Twenty Years

Twenty years ago on the 22nd of July – so twenty years this Tuesday coming up – I migrated from ranting on MySpace, to blogging on Blogger. If you don’t count the Blogger blog I think I remember starting, forgetting, and losing the login information to in around 2001, the 22nd of July, 2005 entailed my formal induction into blogging. I made the leap to WordPress-dot-com in March of 2007, and have remained with that host under a succession of blogs – all mothballed, bar this one.

The writing was on the wall well over a decade ago though; the blogosphere is dying. Not that I listened. Social media was spitting out posts for shorter and shorter attention spans, WordPress was becoming an e-commerce platform, and increases in internet access speeds were making vlogging and short video content more viable.

Text blogging? That was for nerds who hung out in Borders. Which closed, appropriately. People want to consume content about the top 10 substitutes for anal bleaching, not participate in a glorified online book club.

***

I left things turned on around here all the same. I’ve renewed the domain name every time it’s been due since starting at this address just over 9 years ago. Now there’s a thing. It feels like forever, but I haven’t even been at this address for half my time blogging. That first half went quick.

I have to admit, though, that the output has been low in the second half. Very low. As in, I-don’t-do-the-algorithmic-churn low. One or two posts a year for the last a few years. I even skipped 2022. “Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience? Aren’t you just shouting at clouds?”

Nonsense. Anything involved with The Cloud gets more traffic than I do.

I managed a few words by email with Mikey of Harrangueman fame last year. Have also kept in touch with Mr Ponsford of 2-bit noir – an old stalwart of a number of comments sections, and a metaller from way back.

More broadly, and more prominently…

Calling Ophelia Benson of Butterflies and Wheels a “blogger” would seem a little too reductive – she’s more than that – a fully fledged author and editor at least, as well – while also being more of a cornerstone of the blogosphere than any of us, and for longer.

We chat. And I still chat with a number of the commenters on her blog, elsewhere. But I haven’t commented over at B&W in a few months, so I should probably go back for a visit some time soon.

ScienceBlogs died long ago when it was sold. FreeThoughtBlogs had a few good bloggers to begin with, but probably wasn’t conceived on all fronts by people who held to the mission statement in good faith.

Ed Brayton of Dispatches From The Culture Wars has been gone for almost five years now. It feels more like two. I’ll admit that five years prior to that, I’d stopped taking him seriously when he exited Dispatches from the FTB network, while pulling the “both sides” card when Ophelia Benson was being dog-piled in a very one-sided, obviously coordinated campaign by a number of Brayton’s fellow travelers. Or former fellow travelers. He really did both the sides he left behind.

So off to Patheos he went. I’d always found the atheists at Patheos conspicuously self-interested, and even cynical on some occasions. It’s not that I think atheists and the religious can’t work together, it’s just that there was always this ick factor from the godless there; a little too much ease with the self-promotion, a little too heavy on the use of polarized jargon the user clearly didn’t fully understand, and a little too many inconsistencies in self-positioning over time. I’m sure the religious readers felt something was a little off, too.

Pharyngula is still going. But the less said there…

If AV from Five Public Opinions had never linked to Dispatches and Pharyngula as much as he did, I’d have probably not have read them nearly as much. I’m not happy Ed is dead, not in any sense, but I do wish I’d clarified my views on his writing, earlier. And, as often is the case, I wish I’d trusted my gut more.

(Gawd, AV. Missing from the blogosphere for over sixteen years now – some of us still miss ya, fella!)

I do recall before blogging myself, that some of the more inquisitive Australian bloggers read and linked to Butterflies and Wheels, while not doing the same with Pharyngula‘s early presence – possibly due to the reception of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense in Australia. I know which I prefer.

I also remember the Usenet atheism days, at least around the 1998-2001 mark. I have very vague recollections of a mass-transition of atheists from newsgroups to blogs in 2004, but in 2004 I was tinkering with various flavours of Linux, and communing with LUGs and open source communities. And arguing with creationists in LUGs and open source communities – which was about as pleasant and not-at-all-embarrassing as you’d expect.

So I missed that transition from Usenet to early Atheosphere, re-emerging in a part of the blogosphere largely separate from what was going on in the US, with a perspective ground in Australian politics (I’d done a lefty political-internship not long before). Of course, evolution was a part of my studies at Uni then, so of course I was going to go there.

Australian political blogs got more of a look-in from me at least until around 2010. Anonymous Lefty, Grodscorp, The Happy Revolutionary, Larvatus Prodeo, The Road To Surfdom, Legal Eagle and others featured.

(And who could forget Iain Hall and Graeme Bird? Maybe that’s the wrong question. Who can remember Iain and Graeme and is still hanging around?)

***

Coming to blogging in 2005, before The God Delusion was published, and with a local political blogosphere that seemed like it was up for open discussion, was welcoming. I’d been to my first protest years before, had joined the Labor party and was already largely disillusioned by it, and had been arguing with creationists online since the ’90s, on and off. (I wasn’t going to join the Greens though, on account of the dogmatism, cultish harassment problem and history of pseudoscience).

2005. The Kansas Evolution hearings had kicked off, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster was unleashed. The End of Faith was starting to getting people interested in discussing religion, but not so much in Australia. Sam Harris was still being roped into atheist circles back then. People forget his first book wasn’t born of “The Atheist Movement” – it was conceived for better or worse, quite independently. And in 2005, it wasn’t really a news item in Australia. Not like The God Delusion or God Is Not Great were, later on.

Online atheism was, and still is, a dis-aggregated population of godless people, with godless interests and an array of persuasions, political and otherwise. It still tends towards social liberalism, with flair-ups of hot-headed, misogynist, libertarian, cry-baby gronks here and there. It still has its clutches of former religiously minded people, overcompensating for their past, while still not quite getting the materialism they rhetorically lean toward. It’s got all that and more – not all of it good, obviously. People are people.

I tell you what though. The tendencies of the Australian political Blogosphere, and the Atheosphere, really started to pull in opposite directions quite strongly. And in bad ways. If the Blogosphere hadn’t imploded, if things kept on going the way they were and blog participation kept up, straddling the two would have gotten pretty unpleasant.

The Oz political blogosphere owed a lot to being arts-adjacent. A number of more prominent bloggers here had intended career trajectories that could be, fairly or unfairly, negatively effected if certain prejudices weren’t catered to, or at least, not aggravated. Depending on what parts of the arts you don’t want to antagonize, you may not want to be seen as too sympathetic to Salman Rushdie – even this late in the piece. Pointing out that “sampling around the dependent variable” in statistics is a methodological flaw, could have you painted a supporter of the Iraq War, and made an outsider in other sections.

Deflate a beloved legal fiction and… you get the picture. Needless to say, denouncing The Wrong Kind of Atheists, irrespective of what those atheists may actually believe or do, was very popular back in the day in arts circles. And still is. What was allowed and what was verboten for atheists to inquire into was not being decided by people who actually knew what those atheists thought or did – or where they were actually going with things. Arguing against eugenics in a technically literate manner could get you accused of supporting eugenics by people with all the understanding of eugenics you’d expect of those raised on a media diet entirely made up of Sunday Arts.

(People who overly pride themselves on being cerebral often don’t like it when people use language they don’t understand – and technical language can become a repeat offender at setting this off).

