Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Evan Osnos writes for the New Yorker:

* The history of broadcasting is replete with figures who play a combative character on the air but shed the pose when they leave the studio. Bongino is not among them.

* In Bongino’s world, it matters little that Trump’s claims of rampant fraud were dismissed by his own top appointees at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, as well as by federal and state judges. To the true believer, the lack of solid evidence simply confirms how well hidden the rigging was. In the study of conspiracy theories (a description Bongino rejects), this is known as “self-sealing”: the theory mends holes in its own logic. “A corrupted intelligence community, in conjunction with a corrupt media, will eat this country like a cancer from the inside out,” Bongino told his audience, as he built to a takeaway. “This is why I’m really hoping Donald Trump runs in 2024,” he said. “He’s the best candidate suited to clean house. Because if we don’t clean house the Republic is gone.”

Spend several months immersed in American talk radio and you’ll come away with the sense that the violence of January 6th was not the end of something but the beginning. A year after Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, some of his most influential champions are preparing the ground for his return, and they dominate a media terrain that attracts little attention from their opponents. As liberals argue over the algorithm at Facebook and ponder the disruptive influence of TikTok, radio remains a colossus; for every hour that Americans listened to podcasts in 2021, they listened to six and a half hours of AM/FM radio, according to Edison Research, a market-research and polling firm. Talk radio has often provided more reliable hints of the political future than think tanks and elected officials have. In 2007, even as the Republican leaders George W. Bush and John McCain were trying to rebrand themselves as immigration reformers, Limbaugh was advocating laws that would deny immigrants access to government services and force them to speak English.

* Trump has fostered a crop of broadcasters who owe their power to him, men like Sebastian Gorka, the former White House aide, and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. Brian Rosenwald, the author of the history “Talk Radio’s America,” has noted the triumph of ideology over experience. “Bongino is speaking to the people who believe Trump’s press releases, who see the world caving in and Biden as a raging socialist,” he told me. Rosenwald likens Bongino’s ascent to that of Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, who reached Congress in 2021, despite having voiced belief in a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” and other delusions associated with QAnon. “Back in the day, Marjorie Taylor Greene would have been consigned to the worst committees, buried by the leadership,” he said. “But the old rules of how you gain stature are out the door.”

* Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, a nonprofit group that tracks and criticizes the conservative press, said that the field is changing for the first time since the nineteen-nineties, when Limbaugh, Fox News, and the blogger Matt Drudge established dominance. “They created the guidelines that people walked along for decades,” Carusone said. But Limbaugh is gone, and Drudge and Fox face more radical competitors. “The new information ecosystem is taking shape over the next year or two, and whatever shakes out is going to set the path for years to come.”

In the long run, Bongino’s most significant impact may not come from what he says on his broadcasts. “My goal is for my content to be the least interesting thing I did,” he told me. He has used his money and his influence to foster technology startups, such as Parler, Rumble, and AlignPay, that are friendly to right-wing views. These companies are intended to withstand traditional pressure campaigns, including advertising boycotts like the one that Media Matters prompted in 2019, based on old radio interviews in which the Fox host Tucker Carlson described women as “extremely primitive” and Iraqis as “monkeys.” Carusone said, “What scares me about Bongino is that this guy could end up owning or controlling or directly building the infrastructure that operationalizes a whole range of extremism.” He continued, “There used to be lines. You could say, ‘O.K., PayPal, don’t let the January 6th people recruit money to pay for buses.’ This new alternative infrastructure is not going to stop that.” If another uprising organizes online, he said, “there will be a whiplash effect. Everyone will say, ‘How did that happen?’ Well, it’s been happening.”

