#narcissistic abuse is so real that it's built into the institution

[montaguespades]

"Egotypicals" wow, so now you're all using buzzwords to describe people who can experience empathy (normal for everyone but abusers) and consciously recognize their own flaws and toxicity (also normal for everyone but abusers) to further make NPD a "special and unique" experience and not just a trauma-based disorder that the sufferer is responsible for tackling without hurting people who DON'T take advantage of every vulnerable person in their path, especially once they KNOW what it is?

It's not a disability to be incapable of not being a dick to the people who care about you, it's willfull ignorance, as well as raw opportunism and egotism. Plenty of people are abused by a narcissist and choose not to carry on the torch, be a little introspective before pointing fingers at people who are already grasping at straws to defend a narcissist on occasion.

does anyone else get really fucking annoyed by how even the “supportive” egotypicals feel like they just NEED to tell you unprompted that they were hurt by someone with npd.

comments on posts with shit like “so true! people with npd need support even though my icky terrible narcissist parent is a horrific abuser” or whatever the fuck like. shut up youre a fucking stranger. thats a weird thing to just bring up to someone and also i dont care

[healingchildhoodtrauma]

My parents met in AA. They consider every day they don’t drink to be a success. But I look deeper and wonder, what caused them to drink? They’re both open about how they were abused as children. Neither of them have thoroughly worked through their trauma, other than AA meetings. They both had other addictions even when they stopped drinking. They basically “white knuckled” their way through life until they could vent at AA meetings. They took me to a couple meetings as a child and told me to never start drinking or I wouldn’t be able to stop. The more I read about the things wrong with AA, the more I understand my parents and how they raised us. My dad was a “counselor” in AA, which is horrifying.

“People with alcohol problems also suffer from higher-than-normal rates of mental-health issues, and research has shown that treating depression and anxiety with medication can reduce drinking. But AA is not equipped to address these issues—it is a support group whose leaders lack professional training—and some meetings are more accepting than others of the idea that members may need therapy and/or medication in addition to the group’s help.

The founder of AA based its principles on the beliefs of the evangelical Oxford Group, which taught that people were sinners who, through confession and God’s help, could right their paths.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/the-irrationality-of-alcoholics-anonymous/386255/

“Any certified professional in the field of addiction treatment can tell you that heavy drinking or drug use is most often times a signal of an undiagnosed mental health issue such as depression or anxiety. There is rarely, if ever, any talk about mental health in the rooms of AA. Therefore, someone who is self-medicating their depression with alcohol and who attends AA will be told that they have a ‘disease, for which there is no known cure’ and that the only solution is for them to attend meetings for the rest of their life.” https://www.healthyplace.com/blogs/survivingmentalhealthstigma/2013/02/one-step-forward-twelve-steps-back

“Alcoholics Anonymous, Circular Reasoning, and Group Think

Alcoholics can engage in a dangerous form of group think. There is this ‘us and them’ mentality, and members are encouraged to think of themselves as this special group with special problems. This feeling of having a unique set of problems can border on the ridiculous – I’ve heard people in Alcoholics Anonymous suffering from the common cold who talk as if they have some type of special alcoholic’s cold.

Those who follow the AA program can feel threatened by any type of criticism, and they sometimes seem more interested in defending AA than in helping alcoholics. I can’t remember ever meeting even one member of that group who was willing to suggest any other option than the meetings. This is all made to seem acceptable by using some fancy circular reasoning – if you are an alcoholic your only real hope is AA, but if you manage to get sober without AA you were never a real alcoholic to begin with.” http://paulgarrigan.com/dangers-of-alcoholics-anonymous/

“Deprogramming From AA—When a Fellowship Resembles a Cult

Some report having been coerced into going off their psychiatric medications, against their doctors’ advice. Others became frustrated with the lack of scientific evidence behind AA’s program. Others still are angry that any inquiry into other options is not only discouraged, but sometimes actively punished—by exclusion from social events, public humiliation at meetings, and constant reminders of the AA saying that to leave the program can only result in “jails, institutions and death.”

Many feel that they replaced their addiction to a substance with an addiction to the program.

Another issue that departing 12-step members report as concerning is suddenly dealing with all the issues that drove them to substance use in the first place, but weren’t adequately addressed in the program. People with a history of trauma, in particular, can find that the onslaught of pain and memories—repressed while they were told in AA that “alcoholism,” was the root of all their problems—can be almost unbearable.

“I would venture to say three-quarters, if not more, of the people in AA are suffering from depression or anxiety or survivors of trauma, and were using alcohol to self-medicate,” said Rachel Bernstein. “So then you have people who are derailed from a more direct and relevant path to dealing with their particular issues, and instead they are told that alcohol is the only source of their problem.”

Regarding the nature of “sharing” in meetings, Bernstein said, “Within 12-step groups, there are people who can defend against the social pressures, and others who can’t. They don’t want anyone to be unhappy with them so they’ll say what they need to say, they’ll make commitments, they’ll ‘admit’ things about themselves even if they aren’t true.”

“They’ll do that in a room full of people who are not mental health professionals and do not know how to hold onto that information in a safe way or help you heal,” she continued.

Within AA, she experienced sexual abuse from her sponsor and men her sponsor insisted she date. She was told that the sexual abuse she endured as a child and the rape she experienced as an adult were her fault.

Even more frightening, Alice said, is that she looked and even believed she was happy during this time. “Upon hearing that I had a negative experience in AA, people that knew me during that 10-year period might be shocked. ‘But she seemed so happy,’ they might say… ‘How could she say that?’”

“My answer to this,” she continued, “is that yes, I was very happy–in fact, I was euphoric at times when I went to AA. This was because I was suppressing all of the emotions and things that AA told me would lead me to drink: anger, sadness, grief, critical thinking, negative thoughts, my intelligence. This led me to have a kind of false gratefulness, happiness and peace that only lasted for so long.”

Both Rachel Bernstein and Monica Richardson give concrete advice on how a person thinking of leaving AA or any 12-step program, and wishing to deprogram, should proceed.

Bernstein advises:

1. Learn about methods of control and manipulative tactics. Bring a checklist to your next meeting and check off the techniques as you see them. You’ll be able to see for yourself if this group is treating you respectfully and being open about its intentions, or if it���s using manipulation to not only keep you there but make you feel like you have no choice but to stay. Here is a checklist of tactics to look out for:

* You are taught that the teachings and techniques are perfect. So if they are not working as intended, it’s because you are not following them the right way, or trying hard enough.

* The organization defines you, tells you what you are, who you are, and how to see yourself.

* Questioning or doubting the teachings is wrong and seen as an issue/problem of yours instead of your fundamental right.

* The organization is a closed system, and any issues you have with it have to stay in-house; there is no outside and/or objective governing body to bring your concerns to.

* Dependency is built into the system by making you feel that you cannot trust yourself on your own, and left to your own devices you would always make the wrong decision and your life would spiral downward.

* You never graduate. You are never done. Your participation and adherence to the teachings are expected to be lifelong.

* You are made to feel these are the only people you can trust in your life, and those outside the group are not able to support and ensure the path you should be on.

* The influence technique of “scarcity” is used by conveying the message that this group is the only group in the world that can give you what you need.

* It has its own social norms and lingo that are different from those in the outside community, so you feel more understood by those in the group and more a part of the world of the group, and this can separate you from those in the outside community.

* The group has one system it provides. No other systems or philosophies are integrated. So, whatever the system is designed to address is the only thing that’s addressed, and other potentially primary issues are ignored. Part of the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” idea, this can cause people to be misdiagnosed and to be derailed from getting help they may need with their true underlying issues.” https://filtermag.org/deprogramming-from-aa-when-a-fellowship-resembles-a-cult/

“And so, the AA accusation that alcoholics are people unable to recognize their wrongdoings and character defects sounded familiar to me. The “fellowship” had the same symptoms as a narcissist! And, once again, I was defenseless. A narcissist is never wrong, just as if you relapse in AA it is your fault, never AA's fault. Narcissists see everyone as their mirror, and if you agree with them all is well. If you disagree, you are an enemy. The AA members I met became instantly defensive whenever I criticized AA. They were like my mother!

If I asked questions, I was told "You think you know it all, but your own best thinking got you here." Hearing that I was powerless and that without AA I would die sounded very familiar to me. AA rules by the same fear and confusion abusers like my mother and my rapist use to keep their victims under control.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/addiction-in-society/201405/woman-fights-aa-alcoholics-anonymous-narcissist?amp

“AA was part of a Protestant evangelical group for the first several years of its existence, and its 12-step program is blatantly religious by any reasonable definition of the word. AA is supportive — as long as you parrot its party line. It’s nonjudgmental–again, as long as you parrot the party line. AA is not purely voluntary; over a million Americans per year are coerced into attending it via court orders and employee assistance programs, as a condition of avoiding jail or keeping their jobs; and many of AA’s promoters insist that AA doesn’t promote itself, even as they do exactly that. As for AA members being “better than well,” attend any meeting and judge for yourself. And AA does have serious negative aspects, both for its members and those merely exposed to it.” https://seesharppress.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/alcoholics-anonymous-does-more-harm-than-good/

Reading these things provides more context for why my family operated like a cult, headed by my narcissist mother and antisocial father. My mother went from being raised Catholic to AA.. both engaging in abuse, mind control, victim blaming and excessive confession of wrong doing/shame. This gives me a lot of insight into her patterns of black and white thinking, scapegoating, suppression, and abuse of power. It makes sense now why I was shamed/vilified for speaking out against the groupthink. Emotional abuse wasn’t an exception to the rule, emotional abuse was the way of life.

[confrontingbabble-on]

“It stood by as the core Gospel message—concern for the poor and the oppressed—was perverted into a magical world where God and Jesus showered believers with material wealth and power. The white race, especially in the United States, became God’s chosen agent.

Imperialism and war became divine instruments for purging the world of infidels and barbarians, evil itself. Capitalism, because God blessed the righteous with wealth and power and condemned the immoral to poverty and suffering, became shorn of its inherent cruelty and exploitation.