If it was otherwise, maybe left-leaning religion journalists and the like would have made a bigger deal about specific instances of sexism documented within atheist communities, a lot earlier? In retrospect, it’s really odd that the critics of “New Atheism” mostly just left this alone, when it had the most evidence to support it relative to other complaints.

But why investigate sexism when you can accuse people, without a shred of evidence, and without being able to articulate why it’s even a problem, of attempting to resurrect a long-dead movement in philosophy? Because some of the people in arts circles you want to impress say it’s on the naughty list, that’s why.

The left side of the Australian political blogosphere catered to this kind of sensibility, to varying extents.

***

Meanwhile, in atheist land… We had the backdrop of an influential, but quite feudal arrangement of US secular organizations steeped in the American Civil Religion. The influence of Paul Kurtz in motivating US Humanism is large and well known, but his influence in making things so tribal? Not as much.

It’s been published what a control freak Kurtz could be, but there’s not so much analysis of the feudalism, at least not that I’ve come across. Needless to say, the details of his feuding with Richard Dawkins and intemperate or tone-deaf atheists seemed contrived – Dawkins hasn’t said half the stupid shit he’s been accused of, and of the actual stupid shit he’s said, Kurtz has had fellow travelers who’ve said worse, all without complaint from Kurtz. Hell, Kurtz had been falsely accused of some of the same going back decades, so he knew the tricks.

So when Kurtz joined in with the chorus decrying the “New Atheism” in the 2000s – a epithet he himself had used against him in the 1980s! – when Kurtz joined in in decrying Dawkins’ tone, amongst other things, Kurtz seemed mostly just to be railing against Dawkins’ influence relative to his own.

There was a struggle, from Kurtz, to direct organizations away from supporting Dawkins’ style (if not Dawkins himself). The way Kurtz exited CFI under a cloud after losing this struggle, just reinforced the impression.

It’s not that I want to smear Kurtz, though. But he had a part in making Playing The Game normal behaviour in movement spaces that are supposed to be geared to, in some sense, serve the truth. That’s not okay.

(It’s not that I imagine that Dawkins wouldn’t have done the same if he were able – he’s just not a natural at it is all, so you don’t really see it from him. At least, not directly. His proxies on the other hand…)

Meanwhile, American Humanism… yeesh. Much like a lot of their Unitarian brethren from the Harvard Divinity School, a lot of formally affiliated American Humanists seen to suffer from a strain of Smartest Person In The Room disease. Albeit a American liberal variety. For decades – DECADES – I’ve been seeing them waltz into conversation, not really understanding what other people are saying, and just assuming something deplorable is being said before launching into a condescending, corrective lecture. Never mind that their interlocutor may have been saying the opposite, and saying it better.

Add to this level of conceit, a dash of overcompensation for shameful memories of previous religious or bigoted misdeeds, an internalized redemption arc fantasy (ala American Civil Religion), and lashings of the kind of ambition-driven anxieties you get from The Cult of LinkedIn, and you’ve got the average American Humanist Association apparatchik I seem to keep coming across. You should see the Humanist chaplains!

Across the pond in the UK, Humanism doesn’t seem to have as much of the American Civil Religion aspects (obviously, but it does seem to be importing some of the tropes), or as much of the overcompensating, cult-hopper nonsense. But self-serving, media-aware professionals, again of the LinkedIn disposition? Yikes!

Australian Humanoatheoskepticism? Not really worth a mention. It’s got most of the usual symptoms, but a lot less of the statistical significance and all of the lack of influence to boot. Again, all of the Humanist chaplains I’ve come across in Australia are the same condescending, Smartest Guy In The Room, modeled-on-American-liberalism types, who seem to be conspicuously lacking in the actually-knowing-shit department for people so confident.

Layered across this, online, you have a small number of secular folks genuinely interested in open, honest inquiry in spite of how the algorithms try to shape their discussion (there were more, but the algorithm, online harassment and loss of interest have each taken their toll). You have a lot of profilitic identities trying to be the next trending thing in quote-unquote “progressive” thought. And you have a load of manosphere-adjacent chuds, similarly profilitic, but who are also the volatile, rage-baiting, less-humorous troll-successors of 2000s 4Chan, Something Awful, the crass end of Internet Infidels and so on.

Too many of the arts-adjacent seem apt to lump all, or much of this into the false taxon “New Atheist”, for various, often self-serving reasons. Maybe they want to appeal to their liberal-arts friends while also being sciencey, but they engaged in some misogynistic online abuse back in the day; they can claim they were “radicalized” by “New Atheism”, thereby externalizing blame.

Never mind that some of those radical “New Atheists” were women on the receiving end of said misogyny. Women who made great efforts in standing up to it. You can’t let facts like that stop you from lumping them in with their harassers and blaming them for your past actions.

Or maybe somebody doesn’t want to be accused of being a “New Atheist”, so they single somebody else out who is (but nobody is – it’s a bogus taxon). Maybe they can’t get tenure at Australian Catholic University, and need to keep being seen to be behaving, so need to differentiate themselves from people – anyone – seen as pesky in received wisdom. Or maybe it’s more base.

“Oh hey babe. Yeah, I’m not like those New Atheist guys. Yeah, nah, I’m not religious but I respect a broad who studies theology. I’m totally a feminist.”

You think people haven’t witnessed behaviour online that’s reducible to parody like this? That this doesn’t happen in liberal, “progressive”, arts-friendly circles? That it hasn’t always happened for as long as there have been progressives?

***

But yeah… if you were a blogger straddled across an arts-adjacent, center-left political scene, and a candid, secular movement committed to inquiry, you’d basically be spread across two antagonistic cultures at once. I’m certainly not the only one I’ve seen straddled across it.

I guess that’s a silver lining to the end of the blogosphere – that particular rift is gone.

I’ve grown away from several people from “both sides” over the years. Some I wish I’d cottoned on to earlier, other I had issues with but tolerated out of deference to the judgement of mutual friends, and with others, we’ve just changed. A handful of folks I’ve befriended via the blogsophere have sadly turned out to just have been somewhat awful all along – but we all knew to expect that about the Internet once upon a time, so I can’t complain at length.

Having Oz politics bloggers and secular bloggers go at it full-tilt, at the same time, at length, would have certainly made this process of parting a lot more explosive. Maybe painfully. Maybe destructively. And the polarization did increase, even if the readership didn’t.

Someone who kept writing, and yet somehow managed to rise above this kind of division in-general, gracefully, and all while not self-censoring (while religious), was the late Neil Whitfield, who died just prior to Christmas last year. I’m coming around to thinking that Neil was the definitive elder-statesman of the Australian blogosphere. I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

The real question is probably whether or not the Australian blogosphere deserves to be associated with him.

Even before his death, more than once I’ve thought “what would Neil say?” The idea of OzBlogging without him around is still hard to process.

So. Back to that question. Why bother writing if you’re not going to be bothered fostering an audience?

***

I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to keep this blog going. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be going.

I’m mortal. When I started this I was in my early thirties and throwing around some heavy weight at the gym, despite not being at peak health even then. I’m in my fifties now, feeling it, and no longer at the gym since the early pandemic. My health isn’t great.

I’d like to leave something – and yeah, I’m thinking of the leaving part – but I’m not entirely sure of the worth of the project. Especially without genuine engagement (no, not the social media statistical definition – I mean the human kind!)

