@Frank ApisaWell *I* can't pick out any word and deem it unacceptable and expect a bunch of others to immediately develop similar intuitions about it. It would just be some weird thing I did. *Who* makes those decisions? You're aware of certain words being 'seen' as bad. its not something I did, of course, because I don't have that power. Who did it?


Ok. Imagine your friend tells you those things and you say it back to him in 'vulgar' language and he's visibly uncomfortable. 'oh you fucked that bitch?' you see your friend seems hurt. What happens next?

I agree about those benefits, ideally. But the reality is that those benefits are missing. One could also say that she shouldn't have been raped. I would also agree with that. But what actually happened?

If the proper help was missing, surely it's more fruitful to focus on that, rather than the fact she was allowed to kill herself. How do we help? But the focus has not been on that.

Alright. And now imagine you're talking to friends about the past, about sexual escapades, whatever. And one friend seems to only use 'clean' words, and seems reluctant to use 'vulgar' language. What's the reaction to that? The principal's intelligent; is the friend stupid?

But seriously... People need struggle, but surely it's preferable to be given the freedom to struggle with our own creative potential rather than to have that diverted into the life-draining swamps of impersonal bureaucracies, corporate greed, enforced poverty etc. It's the great self-defining struggle most people never get the chance to have that we should be fostering, no? And the fact that not all will take the torch passed is no excuse to blow out the light. — Baden

[bunch of clap emojis]

But I'm asking, how you'd react to the principal saying that. I know that you see the demarcation between vulgar and acceptable as arbitrary. I'm wondering if, knowing all that, you'd still be at least slightly discomfited by the principal's speech.

If it's equivalent to 'These wonderful kids, they've dealt with so many difficulties, but they still made it through' then of course not, right? There's no meaningful difference between the two speeches.

Maybe, but that's a pretty stringent insistence on topic hygiene I don't usually see crop up. It's not exclusively philosophical, but philosophy has a part to play, and that characterizes quite a few threads on here, including many of both mine and yours. Besides, the OP ends with a question that is legalistic, not philosophical.

In essence it is just sex with someone you don't like — Schzophr

Demonstrably untrue. I've had sex with multiple people I don't like & I have never been raped.

If she was in pain enough to still want to die three years later, and to actually go through with it, all the way to the point where its not something you talk to people about in order to get them to see you a certain way and something you actually do - then, I don't see anything wrong with it. She was 17, sure, but it's hard to imagine she'd feel different at 18.

The big problem is that people who are quick to see this as [government something] run amok are very good at spotting [government somethings] run amok and not very good at thinking about how to actually help people suffering like this in some meaningful way, preventative, or palliative. 'I may be resistant to pc/sjw discussions of 'rape culture' but I'll defend to my death your right to not be able to decide how to deal with the consequences of it if your way of dealing with it seems to favor the ideology of the wrong political side.' The emphasis, note, isn't that she was raped; it was that she was allowed to kill herself. Stories about rape, while sad, aren't worth starting a conversation about. Those conversations are always a little histrionic anyway. It's when people start killing themselves over it, that the real danger becomes apparent.

Some people post threads about trauma and how to deal with it. Others only care about trauma when it results in the greatest trauma of all - liberal government overreach. Who cares more about the experience of the person at the center of this?

Maybe one way at this is to determine where 'arbitrary' ends and 'non-arbitrary' begin. Cutlery is one thing. What if you went to a daughter or nieces middle school graduation and the principal gave a speech - 'These fucking kids, they've dealt with so much shit, but they still made it through.' Honest reaction, like if it happened irl and not just as an idea in this thread?

@Frank Apisa

If 'profane' language wasn't treated as profane, but normal, would you take such obvious delight in the use of profane language by yourself and others? If it's all the same, why not just use the other terms? It's exciting to sneak into a forbidden room, but its pretty boring once it's no longer forbidden. Might as well hangout in any fucking room.

I'm not psychoanalyzing you, I'm trying to understand the purpose of the thread, because it's confusing. If i were trying to psychoanalyze you, I'd offer a profile of how I see your psyche in order to explain why the thread is as it is. I didn't do that. I think I was perfectly new-critic here. I not asking 'what kind of person wrote this thing?' but 'what type of thing is this?'

edit: well, except I did say 'for the kick', that one's on me.

eople who bought this book also bought a handy keyring bottle-opener. According to Amazon. :smile: — unenlightened

ha! Any damaged person worth their salt oughta take a few moments and learn how to open a bottle with a lighter imo. A bottle, unopenable is its own trauma.

