The injured party is the one who feels the most offence

Zivira:
Herein lies the problem – most women believe that they have communicated their hurt to their husbands, but most husbands only have memories of their wife’s bad attitudes. All those times a wife thought she was simply expressing the cry of an injured heart, her husband only perceived hostility, coldness, or hatred. She felt like she was begging for tenderness and sensitivity, and he backed away because he thought he was being attacked.-Reb Bradley
Harare, Mashonaland East

Jennifer Frances Armstrong: Yeah, well by expressing that she was injured, she was actually damaging his sense of moral righteousness. So, he experienced it as hatred.

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Draft Chapter 3–my father’s memoir

Whilst in kindergarten some bulldozersarrived and started to flatten a hill on the other side of the playingfields.  We were told this was for a new hostel.  One day, my mothersaid to me would you like to go to boarding school.  My dad thought itwould be very good for me.  I had now reached a stage in life where didn’twant to avoid challenges.   If everyone was saying to me this is goodfor you, I realised they wanted me to do it.  I was six at thetime.  In due course, the bulldozers left and this square block ofbuilding started to rise. In due course,  mother took me to the shops toget kitted out with a uniform, which was khaki shirt and shorts, grey sockswith a red strip, red belt, grey tie, with diagonal red stripe, grey felthat.  

Everything was put into a metal trunk withmy name on the outside and I was bundled off to boarding school.  I’dnever been to boarding school, had no idea what to expect.  I found myselfin a long dormitory with eighteen or twenty beds, covered in yellow quilts withlockers next to each bed.  A mosquito net hung over each bed.  Theywere white.   Matron came in and allocated each of us a bed. She did her job and that was it.   So then, matron came and collectedany tuck we had, such as biscuits, sweet bars.   Every mother,knowing their kids were going to be away for some weeks would give them enoughsweeties to last three months.   Medications were collected at thesame time.  We all got into pyjamas and into bed.  We had earlierbeen taken into the shower room, a longish room with twelve shower heads. 

We were told to take our clothes off,whereupon some of the boys started to twist their towels up and flick eachother with the towel.  Matron would stroll along and check we were allusing soap.  Then we’d all brush out teeth.  I remember the ablutionblock for the smell of toothpaste.  So then, we all went downstairs to thedining room and we were allocated a table.  Ten boys to a table, five downeach of the sides, sitting on benches.   Then somebody at the head ofthe table would start to serve up food on each of the plates and you were toldto eat it.  Then suddenly everyone stood up and a teacher said, for whatwe are about to receive, may the lord make us truly grateful. 

Everyone then sat down with a big clatterof plates and started to eat.   Then the person invested with theauthority to serve, either a teacher or a prefect, served up the dessert. Eventually I began to vomit a lot and decided I would have to take steps to dosomething about this, so I stopped eating.  One day I went into lunch andthe sweets was as an orange fruit salad.  I might have guessed it wrong asI was only six, but I think I worked out I didn’t eat for six weeks.  Atthe end of the meal, we all stood up and the teacher said, for what we havejust received, may the lord make us truly grateful. 

