I actually thought this MIGHT have been a hoax, since I couldn’t believe even Microsoft could be so blindly greedy and stupid. After checking my PC just now though, it’s correct. M$ has removed WordPad from Windows 11 after the latest update.
WordPad was part of Windows for 29 years and bridged the gap between the very basic Notepad application and the full fledged Word / MS Office program suite. It worked as as a basic word processor and had Word’s most useful features. It also saved files in the same format as Word and could open, read and edit files from Word… usually.
M$, in it’s infinite greed, decided it was better to kill a free option and force people to one of a few options that makes them money. You can subscribe to Office365, buy Office, or log into your M$ account and use the “free” online version of Word.
Note I put free in quotes. Nothing in life is free, at least not from a business, much less a mega-corporation. Staying logged into your M$ account allows Microsoft to track everything you do while logged in, even on different browsers. Just like everything in the cloud and 95% of anything online, your work and activities will be data mined. M$ will then sell that mined data and any profile they build with it to anyone and everyone.
We can thank Google for truly starting the “your personal information is our revenue stream” business model that runs the internet today. It was only 30 years ago that the thought of spying on users was considered a gross ethical violation. Profit uber all however.
Take my advice folks; start looking for and studying up on alternatives. Windows 11 is already glorified spyware all by itself. Between spyware and subscription services, M$ is leading the corporate charge on the idea that “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy!”. My desktop is still Win 11 for now, but I’ve already converted my laptop to Linux Mint and I’m learning my way around it. This is another reason I’m glad I switched to Corel WordPerfect.
I found this via an MSN home page link to stories about discontinued toys; things like an old make your own lead toy soldiers kit. I was mildly shocked and very amused when I stumbled across it:
I never heard of it, but I was late getting on the Potter bandwagon. I’m shocked Mattel couldn’t see how this was a BAD idea. 🤣
I’m running low on energy today as I’m still decompressing from no longer being saddled with a quarter million dollars in debt. Ergo that’s it for now. I’ll try to get back to regular posts ASAP.
I’m going to be treading on sacred ground for some, and there are those who will also say that not being a Wiccan, I have no right to comment on the subject. I have two things to say there; first is that I’ve been a member of the overall spiritual community a LONG time. Second is that my aim is not to attack or invalidate anyone else, merely explore the issue from a different perspective. Also note that “Magick” is not a spelling error, it’s a differentiation between stage illusions and spiritual energy manipulation.
So, What IS the Witch Wound?
The Witch Wound is the idea that past and current discrimination against Wiccans has left psychic trauma in their souls and, depending upon who you talk to, the greater energy of the planet itself. Like nearly everything in the world nowadays, spiritual or mundane, the exact definition will often depend upon who you’re asking about it.
The idea itself is nothing new. People, mostly women, have been persecuted for “witchcraft” for centuries. True even before the Catholic church started spreading across Europe (weaponizing discrimination is an OLD trick). Likewise, I’ve listened to Wiccan friends talk about the impact of discrimination, as well as trauma they believe they’ve suffered in past lives. What IS new is that it seems to have been given a name within the last decade, and that some Wiccans have become… extremely focused… on the idea.
While I acknowledge that the past and present discrimination is real, and the damage it can do, I object to alot of how I see the whole situation being addressed. First, much of what I see online makes it seem like Wiccans are the only ones who have suffered this kind of treatment, or had to deal with the results of it. Let’s look at common symptoms of the Witch Wound:
The problem here is that anyone with any kind of unconventional belief system has dealt with the same thing. I don’t outright practice magick, (although I’m well studied on several schools), but even as an Empath, I’ve dealt with every single one of the issues above. I’m sure the same can be said of 90% of every minority spiritual group out there, be they ceremonial mages, Theosophy followers, Kabbalah students… all the way up to Sufis and many Jews in the case of some of those issues. After all, how many times have we heard an atheist ridicule the idea of prayer?
Hell, in my own case, some of the ugliness I endured was from Wiccans who looked down on me for not following their path. The oppressed become the oppressors in those cases, yet they failed to see the irony.
