Speaking Of Extremists...

From a source not Facebook.

Placeholder: What explains the rise of the "Woke" Left? Is the ideology coherent? What are the wisdom and dangers within the ideology?

I'll put some thoughts on this, this weekend; just wanted to put it here.

Me: Interesting question regarding the left. I think the woke movement is a natural reaction to the insistence of suppression and denial by so many Americans, not merely those on the right.  (A situation which may be finally changing in the view of what’s occurring at the moment.)

I always liken those with extremist political positions to addicts. I would love someone to actually study this. I suspect the brain chemistry may be similar. Just like addicts, every extremist thinks that their position is so obvious that they simply cannot conceive of others not agreeing with them unless the others are being willfully oppositional or simply in denial.

Ideology does not need to be coherent because it involves a true believership. All that is required is that it be as powerful as a doctrine in a faith. It is not to be questioned.

Utter frustration at not getting anyone to listen to you and see obvious realities leads you to conclude that you are completely correct on the subject and drives people into their own version of extremism. Centuries of oppression and denial have brought forth the fruit of a new true believer movement.

The problem is that extremism is not countered by an opposing extremism. At least it is not countered effectively. The two extremes become symbiotic upon each other. Each merely needs to point to the other’s radicalism to justify their own.

The situation becomes a positive feedback syndrome. Each extremist action by the one party causes an increase of extremist action by the other, which then causes… You can see how the escalation occurs.

As for me, I refer to the movement as the “woking brain dead” to express my contempt for the refusal to be reasonable or to deal with matters rationally rather than emotionally.

I also apply my teeter totter analogy. They correctly see that the teeter totter has a huge load on one side. This makes it incapable of being used as it was intended. 

Unfortunately their solution is to put an equal load on the other side. While this will theoretically balance the load, all it actually accomplishes is to put so much weight at the two extremes that the pole simply breaks in the center.  Now the teeter totter is completely useless.

Bicycles And The Junior Anti-sex League

From a Facebook post. Short, but important enough to re-post here.

https://quillette.com/2019/09/10/in-praise-of-renoirs-male-gaze/

Me: It has come to this? A female scholar must defend Renoir against the anti-sex, anti-male attacks of radical feminism. How sad.

B: Quillette is a magazine I've come to really appreciate right now. They've become the center of cultural controversy: they are routinely castigated as a fascist mag. It's bizarre. The CEO is Claire Lehmann; she's a smart thinker who seems to love jumping into the vitriolic fray of social commentary.

Me: They do tend to have too much of a conservative slant for me to enthusiastically support them, but they often make excellent points. I do notice that if you disagree with them on even minor matters it’s common for you to be instantly labeled a Marxist. Not all the contributors practice this unusual ritual, but too many of them do.

For any of you out there asking, the Junior Anti-sex League??? I include The following link and quote.

> The Junior Anti-Sex League in 1984 is a group that advocates "complete celibacy for both sexes." They are pushing the agenda of the Party, the group that rules the country. According to the Junior Anti-Sex League, children should not be conceived through sexual intercourse. <

https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-junior-anti-sex-league-1089836

Or, put another way, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Oh sorry, that’s not an accurate quote. Let me correct that, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a mate.”

Fake...News? No, Meat

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/19/20869271/impossible-burger-foods-gelsons-markets-southern-california-meat-free-plant-based

Me: Susan, the times they are achanging.

S: Are you going to try it? Just because it's plant based doesn't mean it's healthy. Check the ingredients. Personally, I hope it is good stuff.

Me: I usually buy already prepared meats. Even simple cooking like making a good spaghetti sauce and browning my own meat etc. is just beyond me right now. I’m willing to try it though. And honestly I’m not concerned so much about it being healthy as I am concerned about the effect on the environment and reducing cruelty to animals.

S: I started on this journey back in the 70's when I was horrified to read how veal calves are treated. So I agree with you on both points, especially reducing cruelty to animals, only wish it could be eliminating instead of reducing.

Me: I won’t argue. I am not a hypocrite but I do admit I make something of a bargain with the devil when I continue to eat meat. But I’ve also always advocated for laws insisting on the most humane treatment possible for animals even if it meant greatly raising the cost of meat at my own economic expense.