Here's something a bit peripheral ... https://humanparts.medium.com/the-danger-in-fake-positivity-and-spiritual-bypassing-c202040b8dd3?fbclid=IwAR3-R-geVAiM9-jahx94XAaZXPN4TgQtE4Vfnua8CcP-CWtdWzsglfmv9ms

Yes. And add to that fake negativity. You can distance yourself from your negative emotions with schopenhauer and Cioran just as well as you can with Norman Vincent Peale and Live, Love, Laugh

According to Pessoa,'the poet is a faker/ who's so good at his act/ he even fakes the pain/of pain he feels in fact.' Same with the self-psychoanalyst for that matter. The prettier and more conceptually coherent you've made your emotions, good or bad, the further you are from them, maybe?

@frank
I may be reading too much into your thread, but I'm picking up an ambivalence between (1)a baiting reductio as a means of pushing 'mechanists' to self-contradict their own philosophy(?) and (2) actual veneration of the strong qua strong(?)

maybe a third: logic-king/nietzschean drag for the kick? The rhetoric about your argument standing untouched except for emotional appeals - It seems disconnected from whats happening and more an example of a rhetorical type?

None of the stuff about strength and lack of mercy follows from 'mechanism' as far as I can tell.

Plus even if you believe in Zoroastrian Sauronism, you could make the point that in the battle of good and evil, the evil is itself falling prey to the argument for Zoroastrian Sauronism.

pot-anxiety is real. I think we may have experienced it in different ways. Smoking with friends, for me, was the best way to kill time. If I could still access it, I believe I'd still feel that way. For me, it was like [whatever force] plunked down something that meant I couldn't go there anymore. When I was into mystical stuff, I got really hung up on the cherubim w/ flaming swords keeping everyone out of Eden.

That's a good interview. I heard about the polyvagal theory somewhere else, recently, but only saw the headline and a precis. Reading the article, the theory makes sense to me.

I want to insert a little of my personal experience, with a very big caveat that the article is talking largely about sexual assault and I'm talking about something self-inflicted, and, I imagine, much less traumatic.

I used to be a big marijuana smoker, 14-20. At 16, I had a very bad shroom trip (ego-death, violent imagery, certainty about being in hell etc).

I really liked weed before that. It was like being in a cozy, intimate room with friends. My experience of smoking with people then was: the space changed, people were more themselves, their real selves, and it was easy to communicate and share. It was really fun, and funny. I treasure those moments a lot.

After the trip, I still had a little of that. But it was like the weed 'space' had in it a kind of whirlpool at the center. I was always kind of aware of it, in the way you're aware of something in your peripheral vision. I was feeling the waves or ripple-effects of the center all the time. Sometimes, it would draw me close to it, and I've have to go to bed.

As I got older, it got more intense. I've stopped now, because three or four times something like this would happen: I'd be very relaxed, settling into the 'intimate space' and suddenly one element would seem 'off'. This could be a character in a movie we were watching, or someone's gesture, or whatever you like. Suddenly, I would be fixated on this thing with a growing sense of...something. Then I would start to have flashes of random images (the time I most remember involved 1. a basement with exposed pipes 2. paper popsicle wrappers with melted popsicle juices. ) and these would flash back and forth, growing in intensity, until some feeling/image reached a distilled peak of [This cannot happen! If that were true, it would be too horrible!] and then I'd have to lay down. I'd be totally still and silent, immovable, and over me would continue slightly softer images and ideas, and there was always comfort in hearing people talk to each other about stuff, without hearing what they were saying, just the sound of voices talking to one another, that you can vaguely locate in the space you're in. Like parents relaxing or making preparations for a party , or something while you're very sick. These states would last for hours with me unable to talk, except in a kind of free-associative babbling, until I fell asleep. Then I'd talk to everyone in the morning (What happened man? you were really fucked up!)

Like I said, I don't want to equate this to the events the author was describing, but maybe it's drawing on some similar thing? I very much felt like I 'got' his description of 'freezing' while stuff happened around you.

What would make the op pop is a convincing historical reconstruction of a time when people *did* trust politicians.

You stole that from samuel beckett — yupamiralda

Part of it

I was thinking more about Das Man, or the notion that there's a one-size-fits-all sanity. I don't think you should continue shaming people with a re-engineered purpose. That wouldn't make much sense. — frank

You're right.

That Hegel quote is very good and I'm inclined to agree with him halfway. Have I spent sordid hours googling 'was hero [x] an asshole?' Yes.

Buuuut

Did I feel better than hero [x] after confirming he was an asshole? No, I felt worse.

Which is to say : there's a difference between (1) getting a moral one-up on someone great to feel greater-than-Great and (2) feeling disheartened learning about the moral failings of someone you identify with, in one way or another.