I’ve stopped listing and have changed my email addresses, and I’m considering closing the comments section, given nobody uses it. Due to legal changes in Australia, blog hosts are now more liable for comments made than they used to be, and it’s otherwise a time-sink, if not a particularly frenetic one.

How would people engage with this “content” after that? Not outside of social media linking to it, I guess. Which is kind of worrisome. Handing over power, even a small residual amount after holding out seems bleak. Not in a practical sense, but in that it’s finally confirming the final nail in the coffin of proper, open discussion. The death of The Dream of The Internet.

This may be goodbye, my friends. Eventually. Soonish.

The only thing stopping me is a kind of Camus-style, existential rebellion against the Universe. The continuation of this blog for so long in spite of everything has certainly been absurd.

What to hope for? I’d like people to be able to talk again like they did in the 2000s. Maybe without the casual bigotry, but also without the self-censorship. How do you balance that? Well, not with an algorithm, and not with BlueSky or Twitter admins.

Maybe, if some of the few people remaining can band together and see past their differences, they can… We had a slow cooking movement, maybe we can have a slow reading… What if Zoomers took on 2000s-style blogging like it was retro…

No. There are challenges, and likely solutions, but they won’t involve denying that the blogosphere is dead.

I’ll keep the lights on around here for a while yet, just to rail against an absurd world in an absurd universe. And maybe I’ll even get a chance to debunk a few falsehoods about movement and subculture history. But I’m not going to kid myself.

If you’ve read this far, then thanks. It’s absurd that you’re here. But appreciated.

~ Bruce

Neil is gone

Towards the end of last year, and after a few concerning announcements, Neil Whitfield, retired teacher, author of the Floating Life series of blogs, and Neil’s Commonplace Book, passed away. I found out last week via a few searches online after not being able to contact him through the blog comments.

I first met Neil who then posted as “Ninglun” online – I’m going to say – back in 2006, or maybe even late 2005, in the comments on AV’s Five Public Opinions blog while it was still hosted on Blogspot. Comments at Five Public Opinions could get…. lively. With hindsight, Neil seemed to have an infinite reserve of patience, because boy wasn’t I an irritable, prickly customer back then? One among a number I guess, not that that ever stopped Neil from showing grace.

That period, from around early 2006 to April of 2009 was kind of a golden era for Australian blogging, back before Twitter, Facebook and streaming video content started cutting into the scene. (Australian atheist blogging also had a culture distinct from its US counterpart – not that Neil was an atheist at the time, he did partake in the discussions and was a valued contributor).

AV bowed out of blogging towards the end of that period, and neither Neil nor myself heard from him again, although on a few occasions Neil and I reminisced and wished that we could. A part of me hopes that AV gets this news somehow, although my old blogging haunts are now gone and the usual channels fell away over a decade ago.

(This is the point in the conversation where someone would make a joke about intercessory prayer).

Neil chugged on, continuing blogging while so many of the old stalwarts closed up shop, the Australian blogosphere practically falling away around him. If I recall correctly, the New South Wales State Library has archived some of his past blogging, so I’m going to have to look into that.

I started making plans to visit Neil in Wollongong back in 2019. The plan was, I’d book into a hostel in The ‘Gong, catch Iron Maiden’s planned 2020 tour while it passed through Sydney, and finally meet Neil in person. That and maybe grab a meal at Diggers.

Suffice to say, the COVID pandemic saw to the end of that plan, and I’ve been pretty much bound to Adelaide ever since. I’m sad I’ll never get to meet Neil in person, but I am still grateful for the writing he’s left us all with, and for the lessons I’ve learned from him.

A kind rebuke from the Five Public Opinions era about my Humpty Dumptyish philosophy of language will be something I hold on to for some time yet, and I expect to come across things from time to time and wonder “what would Neil make of this?”

As a conversationalist, and as an educator, he had that effect on people.

Vale Neil Whitfield (1943-2024).

~ Bruce

Memories of madness

Age enough, and the timeline of your life will arc in such a way that you can view your past self from the outside, like viewing the exterior of a back carriage from the front of a train traversing a curve. Life throws you the curve and time does the rest.

From the mid-nineties through the early aughts, with 1998 and 2001 particular in-mind, I didn’t know how balmy I was, nor did I have much appreciation of how unsettling my manner could be for others. Now, my former self seems unsettling to me as well, despite knowing from memory that I didn’t have any evil intent at the time.

I can hardly blame anyone for feeling put-off during any one or more of my episodes.

A few years ago, I was shown a YouTube video of a therapist who claimed – probably truthfully – that statistically, women found mentally ill men creepy. He went on to opine that this was a tragedy, as if mentally ill men are owed some kind of equal consideration by women in their own personal lives. To me, that part sounds like horseshit.

It keeps popping up in pop-psychology that people proffer to me; this idea that people – especially women – are somehow obligated to act with a para-professional kind of compassion towards random, mentally ill strangers, either as a duty in and of itself, or in service to actual mental health professionals whose jobs would thereby be made easier. That the duty of care that binds nurses, therapists and so on, were somehow applicable to people outside the job (again, especially women).

Again; horseshit. I neither wanted nor needed this special consideration at the time. And there is a reason we distinguish professionals in the first place: they have responsibilities the general populace don’t have. It’s not like my friends, neighbours and acquaintances could join the relevant professional organizations, nor receive the relevant award rates. Any such compassion would therefore be supererogatory.

What I would have liked was better mental health care. Specifically, better advice. In either late ’97 or early ’98, before the first time the wheels really came off.

In early ’98 I went to the GP clinic nearest to my flat, and the local GP was adamant that I shouldn’t consider my mood, the changes to my personality, nor my extreme insomnia to be mental health issues; that I should put the idea of mental health care out of my mind categorically.

He did his little chest puffy thing about being a doctor in the Korean war, and that “yours is not to reason why” regarding the nature of my shift work and what it was doing to my sleep cycle. Suffice to say, I followed his advice, mostly just in the form of resignation to the fact I wasn’t getting any help, and off those wheels came. La-la land ’98 wasn’t much fun for anyone involved.

1999 wasn’t too bad. I got prescribed paroxetine by another, quite decent GP, although this was before some of the side-effects (especially for the 25-and-under), and before things like discontinuation syndrome were known about. Then between a newer, dismissive GP, newer, early shift work, and being pressured into going cold-turkey off of paroxetine, things started to fall apart again in late 2000 before eventually going haywire in 2001.

Again, I don’t think I should have got special consideration from neighbours and the like at the time. And I don’t blame any medical professional for only using what limited information was available at the time.

I do wish I’d fronted up to a hospital on a few occasions, though. I’ve since been told that if I’d done that at the time, reporting my full list of symptoms, standard practice would have been to sedate me and keep me under observation for a period. And gawd, didn’t it sound nice when I heard that?

Only, I was a casual shift worker, so a hospital overnight could have spelled unemployment. Looking back I have no idea how I managed to do my job while being so flat out bonkers. My internal narrative is unreliable on the matter, and viewed with better perspective and more objective data years later, it’s confounding. How can anyone do that?

By 2002, more than two decades ago, it was over. Mostly. No more psychotic breaks. No more panic attacks. I don’t really know what to attribute the change to, but I did make an effort to correct some of my attitude problems come late 2001, and it is that case that the time from the onset of puberty to the mid-20s is a turbulent period when psychotic traits can peak.

