MiraiRonin

Thanks ofd. That's some good background to why Stef takes this approach, and one I hadn't heard before.

Hi Coleman. I've had some friends do the Landmark Forum who say that it's improved their lives immensely, but I'm torn about it for the following reasons. Firstly, what I've heard from my friends and what I've read suggests that it's about enforcing personal responsibility, stopping your history from determining your future, and not projecting your past onto your relationships. All of that sounds damn good. In fact, it sounds like the call-ins to Stef about relationship or self-knowledge questions. Back when I first started listening to FDR Stef would go in in deep with these callers for an hour or more. Stef's approach is to question the caller thoroughly about their question, situation, personal history and childhood, draw parallels between the past and the decisions the caller is making today, and discuss how to overcome those patterns of behavior. Importantly, Stef insists on absolute personal responsibility and honesty. He unhesitatingly calls out lies, contradictions, evasions, minimizations, and any attempt to avoid answering questions. Through this, the caller comes to realizations they may not have otherwise. The Forum's method includes something of this, so that appeals to me. On the other hand, Stef counters the caller's resistance with reason and evidence (usually by pointing out something the caller said but then tried to gloss over). Some reading I've done suggests that when Forum participants make excuses, and especially if they criticize Landmark's methods, they are met with abuse, mockery, and public shaming in front of a group that has been primed to police your and each other's behavior. Less correcting factual errors via logic and more silencing dissent via emotion. The other reason I don't like the Forum is also the reason I didn't join; the ferocious, manipulative, borderline-abusive hard-sell. I attended a home introduction to Landmark, and went through one of these for two hours, and it was miserable. I almost caved but thankfully another friend who was there (and didn't sign up) gave me the social backing I needed to refuse. My memory of that event has kept me away ever since. On top of that, my reading suggests you get called on throughout the Forum to sign up for the advanced course, and are required to bring a friend or family member to the "graduation ceremony". There, your guest is surrounded by Landmark sales reps and pressured to sign up for the Forum. This is exactly what happened when my sister attended the graduation of a Forum-going friend. I don't want that again; not for me, sure as hell not for anyone I care about. So that's a big and enduring turn-off. And just to put the cherry on it, the friends who did the course seem to have cut me off, and I think it's because of my persistent refusal to follow them. Here are the sources I've been referring to. Have a look and see what you think. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/inside-the-landmark-forum_b_90028.html https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/14/ameliahill.theobserver http://www.xojane.com/newagey/landmark-forum-cult http://www.gq.com/story/landmark-forum-get-confident-stupid-gq-may-2005 http://www.philosophyforlife.org/category/landmark-forum/ http://www.mypracticalphilosophy.com/shelp/landmarkforum.htm EDIT: Mentioned the personal experience of Landmark's hard-sell to one of my siblings.

Greetings. I'm here because I've got a problem and only just realized how serious it is. I realized I'm in the grip of eternal student syndrome, and that it's just a symptom of a bigger problem. Specifically, I've never initiated a project of my own accord and seen it through to the end. A summary of my current status: 31 year old white male. Studied potentially useful university degree (chemistry and Japanese studies) Never made meaningful use of first degree. Got dead-end clerical job. Still in dead-end clerical job after seven years Decided 'enough was enough' and decided to... get a second degree. Currently studying potentially very useful second degree (robotic engineering) Plagued with doubt about my 'interest' in robotics (If I loved and enjoyed this stuff so much, why wasn't I teaching myself for years before?) Extremely isolated; often not leaving the house except for work or study. No close friends. Strained relationship with family (All on the left. High school best friend is a government employee. Formerly close sister a radical feminist. Some strain inevitable after listening to FDR for years) Never had a romantic relationship. Never had sex. As you can see, things are pretty grim. I recognize how all the above are either unacceptable or at least symptoms of an unacceptable situation. It's all the more galling because I have been listening to FDR for years. I have heard countless examples of good and responsible, brave and honorable ways to live life, yet I never enacted any of them in my life. All the time and energy that could've built a great life, has been devoted to the creation of self-justifying excuses, and, to paraphrase this, refusing to grow up, cocooning myself in a shell of post-industrial creature comforts, never evolving, never building or achieving, and self-medicating my inner needs with my choice of instant gratification du jour. This all became crystal clear to me last night when I went to a fundraising concert organized by a former friend of mine. The concert was a huge success, and the painful part for me was realizing, in the clipped greetings and farewells and the silence in between, that we were no longer friends. She had successfully completed a massive project, and now moved in a world full of colleagues, supporters, friends and admirers, in which I had no part. In which I was dead weight, or even a detriment. And I had no one but myself to blame. I know I can get no absolution for this; philosophy is not a confessional. But I am here for anything you want to give me that can stop me from staying up late watching my cartoons, fooling myself into surprise every time, fooling myself that this is a life. So please, give me advice, encouragement, sympathy, criticism, a kick in the ass, a high-res photo of my horrible future shoved into my face as you scream "LOOK! LOOK!". Any and all of healthy social praise and scorn that I have so carefully avoided for years. I'll contact Mike about getting a call-in as well. If anyone lives in Oz, around the Sydney area, and wants to deliver this in person, PM me; I would dearly love to meet some fellow FDR listeners after all this time, even if it is only to get a taste of bitter medicine. Now I just have to force myself to click 'post' instead of 'cancel'.