* At first, according to “Something in the Air,” Marc Fisher’s history of radio, stations emphasized variety, and avoided playing the same song twice in twenty-four hours. Then, in 1950, a young station owner in Nebraska named Todd Storz started to study listener preferences, perusing research by the University of Omaha and, as the story goes, staking out the jukebox at a local diner. He discovered that, even if people claimed to want variety, they tended to choose the same songs over and over. In 1951, Storz introduced a two-hour hit parade—a finite, repeated list of songs—and by the end of the year his station’s market share had grown tenfold. Storz’s method became known as Top Forty, though d.j.s discovered that they did not need forty songs to keep listeners engaged. “If they quietly cut their lists down to thirty or even twenty-five songs, the audience numbers responded immediately,” Fisher writes.

* Other d.j.s, including Don Imus, Howard Stern, and Glenn Beck, migrated from music broadcasts to talk radio, bringing with them a pop sensibility. At Talkers magazine, the editor, Michael Harrison, created a weekly list of hot topics—a hit parade of politics. “The similarity between Top Forty and commercial talk radio has been profound,” he told me. “Certain topics get the phones to ring. Certain topics are boring but important, so they stay away from them.” Even though Limbaugh saw himself as an agent of commerce, his political identity proved so profitable that it left a permanent imprint on the industry. The new generation of radio conservatives—Sean Hannity, Mike Pence, Mark Levin—devoted more attention to ideology than to show biz. “They still want to be entertaining, but entertainment is not as big a deal,” Harrison said. “These are people who are doing political content on broadcasting platforms, as opposed to doing broadcasting with a political aspect.”

* But his failure to make his network comply fortified his argument that conservatives needed their own platforms, to protect against liberal antagonists. “If they can’t get a bank to cancel you, they’ll go to the payment processor, Stripe,” he told me. “If they can’t get Stripe to cancel you, they’ll go to PayPal.” He added, “I said to my audience years ago, ‘We have to find every single link in that chain and create an alternate company that believes in free speech.’ ”

* He conceived of projects to create conservative alternatives to GoFundMe and Eventbrite, and promoted the video site Rumble, in which he is an investor. I asked him what boundaries Rumble imposes on users, and he said, “If you’re not violating our terms of service, and you’re abiding by the law, it’s not my business.”

Since the fall of 2020, Rumble’s traffic has grown more than twentyfold, to an average of thirty-six million users a month. Bongino, in promotional mode, told me that it was the “first viable video-platform contender to YouTube that’s exploding in traffic.” It’s “through the roof,” he said. Still, Rumble’s traffic represents less than two per cent of YouTube’s in a typical month.

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Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this 2021 book:

* The reason rituals are so effective at helping us manage our inner voices is that they’re a chatter-reducing cocktail that influences us through several avenues. For one, they direct our attention away from what’s bothering us; the demands they place on working memory to carry out the tasks of the ritual leave little room for anxiety and negative manifestations of the inner voice. This might explain why pregame rituals abound in sports, providing a distraction at the most anxiety-filled moment.
Many rituals also provide us with a sense of order, because we perform behaviors we can control. For example, we can’t control what will happen to our children throughout their lives, and we can protect them only to a limited degree, which is a source of chatter for many parents. But when they are born, we can baptize them or perform any other of a variety of birth rituals that provide us with an illusion of control.
Because rituals are infused with meaning, and often connect to purposes or powers that transcend our individual concerns, they also make us feel connected to important values and communities, which fulfill our emotional needs and serve as a hedge against isolation. This symbolic feature of rituals also often furnishes us with awe, which broadens our perspective in ways that minimize how preoccupied we are with our concerns. Of course, rituals also frequently activate the placebo mechanism: If we believe they will aid us, then they do.

* This organic emergence of rituals is seemingly a product of the brain’s remarkable ability to monitor whether we are achieving our desired goals —for our purposes, the goal of avoiding an inner voice that turns painfully negative. According to many influential theories, your brain is set up like a thermostat to detect when discrepancies emerge between your current and your desired end states. When a discrepancy is registered, that signals us to act to bring the temperature down. And engaging in rituals is one way that people can do this.