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TOP 30 REASONS WHY WOMEN DON’T RECEIVE PAY RISES

TOP 30 REASONS WHY WOMEN DON’T RECEIVE PAY RISES

1.You have secret sin – Lam 3:44; Psalm 66:18, 90:8; 1Peter 3:12
2.You are not tithing – Malachi 3:10
3.You are not fasting – Mark 9:29
4.You are not asking in faith, believing – James 1:6; Mark 11:24
5.You are not reading the Bible regularly – Romans 10:17
6.You are not in fellowship with God – John 15:7
7.You pray after your own lust – James 4:3
8.You do not pray with spiritual authority in Jesus’ name – John 14:13-14
9.You are not praying loud enough: don’t whisper, speak audibly – Matthew 16:19
10.You are too greedy: be more thankful – Philippians 4:6
11.You don’t ask – James 4:2
12.Your prayers are not big enough, don’t be petty – Mark 11:23
13.Your prayers are too vague, be specific – Matthew 7:9-10, 21:22
14.You presume God will answer your prayer your way – Isaiah 55:8
15.You are not praying in accordance with God’s will – 1John 5:14
16.You are impatient: it will be answered in God’s time – Matthew 6:7-8
17.You are not persistent, pray until it is answered – 1Thessalonians 5:17
18.Your prayer is already answered, you just don’t know it yet – Daniel 10:12-13
19.Your prayers are too long – Matthew 23:14
20.You don’t spend enough time in prayer – Luke 6:12
21.You doubt and harbor unbelief – Mark 9:23; 1 Timothy 2:8
22.You are not helping God answer the prayer – 2Thessalonians 3:10
23.You are not praying the right way (prayer formula) – Luke 11:1
24.You are holding a grudge with someone else: forgive – Matthew 5:23-24
25.You do not have the proper environment to focus – Matthew 14:23; Mark 1:35
26.You’ve rejected God’s counsel -1John 3:22
27.You are not praying in the Spirit – 1Corinthians 14:15; Jude 1:20
28.You need to pray in agreement with another – Matthew 18:19-20
29.Your prayers are too public; pray in secret – Matthew 6:6
30.God did answer; his answer was ‘No’. – 2Corinthians 12:9

Now replace “prayer” for “petition” and “God” for “Boss”.

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Three Battles with Sensei Craig Monie

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The parable of the colours

Once upon a time, there was a male. This was no ordinary guy, however, but one who heard messages from on high.   The messages pained him and brought him shivers of ecstatic pleasure.

There was a voice carried in the midst of a storm to elevate his heart.  It came as if from behind a rainbow — a stream of fractured white light.  The sound of his deity carried all away along the rainbow until it reached him.   In dulcet tones, it made itself known: “See those colors, red and blue?  How free and separate they are!  Their bondage chains are broken and now radiate they most vividly into thine eye!  Behold the separate colors ‘blue’ and ‘red’!”

The deeper-than-usual-man went apart from his fellow male to meditate awhile.  He has discovered ‘red’ and ‘blue’ as separate identities.

This holiest-of-men drew himself even further apart from his fellow man.  He began to write the tablet of the law that only vain and foolish idol worshipers would ever question:

-1. Blue and red are fundamentally separate colors, a fact uncontested by all pious men .

-2  Blue must be made to stay on its side of the spectrum and red must be made to stay on its opposite side.  For them ever to shift or merge is both malicious and impious and those who perform this technique of mixing will be punished .

-3. The nature of blue shall be to depict coolness and tranquility.  The nature of red shall be to depict urgency and enthusiasm.  Blue is not permitted under any circumstances to depict enthusiasm:  It is ‘blue’.

-4. The two colors ought to radiate and shine in splendor for the glory of the universe.

-5.  These laws inscribed above depict the status of all things in the realm of nature itself. It is evil and sinister to go against fundamental laws of nature.

—-

AND NATURE LAUGHED!

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Intergeneration conflict / suicide | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

Intergeneration conflict / suicide | STAY SANE AND SAVAGE

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HITTIN.

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me hitting very hard on a hot day

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Nietzsche

In the Preface of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche outlines the project that was also to be mapped out and re-formulated in more detail by Bataille. In more well-known Freudian terms, to get control over one’s Superego and to master it, rather than to have it controlling one from above.

More to come later, but the three stages of becoming healthier he describes are:

1. Starting from being the unquestioning servant of one’s Superego.
2. Losing a sense of ego in the sense of no longer taking anything personally, but transcending “for and against” (thinking about right and wrong).
3. Adopting a perspective based on these earlier stages of experience, whereby one understands that “injustice” is written into the framework of all things.  This insight accompanies a state of being whereby one comes to master Superego and thereby to gain mastery of one’s “for and against”.  One might put this in a different way by saying one’s “for and against” become relativised on the basis of having seen oneself transcendentally — from a distance.  They are now no longer absolute and rigid and one is no longer unquestioningly subservient to them.  Thus, one is healthier than previously.

STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism

updated:

It may never gets so far that someone has a desperate need to be an identity that isn’t the consumer unit — most people have a desperate desire to be one that IS the consumer unit. That’s because Superego (the device that makes us conform from within) is going to make us conform to the prevailing paradigm/s. This is why intellectual shamanism counsels that one should depart from everything one thinks one “knows” or feels to be true about oneself and one’s world.
By sacrificing one’s “self”as one mistakenly understands it to be, one has a much greater chance of finding one’s true nature.  (This principle is in some ways more Bataille’s than Nietzsche’s.)

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Why I write

My feelings, my emotions, like sheep, had gone astray and I had no idea where they were or what they were up to.  I was in my late twenties at this time and I knew something was wrong.   My life was dominated by attitudes of duty and hope for a better life if I pleased the correct authorities.   And I had every intention of pleasing them with all my might – so much so, I was coming apart at the seams.  I had no concept of pleasing myself.

I realize that many people would consider the attitudes I describe above to be ideal ones for a young female.  This was far from true.  My health was suffering and I would catch viruses much of the time — signs indicating that I’d become a spiritual anorexic.

So, I began writing to feast on my own lamb stew or in Jung’s less malicious prose, “to water one’s own garden”.

All of my writing has been an attempt to track down and reintegrate my emotions.

This is why there are certain modes of critiquing any of my work that are wholly wrong.  My writing is not, for instance, inherently emotional.  I worked hard to get this effect.  Also, I don’t need to be told to take a good, hard look at myself to figure out what, from a right-wing perspective, I need to change.  It should already be obvious, not least on the basis of good manners — I really don’t need to be told to go ahead and do what I’ve already been doing over all these years, to find out what needs to change.    I’m also not a female stereotype, pent-up with emotions that just want to come pouring out at the slightest touch. If that had been so, I would never have chosen the self-discipline of learning to write.

A friend from a similarly repressed culture recently told my of her disappointment in viewing a movie, Diary of a Geisha. She observed that the book had been very poorly rendered into film because the character seemed like a “Western girl”, very emotional.

“At that age,  she would not have known what she was feeling.”

The structure of shamanistic observation

From Nietzsche: But someday, in a stronger age than this decaying, self-doubting present, He must yet come to us, the redeeming man, of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond, whose isolation is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality-while it is only his absorption, immersion, penetration into reality, so that, when he one day emerges again into the light, He may bring home the redemption of this reality; it’s redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it. The man of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism; This this bell-stroke of noon and of the great decision that liberates the will again and restores its goal to the Earth and his hope to Man; this Antichrist and Antinihilist this victor over God and nothingness-He must come one day.
[My bolds.]
——————

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Psychiatry: An Industry Of Death 10/10

Leans too much towards right wing conspiracy ideas, but hey, what’s not to like?

I agree with the guy who says, “psychiatry IS politics”. The tone is a bit alarmist, though.

Try shamanism. Aim for a baseline experience of nature, not moderated by social notions or ideas.  You will find out what is missing in your life and restore it.

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Human Nature, ready to rule the roost

In many quarters of society, it’s considered quite urbane and natural to refer to human nature in terms of the conditions of domesticated and wild animals.Workplace harassment is dismissed as a natural expression of “the pecking order”.   We often hear reference made to “alpha males” and humans willingly acquiesce to the idea that what works best to keep others in line is both “the carrot” and “the stick”.

Given the near universal acceptance of barnyard metaphors and appeals to certain idealized versions of “the wild”, I find it astonishing that whenever I choose to casually refer to people in these terms, umbrage is taken.

For instance, someone might greet me casually, according to the dictates of the wild and the pecking order with “hey gal!”

To this, I respond, “hey ape!”

My response is always reasonable and wholly consistent in accepting the predominant world view that humans haven’t quite made it to human status yet.   In other words, we only recognize each other hazily and in accordance with sado-masochistic notions of gender and racial hierarchy.

We might try harder, but we cannot seem to budge:  perhaps more carrot and more stick is necessary?

What is metaphysics?

Metaphysics is: “The assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

For instance, if one believes that different people are constrained by inner essences to behave according to their “genders”, often this is metaphysics.

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enjoy life to the full

I give you my recipe for health:  enjoy life to the full.  

