Thanks. I guess it's not the vocabulary I want to acquire as much as the craftsmanship (no gender offense) you have to string the words together into concepts. You are an excellent writer.
Even 20 or so years ago when the nonsense of gendered language was a fringe argument, I always understood that 99% of the time, vernacular with the word "man" in it was obviously alluding to the concept of "mankind," i.e., humanity or personhood, not "male," and it feels like deliberately looking for an fight to push that point.
My understanding (Rikard can help) is also that the linguistic roots of "man" were gender-neutral anyway, and simply meant "human."
When I read things like "man's inhumanity to man," it's understood that it is inclusive of me and other females. Ditto "craftsmanship." Or "mastery"? Would I say "I have achieved mistressry of English?" See, I can't even make the wiggly red lines go away on that one.
That last rhetorical question is very dependent on the language you formulated it in. In German(y), there are people trying to push Meisterinnenschaft (or worse, Meister*innenschaft) instead of (or as tantamount to) Meisterschaft.
It is absolutely the case that woke is very peculiar to the local language, as it seeks to subvert it. In the Anglosphere, it looks ridiculous in completely different ways than when it is exported (looking at you, 'Latinx').
Thanks for that witty and insightful explanation of postmodernism and critical theory--two things that have always confused me and now I see that was the point!
It really is the point, which should make you rightly see it as a threat. You do not want these people at the wheel. This is a different animal from globalist fascism- it is legit outer-horror madness.
There was a hilarious piece in a local leftoid paper warning people who were newly going to the gym to mind they didn't accidentally become "right wing".
What I find interesting is that, if you question this thinking, the argument ultimately seems to be something along the lines of "fitness increases testosterone which makes you right-wing," though I haven't seen an example of it being stated quite that explicitly.
I think the fear is if people improve themselves through hard work they might start believing in merit and paraphrasing Ben Shapiro about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps!
You do have to be careful in a gym. You start off with bench pressing lighter weights and later that day find yourself questioning border controls. Before you know it, when you can press over a hundred kilos, you're drawing swastikas everywhere.
Darnit and dagnabbit, I wanna add lots of clever stuff but you already made the main points about pomo and the rest of its "The Hills have Eyes"-style family tree!
Oh well. Let me just say that postmodernism is a tool. Problem is, it's the kind of tool that easily becomes your master. Sort of the One Ring or the Rheingold. Which makes you the user the tool. And who is the greater tool, the tool or the tool that follows him?
For some reason, that makes me think of Obi-Wan Kenobi facing Darth Vader in 'A New Hope'.
"Only a tool of Evil, Darth" sort of.
My wife once (1997?) decribed postmodernism and deconstructionism when used as an ontological or epistemological position instead of an analysis tool, as "self-enforced paranoid schizophrenic psychosis".
It is my belief that she was correct, for real, not joking. The effort of maintaining waht is in essence a completely arbitrary and chaotic set of ideas, most of which are paradoxic and mutually eliminating to boot, forces the believer to make themself psychotic as a coping mechanism.
So the woke live their lives in a contionous low-level psychotic break, where projection and collective relapse (psychiatric definition) becomes rituals for releasing anxiety and for enforcing the feeling of 'rightness' in being the way they are. Persons partaking of group therapy typically tend to normalise, even increase the behaviour the group is supposed to help with and I see no reason not to apply the same logic to wokeness.
And just as real, essentially blameless psychotics they invent rituals to create meaning, and as schizophreniacs they invent their own sounds and words to convey said meaning, and as narcissistic cluster B type 2 paranoiacs they can only project emotional reactions, lacking the requisite psyche to experience them within for real.
They feel [Nothing] is real; therefore everything must be made into [Nothing] for it to be real to them. Sort of like the werewolf in The Neverending Story, come to think of it.
I am 100% with your wife, which is why I so freely throw about the word "madness" when I'm describing/educating about pomo, a word I have a grave determination to not use lightly.
It really does remind me of my brief foray into the deep occult, and the kind of reason-shattering language that you get beyond a certain level of reality hacking (again, Lovecraft).
They are NOT people you want to see in charge of ANYthing, no matter what your political alignment. They will ultimately eat you alive, shit you out, and smear themselves with the filth.
There is a scene in 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' where the protagonist has demolished Merlin's tower by piling gunpowder in the tower's dungeon and then attaching a lightning rod to it, and then when the king and the knights are gathered and looking on during a thunderstorm, he claims his magic will destroys the tower.
Ala-ka-zapp later, the tower is in ruins, Merlin is disgraced and out of favour and our protagonist goes on to explain exactly what he did and how he did it. From the making of gunpowder to what a lightning rod is and so on, thinking the court will realise that magic equals pure BS and science and engineering is real.
And king Arthur and the rest responds with "Your magic is mighty indeed!".
That scene is a good way of understanding the obstacle postmodernism erects. It simply disawows whatever doesn't suit purpose - it doesn't even have to do what religions do, rationalise olden stuff as exactly that, it just ignores it completely.
The counter to Lovecraft, if we use his Old Ones as avatars of postmodernism (which I guess would make academics in the humanities cultists of their messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep) is unsurprisingly Howard and his embodiement of the Will to Power (an idea Howard is one of few to dare understand): Conan.
"Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content." From Queen of the Black Coast, which is breathtaking from the opening scene until the end.
Point being, if all truth is subjective, then that very statement too is subjective, meaning that out that subjectivity we create objective truth by way of experience and empiricism, which enables us to create more and better tools to measure said objectivity. The postmodernist and his ilk is a coward, not daring to draw the line of subjective reason to its end: if all mores, norms and morals and ethics are arbitrary constructions then any and all actions they take are wholly upon them wthout recourse to any set of morals defined and made righteous by external authority, be that authority gods or principles or anything else.
So, cringing and creeping back from the searing flame of that undeniable truth which is both utterly subjective and fully objective, they instead turn their to hate - hate against those who dare to say "This is my code, and I hold to it, and I make no excuses" as well as hate against those who say "This code, called -ism, is what I adhere to and hold as good and true". They are stuck between two fires, fearing both yet hating the cold place inbetween in which they themselves have positioned their very being.
Queen of the Black Coast is my favorite, I think. But I especially love that you connect Howard more generally to the will to power- and I hate the fact that merely acknowledging the concept has become such a taboo since his time.
That's avery good way of looking at it! I'll need to think about it, but it immediately rings true - why didn't I think of that? (That envy is a form of praise by the way.)
A lot of past boyfriends were on the "chunky" side, because most of them were nerds and there's overlap there- I can absolutely look at someone who is highly intelligent, socially skilled, confident, successful, but not a swimsuit model, and be attracted to them.
But there was, and is, definitely a line in terms of size beyond which my senses just refuse to be neutral- where my instinctive reaction is "that's REALLY not good, and not desirable at ALL, a human leg/back/whatever should not look like that" and while I would never be unfriendly or impolite to an undeserving stranger, I'm not going to pretend I'm into it.
If "fat" men are as horrible as "fat" women, how come they're not the ones that get discriminated against? Why do they still get paid more? Why do they still get promotions? Why do women still date them? (That's a real question. Why?!) Why do they not have the same self-esteem issues pushed onto women? Now, they're bitching that "fat" women are trying to be seen as pretty, sexy, and worthy, but they're being left out of the fat promotions. ?! (No, that broad on the bikini does not look good or sexy.)