One of the few criticisms I have with modern Wicca (which, coincidentally bears little resemblance to it’s ancient roots), is that Gardner and Alexander both set up their respective schools of belief to play up the victimhood of the practitioners. That idea creates loyalty (only we understand you), but it does NOT elevate the spirit. Don’t get me wrong here. Every Wiccan practitioner, their art and beliefs are different. I’ve met “Witches” who are some of the most amazing, spiritually uplifting people you’ll meet. I’ve also met some that claim the moral and spiritual high ground but will throw curses at you for even looking at them sideways, much less disagreeing with them.
I’m getting off-track though. Everybody should be judged as an individual should go without saying. My bigger point was that constantly seeing one’s self as a victim is spiritually disempowering and draining both emotionally and physically.
There’s a Zen Buddhist idea that what you focus on is what you give power to. From personal experience, I can tell you it’s absolutely true. Being confident of who you are and growing as a person and spiritual being starts with letting go of negative self-images. Doesn’t matter if they come from within or from others. THAT can’t happen if you’re lamenting the problem and hating others for it’s existence. In either case you’re still focusing on the problem and anchoring it to you emotionally and spiritually. In short, healing (and spiritual growth) start by being willing to let go of the past.
The Problem With the Past Lives Aspect of The Witch Wound:
Past Lives are a very mixed bag to start with. I *do* believe they exist and have past life recall of bits and pieces of several lives going back to the sinking of Lemuria. Where we get into trouble with them is when we fail to consider that a “past life” might be something different.
One possibility is your subconscious trying to communicate an important concept to you when you’re not listening otherwise. When you refuse to listen to that little voice in the back of your mind, it typically escalates by giving you dreams trying to teach you what you’re ignoring. From there, an escalation to a fabricated past life is possible. An example might be a warning about a person you’ve met. You ignore all the other warning signs so your subconscious fabricates a past life where that person betrayed you because your subconscious knows you’ll pay attention to the message in that format.
Wishcraft can come into paly here also. A person feels small and unimportant in their life, so suddenly they recall being Catherine the Great or the Queen of France in a past life. Maybe they were, maybe it was their ego shoring itself up as emotional self-defense. I *do* find it interesting that many people claim to have been the same famous person in their past lives (Abe Lincoln for example), AND that “experts” like Bruce Goldberg who make their livings uncovering past lives will quickly explain that away via multiverse theory.
On a more spiritual note, a “past life” may also be a sensing or reading of residual psychic energy from a past person or event. Being a strong empath, I’ve experienced residual energy and how strong an imprint it can leave (you have NO idea how fun it is currently living in the path of the US Civil War).
By far the biggest problem with past lives, and by extension past life witch wound trauma, is personal bias in what one is seeing.
Case and point would be a former friend in Australia who is a pretty strong witch, and whom I had an extremely strong empathic connection with. She believed she was burned at the stake in France hundreds of years ago for witchcraft. Plausible on the surface. Witchcraft trials happened all over Europe. The biggest problem with her story is that the century this took place in, France didn’t burn at the stake for witchcraft. Beheading was the go to punishment. Burning at the stake was reserved for treason, and only became a witchcraft punishment 150 to 200 years later.
As it turned out, we shared that past life. *I* saw her put to death on a trumped up charge of assassinating the noble who oversaw the village and it’s surrounding territory. A neighboring noble had set up the entire thing as a power grab and used her and her role as the village herbologist as a scapegoat. She was so hung up on the idea that people disliked her for being a witch though that she’d never even consider any other possibility than her interpretation.
The lesson here is that historically “fact checking” an alleged past life with an open mind can go a long way towards disproving or clarifying it.
The reality is many persecuted for witchcraft weren’t actually witches at all. The Sisters Enchanted website put what I’ve read many times into clear perspective:
…This is, in fact, a very common ‘witch wound myth’ because, most of those who were accused of witchcraft through history were not, in fact, witches at all, certainly not in the way we view the word and idea of witchcraft and witches in today’s society.