* Culture is often compared to the invisible air we breathe, and much of what we inhale are the beliefs and practices that shape our minds and behavior. You can even think of culture as a system for delivering tools to help people combat chatter.

* As much as it can hurt, the ability to experience fear, anxiety, anger, and other forms of distress is quite useful in small doses . They mobilize us to respond effectively to changes in our environments. Which is to say, a lot of the time the inner voice is valuable not in spite of the pain it causes us but because of it.
We experience pain for a reason. It warns us of danger, signaling us to take action. This process provides us with a tremendous survival advantage. In fact, each year a small number of people are born with a genetic mutation that makes it impossible for them to feel pain . They usually end up dying young as a result.

* You wouldn’t want to live a life without an inner voice that upsets you some of the time. It would be like braving the sea in a boat with no rudder.
The challenge isn’t to avoid negative states altogether. It’s to not let them consume you.

* Imposing order on our surroundings likewise can be comforting and allow us to feel better, think more clearly, and perform at higher levels. Then there are our beliefs, whose malleability can work to our advantage.

* while creating a calming distance between our thoughts and our experiences can be useful when chatter strikes, when it comes to joy, doing the opposite—immersing ourselves in life’s most cherished moments—helps us savor them.

* Tools You Can Implement on Your Own
The ability to “step back” from the echo chamber of our own minds so we can adopt a broader, calmer, and more objective perspective is an important tool for combating chatter. Many of the techniques reviewed in this section help people do this, although some—like performing rituals and embracing superstitions—work via other pathways.
1 Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you’re experiencing chatter involves language. When you’re trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person “you” to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, thinking, and less negative emotion.
2 Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you’d give that person, and then apply it to yourself.
3 Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we’re experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you’re worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.
4 Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat—something we can’t manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you’ve succeeded in similar situations in the past, or by using distanced self-talk.

Tools for Receiving Chatter Support
1 Build a board of advisers. Finding the right people to talk to, those who are skilled at satisfying both your emotional and your cognitive needs, is the first step to leveraging the power of others. Depending on the domain in which you’re experiencing chatter, different people will be uniquely equipped to do this. While a colleague may be skilled at advising you on work problems, your partner may be better suited to advising you on interpersonal dilemmas. The more people you have to turn to for chatter support in any particular domain, the better. So build a diverse board of chatter advisers, a group of confidants you can turn to for support in the different areas of your life in which you are likely to find your inner voice running amok.
2 Seek out physical contact. You don’t have to wait for someone to give you affectionate touch or supportive physical contact. Knowing about the benefits they provide, you can seek them out yourself, by asking trusted people in your life for a hug or a simple hand squeeze. Moreover, you need not even touch another human being to reap these benefits. Embracing a comforting inanimate object, like a teddy bear or security blanket, is helpful too.
3 Look at a photo of a loved one. Thinking about others who care about us reminds us that there are people we can turn to for support during times of emotional distress. This is why looking at photos of loved ones can soothe our inner voice when we find ourselves consumed with chatter.
4 Perform a ritual with others. Although many rituals can be performed alone, there is often added benefit that comes from performing a ritual in the presence of others (for example, communal meditation or prayer, a team’s pregame routine, or even just toasting drinks with friends the same way each time by always saying the same words). Doing so additionally provides people with a sense of support and self-transcendence that reduces feelings of loneliness.