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the doubling of mind

The following section from Foucault is very interesting, because it recognises what I have also discovered, which is that you need a kind of “doubling” (in my terms) or in this case, “a mind folded back” in order to have any kind of profundity in thinking.

[Y]ou find this idea of a mind in profundity; of a mind folded back in the intimacy of itself which is touched by a sort of unconsciousness, and which can develop its potentialities by the deepening of the self. And that is why the grammar of Port Royal, to which you refer, is, I think, much more Augustinian than Cartesian.

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Minefields of language and culture

Posted by Jennifer Armstrong

Over the years — over very many years — I’ve realized that the way I communicate is different from many people, perhaps even the majority.   I’ve realized I have an inside-out soul.  Also an upside-down soul.   I’m not entirely alone in this.  Mike has one too.   “When my father died and I was still six, I shut out all emotion in order to cope.”  That is how he describes his progeneration of an upside-down soul.

Perhaps most people experience their reactions to the world on the basis of emotion.  They then become aware of the emotion and try to tame it and control it.   This capacity to tame the emotions defines the progress one typically makes from childhood to adulthood.   In my case and in Mike’s, out natural progress has to be in the opposite direction — from stoicism to greater feeling-integration.

Language itself becomes contorted when an innate propensity for emotionalism rather than stoicism is assumed.   Even empathy may be a contributing factor to meaning going off course.  For instance, in not understanding something I do, another may exhort me to “act with more self control”, when in fact my level of self-control is extremely high.   It would facilitate communication better if I understood why something had to be a certain way and not another, rather than pushing me to act in a manner of even colder, rarefied detachment.   The assumption that bringing my emotions to heel would enable me to see anything more clearly is wrong.  The would only lead to socially defined meanings becoming much more opaque than ever.

These mechanics of distancing become even more relevant with regard to my writing, where I tend often to use terms outside of their regular social meaning, adopting intellectual terms to embody certain aspects of my experience. I’m sure at times I have given these meanings my own slant to the extent that they no longer have precisely their original definition.  Nonetheless, they have my intended meanings, which are generally self-consistent (unless I’m still in the process of intellectually refining what the terms actually mean to me.)  I’m never concerned with socially formulated meanings in any of my writing.  I am only concerned with how people read — or misread — my personal sense of partially obscured or underlying cultural structures.  I’m fascinated, in other words, by the way people draw forth implicit meanings or understand connotations.  In relation to this, I’m interested in finding out about the emotional structures of various perspectives.

The ability to understand the implicit meanings will enable (or obstruct, in some cases) communication. In a cross-cultural situation, the meanings are often misread and communication is thwarted.

Someone who is moving away from an emotional way of responding to the world  will probably misread the actions and ideas of someone who is the process of moving towards a more emotionally integrated view of the world.  They will see moments of release from the necessity of stoicism, for instance, as a shameful loss of self-control. However, if one has self-control almost inevitably and necessarily, one may not be so alarmed at losing it through episodes of humor, even when this involves a risk of being profoundly and irrevocably misunderstood — indeed “read backwards”.

I enjoy cultures where having stoicism at the base-line of one’s character is considered normal and I find it akin to walking in a minefield whenever I engage with cultures which have the opposite assumption at work.

Boxing for fitness class 18 JAN 2012

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Power/identity through perversion

Jennifer: The system exerts a tremendous amount of force to push us into certain roles and into adopting certain “perceptions”.

 

 

Karen: As opposed to a powerful and intrinsic knowledge of one’s own gender/race equality and right.Oh yes…prescribed or recreational drugs are certainly a big keeps of the status quo.

 

 

Jennifer:  Well the “intrinsic” knowledge can also be wrong and limiting. That’s why I propose the shamanistic thing of self-knowledge through perverting the dominant paradigm. i.e. create various perversions of it and find out if any of those are  suitable for you.

Note: The term, “perversity”, offers an ironic take on this matter above, since those who defend the dominant paradigm will always view any kind of creativity in dissent as “perverse”.

Minus the Morning

[O]ver time I’ve come to think that the victim is a far more fundamental, and sincere, figure in the conservative canon. Because not only does he appeal to us as a figure of compassion or pity, but he’s also someone who has a very particular claim on us: he demands to be made whole. In other words, he’s a rallying figure, someone whose losses – a country house, a plantation, a factory, a white skin – ought to be recompensed.