Thing is though, is that I’ll never be sure what exactly happened. I do still have issues, and things that need looking in to, but nothing particularly florid. Certainly nothing for emergency. And waiting lists for assessment are a thing, more so now than before.

“Psychotic depression”, “depression with psychotic features”, and other maladies with references to the “psychotic” have been raised speculatively, but no retrospective diagnosis is possible. That’d be unethical. no attempt can be made.

For one, a number of these conditions are superficially similar, requiring blood tests contemporary with the psychosis in orders to distinguish between them. Moreover, some of the treatments for some of these conditions are contraindicated with the others, meaning that a misdiagnosis could lead to very real harm.

Suffice to say, I don’t have the necessary blood work from ’98-2001. So I’ll just have to resign myself to never knowing the full picture.

I can accept this. And I can better see – and regret – the distress I caused some of those in my social proximity, while also being more appreciative of what compassion I was shown. Compassion that I didn’t much deserve at the time. Learning to understand grace over time is whole other story.

I’d be lying though, if I said I wouldn’t have preferred a diagnosis at the start. Imagine that. It’s early ’98, my GP does the right thing and refers me to a competent psychiatrist for assessment, I get some answers and resign from my job eight-or-so months earlier than I actually did. It’d probably have helped save others some drama, while leaving me without the mystery.

Still, that’s not the way things panned out.

Looking back with the benefit of the curve, viewing things from the outside, aside from seeing how disturbing I must have looked to others, I’ve gained a few insights at the expense of realizing just how much I be-clowned myself.

If you’re any kind of rationalist, you’re probably at a heightened risk of a particular conceit; that your behaviour and attitudes are going to be rational independent of your mood. I certainly had that conceit; that I could be agitated, yet soldier on with a clear mind.

I used to have male friends who resented women more deeply than I realized at the time, and they did on occasion try to use me as a soundboard for misogynistic ideations. I didn’t rationalize or take these ideations to heart – quite the contrary, I most often thought they were bullshit in the very first instance. So I imagined that I was 100% immune, not realizing the possibility of any kind of emotional contagion.

Not being able to have much in the way of honest, candid discussion with The Guys, of my own volition, and without much consideration, I did what any number of other guys have done for eons; I leaned more heavily on the emotional labour of women – a sexist imposture I can only blame myself for. When you add a bit of emotional contagion from the misogynists to this imposture, maybe just tone, maybe just a posture, and overlay all of that over a psychotic break and a complete lack of awareness about what may be triggering you, you wind up with a babbling loony of a guy who makes a bit of a pest of himself with women.

A tip for my fellow guys: When a woman is worried you want to date her, but you don’t because you’re even more terrified at the prospect than she is, don’t try to diffuse the tension with sarcasm (or facetiousness). It probably won’t be received as sarcasm and you’ll have only yourself to blame. And it’ll be even worse if at the time you’re generally barking mad and randomly reacting to a minefield unknown triggers.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can’t help but suspect that some of The Guys – the misogynists at least – seeing my state, were deliberately trying to wind me up as some kind of proxy as revenge for some perceived injury they’d suffered at the hands of women. If I’m honest, although I can’t quite remember, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t pick up on this at the time and just fail to act accordingly.

Thing is, I really didn’t like incel and PUA types even back then, and I was big on personal boundaries, so I kind of failed to instantiate my own values. I should have reconsidered seeing a better GP instead to offload my immediate dramas, sort things out for myself, and then deal with the neighbours, friends and family where necessary when I was more stable. Coulda, woulda, shoulda, I know.

Suffice to say, it’s been well over a decade since I’ve regularly seen any of Those Guys, and it’s been better for all involved, other than maybe them. You don’t want to be around people like that when you’re balmy, if only to help lessen what a nuisance you may become.

It’s not all been gained perspective though. Some of the arc entails loss of perspective as sanity increases.

At the time of any of my mental breaks, I used to think that my thoughts were coherent. In fact, I was obsessed with exorcising these thoughts through articulation – that if I finally managed to speak them clearly, or put them on the page without error, that I’d be able to just forget about them and move on more calmly.

This was nonsense. My supposedly clear and rational thoughts were in reality so incoherent that they were impossible to render in a grammatical fashion. Even the most basic rules of language made such articulation impossible, and even when interpreted charitably, these views and opinions born of psychosis were still so much nonsense.

Insoluble internal contradictions. Non-sequitur segues. Hidden premises that I thought were obvious, but nobody could actually understand because they were literally impossible to understand. Bad jokes nobody could see the point of. Diversions, largely so I didn’t have to think uncomfortable thoughts. But mostly, just shit that couldn’t be resolved in logic, all of which was presented by myself, as perfectly reasonable.

It didn’t help that I’d get sooky-pissy when people didn’t get where I was coming from, or worse, when they thought I may be coming from a place of malice.

Me, a bad guy? Well, no I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but you can’t blame anyone for considering me to have been at least a little bit suss.

Dear younger self: Again, go to a different GP, don’t bother the woman next door, or anyone else in your social circle with your nonsense. Once you realize that they’ve been triggering you, you’ll soon come to the conclusion that it’s your responsibility to manage your own triggers, not their responsibility to deal with the fallout, and that you’ve been an ass all along for not taking the right steps to take care of yourself. Also, ditch the man-babies. Stop lying to yourself. They aren’t your friends.

The loss of perspective comes in when becoming increasingly more rational again. Trying to remember the nonsense that was swirling around your head, even if only to take responsibility for it, isn’t really doable. If it’s so incoherent that you can’t reliably put it into words, you’re just not going to be able to retain it with a sane mind, and you can’t really put it to paper with any kind of fidelity to the original thought. Retaining the incoherence requires the insanity to remain in place. No thanks.

(And I’m really glad I wasn’t blogging back then. Good grief.)

At any rate, the train still progresses around the curve, and with each passing year I can see more of the carriages from the outside, the way that others have seen them. Meanwhile, personal gibberish from the past is becoming increasingly less memorable. I hope this progression continues to work out for the better.

~ Bruce

A few thoughts on Jesus

So. First things first; apologies for not posting in a while. I’ve been contemplating a number of things while in absentia, and I haven’t felt a compulsion to force out a post.

That kind of grind is creatively and intellectually corrosive; you don’t reflect on life according to schedule. But still, I could have kept touch.

What have I been up to?

Recently I went back and had another watching of/listening to Xasthur’s Walker of Dissonant Worlds. There’s a placard in the film clip that’s held by a homeless man in a wheelchair that reads “Christ’s Wounds are NOTHING compared to MINE!!!” It got me thinking.

Comparatively speaking, the alleged son of God didn’t really go through the worst of horrors. Anyone who’s worked with refugees at length, or had to prosecute war crimes, is going to be able to conjure up images of far worse. Hell, Steven King can and has; on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is hangnail, 5 is the experience of Paul Sheldon in Misery, and 10 is unspeakable, Jay-Cee’s time at Calvary earns maybe a 4.

Not a great holiday experience, but quite incapable of encapsulating the full breadth of human suffering. Sexed-up as it has been, it’s a bit of an insult to anyone who’s been through worse and survived.

And of course, Jay-Cee did survive. After a long-weekend cooldown, he just auto-self-resurrected and went on his merry.