1) Fat men ARE discriminated against, statistically significantly, in terms of things like promotions, income, and getting dates. There is solid research on this.
2) Women are more likely to select for income than men are, which means that men have a dimension they can leverage to compensate for being fat. Women can compensate by being more sexually available- as many women who perceive themselves to be unattractive do- but that has its own problems, and not something I'd recommend, ever, as a compensatory mechanism.
3) Part of this is "society is unfair"-category stuff, but part of it is also "biology is unfair"-category stuff. Men and women select and mate differently, and BOTH sexes find aspects of the modern incarnation of the selective criteria irrational and painful. (Ask a short but otherwise good-looking, successful guy sometime.) We have been in a very unpleasant period of human history where biological imperatives do not map well onto our lifestyles and EVERYone is being made unhappy by it.
"Everything is subjective, and all subjective claims are equally true," says the purple-haired postmodernist.
"Awesome!" replies the ISIS executioner, as he throws the postmodernist off a rooftop. "That means my claim that you are deserving of death as an infidel is valid! Allah akbar!"
Exactly. Especially when they attack Christianity for being too violent, "OK, now do Islam," is the perfect response, and for some reason, they usually just double down on Christianity instead.
Thank you GM for your valiant defence of my sanity. You may, as we dour and self-deprecating folk in the UK say, be batting on a sticky wicket. I wish my sanity and my waistline were swapped in some mirror dimension - the right one would then be receding, and the other increasing.
My life, or my working life at any rate, has been shaped by my passion to understand physics. In particular, to understand quantum physics. I nerded through life in a kind of Sheldonesque bubble of Geek (whilst not having Sheldon's redeeming feature of genius-level intelligence) and the social currents and trends largely passed me by.
I feel a bit like Rip van Winkle - having woken up only to find I have a near terminal case of "what the fuck happened?"
For example, we now have a few physicists (yes, people who might be expected to have some passing acquaintance with, oh I don't know, things like the scientific method), claiming that "indigenous knowledge" should be viewed with equal respect and consideration as things like Newton's Laws of Motion.
You also referenced the whole 2+2=5 lunacy. Of course, I can consider a fully logical consistent framework where a statement like 2+2=5 would be absolutely correct. But in this framework the symbol '2' and the symbol '5' and the symbol '+' would mean **different** things than the usual things. There are different algebras and operations we can construct.
The point is that NONE of these are in any way 'subjective' - once you've established the 'rules' and meanings in your algebraic construction - there is no room for manoeuvre, none whatsoever. Sure you can write down an expression 2+2=5 and be fully correct - but you're no longer working within the framework of integers and the usual operation of addition.
One example here is if you're working within the mathematical structures appropriate for something like elliptic curve cryptography then it's perfectly possible to have an algebra in which the result 1+1=3 is valid. You're no longer in the world and algebra of (conventional) numbers, though.
The post-modernist tries to pull the wool over your eyes, to convince you that just because there ARE legitimate algebraic structures in which 2+2=5 is a correct result this implies that mathematics and logic are somehow a bit on the flabby side and a matter of choice with an element of subjectivity. They want to convince you that the entire process of logical thought and rational deduction is somehow illegitimate - it's an "oppressive" tool invented by big bad colonialist whitey to maintain their dominance.
The problem is that the legitimacy of the result 2+2=5, in a given alternate algebraic system, is wholly dependent on the very rules of logic and rational deduction that they want you to dismiss.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying the post-modernists are talking shite.
I'm off to find where I've put those weights and maybe soon I'll be able to lift something heavier than my glass of beer.
You'd love Moira von Wright. She's a swedish-finnish professor of pedagogy and is, or was thankfully, infamous for stating things like "gravity is a social construct" or that physics uses patriarchal examples thus excluding women from physics (the patriarchal examples in question being able to actually know stuff like Ohm's law and how to apply it).
I also think your blood pressure would benefit from what a colleague of my mother-in-law once said, in all seriousness: "Let's hope that the comet (don't remember which one) doesn't hit the Sun, and causes it to go out, because then it would get cold". This was a woman of 60+ years of age, who taught natural science as a subject. No, she wasn't joking.
Or this one, a colleague of my wife when she, my wife that is, was still in "women's studies":
"If we only breath out every other breath, we could all halve our CO2 prouction!"
Me, I'm sticking to my truth that the key word in "of average intelligence" is average, not intelligence.
You're not alone. Thankfully, she has been deposed form every position as head of department she's occupied, yet she is but the most publicly known figure of the entire movement.
Sadly, the reason for that is not her whackadoodle ideas but that she personally is impossible to work with. You either follow her orders or she immediately sets out to destroy you via bullying - think high school alpha bitch style and you're not far off.
I do feel that some, at least, of this post-modern pillock-fest is stemming not from abundant stupidity (of which there is, erm, an abundance) but from more devious and duplicitous goals.
Some of it might just be laziness or a kind of fear. I mean, this technical stuff is effing *hard*. My students (mostly), however, just wanted some 'recipe'; this is problem of type X, apply solution method Y. They just wanted to know which bits of the textbook to 'learn' - and I really do mean learn in the sense of memorizing every example. In the Fourier series course I kind of expected them to be able to do important foundational stuff, like integrate. Yet several students told me the course was hard because they had to go back and memorize all the integrals they'd learned. I don't mean revise integration *methods*, but to literally learn, by rote, every example of integration they had seen.
I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks.
Gravity is a social construct right up until the point, when falling out of a building, you meet the social construct of the sidewalk.
>> "I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks."
Yes, yes, yes, this is 1000% the case. There are cynical foundations to all of this every bit as robust as the sincerely zealous ones, and my work history is replete with examples of people able to get jobs as accountants and do no accounting as long as they're able to spout something Marxist in an email once in a while.
This is what I pointed out in a recent comment elsewhere about how leftist ideology always sows its long-term destruction, because it creates a feedback loop of declining competency- once you hit a tipping point of airline pilots and engineers that were hired because they could parrot the commissars and not because they understood physics, everything starts literally crashing down.
Speaking as a former teacher (of the fuzziest of fuzzy subjects, the history of ideas and th ideas of history among other things), I can testify, attest and bear witness that this is literal truth:
"I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks."
Yes. Yes, it is. Abso-diddley-lutely. I have no idea how many times I've been looking a test paper where the question has been something like "State and explain how to succesfully implement idea Z on situation Y as outlined above", the point being to give the student maple opportunity to show they a) have memorised the topic and b) can utilise the memorised facts in a situation.
And where the answer has been some flavour of "The right way of course"... Yah, that doesn't answer the question, now does it? But to today's students, it does.
I have actually had the pleasure to ask, before dozens of our peers, one such pomo-freak spouting the "social construction" line about gravity: "So why don't you step out the window?". Her apoplectic response was one for the ages. I have no doubts that if I had been a woman, or of small and slight built, she would have assaulted me.
You know, I could spend all day listing funny - in both sense - anecdotes from teaching, academia and life in general relating to this wide topic, due to mine and the wife's backgrounds.
Like when an argentinian professor wanted us to remove all the furniture form the classroom, and sit on pillows and cushions in a circle instead. Cue me: "To what practical effect apart from just wasting time?"
