Month: August 2020

by William Skink

Who is Mary Sheehy Moe? Is she an epidemiologist studying infectious diseases? No, she’s a former school teacher and former State Representative who wrote an essay that appeals to older people like James Conner, who provided his platform for Moe’s indelicate call to cancel school for the foreseeable future, which starts with this:

I’m just going to blurt it right out: Call off on-campus schooling for the foreseeable future. There is no way, in the throes of a pandemic, you can protect the safety of all the people in the school environment and all the people they go home to on a daily basis AND retain the advantages of in-class instruction. Yes, remote learning is not the same. But neither is what we’re planning, and all these labor-intensive exercises charting out inane details cannot blot out the big picture we’ll do anything NOT to see: We are stuck in this time and space. There is no new normal. It is what it is: a pandemic.

In order to keep ALL people safe in “the school environment” Mary Moe is demanding school kids stay home indefinitely. Yes, this would greatly insulate teachers from our snot-nosed kids, so why not apply this logic to “the grocery store environment” as well? Why are we allowing so many icky bodies into so many physical structures to possibly infect so many front-line workers?

For parents who think it’s still important to get paychecks in order to eat and and service housing costs, Moe feels your pain, but kids being back in school is just not in anyone’s interest:

Going back to school with a pandemic spiking is NOT in the best interest of children. Nor is it in the best interest of their parents, in spite of the fact that they dread an autumn like last spring and need to get back to work and want to believe that the old normal can return simply by ferocity of wishing. Parents, I’m not judging you. I would be feeling exactly the same way if I had school-aged children and a career to worry about. We should be helping you and your children with resources for the new reality, not filling your heads with bubble-licious.

It’s nice to know we parents aren’t being judged by a woman who has no school-aged kids and no longer needs to work.

And it’s equally heartening to know Moe totally thinks we parents “SHOULD” be assisted with resources. But where O where are these “resources” going to come from? Does this former Democrat politician have anything critical to say about the current Democrat Governor who continues to sit on a pile of Covid cash like Scrooge McDuck?

No, instead Moe plays the teacher victim card and makes parents out be labor exploiters pawning off their kids to make “tons of money”, but before getting to that gross generalization, here is how Moe envisions recess playing out in our new normal:

Imagine recess, for instance: Kids playing the game du jour with gloves on their hands and masks on their faces, the ball being washed after the accidents that will happen. Kids being shushed singing jump rope songs – “the droplets!” Kid standing in a socially distanced line waiting for the monkey bars to be cleaned between each child’s romp. Kids being monitored by a masked adult with an electronic whistle or perhaps a pool noodle to corral the errant children erupting in a game of tag into the tiresome, deadening, ever-present, socially distanced, droplet-free zone. My generation blamed decades of substance abuse on the trauma of hiding under our desks for 15 minutes waiting for the atom bomb to hit. This pales in comparison.

Is this a threat? Because it kinda sounds like one. It sounds like Mary Sheehy Moe is using the threat of traumatizing my children to get the indefinite closure of schools she is calling for.

In the next paragraph, Moe shifts from her dystopian vision of pandemic schooling to that gross generalization of money-making parents I mentioned above:

May I mention the teachers and staff – what we now call “essential workers,” which, loosely defined, means “people we pay squat and treat worse so that they can take care of our kids while we go off to be big shots and make a ton of money”? What kind of magical thinking does it take to believe that a workforce 33% of whom are over 50 years old and a goodly number of whom suffer from debilitating conditions, are going to be just fine in that petri dish of humanity we call a public school?

I ended up deleting a bunch of different ways of responding to this because they all included profanity.

Instead I’ll say this; parents and teachers are both being put in difficult to impossible situations while politicians politicize the issue, and while Governor Bullock waits for some unknown reason to use relief funds, and while the billionaire class is getting RICHER and RICHER.

And while all that’s going on, Mary Sheehy Moe thought hey, you know who else had to learn under difficult conditions? Anne Frank!

Anne Frank probably didn’t learn in quite the same way the 761 days she spent in hiding. But anyone who has read her diary cannot doubt that she learned … or that her forced isolation in turn forced a level of study and reflection deeper than what any kids experiences in any school.

Atom bombs and Anne Frank are the images Mary Moe is conjuring, and maybe that’s appropriate, considering the grand vista at the apex of American power her generation enjoyed, but for some reason I don’t think that imagery will resonate with two paycheck households and one parent families wondering how the fuck they are going to survive the coming weeks and months.

by William Skink

I’m going to take another stab at articulating why I think Jasun Horsley’s work is so important, though I’m not sure I can do much to improve on Dan Mitchell’s comment, which you can read here or below the fold at the bottom of this post.