Another song comes to mind. Pulp’s Common People.

If he called his Dad, He could stop it all. And eventually He did, although not before the younger divinity had a bit of a moan.

I don’t expect the story of Jesus to be some kind of lurid, sadistic tale of pain and ultimate humiliation. It is a story after all, and if it were told that way it’d be a bad one. But if Jesus’s experience is going to fall short of what can and has been experienced by too many humans, what was needed was for the story to not mock human misery. Sadly, that it did. All it had to do was not caterwaul or pretend the maximal of human suffering, nor the apex of sacrifice, but alas.

What we got was Jesus the Cosmic Class Tourist.

It doesn’t really say much to me about Jesus though, this story. It reads more like a tale of how ordinary people should frame their drudgery and pain as written by people somewhat fortuitous enough to be insulated from much of that experience – it says more about the authors. If Jesus was a man, I don’t think think he was divine, and I don’t trust scripture to describe him.

Maybe he was a class act. His biographers haven’t painted him that way is all.

Some immortal dude in the sky with power and privilege beyond anything we lowly humans could imagine, deigns to transubstantiate as one of us, then tell us how it is as if we hadn’t the experience? It couldn’t have been worse if he’d transubstantiated to the hood to use karate lessons to reach troubled youth.

And yet some will complain that they don’t understand why others don’t find this appealing.

~ Bruce

2021: Well that was a thing

Sooooo… got any New Year’s Resolutions yet?

Find adventure? Travel more? Better work life balance? Less grinding of teeth?

Blahblahblah. Perspective has kind of buried all that. I expect I’ll be doing more of the same, except perhaps more frugally.

Bought tickets to three gigs this year and didn’t make it to any of them. None were cancelled. Just got crook. Which is a bit of a shit showing on my part considering the odds of catching a show with full mosh pit going forward.

Will be getting my booster next month, and remaining otherwise pretty isolated. I have to say I do like getting deliveries to my post office box though. Until this month, the regular walk to pick up a parcel from the comic’s shop first thing in the morning isn’t something I’ve done since 1995 – back when I last lived in Port Lincoln.

May have to drop the gym membership though. Get some weights. Take advantage of the increased amount of walking. Circumstances being what they are.

Not sure that’s a resolution though. Won’t hinge on the calendar date either way.

Travel interstate to see friends? Gawd. I want to. I’m not sure that’s in the foreseeable future though. But given how fast the medical response was in 2020, perhaps the unforeseeable isn’t actually that far off.

Also not a resolution.

What I can say is that I’ve learned a bit this year. A good part of that concerns the nature of good friends and good faith. (Short version: political compliance has a poor correlation with good faith, about as poor as contrarianism has, and there’s a marked difference between being an on-point-ally and decent fellow human. I knew this before, but my understanding has grown appreciably).

At any rate, I’ve got a bit of bad faith of my own going on here I need to confess to.

This post exists largely just to give me something for the year of 2021 in the archives. I think it serves that purpose admirably – or it will if I post it within the next three hours.

So… If you’ll forgive my ulterior motive – my perfunctory posting – I’ll wish you a Happy New Year. Or a not-too-shit one, at any rate. Don’t want to get those hopes up.

~ Bruce

No, it’s not “Darwin’s Law”

This one’s been irritating me for a while.

First some antisocial yokel with a poor education and possible low intelligence, along with their peers, decides to flout social distancing or isolation protocols, and stomp out into a densely packed public space in the middle of a viral outbreak as a form of ill-informed protest. The response? Someone sneers “oh well, that’s Darwin’s Law, isn’t it?”, as if the spectacle of social irresponsibility was evidence that an ironic social Darwinism was selectively afflicting the right wing.

Aside from being conspicuous mostly coming from lefties who aren’t supposed to be in for that kind of eugenic fantasy, supposed irony not withstanding, it barely stands up to scrutiny. Natural selection doesn’t work like that.

Put simply, if alleles for a hereditable trait give an organism a reproductive advantage in a given environment, then through that increase in reproduction the hereditable trait will flourish compared to its competing alleles that don’t share the advantage, or don’t possess it as strongly. Conversely, alleles that confer a reproductive disadvantage inhibit their own reproduction, comparatively speaking.

The end result: the genetic makeup of a population shifts towards being more conducive to reproduction within a range of environmental settings.

But there’s no Trumpist bleach-drinking allele, nor an allele for politically particular cabin fever. As far as I know, there’s no Florida Man allele either.

Perhaps then, what people mean is a more general “allele for stupid white trash-like behaviour”. That seems to be the inference right? Leaving aside the questionable politics of eugenic fantasy and classism, this still doesn’t translate to even half-decent Darwinian speculation.

Any allele (or alleles) that purportedly predisposes people to bad life decisions of the redneck kind may, hypothetically, in addition to life-threatening acts of social disinhibition, also predispose the redneck organism in question to contribute to an overabundance of unplanned pregnancies, and hence an abundance of descendants. So even if the entire population of the genetically redneck were infected with a pandemic infection due to genetically predisposed behaviour, if the mortality rate were more than offset by an associated increase in fecundity, then there’d be a resultant net evolutionary advantage, not a disadvantage to said allele (or alleles).

None of this considers the practical epidemiology either. There’s nothing to say that after a day at the 5G-Conspiracy Theorist Congregation, a Southern Neo-Brownshirt won’t go on to protest educated multiple “Libruls”, in person, and with much spittle-flecked gusto. There’s nothing to say they won’t travel back to their communities to infect more sensible neighbours through further acts of neglect – that the spread of the disease won’t go on to infect and kill indiscriminately regarding politics or intelligence.

Ask yourself; frontline workers – nurses, doctors etc. – how many of them are of of above average intelligence and education? What happens if they have to take care of sick protestors and get infected themselves? It’s hardly self-evident that this or any other viral pandemic is going to selectively exterminate the witless and their descendants.

So yeah, smarmily claiming “it’s Darwin’s Law” is hardly the best way to differentiate yourself from the ranks of the ignorant. It also isn’t a great way of differentiating yourself from an asshole.

If you have already, please re-consider before trotting off this nonsense again.

~ Bruce

More of the same

It seems the hand-wringing over “New Atheists” hasn’t abated in respectable circles, and is still as depressing as ever. Take this latest effort by Tim Robertson over at Eureka Street.

Like it’s 2006 all over again, we kick off with a retread of the “New Atheists do it too” retort concerning creation myths; an old standard still carries the tacit admission that there’s something to be embarrassed about in believing in creation myths. I guess I’d be more disappointed if I was religious.

Getting closer to the meat of things, Robertson portrays a “New Atheism” that views itself as being in line with a Humean kind the Enlightenment. This strikes me as more than a little odd, because ever since Harris’s The Moral Landscape, misunderstanding of and dismissiveness towards Hume could be portrayed as a fashionable trope of the “New Atheism”; from cod-moral realism, to dyspeptic rationalists* giving anti-Humean lectures at the pub, to train-wrecks involving the is-ought distinction like those described here.

If you’ve been around skepto-atheist circles during the past ten years, and you haven’t come across this anti-philosophical, anti-Humean schtick yet, you’ve either not been paying attention or have been incredibly lucky. “New Atheism” sees itself as anything approximating Humean? Phooey.