The iconography and symbols of American nationalism became intertwined with the iconography and symbols of the Christian faith. The mega-pastors, narcissists who rule despotic, cult-like fiefdoms, make millions of dollars by using this heretical belief system to prey on the mounting despair and desperation of their congregations, victims of neoliberalism and deindustrialization.

These believers find in Donald Trump a reflection of themselves, a champion of the unfettered greed, cult of masculinity, lust for violence, white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, religious intolerance, anger, racism and conspiracy theories that define the central beliefs of the Christian right.

Trump has filled his own ideological void with Christian fascism. He has elevated members of the Christian right to prominent positions, including Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Mike Pompeo to secretary of state, Betsy DeVos to secretary of education, Ben Carson to secretary of housing and urban development, William Barr to attorney general, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the televangelist Paula White to his Faith and Opportunities Initiative. More importantly, Trump has handed the Christian right veto and appointment power over key positions in government, especially in the federal courts. He has installed 133 district court judges out of 677 total, 50 appeals court judges out of 179 total, and two U.S. Supreme Court justices out of nine. Almost all of these judges were, in effect, selected by the Federalist Society and the Christian right. Many of the extremists who make up the judicial appointees have been rated as unqualified by the American Bar Association, the country’s largest nonpartisan coalition of lawyers.

Trump has moved to ban Muslim immigrants and rolled back civil rights legislation. He has made war on reproductive rights by restricting abortion and defunding Planned Parenthood. He has stripped away LGBTQ rights. He has ripped down the firewall between church and state by revoking the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches, which are tax-exempt, from endorsing political candidates. His appointees throughout the government routinely use biblical strictures to justify an array of policy decisions including environmental deregulation, war, tax cuts and the replacement of public schools with charter schools, an action that permits the transfer of federal education funds to private “Christian” schools. 

I studied ethics at Harvard Divinity School with James Luther Adams, who had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936. Adams witnessed the rise there of the so-called Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi. He warned us about the disturbing parallels between the German Christian Church and the Christian right. Adolf Hitler was in the eyes of the German Christian Church a volk messiah and an instrument of God—a view similar to the one held today about Trump by many of his white evangelical supporters. Those demonized for Germany’s economic collapse, especially Jews and communists, were agents of Satan. Fascism, Adams told us, always cloaked itself in a nation’s most cherished symbols and rhetoric. Fascism would come to America not in the guise of stiff-armed, marching brownshirts and Nazi swastikas but in mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the biblical sanctification of the state and the sacralization of American militarism. Adams was the first person I heard label the extremists of the Christian right as fascists. Liberals, he warned, as in Nazi Germany, were blind to the tragic dimension of history and radical evil. They would not react until it was too late.

Trump’s legacy will be the empowerment of the Christian fascists. They are what comes next. For decades they have been organizing to take power. They have built infrastructures and organizations, including lobbying groups, schools and universities as well as media platforms, to prepare. They have seeded their cadre into the political system. We on the left, meanwhile, have seen our institutions and organizations destroyed or corrupted by corporate power.

The Christian fascists, as in all totalitarian movements, need a crisis, manufactured or real, in order to seize power. This crisis may be financial. It could be triggered by a catastrophic terrorist attack. Or it could be the result of a societal breakdown from our climate emergency. The Christian fascists are poised to take advantage of the chaos, or perceived chaos. They have their own version of the brownshirts, the for-hire mercenary armies and private contractors amassed by Christian fascists such as Erik Prince, the brother of Betsy DeVos. The Christian fascists have seized control of significant portions of the judiciary and legislative branches of government. FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of the Family Research Council, gives 245 members of Congress a perfect 100% for votes that support the agenda of the Christian right. The Family Research Council, which has called on its followers to pray that God will vanquish the “demonic forces” behind Trump’s impeachment, is identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group because of its campaigns to discriminate against the LGBTQ community.

The ideology of the Christian fascists panders in our decline to the primitive yearnings for the vengeance, new glory and moral renewal that are found among those pushed aside by deindustrialization and austerity. Reason, facts and verifiable truth are impotent weapons against this belief system. The Christian right is a “crisis cult.” Crisis cults arise in most collapsing societies. They promise, through magic, to recover the lost grandeur and power of a mythologized past. This magical thinking banishes doubt, anxiety and feelings of disempowerment. Traditional social hierarchies and rules, including an unapologetic white, male supremacy, will be restored. Rituals and behaviors including an unquestioning submission to authority and acts of violence to cleanse the society of evil will vanquish malevolent forces.

The Christian fascists propagate their magical thinking through a selective literalism in addressing the Bible. They hold up as sacrosanct biblical passages that buttress their ideology and ignore, or grossly misinterpret, the ones that do not. They live in a binary universe. They see themselves as eternal victims, oppressed by dark and sinister groups seeking their annihilation. They alone know the will of God. They alone can fulfill God’s will. They seek total cultural and political domination. The secular, reality-based world, one where Satan, miracles, destiny, angels and magic do not exist, destroyed their lives and communities. That world took away their jobs and their futures. It ripped apart the social bonds that once gave them purpose, dignity and hope. In their despair they often struggled with alcohol, drug and gambling addictions. They endured familial breakdown, divorce, evictions, unemployment and domestic and sexual violence. The only thing that saved them was their conversion, the realization that God had a plan for them and would protect them. These believers were pushed by a callous, heartless corporate society and rapacious oligarchy into the arms of charlatans. All who speak to them in the calm, rational language of fact and evidence are hated and ultimately feared, for they seek to force believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them.

We can blunt the rise of this Christian fascism only by reintegrating exploited and abused Americans into society, giving them jobs with stable, sustainable incomes, relieving their crushing personal debts, rebuilding their communities and transforming our failed democracy into one in which everyone has agency and a voice. We must impart to them hope, not only for themselves but for their children.

Christian fascism is an emotional life raft for tens of millions. It is impervious to the education, dialogue and discourse the liberal class naively believes can blunt or domesticate the movement. The Christian fascists, by choice, have severed themselves from rational thought. We will not placate or disarm this movement, bent on our destruction, by attempting to claim that we too have Christian “values.” This appeal only strengthens the legitimacy of the Christian fascists and weakens our own. We will transform American society to a socialist* system that provides meaning, dignity and hope to all citizens, that cares and nurtures the most vulnerable among us, or we will become the victims of the Christian fascists we created.”

Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers…

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/onward-christian-fascists/

* “There are many varieties of socialism and there is no single definition encapsulating all of them...” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

..."democratic socialism" is really social democracy, as found in much of Europe and especially in the Nordic countries.[19] In 2018, The Week suggested that there was a trend towards social democracy in the United States and highlighted elements of its implementation in the Nordic countries, suggesting that Sanders’ popularity was an element in favor of its possible growth in acceptance.”... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Bernie_Sanders

[goosegoblin]

Hey, a friend of mine has been in an awful abusive relationship and believes that this was caused by him being a narcissist. Now she spents a lot of time talking to me about how narcissists are these evil, irredeemable people and tbh, it makes me uncomfortable. You're the only person I've seen who hasn't taken that approach with the "scary" mental illnesses, and I was wondering how I should deal with this. Is it okay to see narcissists as sick people, rather than dangerous, or am I just (1/2)

 being naive, as my friend says? (2/2)

Ahh Christ, I hate this phenomenon. 

She’s almost certainly talking about narcissists in the pop culture, Reddit-y way that gives that label to pretty much all abusive or toxic people. Most groups using this word freely admit that they aren’t referring to NPD when they do so, but that doesn’t stop a lot of people from conflating the two.

It’s especially difficult because your friend has obviously had a really, really difficult and traumatic time, and that deserves respect. But honestly, focusing on ‘narcissists‘ to that degree does not sound like an especially healthy coping mechanism. Is she in therapy? Could you encourage her to get in therapy? Hopefully a therapist could help her work through her trauma while gently challenging the beliefs she’s built.

–

Because I’m anticipating unhappy replies to this post, I’d like to remind you all of the DSM 5 criteria for NPD:

NPD is defined as comprising a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by the presence of at least 5 of the following 9 criteria:

- A grandiose sense of self-importance- A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love- A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions- A need for excessive admiration- A sense of entitlement- Interpersonally exploitive behavior- A lack of empathy- Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her

The majority do not refer to behaviour, but to internal thoughts and beliefs, because- surprise!- that’s how mental illness works. Anybody attempting to come into my inbox and pick a fight over ‘lack of empathy’ is going to have to first demonstrate to me that they know what ‘empathy’ means, because it does not in fact mean ‘being nice and good’. Empathy exists on a spectrum, and some of the best people I know experience relatively little (or no) empathy.

As for ‘interpersonally exploitive behaviour’, I have… some thoughts on that. I won’t go into them too much here, but some quick notes: that does not necessarily mean ‘abusive’, that is in no way unique to people with NPD, all social interactions are manipulative to some extent (patrexes has some really great stuff on that), that criterion is not necessary for diagnosis, and these are the symptoms of untreated NPD. We can critique people on behaviours without labelling a whole condition as ‘evil’.

By comparison, here’s the trait listen given on the most prominent N-related subreddit. How many of those are actually unique to NPD? In contrast, how many are just plain abusive behaviours?

Yet another reason I dislike this recent ‘He/she’s an N!’ craze is that it completely erases the abusive behaviours of people who do not have NPD. I’ve experienced toxic and borderline abusive behaviour from people who were hyperempathetic. I’ve been in toxic relationships with people who hated themselves and thought they were garbage. I’ve known many people whose untreated depression, ADHD or anxiety led them to behave in toxic and abusive ways. Why is NPD different?

And, as ever, if your mental health awareness and advocacy stops at ‘the people you think are the real crazies’, it’s pretty fuckin’ bad, and you should really find a different label for what you’re doing. We need to strive to talk about abuse and trauma without merrily throwing mentally ill people under the bus while doing so; we cannot move forward by throwing other groups behind.

xx

[montaguespades]

Anyone: literally just describes narcissism as it clinically exhibits to people who are being abused by a narcissist

This blog, every five minutes: "Nuuuu you're using the wrong TERMS to describe the textbook behaviors of a narcissist! Because...it makes me (a narcissist) feel BAD to consider that in order to intentionally and methodically abuse another person, you HAVE to be completely self-obsessed and detrimental to society as a whole! It's not MY fault (the narcissist) that I got diagnosed with the cluster B disorder that conveniently encapsulates every single abusive trait displayed by every abuse survivor's personal account! Stop being ableist, it's JUST the boomers hurting you for authoritarian reasons, not because our self-serving government continues to promote individualism and promote/obfuscate abuse for profit, therefore incentivizing people who have no capacity for empathy to hurt MORE people behind closed doors! We (the narcissistic abusers) don't need to own up to our actions because someone hurt US first! We're not obligated to do any self-reflection, or make an effort to notice that we're hurting the people who love us!"

