of humanity The Jews.  Racists, who can’t give the race they hate credit for being intelligent enough to have thoughts of their own, attribute their feeling of lost power to the Jews, who are replacing them as the power bloc in democracy with brown robots programmed to do the infernal work of the Jew, so they can impose their sick vision on the rest of the good, God-fearing people, the rest of the people like them. 

You don’t have to be an antisemite to reduce the war-torn world to this kind of paranoid cartoon.  Just think of the unknown aged billionaire who legally left Leonard Leo, architect of the 6-3 extremist Federalist Society Supreme Court majority,  a war chest of $1,600,000,000 to strategically spend doing whatever is necessary to finish creating the world this small, powerful minority hopes to see in perpetuity.

We learn the names of most of these creepy reactionary billionaires (and, to be fair, there are some billionaires who bankroll Democrats hence corporate Democrats) only in their old age, after a lifetime of dirty deeds: The Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, reclusive Robert Mercer (patron of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Cruz turned Trump patron), secretive Jeff Yass, Ken Langone (Home Depot), Betsey DeVos, Erik Prince, Harlan Crow, who bought his own far right Supreme Court justice, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, among others on the far right with money to burn. There are dozens of these motherfuckers, all cursing George Soros, a Jew, for being the evil radical left puppet master/bankroller of pedophile Democrats.

The Age of Reason, we are reminded, was an aspirational age.  Like the Warren Court, that expanded rights and greater justice to all citizens of our democracy, The Enlightenment was an outlier in human history.  Most of our bloodstained past is written by ruthless rulers, in the blood of the oppressed.  Oppression itself, with its attendant atrocities, is so ubiquitous in human history that we have many words to describe it over the ages, including serfdom, slavery and genocide.   So let’s not talk about any of that anymore, shall we?

The larger war sadly rages in our personal lives too, when conflict arises and empathy disappears.  Damage done to us by damaged people who were in turn damaged by damaged people lingers, may become all we can see.   For a feeling of safety in a hostile world, for the comfort of attachment to others, we sometimes accept things we should not accept. 

As I’m unable to sleep because the replaced knee is making things too uncomfortable, for the 24th night in a row, I find myself wondering about the things damaged people accept from other damaged people that may be unacceptable.  We can accept mistreatment that damages us worse than we already are, thinking it is the price we must pay for things of greater value, like love, friendship, a feeling of community.

We are all born reaching out for love and attachment.  Chemicals are released in the brain of the baby, of the parent, to create an intoxicating pleasure in bonding.  Things do not always go according to this beautiful plan, because most people have been damaged during this earliest stage of life, including, tragically, the parents.   

Parents are often overcome with their problems and nobody bothers to teach anyone how to do the difficult, almost impossible, job of being a compassionate parent when you are beset with your own terrible challenges.  It can’t be easy, to be always loving, always kind, always patient, when you are exhausted and the fucking baby won’t let you sleep.  Behaviors arise in the parent and the child that nobody bargained for.   Then the child is an adult — and then?   We wind up accepting things we should not accept, as the price for things we need in a dangerous life that ends, for all of us, in death.

Being abandoned when you are physically impaired, is it something you should ever tolerate from people who love you?   What goes on in the group of lifelong friends when they decide “if he’s too weak to keep up, he’ll just have to do the best he can, it’s not our problem”?   

Instead of waiting, or turning back to make sure he is not in trouble, let him struggle on, if he’s strong enough, he’ll make it, We made sure he bought hiking sticks and has a bottle of ibuprofen.  If he’s really too weak, we’ll unfortunately have to go back and see what happened.  Why is his trouble walking our problem when we are out on a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, enjoying a beautiful aerobic hike?  Why would he selfishly think we’d be thinking of him if we hadn’t seen him in an hour or two?  He knows the way back to the car, it’s at the end of this clearly marked six mile trial.

When, limping, you show up at the end of the hiking trail, where they have been resting, and will rise as soon as you appear, ready to continue, they will smile at you and say “we wondered what happened to you.  Are you ready?”  Meaning, we’ve had a nice rest, for a while, since you’ve been struggling to catch up with us for the last few hours, you don’t expect us to wait longer for you to rest yourself now, do you?   

Meaning, we smile, you smile, you accept that there is nothing wrong with the strong not waiting for the weak, it is clearly the way of the world.  You have to keep up, or you die.  In the end, you did not die, all’s well that ends well and you go out for a nice meal, pretending, for the sake of old friendship, that nothing is amiss.  Why get angry just because you were treated thoughtlessly?  This is a lesson you learned as a baby, you show you’re fine by acting fine and everything is as fine as it can be.

