racism and being 'WOKE"

[Immanuel Can]

It seems to me that some progress is being made.

You're being misled, I'm afraid. The facts are otherwise. Check them out for yourself.

Well, the air quality isn't as bad in various ways as it was around the beginning of the industrial revolution when coal...

This isn't the Industrial Revolution. The coal burning is actually much higher-tech in the West. But also, we have nuclear, if we dare to use it. Although China has no compunctions about using it at all, and I hear that Poland is scrounging for coal due to the latest unnecessary war, and in Germany, they're looking for firewood.

when Covid basically shut down air travel and other consumption, there were apparently signs that air quality in some places had improved slightly.

I think that's true. Now if we could only get all the "green ambassadors" of the WEF and Hollyweird to stop flying their lear jets around, we might actually make an improvement.

That seems to indicate that such human activities do indeed have a significant impact on air quality, and therefore potentially climate as well.

Well, we know that our climate is changing. We don't know that it's due to human activity, and we don't really know which human activities are most to blame. It seems to me that if we're serious, we'd be using our very best scientific methods to arrive at the best solutions.

But that makes it utterly inexplicable why things like windmills, solar panels, electric cars and recycling-truck programs even got off the ground. Very clearly, the scientific method was not being employed by those who advocated those disastrous strategies. I'm afraid we are more in love with the appearance of "doing something" than with the reality of actually doing something. And that's reflected, as well, in our reluctance to talk about any of the areas of the world that are actually going to determine what happens -- China, India and the developing world.

I assume it's fair to say that progress has been made to the point where people have become aware of the effects of human emissions.

I think that's optimistic. We, in the West, are clearly not the problem, and not in charge of the problem. We can't fix anything by ourselves. So our "awareness" means little, unless we use that "awareness" to change policy in the the three geographical areas I mentioned. Other than that, we're just going to be "aware" of the problem as it gets worse.

I'm afraid too many of us are willing to substitute "climate enthusiasm" for any actual action. We don't like science, because it tells us the truth about how little power we actually have in the situation; and we lack the moral fibre to be willing to do anything in relation to the rest of the world. But we still want to preen ourselves as "green."

That's a little sad; but it's also going to doom the planet, if what the climate activists believe about the human contribution is at all true.

P.S. -- Gary, have you noticed where all the raging wildfires are this summer? They're in Canada, mostly. Canada.

Canada is the country in the world with the best ratio of inhabited land to treed land. It's the most carbon-positive and "green" country there is, literally, in the globe. They have a tiny population relative to having the second largest land mass for any country in the world, most of the world's fresh water, and comparatively minuscule industrial activity.

So let me ask you this: if somebody's responsible for the aridness that's burning up Canada, do you think it's the Canadians? Or would you guess that if there's an environmental disaster in the making in Canada, it's being made in one of the rapidly-industrializing and unregulated countries, like, say, China, India and South America? What would your guess be?

[phyllo]

P.S. -- Gary, have you noticed where all the raging wildfires are this summer? They're in Canada, mostly. Canada.

Canada is the country in the world with the best ratio of inhabited land to treed land. It's the most carbon-positive and "green" country there is, literally, in the globe. They have a tiny population relative to having the second largest land mass for any country in the world, most of the world's fresh water, and comparatively minuscule industrial activity.

So let me ask you this: if somebody's responsible for the aridness that's burning up Canada, do you think it's the Canadians? Or would you guess that if there's an environmental disaster in the making in Canada, it's being made in one of the rapidly-industrializing and unregulated countries, like, say, China, India and South America? What would your guess be?

If the USA and Canada drag their feet, deny responsibility and don't do anything, then why should the developing countries do anything?

They want to catch up with the first world. Why should they make it harder by being environmentally responsible?

The US, Canada and Europe need to suck it up and show some leadership in order to get other countries on board.

It's one shared planet, and one shared responsibility.

[phyllo]

The great thing about climate change not caused by human activity is that we don't have to do anything.