Like, can you hear yourself? If you have no capacity for empathy, you shouldn't be trusted around any vulnerable person, child or animal. Just be slightly introspective and stop abusing people, holy fuck.

Stop defending abusers online, it JUST makes you look like a bigger one.

This is typical authoritarian parenting.

When a typical authoritarian parent does this, they're praised for it. People insist that the world needs more of this. People blame all of society's problems on there being not enough of this.

But when it's labeled as "narcissism", people instantly drop everything and realize how cruel it is to treat someone this way.

[jade-ngoc-yeshim]

1. The M.O.

Why did I start this blog?  I have no plain and straightforward answer to offer; it’s a coalescence of several factors—some tangible; some I’ve yet to identify; and some rustling around in the pit of my stomach, for which I lack the words to will into coherence.  But I will try my best to explain:

2019—my 25th year of existence—I will always reflect on and refer to as “The Crumbling.”  It was the year when I lost myself to a number of competing forces: work, love, extraordinary circumstances, and the cyclical churn of life.  Those who’ve known me for a long time would characterize me as incredibly stable; risk-averse; always planning for the long-term; cripplingly self-aware; and always doggedly marching uphill towards a set of well-defined, high flying goals.  My tunnel vision was impressive.  My modus operandi clearly articulated.  My drive unflappable.

The inertia behind it all was guilt.  I had guilt about a lot of things:

Firstly, I had access to the full gamut of opportunities that were ripped away from my parents by war and displacement.  I had to make up for this as their only child.  Fuck selfish millennial self-realization.  I had to live for three.

Secondly, my birth-given liminality.  That I, as a second-generation immigrant/migrant/refugee (whatever legal or sociocultural label you deign to ascribe to my personhood), stand at the boundary between homeland and foreign land (cum new “home”), Vietnam and America, past and present.  It is difficult to occupy two spaces; oftentimes, I feel that I am in neither, and that the only comfortable place to inhabit is the hyphen that tenuously connects “Vietnamese” and “American.”  To straddle two identities is to be constantly uncomfortable.  It requires a lot of shifting, recalibration, and a lot of stumbling.  I was never Vietnamese enough, and so others shamed my parents for not doing a good job in raising me.  I was never American enough, and so I shamed myself into invisibility.

Third, being a Vietnamese woman.  The consequences of veering off-course extend far beyond you.  The stories uttered in hushed tones about one’s paternal second cousin twice removed from Cleveland or what have you:  She had such promise.  She had the potential to become an engineer or doctor—to elevate her family’s social status.  But she just had to succumb to the vices of the typical Vietnamese woman:  boys, hard substances, and the cold, hard draw of under-the-table cash from working in auntie’s nail salon.  And so my existence as a young, OK-looking, Vietnamese-American woman in a foreign land with many foreign ideas inherently made me a flight risk.  And so be it.  And so it is.

Turns out, guilt is a great motivator.  It led me to unbelievable achievements at a very tender age:   becoming valedictorian of my high school class; being the first of my family’s generation to go to college; graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League institution; becoming a Rhodes Scholarship finalist in one of the most competitive districts in the U.S., winning a full scholarship for a master’s program in the United Kingdom; graduating with high marks from the world’s best refugee and migration studies course at the University of Oxford; landing my first real job working for USAID; and having the privilege of serving as a Program Officer for the Syria humanitarian crisis during some of the most tumultuous times in the war’s history.

But what is the point of great material achievement when it comes at the expense of other, more important aspects of your life?  

For most of my adult life thus far, I have foregone love, social engagements, precious time spent with family, and beloved hobbies in the ruthless pursuit of achievement.  I let go of art, music, good men, and good times.  I was constantly hunched over my laptop, producing—worrying my friends and family sick in my permanently crooked state.  And I kept going, motivated by a dangerous cocktail of excitement over how much I was gaining and the eternal damnation of imposter syndrome.  I thought that I can rest only when I become successful, with no clearly identifiable marker or metrics for success.

I get easily carried away, but I am not stupid.  I knew the bubble had to burst at some point.

I just didn’t know how violently it could.

///

“The Crumbling” was a sudden conflagration with a long kindling period.  The first match was struck at Oxford, when my lack of romantic savvy led to my falling in lust/infatuation with a narcissistic, well-networked man who offered me manufactured kindness during a very confusing time in my life.  To put things colloquially, I was “lost in the sauce.”  I was fixated on how much I didn’t belong at my graduate institution and felt so sorry for myself.  I craved validation and understanding; it was the soporific I needed for my weeks’ long insomnia, the Xanax for my constant worries, and the energy boost I needed to wake me from my malaise.  I was emotionally hemorrhaging.  And smelling blood, he barreled towards me.

He raped me when I was drunk in my own bedroom.  He weaponized the insecurities I shared with him against me.  He further emptied me of whom I was, spun a narrative of how I was a pitiful, love-drunk woman who deserved what he done to her; and made my home away from home a fundamentally unsafe place.  And the only coping mechanism I knew was to dive head-first into work—to fill my empty spaces through the only way I knew: producing.  

It was the wrong answer.  But I managed to see myself through to the end of my master’s with it, albeit with a few sacrifices:  Never attending my own graduation out of fear of seeing my rapist again.  A bitter distaste for life.  An inherent fear of men and relationships (and of my own shadow) that went long unresolved.  Strained communication with my parents.  And a further shattered sense of self-worth.

///

Things were fine for a year or so when I was caught up in a flurry of new beginnings: moving to a new city, starting a dream job in a dream organization, and making my first furtive steps into adulthood.  I was occupied with finding my identify as a young professional and invested my heart and soul into my new career.  And on a fateful afternoon in September 2018, I was tapped for my first humanitarian deployment to Adana, Turkey—a three-month commitment that doubled just a month into my stay.  

It was thrilling.  It was exhilarating.  It was empowering to be the face of U.S. humanitarian assistance in northern Syria at 24.  But as exciting as it was, it was also overwhelmingly terrifying to sit at the helm of a humanitarian juggernaut as the trajectory of American foreign policy changed overnight.  From December onward, Turkey was an amalgam of mild PTSD, living in hotels, unpacking and re-packing, armored vehicles, Jack Daniels, furtive puffs of Marlboro Milds, military men, street cats, insecurity, getting rowdy, hardened alternative trailer systems, over-caffeination, and exhaustion.  

I traveled to beautiful places.  I broke hearts, and I encountered love.  I was where the action was.  I was living out my wildest dreams.  I had purpose.  I felt alive, and maybe for the first time.  I sincerely believed that I would always look back at Turkey as my golden era.

/// Wheels down ADA-FRA-IAD.  Enter “The Crumbling” in full force. ///

What does it mean when the “golden era” of your life—the moment when you most felt alive—was wholly illusory?

When you look back several months later, scratch through the vermeil, and find nothing but the shaky foundations underpinning your drawn-out, whisky- and cardamom-scented daydream?  

When the person you fell in love with—the first after being raped, the one who earnestly listened to you recounting your survivor story—ended up emotionally using and abusing you, as well?

When, despite putting in blood, sweat, and tears into your work (quantified at approximately 10-12 hours a day, inclusive of weekends), your supervisor tells you to reconsider whether humanitarian work is right for you?

When deployment is no longer an option for you because of that, and you come face-to-face with the crushing reality that you never built a life in your home base.  (Rephrased:  When there is no escape from the void.)

When the wounds finally start to seal up, and then your grandfather passes away.  And suddenly you’re shoulder-to-shoulder at his altar with the extended family who narcissistically abused you during your youth? (Re: The past rears its ugly head again.)

The symptoms of all of this occurring within a 3-month timespan were:

Losing 20 pounds;

Vacillating between sleeping constantly and not at all;

Your loved ones remarking that the light in your eyes has completely vanished;

Hours and hours of self-help podcasts;

A lot of consolatory chocolate from coworkers who’ve noticed that something is terribly amiss with you;

Near-constant mental haze;

Ostinatos of teary-eyed apologies to your friends, whom you’re convinced you’ve burdened;

Manic consumerism;

Trying to harvest endorphins through prolonged cardio sessions;

Taking a lot of strange vitamins and supplements that didn’t do anything, other than make you dehydrated;

Frequent panic attacks; and

Desperate forays into various branches of spirituality (inclusive of a cheap [actually not cheap at all] psychic who tells you that you’re the victim of both black karma and an inter-generational love curse [!]…but at least she had an adorable cat.).

Tl;dr:  It’s depression.  Horrendous, soul-crushing depression, and constant anxiety over the other shoe dropping.  It’s coming to terms with the daunting reality that the only way out is to roll your sleeves up and start laying the foundations of your identity brick-by-brick.  It’s coming to grips with the fact that you have no sense of self outside of what you do.  What is the point of accumulating achievements when you never pause to appreciate them?  

What is the point of working tirelessly for others, when you make no time to sit with them and to enjoy all of the abundance together?  What is the point of life when it is all prospective?

Do you truly have a sense of self when you have relied on others to give you meaning your entire life?

///

As the thick haze of “The Crumbling” dissipated, I arrived at a bit of clarity:  That what had passed had not happened to me, but for me.  That the shaky foundations on which I rested my already fragile sense of self needed to collapse—that I needed to collapse—in order to build something that was truly steady and purposeful.  

All is not lost.  On the contrary, the ashes borne from the waves of trauma that I endured over these past several months are but the rich inputs for a more fortified way of being.  

I would be remiss to not document the process along the way.  A process I will affectionately refer to as “The Awakening.”