To maintain the self-protective-gilding metaphor, it feels like a scratching away.

But you only do the googling, of course if there's already something biting at you. I'm tired of - tho addicted to, as my post-composition shows - the gilding. It's an inverted status, its a compensation. And any sort of gilding (rare attunement,etc) can all too easily become a carte blanche to discount the real effects of one's real actions on people. If your dad or husband was a dick, it doesn't really matter how in tune with the rare he was. Maybe its different for caesar and alexander on account of they were doing hyper realpolitik war campaigns. John Cheever ( & Hegel!) they were not.

You mentioned Nietzsche, and Nietzsche loved Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky followed the entrancing, lyrical, hyper-personal, boundary-violating turbulence of Notes From The Underground with Crime & Punishment. And the joke of crime and punishment is that once you zoom out from the thoughts and words, and look at the person thinking them, you just have a neurotic in squalor earnestly comparing himself to Napoleon in order to justify being shitty. Sure, I'm doing what people I despise do, but it's different, in this case, because its like this gilded thing.

It's meaningful that C&P came second. We're used to narratives that start with the objective, then try to 'get to the truth' by diving into the subjective. It's just the opposite - the thoughts are less important than the lived situation. (Of course the Notes narrator would know that, and agree, and work it into his monologue - what he would never allow is someone else (an objective narrator) to speak on his behalf.

My question is whether your slobbiness is ultimately an artistic decision, a costume of humility or transcendence of fashion.. Like a king in his bathrobe. I'd be surprised if you didn't walk through the world feeling tuned in to something rare. — ghost

A transcendence of fashion would be nice, but its mostly exhaustion. I am familiar with the dialectics of fashion, which is just the dialectics of anything which oscillates between ideal/fallen rare/common. cool kids dress shitty, because they know (intuitively) that dressing fancy is aspirational, and that aspiration means lack. I dress shitty because (1) I can't afford to dress nice & (2) the more I try to dress nice, the more I feel I've fallen short.

But there's also this: being 'a king a bathrobe' when you're not a king, and you're in a bathrobe means you're injecting some phantasmic other-viewer (even if it's your self) into the thing. You are being to be seen - and you're supplying the seer. This seems to me like a very primal form of self-protection, a psychic self-gilding that keeps away the bad stuff. King in a bathrobe as ultimate transcendence is the same in essence as a high schooler wearing a fedora.

So to transcend that.....


But that's why I'm hammering away at action over words. You can't win, fashion or poetry or philosophy, because even king in a bathrobe may not be as king in a bathrobe as the other king in a bathrobe. And you'll never quite be sure, when you're tuned into the 'rare,' what is real and what isn't. That's the thing I would like to untune from, because the same way :

king in a bathrobe ---fedora

-

tuned-into-the-rare---everyone loves my dank weed, i have the best weed.

I think it is fair to say I'm in a moralizing role here. This, too, is words, and my ragged irl self doesn't live up to it. But it's all a play and this is the role I've chosen for the moment.

I'm not saying, I hope it's clear, that there's no place for post-orgasmic clarity. By all means, inner kingdom, Blake etc. I don't mean to say that everything is the company picnic. You know, the company picnic where everyone is thinking 'I'm at the company picnic, and am entirely my social role' except for the hero & one or two ladies with a glint in their eye.

But why the jump from 'action' to reputation, pride, money? Why does 'what you do is what you are' translate, reflexively, into a question of status?

'a slob, but still'. What is the 'still' doing? 'Slob' negates something, 'still' preserves something else. What, and how?

I imagine that you dress carefully, — ghost

Ah, I'm a slob.

That's a profound question. I think usually the persona is the self one is invested in constructing, maintaining, protecting. The mask just is the face. But something happens in human consciousness, for all of us I think, especially those who live in words. The 'true' self is made of words. But words are the infinite medium. Concept is the highest manifestation of religion for thinkers like Hegel, and there's a case to be made. So a single face and a single history are a sort of absurd vessel. — ghost

I have seen Unforgiven but it was a really long time ago.

But, speaking in declaratives, the 'true self' is made of actions, not words. What you are is what you do, no matter what you feel. Because everyone feels! Which doesn't flatten or normalize it. It comes out in different ways. Everyone feels stuff, and sees the gleams in different places. But what you do is what you are. On a cosmic scale? Who knows, sing! You don't need the face and history all the time. But they're still there, once the song's over. That you extend beyond your face and history doesn't mean that you don't bear the responsibility of the face and history. Feeling something very important (which literally everyone has felt) isn't a get-out-face-free card.