Adapt. Just as people are adapting to rising oceans,

I'm quite looking forward to living closer to the coast.

So far, all I have out of it is ... smoky air from weeks of forest fires, drought killing many of the garden plants, swarms of pests like ticks, ants, beetles and moths.

So nothing wonderful.

[phyllo]

Well, among other things, over the years I have known and interacted with many, many, many of them as a political activist. And in numerous films, books and articles that I have encountered pertaining to the gay community over the years, that is often stressed again and again.

A lot of the issues that are being brought up with respect to trans are not applicable to the gay community.

Issues like body modification, access to facilities and participation in gender specific activities.

Lumping transgenders and homosexuals together distorts the discussion.

I get why it's done , the argument ... "Look homosexuals are not a problem, therefore transgenders are not a problem."

Well, no. There are significant differences.

[phyllo]

But that makes it utterly inexplicable why things like windmills, solar panels, electric cars and recycling-truck programs even got off the ground.

Recycling had worked for decades for metal, paper and glass.

The plastics companies piggybacked on it. They convinced politicians that it would work for plastic as well.

It doesn't. Now we are stuck with a lot of plastic garbage.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Why do AJ and you think that climate change has something to do with the OP?

Mea culpa! I myself strayed into a discussion about transgenders.

Not such a "culpa." Transgenderism and climate crisis are both memes of the Woke Left. The idea that everybody's racist is just another.

If it is one's *project*, say, to come to understand and to be capable of talking about that is going on in our present, and by this I do mean in a pathological sense if we do recognize that *things* are careening out of control, then it most certainly becomes necessary to examine, closely, any social phenomenon that *captures* the attention of people and seems to *take possession* of their consciousness.

We do have a marvelous example that we can present and *muse on*: Greta Thunberg. Here is the curious thing. While I will say that poor Greta is obviously a child-neurotic and one deeply disturbed, there are others here on this forum who see her as one manifesting needed and *good* traits of character. Greta is a classic hysteric though, and she acts like the canary in the coal-mine of general mental health, providing a clear picture of how hysterics, and the social phenomenon of hysterical infection, can take place.

Now, why is it that we witness people like Greta Thunberg coming onto the social stage and enacting these strange, neurotic and seemingly choreographed rehearsals of externalized neurosis? And why is it that there is an audience that responds?

My assertion, though I cannot develop it here and only allude to it, takes shape as a question: What is going on today -- if we take the question at the level of social and psychological phenomena -- that causes people to careen into hysteria, irrationalism, emoted hysterical outbursts, and to present us with displays or irrationalism and irreason that are enacted on the social and cultural landscape?

It is as though in the pressure-cooker of society the heat is turned up and all around us we see signs of hysterical reaction. But it is also the inner person in whom internal pressures become unmanageable. What happens when that person cannot contain the pressure? It has to escape as overheated steam or perhaps the pot will explode and then the *fractured & fragmented* person, and his distorted personality, will become almost normal or commonplace.

I read the NYTs every day, and over the course of about a decade I have watched it transform itself from a bona fide and respectable *journal of opinion* -- indeed a standard of responsible journalism -- into an Occidental Maoist cultural transformation organ where America's *struggle sessions* are reflected and also intensified. Thus the words that I tend to use are words like *infection* and *conflagration*. What I see as abnormal and deeply strange and troubling, is cultivated by a class of people who, I can only imagine genuinely and honestly, actually see the world in these terms. There of course I introduce the term *psychological hysteria* but it is a personal condition that also intersects with the political world.

So we can turn to some of our own denizens here, those among us, and try to examine their *condition* as a sign of the times. I understand that this is problematic because it is armchair applied psychology. True indeed that each side attempts to psychologize the other and to determine who, really, is the sick or deranged one. I admit this. But when we turn our gaze back to Greta Thunberg we know, and beyond all doubt it seems to me, that we are indeed dealing with a mass-phenomenon which might fall under the category of mass formation psychosis.

