Didn’t really end up going where I had meant to go, but that’s nothing new.
Category Archives: Commentary
Stop keeping score
How conservatives think
Or should that be “think”?
Get to work!
Yeah, I am going to go on about people needing to work in order to be happy again. Blame it on the last episode of Bones that I watched. It got me back on the subject.
As you know, I think that we need to seriously reevaluate the way we think about work in our lives. School does not prepare us for the realities of working life, and one of the ways it fails the student is that it teaches them that there is this natural separation between the working part of the day and the total leisure part of the day.
This leads to an “I hate work/I hate school” mentality that is, of course, perfectly understandable, but ultimately counterproductive. This split down the middle of our lives prevents us from truly adapting to circumstances and, in a sense, keeps our inner child from growing up.
I think the truly healthy and happy people are the ones who learn to simply accept the realities of life and adapt to them. It is pointless to continue to resist something you have already decided to do.
Worse than pointless, it’s childish, and it causes a destructive bifurcation in people’s lives. Spending your day hating your job and your nights in the million distractions our culture offers in order to recover from said job is not a route to happiness. It is a spiritual dead end, a wound that does not heal, and it is that stubborn inner child who refuses to let go and just accept that this is what life is like now that is keeping it from healing.
That’s why people are happier when they are older. It is not simply that with age comes more money and status. It’s that with maturity comes the ability to stop fighting circumstance, accept that to live is to work, and look around your environment for ways to better adapt.
I know this isn’t easy, especially if you have a low-status job. The urge for status advancement is in us all, and it is a rare person who can fully accept a low-status job. No matter how much of a rugged individualist you think you are, being low status will get to you, and that will inform your work experience on every level.
But I am not asking you to accept that you will never be more than a McDonald’s french fry chef. That would be too difficult for any but the most dedicated urban hermit.
All you have to accept is that this is how things are now. It is this inner resistance that keeps you from making the best of your situation. On some level, a part of you refuses to accept that your Golden Arches life is really happening and that therefore its status attaches to you. You even preserve your prejudicial judgment of low status people by telling yourself that maybe you are a McDonald’s chef du pomme frites, but you aren’t like the other people here. You’re different.
And you are different. Different just like the rest of us.
You will only find inner peace if you accept what you cannot (or don’t really want to) change. That is why I keep asking people if they would rather be right or happy. So much unnecessary suffering is caused by sheer stubbornness over some position you took a long time ago and that you are still maintaining because it would damn near kill you to admit to the person in your head that you came into conflict with that they were right.
Imagine it now. Imagine telling your worst enemy they were right about something. You would have trouble doing it, wouldn’t you? Even if you knew you would be way happier afterward?
But what is more important, an argument, or your future happiness?
Casting the asides…. aside, what can we do to help fix this useless dichotomy between work life and the rest of life? I think we start with the schools.
There are so many things wrong with our current outdated industrial model of education, and so much hard scientific evidence to back that claim up, that to get into it would be a whole series of articles unto itself.
Suffice it to say that the current educational system is unnecessarily unfun. Children naturally want to learn. That’s why they like to explore and what a lot of their independent play is all about. We have a very strong instinct to increase our knowledge of the world.
And yet, kids hate school, because we ignore what they want and what they enjoy just cram the knowledge funnel down their throats and force-feed them while making them sit still and be quiet, which they hate doing because nature is telling them to move, explore, talk, and figure things out about their world that way.
So if we just opened our minds to organizing school around what children actually enjoy and want to do, and stop forcing them all through the same cookie cutter mold over and over again so they learn they have to protect their own identity at all costs, the dichotomy would crumble. It would be far easier for children to learn that school is not the enemy, and they would carry that lesson into thinking that work is not the enemy.
And the same goes for our work environments. The same sort of reforms will work there as well.
Human beings need to work. We need meaningful labour, and no matter how much you hate your job, that is what it is giving you. It gives you a place where you can apply your energy to something with tangible results (even if those results are in the form of french fries) and where your labours are part of a larger group endeavor.
All human beings need this kind of place in society, and once you realize that, then you realize that it is only by recognizing that work is a necessity, not a luxury, can you accept that you too need work (and not just a paycheck) and tear down that wall that school built down the middle of your day.
It’s all just life. Learn to live it.
I will talk to all of your nice people again tomorrow.
Feeling the future
Different people perceive time in different ways.