It's complicated. I guess it depends on how one values that missing thing. Obviously it's got to be talked about carefully. It's not far from madness in the emotional sphere. It might be as rational as you please, coldly rational, ironic (as I think you know.) And in my more Nietzschean youth I used the charisma that comes with this 'gleam' in ways that look pretty shoddy now. But I also made people feel empowered. It's related to faith, I'd say. Christian heresy. — ghost

It's funny you mention faith. Coincidentally, that's something I'm interested in. It is complicated. Kierkegaard, as I'm sure you know, found he could only express his faith through a hodgepodge of various personas. & That's a whole question unto itself. What is the function of a persona? How do various personas interact? Is there a difference between a collection of personas arrayed radially around a central topic as opposed to a series of personas taking different, though similar tacks? How would we understand the difference between the two approaches? What about empowerment? Can we establish an axis [momentary ego-boost] ---------[long-term benefit] that relates to concentric versus serial personas?

Along similar lines : Is it possible for a singular person to consider the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, the metaphysical and the real without integrating all of their personas? And what is the relationship between private integration and public?

My take is that some 'internal' experiences are as rare as they are potent. So descriptions of that experience aren't going to mean much to most people. I'd say that people who really love Nietzsche (for example) have probably all found a mirror there for something that they suspect is missing in many others. It's a gleam in the eye. It's divine malice and golden laughter, etc. — ghost

Fascinating.

But...that way of looking at people, ideas, experiences (common/rare impotent/potent) leaves you liable to being dashed against the rocks, over and over. Sirens, etc. If you think most people are missing something you have, you won't blink an eye at flattering people just enough to carve a space where you can supply what they're missing. And so forth and so forth until it allsnowballs into something...what do you think?

I agree with that. My thought is that there's less of a need to people-please if you've made peace with your own (potential for) negativity. I find that the more I'm uncomfortable with my thoughts and emotions, the more I succumb to people-pleasing.

I don't know man. You posted an emotionally charged meme and I responded with why I don't think that approach works.

I mean, if someone at work was participating in a conversation and then suddenly said 'stay the fuck away' but remained in the conversation, I'm not really sure how I'd react.

It's a short term strategy. Not because you oughta be negative. But because 'keep away' means not-handling, and not handling means more and more false-positivity draped over a non-confronted negative. One old example that comes to mind is Chevy Chase's patriarch in the 'vacation' movies. A newer example that comes to mind is waves upon waves of ultra-positive instagrammers making everyone feel ashamed of their negativity, leading those people to also project positivity, which exacerbates the feeling of negativity for anyone else, which leads them to project positivity ..and so on.

And then that leads to a reaction of people who seize onto negativity (sadboi memes etc) and react so far in the opposite direction, that they won't brook a bit of positivity, because it's offbrand and caving-in.

And then that leads to over-self-aware positivity, like half-winking animal memes, which is still in the whole thing of not actually confronting negativity.

If that proves unworkable, then something like : a regime where it's three guys in a field. They're always saying things to each other like 'this is crazy'. (They're talking about just being three guys in a field)) They're always getting covered in mud, from the mud in the field. 'We're covered in mud, guys' they say to one another. Are there scarecrows? Yes, three of them. But that's in a different part of the field (the field is miles and miles long.) Sometimes, late at night, one guy says "what if there were more than three guys in a field?" but, though this thought is entertainable late at night, looking into the fire or at the stars, it always betrays its falseness in the cold light of dawn. If it wasn't meant to be that there were three guys in a field, then there wouldn't be three guys in a field. One time, a castle appeared at the far end of the field, but the closer the three guys got, the smaller the castle seemed. When they finally reached the castle, there was no castle.

There are fourteen rulers and they're all very empathetic. They're called the Empathetic Fourteen. Geographically, the state moves from near-pole to near-pole during the year, so it's always sunny, all the time. All the redboxes have a one dollar flat fee, and you can keep the movie or game for as long as you like. There are redboxes everywhere. The national anthem is the original 'big rock candy mountain' only no one understands it because there is no homelessness. The only taxes are mutual glances of recognition and respect. There's a state-sponsored youth group, and their only responsibilities are (1) to go on youtube and say 'i'm only 13 but I really like this song' & (2) write very good fan fiction. There are oracles, like at delphi, only all they ever oracle is the lyrics to cheeseburger in paradise. And priests who interpret the lyrics, and the interpretation is always 'nothing to say, they got it right the first time.' The national religion isn't great, but it's good enough, and good enough is great.

Also, I just recently read this very short story. I thought it was a funny take on the compulsive need for reassurance.

I believe I have some kind of harm OCD (psychological harm, specifically, likely comorbid with something else) and I related a lot to your post.