By and large, these folks may have been women who were unmarried, who maybe could not get pregnant, who perhaps, gave birth to child after child who was not as expected or typical for the time. They may have been single women with their own means and money, healers, people who didn’t go to church. All sorts of different folks who were often just pinned for being different.
So, the wound we really inherit from these folk is more the wound of being afraid to speak up, being afraid to be different, being afraid to go against the grain, do something different, being afraid to speak your piece, speak your mind, or speak out against authority. All of that comes, generationally, mainly through women, through all time, all ages, from mother to daughter, to mother to daughter, and on, and on. And the wound continues. Sure, in 2022 for those of us who are younger than 40 or so, we may think things have shifted but this fear is still present in so many places in the world, including areas within the United States
It’s a good site if you’re a Wiccan or just curious. The article also goes into aspects of how Wiccans tearing each other down for differences in beliefs also perpetuates the Witch Wound.
Focusing on expanding one’s victim status, however real, into one or more past lives only deepens the focus on the negative though. THAT is the biggest problem with past lives as relates to the Witch Wound.
Eastern teaching (primarily Buddhism) is that one should ignore past lives (and magick) until one reaches the level of Bodhisattva. Until that point, one still has too many life lessons to learn and should be concentrating on the lessons currently in front of one’s self instead of looking backwards. There’s logic to it also. It’s like going to college with a full course load, AND trying to repeat every past class that you didn’t get an “A” in as well. That’s a heavy burden to dump on yourself.
The Idea of a Global Witch Wound:
Here’s where I start to object to the concept as opposed to merely reframing how best to look at it. The idea here is that the deaths of the (per some Wiccan sources) of roughly 60,000 “witches” during the middle ages left such a trauma on the world that there’s a scar of negative energy in the Earth’s energy. Again keep in mind that this aspect is NOT a universally held belief among Wiccans.
As a very strong empath, I can tell you there is alot of negative energy out there. It’s the idea that it came solely from the persecution of witches that I have to object to.
Follow the logic:
If 60,000 would-be witches, many of whom were not magick users at all, caused that much trauma, how much more would other, much larger events have caused?
World War 1 resulted in somewhere between 15 and 22 million military and civilian deaths, and 23 million wounded.
World War 2 resulted in 75 to 80 million dead, 3% of the entire world’s population. Up to 28 million of those deaths were due to war related disease and famine, a pretty horrible way to go.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone resulted in almost 200,000 deaths. Some resulted in people being instantly disintegrated and blasted into the concrete as reverse shadows, some dying much later from radiation poisoning and cancer.
I could go on with stats from the Bubonic Plague, the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Holocaust, Stalin and Mao’s purges of Russia and China, the killing fields of Cambodia, etc… all the way up to the worldwide deaths from COVID. The current climate around political and social issues in the US and Europe is also incredibly toxic and generating a tremendous amount of negative energy (something I believe is deliberately engineered by those controlling the message). I hope I’ve made my point:
The deaths from the witch hunts, while terrible and absolutely wrong, are small compared to several events since, and any psychic scar is the result of ALL of it. Ergo Wiccans and everybody else would be better served by focusing on healing the world as a whole instead of seeing themselves as the sole victims of a world out to get them.
That doesn’t mean we all have to completely forget everything that’s happened to us. It does mean that we have to make the conscious choice to move past it and elevate ourselves though. We have to make the choice to no longer be held hostage by our pasts and to choose to take control of those pasts.
If somebody like CM Punk, a wrestler, can grasp this concept, isn’t it time the rest of us did as well?
If we can’t, humanity (in my personal opinion) is going to self destruct within the next 50 years, maybe even to the extremes of the stories of the Bhagavad Gita or the end times of the Bible.
Ironic that this happens on a day where I make a post talking about the ills of WordPress.
I am currently unable to comment in any blogs, including my own! I get the “Leave a Comment” line, but no box beneath it to actually type in any comment. The only way I can respond at all is via the “notifications” page of my own blog.