Thaaaaaat's the one. The one who kept saying "if you'd just take ten minutes out of your day and just try MDM" and things of that nature. I remember his description of having a trip where he talked to aliens about how to make an infinite power source and thinking "a super-smart alien race would not come up with this idea. However, an underachieving drug user who doesn't understand physics? Maybe."

This isn't a current event strictly speaking, but current events where this isn't relevant are few and far between. "Seriously though, we've heard a lot about extremism recently, a nastier, harsher atmosphere everywhere, more abuse and bother-boy behaviour, less friendliness and tolerance and respect for opponents. Alright, but what we never hear about extremism is its advantages. Well, the biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel good, because it provides you with enemies. Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you. Attractive, isn't it? So if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway, and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons, and that if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good-natured and courteous and rational all the time. So, if you want to feel good, become an extremist. Okay, now you have a choice. If you join the hard left, they'll give you their list of authorised enemies; almost all kinds of authority, especially the police, the city, Americans, judges, multinational corporations, public schools, furriers, newspaper owners, fox-hunters, generals, class traitors and, of course, moderates. Or, if you'd rather be an extremist on the hard right, no problem, fine, you still get a lovely list of enemies, only they're different ones. Noisy minority groups, unions, Russia, weirdos, demonstrators, welfare sponges, meddlesome clergy, peaceniks, the BBC, strikers, social workers, Communists, and, of course, moderates. And upstart actors. Now, once you're armed with one of these super lists of enemies, you can be as nasty as you like and yet feel your behaviour's morally justified. So you can strut around abusing people and telling them you could eat them for breakfast, and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth, a fighter for the greater good, and not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are."

This first aired in 2000. The more things change...