Some people are highly focused in the present. They get a great deal of stimulation and information from the here and now. They live their lives moment to moment, and are great at dealing with things immediately and with great drive, energy, and focus. To them, life is an ever-unfolding series of moments to enjoy or endure. They tend to live life in the present and let the future take care of itself.
To them, the future is not real. Not emotionally speaking. Sure, they understand the basics of controlling the future by controlling the present, but on a fundamental level, the future is a vague and mysterious place, and they spend very little of their time thinking about it. After all, the world is full of possibilities and variables, so who really knows what is going to happen? The only thing you can truly know is what is happening right now.
Contrast that to the future oriented person. They feel that the present is only the place where the future begins, and that the secret to a good life is, via a series of carefully planned actions, control the future and make it a better place for themselves. They know that nobody can control their future perfectly, but they still have faith that they can control their outcomes via forethought and understands to a sufficient degree that they can make their lives better, or at least less bad.
To these people, the future is very real. They experience potential outcomes almost as if they were really happening. This feel for the future is the what guides a future oriented future. They are constantly analyzing all the variables in order to find the best path that leads to the best future, and plotting a series of steps to get there.
To the present oriented person, life is a broad, flat plain filled with things to explore. To the future oriented person, life is a staircase leading ever upward into the future.
Both of these types have their strengths and weaknesses. The present oriented person excels at handling complex, stressful situations in realtime. Because they do not require a plan before they act and because they live fully in the present, they can experience and react to life with full immediacy.
Also, because they give little thought to the future, they are less prone to the sorts of neuroses that are based upon anxiety about future events. In fact, for the most part, present oriented people have a much more positive outlook on life and a great deal more optimism than their future fixated friends.
On the other hand, it could almost go without saying that if you don’t think about the future, you have little control over it. For future oriented people, long term planning is extremely unpleasant and they will avoid it whenever they can. As a result, the things that only come with long term planning and patience will never come their way except, perhaps, by accident.
Without an emotional connection to the future, past oriented people’s ability to influence the world is severely curtailed unless they connect themselves with someone more future oriented.
The benefits of being future oriented are obvious. The future oriented person’s emotional connection to the future has the potential to be a powerful tool that leads one to an ever improving future.
Also, this emotional connection allows the person to form an attachment to a future goal that allows the future oriented person to derive emotional satisfaction from progress towards that goal, and this is vitally important for maintaining the long term motivation necessary to sustain someone emotionally through all those long term steps.
To the future oriented person, every step towards a long term goal is its own reward.
That is why, for the most part, while the present oriented person might be happier in the short term, it is the future oriented people who run the world, and thus, rule it.
Speaking of happiness, one of the negative aspects of being future-oriented is that it can lead to depression and/or pessimism. The future-oriented person can lose their emotional connection to their long term goals, and without the ability to recharge their batteries in the present, it can be very hard for them to get things going again.
Also, their ability to feel the future is not a psychic power or mystic insight. It is a faculty of the brain, and as such, can be influences by other emotional issues and become wildly inaccurate. Despair can cause it to only produce negative readings, thus reinforcing the idea that the future can only be worse than the present, and thus withdrawing from the world seems like it is the the only possible solution.
The real solution is for the future oriented person to put down the telescope and take a look around their immediate world and learn to take more joy and pleasure in what is going on (or what COULD be going on) in their lives right now.
This will reboot their motivational structure and draw them back from the edge of despair because their lives are just plain more rewarding now, and the future oriented person can both see and feel that some of the paths that their sense of the future senses might actually lead to something good.
And no despair can survive that for long.
So as you can see, the world needs both kinds of people. A world of only future oriented people would be an emotionally desolate place where the lack of immediate pleasures would lead people to becoming dour, sour, and depressed. Despite their future orientation, by the time any of their long term plans come to fruition, they are too emotionally numb to enjoy it.
You have to live through today to get to tomorrow.
And a planet of only present-oriented people would be a chaotic mess of unenlightened hedonism and thoughtless action in which even the bare minimum amount of civilization would be impossible.
It takes a lot of different kind of people to make the world go round.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
Oh, and PS. I know that I have left out past oriented people, but I am not sure they exist, and if they do, they just seem so sad that I don’t like to think about them. Sorry.