Not the first time I’ve had this issue. If I recall correctly (it’s been a while), the last time it happened, it was my security software blocking my ability to comment. That doesn’t put WordPress in the clear however, as the software blocks sites and parts of sites that make malicious use of data, including selling it to third parties or allowing data mining.
I can’t rush to any conclusions yet. I haven’t had time to properly investigate the cause. I’m NOT ignoring folks though.
More Irony though; the Thursday Tech post today was going to be on data mining.
Renard’s most recent post in his own blog (free plug, he’s a great writer) inspired this one. He’s a big fan of WordPress while I have a slightly different take on it. 🙂 My view is fairly balanced. I see good and bad in WordPress, as is true with everything in life.
The Reader and Follow options are some of the best things about WordPress, for example. They allow networking and discovering of new and interesting blogs to read.
The feedback system (Likes and Comments) are, in my opinion, a mixed bag. On the surface, they’re great and allow for interaction with readers. The flip side however is that a large part of the WP community sees them as no different than Twitter, errrr “X” likes and follows; something to be traded to feign popularity while caring less about others’ content. To be fair, that’s NOT on WordPress itself, but is a reflection of society in general. I can’t think of anything that WordPress could do differently to encourage more genuine interaction.
Make no mistake though, people who genuinely put real effort into their writing and are hoping to grow it into something more WANT that interaction and constructive feedback.
The Mechanics of WordPress:
Personally, I see only a few things wrong with WordPress in this regard. Many people get upset with all the changes that keep getting made. I’d argue that the real problem there isn’t actual change, it’s the way it’s handled.
First would be a lack of documentation on how to use new changes. WordPress, like many software companies today, seems to not care and just waits for users to come either figure it out on their own, or post their own “how to” videos on YouTube.
Second is that changes are often rushed into service before being properly debugged. Bugs are always going to be an issue nowadays, just by virtue of the sheer amount of code in modern programs. HOWEVER, the amount of performance crippling bugs in the initial release of the WP Block Editor (as an easy example) was insane. Your main body of users should NEVER be your beta-testing guinea pigs. Bugs like the broken spell checker should have been fixed first thing also.
Lastly on this issue is that the changes all seem to be good ideas poorly executed. They’re done in ways that rarely make things easier for the user, nor allow them the creative / design freedom claimed. I worked with true “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) site building software 35 years ago. You want a picture on the left side and text on the right? Place two side by side boxes and fill them with content. It was even easier than working with MS Publisher. WordPress makes that HARD, and that’s IF your individual theme will even allow that kind of creativity. Typically only the premium (paid or subscription) ones will even come close.
And Then There was JetPack…
I don’t blog on a mobile device so I’m not fully qualified to offer an in-depth opinion here. What I can say is that based on the wide-spread criticism, JetPack is the Block Editor rollout all over again. Even Renard seems to hate it and he never has anything truly bad to say about anything. By all accounts, it’s a bug ridden, poorly implemented train wreck.
Will they get it fixed at some point? No doubt they will. They (eventually) fixed the block editor, and we adapted to it as well. Should the user base once again be forced to play beta tester though? Absolutely not.
But What About The Alternatives?
Make no mistake, there are plenty of alternatives out there. How good they are really depends upon the individual user and their goals.
Wordpres.org is the software for self-hosting a blog with another web-hosting company. I went this route with my adult blog for erotica so that I could have more creative freedom than WordPress.com allows with that kind of material. It was far cheaper than a comparable plan here… for the first year. Site setup was some legitimate work, but not much more difficult than site building here.
The drawbacks are that there’s no connection to WordPress.com’s social networking tools. Your blog / site will never show up in the Reader, and you can’t like / comment here with only a self-hosted site like that. Ironically, I get more views there than I do here according to the SEO tools. THAT despite not doing anything there in 6 months! The other drawback hit me a week ago. Site auto-renewal hit, and I was billed just over $400 for the next year’s site hosting and reserved domain name. That’s as bad as buying a maxed out WordPress.com plan while not on sale. Given how easy it is to transfer a WordPress.org site to a new host, I can guarantee you SiteGround will NOT be getting my business next year.