Especially this : "While I don’t feel consciously lonely, and socialising doesn’t feel like a priority since I believe my life is about to collapse, the experience of the human race as a whole would suggest it’s a bad thing that I haven’t talked to anyone except my parents in almost three days and that this, not my situation may be the real reason for my terror, so I need to go meet up with a friend."

It's hard for me to override the next thought : "yeah, but if you hang out with anyone, you're going to somehow hurt them, so you can't talk to anyone, and if you do, you have to very carefully monitor everything you say."

Also: this "What’s the point in going to a psychologist- I’m just as clever as they are, any point they can make about how my fears are illogical I will have certainly thought of myself!"

That's a tough one. The OCD loop here for me is : if the psychologist doesn't realize how horrible I am, it's because I've been misleading. Anything he says to reassure me means that I've subconsciously mislead him, or even myself. Thus the only way to be honest is to show how that reassurance doesn't apply to me.....and then you have this weird therapy session where it's like defending yourself against any reassurance because if you are reassured, you'll have been reassured illegitimately, which will leave you liable to do something truly terrible.

'They saw that they were naked and were ashamed.'

The original narrative; and thus universal. We cover up, we make plays, and live out dramas, and a life without these dramas looks empty, like the void from which creation sprang. — unenlightened

I kind of picture an hourglass shape. At the top is all the plays, the lived-out dramas and so forth. At the center is a void [silence]. On the bottom is still...something, but it only comes up to the void if there's not something in the top half waiting to pounce on it, and reshape it, to fit it in to all the other stuff. That crouching-in-wait & pouncing is what I'm trying to let go of, though with very limited success.

Maybe, but maybe also trying to get rid of him makes him stronger. I had that ironic trainspotting 'choose life' poster on my dorm-room wall & I read a lot of Beckett & Cioran and now look what happened. You either die the hero, or become the fitter happier voice, I guess.

Still, not of all the advice in the song-thing is bad, if you don't take all of it together, and if it's not read like a computer-man. For Jung, the shadow has important stuff to tell us, but our distrust of it distorts it, right? If you repress the feminine, all women have shrill harpy tones. If you repress your passive side, everyone seems lazy and full of excuses. If you repress your active side, everyone seems impulsive and stressed-out. if you repress modest discipline, everyone sounds like fitter happier.

The alcoholism thing was just a bad play on 'dry' + a paradigmatic example of rationalized self-destruction. I think self-destruction is probably trying to replace intimacy with something else, at first (the alcohol is connected to the party - i.e connection - & then becomes a stand-alone metonymy for it.) I think there's a phase change at some point where the destruction becomes less an attempt to connect, then a kind of destiny you feel compelled to fulfill, like all that stuff in Dostoevsky.

I guess I'm talking about self-delusion. I agree, abstractly, about acting with energy rather than against it, but I don't know how you do that. And since I don't know how you do that, I don't know what's acting in line with it and what's rationalized self-destruction. The allusion to Nietzsche was that he ended poorly, though maybe that's unfair if it was all due to syphilis. The feeling I get reading Nieztsche is an uncomfortablly familiar feeling of : things going wrong and then trying to work out a thought-picture of why & how to fix it, and then things still go wrong and then there's a new thought-picture, like all the 'cures' are just symptoms.

"The most shortsighted and pernicious way of thinking wants to make the great sources of energy, those wild torrents of the soul that often stream forth so dangerously and overwhelmingly, dry up altogether, instead of taking their power into service and econominizing it." - Nietzsche — frank

Maybe. But that sounds a lot like the drinker who's gone white knuckle a few months and is slowly convincing himself that a better approach than drying up would be to drink more economically, drink only in these settings etc.

I mean, how'd it work out for Nietzsche?

I want to emphasize again that any kind of sexual attraction that is harmful for the person to whom you're attracted - that attraction has to be reined in and managed. What I was saying in what you've quoted is that you can't change what you're attracted to through reason. If what your attraction is, is ethically ok between consenting adults you ought to cultivate it and find a community where it works. If it isn't, that's a truly hard thing , and you have to find a way to manage its explosive potential through other outlets.

This is profound. Has this been evidenced or formally classified? Would you say that this is where the realm of paraphilias lie? If so, once a paraphilia has become set as a result of the burst as you put it, how would one determine the difference between true sexual attraction and a paraphilic attraction? — earthlycohort

No idea about evidence or formal classification, grain of salt all of what I said. I don't know enough about paraphilia and what I said only goes so far. If you have an attraction that is harmful for the object of attraction, if it's beyond a fetish, then it's a little different.It would have to be a matter of management. But again, I don't really know what 'paraphilia' encompasses.