-"Well, you seem dead set on creating negative energies!"
Sociology; topic being Zygmunt Bauman, who else? I would have loved to have had an actual physicist there to ask this rectangular cuboid of a woman exactly what she meant by "negative energy".
Or when one of the sociology professors announced to 250 students that "You can't pass our multiple choice exam unless you study hard! We have eliminated probability!" (The bar for a passing grade? 35% correct answers out of 100...)
I weep for sociology. It used to be about going out and observing human behaviour, or doing strictly defined and limited experiments, and then hopefully balancing observation of the subject in the wild with the findings in clinical experimentation, and build from there, combining it with neurology and psychology along the way.
Today, you start with your own opinion or feeling and then conjure a virtual yugoloth in text form to prove it true.
I think we can more broadly blame- and mourn- the death of the scientific method and simply experience sociology as one of the most visible casualties thereof, because of its more direct impact on our popular culture.
Aug 31, 2022·edited Aug 31, 2022Liked by Guttermouth
It's never redundant or belaboring the obvious to clarify that subjective human experience does not preclude reality from being real and objective, especially in the context of this culture (it's not the Enligtenment anymore). It's also necessary to point out that the phenomenon of subjectivity does not mean that subjectivism (the idea that consciousness precedes or creates or molds reality) is valid.
I worry I get repetitive with concepts that I often think about and I fear pedantry as the worst poison to my writing.
I've lectured and taught a lot, and I know my mind can fall into certain patterns of expression where the context is actually to be entertaining and casual.
I find that reformulating ideas, however basic, is conducive to reifying them and understanding them better, for writer and reader--and you just don't know who's reading something like that for the first time. Overstating what should be obvious is sometimes crucial, these days.
I was in the belly of the post-modernist beast at the JHU Humanities Center in the late 70s. I found it to be an excellent crucible for thought and writing, but then I was high, used a lot of meth and hallucinogens and my and most of my friends' motto was "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." Objective reality is all the clearer for the experience. I think that's what Dick Macksey (RIP! greatest prof of all time--objectively! https://youtu.be/4rvXUHI331k) intended. Subjectively, worked for me!
I was around it much, much later, and by that time, like a lot of exciting ideas that challenged conventional thinking, it had really started to stink.
We called older bro “Chaos” because everything he touched turned to chaos. His lifestyle, his communication, his relationships devolved into one deconstructing rabbit hole after another. Seems likely he’s on the spectrum of autism (asperbergers perhaps.).
I’ve always wondered if there’s a relationship between this type of post modern deconstructivist thinking and autism.
On an individual level, this type of thinking ends in insanity.
HFAs tend to be too logical and too literal, lacking a sense of fantasy - any fanciful story they care to make up is always logical (internally consistent). So if they tell a story about a spaceship being more than a light year long, you can bet on they having already considered the problems of communication between the stern and the aft. Whereas a normal (as in: most people aren't autistics) person writing such a story would ignore it unless it's a point in the story.
Of course, that's completely anecdotal from my work experience, having worked as teacher(/tutor/mentor/whatever, they kept changing the title over the years) for HFAs on and off for 20-25 years. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is a good fit I think.
Many of them could easily latch on to one single fractioned aspect, and then dig and dig until they - according to themselves - had demonstrated that whole was illogical, arbitrary and therefor nonsensical. Such as taking daily showers - why shower when you haven't done anything which makes you dirty? Frustrating in the extreme when the student has an IQ of 150+, and virtually no social skills since that part of the brain (or rather: that function) is stunted and the home environment isn't supportive of developing what little inborn ability there is (not blaming parents here, just staing facts as I've experienced them).
It is however fully possibe to train these persons to function in a way that isn't detrimental to their daily life - and I do mean train, because that's the way it often feels to them, according my experience. The social codes and behaviours which otherwise comes naturally simply doesn't develop without quite formalistic training.
What I feel has happened since the 1970s is that with the destruction of societal stricture and structure, children who in our earlier society would have been taught limits and rules - the whys and hows and whats of being a social animal so to speak, the rules of the pack - and therefore being forced to learn to control their autisitic impulses were instead given exactly the wrong kind of freedom, meaning that they instead developed their autistic impulses, making them much more impaired than necessary. This, together with changing the criteria for the diagnosis (for various reasons) and possibly chemicals acting upon sperm, eggs and the zygote/child itself during gestation has led to autism becoming ridiculously common.
A very controversial way of describing it would be comparing with dogs. In one society, all dogs are trained to a rigorous standard, not ever needing leashes or monitors. In another society, the dogs are allowed to develop spontaneously. Now, in which society do you think dogs would be a problem?
I know I don't have to point out that I'm not comparing dogs to autisitic humans but for the sake of form I'm doing it anyway. Call it "teacher's PC-OCD" if you like.
"On an individual level, this type of thinking ends in insanity." 100% true. It is, as someone remarked either here or in RRs thread on his stack, the opposite of CBT.
I think it falls to a failure of tolerance vs acceptance. I'm probably going to piss some people off by saying this (and I really don't care because I'm sick of this), but autism isn't a superpower, nor is it desirable; it is an impairment that sometimes (but not nearly as often as in TV land) is accompanied with compensatory abilities but otherwise makes the sufferer and those around them worse off.
I dealt with plenty of people that didn't have that "H" in the front of their FAs, and you eventually start to feel bad for the parents getting mauled by their kids or the siblings whose lives are consigned to permanent emotionally neglected supporting roles because of their high-maintenance brother who is incapable of thanking or appreciating their involuntary sacrifice.
We went from "having a disability does not diminish your worth as a person" to "having a disability increases your worth," and it is one of many things that has crashed repeatedly into the wall of objective reality.
All true, tragically. Problem is, without the parents training the autistic child, our work at school has a very marginal effect, if any. "Band-aid on arterial bleeding" sort of.
Autism is certainly no superpower; no kind of mental retardation, which autism is, is a superpower, nor is any psychological condition such as neurosis or psychosis a power of any kind. I hope I didn't convey that image, that was not the intent. HFAs make up the most visible and most vocal faction of autistics, which creates a double bind/double punishment for the rest of them whether they are aware of it or not.
If I recall correctly (and the data may well be outdated due to changing definitions), about 60% of autistics have an IQ of 85 or lower, with the majority of this group clustered at about 60. Of the remaining 40%, more than half have an IQ under 60 and are barely communicable at all, especially since the greater the impairment, the likelier other disorders become.
"Aspies"/HFAs make up the remainder, and the majority of those still land on or close to normal IQ - the "Sheldon Cooper"-stereotype is pure Hollywood. My perspective is of course skewed by having worked with HFAs of above normal IQ.
I maintain that our older more strict and therefore more predicable society was better for anyone with autistic personality traits - their ability to be "flexible" or deal with randomness or what they perceive as arbitrariness is so impaired even the most intelligent among them still need help learning even basic stuff like how a student loan works. Imagine a person, very intelligent with a natural insitinct for math not understanding the way student loans and interest works, simply because they find the idea of student loans illogical. The brain locks and cannot move past "Error: illogical societal system detected. Solve problem before continuing."
Small wonder they lapse into depression, become suicidal by 25-30, and have unemployment figures in the 70%+ range, despite their intelligence.
You didn't convey that image. It's just a frustration I've had for a long time that has been politically incorrect to express for decades.