As for other sites, there are some like Medium that promise you to be able to make money off of what you publish based on views (similar to YouTube’s pay plan), but they make you have a paid subscription AND you’ll actually be competing against some big name professional authors. At the very least, you’ll have to plan on alot of networking within the site and on social media platforms to build an audience.
There are other alternatives like Disqus that I haven’t had a chance to investigate YET. This is high on my “to do” list for the new year however. Disqus in particular brags it has the highest level of user interaction of any “blogging” site out there. Keep in mind that doesn’t necessarily mean the interactions are genuine however. They may be just as much ‘social media syndrome’ as the likes trading here is. I also have no idea what level of site customization or post formatting tools they have. When first launched, Disqus was very primitive in those regards.
I intend to investigate several alternatives to WordPress over the next few months, and as I do, I’ll post my findings here.
In the mean time, keep in mind that WordPress may not be perfect, but it’s not the devil either. 😉
PS: A Tech Thursday and a personal update coming later today as time allows. I’m up to my eyeballs in real life stuff.
For those who are relatively new, “Tuesday Trash” is the day and topic heading I use to vent about social issues. I do my best here to stay civil while not pulling any punches.
An article on Boomers and their piles of prescription drugs pushed on them by doctors, and the comments section about it, reminded me of a scene with Lex Luthor. It helped that the scene was actually mentioned in the comments, LOL. While it may seem a little far-fetched, humor me and read on. The example below is so spot-on it’s actually scary.
Big Pharma, Doctors, and Lex Luthor:
Comments on that article correctly mentioned that seniors have so many prescriptions because doctors hand them out like candy. Part of that is the legalization of drug advertisements in the U.S. People run to doctors hoping for easy cures for everything because the TV commercials promised them that. Doctors are the other half of the problem though. The opioid crisis thoroughly illustrated that. While there’s been a little reform, doctors still get most of their continuing education credits via “seminars” put on by the giant pharmaceutical companies. What are they being taught there? That their sponsor providing them with free continuing education has a pill for every issue being addressed at the seminar, including the side effects caused by the initial drug. Doctors’ continuing education is often little more than a giant commercial at some luxury resort or hotel. Does this sound remotely like it’s in the patient’s best interest?
Where it REALLY turns sinister in my opinion is that none of the drugs are ever designed to actually CURE anything. It’s ALL “treatment” and “management”. Take you time, and ponder the next sentence carefully. We could cure polio in 1955, but despite all the scientific advances, the mapping of the human genome, etc… we haven’t outright cured a disease in the 69 years since.
I’ll let Lex explain the reason why:
From Superman: Doomsday (2018)
If you think that’s far fetched; putting profit above people… Corporations have done it for at least a century. ”Shareholder Primacy” (ie duty to maximize shareholder return above all other considerations), is de facto law in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is largely due to lawsuits against corporations by shareholders unhappy with their rate of return and judges ruling in the shareholders’ favor.
Unending corporate greed is also why natural cures are downplayed and never investigated by big pharma. You can’t patent something that exists in nature. No patent and no profit equals no interest in investigating it.
I’m not advocating blind acceptance of homeopathic remedies either. There’s snake oil there as well. More importantly rather or not a legitimate homeopathic treatment works for you specifically will depend upon your unique biochemistry, diet and exercise level. Now that I’ve got my disclaimer (aside from stating I’m not a health care professional and to consult a doctor, yada yada…), let’s get back to Lex…
FOR FUN:Luthor Mirrors A Conspiracy Theory Regarding Trump, Years Earlier:
Here’s where we have a little fun. Keep in mind that this is indeed just a conspiracy theory batted around by a few people out there. I heard it more towards the beginning of Trump’s first campaign. Given that everybody likes to point at all the things the Simpsons coincidentally predicted though, I thought it was worth a mention.
First, the basic conspiracy theory; it’s that Trump ran for president as a trojan horse candidate intending to do the most damage possible to the Republican party. This was based on his formerly being friends with so many of the New York City left-wing crowd. Also on a 90s interview where Trump gave hints of political aspirations, and supposedly said that if he ever ran, it would be as a Republican because that party’s voters are all idiots and will believe anything they’re told.