[aion-rsa]

The Boys Season 2: What Is The Church of the Collective?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

The following contains spoilers for The Boys season 2 episode 7.

The ongoing presence and practice of politics within democratic societies should represent the pinnacle of human achievement: the fair and equitable ordering of communities, city states and nations; the voluntary outflow of power from the people to their chosen representatives. 

In reality, however, the true power rests not in the hands of the people, but in the gloved fists of major institutions: including corporations and religions, the balance of power between those two behemoths varying from country to country, all around the world, western or otherwise. Certainly in the U.S., no man or woman can ascend to the presidency without the backing of at least one of them, and Amazon Prime’s superb superhero satire The Boys understands this bleak state of affairs perfectly. While the show is at heart a reaction against the implausibly virtuous world of the comic-book superhero, it’s also a searing indictment of the intersecting worlds of corporate power, consumerism, and celebrity culture. 

Vought International – the business-suited big bads who keep the show’s superheroes in their pocket in order to fatten their own – is savagely adept at using its corporate power to flatter, curtail and manipulate both the populace and its own employees. It’s hard to keep God-like beings in check, but Vought management is smart and cynical enough to understand that even potentially planet-ending supes aren’t immune to the allure of celebrity. 

The Boys season 2 introduces the yang to U.S. corporatocracy’s yin with The Church of the Collective, a none-so-subtle parody of the Church of Scientology. The Deep (Chace Crawford) has been pulled slowly in by the tentacled embrace of the church to the point where we find him, in the penultimate episode of the second season, brainwashed into following its codes, without really understanding its purpose, aims or reach. We, the audience, are similarly in the dark, though the parallels to The Church of the Collective’s real-world counterpart, plus the narrative hints we’ve already been given, can help us imagine what this mysterious cult might have in store for the supes, ‘the boys’, and the world at large.

Cultish Context  – Scientology

The Church of Scientology was founded in 1953 by the pulp sci-fi writer and former Naval Officer L. Ron Hubbard. Throughout the early 1950s Hubbard popularized a branch of pseudoscience called Dianetics, which slowly evolved into the core tenets of his new religion, coincidentally not long after the therapeutic applications of Dianetics were uniformly rubbished by academics and psychologists. This became something of a trend with Hubbard. Don’t like my contribution to the field of modern psychology? Fine. I’ll use it to start my own religion. Don’t want me in the Navy? Fine. I’ll start my own navy (which he essentially did with Scientology’s naval-based fraternal order “Sea Org”). 

Scientology gets its hooks into prospective church members – usually the needy, the narcissistic, the unfulfilled, or the damaged – by promising them enlightenment through auditing. This process – part talk-therapy, part spiritual confession, part future blackmail – works by breaking down and analyzing a subject’s life (and past lives) in order to purge them of those traumatic, or unhelpful, memories (engrams) that may be negatively influencing their behavior in the present. While Scientology needs a large rank and file to sustain itself it’s also shrewd enough to target celebrities – it has a whole department dedicated to their pursuit – whose presence in the church guarantees money, media attention, and free, recruitment-based marketing. Scientology knows that it’s celebs and profits, not saints and prophets, who will rally crowds of the spiritually empty to their doors.     

The Church of the Collective uses similar strategies, both of which converge on The Deep at the start of the second season, being that he’s both a celebrity, and a damaged vessel. Things have never looked worse for the disgraced submariner: cast aside from The Seven; isolated; reviled; drunk; full of doubt and recrimination. He’s also the #metoo poster boy. 

Simply put: he’s easy prey. 

The Church offers him a way back into The Seven via a journey of self-and-bodily acceptance, ostensibly a combination of talk-therapy, interrogation and mind-altering drugs. The Deep is quickly broken down then built back up again. The Church even stage-manages him a wife (an allusion, perhaps, to a certain fighter-jet-flying, cocktail-mixing actor who’s long been Scientology’s most famous recruit) to repair the PR already done.

The Deep is recruited by Eagle the Archer (Langston Kerman), a washed-up, Travolta-esque supe who dangles the story of his own success and redemption before him like a hypnotic carrot. The Deep, in turn, brings A-Train (Jesse T. Usher) to the Collective, although A-Train’s entry into the fold is a little less wide-eyed and willing. He can see past the bullshit, and wants no part of it, but nevertheless is ensnared by the Church’s smooth-toned, immaculately-groomed leader, Alastair Adana (Goran Visnjic), who knows all about A-Train’s spiraling debt, drug abuse and heart condition, and implies that such knowledge could only be kept private for a price.

“The church knows all kinds of things,” he tells a suddenly cognizant A-Train, “But don’t worry. We also know how to be discreet… especially for our members.”

Adana is a thinly-veiled approximation of David Miscavige – Scientology’s current leader – in that he’s a man who projects a smiling, sophisticated veneer to the world, beneath which lies barely concealed torrents of ruthless cruelty and rage. Allegedly.  

When Eagle the Archer refuses the Church’s request to break off contact with his mother, the organization releases a damning and embarrassing sex tape to the media. Adana declares Eagle a toxic person (Scientology labels its enemies “suppressive persons” or “SPs”) with whom no-one in the Church should associate. The Deep doesn’t hesitate to cut his new friend out of his life, showing that even supes are susceptible to the power of suggestion and a little psychological surgery. A-Train observes all of this with quiet but troubled detachment, doubtless wondering how high a price he’ll have to pay for his past… and for how long.

What Is The Collective Up To?

So far it seems that the Church has been biding its time, waiting for an opportunity to infiltrate Vought, or The Seven. Each time a smaller fish has been sent to catch a bigger fish. There’s little reason to assume that this chain will stop with A-Train. Who’s next? The CEOs and head honchos of Vought itself? Black Noir – leveraged into the fold with the threat of revealing his crippling tree nut allergy to the general public? Maeve – if the Church gets its hands on the footage that was filmed onboard a certain doomed civilian airliner? And who, or what, is its ultimate target? 

Homelander?    

While the loony, laser-eyed lout regularly expresses a desire to unleash his unrestrained fury upon the helpless world, adoration and popularity really are important to him, which is probably the only reason he’s held himself back from going full superhero postal. Vought, however, can only fluff Homelander’s vanity insofar as it doesn’t upset the shareholders, whereas the Church of the Collective can offer him the one thing he truly craves: uncritical, unquestionable, unending Godhood and adulation. 

This wouldn’t be Homelander’s first religion rodeo. In season 1 Homelander bent Christianity to his, and Vought’s, will, claiming that superheroes like him – living miracles – had been chosen by God to carry out His plan for America: so why shouldn’t they join the War on Terror? The discovery that supes were created by Compound V rather than God destroyed that useful illusion, but perhaps The Church of the Collective represents a second chance to co-opt a religion. A marriage made in heaven this time.    

Stormfront is the only snag here, given that she already has her claws into Homelander and there’s bad blood between her and the Church. Once a member, she rejected it on the grounds that its inclusive membership criteria was an affront to her deeply cherished Nazi ideals of racial purity. If she was declared a toxic person by the Church, though, what was her punishment? Why is she allowed to operate with impunity? Is it possible that she’s secretly working for the Church – or at their command – to recruit Homelander, and the whole eugenics angle is part of their true and hidden design for the planet? 

Unlikely. It’s more likely we’re about to see The Church of the Collective try to take down their fallen angel. Or take over Vought. Or both.  Corporate might versus religious zealotry, with supes on both sides, and the boys trapped – as always – somewhere in the middle.

And if that’s the case, who should we put our money on?    

The Church of the Collective, like its real-life counterparts Scientology and NXIVM, apes the marketing methods, structure and language of the modern corporation, projecting the power and seriousness of the boardroom rather than the prattling of the pulpit. While these quasi-religious entities need money to survive and grow, and indeed mercilessly pursue it, money is but an adjunct to the real prize of power, which makes them at once more deadly and much harder to defeat (that isn’t to say that The Church of the Collective isn’t set on getting what The Church of Scientology already has: tax exempt status). 

You can bring down a business; it’s a little harder to snuff out faith, especially at its most zealous and jealously guarded. It’s the reason The Sparrows were able to take over Kings’ Landing in Game of Thrones. It’s the reason you’d rather meet a Ferengi in battle than a Klingon. 

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Whatever chaos the Collective is about to unleash on the world of The Boys, you can guarantee that it’s going to be messy. And a whole load of fun.    

The post The Boys Season 2: What Is The Church of the Collective? appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3njmMCK

[secretlyatargaryen]

So, um, Legion season 3.

Obviously huge spoilers ahead.

So season 3 goes full tilt into David being a narcissist and a bad guy (although to the show's credit they did it more subtly than I expected. David never actually becomes the destroyer of worlds, the evil acts he commits with his powers are mostly in manipulating people's minds when he can't deal with anything negative. Which is a good analogy for why a lot of abusers who become that way because of trauma and abuse do what they do. I still don't buy the way he got there as a character though. The show seemed to occasionally be suggesting that he had multiple personalities, and I understand that comes from the comics, and I could possibly even buy that the "Legion" persona, the narcissistic person who believes that "nothing that hurts me is real", is distinct from the David persona that we saw in season one, as psychologically dodgy as that is.

And I do think the show was TRYING to address the issues of abuse and redemption and how sometimes you can't save everyone and how shouldn't try to save abusive men. They never had Syd go back to David or forgive him for what he did to her, as hard as it was for her.

But that's also hard to reconcile with the rest of the way the show treats the topic of abuse and mental illness. Okay, so the show spent the whole season telling us that David's desire to rewrite the past was a symptom of narcissism (true) and what made him a villain (okay) but then in the end they had him...get what he wanted anyway? And present it as a good and hopeful ending?

The fixation on David's biological parents was definitely narcissistic, but then it seemed like the show actually brought into it in the end, which made no sense. After season two I felt like this show insulted me as a viewer and now I feel like it slapped me in the face again and tried to convince me I was stupid for believing what was presented onscreen. Which, okay, it's Legion. The show has always run on the idea that nothing you see onscreen might be real, but there has to be some narrative grounding somewhere.

