Author Archives: oinsketta

Sociopathic transgression # 397

We all know that a desperate person with no scruples, feeling cornered and about to lose something they need, is capable of atrocious behavior. Even if the person has some scruples, when badly wounded and in great pain they may become capable of terrible acts.

Donald Trump’s brain, politically speaking, is an apparently very disturbed man named Steve Bannon. Sloppy Steve fancies himself a modern day strategist of international nationalism (which rings like National Socialism), right-wing oligarchic authoritarianism. He speaks of Vladimir Lenin’s “fire hose of mendacity”, the idea of flooding the marketplace of ideas with a constant high-powered flood of incendiary lies, like spraying diarrhea out of a high pressure nozzle. People get so overwhemed, so worn out, so sickened, that they turn away, while many others, less capable critical thinkers, are convinced by the constant stream of verifiable horseshit that comes too fast to fact check.

The transactional Trump was arguably the most corrupt, and one of the most insane, presidents who ever won the Electoral College. He was said to constantly push against the guardrails, as the New York Times styled it “bending and sometimes breaking them“. Most of the time he would just take a greasy shit on them, “here are your fucking norms, asshole.“

By design, according to Bannon’s Leninist strategy and Trump’s own penchant for chaos, it would take hours to list all of the destructive, corrupt and despicable acts committed by this administration (ask any of the remaining 900+ of the almost 4,000 children seized from asylum seekers who will never see their parents again).

Here’s a disgusting one that just jumped out at me, nicely encapsulating the destructive psychopathy of the GOP’s leader and the moral tone of its lynch mob caucus. I was reminded of it when I saw a photo of the supremely spineless Mike Pence wearing his special Vice President of the United States Covid mask.

Trump tested positive for Covid a day or two before the first 2020 presidential debate, and lied about it, claiming his retest was negative. It would have been a political disaster for him to admit that he was so weak and mortal that he got Covid, the hoax virus that Biden invented to defeat him in a rigged election. So the usually punctual president showed up late for the debate, too late to take the Covid test he’d agreed to take, and immediately took the stage with no mask barking at Biden from close range. Biden was, fortunately, wearing a mask.

Trump mocked Biden’s mask and within a day or two was medevacced to one of the greatest hospitals in the world to have every one of the new million dollar Covid treatments available.

Trump demanded an early release from the hospital and forced his secret service detail to drive around with him in a closed car so he could wave to his fans while his agents contracted Covid from him during his strongman photo op right out of his boyfriend Kim jong-un’s playbook. Then he immediately bragged about how easy it was to defeat Covid, that it was mind over matter, that if you were strong you had nothing to fear from this so-called pandemic.

Then the insane, highly infectious prick skirts the agreement he made to be tested before he took the debate stage. On the honor system the infamous and prolific liar lyingly told the corrupt, sick, dangerous, biased libtard cucks who were running the unfair debate that he had tested negative for Covid. His fucking family sat in the first row hissing and coughing throughout the debate with no masks on. Biden, fortunately, was wearing a mask. Which is probably what saved his life, or at least saved the senior citizen a bad case of a deadly pandemic.

Hard to even untangle the many strands of that transgression. He’d been lying for months about Covid, first claiming it would go away in a few weeks, saying it was the Kung Flu, blaming Hunter Biden, China and corrupt Ukraine for Covid-19, then appointing his imbecile son-in-law to be the czar of Covid, because Jared had done such a wonderful job fixing the opioid crisis and had also successfully brought peace to the Middle East (not including the Palestinians who he called ungrateful idiots).

Now if Biden had died of Covid that he contracted from Trump at that debate, could Trump go to prison for manslaughter based on his demonstrable depraved indifference to human life?

LOL!!!

When the truth bites you in the ass

Sometimes you can’t avoid a truth you would rather not confront. Without looking squarely at the actual situation, and understanding how it works, no solution will ever be possible. So if you are tormented in a relationship you will need to find a way to grasp the dynamic, and assess the damage being done, before you can end the torment.

A parent’s overwhelming need to feel in control and infallible, constantly undermining your own needs is a brutal thing to look at directly. It is natural to make accommodations, learn to accept blame for things you didn’t actually do, flatter the parent when necessary, learn when to withdraw, swallow a response, put on a false smile. These do not really solve anything, but they keep the ongoing harm to a minimum since you avoid fresh conflict with them.