(And if the “New Atheism” did actually exist, you’d also think it’d be more Millian than Lockean, too, what with all the utilitarianism and the motivation to avoid all the peskiness involved in natural law.)

As for the matter of Dawkins and his eugenics tweet, and how this moves the “New Atheism” away from the Humean, I’m pretty sure Robertson is just being salacious here. Mentions of Dawkins and eugenics in close proximity may excite the usual audiences, but Robertson doesn’t really go anywhere with it so much as riff over the matter with a cheap jab and glib allusion to critical theory by way of Wikipedia. It’s all over a bit quickly.

An essay detailing why we should consider the referenced Dialectic of Enlightenment as a sound analysis, and how it applies specifically in cases like Dawkins’ might be interesting (and probably a good deal more interesting again if involving a case with a publisher other than Twitter). We don’t get that though. Is something like this expecting too much, or are we all supposed to be clever, to be “in” enough to just know where Robertson is going with this and give each other knowing nods?

(If you have the time, patience and curiosity, there’s a discussion on much the same topic that has the merit of being somewhat less conjectural or opaque than discussion centered on theory. Keith Stanovich’s concept of cognitive decoupling presents as highly applicable to Dawkins’ tweets and similar displays of reasoning. Points for dipping your toes in that are as good as any other can be found here and here.**)

The matter of eugenics and the Dialectic of Enlightenment pushed to one side, Robertson moves back to bromides, performing a bit of splitting to present Dawkins The Biologist and Dawkins The Atheist as if they were somehow distinct. It’s a artifice of course, so that Robertson can present one as having failed to do the work of the other – in this case Dawkins The Atheist being a mean uninspiring sod, incapable of the “wonder and splendor” achieved by Dawkins The Biologist. A neat little trick of Manichean negation if your brain can manage it, I guess.

Of course religion is positioned as a purveyor of “wonder and splendor” itself, which Dawkins himself could have remained more like if only he’d stayed in his lane.

(This splitting does raise a question, though. How do you dissociate Dawkins’ tweet on eugenics from Dawkins The Biologist in the first place? Because we are trying to hang shit on the “New Atheism”, right? This is Dawkins The Atheist leading us towards scientific racism, not Dawkins The Biologist yeah?)

I can’t help thinking that deep down, this hope-trope is tied to another piece of apologetics: “The New Atheists have failed to contend with the hope brought by sophisticated, progressive religion! They talk about us like we’re creationists!”

The “New Atheists” – whoever they are on any given day – among others, treat religious moderates/liberals/progressives as if they are statistically or socially marginal, which in many, many contexts they are. In practice this often means just overlooking them. Does being ignored like that hurt so much that apologists still need to trot out the denials? “No, no. They’re talking about us!”

Maybe people need to get over themselves, yeah?

Getting back to hope; what’s to contend with anyway? I don’t just mean background levels of hope, or hope that the credulous can get behind. Why is religion portrayed as especially inducing of high-grade hope, more so than say worker’s clubs, group knitting or mosh-pits?

We’re challenged by Robertson to consider why the “New Atheist” bogeyman fails to inspire hope like religion or like Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn? It’s truly odd that Corbyn is presented by Robertson as an alternative given that this piece was published well after the bloodbath that was the 2019 UK general election.

The Corbyn rapture didn’t happen. And it’s less than hope-inspiring to have to listen to all the rationalizations for why prophecy failed to materialize. Yes, the Russians got involved. Yes, the Tories lied, even more so than usual. But no, none of this clinched it. It’ll all be just as much fun when the Bernie Sanders rapture fails to materialize and his more fervent followers – the hopeful ones – try to re-invent history so as not to look like followers of Harold Camping each time they pass a mirror***.

Robertson compares religion to this cascading disappointment and still finds the nerve to criticize “New Atheists” for slagging off religion?

This phenomena of Australian writers of a radical bend, or of progressive theological sympathies, crying into their beers and pissing and moaning about perceived slights from now over a decade ago, doesn’t inspire much hope either. I can understand religious people not liking The God Delusion. What’s not to understand? I can understand them not finding it inspirational either because outside of a particular subset of the ex-religious, who does?

I can understand people finding Dawkins’ tone-deaf tweeting annoying or uninformative. My suggestion is simply that if you don’t like the guy’s tweets, you treat him like someone who’s transitioned well outside their talents into a retirement full of awkward, eminently ignorable beat poetry. It’s not like you’ll ever have to worry that some nation will turn one of his tweets into policy.

What I do have difficulty understanding is why any curious, emotionally functioning, religious adult would feel the need to get Dawkins so long after the original narcissitic injury. Defensive, thin-skinned, grudge-holding types on the other hand – that’s easy to grasp. As is the idea of authors willing to pander to these sentiments to get published.

I’m not sure how sulky axe-grinding, or peddling ego-balms is a good fit for publishers of serious literature, though. Don’t ordinary religious people find these grudge pieces utterly depressing? Maybe they do and maybe more literary journals and should reflect that.

At any rate, you don’t have to be religious to find a failure of Jesuit culture depressing; we’re all humans after all. Unless you’re a sadist, the failure of other humans is something that we should feel on some level.

Similarly, if you have any care for Australian literature, the indulgence of pettiness has got to be pretty disappointing as well. I don’t think people are remotely as inured to this as some pretend.

~ Bruce

* Term borrowed from here, which is a good read in its own right. Apparently Sam Harris first coined the term, so I guess it’s nice to have something decent to attribute to him.

** I won’t endorse all the points made, obviously, but the discussion overall seems fruitful enough, and leads off into other conversations people may want to chase up.

*** Even if Sanders becomes president, his purported appeal won’t be enough for his supporters dream to survive Congress.

A strange thing happened…

At the end of last year I eluded to “the derailment of 2019”. I was planning, at length in 2018, and possibly well into 2019, to examine three texts: Kate Manne’s Down Girl, Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules, and Karl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. I’ll still look further into Man and His Symbols and other Jungian material later, but Down Girl and 12 Rules won’t be getting the same treatment. It probably helps that Jung never got onto Twitter.

But first, a few summarized opinions regarding my reading of Manne and Peterson over the period:

Kate Manne’s criticism of 12 Rules (in the now hard-to-link-to Reconsider The Lobster*) seemed fair, and sufficiently accurate for the reaction of both Peterson and his fans to be regarded as hyperventilation.
I’m more than a little sympathetic to the treatment Manne gives to the phenomena of “himpathy” in Down Girl. More generally, this tacit deal where men are supposed to supply supererogatory sympathy to other men, not just in terms of sexual misconduct, shits me.
12 Rules isn’t terrible in as far as most of its advice goes, but when I find it’s useful it just seems a rephrasing of something I’m already on-board with. The trick, it seems, is seducing you into thinking you’d not already realized these things yourself. In terms of justifications and explanations – cue lobsters, seretonin just-so stories and bowdlerized narratives about young male angst – I find the book particularly weak.
Peterson isn’t a fascist, he’s just a generic conservative. Some of the hyperbolic criticisms of Peterson seem devoid of historical perspective, and suffused with more than just a jot of social media tribalism.
I’m beginning to think that of all the Intellectual Dark Web types, Peterson may be the most sincere, and that he may harbour suspicions about the character of the other IDW members. (There are some glaring narcissists in the IDW, and Peterson is academically accomplished in the area of personality, so…)
Given some of the antics of Kate Manne’s fellow travelers on Twitter, and the behaviour of some of her colleagues from 2018-2019 (behaviour which she has endorsed, but which elsewhere has elicited an apology from an editor of the American Philosophical Association blog, and possibly a suspension**), I’m going to limit my interaction with her work to an as-necessary basis.