* Tools That Involve the Environment
1 Create order in your environment. When we experience chatter, we often feel as if we are losing control. Our thought spirals control us rather than the other way around. When this happens, you can boost your sense of control by imposing order on your surroundings. Organizing your environment can take many forms. Tidying up your work or home spaces, making a list, and arranging the different objects that surround you are all common examples. Find your own way of organizing your space to help provide you with a sense of mental order.
2 Increase your exposure to green spaces. Spending time in green spaces helps replenish the brain’s limited attentional reserves, which are useful for combating chatter. Go for a walk in a tree-lined street or park when you’re experiencing chatter. If that’s not possible, watch a film clip of nature on your computer, stare at a photograph of a green scene, or even listen to a sound machine that conveys natural sounds. You can surround the spaces in which you live and work with greenery to create environments that are a boon to the inner voice.
3 Seek out awe-inspiring experiences. Feeling awe allows us to transcend our current concerns in ways that put our problems in perspective. Of course, the experiences that provide people with awe vary. For some it is exposure to a breathtaking vista. For someone else it’s the memory of a child accomplishing an amazing feat. For others it may be staring at a remarkable piece of art. Find what instills a sense of awe within you, and then seek to cultivate that emotion when you find your internal dialogue spiraling. You can also think about creating spaces around you that elicit feelings of awe each time you glance at them.

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What Are The Most Common Lies You Tell Yourself?

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

Mine are:

* There’s nothing I can do…
* There’s Something Inherently Wrong or Different About Me.
* I Would Change, But I Can’t Because Of X.
* I Know What I’m Doing.
“I am just not good at X.”
“I don’t regret anything.”
“I’m unlucky.”
“When I’m ready, I’ll finally X.”
“I never had a chance.”
“That’s just who I am.”

I couldn’t even come up with these on my own. I borrowed them from here and here.

I don’t tell these lies to myself very much these days. They’re more lies of the past, not so much of the last five years.

A common lie I notice other people tell themselves is, “I’ll do it tomorrow.” And it doesn’t happen.

Therapist Jon Frederickson writes in The Lies We Tell Ourselves: How to Face the Truth, Accept Yourself, and Create a Better Life:

* We become well by relating to what is here; we become ill by relating to our fantasies. The therapist stops us from running away from ourselves so we can rest in reality. Remaining in this moment, we feel our feelings, which always reach out to us through anxiety. Anxiety, strangely enough, invites us to dive inside to the places from which we always run, the places we are afraid to descend into and explore.

In effect, therapists always give the same message: “What you run from is where you need to rest. What you fear you need to face. What you ignore you need to hear.”

* “You are the most important person you will ever meet,” she says. “Why not be on good terms with yourself?”

* To be on good terms with ourselves, we must learn to listen to who we are under the words, the excuses, and the explanations we use.

* These beliefs, called “projections,” seem true because they are real: they are the realities we reject in ourselves and relocate in others. If we criticize ourselves, we imagine others criticize us. If we ignore ourselves, we imagine others ignore us. If we fail to care for ourselves, we believe people don’t care for us. However, the persons we project upon can be the mirrors we look at to see, learn, and accept what we reject in ourselves.

* “Breakdown can always point to the break-through of a deeper truth, since only that which is false in you can break down. Truth does not break. Some call this recognition ‘waking up,’ some call it ‘self-realization.’”

* When facts kill our wishes, a few of us may seek to kill ourselves to wipe out the pain of the dying wish, what the suicide researcher Edwin Shneidman called “psychache.” 3 Experiencing the living death of the dying dream, we may choose physical death to abort the painful birth known as grieving.

* Waiting is the magic wand we hope will make life fit our fantasy, but our fantasies must change to fit what is here.

* When we stop waiting for life to change, we change instead. Every crisis in life cracks our defenses and unlocks our feelings, revealing hidden dimensions in ourselves. And after bearing those hidden dimensions, we experience insights rising from within. When we dive inside, we experience ourselves more deeply and find the wisdom for which we longed. Then we can choose whether to deny or embrace it.

* Feelings are forms of love, invitations to embrace what is, so the false can drop, revealing the real in you.

* Revenge is a form of magic. When we exact revenge, we pretend that we can get rid of our pain by putting it in other people.

* Why do we tell ourselves lies? To avoid the feelings that arise when we face and embrace reality.
We often avoid the truths of our lives by waiting for fantasies to become true rather than face what is true. Waiting for what is real to become unreal is how we lie to ourselves about our loved ones, ourselves, and life itself. We suffer because we fight reality, a fight we always lose.