I didn't like the suggestion that all David needed in the end was to be loved by his biological parents. I go pretty hard on nurture vs nature usually, but the thing is...he had loving parents before. His adoptive family loved him. They didn't understand him, which led to a lot of his trauma, but...that's life. X-Men and all its properties have always been about the trauma of living in a world that doesn't understand you. And Legion season one said that's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. Season two said, well, actually, it does. Season three said you can fix it by resetting the whole thing. The show tried to say that the other characters weren't acting from the same narcissistic place as David was, but David was still never held accountable and never had to actually deal with his shit, because everything just got reset like he wanted it to.

Oh? Also? The show's insistence that some people can't be redeemed would have made much more sense if they didn't try to convince us not only that the mentally ill protagonist was bad all along, but that the Shadow King actually became a good person! That was completely ridiculous, narratively unearned, and insulting. David doesn't get redemption because of his abusive actions but his abuser, who the show had built up as totally sadistic, does? Because he said he loved David? The show said no to one abusive love story but then gave us another. The show demanded that David be held responsible for things that (in season 2, at least) weren't his fault, in order to make him a villain, but then they never held the Shadow King responsible at all. I think the show was trying to say that the Shadow King got redeemed because he chose redemption, but there was still no build up. Yeah, he repeatedly said that he loved David but you can love someone and still be abusive to them, and whatever the Shadow King felt for David was never shown as anything other than extremely toxic. The hypocrisy of the Shadow King showing us David's life to show his newfound empathy when during all those scenes he was the one who destroyed David's life was bizarre and offensive.

Speaking of troubled relationships, the show's increased focus on David and Syd didn't work, either, because they never felt like a believable relationship in the first place. I liked it in season one largely because it hit my hurt/comfort kink, but as I said before, it also came across as a male fantasy and an unbalanced relationship. From the beginning, he was emotionally dependent on her because she literally saved him. I saw a gif of the scene in the first episode when she saves him from the anti-mutant organization, and when she's holding out her hand to him, there's a flash of her as she was in the mental hospital, holding a hand out to him as he was in the hospital, and in both scenes she is standing over him and offering a hand to help him up. I remember noticing it at the time but thought it was an indication that what was happening was maybe in David's imagination. But I think the meaning is more symbolic, and it's really a brilliant visual way of showing the audience how David sees her, as someone who not only saves him from literal danger but who saves him from his life in an institution, saves him from the schizophrenia narrative, from himself. And given what happens later I feel like the show wants me to think that David was the unhealthy one in the relationship all along, and I want to tread very carefully when I talk about this because I've read some discussion and it seems like there's a lot of discourse over whether David actually raped Syd. And I want to make it clear that he did and that she shouldn't be blamed for it in any way. I also think that it never should have been her responsibility to fix David. But she was the one who told him in season one that she could fix him. In fact, she was the one who told him that he didn't need fixing.

I saw somewhere someone say that season one Syd was like David's medication, and season two was him going off his meds. But first of all, women are not and should not be responsible for fixing unstable men. And second of all, that wasn't what happened onscreen. In season one, Syd was like the manic pixie dream girl that told David he didn't need his meds. That what he thought was a problem was actually a super power.

That relationship worked when it seemed like they were both unstable (their initial meet cute and "Do you want to be my girlfriend?" "Okay, but don't touch me" works in the confines of the mental hospital, but as the grounds for a real relationship it doesn't work, on both ends. Syd never explains to David why he can't touch her until it's too late, and then she's all "this isn't a problem we have to address in our relationship, it's a super power!")

If season two is David going off his meds it's because his girlfriend literally told him he didn't need them, and then at the end of season two it's like "just kidding, plus you're the one in the wrong for not accepting that you're ill." God.

Again, that does not change the reality of what he did to her or make her somehow not a victim, but I still think the narrative had to twist things in unbelievable ways to get him there, and part of that was some bullshit regarding his relationship with Syd. And it's not that she's at fault, I think it's more that she's not written well. She does the "you left me, you don't appreciate me, also I'm irrationally jealous" thing that women written by men often do in fiction to advance a male character's plot and provide conflict. Like, he literally gets kidnapped (by her from the future!) and she accuses him of leaving her?? She tells him to lie to her, won't tell him why except that if she loves him he'll do it, and then tells him he's sick and doesn't really love her when he does those things? Like, maybe this is a commentary on what happens when two broken people initiate a relationship, but in the end the show definitely tried to present Syd as the healthy one and David as the "crazy" one. Again, I'm not saying Syd was really the abuser or whatever junk the man-boys of the internet are putting out there, but I am saying this narrative frustrated me a whole lot.

One commentary I read which I do agree with is that the show went off the rails when season two flipped the script from seeing the world from David's fractured perspective to presenting us with a crazy outer world instead of a crazy inner one. Which on one level I understand why, because it's hard to create a sustainable TV show with the premise of this show. Once David figures out that his powers are real it's hard to maintain the "is he crazy or not" narrative, so at the beginning of season two it's largely dropped, as is the conflict of David struggling to control his powers. Then at the end of season two the narrative becomes "he actually is crazy but in a different way, and now he's powerful and that presents a problem." Which, on paper, okay. But I really feel like the show missed an opportunity to show David struggling with the aftermath of finding out his powers are real, picking up the pieces of his life after the Shadow King is gone, and really dealing with what happened to him and what he is. That would have been a compelling and weird and wild journey without the constant narrative fake-outs. Maybe it's because I read him as a trauma victim in season one more than anything. Or maybe it's because of how season two introduced a lot of elements that I hate in fiction (time travel, self-fulfilling prophecies). But I do think that season one, even with its faults, presents a nuanced and empathetic picture of mental illness and healing that ultimately isn't delivered on.

But, the stylistics of this show! The dance numbers!

[divinefrugivores]

Reasons People Give For Not Supporting Resistance to Ecocide

From the book Deep Green Resistance:

“The human race is now in its adolescent phase. We have to grow up.”

If this is true, then current destruction is inevitable, a natural part of the “life cycle” of humans as a species. Some people even claim that human destruction is part of the earth’s life cycle. We could spend hours trying to puzzle out the psychological needs motivating people to create such a narrative, but does it matter? Some of them have morally collapsed from despair, and to quote Isak Dinesen, “All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story.” Others are too attached to their comfortable lives to want them disrupted even though they can intellectually admit to the destruction embodied in their computer chips and housing suburbs. The third group are simply cowards: if human destructiveness is natural and inevitable, then it can’t be fought and they don’t have to risk anything. But the current destruction is not a developmental stage. The idea is offensive and condescending to all the cultures that have come before. Were they the “children” that led inevitably to glorious us? And there are plenty of examples of cultures that didn’t destroy the living communities in which they participated. It’s only a few that have gone psychopathic. There’s nothing inevitable about any human culture. In fact, this argument doesn’t even work on its own merits: faced with an abusive or psychopathic adolescent, the first order of the day is still to stop him. In any case, this argument is pathologically narcissistic: the world is being murdered so we can learn some lessons? Only in an utterly insane culture could such an idea be conceptualized, much less given voice.

“The only way to change things is to change people’s hearts and minds individually.”

This is liberalism condensed to one sentence, and we have covered it previously. Movements for social change must have a program of popular political education. Successful movements get very good at it. But the point isn’t to change people one at a time; it’s to create a movement that can alter or abolish the institutions that organize power.

“Our assaults on [fill in the blank: empire, industrial civilization, patriarchy] won’t work unless we change the culture of endless destruction and consumption. The question is really one of how to change culture.”

This is a neat liberal trick that elides the nature of power, which is both sadistic and systematic. Imagine if blacks in the segregated South decided that changing “the culture” of segregation or “the hearts and minds of whites” was a workable strategy; they’d still be sitting at the back of the bus. What they attacked instead were some key instances of segregation in public accommodations. The Montgomery bus boycott was brilliant because blacks had economic leverage, and it was that economic power that brought down segregation on the buses. While the frontline activists were risking their lives at lunch counter sit-ins and registering voters, other activists were rallying for laws that would outlaw segregation and shift the balance of power. Hence the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And guess what? The culture changed. So did hearts and minds. A whole generation of now middle-aged people have never had to drink from a “colored” water fountain. One of them is even president. In parallel is a generation of white people whose psychology of entitlement and institutionalized ability to dehumanize blacks has been curtailed. That’s because structural change toward justice affects hearts and minds and does it on a broad scale. That’s why liberalism, with its focus on individual consciousness, will never change the world. Even if your passion is to do that “cultural” work, you need to be thinking in terms of institutional power and how our movement is going to attack it. And we all need to stand with the people willing to take the biggest risks. But we haven’t got a chance in hell without facing the facts. It is possible that the Prime Minister of Monsanto or the Crown Prince of Porn will have a spiritual epiphany, but is it probable? A one in a billion chance is not a solid base on which to build a political strategy.

“We can’t stop them.”

This is the Om of the alternative wing. There can be understandable personal reasons for believing in the invincibility of an oppressive system. And there are certainly reasons that those in power want us to see them as invincible. Abusive systems, from the most simple to the most sophisticated, from the familial to the social and political, work best when the victims and bystanders police themselves. And one of the best ways to get victims and bystanders to police themselves is for those victims and bystanders to internalize the notion that the abusers are invincible. Even better is to get the victims and bystanders to proselytize about the abusers’ “invincibility” to anyone who threatens to break up the stable abuser-victim-bystander triad. But those who believe in the invincibility of perpetrators and their systems are wrong. Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. The people in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down. People with a lot fewer resources collectively than any single one of us in rich countries have fought back against systems of domination, and won. There is no reason we can’t do the same. But resistance starts by believing in it, not by talking ourselves out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it. History provides many examples of successful resistance. So do current events. Right now, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has disabled 30 percent of the oil industry’s production in Nigeria, and the industry is considering pulling out altogether. If we had one hundredth of their courage and commitment to their land and community, we could do the same thing here. We have vastly more resources at our disposal, and the best we can come up with is, what, compost piles? The world is being killed and environmentalists think that riding bikes is some sort of answer?

“Because we feel such a strong need to fight, is it better to fight battles that we chronically lose just to fight?”