In 1895, Gustav Le Bon wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which argued that something nefarious happens when people gather together: A crowd develops a psychology of its own that usurps the individual. This psychology is impulsive, irrational, and resistant to reason.

“A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile,” Le Bon wrote. “Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realization of its desire.”

“Mass formation” suggests it is a large-scale event. Much like “mob psychology,” a pop-psychology term to describe the behavior of crowds in specific, limited-time environments. Mass formation isn’t a term typically used in psychology or sociology today.

Psychosis is when a person’s thoughts or how they perceive the world are abnormal in so much as the person may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not. Psychosis is extremely rare, experienced usually by people with schizophrenia. Most people don’t experience psychosis (or anything like it) in their lifetime.

Putting these two together and we get what is more commonly referred to as mass psychogenic illness (MPI) or, in pop psychology terms, mass hysteria or mass delusion. These are the terms that have some research basis.

Come now! if we do not recognize with genuine clarity that our societies are in the grip of various levels of mental crisis and outbreaks of states akin to *psychosis* we are hardly paying attention. Our cities are overrun with the mentally ill. And the infection I refer to, whatever its cause, is evident everywhere.

The entire System has become one where information comes to us, and indeed entire constructs filled with image and emotion, designed to sway us, designed to capture our minds, designed to hook us.

They've used the term *to go down the rabbit hole*. There are any number of *rabbit holes* to go down if one is so inclined!

These information darts come with drugs or poisons and, for the susceptible individual, overcome him. Again: look at Greta Thunberg! who became an international celebrity who danced her mad dance for a maddened audience who could not distinguish what is *real* and *genuine* from what is *unreal* and *genuinely hysterical*. And then in a week or a month she is discarded and forgotten and some other Lunatic, or a lunatic-event, captures the psychic field.

Now, what is 'wokeness'? I admit the term is way too vague. It is a general reference, an allusion, to something that requires a far more substantial definition. But can lunatics self-analyze? Take Kropotkin (sorry Old Bean). He shows a man who externalizes his inner hysteric. (I apologize for making these sorts of assessments but I think it important, and it is not personal or an attack motivated by personal animus).

What happens when the lunatics, to play on the metaphor, escape the mental institution and run amok? What is the hysterical mode of perception (irrational, paranoid, over-emoted, hysterical) becomes pervasive?

And what if there is interconnection among different political and social trends? Riots and uprisings. Hysteria about *climate change* which can be taken as a deep insecurity about *the ground under one's feet* and the Earth (i.e. existence) perceived as dark & dangerous, unstable & threatening? How many of the manifestations today are of this sort?
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[Immanuel Can]

...poor Greta

It was an amazing sight.

Everybody suddenly seemed unable to realize that she was a 15-year-old child. They followed her like she was "Our Lady of Stockholm," divinely blessed and sainted to deliver salvation to an Earth bound for Hell. The Wokies bowed at the feet of this golden little idol, and absolutely demanded that everbody else must do the same whenever they blew the horns. Anyone resisting was to be thrown into the fiery furnace of their wrath.

But they were manipulating the public. They had no love for Greta Thunberg. They were using her. They saw her as an ideal pawn and vehicle for their ideology...uncriticizable, sweet and innocent, morally earnest, unimpeachable to the sympathetic public, she offered the ideal mouthpiece, the ideal "victim" for them to "defend," and the ideal vehicle from which to heap opprobrium on their critics. But they never cared about Greta.

But she's used up now. She's too old, and too obviously struggling with some form of spectrum disorder now. She's made some public mistakes. She's even retracted and ridiculed some of what she did in her early teens. So she's become less plausible and less sympathetic; and without remorse, they've shuffled her off to the wings. All along, it was really about positioning their ideology, not about helping a struggling little girl. It wasn't even about saving the environment. It was about who had power.

So much for the tender mercies of the Left.

The same is noteable in all the cities their "protests" have devastated. The inhabitants for whom they claimed to "protest" have now returned to destroyed neighbourhoods, stripped of their businesses and possibility of employment. None of them are one stitch better as a result of the protests, but rather they are immeasurably worse off. Nobody cares. The Lefties went back to their middle-class homes in the suburbs. The residents are left with the consequences.