The sex lives of children
That’s a heck of a title, isn’t it? Don’t worry, it’s not as potentially illegal as it sounds. I just want to do a thoughtful overview of our views of child sexuality to see how it has changed and how we got to where we are today.
Before Freud, people did not have a view at all about childhood sexuality because back then, people did not think about children much at all. Much of the world didn’t even totally see them as people. They didn’t educate children, they did very little to raise them, and often children were treated as if they were petty annoyances that have to be endured, rather than innocent wonders who must be treasures.
That is, of course, exactly what you would expect from immature adults who can only view “other” children as dismal reminders of how onerous one’s adult responsibilities have become, or as rivals for all the good things in the world. And the adults were immature precisely because said adults were raised by adults like them.
The concept of the innocent child was not truly established until the 1800’s. Bucolic childhood imagery flourished, especially in the newborn field of advertising, and with the rise of urbanization came a rise in education, literacy, and what we would consider the proper upbringing of children. Children were freed from their role as farm labour and thus free to have a lengthy education and plenty of leisure time besides.
This opened up the possibility of a vision of childhood as a time of purity and innocence. Children were viewed almost as angels, and urban life created a demand for this state of purity in an increasingly filthy world.
Couple that with the attitudes towards sex of the era, and you get the birth of the sexless child. In this view, children are free from any association with the world of filthy animal rutting. Sexuality was something that just sort of happened at some point in a child’s life, and before that point, there was no such thing as childhood sexuality.
Enter Freud. Via his analysis of his patients, he concludes that not only do children have a sexuality, but that sex-related events in the child’s life could have a massive impact on the child well into adulthood.
Perhaps the idea of with the deepest impact, though, was the evils of repression. It broke the code of silence of a highly repressed world and dared to say that it is better medically to discuss these things openly and release them than it is to suppress them and let them fester.
This was a massive improvement over the hyper-rational authoritarian view of the times which held that it was your duty to behave a certain way and everything else was to be completely suppressed and never even mentioned, ever.
Thus, via Freud, the idea of the innocence of children (and the brutal and traumatic suppression it engendered) was shattered for the first time. A great emancipation of sexuality was unleashed, the first sexual revolution, and a common sense naturalism flourished where many taboo things were re-labeled as “natural” and “normal”.
Freud’s work even helped destroy the pernicious delusion that masturbation was somehow harmful to a child.
Unfortunately, that only lasted until around World War I. Both world wars, plus the Great Depression, caused a huge setback in the urbanization and educational trends that had led to both the sexless child view and the post-Freud naturalist view. Children went part-way back into the background of life, and the world became a very adult place.
Then came the Fifties and the birth of the truly modern lifestyle, and the “atomic family” view of life. The wife, the kids, the two car garage, the thoroughly modern kitchen. It was a vision of limitless middle class lifestyle and endless optimism stretching out into an ever improving future.
This came with a brand new vision of the innocence of children, the Father Knows Best version, and a more modern wave of suppression, repression, and hidden depression. People could barely acknowledge adult sexuality existed, let alone child sexuality, and so began the Long Dark that was not truly broken until the rise of therapy in the Seventies.
The final straw, though, was when child sexual abuse was dragged into the light and people were forced to accept that sometimes, sex and children do intersect in a very bad way.
And so begins the modern era. On the one hand, when the naturalist view came back into power in the Seventies, it stayed for good. The idea that children should not be punished or scolded for asking questions about sex or masturbating took permanent root and the traumas of old were, by and large, not visited upon children any more.
But the “explore and accept” culture of sexual revolution, while largely successful in bringing sexuality into the mainstream and banishing the darkness clinging to human sexuality, hit a major bump in the road when the sexual revolution looked like it might start including children.
That violated the child/sex barrier’s deepest level, and so in the rush to stop the sexual abuse of children, it slowly became increasingly taboo to even discuss children and sexuality in the same sentence.
Pedophiles of all stripes became the societal outcasts, a dumping ground for everyone’s hate, and in the process, otherwise free nations became infected with an entirely out of character paranoia about seeming like “one of them”.
That would not really matter, of course, except that once more, we are traumatizing children about sex. Not about masturbation or where babies come from, granted, but instead we are teaching them that their innocent bodies attract the most horrible, despicable, hated kind of people and they have to be constantly on guard against this in order to be safe.
Thus, we push child sexuality back into the darkness again. Maybe not all the way, but in a way that is sure to cause the poor children raised in such an atmosphere much undue suffering and confusion in the years to come.