Found this blog post online and wanted to ask American FDR listeners what they thought of it (I'm in Australia); the author claims that predictions of a close election are groundless and we are about to witness a pro-Trump landslide. Are his facts accurate, his reasoning plausible? The original blog post is here: https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/destruction-of-nate-silver/ Destruction of Nate Silver Why aren’t you guys quoting Nate Silver anymore? Because he’s a crock. He hasn’t been ‘mistakenly’ wrong. He has been wrong again, and again, and again.Check it out. Everyone is going to be looking at the Trump vs. Clinton general election from the prism of 2000 battleground. “First, let us give these states to Clinton, those states to Trump, and focus on the one or few battleground states.” 2000 was close because both candidates sucked. Gore? Bush Jr.? 2004 was also close because both candidates sucked. Bush Jr.? Kerry? 2008 was completely misread by people since 2006 was misread by people. Democrats won control of the House in 2006 due to conservative districts punishing Republican GW Bush Administration by voting for the Democrat. After all, Obama campaigned on lower taxes, stronger military, etc. Carville hilariously wrote a book saying that there would be 40 more years of Democratic control. 2012, you have Obama vs Romney, a terribel(sic.) candidate. Here is why 2016 won’t be ‘close’ in the perspective of 2000 type ‘battleground’ scenarios and ‘ground game’ crap. First, I think we are in a Re-Alignment. I know this is said every election, but we are due for one. Liberal and Conservative alignment is dead. What is happening is a Globalist vs Nationalist alignment. Republicans would be very smart to have Trump help undergo the alignment of Republicans into Nationalists. The Democrats, especially with their super-delegate bullshit, are delaying their inevitable re-alignment into a Globalist Party. They will get there, but it may be a shellacking for a general election or two in order to get it. Second, most people reading this site have never seen a true landslide election. The strangest general election ever was Carter’s. Reagan and Nixon won 49 states in two of their elections. The point is that the 2000-ish ‘this is going to be CLOSE and battleground states OMG’ type thinking may not apply here. It could very well be a blowout. Trump, like Reagan and Nixon, will get Democrat votes. Laffer, from the infamous Laffer’s Curve, predicts Republican candidate to win 47 states. He predicts this because he has seen Nixon and Reagan elections because in those cases the Democratic Party put up a ‘machine candidate’ who just royally sucked. Hillary Clinton royally sucks. I think she is the worst (electoral wise) candidate the Democrats could have chosen. They could have put in anyone else. Third, Hillary Clinton will be the first time we have ever had a female Presidential candidate. How will people respond? I do not think they will respond well. So many women do not want a female president. We have had two instances of female VP picks. Mondale in 1984 (lost 49 states) and McCain in 2008 (big loss). Cruz had Fiorina as a VP pick before Indiana primary and Cruz got blown out. Inside the beltway thinking says it is good to put up female VP candidates, but the public doesn’t seem to agree. Based on this, a main female presidential candidate will likely be blown out. Fourth, Hillary Clinton has the most baggage I’ve ever seen a political candidate have. It goes beyond the emails and money cheating. I am talking Monica Lewinsky and all the other bimbo eruptions. Many young people did not live through that. They will be shocked that Hillary Clinton stuck by and allowed Bill Clinton to humiliate her again and again. I expect young feminists to vote against Hillary Clinton because of that. Fifth, Hillary Clinton is seen as ‘status quo’. With so many Americans upset at the direction the country is going (polling wise), I think this will be an anti-status quo election. Sixth, this is extremely important and will not be mentioned anywhere. Pundits think Hillary Clinton is ‘popular’ because Bill Clinton was ‘popular’. The truth was that Bill Clinton was never popular. Did you know that Bill Clinton never won a majority of the vote in either the 1992 or 1996 elections? He won majority of electoral college votes, but he couldn’t get the majority of the popular vote. In 1996, he got 49% of the vote. In 1992, he got 42% of the vote. This happened because of a third party candidate called Perot who got, astonishingly, 20% of the vote in 1992. Seventh, the pundits will have tunnel vision because they believe that unfavorable ratings are equal. They are not. Most presidential candidates try to appear as the hero. Trump, in a most brilliant move, is trying to appear as the villain. This is why the media cannot stop reporting on what he says. It is why he loves being the ‘great villain’ with GOP against him, conservative pundits against him, Democrats against him, etc. The more Trump is attacked, the stronger he gets. Trump isn’t running as a hero or as a moral saint. This is why his unfavorables are so high but he keeps winning elections. In other words, I think Hillary’s unfavorable numbers doom her but Trump’s unfavorable numbers boost him. Trump isn’t seen by his supporters as a candidate, he is seen as a murder weapon. The supporters wish to use Trump to murder the political class and destroy them as they believe they have been destroyed by their policies. In 2020, when Trump runs for re-election, Trump will reverse this and run as the hero which will leave the 2020 candidate in the dust acting like he (and it will be a male Democratic candidate in 2020) prepared to go ‘more villain’ to answer 2016’s surprising Trump win. Trump will play the devil in 2016, the angel in 2020.

In that order?

Sorry Kevin, beg to differ. Start listening around 00:34:50 for this exchange. STEF: Now, one to ten, what's this guy hovering at? Just physically ASHLEY: Just physically? Um... I'd say about a six, seven... Six may be closer, because he's slightly balding. STEF: Oh no, that's an automatic ten. ASHLEY: (laughs) Bald power!

Hi Rummycat. For overcoming this, the first thing I'd advise is cutting yourself some slack You had some hideous experiences in your childhood, for which you get both massive sympathy and massive props for being able to consciously recognise them (and not Iben Thranholm or her arguments) as the source of your emotions. There's no need to pour acid in the wound by punishing yourself for feeling the way you do. All through your childhood your growing brain was doing its job, it was analysing negative experiences and the circumstances that surrounded them, looking for red flags that would ready it to fight back in the future. When Thranholm started on about how Christianity was necessary to be a good person, your unconscious recognised the warning signs and opened the adrenalin and cortisol valves, making you angry and readying you to fight or run away. Now, I'm sure you're already aware of this, but your parents weren't evil because they were Christian. Your parents would have been horrible if they'd been atheist, sikh, muslim, shinto, buddhist (yes, even buddhist; see Stef's presentation on the Dalai Lama if you need proof), zoroastrian or anything else. They weren't evil because they were Christian, they're evil because they were evil. They were evil because they abused their privileged position as your parents to inflict abuse on you that they'd gladly inflict on everyone they met, if they thought they could get away with it. Now, you want a way to ease the anger or re-designate its target. All the above leaves me with the belief that anger with Christianity overlaps heavily with anger at your parents, and if you can heal the latter the former would be much easier to manage. The procedure for that is pretty standard; therapy, eventually followed by honest conversation and if necessary confrontation with your parents. If they admit to the harm they did you and make meaningful recompense, well and good. If not, well, you've put the evil they've done onto them and you can put them and it in the rear-view, and enable yourself to deal rationally with the problems of the rest of the world.