The next step, the painful but freeing one, is understanding that this parent is not capable of behaving any better. They are stuck in unresolved pain from their own earlier life. They may not know how to resolve conflicts peacefully. You may tell everyone that your mother is a goddess, and she may smile, and bask in your admiration, but if you explain that you were calling your mother a goddess only to avoid her rage, she will make you pay for your unappreciated candor.

There are truths we resist because they undermine things we value greatly. At the same time, there is no healthy alternative when you understand the mistreatment you’ve been forced to tolerate. Someone who forces you to tolerate the intolerable does not love you very well.

“What is hateful to you do not do unto another” is an excellent and practicable formulation of the Golden Rule. We all know what we hate, we probably know it better than almost anything. So if I am doing something to you that I hate done to me, you will, and should, point this out to me. If my answer is “yeah, you hate it, maybe even I hate it, but fuck you, this is all you deserve and all you’ll ever get from me” you should very much take me at my word.

Every day that you don’t take me at my word, and hope that somehow love will prevail, is a day that the unacknowledged truth (that my final word to you is fuck your fucking feelings, asshole) is taking another giant bite out of your ass. In the end you’ll have no ass left, a very bad way to live.

Truth is hard, sometimes

I recently got a note from somebody telling me he wasn’t interested in taking sides, or even forming an opinion, but in learning the truth about a conflict we are mutually interested in.   The comment reminded me of an essential thing about truth.   It looks different depending on our point of view, how much information we have, our tolerance for cognitive discomfort, our level of self-awareness and honesty, while at the same time, things are objectively more or less true when viewed in light of the facts, and in the context of the situation. Truth can get famously foggy during a moral battle.

There is an eternal debate, among eggheads (old term for intellectuals) about the nature of truth and morality, the nature of reality.   These brainy types like the structure and rigor of science, even when talking about matters of the spirit and the soul.   Two prominent schools of thought are moral relativism and moral absolutism, both terms also used as pejoratives.  Most people simply believe in the truth that confirms their view of things and call it a day.  Academics write books, teach courses and defend their school of thought in the debate over the true nature of cherished, elusive truth.  Some views are closer to the truth than others, alternative facts are not the same as actual facts.   The academic stand-off goes something like this:

Moral relativists believe that truth, and its close cousin morality, are not absolute but change according to culture, social condition and historical epoch.  An example of this lack of universal morality/truth would be leaving a new born baby on a hill top to die.   Many, perhaps most, would recoil from this practice, condemn it as immoral.   But what if the baby’s mother, and the entire community, were starving to death during a drought?   People living in this harsh environment would not judge a mother for exposing her child for a quick death rather than struggling to keep the doomed baby alive, using valuable resources that others with a real chance of survival need.  In fact, in that case, she’s doing the right thing. Sadly, this rare example, though hard to refute, muddies the discussion of universal right and wrong.  If all morality is relative, who’s to say who is moral and who is acting immorally — how do any of us know the best way to act? 

Moral absolutists believe there is a universal morality, an immutable set of truths that apply across all cultures, times and places.   Murder, for example, the willful taking of an innocent life in a malicious or depraved manner — universally evil.   If there are universal truths, and it’s hard to imagine that something like refraining from murder is not a universally valued trait (but, see example above) then laws can be made based on these principles, to combat evil impulses.  Sadly, moral absolutists are often religious hardliners with no tolerance for the viewpoints of those who don’t embrace their religious views.  Their moral absolutism allows them to believe  morally problematic things, like the abortion doctor who was killed outside the clinic is burning in Hell, while the one who shot him gets a wink from Jesus Christ.

Truth can be elusive, though only in academia (and politics) are there only two ways to see it.  Truth is compatible with both of the warring views above, it is not always one thing or the other.   

Facts exist — I punched you in the nose, your nose bled, you called the cops, the cops arrived and told us both to sober up and fuck off.  The truth is that we had a conflict that turned violent, you were threatened enough to call the cops.  We will tell different stories about the facts.  

You will insist the punch was completely unprovoked, that I blindsided you, fooled you into relaxing just before bashing you.  That will be your “truth” and those sympathetic to you will accept it.  My story will have a detailed set-up, the context that came before the blow, the reason you needed to be hit right at that moment, and those who relate to my telling will be certain I was well provoked before I busted you in the head.   