That’s it for my recap. Tomorrow, we discuss a rational, evidence-based observational model of the true face of childhood sexuality, and how we can use this model as the blueprint of a brighter and more harmonious sexual future for all.
I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.
Burnaby Versus Closed Captioning
Something a little different tonight.
See if you can spot the subtle difference.
Never tell him he’s smart
Some of you might have heard of Khan Academy. It’s a rather marvelous website that got started when its founder, Salman Khan, made some videos to help his young cousins with their studies.
The kids loved them, so Khan made more, and more, until it snowballed into an amazing website with dozens of contributors creating hundreds of hours of engaging videos on every subject known to humanity.
They even have a motto for their movement to make education not just free but awesome for everybody : You Can Learn Anything!
I signed up for said website, and hence I get its newsletter. The latest newsletter had a rather attention grabbing deadline: “Why I Will Never Tell My Son He’s Smart”.
Sounds pretty awful, doesn’t it? Like some kind of testosterone laden Dragon Mother bullshit. But that is not the sort of thing that fits with my image of Khan Academy, and so I read on.
Turns out, what the author means is that he reserves his highest praise not for when his children excel at things they are good at, but when they apply themselves to something that does not come easily to them and, through perseverance, improve themselves in that area.
In other words, you get the most praise not for turning an A into an A+, but for turning a C into a B.
Once I got over the shock of this novel idea, I realizes what a profoundly superior scheme that is. Learning to overcome obstacles is one of the most live-improving skills a person can have. To someone who is confident that they can overcome obstacles, the world is at their command. They are not stuck in the rut of trying to only do the things they are good at. They can go wherever they want in life without having to worry about whether it requires something they are “good” at.
From this point of view, the very concept of aptitudes comes into question. Perseverance is the meta-aptitude that unlocks all the rest. If you learn that you can learn whatever you need to learn to accomplish your goals, then you are unstoppable.
That’s why you have so many stories of successful entrepreneurs who dropped out of high school. They realized that if they just applied themselves, they didn’t need to be the smartest or the most gifted.
They were the most persistent, and that’s why they the high school dropouts ended up rich and powerful while the straight A students ended up working for them.
If I had been educated like that, it would have vastly improved my character. One of my main problems as a kid (a problem, I admit, a lot of people would have loved to have) was that it was all too easy. The schoolwork offered no challenge to me, and so I never had to learn to overcome difficulties because for me, there were no difficulties.
Being unable to challenge your gifted students does not merely leave them bored. It leaves them weak.
Admittedly, getting me to try things that did not come naturally to me would have been difficult. I was ferociously stubborn and could out-think my teachers ten times over. It would have taken someone with a very strong will and oodles of patience to convince me to just keep trying at things I found difficult, like arts and crafts, or gym, until I got it right.
Jesus, I was a difficult kid.
Still, the point remains that I could have benefited greatly from an obstacle based education. It would have both challenged me and led me to develop that all important perseverance muscle that I lack to this very day.
I have a lot of trouble sticking with things, and following through on them. I give up things far, far too easily. The moment something becomes tricky or scary or work, I tend to give up. This is especially true if it is something that will only benefit myself, or that only involves myself.
If it involves others, then my strong desire not to let them down and to do my part will keep me motivated. But if it’s just me? Well, who does my giving up hurt? Only me.
And honestly, who cares about me? Not me.
And it’s not just me. I have seen the same sort of weakness of spirit in dozens of my fellow intellectually gifted people. People who have oodles of intelligence and therefore oodles of potential, but there is some vital ingredient missing between them and the things they theoretically can do, and so they end up lost in society’s wastelands.
People with excellent marks that lead to brilliant academic degrees…. only to have them give up faced with even the thought of competing with many similar people for scarce slots in a master’s program. People with amazing programming skills who nevertheless can’t keep a job doing it, or even finish their own projects, because they flee at the slightest sign of pressure. Even people with full doctorates who end up as Starbucks baristas because they can’t face the scramble for professorships.
What is this malaise? It’s more than a lack of confidence. It might seem like you have to be a tower of confidence to overcome these obstacles, but you don’t.
You just have to keep going. You just have to have faith that you will make it there as long as you don’t give up. And you get this faith by overcoming obstacles.