 And THIS is why I destroy my former identity and its appeals in the last pages of my memoir.

 I’m explicitly renouncing any such conservative claim.

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ego reification

The corrective to Nietzsche is of course Georges Bataille, who also has a few problems, but at least is clearly of the left. I think you sum it up there very well in stating that the problem of bourgeois society IS the reification of the ego — that is, the assumption that concept of oneself defines one’s actual identity in every sense that matters. I think that liberals in general cannot understand a critique from someone of my bent, who takes up the Nietzschean tradition. They imagine that it would be impossible not to reify the ego or to avoid doing so would mean to denigrate (perhaps even to disintegrate) the ego. This is typical bourgeois black or white thinking. One cannot gain real subjectivity unless one sacrifices the aggrandizement of the bourgeois ego. Yet the (only apparent rather than actual) sacrifice does not lead to nothing or negation. It leads to wholeness and a fulfilled life.

Gender versus maturity

My experience with Western society is that gender roles are conventionally a division of labour, whereby males are expected to do all the hard lifting in terms of solving life’s problems and women are expected to reciprocate by processing their (male) emotions for them.

This keeps everyone at a very infantile level, because the system of assigning genders to do certain roles can only work by means of projective identification. How can a woman process the various emotions a male might be feeling unless he projects them into her, to begin with? She accepts them as “the emotional one” and performs a hygienic role of allowing him to be unimpeded by emotions in his work.

Certainly I think this is what many men and women are reacting to. It’s where gender politics can go wrong, because often people are reacting to the dismantling of this practice and the way it leaves them out in the cold. It’s absolutely necessary for this system to be dismantled, but it means each person has to be an individual in their own right, not a function of part of one. Many “men’s rights” guys freak out because women are no longer playing their expected role. They are reacting to the betrayal of expectations concerning this role. Women, too, dig their heels in and refuse to budge when they create systems of female solidarity that reinforce the view that women are fundamentally emotional and sensitive creatures. We are not.

The feminist project is for both men and women to be stand-alone adults. This is a process of evolution and many people are getting hurt along the way. I’ve often feel hurt myself having to say, “I know you need me to play this role of processing your emotions for you, but I’m not available for that.”

Fortunately, my husband does not require that kind of service to feel whole. He’s done all the emotional work necessary to get himself to level of being where he is a really attractive man.

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Ideological sensitivity

A misleading idea is that feminism is about sensitivity, a variation of “sisterhood”.  This may be related to the idea that one achieves a sense of belonging by embracing an identity.   I do not attach an identity to my actions, so my actions are not immediately understood.   Those who uphold the ideology of identities can easily point out “inconsistencies” in my attitudes, just because being human is an inconsistent act.  To “belong” one has to submit to correction by others, who believe they are called upon to make you consistent.   Inconsistency is held to be the worse possible condition for anyone, that has to be stopped at all costs.

Humanity, spontaneity and pleasure, therefore have to be stopped at all costs.  All ideologies command this.

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Newsflash: war is worse than anarchism!

DID YOU ASK WHAT’S WRONG WITH WAR –DAMBUDZO MARECHERA

There are no wrong words, right?
There are no wrong trees, right?
There is no wrong sand, right?
I’ve slept the world in frilly
underwear
Dreamed I buggered all the little boys
who are future leaders
Fucked all the funny little girls made of
thatch and ghandy
My anarchist arse has shat on society
And LOOK millions of open flies
are homing in on your wide-open lips.

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Nietzsche, Bataille and "facing death"

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apes in capes: the human condition

I’m not an introvert. I’m slightly to the side of extroversion. All the same, I’ve adapted to a rather introverted lifestyle because I find too many conventional social assumptions to be alarming. The pop psychology embraced by all too many, including university professors, makes my head spin with its degree of wrongness. For instance, there is the idea that what others believe they observe about you must necessarily be more objective than what one observes about oneself. The illogical and obscene nature of this assumption is something I have no will to deal with. It’s just crazy.

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