Being abandoned emotionally when you feel most in need of reassurance from loved ones, is that something you should ever accept?  Imagine what is going through the minds of those who turn away when they know you are most in need.  Imagine what makes them so angry afterward that you can be so unfair as to question their love just because they didn’t reach out after they promised to.  Imagine the immensity of the damage that makes someone act like that. 

Whatever it was, can you really accept a lack of basic empathy from a person who claims to love you?  It harms you in a place where healing is very difficult, it attacks your ability to trust.

I feel great fear for the adult son of parents who live by this ruthless credo of strength and shifting all blame to others.  The son feels he lacks the basic strength of an ordinary person, because, in fundamental ways, he has always been struggling to keep up with the illusion of vigor, indomitability and self-sufficiency his parents have set before him.   

If he can’t accept something as basic as that, maybe he’s not ready to take his place as heir to their good name.  I wonder if they really meant to teach their children the ruthless truth that someone they love can be removed from the world because their parents insist, in spite of they guy being alive and well, and desperately hoping to speak to the one most clearly in danger, that he is fucking dead to them. 

There are winners, son, and there are losers.  Winners persevere, never hesitate, do whatever is necessary to win, they face their fear and conquer it with their will.   You, sad to say, although we raised you to win, to keep up, to never pity yourself, do not seem able to do these things.  We love you no matter what, of course, but you must accept that we had nothing to do with the sad state you are in now. 

The son smiles, accepts their help whenever they offer, winds up, days after moving back into his parents’ house,  in a psychiatric hospital.

Something very serious must have occurred for these two parents, the strongest, proudest, most admirable people any of us have ever met, to subject themselves to the shame of admitting their son to a mental ward.  They taught their adult son that their word is final, if they say people he loves, who are walking around right now, are suddenly and forever dead, those people are fucking dead. 

DEAD.

DOJ headline few are reporting, damn it!

This excellent DOJ description of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, the one the RNC called “Legitimate Political Discourse” and FOX and friends characterized as a “meek, respectful tourist visit protected by the First Amendment” should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and all over the internet. It is from the recent DOJ sentencing memo (pp 73-75) for several leDers of the riot convicted of seditious conspiracy, violence against police and other crimes involved in the successful, violent, successful disruption of the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021 to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. Here is part of the statement of facts:

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a criminal offense unparalleled in American history.

A. Nature and Circumstances of the Offense and Need for the Sentence Imposed to Reflect the Seriousness of the Offense and Promote Respect for the Law

These defendants each played a role in an unprecedented conspiracy to oppose the transfer of presidential power. As the Court noted after the second trial verdict, the seriousness of these offenses cannot be overstated. For over two-hundred years, since President George Washington first voluntarily relinquished his executive power back to the people and set in motion a tradition that has formed the bedrock of our democracy, the American people have chosen their president through free and fair elections. Not force. To justify their actions, the conspirators called the outcome they disagreed with “tyranny” that would lead to an apocalyptic end of the country. They sowed doubt in others, riled up and recruited them to travel to D.C., and led them in an attack on the Capitol by giving the riot leaders, in the form of so-called Oath Keepers. Their oaths of service were not to the country, but to themselves.

The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6 was a criminal offense unparalleled in American history. It represented a grave threat to our democratic norms; indeed, it was one of the only times in our history when the building was literally occupied by hostile forces. By its very nature, the attack defies comparison to other events. Every defendant here joined a conspiracy that contributed to this unprecedented attack on our democracy.


Moreover, opposing the transfer of presidential power and attacking the U.S. Capitol building and grounds constitutes an attack on the rule of law. Leading up to January 6, the defendants and their co-conspirators believed their view of the Constitution trumped all others and anointed themselves the “Guardians” of their “Republic.”

These defendants attempted to silence millions of Americans who had placed their vote for a different candidate, to ignore the variety of legal and judicial mechanisms that lawfully scrutinized the electoral process leading up to and on January 6, and to shatter the democratic system of governance enshrined in our laws and in our Constitution. And when they did not get what they wanted, they acted by together attacking the very people and place at the very time when those laws were in action.

At its essence, these defendants’ crimes are the antithesis of respect for the law. “The violence and destruction of property at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 showed a blatant and appalling disregard for our institutions of government and the orderly administration of the democratic process.” As with
the nature and circumstances of the offense, this factor supports a lengthy sentence of incarceration. A lesser sentence could encourage further abuses not only by these defendants, but by others who disagree with the next elections in our country’s local, state, and federal governments. See Gall, 552 U.S. at 54 (it is a “legitimate concern that a lenient sentence for a serious offense threatens to promote disrespect for the law”)

(citations removed, except for last one.)

source