Start slow. Start with something that isn’t very important that only seems sort of hard. Once you overcome that, try for something a little tougher. Work that perseverance muscle just a little bit each day, till it is strong and powerful and you are no longer locked in the box of being only able to do what comes easily to you.
There is a world of possibilities out there. Name it, and you can have it. You just have to hang in there and not immediately give up in favour of something more immediately rewarding.
Learn to hang on.
I will be with you, learning too.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
The light of morning
So what is the average world citizen to do against the heart of darkness?
You have to be willing to sacrifice some of your innocence in order to remain open to believing that humanity’s dark side knows no bound, and that where the conditions for evil exist, it will inevitably occur. Like an open wound becoming infected, the body politic is always vulnerable to the temptations and dark desires of those given power without an equal degree of accountability.
That sort of morally compromising position can exist anywhere, at any level of society. It can be as simple as a single parent abusing their child with nobody around to witness it, or as complex as as entire world governments being beholden to the rich and powerful because they have accepted so much cash and favours from them.
Thus is our human instinct for reciprocity, the desire to do good things for people who have done good things to us, twisted to serve the amoral desires of the rich and powerful.
Luckily, most of this sacrifice of innocence has been done for us. It was not an easy task and the job is not yet completely, but we have all had to learn about things like domestic abuse, genocide, people who prey on children, wretched poverty, and dozens of other ways in which life is nothing like the Ozzie and Harriet worldview that now seems hopelessly childish.
We are an older but wiser people in today’s world.
Along with the willingness to sacrifice a portion of one’s innocence, the darkness also requires a dedication to tight vigilance of those who wish to fight it. We must be able to direct our attention to those in power and let them know that they are being watched and no longer operate under a cloak of darkness.
Keeping our eyes on those in power is not easy. The first thing anyone does with power is use it to make sure they get to keep their power, and that inevitably leads to hiding what they do from all prying eyes, including those of the people who are explicitly tasked with keeping them in line. Power, as we all know, goes to people’s heads, and people who were perfectly normal citizens before they got power can turn into paranoid tyrants in a shockingly short amount of time.
They have power, and thus, the means to hide what they do with it. But we the people have time, patience, intelligence, and most of all, numbers.
It doesn’t take a huge percentage of us to track everything those in power do. And there are many ways to deduce what is not explicitly revealed. If we are willing to tear ourselves away from all the wondrous distractions the corporate world has provided for us to fixate upon and just spare a little time to scrutinize those in power who are NOT celebrities, we could bring much needed accountability to the power structures of the world.
And then, there is the issue of whistleblowers.
The world desperately needs whistleblowers. A lot of times, it is only those people on the inside who are willing to, in effect, defect to the outside world who can take down large and well organized evil. Often it is only those inside the operation but considered too unimportant to bother keeping secrets from who are in a position to take the giant down from the inside.
But I do not claim that becoming a whistleblower is easy. This is why there are so few of them. Often, it means sacrificing your entire current life, including your financial stability and your safety, just to speak up for a moral principle. It means leaving behind the world you knew and entering a colder, harsher, more anxious one where people in power are using every means at their disposal to discredit, degrade, and destroy you. You have to be willing to turn on all your co-workers and your boss, not to mention the organization that has been paying you for however many years. You have to be willing to shoot your arrow at the giant’s eyes, and flee before he falls, leaving everyone else you know at work to their own devices.
None of that is easy, especially if you have obligations outside yourself, like a spouse, children, elderly grandparents,and so forth and so on. Sure, you might find the corruption and abuse you see all around you intolerable, but what about them? What right to you have to disrupt their lives?
The only solution to this that I can see is if someone with wealth and power of their own takes up the cause of protecting and supporting the brave whistleblowers who are willing to step out into the cold. Someone with enough power of their own to face down all the other rich and powerful people who want the whistleblower’s head on a platter and will call them a class traitor to their face for sheltering them.
So in a way, the rich person must become a whistleblower themselves.
We can bring accountability to these out of control moral imbeciles who we have somehow allowed to access the lever of power, but it will cost us. It will cost us our time, our addicting distractions, our attention, our lifestyles, and maybe even our jobs.
But we are legion, and they are a tiny minority who only wield the power they do because the systems to keep them in check have been allowed by weak and corrupt leadership to be eroded away to nothing.
We the people are still in charge, if only we unite against them. No regime in history has ever been able to stay in power if the people unite against them in sufficient numbers. The politicians and governments of the world need to be told, in no uncertain terms, that they can only survive if they rein in the rich and power and restore law and order to the top income tier.