Anybody can see this. But again, these are the tender mercies of the Wokies. This is what they do, because it's all about their own power for them. It's never about actually helping the weak.

"By their fruits, you will know them."

[phyllo]

The entire System has become one where information comes to us, and indeed entire constructs filled with image and emotion, designed to sway us, designed to capture our minds, designed to hook us.

The system has always been that way.

There's just more data and data noise now.

[Alexis Jacobi]

The entire System has become one where information comes to us, and indeed entire constructs filled with image and emotion, designed to sway us, designed to capture our minds, designed to hook us.

The system has always been that way.

There's just more data and data noise now.

There is also I think an intensification of something I am chary of naming. Is that because it is soul- or psyche-related? Two decades back, or 40 years back, what figure came on the scene comparable to Greta? and carrying her distorted apocalyptic messages?

Were the Sixties as turbulent psychically as the social and political upheaval of today? I am uncertain.

In today’s case an entire sector of the academic establishment has fallen into wokeness. But corporate boards are incorporating their politics. What about Big Pharma and the consequences of the cultivation of a drugged mentally-ill nation? When it is good economics to encourage or facilitate mental illness and a drug corporation insinuates itself to the center of government and influences policy?

Come now, these things are far intensified though they were intimated long time back.

[phyllo]

You only have to look at the war hysteria in the past.

Or atomic power.

Or the buzz around Rousseau.

Or The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Or mesmerism.

Or dancing mania.

Or any number of religious fads.

There have always been "celebrities". We're just connected 24/7 now.

There was less information and it was slower.

[iambiguous]

Well, among other things, over the years I have known and interacted with many, many, many of them as a political activist. And in numerous films, books and articles that I have encountered pertaining to the gay community over the years, that is often stressed again and again.

Or have you accumulated evidence that the sort of stuff we get from Satyr and VT is actually the rule instead? Satyr does the same thing with blacks. He scours the internet looking for blacks behaving in a manner that "proves" how superior the white race is. Most of what he posts now is straight out of YouTube land.

And, no, they do not live normal lives...sexually. But they are often mainstream in regard to other aspects of their lives.

But, okay, as with AJ, I'll ask you to note what behaviors, if you were in a position of power in a community, would be prohibited? No gay marriage? No gay clubs? No gay pride parades? Sodomy with become a crime again? Homosexuals and transgenders would be arrested and sent to jail?

Is there a religious -- Christian -- component to your own convictions? Is the manner in which I rooted individual value judgements as an existential component of dasein not applicable at all to you?

And the activism often revolves around the fact that there are reactionaries on the right who really are intent on ridding America of anything that is not straight out of the 1950s Father Knows Best mentality.

A lot of the issues that are being brought up with respect to trans are not applicable to the gay community.

Issues like body modification, access to facilities and participation in gender specific activities.

Lumping transgenders and homosexuals together distorts the discussion.

Come on, for many here in America, any behaviors [sexual or otherwise] not deemed to be what they construe to be "normal, civilized, Christian" behavior is attacked. They are all thought to be "deviants". Then it comes down [again, from my own frame of mind] to what those like you would do in regard to those you did deem to be behaving in an abnormal, uncivilized or unchristian manner.

I get why it's done , the argument ... "Look homosexuals are not a problem, therefore transgenders are not a problem."

Well, no. There are significant differences.

Okay, you make a distinction between homosexuals and transgenders. But others here do not. For them they are all "mentally ill" and "sick" and "perverted"...and a dire threat to children.

But my point is that in regard to specific sets of circumstances there are transgenders who take their own rendition of "woke" "too far". Too far for me and others -- re women's bathrooms, women's sports, kids -- but not too far for others. Also, that, in my view, particular political prejudices here are derived more from the manner in which as individuals we acquire our value judgments existentially than from anything deontologists can demonstrate is either objectively moral or immoral in regard to human sexuality.