***

2018, just after beginning preparation to examine Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules: As a part of my ongoing health plan, I signed up for mental health counseling. There wasn’t a crisis involved. There was more the realization of the need for maintenance work, which is something I’m not terribly familiar with practically speaking. Self-care isn’t one of my strong point.

It’s not the worst problem to have, trying to work out how to hold on to an unprecedented level of mental health. But it is perplexing if you haven’t much experience.

Before this post gets critical, I’ll say this: I got something out of the process. I did learn a couple of tricks. The counselling also provided some useful perspective; where I sit in the bureaucratic scheme of things, what may have been going on in the past when I should have first received help.

But now: The weird. This is where my reading interests collided with my mental health care.

I was asked during counselling what my stressors were, and I stated amongst other things that the persistence of a generalized “himpathy” was one of them. I defined this “himpathy” for my counsellor with reference to Manne’s work; words to the effect of a extra serving of sympathy a community affords men that it denies others (not just in relation to sexual harassment). I gave an example recent at the time: The expectation of my sympathy in relation to the angst suffered by men witnessing a Gillette advert they didn’t like.

Weirdly it was suggested that I was somehow being too hard on myself. My stressor wasn’t the concept of “himpathy” it was the “himpathy” itself. Something like it has been bothering me for a long while, Kate Manne’s Down Girl just gave it a name. It’s not like I’ve been at myself with a cat-of-nine-tales at Kate Manne’s request.

It should probably be noted that my counsellor was male.

“Himpathy” is a stressor for me. I don’t want special sympathy on account of being male. I don’t need it. I find it repulsive. The quid pro quo in the scheme also means that I’m also expected to provide this sympathy. So I’m expected to pay a cost for something I didn’t even want in the first place.

Frankly, if I fucked up and got told off by even an intemperate feminist (gasp!), it’d be less stressful than having some bro mewling around, offering unsolicited sympathy with strings creepily attached.

Can you see the reversal my counsellor made? Who am I being too hard on? Who’s the presumed beneficiary of the extra sympathy I’m denying? The Guys.

The Guys got defended, and my stressor went ignored. In a counselling session that was explicitly supposed to be for my benefit.

At any rate, Down Girl got a bit closer to home thanks to counselling, and gave me a little too much material to know where to begin at the time.

Still, things got weirder.

***

A question was raised early on: Am I in any clinical sense dissociative? Thanks to waiting lists it’d take a while to answer rigorously, and in the interim the seriousness as the query was walked back a good way. But having made a booking with a clinical psychiatrist, why back out?

It was the nth day in a heat wave, and after four hours sleep owing to said heat, I traipsed uphill to the clinic through a humid morning. I was the first client of the day, but he was over half an hour late. To be fair, traffic into the area had been horrendous in the morning. There’d been similar delays in prior months with both my optometrist and surgeon.

Despite the air conditioning, I had a good deal of difficulty concentrating. I’m not sure I wasn’t experiencing a degree of heat stroke. I can’t be sure the psychiatrist wasn’t effected either.

Such diversions! I didn’t have to say much at all to get this guy going off on tangents. I mentioned that I write, and that the response to the Gillette advert was a stressor, and off we went.

I got recommendations for a couple of advertising guys who obviously scripted their “conversations” with pre-determined conclusions. I got a recommendations for Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan and the like, who I pretended were new to me in the hope of speeding things along. It didn’t work.

For a few minutes, despite never being tied to anything diagnostic or therapeutic, this was all being written down for my reference; a barrage of contrarian suggestion like I was being talked at by an overzealous YouTube algorithm with a underdeveloped interest in personal information. At least I didn’t get Stefan Molyneux as a suggestion.

Then came the Jung soft-sell. Apparently arrogance – as deduced from an uncharitable reading of a short string of words on my part – may be my “Shadow”. By this point, between being baked and being blabbed at, I was wondering how someone could draw conclusions – any conclusions – given the scant amount of data I’d offered up.

Suffice to say, the question of dissociation, despite being mentioned by me, and being written on my referral, was not investigated.

When it came time for the health advice, most everything turned out to be Jordan Peterson. Barring the 600mg of magnesium a day recommendation, even the bits that weren’t Jordan Peterson were Jordan Peterson. I wasn’t going to follow the YouTube URLs that linked to his material, because at the time YouTube was being very, very aggressive with suggesting white supremacist and InCel material if you even accidentally went anywhere near anything like Peterson.

There was other stuff on the list. Stuff that didn’t scream Jordan Peterson. Stuff not entailing a YouTube URL. Stuff with embedded videos. Embedded videos that started off “Hi, I’m Jordan Peterson”. Jesus!

“When you Jordan Peterson first thing in the morning, be sure to take three Jordan Petersons with a Jordan Peterson before your first Jordan Peterson.” – I paraphrase.

Say, for a moment, neither you nor I could think of a single thing Jordan Peterson had ever said or done that we could find fault with. Wouldn’t it still be just a bit obsessive focusing on the guy, over and over like that? Even undergrads are eventually expected not to go to the same well over and over again in their sources.

I felt like I was a text in a first year Film Studies class. Eek!

After this deluge of Peterson enthusiasm, I didn’t know where to begin in terms of an extended critique. I feel dishonest when I don’t divulge context – which is a recipe for rambling to be sure – but this threatened to unleash a deluge. I put off responding to 12 Rules indefinitely.

Maybe it’s something for the distant future.

No disrespect meant to Peterson, but ultimately I think Jung is more timeless. In the long run a focus on Jung – weird as he is, as pseudoscientific as his ideas may be – I think will be more fruitful. There’s just a whole heft of history there.

***

Ultimately, I started getting diminishing returns out of the mental health process and opted out. This was after sitting in a waiting room for 45 minutes when I was supposed to be meeting a new counsellor. I was already considering making that my last meeting; a “lets close my file and say goodbye” session.

I never walked into that meeting. Instead I walked out and down to the local train station and started to wonder if I was more or less sane than the people who’d been paid to help me. If I committed to taking care of myself, really taking care, could I say that I’ve got this?

The rational answer, I think, was and is yes. I don’t want to be the arrogant prick who thinks he knows better than the people with actual training, but my experience didn’t impress on me the absolute wisdom of the process either – not that such a thing should be possible anyway. People make errors of judgement. Mental health workers bring themselves to the process. Outsourced health care has its limitations. And again, I still got something out of it all.

If this is arrogance, then so be it. In this respect Jungians can consider my shadow accepted and embraced, if glibly***. Weirdness, on the other hand, I hope increasingly to compartmentalize and critique.

~ Bruce

* It featured in the Times Literary Supplement, but (old) links now only point to an error message (and at last glance, a Cormac McCarthy quote).
** Just trying to track down the details surrounding said apology is a real down-the-rabbit-hole experience, especially concerning the supposed suspension of Nathan Oseroff. With multiple updates, corrections, and talk of people impersonating editors, it’s off-putting to say the least.
*** How else would you expect a non-Jungian to embrace Shadow arrogance, if not glibly?

