The boy can’t help it

Granted, yesterday was a bad day for F POTUS all around, his own Supreme Court dismissing his latest delay attempt in one sentence, NY AG moving to cut off his attempt to transfer assets to avoid paying fines and restitution after the fraud trial, and the J6 Committee slap down. The 76 year-old boy went nuts after yesterday’s closing statements showed him being, coincidentally, at the center of all of the fevered plans to keep himself in power and then lead an armed attack to seize by violence what he still considers his, to this day.

He ranted in a 14 page statement about the unselect committee, an illegitimate bunch of lying, traitorous assholes, ignoring both his enormous crowd size on Janiary 6 (see photos!) and never even mentioning his equally gigantic penis size (Stormy Daniels is a fucking liar!). Total witch hunt by more disloyal, lying, sick truth denying deniers, corrupt rats, in so many states.

He truly can’t help it. Even having to plead the Fifth makes him furious.

Mine, mine, I own it all! Everyone is in on the vicious, sick conspiracy to steal from me. You traitors have unleashed the rage of the majority of Americans, ready to kill and die for me. You’re all fucking dead, watch.

Ari Melber nails a terrible truth about our selectively blind justice system

As we led the world in Covid deaths with MAGA’s staunch, idiotic insistence on personal freedom for infectious assholes, we also lead the world in incarceration. Pretrial incarceration, which is spared our wealthiest citizens charged with felonies, is a violent, brutal, punishing, sometimes deadly world for poor people presumed innocent, locked up in hellish, overcrowded conditions prior to their trial, conviction and sentence. This torture is reserved for the poor and racial and ethnic minorities. Or as Bill Barr, our former culture warrior Attorney General, warned Blacks and Hispanics, in front of a law enfrorcement audience, you’d better obey law enforcement and respect them or they ain’t going to protect you, and shut up, there’s no such thing as systemic racism here you fucking whiners.

Ari Melber with a devastating report on the reality of Riker’s Island and our grotesquely unjust two tiered system of justice in exceptional America.

“Biden rethinking relationship with Saudi Arabia”

I don’t know what the most sickening aspect of this Washington Post headline is.

That the psychopathic young acting monarch of this medieval theocracy, a ruthless billionaire who murdered a critical journalist and had him dismembered, is cutting the oil supply to help his suck up friend Jared Kushner’s father-in-law claw his way back to power to avoid prosecution for multiple felonies?

That our great, exceptional country, a beacon of democracy and freedom to other countries, is hostage to a family of torturing medieval billionaire sheikhs who seem to have a chokehold on the world’s oil supply and can dictate prices at will? We’re beginning to reexamine our relationship with the House of Saud? Beginning?

Well, better late than never, I suppose.

If you read the article you’ll notice that only Democrats seem to be critical of dictatorial crown pronce MBS, the Reformer, and his current plan to drive up prices at the American oil pumps to help American right wing extremists and his embattled buddy Vladimir Putin, who never helped Trump in any way, I mean, why would he, I mean, why wouldn’t he? Now support for beleagured, innocent Putin is a touchstone for Republicans.

Only Democrats seem to give a damn about this axis of theocracy, repression and evil. Talk about a marriage of convenience made in hell… I can picture these implacable religious fanatics meeting again in the new Crusade, and they won’t be smiling at each other, or handing each other two billion dollar checks…

https://wapo.st/3rO5XDC

Follow-up to a month of no reply

Since silence can be for many reasons, and is construed differently by different people, please let me know what your silence means.

If you simply don’t know what to say, let me know. This leaves open the possibility of future communications from me.

If your silence means “fuck off!” let me know. It is the courteous and considerate thing to do, you fucking fuck.

A philosophical nature

If you wonder why things are the way they are, how flagrant injustice can flourish, how devoutly religious people following saintly martyrs can condemn countless children to lives of misery, commit atrocities in the name of their all-merciful God, you may have a philosophical nature.   I was always this way, and it was largely because I grew up in a family home with three other intelligent people where life made little sense.   When I left home I found myself studying philosophy in college, (psychology would have been a logical choice, too, I suppose, but it always struck me as a bit crazy, like so many drawn to study it).   While interesting to me at the time, reading and discussing the philosophical opinions of mostly dead white men now feels like an empty pursuit.  

The way it was taught, every philosophical position that was not your rare original thought was part of a school, a tradition.  Like any other field where leaders codify their views and their followers fight to defend their turf, there were schools of thought and even the occasional original thought could always be subsumed under one or another.  “Oh, so you’re making an existentialist argument, then,” a philosophy professor might ask.   Here I cite R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural for my final answer “existentialism my ass!”9

This categorizing and hierarchy-making is how humans have always worked.   Wise apes (homo sapiens) understand the world, a place of unfathomable complication, through simplification.   The ultimate simplifier is faith.  If you have faith, if your life is based in faith, that’s the only argument you will ever need.   How do you know that?  I have faith.  Faith, in fact, is the greatest grace that a human can have, it relieves all doubt, all torment, prevents bad thoughts and leads you, after your bodily life is done, to a heaven of unimaginable glory. 