Leaving aside the fact that the environmental movement has never fought militantly in the US, and taking “fight” to be the more general idea of resistance, this is a question worth asking. Why are environmentalists content to use the same strategies when they are clearly not working (for example, attempting to “change the culture” through discourse or example: that was tried once or twice or a million times by indigenous peoples)? Why not talk about what really needs to happen to save this planet? Burning fossil fuels has to stop. This is not negotiable. You cannot negotiate with physical reality. It’s real.

Next, the infrastructure is vulnerable, as any reasonably informed member of a resistance movement—or any competent military strategist or historian—could tell us. Why not do what needs doing? Why are we not even discussing a serious strategy to save this planet?

A real culture of resistance would see that activities like biological remediation, the creation of local food networks, and teaching people self-sufficiency skills are part of a larger struggle to actually save the planet. Those activities should not be at odds with political resistance; they should be nestled inside each other in mutually nourishing and encouraging ways. Instead, the lifestylists take every opportunity to shut down discussion about action, actively discouraging a resistance movement from forming.

“We need to question some basic assumptions about how the culture has taught us to fight. We need to think outside the cultural box.”

We agree. And three of those basic assumptions are that (a) resistance is futile; (b) the most meaningful resistance today is lifestyle change that can stand as an example; and (c) the physical structures that allow the psychopaths to run this culture are somehow immutable and cannot be physically dismantled.

Meanwhile, a very small group of half-starved, poverty-stricken people in Nigeria have brought the oil industry in that country to its knees. They remember what it is to love their land and their communities. Perhaps because they are not drowning in privilege, but in the toxic sludge of oil extraction. MEND has said to the oil industry: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.” And they are actualizing that.

Andrea Dworkin once said, “I found that it is always better to fight than not to fight, always no matter what.”110 This is the last moment to feel that passion, to defend whatever you love as a form of grace. Far too many people on the left claim that resistance never works. Some combination of cynicism, despair, ignorance, and cowardice has taken hold and even taken root. Some of the claimants have a solid radical analysis of capitalism, racism, patriarchy, civilization. They understand that the planet is being killed, that all we hold dear is under assault.