Years ago, I met one very intelligent HFA man at an auto company I contracted with, who told me that the effort and cognitive load it took him to master social discourse more or less by rote, and maintain interpersonal relationships sufficient to hold a job and date women were exhausting and that he operated more or less at capacity all the time. I told him I was extremely impressed- I would not have pegged him as HFA until he had told me why he was writing down seemingly random details of our conversation- but it clearly was no picnic for him.
He is pretty much the only one I've met at that level of global functioning.
On the flip side, when I lived in Japan I observed the Japanese cultural proclivities to A) not get involved with things and B) to ignore uncomfortable behavior when I watched a single mom in McDonald's being continuously battered by her young nonverbal autistic son who had thrown himself on the floor and refused to get up for about 30 minutes (with NO ONE HELPING). After finishing my sandwich I politely introduced myself as a psychologist, entertained him with my car keys, threw him over my shoulder, and carried him down the stairs and out the door so she could get a taxi home.
As you say, your statistics may be outdated due to redefinitions, which is a source of my griping- it has become very convenient to diagnose oneself with Aspberger's when a proper diagnosis would be "unwilling to learn basic social skills or does not find oneself sufficiently interesting." That permanent cognitive deficits should be seen as a desirable badge to wear is beyond comprehension- perhaps I'm the one with a deficit for my lack of imagination.
Teaching those abilities you describe that man as having was sometimes the entire point of my work, more or less. And it is extremely exhausting - I can actually relate, having more than once sat in on meetings in a group of adult HFAs, all with settled normal lives. They were volunteer mentors for teenaged HFs, age 16-21 mainly. The psychologist in charge had started the project because she had noticed that no matter how positive the development had been during school years, all her patients fell into severe depression with suicidal tendencies after they left school.
Since I couldn't pick up their signals due to their stunted affect and lack of body language, it was exhausting to have to consciously look for all those signals we pick up and project unconsciously.
As for the diagnosis: it fulfills the same function for people/parents as does calling alcoholism a disease.
It's no longer my fault. It's the disease's/Uncle Bad Touch's/the diagnosis' fault. (Imagine the preceding sentence read out loud by the creep clinking bottles together at the end of 'The Warriors' for the full effect.)
Too bad it doesn't work like with diabetes and other -real -diseases and conditions: the ones not taking good care of themselves taes home a Darwin award sooner than later. Spencerian natural selection at its finest, if we're going for the gold in non-PC statements?
GM, here I come to read your stack and right away picking on the Vikings. They looked really good last night. Anyhow, the more I read the more I will get to know about your persona and what formed your imperfect but enlightening creature.
Sure, I'll discuss it in passing but the meat of it isn't honestly very interesting.
I went on a very passionate and aggressive journey of comparative theology in my teenage and college years, settled down into Eastern thought for much of my 20s, and ended up coming back to the proto-European/Germanic heathenry of my roots after that. But most of that had nothing at all to do with the occult, just philosophy/faith.
While I was in college and for a little while after I messed around a little with Hermetic and pagan occult practices, generally interested in ritual traditions and edgy stuff like blood and humors. I didn't belong to any groups or run around in silly robes, but I chatted with some folks on the proto-Internet from various traditions and read lots of books and experimented. No, nothing satisfying ever occurred.
I have the kind of personality that makes it hard for me, even if I want to, to get "sucked into" things, so my curiosity about the occult was mainly me banging my head rationally against something I wanted to find some substance to and refusing to convince myself anything was true that wasn't, and ultimately concluding none of it was. I have too much of a scientist's mind to allow myself to see things that I'm not really seeing.
I still cycle through phases of nihilism sometimes and generally feel very, VERY badly when I do, but it's an entirely intellectual process that I always manage to climb out of eventually.
Don't laugh too hard ... OTO, not Golden Dawn. Yeah, I know, sad.
I'm much saner than I was then, let's just leave it at that. Too much LDS is the 70's maybe.
Myself, I've been having a lot of 'black pill' days lately. Trying to talk a dear one into at least taking some supplements to strengthen herself, as she's chosen to accept the 'chemo' (aka poisoning) for her esophageal cancer (yes, aggressive, and yes, she was double vaxxed but I was at least able to talk her out of the booster).
But really, the world has always been one of grey and muted crumbling ruins, from some persons' perspectives. We just finally got really freakin' unlucky. Or lazy, we had it all, really.
I enjoyed reading the dialogue on this topic, between you and several learned persons of braininess. Keep 'em coming, would ya? Lifelines, I tell ya! Lifelines!
I'm sorry about your friend. My FIL showed up at the farm out of nowhere yesterday to tell Husbandmouth and I his prostate cancer is back after 20 years. He cried in my arms and said he was so scared. (People do this. Strangers sometimes, even.)
Very sorry about your FIL. How's Husband-mouth taking it?
So you get that too? One of the stranger things that has happened to me with a stranger (heh) was when I was 19 or so, I was going cross-country on a Greyhound, and an elderly lady opened up to me about the night her husband died. I'd never met a complete stranger so much in need of hugs before. She got on at Chicago, and off at Salt Lake City, though she was from Maine, originally. Poor old gal, he died on the way to the hospital, and she was so upset that she'd probably been talking to him for a few minutes after he was gone -- such a strange thing to imprint upon one's memory, but it seemed to strike her to the core.
You must seem safe to people, despite being such a tough in some ways. But there's a strength and safety in toughness, right?
Wow, Existential Comics. I haven't visited that site in... gosh, ages. It's clever, but I don't claim to get all or possibly even most of it.
I'm not an existentialist, and I actually don't spend a ton of time on formal philosophy. My study is fairly narrow and post hoc (I encounter a problem and then do a bunch of reading about thinking that specifically addresses it).
I do find it interesting, though, that "the French school of thought" is a clear and coherent thing we can identify and everyone with at least a little background in philosophy understands who/what is included. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but having personally known a goodly number of very smart French people, I'm always a little puzzled as to how and why we got what we got from French thought as opposed to, say, ze Germans. Wouldn't you have predicted we'd get existentialism from a Teuton?
Existentialism is so depressing that it can only be developed by conversation in melodious, spoken French, in a Café or with some good wine. When we Germans have an idea, we lock ourselves into our study, write a scholarly book in cold, hard German, and go mad afterwards. It is important that the going mad does not happen too early.
I'm 71 years old. My next goal in life is to acquire at least 25% of GM's vocabulary before I meet my Maker.
You strike me as an aggressive reader. I would think your vocabulary is deep and wide by now!
Thanks. I guess it's not the vocabulary I want to acquire as much as the craftsmanship (no gender offense) you have to string the words together into concepts. You are an excellent writer.
Even 20 or so years ago when the nonsense of gendered language was a fringe argument, I always understood that 99% of the time, vernacular with the word "man" in it was obviously alluding to the concept of "mankind," i.e., humanity or personhood, not "male," and it feels like deliberately looking for an fight to push that point.
My understanding (Rikard can help) is also that the linguistic roots of "man" were gender-neutral anyway, and simply meant "human."
When I read things like "man's inhumanity to man," it's understood that it is inclusive of me and other females. Ditto "craftsmanship." Or "mastery"? Would I say "I have achieved mistressry of English?" See, I can't even make the wiggly red lines go away on that one.