No problem. If anything it gets even crazier when you consider that these women's day jobs consist of selling their looks and attention to get resources from men*, but in their off-hours they spend those resources to get attention from attractive men; typifying the traditional resource transfer and turning it on its head in the space of a single day. * In the doco itself, one woman talks about being a 'hostess' which basically boils down to 'hot woman who gets paid to pretend that fat old businessmen are really interesting'.

Heh. I'm translating your image as "what the hell was the point of that?"

@ Pod I can see the logic in that; I didn't make much progress in my therapy until after I'd imbibed a fair bit of FDR. Was that the best approach? Hard to say; on the one hand, I didn't make much progress until I understood the importance of early childhood experiences and brought that perspective to my therapy sessions. On the other, would that new perspective have been as beneficial had I not had an established, positive relationship with my therapist? Tough call.

Sadly, that phased de-escalation that you're describing, where your parent's behaviour is dictated by the question "what can I get away with?", is very familiar not only to me but a lot of people. A stark example is in podcast 2718, this episode: Specifically, this part: https://youtu.be/S4E_2utxR5k?t=1h6m59s, although the entire episode is well worth a listen. What you describe with your father is very familiar to me. When I was very young, I was hit. When I got too big to hit, I got verbal aggression. When I became inured to the verbal aggression, came passive aggression, guilt, and manipulation. This continued until well after I moved out, after a few years of grimacing every time I saw him on my caller ID, that he got the message and became more patient and solicitous. Ironically that only drove home the fact that he could've reigned in his earlier unpleasant behaviour, but he didn't have to, so he didn't. The harm it was doing to our relationship in the future, or to me right there and then, were non-issues. It did cross his mind from time to time; I remember a conversation where he sadly told me that he never thought he and I would truly be close or understand each other, and like the well-programmed appeasement-bot I was at the time, I tried very hard to comfort him and tell him it wasn't true. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but moving away and letting the relationship dissipate was not the best way to deal with the situation. The best way, once I'd gotten some therapy, done some self-knowledge work and understood how my behaviour in the present was rooted in my past (to the point of being so timid around people that I was afraid to even post on these forums - seriously), the best way would have been confront him with his behaviour and the effects it had on me. This is the approach Stef champions: confront, always after consultation with and with the guidance of a therapist, but confront, and you will learn if there is any capacity for remorse or empathy in the other person on which a true relationship can be built. Not a perfect relationship, not the relationship you'd have if your father had been stable and emotionally available your whole life, but something positive and honest. And if not, well, you're freed from hoping and can make way in other parts of your life. Another podcast that may be relevant is FDR3032 - Economic Determinism: Weekend at Bernie Sanders'. About an hour in a guy calls in to talk about boundaries in relationships and the conversation struck so many chords with me, it may do the same for you. I realise we drifted pretty far from your original post Pod, was this helpful?