The arrival of Vice Of Kings and Prisoner Of Infinity in my mailbox could not have come at a more ideal time. I had pledged on Independence Day to abstain from drinking alcohol because I was tired of this chemical dependency I had used to self-medicate for far too long.

Why was I self-medicating?

In my recent past I could point to the vicarious trauma I absorbed by working with people in crisis at the homeless shelter. Vicarious trauma is a real, recognized phenomena, defined as

…the emotional residue of exposure that counselors have from working with people as they are hearing their trauma stories and become witnesses to the pain, fear, and terror that trauma survivors have endured.

While I wasn’t in a formal counseling relationship with the clients I worked with, the nature of triage that our decrepit social support systems are faced with day to day translates into most social workers wearing “multiple hats” so to speak in trying to meet the needs of so many people.

While this explanation makes sense, it doesn’t explain my pre-social-worker habits, so to be honest with myself I went farther back to acknowledge that even the childhood experience of having a workaholic father can prime a person in the early stages of development to having a greater chance later in life of developing addictive coping strategies.

One of the best looks at the root causes of addiction is the work of Dr. Gabor Maté, especially his book In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Here is a very basic summation of Maté’s work from his website:

Turning to the neurobiological roots of addiction, Dr. Maté presents an astonishing array of scientific evidence showing conclusively that:

1. addictive tendencies arise in the parts of our brains governing some of our most basic and life-sustaining needs and functions: incentive and motivation, physical and emotional pain relief, the regulation of stress, and the capacity to feel and receive love;

2. these brain circuits develop, or don’t develop, largely under the influence of the nurturing environment in early life, and that therefore addiction represents a failure of these crucial systems to mature in the way nature intended; and

3. the human brain continues to develop new circuitry throughout the lifespan, including well into adulthood, giving new hope for people mired in addictive patterns. Dr. Maté then examines the current mainstream.

While Gabor Maté offers a more clinical approach to understanding the deeper psychological engines that drive the consequences of early childhood adversity–like addiction–Jasun Horsley’s approach includes selflessly using himself as an example of how trauma manifests, while simultaneously (and sympathetically) deconstructing the incredibly complex narratives of trauma that seem to lurk beneath fantastic cover stories like Whitley Strieber’s; cover stories that are being exploited to further a larger agenda that the traumatized storytellers are not fully conscious of.

Before the fortuitous arrival of VOK and POI, I had two main branches of books in my library that engaged with these topics: occult books with authors who are often times too enthusiastic about this material (whereas I am deeply suspicious), and books with an overt Christian perspective with hokey religious language that makes it hard to read.

Horsley’s work carves out a middle ground that understands occult dynamics as a once active practitioner, while at the same time reassessing a liberal cultural upbringing that conditioned him to deplore Christian Conservatives in the UK like Mary Whitehouse, one of the most vocal opponents (at the time) of the Paedophile Information Exchange, or PIE.

For those unaware of the overt effort in the 70’s and 80’s to mainstream pedophilia in the UK, here’s a BBC article from 2014 that asks the very good question How Did The Pro-Paedophile Group PIE Exist Openly For 10 Years? From the link:

PIE was formed in 1974. It campaigned for “children’s sexuality”. It wanted the government to axe or lower the age of consent. It offered support to adults “in legal difficulties concerning sexual acts with consenting ‘under age’ partners”. The real aim was to normalise sex with children.

Journalist Christian Wolmar remembers their tactics. “They didn’t emphasise that this was 50-year-old men wanting to have sex with five-year-olds. They presented it as the sexual liberation of children, that children should have the right to sex,” he says.

It’s an ideology that seems chilling now. But PIE managed to gain support from some professional bodies and progressive groups. It received invitations from student unions, won sympathetic media coverage and found academics willing to push its message.

Well, that was the 70’s, you might say. Or, if you’re a conservative, you can try to rationalize it away as being just those liberal pervs.

More recent attempts to normalize pedophilia have been identified and content subsequently removed, like at Salon, which some think was a mistake. A TED talk was also removed:

An independently organized TEDx event recently posted, and subsequently removed, a talk from the TEDx YouTube channel that the event organizer titled: “Why our perception of pedophilia has to change.”

After reviewing the talk, we believe it cites research in ways that are open to serious misinterpretation. This led some viewers to interpret the talk as an argument in favor of an illegal and harmful practice. TED would like to make clear that it does not promote pedophilia.