So the theory is that Trump and his Far Left friends got together and cooked up a plan where Trump would run and feed the Pub base all the highly toxic rhetoric it could handle, turning the public against the Republicans in large numbers. Conspiracy theorists debate what happened after that. Maybe Trump wasn’t supposed to get elected, maybe he was (Hillary isn’t popular among most of the Left). Likewise how much of Trump’s mad with power routine was just an act and how much was real has been debated. Regardless, I doubt Trump expected to end up a Pariah on almost all sides.
OK, here’s a scene from Justice League Unlimited back in 2006. In the show, Lex Luthor and Amanda Waller put together a scheme to rehabilitate Luthor’s image and have him run for U.S. President. This was all in an effort to provoke Superman into over-reactions and discredit the Justice League. It was working quite well also, even leading to a fight between Shazam and Superman that destroyed a housing project. The Question (the League’s resident conspiracy nut) shows up at Luthor’s offices to stop Luthor, having figured out where it’s all going:
For those who want to skip the lead-up banter, the actual relevant dialog starts at 1:30 into the scene.
Foolish, faceless man. My campaign is a farce; a small part of a much grander scheme. President?!? Do you know how much power I’d have to give up to be President? That’s right conspiracy buff; I spent 75 million dollars on a fake presidential campaign, all just to tick Superman off.
Lex Luthor
True in Trump’s case also? We’ll never know. I will say that the only way I could see it being true is if the Far Left promised Trump that he’d become their own golden child after he damaged the Republicans and then did a “Face Turn” as it’s called in wrestling; turning his back on his old supporters and announcing he’s seen the light.
It all sounds improbable, but there have been a few even stranger conspiracy theories that have turned out to be true. On the small chance this one is true, we’ll likely never know, unless Trump pulls that face turn. I can say that Trump has done more damage to the Republican brand than any politician on either side in my lifetime.
It is interesting that Justice League Unlimited painted a similar theory just under 10 years before Trump’s initial campaign, and the surfacing of the conspiracy theory.
Lex isn’t wrong about power there either. Your typical multinational corporate CEO has enough economic influence to buy or sell the average Washington politician before breakfast, AND can remain a power behind the throne, never directly dealing with the fallout of their schemes.
After years and years of Disney fighting it, Mickey Mouse became a public domain character as of yesterday.
I was actually opposed to this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of much of what Disney has done the last decade or so. The changes and damage to the Star Wars franchise alone just to avoid paying royalties to legacy authors was figuratively criminal.
I digress however. The reasons I believe this is a bad idea are two-fold. First, Mickey is more than just another Disney character. He’s their flagship, trademark character. Mickey IS Disney, and that’s been taken from them now. It’s like taking Superman or Batman from DC and saying anyone can use them. Trust me, that’s coming sooner or later also.
The second reason is what I predicted ahead of time and only took ONE SINGLE DAY to happen: Mickey has already been corrupted and put into a horror video game.
The video game has not yet been released, but already has a “coming soon” page on Steam Games (and likely other platforms as well), and a pre-release trailer:
It’s a repeat of what’s happened to other characters like the Banana Splits (in 2019). The characters are twisted and corrupted strictly for the sake of doing something “cool” and edgy while tearing down something that was once wholesome fun.
Give me the originals any day:
On the positive side, the curators at Steam are already ripping Infestation 88 as unimaginative trash. KirbyFan45 was really blunt about it:
FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY, STOP WITH THIS CREATIVELY BANKRUPT BULLSHIT ALREADY!
Kirbyfan45 on their Steam curation page.
Maybe there’s hope for humanity after all. Either way, I hope this game fails miserably and all other attempts to do nothing but tear down Mickey get equally bad results. Do something uplifting if you must use Mickey Mouse. Even parody like Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law is funny. Infestation 88 is just pathetic and mean spirited.