Stef's recent conversation with a male stripper brought to mind this documentary on a host club in Japan, where women go to, essentially, pay attractive men to pay attention to them. Below is a review of the documentary from https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/buried-treasure/2008-09-18/the-great-happiness-space; if that piques your interest the doco itself is easy enough to find online. "It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious." - Oscar Wilde By now, most anime fans are familiar with the idea of Host Clubs. Thanks partly to the success of Ouran High School Host Club, and partly due to some mainstream American media attention they've gotten (usually with a hint of "look, those sexist Japanese troglodytes now have male geisha! hur hur" in them). But as familiar and as popular as the concept is among Western fangirls, few of them have ever experienced one, and very few really knows what goes on behind the scenes. For this week's Buried Treasure, we'll take a break from reviewing old anime and instead look at a unique, moving documentary on one particular host club on Osaka. After going to many film festivals, it's out on DVD in limited form, and is absolutely fascinating look at that world, wrinkles and all. But it's just hard enough to find that most anime fans will probably never stumble across it. THE GREAT HAPPINESS SPACE Tale of an Osaka Love Thief The Great Happiness Space is the story of a host club in the Minami district of Osaka called "Stylish Café Rakkyo," a loud, lively bar with karaoke and a young clientele base. It's the number one host club in the area, and even advertises on TV. Its proprietor and #1 draw is a guy named Issei. He gets whatever girls he wants. ("I was having sex with 365 girls a year," he boasts.) And he makes a RIDICULOUS amount of money: up to US$50,000 a month. Dressed in designer couture and preening relentlessly, Issei and his team of pretty boys go out on the street every night to hustle up some customers. It's hard to argue that this is a parasitical life. Girls come in and drop an obscene amount of money -- often thousands of dollars at a time -- to spend some time with these attractive, fun guys. Alcohol flows like water. Like the gang from Ouran, the guys are all good-looking, quirky, charming and utter players. But as often happens in social circles, the underlying interplay is much more complicated, and far more interesting than what can be observed on the surface. To those who have seen Ouran, the sight of girls, giddy with delight, glomming onto their attractive host is a familiar one. "Four years ago, it would have excited me," Issei says, "but not anymore. It's rather stressful to me. I've been told 'I love you' too many times. And I'm not bragging." If only it stopped at "I love you." Every girl is after something different. For some, it's sex. (Give it to her, and she probably won't ever need to come back.) For others it's just a chat, a foot-rub, a boyfriend for the evening. They drink, they flirt, they roughhouse, they play around, and they get to be treated like princesses. British director Jake Clennell happened across Rakkyo while he was in Osaka shooting another film. It's an odd sight to see, for a foreigner: these suave, impeccably dressed young men systematically pursuing women on the street, and most of them running away and turning them down. After a brief chat, the veteran cameraman and TV documentary director got Issei's permission to film, well, everything. Nearly nothing is cut out from what Clennell witnessed over the following two weeks. The first sign that this isn't exactly the most healthy lifestyle in the world is mentioned early. Physically, there's a huge toll, as anyone over 25 who's tried to party all night can attest to. The girls often demand the guys to down entire bottles of champagne, usually in a for-hire ceremony called a Champagne Call, costing up to several thousand dollars a bottle. They're supposed to share it with their dedicated host while being cheered on by the rest of the staff, but usually the host drinks it all for them. Issei typically downs well over ten bottles a night, and throws up two or three times. "I've seen guys throw up blood," he says. "My liver's probably shot." Both the hosts and their clients are stunningly honest. The clientele couldn't be happier. "They've changed my life," is not an uncommon sentiment among them. They've fallen in love with the hosts, and are all too happy to pay a few hundred dollars a night to pretend that they're in a relationship with them. "I'd love to marry Issei," they say. He has a kind way about him, and is always ready to entertain them with ideas that they might, someday, end up together. Issei's people-pleasing nature is entirely a façade. "We have to keep them happy, so when we have to lie, we lie. If I were honest, many girls would hate me." The idea is to keep them coming back, so they act as a tease. They'd never dream of dating most of these girls seriously. Some of them truly make one recoil inside. And where are they getting so much money? As it turns out, the majority of them are either hostesses themselves, or fuzoku, sex workers at places like soaplands and image clubs. Left with an abundance of money and a lack of self-worth and responsibility, they become Rakkyo's most frequent clients, paying several thousand dollars a night. This complicates things greatly. The girls become addicted to the power over men they get at the host clubs, using them as a combination of healing and subtle revenge for their day jobs. The mutual head games are endless. One girl (who Issei reveals later is the bane of his existence) has a long conversation with him about "their relationship," trying to argue that it's high time he quit the club and marry her once and for all. It's a serious conversation for her, and Issei, cornered, is trying his best to stay non-committal without pissing her off. In a private interview she says that being his wife is her dream... but she's also visiting COUNTLESS other host clubs as well. Some (many) of the guys worry that they're enabling these women to continue their life as prostitutes, and indeed Rakkyo has a strict policy not to take advantage of them when they're too sloshed to be thinking clearly. It's a horrible, guilty thing to think about, to become the object of a broken woman's affection, to the point where she will continue destroying herself to continue a non-existent relationship. Issei often finds himself having to talk some of the more sensitive guys out of a pretty dark place. He struggles with this issue himself, but it's usually only a matter of minutes until one of his customers, on a catty power trip, inevitably reaffirms why he doesn't trust women. On the other hand, for many of these women, the hosts are simply all they have. One younger host breaks down during his interview. "They have a lot of money, but so few are content with their lives... They want to fall in love, they want to feel needed, and they all come to this space. People are not so strong, especially alone. Even though [we charge a lot of money,] they still say 'thank you' when they walk out the door." Clennell returned a year later to Rakkyo to visit Issei and the boys, and many of the ones he'd profiled were still working there. He was amazed at how the job had aged them: though only a year had passed, the lifestyle was clearly taking a physical toll. Though they were still in their (very) early 20s, they looked quite a bit older. Indeed, most hosts don't last more than a month. I asked Clennell where all the money went, and apparently many are working class boys trying to provide for their families. (I admit, I'm a little skeptical of their sob stories, as told by a Japanese newsmagazine, which involved medical bills for sick mothers.) Issei may never get married or have a happy life. "I've been working as a host for so long, I've kind of forgotten who I am," he says, while another host admits, "you start to have a numb feeling... I still think a girl is pretty or beautiful, but to us they're customers, and I start thinking about my sales figure. It turns into a mess." At the end of each night, long after daylight has broken, most of the guys are so tired/drunk that they can barely stand. They ladle themselves into the back seat of a cab. After ten bottles of champagne I can't even imagine the hangover the next day. Clennell is quick to point out that he has no way of knowing if Rakkyo, or even the time he spent observing Rakkyo, is typical among host clubs. The film is simply a short window into this strange, strange life of being a boyfriend for hire, and the various strange and bizarre complications therein. But this may be selling the film a bit short. We see such an intimate glimpse of these people, it's impossible not to see a bit of ourselves in them; the strange emotional dance between customer and host isn't entirely unlike some real relationships that many of us are intimately familiar with. After all, as Misato Katsuragi once said, what is sex but "two lonely people being lonely together?"