The only problem with that, as far as I can see, is that you may have faith in a total crock of shit.  A deadly crock of shit, sometimes.  Millions had faith in Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Jerry Falwell, our current strong man wannabe, F POTUS.

Let’s leave politics out of this, though.  If you have faith you consider yourself blessed to have the answer to every perplexing question we humans face —  “I believe!”   As in law, philosophers always wind up distinguishing between one thing and another.   If you say “I believe!” as you are rescuing hostages from sadists, giving food to the hungry, teaching the poor a skill that will allow them to feed and clothe their family, comforting the miserable, I say AMEN.  If you believe that whatever you do, even things that will haunt you years later (like machine gunning hundreds into open graves), is for a higher good because you have faith, I say BAH.   Any lynch mob is animated by the belief, somehow, that they are doing the right thing.  They almost never are.

Faith is generally seen as in opposition to Reason.  Reason is the use of evidence, in light of experience to solve idemtifiable problems. Using Reason, as humans began to do during the Renaissance after centuries of “monkish ignorance and superstition” (Thomas Jefferson) civilizations began to look back to the long suppressed teachings and arts of ancient heathens.   This Age of Reason led  — for better and for worse — to science, world exploration, philosophies based on empirical truth instead of dogma enforced by God-sanctioned violence.   The Age of Enlightenment was a blip on the screen of human progress and may be at an end in our lifetimes, as the light of Reason winks out on all of us amid the righteus force of otherworldly true believers, ready to kill and die before they will submit to ungodly heathens, humanists, those who steer through life arrogantly using their facility to reason rather than the divine gift of faith.

Once again, I have taken a high-minded position, stating the obvious and coming down on the side of so-called decency and humanistic common sense while dismissing the undeniably true faith of millions of god-fearing people.  I am a self-righteous prick and you have every right to treat me as such.  Do it with evidence, though, not faith.

The necessity to lie

There are some relationships that can only be maintained by agreeing to lie, omit, reframe, delete, deny, pretend.  I mean ones where this agreement is a prerequisite for the relationship itself.  I have been forced to oblige in some cases, with my father and a few other close family members. 

It was always hard for me, but it is unsustainable now, the requirement that I continue to suppress my true feelings to maintain the illusion of love.  Maybe it’s my artistic fucking temperament, I don’t know.  Understanding my feelings and dealing with them is of supreme importance to my life.  My health suffers, my sleep turns unrestful, if the requirement of a relationship is pretending that I’m wrong to feel whatever it is I am feeling, no matter how precisely and reasonably I can describe those feelings.  

Beyond that, we all know in our hearts that a feeling itself cannot be wrong.  It is truly what we feel, whether we deny it or embrace it.  We may feel hurt based on a misunderstanding sometimes, and it’s always a relief to work that out afterwards when it happens that way, but the hurt we felt is just as real, even after we understand we felt that way based on an incomplete understanding.  The feeling itself often disappears once we learn more about why we felt hurt.  A mistaken feeling can be neutralized by the truth, a beautiful thing.

Pain, unbearable, terrifying pain, causes people to lie.  I understand that.  Shame and humiliation cause people to blame others for their pain.  I’ve seen it up close, when I was too hurt to see anything else.  It is a bad place to be. Doing it reflexively is a childish way to live

To me, reducing the world to this flat, dry, one choice right or wrong place is a kind of death.   My father stated it succinctly and poignantly, hours before he died “if only I hadn’t seen the world as black and white, winners vs. losers.  I think now of how much richer my life would have been if I’d allowed myself to see all the colors, all the nuance of this beautiful world.”   The poor guy was dead a few hours after expressing this.  More tragic words are hard for me to conjure at the moment.

The personal, of course, is also political.  If you defer to tyrannical demands in your personal life — act like you were never hurt, no matter what — you will be apt to do the same when it comes to political choices.  You compensate by pretending to be the hardest hard-ass in the world.  You accept one lie and the next, and feel righteous in your anger, blaming others for complicated mutual dilemmas.  You can wear a red baseball cap and passionately claim that the elected president is a fraud, an imposter, a lying puppet of some sick, dangerous people.  And your life is great, because you’re not a fucking loser.

The demand that you deny your own feelings launches you directly into an incoherent, intellectually indefensible world.  Everything becomes a reflex to deny, oppose, prevail.   Accede to this demand, accepting as true the opposite of what you deeply feel, and you cease to exist as an agent of your own heart.  You were hurt?  YOU WERE NOT! You are confused?   NO, YOU ARE NOT.  You feel misunderstood?   NO, YOU DO NOT.  In the end everything you feel is reframed to something else, all problems are yours alone and can only be resolved by pretending they’ll resolve themselves if you ignore them.  Does it make sense?  Who cares?  

To which an artistic, self-expressing fuck like me can only say “fuck that.”   It is no way to live.  You can do it short term, to weather some emergency, maybe, but as a long-term plan for love or friendship, it sucks its own crusty ass.