Then the part that revolves around this:

Maurice Brinton in The Irrational in Politics:

In learning to obey their parents children learn obedience in general. The deference learned in the family setting will manifest itself whenever the child faces a 'superior' in later life. Sexual repression----by the already sexually repressed parents---is an integral part of the conditioning process.

According to Reich, the 'suppression of natural sexuality in the child...makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, 'good', and 'adjusted' in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief the goal of sexual repression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all the misery and degradation...the result is fear of freedom, and a conservative, reactionary mentality. Sexual repression aids political reaction, not only through this process which makes the mass individual passive and unpolitical, but also by creating in his structure an interest in actively supporting the authoritarian order'.

Psychologists and psychiatrists have written pages about the medical effects of sexual repression. Reich however constantly reiterated its social function, exercised through the family. The purpose of sexual repression was to anchor submission to authority and the fear of freedom into people's 'character armor'. The net result was the reproduction, generation after generation, of the basic [psychological] conditions essential for manipulation and enslavement of the masses.

The part that, in my view, some will not even broach at all because they themselves are so squeamish about all things sexual.

And then the irony others note: that because sexual repression is such a widespread component of conservative value judgments, this actually precipitates so-called "sexual deviancy".

[Alexis Jacobi]

"For us, as revolutionaries, meaningful action is whatever increases the confidence, autonomy, initiative, participation, solidarity, egalitarian tendencies and self-activity of the masses, and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, cynicism, differentiation through hierarchy, alienation, reliance on others to do things for them, and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others, even those acting on their behalf." (Maurice Brinton, About Ourselves)

For revolutionaries, using sexuality as a tool of praxis is one of their most notable undertakings. The authority that imposes sexual restraint — the father, the patriarchy, even Platonic philosophical theory — become authorities to undermine and topple. Stimulating sexual desire the means to achieve that end.

Part of Marxist praxis within third-wave feminism involved encouraging women to liberate themselves from “oppressive” restraints. And all of it to undermine the family: the primary oppressive institution.

I am surprised Iambiguous that you reference sources like this and understand so little about how Marxism operates.

Additionally, if anyone has been largely discredited and rendered ridiculous I’d imagine it to be Wilhelm Reich.

A ‘lunatic’ and really there is no other word for him.

[Alexis Jacobi]

…

You seem to explain away something important. The way you look at it, it’s simply an intensification of the normal.

[phyllo]

Do you think that human nature has changed significantly in the last 20 years?

I don't.

What has changed is that there is now a widespread disregard for the truth.

I don't think that is desirable.

[iambiguous]

"For us, as revolutionaries, meaningful action is whatever increases the confidence, autonomy, initiative, participation, solidarity, egalitarian tendencies and self-activity of the masses, and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, cynicism, differentiation through hierarchy, alienation, reliance on others to do things for them, and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others, even those acting on their behalf." (Maurice Brinton, About Ourselves)

For revolutionaries, using sexuality as a tool of praxis is one of their most notable undertakings. The authority that imposes sexual restraint — the father, the patriarchy, even Platonic philosophical theory — become authorities to undermine and topple. Stimulating sexual desire the means to achieve that end.

Part of Marxist praxis within third-wave feminism involved encouraging women to liberate themselves from “oppressive” restraints. And all of it to undermine the family: the primary oppressive institution.

I am surprised Iambiguous that you reference sources like this and understand so little about how Marxism operates.

Additionally, if anyone has been largely discredited and rendered ridiculous I’d imagine it to be Wilhelm Reich.

A ‘lunatic’ and really there is no other word for him.

Right, and, of course a "deviant".

Also, a Jew.

On the other hand...

"Both parents were Jewish, but decided against raising the boys as practicing Jews. Reich and his brother, Robert, were brought up to speak only German, were punished for using Yiddish expressions and forbidden from playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children."

Let our resident Wonk tackle that one for us.

In a "wall of words" of course.

Next up: how sexually repressed is AJ?