That last rhetorical question is very dependent on the language you formulated it in. In German(y), there are people trying to push Meisterinnenschaft (or worse, Meister*innenschaft) instead of (or as tantamount to) Meisterschaft.
It is absolutely the case that woke is very peculiar to the local language, as it seeks to subvert it. In the Anglosphere, it looks ridiculous in completely different ways than when it is exported (looking at you, 'Latinx').
Thanks for that witty and insightful explanation of postmodernism and critical theory--two things that have always confused me and now I see that was the point!
It really is the point, which should make you rightly see it as a threat. You do not want these people at the wheel. This is a different animal from globalist fascism- it is legit outer-horror madness.
There was a hilarious piece in a local leftoid paper warning people who were newly going to the gym to mind they didn't accidentally become "right wing".
I'm not making this up.
It isn't an isolated thing. At all.
What I find interesting is that, if you question this thinking, the argument ultimately seems to be something along the lines of "fitness increases testosterone which makes you right-wing," though I haven't seen an example of it being stated quite that explicitly.
I think the fear is if people improve themselves through hard work they might start believing in merit and paraphrasing Ben Shapiro about pulling themselves up by their bootstraps!
You do have to be careful in a gym. You start off with bench pressing lighter weights and later that day find yourself questioning border controls. Before you know it, when you can press over a hundred kilos, you're drawing swastikas everywhere.
Darnit and dagnabbit, I wanna add lots of clever stuff but you already made the main points about pomo and the rest of its "The Hills have Eyes"-style family tree!
Oh well. Let me just say that postmodernism is a tool. Problem is, it's the kind of tool that easily becomes your master. Sort of the One Ring or the Rheingold. Which makes you the user the tool. And who is the greater tool, the tool or the tool that follows him?
IMHO, the follower tool, who obviously can't think for themselves.
For some reason, that makes me think of Obi-Wan Kenobi facing Darth Vader in 'A New Hope'.
"Only a tool of Evil, Darth" sort of.
My wife once (1997?) decribed postmodernism and deconstructionism when used as an ontological or epistemological position instead of an analysis tool, as "self-enforced paranoid schizophrenic psychosis".
It is my belief that she was correct, for real, not joking. The effort of maintaining waht is in essence a completely arbitrary and chaotic set of ideas, most of which are paradoxic and mutually eliminating to boot, forces the believer to make themself psychotic as a coping mechanism.
So the woke live their lives in a contionous low-level psychotic break, where projection and collective relapse (psychiatric definition) becomes rituals for releasing anxiety and for enforcing the feeling of 'rightness' in being the way they are. Persons partaking of group therapy typically tend to normalise, even increase the behaviour the group is supposed to help with and I see no reason not to apply the same logic to wokeness.
And just as real, essentially blameless psychotics they invent rituals to create meaning, and as schizophreniacs they invent their own sounds and words to convey said meaning, and as narcissistic cluster B type 2 paranoiacs they can only project emotional reactions, lacking the requisite psyche to experience them within for real.
They feel [Nothing] is real; therefore everything must be made into [Nothing] for it to be real to them. Sort of like the werewolf in The Neverending Story, come to think of it.
I am 100% with your wife, which is why I so freely throw about the word "madness" when I'm describing/educating about pomo, a word I have a grave determination to not use lightly.
It really does remind me of my brief foray into the deep occult, and the kind of reason-shattering language that you get beyond a certain level of reality hacking (again, Lovecraft).
They are NOT people you want to see in charge of ANYthing, no matter what your political alignment. They will ultimately eat you alive, shit you out, and smear themselves with the filth.
There is a scene in 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' where the protagonist has demolished Merlin's tower by piling gunpowder in the tower's dungeon and then attaching a lightning rod to it, and then when the king and the knights are gathered and looking on during a thunderstorm, he claims his magic will destroys the tower.
Ala-ka-zapp later, the tower is in ruins, Merlin is disgraced and out of favour and our protagonist goes on to explain exactly what he did and how he did it. From the making of gunpowder to what a lightning rod is and so on, thinking the court will realise that magic equals pure BS and science and engineering is real.
And king Arthur and the rest responds with "Your magic is mighty indeed!".
That scene is a good way of understanding the obstacle postmodernism erects. It simply disawows whatever doesn't suit purpose - it doesn't even have to do what religions do, rationalise olden stuff as exactly that, it just ignores it completely.
The counter to Lovecraft, if we use his Old Ones as avatars of postmodernism (which I guess would make academics in the humanities cultists of their messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep) is unsurprisingly Howard and his embodiement of the Will to Power (an idea Howard is one of few to dare understand): Conan.
"Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content." From Queen of the Black Coast, which is breathtaking from the opening scene until the end.
Point being, if all truth is subjective, then that very statement too is subjective, meaning that out that subjectivity we create objective truth by way of experience and empiricism, which enables us to create more and better tools to measure said objectivity. The postmodernist and his ilk is a coward, not daring to draw the line of subjective reason to its end: if all mores, norms and morals and ethics are arbitrary constructions then any and all actions they take are wholly upon them wthout recourse to any set of morals defined and made righteous by external authority, be that authority gods or principles or anything else.
So, cringing and creeping back from the searing flame of that undeniable truth which is both utterly subjective and fully objective, they instead turn their to hate - hate against those who dare to say "This is my code, and I hold to it, and I make no excuses" as well as hate against those who say "This code, called -ism, is what I adhere to and hold as good and true". They are stuck between two fires, fearing both yet hating the cold place inbetween in which they themselves have positioned their very being.
Queen of the Black Coast is my favorite, I think. But I especially love that you connect Howard more generally to the will to power- and I hate the fact that merely acknowledging the concept has become such a taboo since his time.
Wokeness is the literal inversion of cognitive behavioural therapy.
That's avery good way of looking at it! I'll need to think about it, but it immediately rings true - why didn't I think of that? (That envy is a form of praise by the way.)
of course you are smart i wouldnt read you if you were not!
my best mate likes bigger girls, never understood it myself. i was miserable when i was a fatty i just didnt know it, it creeps up on you
A lot of past boyfriends were on the "chunky" side, because most of them were nerds and there's overlap there- I can absolutely look at someone who is highly intelligent, socially skilled, confident, successful, but not a swimsuit model, and be attracted to them.
But there was, and is, definitely a line in terms of size beyond which my senses just refuse to be neutral- where my instinctive reaction is "that's REALLY not good, and not desirable at ALL, a human leg/back/whatever should not look like that" and while I would never be unfriendly or impolite to an undeserving stranger, I'm not going to pretend I'm into it.
I read his piece and loved it. Also loved his Star Wars "movement" and his dad joke...
He's an awesome guy, and brilliant to boot.
Oh, Lord! That dad joke was the best! I laughed, off and on, for a good five minutes.
If "fat" men are as horrible as "fat" women, how come they're not the ones that get discriminated against? Why do they still get paid more? Why do they still get promotions? Why do women still date them? (That's a real question. Why?!) Why do they not have the same self-esteem issues pushed onto women? Now, they're bitching that "fat" women are trying to be seen as pretty, sexy, and worthy, but they're being left out of the fat promotions. ?! (No, that broad on the bikini does not look good or sexy.)
I understand your position. I have some thoughts.