Only then will we take back our democracy.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
The Heart Of Darkness
Today’s blog entry was inspired by this brutally revealing GQ article. It does not make for light and pleasant reading, but I ask you to read it anyway, because it is only by understanding and acknowledging that things like this can and do happen that we can find the way and the will to stop them.
The gist is that men get raped in the military too. And unsurprisingly, men are far, far less likely to report it than women, and women aren’t exactly eager to do so either. Men are ganged up on, brutally raped, told that they will be killed if they speak a word of it to anyone, and if they do try to report it, they are met with a system that is perfectly willing to slap them with a mental illness label and give them a dishonorable discharge, thus wrecking the victim’s lives forever. And because their discharge is a dishonorable one, they cannot even get help from the VA. It is a most perfect hell.
This saddens me but does not surprise me. Absolutely anywhere there is unchecked power and insufficient scrutiny, especially in a highly charged, testosterone laden atmopshere, the darkness within men’s souls will rise and corruption of the worst possible kid will creep in, take hold, then take over.
And it is always the same kinds of evils. When power can use its power to protect itself from accountability, you always get the same evils of power, sex, and greed – the reptile takes over from the monkey.
But it not just the people with power who do these evil deeds that are to blame. They are merely the active component of a system far bigger than their little spiderwebs, and that system protects them not because it approves of their actions, but because people prefer to believe that these things do not happen.
Here’s how that works :
Suppose you are a child psychologist in the 1970’s. A very troubled patient of yours, an eight year old girl, has just tearfully told you that her father routinely and brutally sexually abuses her. What do you do?
From the point of view of the here and now, this is an easy question. You counsel the girl, report her father to Social Services and local police, Dad goes to jail, end of story.
But from the point of view of that child psychologist, the world has just split in two and he has a choice to face.
He could accept that what the girl is saying is true, and have his entire world view shattered. He would have to accept that this sort of thing really does happen and that would change everything he thought he knew about love, family, innocence, and the nature of evil. He would have to live the rest of his life in a much harsher, colder, crueler world, and sacrifice his entire sense of security and safety.
Or, he could call her a liar, get her out of his office, and go back to the world he lived in before that awful little girl opened her mouth and said those awful things. The steel shutters of total denial go down in his mind, he tells himself “it can’t be true. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen.”, and goes back to his life, never thinking about it again and going back to his more “normal” clients, of whom he has plenty.
We know which of those choices is right. But we also know which one is easier, and therefore which one he is most likely to choose. He’s only human, after all.
And that’s how evil grows.
If you want to get away with evil, simply do the unthinkable. Commit crimes so unspeakable that people do not want to think that kind of thing happens at all. If you do this, you will enlist a powerful ally called denial. Good, decent, wholesome people who are kind and benevolent and good citizens will commit profound crimes of negligence and heartlessness by turning away your victims, or even attack your victim themselves, simply because they want to preserve their candy-colored world view, where such things simply don’t happen.
That is why the world will always need those of us who are willing to go directly into the very heart of darkness in order to learn what is there and how to stop it. It needs those of us who are willing to give up all our illusions of comfort and safety in order to find the evil that lurks within the heart of humanity, and by exposure, destroy it.
People like myself, who are willing to think and ask questions like… exactly how does a rape gang organize itself? It’s not something you can advertise. Somehow, like-minded people find each other, and somehow the first time they find a victim and do the deed happens, and after that, they can do it again and again without ever mentioning it out loud. They just know what to expect will happen when they get together.
And in the case of men raping men, how much of a role does internalized homophobia play? It is clearly not about the sex. If the perpetrators were just looking for gay sex, they could have sex with one another.
But if they did that, there would be no way to deny to themselves that they are gay. Only by making the sex as violent, brutal, and most importantly dominating as possible can they reassure themselves that they are, as it were, the man in the relationship, and therefore not gay at all.
That would be at least a partial explanation of why, time and time again, when men have unchecked power over other men, the Abu Ghraib scenario repeats itself over and over and things always get more and more sexual.
If you want to know the true heart of darkness, that is it : the darkness in the hearts of humanity coupled will power using power to prevent accountability, and the public’s desire to maintain a happier worldview than reality will allow.
Now you understand why I am pro-surveillance.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.