Stef's recent conversation with a rabidly anti-empirical (if not flat out insane) drug user reminded me of this poem/animation by Tim Minchin, though I suspect the caller is somewhat less hot than Storm is purported to be. Transcript below the video. STORM by Tim Minchin In a North London top-floor flat, all white walls, white carpet, white cat, rice-paper partitions, modern art and ambitions, the host's a physician; bright bloke, has his own practice, his girlfriend's an actress, an old mate of ours from home, and they're always great fun, so to dinner we've come. The fifth guest is an unknown the hosts've just thrown us together for a favour 'cause this girl's just arrived from Australia and she's moved to North London and she's the sister of someone or has some connection As we make introductions I'm struck by her beauty She's irrefutably fair, with dark eyes and dark hair, But as she sits, I admit, I'm a little bit wary, 'Cause I noticed the tip of the wing of a fairy tattooed on that popular area just above the derriere and when she says “I'm Saggitarian” I confess a pigeonhole starts to form and is immediately filled with pigeon when she says her name is 'Storm' Conversation is initially bright and light-hearted, but it's not long before Storm gets started; “You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion” she opines over her cabernet sauvignon, vis a vis some unhippily empirical comment made by me. Not a good start, I think. We're only on pre-dinner drinks, and across the room my wife widens her eyes, silently begs me “Be Nice”. A matrimonial warning not worth ignoring, so I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door, or the window on her second floor. The food is delicious, and Storm, whilst avoiding all meat, happily sits and eats as the good doctor, slightly pissedly, holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history, When Storm suddenly insists “But the human body is a mystery. “Science just falls in a hole when it tries to explain the nature of the soul.” My hostess throws me a glance She, like my wife, knows there's a chance I'll be off on one of my rare-but-fun rants But I shan't, my lips are sealed I just want to enjoy the meal, and although Storm is starting to get my goat, I have not intention of rocking the boat Although it's becoming a bit of a wrestle, because, like her meteorological namesake, Storm has no such concerns for our vessel. “Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy. “They promote drug dependency at the cost of the natural remedies that are all our bodies need “They are immoral and driven by greed “Why take drugs when herbs can solve it? “Why use chemicals when homeopathic solvents can resolve it? “I think it's time we all returned to live with Natural Medical Alternatives.” And try as I like, a small crack appears in my diplomacy dike. “By definition,” I begin, “Alternative medicine,” I continue, “Has either not been proved to work or been proved not to work. “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? “Medicine.” “So you don't believe in any natural remedies?” “On the contrary, Storm. Actually, before I came to tea, “I took a remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree, “A painkiller that's virtually side-effect free. “It 's got a weird name. Darling, what was it again? “Masparin? Basporin? “Oh yes, Aspirin. “Which I paid about a buck for down at the local drugstore.” The debate briefly abates as my hosts collect plates, but when they return with dessert, Storm pertly asserts: “Shakespeare said it first: “'There are more things in heaven and earth “'Than exist in your philosophy' “Science is just how we're trained to look at reality “It doesn't explain love or spirituality. “How does science explain psychics, auras, the afterlife, the power of prayer?” I'm becoming aware that I'm staring. I'm like a rabbit, suddenly trapped in the blinding headlights of vacuous crap. Maybe it's the Hamlet she just mis-quothed, or the fifth glass of wine I just quaffed, but my diplomacy dike groans and the arsehole held back by its stones can be held back no more. “Look, Storm, sorry, I don't mean to bore ya, “But there's no such thing as an 'aura'. “Reading auras is like reading minds, “Or tea-leaves, or star signs, or meridian lines. “These people aren't plying a skill, “They're either lying or mentally ill. “Same goes for people who claim they can hear God's demands, “Or spiritual healers who think they've got magic hands.” “By the way, why do we think it's OK for people to pretend they can talk to the dead? “Isn't that totally fucked in the head? “Lying to some crying woman whose child has died, “and telling her you're in touch with the other side? “I think that's fundamentally sick. “Do we need to clarify here that there's no such thing as a psychic? “What are we, fucking two? “Do we actually think that Horton heard a Who? “Do we still believe that Santa brings us gifts? “That Michael Jackson didn't have facelifts? “Are we still so stunned by circus tricks, that we think the dead would “want to talk to pricks like John Edward?” Storm, to her credit, despite my derision, keeps firing off cliches with startling precision like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition. “You're so sure of your position, “but you're just closed-minded. “I think you'll find that your faith in science and tests “is just as blind as the faith of any fundamentalist!” “Wow, that's a good point. Let me think for a bit... “Oh, wait. My mistake. That's absolute BULLSHIT. “Science adjusts its views based on what's observed. “Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved. “If you show me that, say, homeopathy works, “Then I will change my mind. “I will spin on a fucking dime. “I'll be as embarrassed as hell, yet I will run through the streets yelling: “'It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it! Water has memory! “'And whilst its 'memory' of a long-lost drop of onion juice seems infinite, “'it somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it!' “You show me that it works, and how it works, “and when I've recovered from the shock, “I will take a compass and carve 'Fancy That' on the side of my cock!” Everyone's just staring now, but I'm pretty pissed, and I've dug this far down, so I figure, in for a penny, in for a pound! “Life is full of mysteries, yeah, “But there are answers out there, “and they won't be found by people sitting around looking serious “and saying 'Isn't life mysterious? “'Let's sit here and hope! “'Let's call up the fucking Pope! “'Let's go watch Oprah interview Deepak Chopra!' “If you want to watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo. “That show was so cool, “Because every time there was a church with a ghoul, “or a ghost in a school, “they looked beneath the mask, and what was inside? “The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the water-slide! “Because throughout history, “every mystery, “ever solved, “has turned out to be “NOT MAGIC.” “Does the idea that there might be knowledge frighten you? “Does the idea that one afternoon on Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you frighten you? “Does the notion that there might not be a 'supernatural' so blow your hippie noodle “that you'd rather just stand in the fog of your inability to Google? “Isn't this enough? “Just this world? “Just this beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world? “How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it “with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters? “If you're so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear! “'To gild refined gold, “'To paint the lily, “'To throw perfume upon the violet, “'Is just fucking silly' “Or something like that. Or what about Satchmo? “'I see trees of green, “'Red roses too.' “And fine, if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu, “In a post-colonial, condescending bottled-up-and-labeled kind of way, “Then whatever, that's okay, but here's what gives me a hard-on:” “I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon. “I have one life, "and it is short, unimportant, “But thanks to recent scientific advances, “I get to live twice as long as my great-great-great-great-uncleses and auntses. “Twice as long to live this life of mine, “Twice as long to love this wife of mine, “Twice as many years of friends, and wine, of sharing curries, “and getting shitty at good-looking hippies “with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties. “And if, perchance, I have offended, “Think but this, and all is mended. “We'd as well be ten minutes back in time “For all the chance you'll change your mind.”