And if you need to smile today:
https://www.eater.com/2019/9/19/20873805/stephen-colbert-impossible-burger-commercial

B: I haven't tried one yet but *everyone I've asked about it who's had it, like it. The ingredients don't seem particularly weird. "Impossible" is mostly soy and "Beyond" is mostly pea protein. Let me know if you try it!

Me: Will do.

An Immiscible Day

What a strange day it's been today. I actually slept seven solid hours. While this doesn't sound like much of accomplishment, it has been months since I've slept for such a sustained period of time without awakening. I've also been up and active for far longer than seven hours. It's been several months since that's happened also.

Obviously, physically I'm doing better than I have in quite some time.

However, I also had to speak with an old friend about his wife's death. I've known them about 35 years. They were married for 41. I told him that I always envied him in that; that he had married once and stayed married. That I never managed.

As I said to my middle daughter, as odd as it sounds, it's hard to imagine one of them living on alone. You simply never thought of one of them without thinking of the other. It's as if one dying would mean the other one would die also.

Then again, when is life ever so simple? It's always messy. Which is why we try to cherish every precious moment that is good and do our best to get through the bad as quickly as possible.

I ought to make a poem of this, perhaps I will. The arts are good at expressing emotions which otherwise can't really be explained.

Idle Thoughts: Extremism

I have been helping my middle girl with her college classes.  I give her my thoughts by dictating to Dragon on my Ipad.   I have decided to share these thoughts here.  These are very rough work, I wouldn't even call them a rough draft.  They are a transcription of a comversation off the top of my head.  They aren't even well proof read.  They do refelect my thoughts, but don't expect careful construction or polished writing. This is verbal conversation transcripted.  Nothing else.

Entry one:  

Was Steinbeck correct? Do we American's tend to act in the extreme?  Undoubtedly.  Isn't that true of all human beings? Much of western literature has found ways of complaining about people acting like they are members of a herd of cows or a flock of sheep. Today we know a lot more about primatology, so we know that we are much more like a group of monkeys or apes in a troop. Which is to say, we are social animals and we tend to react as a group rather than as individuals.

Even more fundamentally we are emotional beings. All the fantasies of so many philosophers notwithstanding, we are not generally a rational animal. We are an animal that is very emotional and is capable of being rational, if we really work at it. It is not the default setting. The default setting is to react emotionally and then think up some rationalized reasons to support what we have already decided on a purely nonrational basis.

This is not entirely our fault. It is our emotions that control and direct and guide us in or daily activities. As Antonio Damasio has pointed out in his books, without emotions we are completely nonfunctional.  Strip a person of his emotions, the neuroscientist pointed out, and he will have no particular motivation to remember to breathe, eat, run from danger, or take any other action to save his life. If he takes the time to figure it out, he will already be dead before he can decide on what's most important.  But when we let our emotions run wild and don't keep a check on them, we create serious problems.

Years ago, as I drove my grandson across town, he and I had a conversation. I told him that human beings must work at being rational. When we get scared, I said, we act like chimpanzees running screaming through the forest in terror.  I told him it it had happened several times during my life, but that it doesn't happen a lot, at least not to that extreme.  I added that it certainly would happen in his life at least once.

About a year later, 9/11 occurred.  I believe it was necessary to take military action in Afghanistan but not in Iraq.  I never supported that war. I never believed it was the right thing to do.  While standing in line at the DMV at a later date, he and I were discussing the Patriot Act.  I told him my experience was that the more noble sounding the name, the more awful was the law that it was covering up.  I added that while Al Qaeda could kill me; the Bush administration could  enslave me.  So that meant I was more afraid of George Bush Jr. then I was of bin Laden.  I got a lot of dirty looks from other people in line, but thankfully, no one said anything.

After the Iraq war had started, when polls showed that over 90% of the American people were supporting it, I said to some friends in the local college philosophy club, "The day will come when the American people will ask, 'How did we get into this mess?'"

The answer of course is that we got frightened so we panicked.  Faced with an extreme situation, we reacted in an extreme manner.  Instead of thinking rationally, we ran screaming through the jungle in a state of terror.

Plato said that a human being is like a chariot.  The human intellect is the man controlling the two horses. The horses are our base emotions and our higher emotions.  The emotions provide the power to take us where we need to go. The charioteer, our intellect, is supposed to guide the whole process.  The problem is, the charioteer too often listens to the horses!