And yet. Resistance—its possibility, its activation—is unthinkable. These people obstruct any attempt to conceptualize how resistance to industrial civilization or, indeed, any form of oppression, could be organized. There are historical reasons for this: the obstructors do not act alone. Behind them are the Adamites, the Ranters, the Romantics, the Bohemians, and the Wandervogel, and some borrowings from Buddhism, building a cultural framework that channels despair, alienation, and even analysis away from direct action and toward individual life. That life may be built on quiet contemplation and good works, on the outraging of mores and boundaries, or on poetic suffering, but it’s not built on confronting systems of power. Without a culture of resistance, alternative cultures and the antipolitical values they promote are all that the alienated and oppressed will find, and they aren’t enough. Trees need rain; resistance needs a culture.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: Stealing Life with the Big Bad Retail King — One-third of All Buying Transactions  Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls. Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; ‘Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. — Iago, Shakespeare’s Othello It’s more than disconcerting to hear the blathering now, September 2018, about Jeff Bezos. About Amazon dot com as richest company ever. To hear the fawning love of the rich guy, now, when we were predicting a slave master killing publishing, killing independence; news reports and tribute after tribute for this full-fledged Midas of tax cheating, our homegrown monopolist of the highest order, anti-American who gives a shit about main street America, a misanthropic fake news purveyor, a full-bore felonious PT Barnum and smoke and mirrors double shuffle guy who thinks of his tens upon tens of thousands of warehouse workers as spindles, interchangeable parts, and to hell with their precarity, their one nose-bleed from homelessness. This is a time of same sides of the coin of the realm: the conservative and the liberal, the War-Mongering Democratic Party drooling at the McCain fiasco and the Sycophantic Zio-Christo Republicans confused about who is going to own what while scampering away like rats into the alleys as the headlights of their narcissist-in-chief blowtorches the world. The most important characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) are grandiosity, seeking excessive admiration, and a lack of empathy. These identifying features can result in a negative impact on an individual’s interpersonal affairs and life general. In most cases, on the exterior, these patients act with an air of right and control, dismissing others, and frequently showcasing condescending or denigrating attitudes. Nevertheless, internally, these patients battle with strong feelings of low self esteem issues and inadequacy. Even though the typical NPD patient may achieve great achievements, ultimately their functioning in society can be affected as these characteristics interfere with both personal and professional relationships. A large part of this is as result of the NPD patient being incapable of receiving disapproval or rebuff of any kind, in addition to the fact that the NPD patient typically exhibits lack of empathy and overall disrespect for others.** ** Note that NPD runs through the DNA of these ministers like Jimmy Swaggart or Billy-Franklin Graham, through the family RNA of so-called royalty of the world, in the brain chemistry of the likes of a Henry Kissinger or Adolph Hitler, in the hypothalamus of fruit-salad bedecked generals and in the frontal cortex of all great and not-so-great thespians, from politicos to actors. Moreover, this Bezos, our great Albuquerque-born plumbing showroom huckster peddling absolutely all the stuff we do not need piled up in his fulfillment centers, represents those two sides of the same coin: powerful, libertarian, ruthless and spirit-less, driven to conquer/distribute/hawk all the stuff in any sort of catalog that exists out there to fulfill the needs and mostly not so necessary junk of obsolescence and consumer addiction. A cold anti-philanthropy multi-billionaire, whose net worth of $160.7 billion is headline news now as the TV clowns present the Top Five, Top Ten/Twenty diligently, Bezos is the top of the dung heap according to another rag with all the news unfit (for humanity) to print . . . . . . Who is the richest person in the world? While Forbes updates their list of the world’s billionaires in real time as markets fluctuate, the magazine also releases a more static list each year. The total net worth of these money-makers when the 2018 list was released in March was $7.67 trillion. Click through to see 2018’s top 20 richest billionaires on the planet. With his company — which epitomizes the heights of death star techie logic, next gen robotics, drones, massive crisscrossing of products through a digital satellite-fed network of Prime Time orders — Bezos has continually kicked out with the help of Seattle PD we protesters with one share of his shit stock at shareholder meetings protesting his sadism around refusing to air condition fulfillment centers while instead putting rent-an-ambulances outside the doors! Oh, this economic disruptor of small and large businesses, all part of that gift of unfettered homicidal capitalism a la retail conglomeration, is reviled, hated, but will be the big section in those econ books from many years to come. Bernie Sanders wants a special tax on this white shark-eyed Jeff Bezos? Funny follies of the political kind. Imagine, justifying all the tax evasion and felonies of the billionaires and millionaires and banks and hedge funders and the rest of the elites — that’s the cool truth of our state of misrepresentation in Washington. Never political cries of “tax them all for their externalities — all the damage capital and capitalists have done to the world.”  Major and minor municipalities and entire states fall over themselves with money dripping tongues out of their mouths while courting this company with so many freebies in the billions to get another load of office buildings or fulfillment centers or even another headquarters/campus or pod of fulfillment centers. At any cost. Walmartization of the world, or was it McDonaldization first, or Fordization, but now Amazonization of the culture outstrips anything up to this point in this country’s lunacy. You can get anything anytime anywhere for anyone from this five and dime on steroids. Or, The Details About the CIA’s Deal With Amazon: A $600 million computing cloud built by an outside company is a “radical departure” for the risk-averse intelligence community Just in Time Employment, 11th Hour appointments, Permanent Temp, a Precarity defined as the New Almost Slavery Gig gigs — Coulda Been HuffPost Slave Yet, on Democracy Now, again, in September 2018, we are led to believe we now have to be aghast about those fulfillment centers and those Americans being worked to the bone, worked down to the shredded screws in their hip replacement hardware, worked to confusion and exhaustion and then discarded for not working hard enough for this Master Blaster of the Retail Monopoly. Juan Gonzalez of DN tells us about these “cutting edge” stories from his Rutgers University Department of Journalism and Media Studies students working on this “breaking news,” while Juan laughs and smirks at the reality of “us” (not me) ordering everything on Amazon. Here, the DN reports: As Amazon Hits $1 Trillion in Value, Its Warehouse Workers Denounce “Slavery” Conditions Exposed: Undercover Reporter at Amazon Warehouse Found Abusive Conditions & No Bathroom Breaks Ahh, but we over at DV have been printing these stories for more than six years: * Punditry of Shit-Hole Thinking  * On-line Dildo Salesman Bezos is the News Fit to Print * Amazon.com Don’t Need No Stinking Climate Change Badge, No Stinking Corporate Transparency Crap * Books, Bountiful Ethics, Brave Buyers Nichole Gracely / May 21st, 2012 Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley (LV) is a distribution hub, and many fellow Amazon associates and Integrity Staffing Solutions temps had previously worked in other local warehouses. I have and I can say that they’re typically rough workplaces. At first glance, Amazon’s LV fulfillment center appears benign. Primary red, yellow, green and blue splashes of color brighten the place, and motivational posters and friendly educational signs that feature cute characters provide guidance. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers populate the warehouse at once, diligently taking direction from hand-held scanners or computers, and the place is enormous so it doesn’t appear cramped. Seriously, the place could house a small city. Physical strength is not a necessary qualification to perform any of their warehouse job functions, and management is ostensibly concerned with worker safety. Just about anyone could staff Amazon’s FC, especially since it only takes a couple of hours to train workers to perform any specific job function. It’s safe to say that anyone laboring in an Amazon FC has fallen into hard times, and many of my former coworkers’ resumes featured distinguished past titles, impressive demonstrations of manual skill and ability, and/or lofty educational attainment. Many never thought they’d wind up in a warehouse and so, yes, this was all foreign for many. Other workers who staffed other warehouses in the past didn’t know what to make of the place because there is something different about Amazon, something alien. “Chairman” Bezos once said that Amazon workers don’t need a union because we own the company. “Chairman” Bezos has zero tolerance for union activity and several Amazon unionization attempts were summarily squashed. After two years on the job an Amazon FC associate is entitled to eight shares of stock. If Amazon is trading at, say, $250 a share, that’s $2,000. Ownership? $250 per share is a generous projection. Seasoned investors are baffled by AMZN’s current overvaluation because of its unhealthy 188:1 (fluctuates, yet always unhealthy) price to earnings ratio, and they’re waiting for the bubble to burst. Nichole went on to write a piece in the Guardian: Amazon Seasonal Work  And the Guardian published another one, more than four years ago: Being homeless is better than working for Amazon Bread and Roses — 106 Years Ago, Back to Now: Strike Amazon, Strike US Correctional Institutions, Boycott I got this from a friend, Andy Piascik, a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion. He can be reached at ###. In the end, in the face of the state militia, U.S. Marines, Pinkerton infiltrators and hundreds of local police, the strikers prevailed. They achieved a settlement close to their original demands, including significant pay raises and time-and-a-quarter for overtime, which previously had been paid at the straight hourly rate. Workers in Lowell and New Bedford struck successfully a short while later, and mill owners throughout New England soon granted significant pay raises rather than risk repeats of Lawrence. When the trials of Ettor, Giovannitti and a third defendant commenced in the fall, workers in Lawrence’s mills pulled a work stoppage to show that a miscarriage of justice would not be tolerated. The three were subsequently acquitted. More than a century ago and it’s rabbit-holed history . . . and what do we fight for in this country now? We have fear of unions, we embrace the gig economy/outsourcing on Kratom (called near slavery by socio-economists), and the unimaginable bullshit and shit jobs have generated aimlessness, screen addiction, be mean to thy neighbor mentality, cold hearts and Homo Retailipithecus. Bullshit jobs, as Graeber states: A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. Shit jobs tend to be blue collar and pay by the hour, whereas bullshit jobs tend to be white collar and salaried. We have become a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself. What is Labor Day or May Day now in a world of Marvel comics and infantilization of every intercourse we have with every sort of humanity? Do we care about solidarity? Do we know how to build communities? Do we see neighbors and people in and on the streets as equals, people, us? What is the value of work when it is drudgery, dog-eat-dog, king of the hill and top of the dung heap relationships? We have to go beyond now this simpleton way of seeing the world from the bifurcated Groucho Marx eyeglasses. This is a great time of upheaval, splintering, hot house planet, Sixth Mass Extinction, a world of capital making more capital off of war, resource theft, thievery of other nations’ and cultures’ futures. Jobs, Who Doesn’t Choose to Collapse, Hothouse Planet, People As I continually teach young people to think, you are what you eat, what you do, what you think, what your read, what you say, what you believe, what you aspire to, what you hope for, what you do or not do to be one with humanity. If your life is one of toil, what is inside the heart, and what do you do with those beliefs and philosophies while slogging away? Are you a believer in exceptionalism, Zionist or Christian superiority? Is the white shade of skin the defining element in your life? Do you have passions that are your own, or are they manufactured, designed, and cajoled by the money changers and propagandists?  The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. This line was from a speech by Rose Schneiderman, Polish-born socialist and feminist and prominent labor union leaders in America. It’s a phrase embodying everything today we workers need to utilize as a galvanizing force upon our souls to break away from these people like Bezos and the entire master crafters of our pain, poverty and penury. When I say “our,” I mean the world’s collective pain in the form of billions of people, for whom Western Culture (sic) has set loose a wildfire of forced displacement, murder, resource extraction, war and disease of the mind and body. It was also a successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, during January–March 1912, which is pretty much universally referred to as the “Bread and Roses” strike. Pairing bread and roses not as counter-balances — fair wages and dignified conditions. Defining “the sometimes tedious struggles for marginal economic advances in the light of labor struggles as based on striving for dignity and respect,” as Robert J. S. Ross wrote in 2013. I imagine the Bezos types wanting every last penny from every last $2-a-day inhabitant on earth, and I imagine this fellow is as steely-hearted as any in an Upton Sinclair book — and note this first quote by Sinclair is for me about men and women working today, even though Sinclair was writing about a living livestock animal torn from life: One could not stand and watch very long without being philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe…. Each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him, and a horrid Fate in his pathway. Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, all his protests, his screams were nothing to it. It did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. ― Upton Sinclair, The Jungle It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked Delusions  of Terra-Forming and Mickey Mouse Grabbing Adults’ Attention So what do we do with these Titans of idiocy, with their billions and their algorithms, with their broken telescopes peering into the black hole of humanity? What about the 150,000 chemicals in human cells created by the industrialists, those synergistic variant effects we have zero knowledge about, which have helped push our American society into a chronically ill species of over 50 percent of a population cycled through Western (Un-)Medicine. Children with autism or on the spectrum — count that as possibly 30 percent of all births by 2040. Diabetes 1 and 2, more than 15 percent or more of the population by 2040. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a really important concept that is difficult to teach the public, and when I say the public, I include my clinical colleagues. Still, atrazine is not the only human hormone-altering chemical in the environment. Dr. Winchester tested nearly 20 different chemicals and all demonstrated epigenetic effects, for example, all of the chemicals reduced fertility, even in the 3rd generation. Still, why do 150,000,000 Americans have chronic diseases? Researchers believe that every adult disease extant is linked to epigenetic origins. If confirmed over time with additional research, the study is a blockbuster that goes to the heart of public health and attendant government regulations. According to Dr. Winchester: This is a huge thing that is going to change how we understand the origin of disease. But a big part of that is that it will change our interpretation of what chemicals are safe. In medicine I can’t give a drug to somebody unless it has gone through a huge amount of testing. But all these chemicals haven’t gone through anything like that. We’ve been experimented on for the last 70 years, and there’s not one study on multi-generational effects. Environmental Working Group tested more than a dozen brands of oat-based foods to give Americans information about dietary exposures that government regulators are keeping secret. In April, internal emails obtained by the nonprofit US Right to Know revealed that the Food and Drug Administration has been testing food for glyphosate for two years and has found “a fair amount,” but the FDA has not released the findings. Ahh, the melting planet, the water cycle’s disrupted, the entire mess of planetary re-shifting is on a collision course with Homo Sapiens. Everyday I get more and more notifications from friends and thinkers about the impending collapses, the impending peak this and peak that (Peak Everything). Globalization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation, as did Easter Island and the Greenland Norse in the past. Any society in turmoil today, no matter how remote … can cause trouble for prosperous societies on other continents and is also subject to their influence (whether helpful or destabilizing). For the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline. But we also are the first to enjoy the opportunity of learning quickly from developments in societies anywhere else in the world today, and from what has unfolded in societies at any time in the past. That’s why I wrote this book.” ― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Feudal Factories of Propaganda and Propagating .001 Percenters — Water, Man, Water We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both. ― Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West We are seeing this circling of the billionaires’ wagons (vultures circling the 7.8 billion marks, us), this Bezos and Musk lust for space, for some planetary gated-armed-Utopian community. These fellows and dames are something else, and the conjurers of news unfit to consume fall over them, recording and publishing story after story about their wisdom and foresight and shamanistic ways of predicting the future. Remember George W. Bush and his big ranch buy in Paraguay? That was 12 years ago, readers, yet, back to the future, with news (sic) report after news report (sic) keeps tracking the next billionaire economic ejaculation. W, and we thought he was only painting pets! The Chaco is a semiarid, sparsely populated area known — to the extent that it’s known at all — for its abundant wildlife, rapid deforestation, nothing in particular… and what lies beneath it… Our Real Wealth Trader and Outstanding Investments contributor Jody Chudley thinks he knows the true gen about the Bush land grab. Jody says he has a “secret” about the Bushes. And he adds, “It has to do with an investment idea that’s hardly on anyone’s radar.” The real reason Jody thinks Bush 43 and family snapped up nearly 300,000 acres in those semiarid, sparsely populated wastes of Paraguay? Water. That’s right, blue gold. Bush bought the rights to a veritable ocean of fresh, clear-as-glass, Grade A water. His land rests atop one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world: Acuifero Guarani, by name. According to Jody, “Acuifero Guarani covers roughly 460,000 square miles under parts of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. It is estimated to contain about 8,900 cubic miles of water.” If you can’t quite imagine 8,900 miles of water, picture a pool nearly three times the size of California. That should give you a decent idea. A fair amount when you consider that 98% of this planet’s water is salt water. Of the other 2%, almost 87% of it is trapped within glaciers, hence inaccessible. Jody’s “trusty calculator” informs him that only 0.25% of the water on this cosmic ball is fresh (underground, or in rivers and lakes). Just a drop in the figurative bucket… Now, we knew this sort of stuff was going on with the elites, who look at us all as easy marks, broken money bags, the fat cows or broken pigs of their global stockades. What’s happened is this trickle-down lust-love-longing for these people who get plastered in the headlines as being grand and philanthropists, deserving of every cent and every billion made on the back of people, earth, cultures. Their trans-capital and monopolies  and viral presence like Google, Facebook, Walmart, and on and on sucks the revolution out of revolutionary, since we are now shackled to their ways of doing things. The goal of the capitalists is to harmonize their theft with our survival, whatever it takes to put five to a studio apartment (of course, sneaking the other four into the room in the dead of night), whatever it takes to just float through a gridlocked urban and suburban world. So, from Bush and Paraguay, to this Gawker Killer Thiel, we have enough evidence of their feudal ways, their slippery snake eyes methods of shitting on we underlings: Here is Robert Hunziker: Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and renowned super-super-super libertarian and unapologetic Trumpster love-fester achieved New Zealand citizenship in only 12 days and bought not only his citizenship but a $13.8 M estate in Wanaka, a lakeside community. According to a phone interview with the former PM of New Zealand John Key, “If you’re the sort of person that says I’m going to have an alternative plan when Armageddon strikes, then you would pick the farthest location and the safest environment – and that equals New Zealand if you Google it… It’s known as the last bus stop on the planet before you hit Antarctica. I’ve had a lot of people say to me that they would like to own a property in New Zealand if the world goes to hell in a hand-basket. Hell in a hand-basket, from the former prime minister of New Zealand — 1935 Book, quote: If the average white New Zealander takes the Maori seriously as a human being, he is usually rather too ready to blame him for characteristics which more careful study will show not to be inherent at all but actually the result of the coming of the Europeans themselves, the extensive destruction of Maori life and the virtual dispossession of the Maori people. Little attempt is commonly made to understand the causes which produced, for a time at any rate (for they are passing) those Maori characteristics which have become almost proverbial amongst us. To put it frankly, we blame the Maori for becoming what we have made him. It is interesting to realise that similar circumstances of the contact of peoples have occurred before, and in view of the people referred to there is one instance which it seems particularly fitting that we should bear in mind. The instance comes down to us from the days when another great Empire, an ancient one, was civilizing native peoples. There is on record a letter from a wealthy Roman landowner to his agent in Britain telling him to ship no more British slaves “as they are so lazy and cannot be trusted to work.” Similar causes produce similar effects; we should be less ready with hasty judgment and hasty blame. There is a widespread belief, and it is one certainly cherished by the average white New Zealander, that no native people have ever been so fairly treated by Europeans as have the Maori people. As a matter of fact, if it is fully and frankly told, the story of the contact of Europeans with native peoples is much the same everywhere. What we have are so many varieties of what a leading anthropologist has recently termed “the tragic mess which invariably results from the impact of white upon aboriginal culture.” It is true that the Maori people have survived, but this, on careful analysis, proves to be very largely due to their own qualities and their own efforts rather than to any specially favourable mode of treatment. If we are honest there is little ground for pakeha self-congratulation. Ahh, the evidence of climate change (global warming–hot planet) was there in 1896 researched, formulated and discoursed by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (and then later, amateur G. S. Callendar ramified the greenhouse effect of burning fossil fuels, and then later, C. D. Keeling measured the rising CO2 levels tying that to the greenhouse hot house effect), but for which has been swept into confusion by those marketers and mad men. Imagine, average planetary temps going up from  2.5–11°F by 2100. Imagine that! The more civilizations evolve, the more energy dependent they become, so it’s possible that trillions of civilizations in the great continuum of space evolved, rose, fell and disappeared. If you develop an industrial civilization like ours, the route is going to be the same. You’re going to have a hard time not triggering climate change. For a civilization to destroy itself through nuclear war, it has to have certain emotional characteristics. You can imagine certain civilizations saying, ‘I’m not building those [nuclear weapons]. Those are crazy.’ But climate change, you can’t get away from. If you build a civilization, you’re using huge amounts of energy. The energy feeds back on the planet, and you’re going to push yourself into a kind of Anthropocene. It’s probably universal. —  Adam Frank, astrophysicist Interlude, Interglacial Periods, Working for the Homeless — Flailing at Windmills   Yeah, these big ideas I broach with homeless veterans and their attendant family members, and while the Gates-Kochs-Zuckerbergs-Bloombergs-Adelsons-et al have zero concern about us, the proles, the  detritus of their Capital, I believe working to change one life at a time — even if it’s a life riddled with evictions, felonies, relapses, epigenetic familial hell, PTSD, trauma, spiritlessness, physical decay — has meaning since in that process I have incredible interchanges with people who sort of want the same thing — paradigm shifts and de-industrialization and ecosocialism a la Marx 3.0. I try to find peace in writing, even these polemics at DV or LA Progressive; and in my own world of fiction-poetry-creative nonfiction, the windmills abound because of a rarefied culture of the M-F-A (masters in fine arts) elite — those gatekeepers of the small literary kind, or even the National Book Award kind. This country is not big on real outliers in anything tied to the arts, and I am one of those round pegs looking to splinter the quintessential square hole. Short story collection? Who the hell would read that? Well, try out a project of mine to get the stories —  thematically (sort of) threaded (sort of) to the “Vietnam experience” — as a hard copy from a small press, Cirque. You can read one of the stories, “Bloody Sheets,” here, starting on page 115. The collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam, is a gathering of fiction, much of which has been published in literary journals. I have succumbed to a Go Fund Me “deal” to help balance-offset the costs of printing a book on paper with ink. I have no idea if a Go Fund Me will even take off. The first and only donation is from filmmaker Brian Lindstrom. Amazing, a struggling documentarian throwing in FIRST. But we are in a new normal of shitting on writers, expecting us to have our day and then our night jobs and then write-write-write for free. That is the question, really, who wants to spend their time reading short stories, outside the very narrow readership of Masters of Fine Arts aficionados who in many regards can be pedantic and puffery artists? Vietnam, no less, in a time of Tim Burns rotting the foundation of the war we committed, or the Obama administration’s scrubbing of the war in his effort to commemorate it (Obama gives killer Kissinger awards). Vietnam. One of my short journalist pieces for an old weekly I worked for in Spokane. How many died in Vietnam and Indochina? 3.8 million? Oh, that Nobel Cause (War) myth I run into daily at a homeless veterans shelter, that is was winnable and worthy. Killing farmers, man, in their rice paddies! Whew, only a Zionist could write that script. Read my short story collection for a different way to frame creativity and that time period, that narrative framing, that time in history that has defined and redefined the ugly wars of today. I am going to give this a shot in a time of blatant skepticism and group-think/act/do. Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam. Be part of the creative impetus. The energy. The publication of a short story collection. With that “ask” of the reader who then gives will receive another book of mine, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber. In my view [Dan Kovalik], this Noble Cause myth may be the most powerful and enduring propaganda trick ever perpetrated. And, it works so well because the audience for the trick — the U.S. people — are such willing and eager participants in the charade. To explain the power of the Noble Cause myth, Marciano quotes from Harold Pinter’s 2005 Nobel Prize lecture.  I set forth a larger quote from the lecture than appears in the book because it is so profound: The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. John Steppling, my fellow writer who studies intersections of culture-mimesis-art-politics (My review of his book,  Aesthetic Resistence and Dis-interest. That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said, here at DV) discusses the MFA phenomenon, a true watering down and controlled form of check and balances fiction: So, the fact that The Rockefeller Foundation underwrote (and still underwrites) a good many MFA programs (and not just in literature, but in theatre and fine arts) is both relevant, and not. Or maybe a better way to address this is see The Rockefeller Foundation as symptom. I received a Rockefeller fellowship, which I hadn’t applied for. But, the very fact that creative writing programs boomed after WW2, and permeated the academic landscape is without question linked to the patronage of institutions like The Rockefeller Foundation (and the MacArthur Foundation, and…). And to deny that the tacit influence of these institutions is idiotic. Now, it’s also true that what John Crowe Ransom and Stegner and Burrows preached is correct. Or it’s correct up to a point. It is revealing that Melville was derided, because Melville wrote a lot of ideas, and additionally observed the ways those ideas and that knowledge existed in the world. But it is equally true that you do not observe those harpoons so closely, or closely in a particular way, that all you get is a harpoon description. And a so described harpoon that never participates in riots or social unrest, and whose production is unexamined and the harpoon company that distributes it is left blank…the better to describe the fluted morning dew that bifurcates my tabby cat’s shadow on the harpoon handle, and etc etc etc is only a individual’s sensory observation. The harpoon must be known, not just observed. The real point here is that what Iowa started, and many other University programs followed, was to narrow down the definition of “fiction”. Dante would not be considered fiction today. While there is a point in demanding a concrete description, and not a generality, the exclusive focus on the concrete meant that ideas were being eliminated in fiction. The world is not abstract… but that includes History and politics and tensions of daily life. Those offices in New York, or those bad marriages, are not separate from the Chinese Revolution, or U.S. Imperialism, or the blockade of Cuba or the present two million men and women in prison in the United States. ‘Greatness’, whatever that means, and I have no problem with that word, or the ideas behind it, is in discovering both what that connection is, and ..and this is important I believe…how our own personal emotional and psychic formation, and development are related to both Mao and our failed marriages (or, even the successful ones). The emphasis on observation, on brute description, however eclipsed ideas as a subject for fiction. You may not sit down to write ideas, per se, but you certainly have an idea of what a harpoon is. You have to know certain things, and, in fact, the best writing is that which tells you what you don’t know, not describes nicely what you already do know. And there is a tendency in young writers to generalize. So on the one hand it’s natural to emphasize the concrete, but the result, perhaps intentional, or partly so (given the Rockefeller project) was the elimination of ideas in prose, and the narrowing of the definition of what constituted “fiction” http://clubof.info/