Oh, I have a few. The first that comes to mind is, doesn't your father's behaviour strike you as infantile? He doesn't get what he wants, so he shouts, breaks things, whimpers? That's how a toddler goes about solving their problems, and that's an insult to toddlers because they at least have the excuse of not knowing any better. Secondly, this immediately reminded me of something Stef wrote in RTR about the distinction between "active" or "overt" aggression and "passive" aggression. To paraphrase, active aggression is "If I don't get what I want, I will be angry, and you will feel afraid", whereas passive aggression is "if I don't get what I want, I will be sad, and you will feel guilty". That doesn't quite cover all the varieties of passive aggression (another is "if I don't get what I want, I will do as you say with pedantic precision that completely fails to achieve what you wanted, and you will feel annoyed"), but it's a good starting point. Now Stef described these as the male and female tactics, respectively, but it seems that your dad was like mine and went for the twofer What's interesting about it is the power relationship that these tactics depend on to work; in active aggression, your dad positions himself as the powerful one, who can bring his wrath down on you if you don't do his bidding; in passive, he puts you in the position of power, the power to make him 'the bad guy', like in your range example, and immediately seeks to make you feel guilty about using your 'power' selfishly. Finally I just find people who rely on others to regulate their emotional state kind of pathetic, but utterly repulsive when these people foist that responsibility onto their children. For why? Because the children can't leave, and they're only just learning to gain emotional mastery over themselves, and they desperately need their parents to model emotional strength and self-reliance, with appropriate levels of openness and vulnerability. Forcing your kids into the role of emotional punching bag/relief valve leads to exactly the situation you described in your goals as a kid; you self-erased. You ceased to have your own needs and became a kind of regulatory mechanism for your dad's poorly designed emotional reactor. Then you get launched into the real world with these emotional mechanisms designed for managing someone else, and lo and behold, you find yourself managing people's behaviour through self-pity. Anyway, those are my thoughts. I hope they're of some help.