In his book Hellfire Nation, James A Monrone contends that America is a particularly extremist nation. He believes that this is a result of the deep religious fervor that Americans feel.  Because so many of us think God is on our side, we tend to go to extremes.  We don't feel the need to think things through, because if God has told us to do something, who needs to think about it?

This sense that we Americans are superior to other people gives us the right to give orders to the rest of the world.  The same rule applies to other groups of Americans. I think it is fair to say that all human beings tend to let their emotions run away with them in times of great stress. We Americans add to that our deep religious beliefs and our conviction of our own moral superiority, which that just makes us even more extreme.

.

FCFD

"Historians debate whether history is made by individuals or by structural forces."- -- Carl Bogus; historian, author.

This is another one of those all too many issues in which the human brain simply refuses to deal with a question in a  sensible manner. Instead, we insist on creating a strained and rigid polarity which does not exist in reality. It seems impossible to me that anyone could seriously deny that a single "great man" can have a massive influence on history. On the other hand, it is also clear that there are forces existing in any given society which push that society in a particular direction.

Consider the United States of America prior to the Civil War. Since the founding of the nation, it was clear that there would always be a terrible stress between slaveholders and abolitionists.  If the slaveholders could not have their way, who could doubt that they would not willingly submit to the will of the majority? Similarly, abolitionists insisted that slavery was a vile and intolerable evil which must be expunged from the face of the earth.  There was no stable compromise possible for these two belief systems.   Abolitionists were at least flexible, being willing to make the moral surrender of rewarding slaveholders by purchasing the freedom of their "property".  Slaveholders were far more rigid.  They came from a violent society and obviously would violently resist any diminution of their lifestyle. Slaveholding to them was a way of life. Being called "master" was essential to their very sense of manhood.

The extant social forces inevitably brought things to a point of bloody conflict. The Civil War could conceivably have been prevented:  Jackson managed to avoid it several decades earlier and Buchanan was practically eager to to let the South go, while men like McClellan were almost desperate to appease the South and thus "save" the Union.  If Lincoln had not been elected, the South would not have panicked; if he had not done as good a job of running the country as he did, the Condeferates might well have successfully seceded.  Clearly, our actual history was a combination of the great man and the impetus of the sociological forces acting together at that time.

What causes history, great men or social forces? The question makes as much sense as asking what makes a plant thrive, sunlight or water?

Krista Tippett, on C-SPAN 2, talked about her book, Einstein’s God. Her points were complex and interesting, very non simplistic. Still, she made interesting viewing as she explored the vast ground between the fundamentalist extremists on both poles in the self declared war between the ultra religious and the ultra secular.

I recall a contest in which high school students were asked to make speeches responding to and defending their positions when answering the question, “Which is most dangerous, religion or science?” I was long out of high school and so could not participate, but I wished that I could, because my answer would have boiled down to, “Extremism in either is the danger. Neither is dangerous in and of itself.”

In our currently so polarized and emotional nation, it pays to take some time to think and reflect on what we share rather than to obsessively focus on what divides us. Even between Democrat and Republican, Progressive and Tea Partier, there is much more in common than in contrast. Unfortunately, it is easy to deny this. Especially from the right at this time we hear cries about conspiracies to destroy America and etc. Do these individuals really believe that Obama wants his daughters to grow up in an America which he has destroyed? What parent would want such a thing? We may fiercely disagree with how to attain security in this dangerous world, or how to promote American prosperity. but can anyone actually think about the situation and sincerely believe that either of the opponents actually wants to hurt this country?

No one despises Bush more than I do, but I know that he thought he was doing the right thing and was sincerely trying to make America wealthier and safer. The left wing nuts who still insist that he lead a conspiracy to destroy the World Trade Center are simply not thinking clearly.

The problem is, of course, that we are emotional creatures who can, but often do not, use our ability to think. It is so much easier to emote and react than it is to think and plan. Hard work is not always pleasant, though it can be, and thinking is very hard work. The brain accounts for a huge amount of our body’s energy usage--even when we are being emotional. Thinking burns up even more power; and free will can only exist as a result of thought.

I remember, when I was a freshman in high school, becoming angry At Barry Goldwater’s declaration that “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” I knew he was wrong, though I had not so thoroughly developed my sense of balance and my opposition to extremism. Today I say, he’s right. It is no vice. It is a mortal sin.