1) Fat men ARE discriminated against, statistically significantly, in terms of things like promotions, income, and getting dates. There is solid research on this.
2) Women are more likely to select for income than men are, which means that men have a dimension they can leverage to compensate for being fat. Women can compensate by being more sexually available- as many women who perceive themselves to be unattractive do- but that has its own problems, and not something I'd recommend, ever, as a compensatory mechanism.
3) Part of this is "society is unfair"-category stuff, but part of it is also "biology is unfair"-category stuff. Men and women select and mate differently, and BOTH sexes find aspects of the modern incarnation of the selective criteria irrational and painful. (Ask a short but otherwise good-looking, successful guy sometime.) We have been in a very unpleasant period of human history where biological imperatives do not map well onto our lifestyles and EVERYone is being made unhappy by it.
"Everything is subjective, and all subjective claims are equally true," says the purple-haired postmodernist.
"Awesome!" replies the ISIS executioner, as he throws the postmodernist off a rooftop. "That means my claim that you are deserving of death as an infidel is valid! Allah akbar!"
This is why, when I hear someone triumphally knocking down religion, you will invariably see me reply "now do Islam," and wait patiently.
Exactly. Especially when they attack Christianity for being too violent, "OK, now do Islam," is the perfect response, and for some reason, they usually just double down on Christianity instead.
Thank you GM for your valiant defence of my sanity. You may, as we dour and self-deprecating folk in the UK say, be batting on a sticky wicket. I wish my sanity and my waistline were swapped in some mirror dimension - the right one would then be receding, and the other increasing.
My life, or my working life at any rate, has been shaped by my passion to understand physics. In particular, to understand quantum physics. I nerded through life in a kind of Sheldonesque bubble of Geek (whilst not having Sheldon's redeeming feature of genius-level intelligence) and the social currents and trends largely passed me by.
I feel a bit like Rip van Winkle - having woken up only to find I have a near terminal case of "what the fuck happened?"
For example, we now have a few physicists (yes, people who might be expected to have some passing acquaintance with, oh I don't know, things like the scientific method), claiming that "indigenous knowledge" should be viewed with equal respect and consideration as things like Newton's Laws of Motion.
You also referenced the whole 2+2=5 lunacy. Of course, I can consider a fully logical consistent framework where a statement like 2+2=5 would be absolutely correct. But in this framework the symbol '2' and the symbol '5' and the symbol '+' would mean **different** things than the usual things. There are different algebras and operations we can construct.
The point is that NONE of these are in any way 'subjective' - once you've established the 'rules' and meanings in your algebraic construction - there is no room for manoeuvre, none whatsoever. Sure you can write down an expression 2+2=5 and be fully correct - but you're no longer working within the framework of integers and the usual operation of addition.
One example here is if you're working within the mathematical structures appropriate for something like elliptic curve cryptography then it's perfectly possible to have an algebra in which the result 1+1=3 is valid. You're no longer in the world and algebra of (conventional) numbers, though.
The post-modernist tries to pull the wool over your eyes, to convince you that just because there ARE legitimate algebraic structures in which 2+2=5 is a correct result this implies that mathematics and logic are somehow a bit on the flabby side and a matter of choice with an element of subjectivity. They want to convince you that the entire process of logical thought and rational deduction is somehow illegitimate - it's an "oppressive" tool invented by big bad colonialist whitey to maintain their dominance.
The problem is that the legitimacy of the result 2+2=5, in a given alternate algebraic system, is wholly dependent on the very rules of logic and rational deduction that they want you to dismiss.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying the post-modernists are talking shite.
I'm off to find where I've put those weights and maybe soon I'll be able to lift something heavier than my glass of beer.
You'd love Moira von Wright. She's a swedish-finnish professor of pedagogy and is, or was thankfully, infamous for stating things like "gravity is a social construct" or that physics uses patriarchal examples thus excluding women from physics (the patriarchal examples in question being able to actually know stuff like Ohm's law and how to apply it).
I also think your blood pressure would benefit from what a colleague of my mother-in-law once said, in all seriousness: "Let's hope that the comet (don't remember which one) doesn't hit the Sun, and causes it to go out, because then it would get cold". This was a woman of 60+ years of age, who taught natural science as a subject. No, she wasn't joking.
Or this one, a colleague of my wife when she, my wife that is, was still in "women's studies":
"If we only breath out every other breath, we could all halve our CO2 prouction!"
Me, I'm sticking to my truth that the key word in "of average intelligence" is average, not intelligence.
Are women not capable of learning Ohm's law? I'm offended by the very logic of her argument.
You're not alone. Thankfully, she has been deposed form every position as head of department she's occupied, yet she is but the most publicly known figure of the entire movement.
Sadly, the reason for that is not her whackadoodle ideas but that she personally is impossible to work with. You either follow her orders or she immediately sets out to destroy you via bullying - think high school alpha bitch style and you're not far off.
Yeah, I've had no shortage of colleagues like that. Lost a job to one.
Oh good Lord - there's no hope for some is there?
I do feel that some, at least, of this post-modern pillock-fest is stemming not from abundant stupidity (of which there is, erm, an abundance) but from more devious and duplicitous goals.
Some of it might just be laziness or a kind of fear. I mean, this technical stuff is effing *hard*. My students (mostly), however, just wanted some 'recipe'; this is problem of type X, apply solution method Y. They just wanted to know which bits of the textbook to 'learn' - and I really do mean learn in the sense of memorizing every example. In the Fourier series course I kind of expected them to be able to do important foundational stuff, like integrate. Yet several students told me the course was hard because they had to go back and memorize all the integrals they'd learned. I don't mean revise integration *methods*, but to literally learn, by rote, every example of integration they had seen.
I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks.
Gravity is a social construct right up until the point, when falling out of a building, you meet the social construct of the sidewalk.
>> "I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks."
Yes, yes, yes, this is 1000% the case. There are cynical foundations to all of this every bit as robust as the sincerely zealous ones, and my work history is replete with examples of people able to get jobs as accountants and do no accounting as long as they're able to spout something Marxist in an email once in a while.
This is what I pointed out in a recent comment elsewhere about how leftist ideology always sows its long-term destruction, because it creates a feedback loop of declining competency- once you hit a tipping point of airline pilots and engineers that were hired because they could parrot the commissars and not because they understood physics, everything starts literally crashing down.
Speaking as a former teacher (of the fuzziest of fuzzy subjects, the history of ideas and th ideas of history among other things), I can testify, attest and bear witness that this is literal truth:
"I wonder if some of the enthusiasm for "decolonizing" technical subjects is because it means they can spout crap and still get good marks."
Yes. Yes, it is. Abso-diddley-lutely. I have no idea how many times I've been looking a test paper where the question has been something like "State and explain how to succesfully implement idea Z on situation Y as outlined above", the point being to give the student maple opportunity to show they a) have memorised the topic and b) can utilise the memorised facts in a situation.
And where the answer has been some flavour of "The right way of course"... Yah, that doesn't answer the question, now does it? But to today's students, it does.
I have actually had the pleasure to ask, before dozens of our peers, one such pomo-freak spouting the "social construction" line about gravity: "So why don't you step out the window?". Her apoplectic response was one for the ages. I have no doubts that if I had been a woman, or of small and slight built, she would have assaulted me.