The reflex of many people is to believe that the real truth exists somewhere between those two stories.  Somebody standing close by while the conflict escalated will be better situated to evaluate the stories, we’d think, but they have biases too.   Plus they won’t necessarily know the history, the smug look, repetition of the most hated phrases, and how they predictably ratcheted up the tension.   Context is important, though not always easily discernible. 

You have the classic “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”  In the case of the more than a thousand angry people who stormed the Capitol after sending 140 cops to the hospital, we can call them insurrectionists, waving a Confederate flag as their belligerently rebellious forebears would have, after sacking the Capitol.   Others call them “patriots” who were engaged in “legitimate political discourse” and are now being held, totally unfairly, as “political prisoners” and martyrs.   Those who blow themselves up for their beliefs are called martyrs, or insane, murderous assholes, depending.

So too in personal life.  Your deepest needs will dictate the truths you believe.   Truth can’t be divorced from opinion, since what we believe to be true forms the basis of our opinions. An opinion based on truth is more legitimate than one based on spin, color, a persuasive, selective  retelling of events that leaves out important facts.   Events and the sequence of how things unfolded, the cause and effect,  how one thing led to another, are the building blocks of truth.  Not everyone is prepared to deal with a truth that is upsetting and potentially destabilizing, like: the peacemaker on his moral high horse has also deployed irritating gas, which had nothing to do with his mission to make peace, in the name of making peace.

The benefit of sharing vexations with others

You can find yourself in a perplexing emotional cul-de-sac, very, very hard to see any way out. You can ruminate, follow theories, compare your situation to others, but the limitation in your point of view is partly that it is only your point of view, uninformed by the views of others.

As soon as you share a perplexing riddle with somebody you trust, you open the door to an insight that might seem obvious once it is expressed out loud but would never otherwise occur to you.

For example, I had an embattled friend who lived in a war zone, who could not help provoking me whenever we got into a conversation. No matter how angry I became, I always restrained myself from bashing this annoying guy in the face, because he was my childhood friend, because I try to conduct myself peacefully, because I don’t bash people in the face. This aggravating cycle continued for several years, until, unable to get him to even acknowledge that he was provoking the shit out of me regularly, I had to walk away from our long friendship.

Recently, I entered a vexatious revolving door dispute with my closest friend. No matter what progress we seemed to make in our peace talks, he regularly became indignant and angry. Each time I exerted myself to reassure him of my friendship and calmed him down. This happened more times than I can recall. He recalls this pattern too.

Talking to an old friend who also knew this guy very well, and has lost contact with him, I described the maddening dynamic. My friend becoming instantly angry, me calming him down. As I described this my friend emitted a knowing chuckle.

“Every every time he got mad and you reacted not with anger but with compassion, you were giving him exactly what he’s been looking for, and never received, for his entire life. And you wonder why he couldn’t stop doing it?!”

And it is kind of funny, how easy it is to see, when somebody else points it out. In both of the cases described above, these are people locked in war who lack good impulse control and basic conflict resolution skills. They are both required to hold in enormous amounts of frustration. In each case, when they vent their anger, which they are not generally allowed to do without severe consequences, they were met, in my case, with the mildness of friendship and understanding. Why would either one of them stop doing it? They wouldn’t, they can’t. Until they succeed in killing the thing that is sustaining their belief that they are worthy of love.

Being so patient in a one-sided arrangement like this is not a long-term strategy for friendship or life. Without mutuality, what’s the point of a relationship?

You can ask this question of people who care about you, and you may be surprised by the obvious insights they may have for you.

Reality vs. Angering Spin

You can argue, as authoritarians like Ron DeSantis do, that teaching current events in light of the actual past stigmatizes innocent young white children with the sins of their grandfathers, but that is only a transactional argument in the service of increasing your side’s power.

It is harder to argue persuasively about a simple fact like this:

Which is why wealthy fascists will always focus on the terrible burden to the “job creators” a living wage for unskilled workers would impose on the wealthy. They focus on why we must pity the poor super wealthy, who grace us all with their generosity and create a beautiful and just society for us all.

Believe that, you know, the myth of the generous, selfless billionaire philanthropist — or stay focused on the so-called grotesque injustice of one person having more than 10 million others, while children starve in the wealthiest country in human history.

And, of course, people like me completely ignore the fact that people who inherit a mountain of money deserve every penny of it, free of DEATH TAX, while poor people, even if willing to work very hard, only deserve a minimum beyond the bare legal minimum. Period.