Adventures in Creepersville #03: Reality Warp

I’ve done geeky things. I used to play role playing games (RPGs) once upon a time. When I first played it was the late end of the Satanic Panic, which in rural Australia seemed to lag on for longer behind the heyday of the source moral panic in the US.

You know how many Satanists, or witches, or delusional people I was exposed to in those early years, thanks to Dungeons and Dragons or Battletech? None. Not one. Nada.

In fact, the first person geek-adjacent that I encountered who could be categorized thusly was someone who deluded himself that he had psychic powers. He had a lot on his plate both socially and mental health wise, and I certainly don’t wish him ill if he’s still alive out there. He introduced me to the better side of anime – the non-creepy kind – but at any rate, he had nothing to do with RPGs.

Nope. The RPG crowd were all a bit bog-standard Stranger Things, really. Mundane.

Then the mid-90s came around, and I was introduced to some new acquaintances, and a new RPG that was published under the banner “White Wolf”. You’d be fair calling the me of this period a cranky pomophobe; I had prejudicially little tolerance for anything remotely post-truth, and the “White Wolf” games were very post-truth. Think “that’s just like, your opinion, man” in gothic fantasist mode, with added lashings of affected-scholarship.

The pretentious references to fetishized academics, and the insular caricatures of “technocrats” and rationalists; blech. You didn’t have to be any kind of rationalist to find this stuff bothersome, but boy did some pages wind me up more than I should have allowed them to. The source books would have been a whole lot more tolerable if the authors seemed a little less impressed with themselves. Cerebral narcissism is always ugly.

At any rate, it was a small mercy that at least the gamers in question didn’t emulate this pseudointellectualism in its full ugliness. No. Instead, some of them imagined that they had magic powers and/or the ability to alter reality through sheer will.

When it’s the middle of a deep recession, a lot of people your age are out of work, and you’re scraping together funds for living in a dingy flat, you can get the impression that you don’t get to be too picky about the company you keep. Never mind what this may do to your own mental health, or theirs, or what your state of mind may do to your employability or educational prospects – you don’t want to be a snob, right?

Sometimes a young, trollish, bored individual will want to break the monotony with a bit of thoughtless, impulsive, consequences-blind fun. Why not? (Well, because it’s childish, obviously).

So rather than confront people about their delusions, or do something otherwise productive, a sceptical friend and I egged them on. One time we exchanged sideways glances while one of them attempted psychic healing. Another time we watched, all the time trying not to giggle, while they attempted to increase their “mana” through an amplification loop. This other time one of my flatmate’s friends hid with me in the bushes of a local park while we giggled and watched a couple of the guys attempting to draw power from the “node” of a “leyline”.

What are the odds that the “node” was on public land, and not in one of the neighboring private yards of the very-much residential area? And only just around the corner from the flat, too. How convenient.

I’m sure if I asked, I would have been told something along the lines that the “node” affected the minds of council planners, causing them to allocate the space as a place of public wellbeing. You never have to be wrong when you can warp reality though sheer power of will!

Their theology for the most part was lifted from Mage: The Ascension, which gave them the idea of others simply being “un-awakened” individuals who collectively suppressed magic through the power of their consensus: Sheeple, albeit magically. You could see this manufactured special status in any number of “metaphysical” bookstores or crystal shops in the 1990s; “my life is drab, people don’t think I’m special, but I’ll show them! I have a special relationship with reality!”

Yes you do, Moonchild. Yes you do.

Despite this having been a bit stressful to tolerate near constantly, and despite it helping to speed up the fraying of my own sanity, I don’t want to piss on these guys. They could be fun to be around. They could be creative. They tolerated a good deal of my bullshit when they shouldn’t have. And some of them had serious personal problems leading into the reality warpage to begin with.

At any rate, this low standard for grasping at reality left the door open for other sorts of weird-and-creepy. Of course a friend of my magic-believing flatmate’s magic-believing friend, visiting at one point, would inform us that women enjoy being raped. My mouth flapped-wide-open at that. I wanted to say something, but it was one of those “so obviously wrong, but so hard to find where you went wrong” type scenarios; I didn’t know what to articulate.

Suffice to say that despite my shocked muteness, that guy never got to enter my home ever again, and I haven’t seen him again in over twenty years. Good riddance.

Fantasy was the over-arching theme with these guys: Having reality your own way. Sadly you get a lot of that around geek stuff, and it’s a good part of why I don’t really do geek conventions. It’d be nice if fantasy would more readily stop at its genre boundaries and stay out of everyday life.

It bears repeating, time and again: You may want to help them, but unless you have a reliable support network, and preferably some clinical qualifications, there’s a severe limit on what you’ll be able to accomplish. Back then mental health awareness wasn’t what it is today, but encouraging people to get help should have been the prescribed action. I still feel that I failed some of these guys in that respect, and of course failed myself.

And whatever you do if you find yourself in a similar situation, don’t do what I did, which was to fall into the trap of morbid curiosity: “What the hell is it with these guys? Why on Earth? I need more data!” You’ll just end up wallowing in an unhealthy, creepy environment. This is especially problematic if you already have mental health problems of your own.

Escape, and escape with anyone else you can get away with who needs to! Don’t let a feeling of disloyalty, a bleeding heart, or a post-truthy kind of inclusion born of a role-playing game tell you otherwise.

***

Next in Adventures in Creepersville, I think I’ll address an interest in the work of View Askew Productions, renting videos, reading comics, laughing about what terrified us, and bad habits acquired.

~ Bruce

Where’d Tahani belong?

Fair notice: Spoilers inbound.

So. The Good Place has finished. I have to confess that the last two seasons were on the brink of loosing me. Ironically, not being a virtue theorist, it was the relative de-emphasizing of character development that almost switched me off. That not withstanding, yes, the heartstrings were pulled by the finale.

(Although you have to wonder why Chidi wasn’t confident that he’d still wait around for Eleanor, letting her work her way through being able to let him go unselfishly, and then just sticking around after she’d achieved that state.)

In all of the almost-losing-me though, most annoying was the apparent stalling of Tahani Al-Jamil’s character development. God. The name-dropping didn’t stop. I don’t have the foggiest as to whether or not this was a considered creative decision, or just an afterthought, but given that the world’s having a narcissism epidemic, the Good Place’s answer to a Cluster B personality disorder could have been toned down more than a little.

This leads into where I’m having a problem with the story logic of the last season.

So the cosmic afterlife schema gets a major patch and reboot, and now there’s a test that people retake until they get in to The Good Place. Tahani gets in with the first cohort: the regular cast.

In earlier seasons, Tahani showed increasing self-awareness, even reaching an epiphany, but then continued with much the same behaviour even after being paired with obnoxious gossip-columnist John Wheaton. Sure, Wheaton was a part of a plot to make the experimental Good Place fail, but that’s all prior to the test in the final season.

Eleanor seemed on-mission and considered, Chidi overcame his indecisiveness, and Jason became less impulsive, all before the test to get into the good place. But Tahani’s final spurt of personal growth in the final season seemed to get crammed into a few scenes in the last episode, after the test.

I get that final seasons can get crammed and all that, and I enjoyed the final episode, but it would have been really satisfying to have seen a story logic in the final season as tightly sewn together as the first.

Tahani Goes To Hell is just going to have to remain fan-fic I guess.

~ Bruce