[we-arnold-lockshin-blog]

Dictatorship USA – A Plundering and Predatory Nation  — 2018 (6)

The Coming Collapse

TruthDig.com, July 2, 2018

Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.

The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It refuses to address substantive political and social problems and instead focuses on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.

This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.

Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces.

Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core.  He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.

But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.

The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency.

All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead to a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.

An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.

The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”

All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions.

We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

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Перед нами сейчас -  коварный и опасный мошенник, расист, лжец и фашист Дональд Трамп, порочный Конгресс, нацистские ФБР - ЦРУ,  кровавые милитаристы США и НАТО >>> а также и лживые, вредоносные американские СМ»И».

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Правительство США жестоко нарушало мои права человека при проведении кампании террора, которая заставила меня покинуть свою родину и получить политическое убежище в СССР. См. книгу «Безмолвный террор — История политических гонений на семью в США» - "Silent Terror: One family's history of political persecution in the United States» - http://arnoldlockshin.wordpress.com

Правительство США еще нарушает мои права, в течении 14 лет отказывается от выплаты причитающейся мне пенсии по старости.  Властители США воруют пенсию!!  

ФСБ - Федеральная служба «безопасности» России - вслед за позорным, предавшим страну предшественником КГБ, мерзко выполняет приказы секретного, кровавого хозяина (boss) - американского ЦРУ (CIA). Среди таких «задач» -  мне запретить выступать в СМИ и не пропускать большинства отправленных мне комментариев.   А это далеко не всё...

Арнольд Локшин, политэмигрант из США

BANNED – ЗАПРЕЩЕНО!!

ЦРУ - ФСБ забанили все мои посты и комментарии в Вконтакте!

… и в Макспарке!

[montaguespades]

It would be really cool if this specific user would stop pretending that capitalism was conceptualized and is perpetuated by anyone other than wealthy narcissists, historically speaking.

Is it THAT hard to admit that being driven by profit and being driven by personal gain are the same exact thing?

I suppose so. Shame about that supposed "self-awareness" you have so much of, I'd certainly like to see a modicum of it one day.

Replace "narcissist" with "capitalist" and you just described them perfectly.