If you think it’s just liberal platforms dealing with this difficult topic, remember Milo Yiannopoulos? He had to resign from Breitbart after disclosing his own problematic sexual relationship with an older man when he was a teen, and how that relationship informed his opinion that these relationships can be consensual and mutually beneficial. From Wikipedia:

In the interview in a January 2016 episode of the podcast Drunken Peasants, Yiannopoulos stated that sexual relationships between 13-year-old boys and adult men and women can “happen perfectly consensually”, because some 13-year-olds are, in his view, sexually and emotionally mature enough to consent to sex with adults; he spoke favourably both of gay 13-year-old boys having sex with adult men and straight 13-year-old boys having sex with adult women. He used his own experience as an example, saying he was mature enough to be capable of giving consent at a young age. He also stated that “paedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old, who is sexually mature” but rather that “paedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.” Later in the interview, after his previous comments received some pushback from the hosts, he stated: “I think the age of consent law is probably about right, that is probably roughly the right age … but there are certainly people who are capable of giving consent at a younger age, I certainly consider myself to be one of them.”[68]

Yiannopoulos subsequently held a press conference, at which he said he had been the victim of child abuse, and that his comments were a way to cope with it. He declined to identify his abusers or discuss the incidents in any detail. He characterised his comments as the “usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humour”, and dismissed the allegation that he endorses child molestation. He alleged that the video had been edited to give a misleading impression, and stated, “I will not apologise for dealing with my life experiences in the best way that I can, which is humour. No one can tell me or anyone else who has lived through sexual abuse how to deal with those emotions. But I am sorry to other abuse victims if my own personal way of dealing with what happened to me has hurt you.”[69] In response to the controversy, Simon & Schuster cancelled its plans to publish his autobiography in June 2017. Media outlets reported on 20 February that Breitbart was considering terminating Yiannopoulos’ contract as a result of the controversy. Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart on 21 February, reportedly under pressure to do so.[70]

It is sad to see our society’s total failure to grapple with this immense cultural crisis. We can’t even seem to acknowledge it IS a crisis, even as unsealed testimony suggests people like Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton engaged in sexual acts with minors.

Instead, for the next three months, we are going to be treated to a political circus featuring two cognitively declining sexual abusers vying for control of a America’s hegemonic death machine. Fun times.

For me, Horsley’s work has been an antidote to this madness. He has shown me there is a middle ground between waiting for the rapture and giving in to the DO WHAT THOU WILT anything goes mindset that seeks any little crack (liberal or otherwise) to get its claws into our culture.

For an even better championing of Jasun Horsley’s work, Dan Mitchell’s comment is reproduced in full after the fold. Thanks for reading.

Continue reading “On Trauma, Cultural Sickness and Healing”

by William Skink

My ability to write posts day after day is, in part, a result of leaving my paid employment earlier this year to try something different (don’t worry, this is not a precursor to a money ask).

Isn’t funny how one can make plans about a life change that was going to include in-person art performance pieces and strange toy cut-up sculptures, just to have a pesky pandemic turn the world upside down, isn’t it?

While I’ve been rethinking and adapting and going where certain leads are taking me, one thing I’d like to do is to more formalize the posting schedule here at RD.

I am going to try and maintain what has become a morning posting routine, with local-ish issues getting most of my attention Monday through Friday.

Saturdays I’d like to dedicate to more artistic-focused posts, whether that’s a William Skink poem, or something else.

Sundays will be more heady material, like spiritual/metaphysical/philosophical topics and explorations. For example, tomorrow’s post will be a continued look at Jasun Horsley’s work, author of The Vice of Kings and Prisoner of Infinity.

Since it’s Saturday, I have both a poem and a song by the Gorrilaz for your enjoyment. The theme is DEMON (author’s note: as our political rhetoric gets more absurd I’m going to be tempted to write increasingly obscene verses, so readers beware).

Enjoy!

DEMON SEX

partisans in masks
will do most anything
to smear opposition
like guilt associating

first, find a nut
a doctor tied to Trump
who claims fucking demons
makes cysts appear on cunts

it’s such an easy trick
what can skeptics do?
any energy spent
means they win, you lose

so mask up, motherfuckers
there’s nothing you can say
accept their fabric dogma
or die like Herman Cain

by William Skink

Partisan Democrats who believe any conspiracy theory involving Russia (to avoid responsibility for their candidate losing to Trump in 2016) are gleefully writing about sex with demons.