Pod, I feel like you were setting off cherry bombs throughout that post and then dropped a nuke in the last line If you have this habit of comparing yourself negatively to others, and your father was, as you put it 'addicted to self-pity' for the purposes of attracting attention, then I think it's a near-certainty that you, on a mostly unconscious level, are mimicking the behaviour he modeled for you. The reason for this is that we all want to get our own way, and, as children, we scan the people the people around us. We watch what they do, we see what works for them, and you saw that your father, I'm guessing, got positive reinforcement, encouragement, compliments, and his own way in disagreements by visible self-pity that affected the behaviour of the people around him. This strategy, which you observed throughout your childhood, got built into the firmware of your brain in a mostly unconscious way, such that you find yourself employing that strategy without realising that you are. Bear in mind that this is off the top of my head; is there any part of it that does not tally with your experience?

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to comparing yourself to people and concluding that you are inferior to them, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, in the meantime I'll proceed on that assumption. This is off the top of my head, but it seems to me that the secondary gains of comparing yourself negatively to others are: Feeling sorry for yourself. This allows you to be the centre of attention in your own mind, so that being less important paradoxically makes you the most important person in your own world. It also releases you from empathising with others, saving you time, effort and discomfort. Being the most capable person in the room, and the most moral, in pretty much any situation, lands the burden of taking action on your shoulders. Being inferior or less capable means that anything important is best done by someone else, allowing you to offload the responsibility for taking initiative, taking risks, taking the blame when things go wrong. Having an excuse for not progressing in your life. If your life is in stasis and not improving, you can use comparisons with others to conclude that you are incapable of making changes to your life. This temporarily diffuses the anxiety of your life direction, long enough for another frozen-pizza-fueled World of Warcraft binge. I have to stress that these reasons are not in any way an endorsement or encouragement of comparing yourself negatively with others. It takes only a moment's thought to see that these habits provide scant short-term gain for massive, irreparable, long-term pain. I hate to admit it, but I've looked at these from the inside long enough to say that it's not worth it. Of course, a rational recognition of an exceptional person's abilities is another matter, one I can go into more if you're interested.

To the best of my knowledge that's as good as it gets; scanned from a newspaper roughly ten years ago.

Thoughts of a Baby Lying in a Child Care Centre Interview: Late Night Live: Dec 5, 2007, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Philip Adams: I’m talking to Australia’s most remarkable cartoonist, Michael Leunig.… The most hated cartoon of yours was the one that had a baby speculating on its absent mother. Could you remind the listener of this incredible attack on feminism and political correctness? Michael Leunig: Without having it here in front of me, it was my way of kind of illuminating this emerging disaster I thought was happening in the culture of maternity and early childhood emergence and development. I thought ‘There’s a disaster shaping up here, and it’s the abandonment of babies, essentially, and the abandonment of mothering,’ and so I made this little tale of the baby and its imagined thoughts, as mother puts it in the crèche and goes off to pursue her career—it was a female baby, you see. So I was picking up—it’s a very elaborate idea and a cartoon can’t handle such a complex question. And lo and behold, there wouldn’t be too many early child development psychologists and people who have studied this who would disagree with it. They would say ‘Y-yes; the mother leaves, and something starts to change.’ And a lot of this came from my concern for the work of the great Donald Winnicott—the very wonderful British psychoanalyst of the 50s and the 40s, the man who did the great work—he was England’s answer to Freud and Jung and everyone else—so many women know the truth of this anyway.

I'm reminded of a previous French caller to Stef, who favoured monarchy because at least a hereditary ruler would think about leaving the country in a decent condition for his children.

Pretty good stuff. I'll admit I cringed a bit when he said "Countries that have kings and queens, (which are rationally stupid, weird ideas) are empirically freer and more socially just than countries that don't." Some research into Saudi Arabia wouldn't have gone amiss, even setting aside the problems with 'social justice' and 'equality' as a moral good. See 9:30 for what's driving people nuts.

I'm afraid I don't follow; what are you objecting to?