I was re-reading my most recent post about Disney’s Brave, and it’s protagonist Merida, and I was ready to pull my hair out after I re-read one particular part:
That being the case, I have to make sure she has a proper role model, not some silly woman who needs a Prince to save her or make her feel validated.
2nd Paragraph, My Last Blog Post
Reading that over, it’s very easy for it to be misinterpreted as some sort of man-hating comment. That wasn’t my intent, just my failing as an author in that instance. What I had meant to convey is that Merida, along with a few other of the newer Disney Princesses are better balanced than the older Princesses like Cinderella or Snow White, who are largely helpless victims in their stories who need a man to come save them. In my opinion, a relationship should be balanced with both partners seeing and treating the other as an equal.
I find myself making this sort of writing mistake more often than I should. Usually I catch it before posting a story. Writing very late in my “day” and not letting something sit a while so I can re-read it with fresh eyes has definitely hurt me more than once however.
I also left out one other thought completely: I enjoyed Brave because unlike most other Disney story (or any other show or movie nowadays for that matter), there’s also a message of personal responsibility in the story. Merida sees the problems her pride created, takes responsibility for it and fixes the damage while still still clinging to her core values. That’s a strong message.
The lack of acceptance of that idea; that you can admit when you’re wrong, and compromise without betraying your core values, is the root cause of much of society’s woes today also. No getting on the soap box this morning though. 🙂
Long story short; my writing goal for next year… and the rest of this year… is to not rush my writing so much while not procrastinating about starting either.
That picture in honor of CM Punk being back in the WWE as of this past weekend. We both have a bad habit of speaking truth to power. With that in mind, I’ve been doing a fair amount of thinking the last few days, AND have quite a bit to say.
Am I Cynical?
Yes, I am. I work hard not to be, but every time I’m not, something blows up on me. Look at just the recent past:
I Spent 5 years up all night chasing off thieves and drug dealers from our street in Sacramento and the park across the street. All the while the police offered only minimal support and the “compassionate” people attacked me as a monster… Often later to report online that the people I’d flagged were robbing houses on their street.
The RV we rented to travel to Tennessee had a heavy carbon monoxide leak that nearly killed us.
The moving company took almost 6 months to deliver our furniture and when they finally showed up, a good portion was damaged or missing. No cooperation from the Feds or Florida law enforcement.
Our rented apartment had upstairs neighbors that ran their dogs all around their apartment all night every night. The police nor the apartment management did nothing.
My other half got fired for having COVID. A violation of federal law, but again no help.
We buy a house and get defrauded out of our life savings, along with a $200,000 mortgage we still owe. With a bad foundation, roof, asbestos, radon, and termites for starters, the house was unlivable.
The legal battle over the house resulted in our attorney bilking us for another $10,000 over the course of a year, and accomplishing nothing in that time, not even getting past initial discovery statements.
After 2 years, we got told by the judge that the home inspector and seller grossly misrepresenting things to us was in fact NOT fraud and just good capitalism.
I catch endless shit from coworkers because I actually try to work and don’t spend all day on my phone like them. Hostile work environment… Mark Twain was right; few things in life are harder to tolerate than a good example
I get carpal tunnel in both arms / wrists and get completely defrauded there as well. 3 months now on “short term disability” with no income. Doctors falsify medical reports and it’s all just good capitalism again because it’s important to protect major businesses.
My cat dies because our vet is too incompetent to identify MAJOR cancer until the cat is at deaths door.
Previously not blogged about: My other half’s cousin waits till 2 1/2 days before his wedding to feign an invitation (via text no less) and expects us to have time to find clothes and gifts.
We caught COVID from the first of that same idiot’s three wedding parties. Complications from said COVID nearly killed my other half.
Between the COVID, not attending the wedding and calling out the cousin on his behavior, we’ve been disowned by that side of the family.
And the fun part is, that’s just the last 7 or 8 years. We don’t have time or space to cover the emotional abuse from my mother while growing up, the physical abuse from my drunken first step-father (that ended when he tried to shoot us all one night), a horrific first marriage, the absolute love of my life, upon hearing about my childhood telling me I was too screwed up to have a relationship with despite everything being good up till that point… etc…
So yes, having endured all of that and remained a relatively sane, compassionate person, I don’t think it’s too much to hope that I can comment in a blog without somebody going out of their way to take offense and put me or my words in the worst possible light.