Why, you ask?

Because equating mask skepticism with conspiratorial absurdities creates a guilt by association deterrent for weak-minded people who are more afraid of ridicule than they are of the possibility they are being lied to by their trusted media sources.

From the link:

Montana Republican leaders, who refuse to believe Dr. Anthony Fauci, the physician and immunologist who has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since the Reagan Administration, are convinced that the social media giants and globalists who run the world are hiding the truth presented by a doctor named Stella Immanuel, a viral sensation in the right-wing world who claimed that pharmaceutical companies are lying when they say hydroxychloroquine isn’t effective and declared that we don’t need to wear masks to stop the spread of COVID-19.

And here is the fun list of crazy this Immanuel apparently subscribes to:

• “gynecological problems, such as endometriosis, cysts and infertility, are caused by individuals having sex with demons and witches in their dreams.”
• reptilians run the government.
• Alien DNA is used in medical treatments.
• researchers are working on a vaccine to turn people away from religion.
  Magic 8 Ball toys are a gateway to witchcraft.

While it’s easy to tar and feather Republicans with this tactic, it’s a little more challenging to extend this guilt-by-association technique to an entire government of a foreign nation, like the Dutch government and it’s decision to NOT advise its citizens to wear masks everywhere:

The decision was announced by Minister for Medical Care Tamara van Ark after a review by the country’s National Institute for Health (RIVM). The government will instead seek better adherence to social distancing rules after a surge in coronavirus cases in the country this week, Van Ark said at a press conference in The Hague.

“Because from a medical perspective there is no proven effectiveness of masks, the Cabinet has decided that there will be no national obligation for wearing non-medical masks” Van Ark said.

The decision bucks the trend as many European countries have made masks mandatory in stores or crowded outdoor areas.

No word on Van Ark’s opinions on the origin of vaginal cysts. And yet somehow the article continues:

RIVM chief Jaap van Dissel said that the organization was aware of studies that show masks help slow the spread of disease but it was not convinced they will help during the current coronavirus outbreak in the Netherlands.

He argued wearing masks incorrectly, together with worse adherence to social distancing rules, could increase the risk of transmitting the disease.

“So we think that if you’re going to use masks (in a public setting) … then you must give good training for it,” he said.

As I go about my daily life in Missoula I see all manner of stupid when it comes to masks. There is also plenty of stupid emanating from the “smart people” on social media.

I saw one tweet claiming only men are dumb enough to not cover their noses with masks, but yesterday (as I was buying ammo) the female clerk at the sporting goods store had her schnoz exposed, and guess what I did to unleash my superior knowledge on her reckless ignorance?

Nothing. I did nothing. The only muffled words that came from my masked face was THANK YOU as she handed me my purchase.

Despite the best efforts of partisans to mock and ridicule anyone who doesn’t mindlessly accept their preferred dictates from their preferred media sources, skepticism about the array of solutions being presented to us is trickling into places like Democracy Now!.

I don’t normally listen to Democracy Now!, but I caught some of this episode on KBGA while driving around. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Amy Goodman use the Republican urge toward deregulation and Big Pharma’s profit motive to exhibit some vaccine skepticism, but the question put to Chomsky was almost totally ignored. Here is the exchange:

AMY GOODMAN: Do people have reason to be afraid, Professor Chomsky, about a vaccine that has been developed, in Trump’s words, the name of the program “Warp Speed”? That in his zeal at deregulation to get a vaccine, which so many people want around the world, that there would be a danger in the original vaccines?

NOAM CHOMSKY: If vaccines are rushed through, there is always a danger. It means that many of the possibilities simply haven’t been tested. That’s what happens when you rush things through. Maybe the balance of costs and benefits says you should do it anyway. But what are we going to do? We are talking about the United states, how to distribute a vaccine. What about Africa? What about Yemen? What about poor areas of Latin America? And what about the huge mass of deeply impoverished people in India? What is going to happen to them? That’s most of the population of the world.

While I haven’t written much about masks, I have been reading and listening to various sources. I can’t say I have any firm conclusions, but I will say this: I won’t be mocked and ridiculed away from my well-founded skepticism when it comes to mask mandates, vaccine safety, and the financial incentive driving Big Pharma.

As my wife and I prepare for whatever school is going to look like, the prospect of my children being forced to wear masks all day has me GREATLY concerned, so I expect I’ll be writing more about this topic in the days and weeks ahead.

What I WON’T be writing about is sex with demons. For that lurid content, you’ll have to read the journalist wannabes at The Montana Post.