You know, I could spend all day listing funny - in both sense - anecdotes from teaching, academia and life in general relating to this wide topic, due to mine and the wife's backgrounds.
Like when an argentinian professor wanted us to remove all the furniture form the classroom, and sit on pillows and cushions in a circle instead. Cue me: "To what practical effect apart from just wasting time?"
-"Well, you seem dead set on creating negative energies!"
Sociology; topic being Zygmunt Bauman, who else? I would have loved to have had an actual physicist there to ask this rectangular cuboid of a woman exactly what she meant by "negative energy".
Or when one of the sociology professors announced to 250 students that "You can't pass our multiple choice exam unless you study hard! We have eliminated probability!" (The bar for a passing grade? 35% correct answers out of 100...)
I'm sure the sociology professors were referring to anti-matter. There's really no other logical explanation.
Or maybe just electrons and I'm being melodramatic.
I weep for sociology. It used to be about going out and observing human behaviour, or doing strictly defined and limited experiments, and then hopefully balancing observation of the subject in the wild with the findings in clinical experimentation, and build from there, combining it with neurology and psychology along the way.
Today, you start with your own opinion or feeling and then conjure a virtual yugoloth in text form to prove it true.
I think we can more broadly blame- and mourn- the death of the scientific method and simply experience sociology as one of the most visible casualties thereof, because of its more direct impact on our popular culture.
It's never redundant or belaboring the obvious to clarify that subjective human experience does not preclude reality from being real and objective, especially in the context of this culture (it's not the Enligtenment anymore). It's also necessary to point out that the phenomenon of subjectivity does not mean that subjectivism (the idea that consciousness precedes or creates or molds reality) is valid.
I worry I get repetitive with concepts that I often think about and I fear pedantry as the worst poison to my writing.
I've lectured and taught a lot, and I know my mind can fall into certain patterns of expression where the context is actually to be entertaining and casual.
But thanks for the reassurance.
I find that reformulating ideas, however basic, is conducive to reifying them and understanding them better, for writer and reader--and you just don't know who's reading something like that for the first time. Overstating what should be obvious is sometimes crucial, these days.
I was in the belly of the post-modernist beast at the JHU Humanities Center in the late 70s. I found it to be an excellent crucible for thought and writing, but then I was high, used a lot of meth and hallucinogens and my and most of my friends' motto was "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." Objective reality is all the clearer for the experience. I think that's what Dick Macksey (RIP! greatest prof of all time--objectively! https://youtu.be/4rvXUHI331k) intended. Subjectively, worked for me!
I was around it much, much later, and by that time, like a lot of exciting ideas that challenged conventional thinking, it had really started to stink.
We called older bro “Chaos” because everything he touched turned to chaos. His lifestyle, his communication, his relationships devolved into one deconstructing rabbit hole after another. Seems likely he’s on the spectrum of autism (asperbergers perhaps.).
I’ve always wondered if there’s a relationship between this type of post modern deconstructivist thinking and autism.
On an individual level, this type of thinking ends in insanity.
HFAs tend to be too logical and too literal, lacking a sense of fantasy - any fanciful story they care to make up is always logical (internally consistent). So if they tell a story about a spaceship being more than a light year long, you can bet on they having already considered the problems of communication between the stern and the aft. Whereas a normal (as in: most people aren't autistics) person writing such a story would ignore it unless it's a point in the story.
Of course, that's completely anecdotal from my work experience, having worked as teacher(/tutor/mentor/whatever, they kept changing the title over the years) for HFAs on and off for 20-25 years. The phrase "too clever for their own good" is a good fit I think.
Many of them could easily latch on to one single fractioned aspect, and then dig and dig until they - according to themselves - had demonstrated that whole was illogical, arbitrary and therefor nonsensical. Such as taking daily showers - why shower when you haven't done anything which makes you dirty? Frustrating in the extreme when the student has an IQ of 150+, and virtually no social skills since that part of the brain (or rather: that function) is stunted and the home environment isn't supportive of developing what little inborn ability there is (not blaming parents here, just staing facts as I've experienced them).
It is however fully possibe to train these persons to function in a way that isn't detrimental to their daily life - and I do mean train, because that's the way it often feels to them, according my experience. The social codes and behaviours which otherwise comes naturally simply doesn't develop without quite formalistic training.
What I feel has happened since the 1970s is that with the destruction of societal stricture and structure, children who in our earlier society would have been taught limits and rules - the whys and hows and whats of being a social animal so to speak, the rules of the pack - and therefore being forced to learn to control their autisitic impulses were instead given exactly the wrong kind of freedom, meaning that they instead developed their autistic impulses, making them much more impaired than necessary. This, together with changing the criteria for the diagnosis (for various reasons) and possibly chemicals acting upon sperm, eggs and the zygote/child itself during gestation has led to autism becoming ridiculously common.
A very controversial way of describing it would be comparing with dogs. In one society, all dogs are trained to a rigorous standard, not ever needing leashes or monitors. In another society, the dogs are allowed to develop spontaneously. Now, in which society do you think dogs would be a problem?
I know I don't have to point out that I'm not comparing dogs to autisitic humans but for the sake of form I'm doing it anyway. Call it "teacher's PC-OCD" if you like.
"On an individual level, this type of thinking ends in insanity." 100% true. It is, as someone remarked either here or in RRs thread on his stack, the opposite of CBT.
I think it falls to a failure of tolerance vs acceptance. I'm probably going to piss some people off by saying this (and I really don't care because I'm sick of this), but autism isn't a superpower, nor is it desirable; it is an impairment that sometimes (but not nearly as often as in TV land) is accompanied with compensatory abilities but otherwise makes the sufferer and those around them worse off.
I dealt with plenty of people that didn't have that "H" in the front of their FAs, and you eventually start to feel bad for the parents getting mauled by their kids or the siblings whose lives are consigned to permanent emotionally neglected supporting roles because of their high-maintenance brother who is incapable of thanking or appreciating their involuntary sacrifice.
We went from "having a disability does not diminish your worth as a person" to "having a disability increases your worth," and it is one of many things that has crashed repeatedly into the wall of objective reality.
All true, tragically. Problem is, without the parents training the autistic child, our work at school has a very marginal effect, if any. "Band-aid on arterial bleeding" sort of.
Autism is certainly no superpower; no kind of mental retardation, which autism is, is a superpower, nor is any psychological condition such as neurosis or psychosis a power of any kind. I hope I didn't convey that image, that was not the intent. HFAs make up the most visible and most vocal faction of autistics, which creates a double bind/double punishment for the rest of them whether they are aware of it or not.
If I recall correctly (and the data may well be outdated due to changing definitions), about 60% of autistics have an IQ of 85 or lower, with the majority of this group clustered at about 60. Of the remaining 40%, more than half have an IQ under 60 and are barely communicable at all, especially since the greater the impairment, the likelier other disorders become.
"Aspies"/HFAs make up the remainder, and the majority of those still land on or close to normal IQ - the "Sheldon Cooper"-stereotype is pure Hollywood. My perspective is of course skewed by having worked with HFAs of above normal IQ.
I maintain that our older more strict and therefore more predicable society was better for anyone with autistic personality traits - their ability to be "flexible" or deal with randomness or what they perceive as arbitrariness is so impaired even the most intelligent among them still need help learning even basic stuff like how a student loan works. Imagine a person, very intelligent with a natural insitinct for math not understanding the way student loans and interest works, simply because they find the idea of student loans illogical. The brain locks and cannot move past "Error: illogical societal system detected. Solve problem before continuing."