* no matter how much we fight reality, reality always wins.

* Rather than face what is, we may choose what is not here, waiting for our fantasies to appear and make reality disappear. When we maintain our illusions, the life we have passes by while we wait for a fantasy life that never arrives. Thus, the losses of life are compounded by the losses we inflict upon ourselves.

* We get attached to fantasies of how we should be loved, respected, or desired. Our suffering is not caused by these fantasies but by our attachment to them.

* Reality often disappoints whereas fantasy seduces us with the promise of infinite fulfillment. When we see a therapist, we mourn the deaths of those seductive promises. When we avoid these painful feelings, we suffer the symptoms that result from ignoring the emotional truths of our lives. In therapy, we can face the feelings we have avoided and stop living in a world that no longer exists.

* What a difficult funeral to hold when we cling to a treasured self-image of one who is loved, victorious, admired, or right. These self-images are the conceptual clothes that hide who we are. Life pulls them out of our hands and we cry, but we have one more strategy for clinging to our self-image: we can treat sadness as a problem to work through and get over.

Our grief is not a problem, however, but a path. When we grieve, we surrender to the truth that washes away the false and leaves behind the real. We do not get over grief but live through it in a communion with what is. In this communion, we need not give up our illusions since the tears wash away our attachment to the fantasies that ward off life.

* The degree of our suffering equals our distance from reality. Rather than end our suffering by running toward the truth, we run farther away from it through food, work, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Mistakenly considered addictions, they merely point to the true addiction. We are addicted to not being here. We don’t want to feel what we’re feeling. We don’t want the present but the imaginary past or future.

* We are hooked on an imaginary experience of the not-me, not-now: the universal addiction. Food, drugs, Internet, sex, fame, work, and booze are tools we use to leave the real world for an imaginary world of how we think people ought to be. We long for an idealized past or future, which never existed. We can’t live yesterday today. Rather than be present to what is present, we wait for what we wish was present.

* We imagine that if we lived in a different time or place, we would find our inner home of calm, rest, and contentment. Craving the not-me, not-here, and not-now keeps us homeless. We try to escape from this moment by racing to the next, but this moment is the only home we ever have.

* We try to run away from our problems: the geographical cure, but we cannot lift ourselves out of life. No matter where we go, our shadow follows: our feelings. Everything we run away from inside us always reaches out for our love. Yet rather than reach out to what reaches out to us, we race away, refusing to sit in, rest in, and be transformed by our feelings.

* We are addicted to not bearing what we feel or being who we are. We are stoned on imaginary selves, imaginary others, and imaginary states of mind: the real drugs.

* Defenses are the lies we tell ourselves to avoid pain.

* Rather than face what is, we pick the parts of life that fit our fantasy, reject the rest, and try to live outside reality. We think we are running from the outer world, but we are running from what the outer world evokes: the inner world—our feelings and anxiety. And we never escape from who we are.

* Rather than embrace life and ourselves, we engage in cherry-picking or its opposite. One man seized on the most negative facts of his life, turning them over in his mind repeatedly until he suffered from chronic rumination. Obsessed with the worst, he could not see how he created a partial view of the universe or that his negative view, not the universe, caused his suffering. He mistook his rumination, a cherished habit, for a higher form of thought. To counter this, I noted that when we see dog feces on the sidewalk, we manage to walk by rather than pick it up, sniff it, and put it in our pocket. Startled, he stared at me and asked, “Oh, you mean I’m a turd hunter?”

* When no longer searching for turds, we hunt for a better truth elsewhere rather than face the truth that is always here. Why don’t we see it? We have blind spots. And since we always have blind spots, we always need others to help us see what we don’t see. For instance, one fellow claimed, “You wouldn’t believe how humble I’ve become!”
Therapy doesn’t eliminate blind spots. It helps us accept our never-ending blindness, so we can welcome feedback from those who see what we cannot. Terrified of our fear, we avoid feedback through illusions and defenses and become blind to the world outside them.

