Lliira

If you want to talk to me about something that's not discussed in one of my posts, make a comment here and I'll probably create a new post for it.

This post was written January 14, 2012. I've post-dated it to 2032 to keep it on top.

My brain works correctly, which it didn't for years.

I am completely anti-censorship and anti-war. No matter the identity of the people on either side.

I will never support anyone who's best buds with Henry Kissinger. I will never support anyone who huggles up on George W. Bush. I am deeply ashamed of having supported someone who did countless drone strikes, fracking, and MOTHERFUCKING BOMBED FLINT. My one excuse is that I was drugged to the gills and/or trying to overcome being drugged to the gills.

I'm still mad as hell, and I guess always will be, because free speech and anti-war stances are always wildly unpopular.

It did turn my whole world around. And I do kinda like it. It's always better to know the truth.

I have the following (among others) in my family: Jewish people, Chinese people, African people, and Russian people.

I'm used to right-wingers hating my family members (and me, since I'm disabled and poor and a woman.) But now we're getting it from the "center" too. I am so fucking sick of neolibs screeching about "the Russians zomg1112!!@@!" The shitheads called my cousin's Russian-American (and Jewish btw) kids "Russian anchor babies." Fuck. Off.

Hammers and sickles in anti-Russian propaganda? SERIOUSLY? Russia hasn't been communist for how long now? Longer than when the Clintons directly and proudly interfered in the Russian election to get the drunken buffoon Yeltsin elected, which btw led pretty directly to Russians looking desperately for a tyrannical strongman, i.e. Putin.

I'm an honest to no-god leftist and starting to wonder if this is how my grandfather felt just before he was blacklisted.

Flint still doesn't have clean water.

People calling Republican assholes "Nazis" has been bugging me. Not because I think it's politically inexpedient, though I do. Not because I care about Trump supporters' feelings, because I don't. (Though I wish people would stop pretending they're working class. Trump won far more votes among the upper class than the working class. The typical MAGA type lives in a 4-bedroom on a cul-de-sac, not in a trailer.)

No, it bugs me for the usual reason: Someone is Wrong on the internet. Nazis were, and are, a specific phenomenon. They're fueled by anger and hate. Further, if you don't have a burning hatred and conspiratorial resentment toward Jews, "Nazi" truly doesn't fit. Republicans, however, are fueled by arrogant indifference with a spice of  wounded superiority complex. It's a different thing. It's not a new thing, but it's not Nazism. So I lay there thinking of what it was like, and it didn't take long to remember a historical parallel:

The prosperous English during the Irish so-called "Potato Famine." I say so-called because it wasn't the fault of natural forces -- it was because of policies purposefully put in place by the English government in order to harm and kill the Irish. The wealthy and most of the middle class among the English saw the Irish exactly the same way the MAGA crowd sees most immigrants: As criminal "pests".

A Modest Proposal is as spot-on a satire today as it was then.

So like...

For years and years: "I just find narcissism super fascinating. That's why I near-obsessively like to learn about it. While I like learning about all psychological things, it is narcissism and watching narcissistic people that I can't stop rubbernecking. Because. I just find it fascinating. It's not going to even occur to me to look under the surface of this to ask the simplest of questions about why. It's just really fascinating to me, okay?"

Two days ago, I realized my father's a narcissist.

I'd forgotten so much about how he treated me. The memories weren't exactly repressed; they were simply not something that ever came to my mind. Abuse amnesia is real. And it all got confused in his alcoholism. If he'd only stop drinking everything would be better, I thought my whole life. Except no -- when he's not drinking, he's significantly nastier (to me, formerly to his wives, and to his brother) than when he's drunk. He is, of course, an angel to his friends at all times.

It took years for me to get un-used to his emotional abuse. But I've lived in a much more normal norm for years now. I actually forgot the old "normal." So when my father started up again, I went "wtf is this shit OH RIGHT." 

My husband's shielding me a lot now, and my father seems to see my husband as above him on the ladder and therefore often sucks up to him in strange ways. One thing he loves to try to do is commiserate with my husband about how terrible I supposedly am, which doesn't work at all because my husband doesn't even try to argue, he simply says "she's awesome" or something similar in response.

My father treats me like he ever did, of course, and boy have I learned why I can't take a compliment. He implants a sting in every one of them, so what sounds like praise at first or to outsiders is actually as nasty an insult as can be imagined. My husband picked up on that super quickly. I think he's angrier with my father than I am.

I'm currently mostly stunned. So much that was incomprehensible in my life makes perfect sense now. Though I still don't know why it didn't occur to me to wonder why I was obsessed with learning about narcissism before now. Glad I did though.

I realize Harry Potter references are way overdone.

But Gina Haspel wearing floaty flower print dresses is the most Umbridge thing I have ever seen.

I've been catching up with Jason Colavito's blog, and he has a post about Steven Pinker that makes me happy.

"Since Pinker’s failings in historiography, scholarship, and reasoning have been amply demonstrated, I will use my space instead to talk about how Enlightenment Now is a secular humanist polemic masquerading as a work of objective science"

Yes. I, like Jason, like secular humanism, but that makes this recent surge of treating secular humanism as some kind of Objective Truth even more galling. It's a religious way of thinking, not a rational one.

Also I'm pretty sure I learned more about the Enlightenment in high school than Pinker has in his whole life, but that's not a real surprise. Evolutionary psychologists are notoriously allergic to history. Looks like Pinker's not up on biology and evolutionary theory, either, since he "singles out anyone who sacrifices himself for the greater good of the collective as a fool."

I wonder where willful ignorance ends and scamming begins. I think Pinker, Dawkins, and Shermer are more on the "willful ignorance" end of things, whereas I'm pretty sure Harris is more of a scammer. Maybe it doesn't matter. What does is that this is why we need to teach history more often and more honestly in schools as a bulwark against this kind of crap.

The Senate Intelligence Committee demanded records of any Green Party communications with "Russian persons."

I've had a lot of communications with "Russian persons." I wished my Russian cousin-by-marriage a happy birthday a little while ago on Facebook, for instance. Then there are the Russian cat posts I've thrown likes at. And the Russian persons who play Sims 2 whom I follow on Tumblr.

I'm joking, but this is something we should actually be screaming on the streets about. Before it's too late. We're looking at full-on McCarthy mode at this point, if not worse. And there are no Edward R. Murrows trying to stop it this time -- instead, the so-called liberal media is all in for xenophobia.

I'm one of those "we need to have actual discussions with people who disagree with us about things, so long as they're civil and not super extremist, and even when they're super extremist there are people who are capable of saving them so support that" people.

But Jordan Peterson fans? I can't. It's not that his opinions are bad, illogical, and willfully ignorant, though of course they are. It's that Peterson himself is both so phenomenally stupid and unbearably boring that I just... can't. I can't even say well, they're falling for charisma, because he's got less charisma than a typical mold spore. He claims that metaphor is reality and then rails against his misconception of... everything, because he's wrong about everything except "clean your room." He probably makes that into a weird attempted metaphor in a way that ends up making it wrong too.

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I remember at one point, a year and a half ago, saying if someone was against Trump we could smooth out our differences and be on the same side for this at least.

I DID NOT MEAN PAUL FUCKING RYAN.

Of all the people against Trump (or seemingly against Trump), he is one of them who is debatably worse. Just... no. The enemy of my enemy is my enemy, and I wish upon them all the same horrific punishment: That they wake up one day realizing who they are and what they've done.