Small wonder they lapse into depression, become suicidal by 25-30, and have unemployment figures in the 70%+ range, despite their intelligence.
You didn't convey that image. It's just a frustration I've had for a long time that has been politically incorrect to express for decades.
Years ago, I met one very intelligent HFA man at an auto company I contracted with, who told me that the effort and cognitive load it took him to master social discourse more or less by rote, and maintain interpersonal relationships sufficient to hold a job and date women were exhausting and that he operated more or less at capacity all the time. I told him I was extremely impressed- I would not have pegged him as HFA until he had told me why he was writing down seemingly random details of our conversation- but it clearly was no picnic for him.
He is pretty much the only one I've met at that level of global functioning.
On the flip side, when I lived in Japan I observed the Japanese cultural proclivities to A) not get involved with things and B) to ignore uncomfortable behavior when I watched a single mom in McDonald's being continuously battered by her young nonverbal autistic son who had thrown himself on the floor and refused to get up for about 30 minutes (with NO ONE HELPING). After finishing my sandwich I politely introduced myself as a psychologist, entertained him with my car keys, threw him over my shoulder, and carried him down the stairs and out the door so she could get a taxi home.
As you say, your statistics may be outdated due to redefinitions, which is a source of my griping- it has become very convenient to diagnose oneself with Aspberger's when a proper diagnosis would be "unwilling to learn basic social skills or does not find oneself sufficiently interesting." That permanent cognitive deficits should be seen as a desirable badge to wear is beyond comprehension- perhaps I'm the one with a deficit for my lack of imagination.
Teaching those abilities you describe that man as having was sometimes the entire point of my work, more or less. And it is extremely exhausting - I can actually relate, having more than once sat in on meetings in a group of adult HFAs, all with settled normal lives. They were volunteer mentors for teenaged HFs, age 16-21 mainly. The psychologist in charge had started the project because she had noticed that no matter how positive the development had been during school years, all her patients fell into severe depression with suicidal tendencies after they left school.
Since I couldn't pick up their signals due to their stunted affect and lack of body language, it was exhausting to have to consciously look for all those signals we pick up and project unconsciously.
As for the diagnosis: it fulfills the same function for people/parents as does calling alcoholism a disease.
It's no longer my fault. It's the disease's/Uncle Bad Touch's/the diagnosis' fault. (Imagine the preceding sentence read out loud by the creep clinking bottles together at the end of 'The Warriors' for the full effect.)
Too bad it doesn't work like with diabetes and other -real -diseases and conditions: the ones not taking good care of themselves taes home a Darwin award sooner than later. Spencerian natural selection at its finest, if we're going for the gold in non-PC statements?
GM, here I come to read your stack and right away picking on the Vikings. They looked really good last night. Anyhow, the more I read the more I will get to know about your persona and what formed your imperfect but enlightening creature.
Sure, I'll discuss it in passing but the meat of it isn't honestly very interesting.
I went on a very passionate and aggressive journey of comparative theology in my teenage and college years, settled down into Eastern thought for much of my 20s, and ended up coming back to the proto-European/Germanic heathenry of my roots after that. But most of that had nothing at all to do with the occult, just philosophy/faith.
While I was in college and for a little while after I messed around a little with Hermetic and pagan occult practices, generally interested in ritual traditions and edgy stuff like blood and humors. I didn't belong to any groups or run around in silly robes, but I chatted with some folks on the proto-Internet from various traditions and read lots of books and experimented. No, nothing satisfying ever occurred.
I have the kind of personality that makes it hard for me, even if I want to, to get "sucked into" things, so my curiosity about the occult was mainly me banging my head rationally against something I wanted to find some substance to and refusing to convince myself anything was true that wasn't, and ultimately concluding none of it was. I have too much of a scientist's mind to allow myself to see things that I'm not really seeing.
I still cycle through phases of nihilism sometimes and generally feel very, VERY badly when I do, but it's an entirely intellectual process that I always manage to climb out of eventually.
Gutter, in so many ways you are vastly stronger and more intelligent a woman than I.
For instance, I was foolish enough to join a group, and spent several years ecstatically exclaiming that, "0=2".
Wow, I haven't heard that phrase in a LONG time.
Were you Golden Dawn?
You're not weak or stupid. Maybe you were naive back then. Maybe not. I didn't know you.
We want and need to dream. This is a grey and muted world of crumbling ruins.
Don't laugh too hard ... OTO, not Golden Dawn. Yeah, I know, sad.
I'm much saner than I was then, let's just leave it at that. Too much LDS is the 70's maybe.
Myself, I've been having a lot of 'black pill' days lately. Trying to talk a dear one into at least taking some supplements to strengthen herself, as she's chosen to accept the 'chemo' (aka poisoning) for her esophageal cancer (yes, aggressive, and yes, she was double vaxxed but I was at least able to talk her out of the booster).
But really, the world has always been one of grey and muted crumbling ruins, from some persons' perspectives. We just finally got really freakin' unlucky. Or lazy, we had it all, really.
I enjoyed reading the dialogue on this topic, between you and several learned persons of braininess. Keep 'em coming, would ya? Lifelines, I tell ya! Lifelines!
OTO's no sillier than anything else.
I'm sorry about your friend. My FIL showed up at the farm out of nowhere yesterday to tell Husbandmouth and I his prostate cancer is back after 20 years. He cried in my arms and said he was so scared. (People do this. Strangers sometimes, even.)
Vaxed and boosted, of course.
Anyway. More brainy stuff to come.
Very sorry about your FIL. How's Husband-mouth taking it?
So you get that too? One of the stranger things that has happened to me with a stranger (heh) was when I was 19 or so, I was going cross-country on a Greyhound, and an elderly lady opened up to me about the night her husband died. I'd never met a complete stranger so much in need of hugs before. She got on at Chicago, and off at Salt Lake City, though she was from Maine, originally. Poor old gal, he died on the way to the hospital, and she was so upset that she'd probably been talking to him for a few minutes after he was gone -- such a strange thing to imprint upon one's memory, but it seemed to strike her to the core.
You must seem safe to people, despite being such a tough in some ways. But there's a strength and safety in toughness, right?
Wow, Existential Comics. I haven't visited that site in... gosh, ages. It's clever, but I don't claim to get all or possibly even most of it.
I'm not an existentialist, and I actually don't spend a ton of time on formal philosophy. My study is fairly narrow and post hoc (I encounter a problem and then do a bunch of reading about thinking that specifically addresses it).
I do find it interesting, though, that "the French school of thought" is a clear and coherent thing we can identify and everyone with at least a little background in philosophy understands who/what is included. Maybe it's because I'm an American, but having personally known a goodly number of very smart French people, I'm always a little puzzled as to how and why we got what we got from French thought as opposed to, say, ze Germans. Wouldn't you have predicted we'd get existentialism from a Teuton?
Existentialism is so depressing that it can only be developed by conversation in melodious, spoken French, in a Café or with some good wine. When we Germans have an idea, we lock ourselves into our study, write a scholarly book in cold, hard German, and go mad afterwards. It is important that the going mad does not happen too early.
And Focault was a pedo.