* We enter therapy not knowing what causes our problems. We start by saying, “I don’t get it. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, but it’s not working.” We have theories to explain our suffering, but those theories, like, “he’s an asshole,” turn out to be forms of blindness, and because we cherish those theories, we ask others to agree: “Don’t you think he was wrong?”

* The Roman theologian Tertullian lamented two thousand years ago that “the first reaction to the truth is hatred.” 7 Hatred tries to make reality disappear, and its constant failure to do so accounts for its violence; hatred always rises as if it only needed to become larger than life to overcome it.

* Another lie we tell is devaluation. One woman claimed I was useless, my comments were ridiculous, and the therapy was worthless. She devalued me, her close friends, and her family, alienating them and punishing herself with a lifetime of loneliness.
All of us will be devalued. It’s nothing personal about us; it’s something impersonal about the defenses devaluers use. It’s not the hydrant’s fault when the dog lifts his leg, nor is it our fault when people devalue us. People claim we have no value to avoid depending on the value we offer. Through devaluation they ward off the danger of depending upon others. Or people may deny our value to achieve an imaginary victory when they envy our genuine success. Unable to tolerate their envy, they devalue in us what they cannot find within themselves.

* Whenever we invite anyone to form a close relationship with us, our invitation will stir up memories of past relationships. In this woman’s past, the ones she loved had hurt her. My offer of help stirred up mixed feelings: she wanted my actual care and feared my imagined cruelty.
Rather than risk being devalued as she was in the past, she devalued people in the present. She enacted her past: “Since you will abandon and devalue me if I depend on you, I will devalue you first.”
When people devalue us, we may feel angry, as they felt when others devalued them. If we do not recognize this anger, we may turn it on ourselves: “Maybe she’s right: I am not good enough.” Or, intimidated by her, we might submit to devaluation as the patient submitted to her mother: “Since she gets angry when I talk, maybe she will like me if I stay quiet.”

* Devaluations are not insights but mind droppings. We are not useless; her devaluation is. Ironically, devaluation reveals our worth—what the devaluer envies and cannot tolerate receiving from us. Devaluation starves a person of any healthy human connection. It tries to kill off anything good that triggers envy.

* When people devalue us, we set limits to keep our relationship from becoming a latrine. 14 If we agree with a person’s devaluation, we encourage her to commit a crime: killing a relationship. We should never submit to devaluation, even though life and therapy involve submission. We submit to the truth, not to a lie, and devaluation is a lie told to us.

* When we doubt ourselves, we refuse to sit with our feelings to discover who will emerge. We preworry, filling the future with fears rather than going into the unknown of who we are.
We go through life with a candle, imagining that the light shows the world when it reveals only a sliver of life. Our true value lies not within the light but in the darkness. Who knows our future? No one. The task is to surrender to and embrace the unknown of ourselves.
Letting go of doubt’s certainty, we realize how it blinded us to our true potential. And as we let go of the lie of self-denigration, feelings open our eyes so we can live the truth formerly hidden under self-doubt.

* Rather than push others to fit our ideas, we must become receptive, allowing what is happening to push our ideas to fit what is real.

* Who has not hoped that love in the present could erase pain in the past? We wish love could do magic, and faced with enormous pain, therapists can wish the same. A psychotherapist years ago invited patients to put on diapers, sit in his lap, and suck on a baby bottle. He tried to reparent them to undo parental failures.
Alas, what is lost is lost. Refathering, remothering, and reparenting are not therapy but magic, attempts to fill the void in the past with fantasies in the present. We can’t make the dead alive. We can’t rewind and rerecord the DVD of life. Unable to wipe out the past, we can only create a better present, accepting loss as part of life.
While we wish we could erase the pain of the past through love, we must face the limitations of life, loss, and death so real healing can occur. Therapy cannot replace what we lost, but it can help us let go of our barriers to love. Then we can mourn what was impossible in the past to form what is possible today.
It is impossible to melt defenses with love. Love is not water, and defenses are not ice. Trying to melt defenses with love is like trying to light a fire while our partner throws water on it. In this blind love, we don’t see the whole person, only the part we want.