Life’s unfair

Whenever I complained about anything being unfair, my parents’ actions or anything else, my father had a stock answer.  

“President Kennedy said ‘life’s unfair’,” my father would say.

I have no doubt that John Kennedy said that, just as I have no doubt he was shot in the head one morning in Dallas, proving his point.   

Life is unfair, it is also immensely complicated.   Sometimes it’s hard to navigate.   I react badly, unfairly, and I hurt you.  You react with hurt.  I think you are reacting with way too much hurt.  Fuck, I didn’t hurt you that badly!  Now who’s the victim of unfairness?

“Wait, you just admitted you hurt me.  Isn’t it unfair to tell me exactly how much I’m entitled to be hurt?   Do you know what I’m going through at this moment, what makes me more vulnerable than usual to suffering from unfair treatment by someone I trust?  Did I ever treat you that way?”

Now the back goes up, which happens automatically as the body is poised for fight or flight.

“You want fair, asshole?”  and the game is on.

If you are philosophical it may seem possible to arrive at a reasonable  understanding of virtually anything.  Once you have some data and a framework to understand something you have the way to make otherwise incomprehensible things comprehensible to yourself.   Of course, life being unfair, having a coherent framework to talk about something does not always lead to a mutually helpful conversation.

I can try to look at the conflict through the lens of your pain, understanding, for example, why it is so hard for you to compromise or make amends, but that view may cut a little too close to your nerve endings for your comfort.  You’ll feel judged, moreso if the view comes close to a painful truth.  Much easier to continue fighting over who has the right to feel more hurt by the other.  On a bad day you will hear things like “you have to understand that I’m too upset by what you did to listen to why you’re upset.”

Life’s unfair, and part of its unfairness is rooted in its often incoherent nature.  In spite of all the theories, and of science, and the role of the marvelous human mind in fathoming things that are difficult, a good part of life simply defies sense, logic, discussion.  Unfair, if you ask me.

The anodyne versus the difficult

It is tempting to live in an anodyne world, where everything is seen in the most painless possible light.  An angry conflict that continues for months, for years, poisoning the lives of both parties?   Two people who actually love each other deeply who just can’t find the way back to love, yet.  A cluster of bad events and painful symptoms that feels catastrophic in your life?  Not really that bad, when you compare them to a hundred much, much worse catastrophes.  You see?   There is a better way to think of bad things, a healthier way to feel about them.  Anodyne means sparing pain, or killing it.

In an anodyne worldview, warring parties can easily come to the table and work out peace terms, if only their better angels emerge and lead, which they easily can.  

True, but a big fucking “if”, if you know what I’m saying.   We don’t, of course, live in a world that always spares us the worst, but … what is the alternative?

Real courage, it seems to me, is looking at difficult things and seeing them for what they are.  Seeing things clearly is the first step towards progress.   As  for the painless view, your truly terrible medical situation does not make my ordinary, if challenging, medical situation any better.  For one thing, they are two different things.  For another, nothing about your awful situation provides any relief of mine.  It is hard to look at a scary thing carefully, a nasty thing, an unthinkable thing.   There are terrors out there, watching with unblinking eyes.  Death is not a ticket to a perfect world, unless I’m sadly mistaken, but it is surely a ticket from this miraculous one.  

We can truly wish that all conflicts could be worked out peacefully, that with enough patience, kindness and intelligence we can work loose the stubborn knots that strangle and keep the war raging.   We can believe this, faithfully, in the face of seamless opposition.  If only I can be more patient, kinder, smarter, if only I can find the words, the metaphor, the story to make clear that I’m not the enemy… except, that when you are the enemy, that’s what you are.

You know what you do with an enemy?  You dig your fortifications and fight like hell.  

While you are fighting you can think “I am fighting for love, I’m fighting for peace, I’m fighting for my belief in lifelong friendship.”   Your enemy is thinking the same thing, and they are convinced that you don’t know jack shit about love, peace or friendship and for that reason your fortifications must be bombarded, stormed and your army vanquished.

Blessed are the peacemakers, as someone in the days of Jesus said.  Then they took one, a man of peace said to perform miracles, and, after a quick trial by mob, nailed him to a cross, along with dozens of others that day.  For centuries people who worshipped this Lamb killed each other over the proper way to follow in his path of peace and gentleness.  Put their fellow believers to the sword, because they had different customs about the best way to show love to the earthly messenger of God’s love.   Anodyne that for me, somebody.