First, the vid of the day :
Nothing in that vid that is entirely new to the readers of this blog, and my voice is a bit weird, but I still feel good about sharing those particular thoughts with the world in a place a tad more accessible than this here blog o’ mine.
I could have gone a lot further into the whole right wing intellectual degeneracy thing. What is so hard for us liberals to grasp is that these people do not think they can figure the world out for themselves and therefore they need to pick people they like to do it for them and just believe whatever those people tell them.
The crucial point is that they feel like they have no choice but to believe what they are told by their chosen articulators, and will go through whatever mental gymnastics are necessary to do so.
When these articulators are corrupt or incompetent (or both), the cumulative effect of said mental gymnastics is to make people stupider as their minds are bent and twisted in all kinds of unnatural ways until they lose all cohesion.
The more holes that emerge in their shared delusion due to it becoming so directly contrafactual, the more those holes have to be plugged with raw emotion, and that’s why they get so mad all the time.
Anger is a highly effective way to keep yourself from thinking. Our brains, left to their own devices, do their best to make sense of things, and if you are deeply emotionally invested in believing things that do not, in fact, make sense, you need to keep getting hot rage injections to keep yourself from figuring that out.
Hence their need to consume right wing media constantly.
A leader like Donald Trump is actually the worst thing for these people because he very efficiency and effectively wriggles his way on to their “trusted source” list and then betrays them and hurts them when they are not able to exercise the correct faculties in order to now reject him.
Once you are on that list, you have a free hand to reprogram their minds however you like. It takes a serious reality breach to shake them. They vehemently do not want to have to rationally examine everything people say. They do not feel like they are capable of doing that and having it produce anything but terror and confusion for them.
And they might be right. They might not be smart enough to do it.
That thought weighs heavy on my mind.
Trump is such a terrible leader that he is managing to lose them anyway because he keeps doing things that actively hurt them or that deeply offend them in ways that are hard for them to ignore even with Fox News’ help.
In fact, he does things even Fox News, with all its resources, can’t defend. All they can do is ignore them and distract their audience with other emotionally charged things.
Right now, Trump is turning the contrafactuality machine up yet another notch by insisting that Portland is some kind of “blood on the streets” social conservative wet nightmare full of left wing hordes determined to destroy America.
And it’s just not true. And anyone can tell it’s not true. Any Fox News viewer can drive to Portland themselves and see that it’s not true. It’s entirely fictional, and there is no ambiguity for its delusional nature to hide in.
In fact, it’s not even plausible. It just plain sounds crazy. And so even for his fans who go strictly by their surface impressions of things – their “gut” – it doesn’t hold water.
And that is driving his approval rating down to the lowest level of any President ever. And it’s quite unlikely to recover because that would require Trump to change how he is acting and for that he’d have to believe he had been wrong about something.
Still, he has shown at least an animal level awareness of danger in the past, so he might try to fix it.
But he’s far too senile and demented now to succeed.
More after the break.
Letting the energy decide
That’s how I have been conceptualizing my attempts to get around my decision issues by letting my intuition choose.
So when I am wobbling with indecision, I just ask “the energy” – also known as my emotions – what to do and it “decides” .
These, then, are the baby steps I am taking towards developing my connection to my will and my emotions. I figure that whether I am letting my routine or my emotional sate “decide”, it’s still an arbitrary and unreasoned decision, so I might as well go with the one that at least does me some good.
I mean, what the hell, if I let the “energy” decide I at least might surprise myself by going off in an unexpected direction or even starting something new.
A big part of this process is a slow and painstaking process of learning not to resist my own motion. To stop, as I have put it before, “driving around with the parking brake on” and learn to accept that sometimes I am still and sometimes I am in motion and either way is just fine.
I have been emotionally dependent on stasis for far too long. I want to be alive, dammit, and living creatures move and breathe and love and grow and want and will and change. They don’t desperately try to stop the world around them out of a devilishly disastrous attempt to be “in control” and “safe”.
Fuck all that. I ain’t controlling jack shit. If I was, I wouldn’t have a laundry list of things I want to do but can’t make myself do. And there are a lot of things I’m not safe from at all and they’re all inside my head.
If I truly want to feel safe, I need to get stronger. Then I won’t feel so puny and pathetic and vulnerable all the time.
And if I want to be in control, I need to deal with my emotions.
And that means feeling and expressing them, and being fine with that.
Bringing myself back to life will be neither easy nor painless.
But it will be incredibly worth doing nonetheless.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.