* Every time we let go of a lie, we get closer to what is. The therapist interrupts defenses—habits of thought, customary commentaries, popular projections, the barricades we erect to separate ourselves from our loved ones—so we can listen. We become open to them—not our ideas about them.

* To understand therapy, we must ask whom therapists relate to: a list of symptoms, a diagnosis, or a personality disorder? No, therapists relate to the person hidden under the symptoms, the symptoms caused by the divorce from his inner life.
Then therapists encourage us to undo that divorce and embrace our feelings.

* When we come for therapy, we bring the history of our suffering—sometimes in words and sometimes in the ways we treat ourselves. If others have hurt us in the past, we often hurt ourselves today in invisible ways, perpetuating our suffering in the present. The therapist, seeing our subtle forms of self-harm, doesn’t go on a fishing expedition into the past. Instead, she points out how we hurt ourselves in the present.

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Stalingrad

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the Vassily Grossman novel:

* When he spoke about the predicament of science in Czechoslovakia, his voice began to quaver. Then he shouted, “It’s impossible to describe, you have to see it with your own eyes! Scientific thought is in fetters. People are afraid of their own shadows. They’re afraid of their fellow workers. Professors are afraid of their students. People’s thoughts, their inner lives, their families and friendships—everything is under fascist control. A man I once studied with—we sat at the same table and worked through eighteen organic chemistry syntheses together, we’ve known each other for thirty years—this friend of mine begged me not to ask him any questions whatsoever. He’s the head of an important faculty, but he behaves like some petty criminal, afraid the police might collar him at any moment. ‘Don’t ask me anything at all,’ he said. ‘It’s not only my colleagues I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of my own voice. I’m afraid of my own thoughts.’ He was petrified I might quote something he’d said and that even if I didn’t mention his name—or his university or even his city—the Gestapo would be able to trace this back to him. You can learn more from simple people—from chambermaids and porters, from drivers and footmen. They think they’re anonymous and so they have less to fear from talking to a foreigner. But intellectuals and scientists have lost all capacity for freedom of thought—they’ve lost the right to call themselves human beings. In science, fascism now rules. Its theories are terrifying, and tomorrow these theories will become practice. They already have become practice. People talk seriously about sterilization and eugenics. One doctor told me that the mentally ill and the tubercular are being murdered. People’s hearts and minds are going dark. Words like freedom , conscience and compassion are being persecuted. People are being forbidden to speak them to children or to write them in private letters. That’s fascism for you—and may it be damned!”

* [At the Moscow zoo:] Just then a fox cub emerged from the bushes. He looked anxious and troubled; his face looked baleful and his tail was sweeping from side to side. His eyes shone, and his thin, moulting flanks were rising and falling very rapidly. He was longing to take part in the game; he would steal forward a few steps and then, overcome by fear, flatten himself against the ground and freeze. All of a sudden he leaped forward and threw himself into the fray with an odd little squeal, playful yet somehow pitiful. The dingo pups knocked him off his feet, and he lay there on one side. His eyes still shone and he was trustfully exposing his belly. Then he let out a piercing cry of reproach—one of the dingo pups must have bitten him too hard. This was the end of him: the dingo pups went for his throat, and the game on the grass turned into a murder. A keeper ran up, plucked the dead creature out of the melee and carried it away; hanging down from the keeper’s hand were a skinny dead tail and a dead snout, with one open eye. The red dingo pups responsible for this murder followed the keeper, their curled tails quivering with intense excitement.

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Is Ron Klain the real president? (12-31-21)

Posted on December 30, 2021 by Luke Ford

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