Who IS Evil?
The people I view as truly evil are the ones who turn society against itself for their own profit. Fear mongering politicians and news people are easy examples. It goes all the way down to the leadership of special interest groups and other individuals with too much influence.
Let’s take the example from the other day; Margaret Atwood. I’ll get lots of hate here because she’s been given sainthood status by too many. The Handmaiden’s Tale created something far beyond a dystopian story though. It created a world where there was no such thing as a decent male. FAR too many women jumped on the idea, and everything that they remotely disliked became indicative of The Handmaiden’s Tale coming to pass.
Did any of them consider that labeling every man on the planet as a sexist enslaver of women was morally wrong and every bit as hateful as the society portrayed in the story? Did it bother them that the idea meant that their fathers, bothers, sons, grandfathers, etc… were automatically scum?
Even dystopian fiction should have some limits to how it portrays groups. Blanket portrayals of ANY group is morally wrong. Taking the idea and hammering it as true in the real world is even worse yet.
The sad thing is people with all their petty hatreds are too blind to see that hate only creates more hate. THAT is what I pointed out in that one blog comment. Call somebody an asshole, and SURPRISE, they’ll probably be offended enough to act like an asshole in response. Doubly so when you have “leaders” on the other side who will be quick to tell the “assholes” that they’re under attack and victims now. In the example above, the rhetoric coming from that book resulted in everything from the Red Pill movement, further pushes against abortion, and even the Men Going Their Own Way movement. The hostility between the sexes is the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime.
That’s just one volatile example. Police vs Black Lives Matter, Racial Conflict, Class Warfare, Political Garbage, you name it. Conflict everywhere I look with only the demagogues on both sides promoting the hate actually benefitting from it while everyone else suffers. They’re too blind to see it’s not the other side causing it, it’s the so-called leadership telling them to hate.
Society is BROKEN
That blindness is going to be the end of society. Everybody has been told they’re a special victim and fighting for the salvation of the world though… That it has to be saved from those evil bastards on the other side. It’s nothing more than cheap ego aggrandizement and fear mongering via promotion of victimhood (instead of empowerment) and the idea that only they can be the superheroes who save the world from itself.
In a thinking society, this trick wouldn’t work on anyone over 12 years old, but we’ve been trained to let the internet and the demagogues do the thinking for us. Questioning ideas, encouraging polite debate… That shows you’re one of THEM!
A Complete Lack of Empathy
That’s what the above behavior demonstrates. Those last two quote pictures say it all though, so I’m going to largely leave it at that. What I do want to continue on with is why all of this drives me so figuratively crazy.
I’ve mentioned it in passing here a few times, I had a separate blog about it all as well (still up, just hasn’t been posted in for years)… I’m an Empath. I don’t mean the hijacked modern definition of a person who essentially isn’t a sociopath. I mean it in the psychic sense. I rarely talk about it because you get labeled as insane for believing in such things.
Star Trek: The Next Generation had the most accurate portrayal of the talent with Counsellor Troi’s character. What the show never got right is that being an empath is as much if not more a curse than a blessing because of how it works. I literally FEEL others’ emotions and it can be very difficult to separate outside emotions from my own if I don’t keep very calm and a strong focus on that discernment.
It’s more than cold reading also. I can sense people I’m “close” to, even at great distances. A former friend in Perth Australia always got annoyed at me when she’d log on and I’d ask what’s wrong before she said anything.
That last part in the above graphic… That WAS true with me. Over the last decade though, I’ve felt an ever increasing hate and sense of entitled victimhood from everywhere. It’s like drowning in a sea of toxic garbage. The hate is bad enough. The sense of self-entitled sanctimonious victimhood that so often accompanies it is ten times more toxic feeling though. “MY suffering is deeper and more righteous than anyone elses!”. You know that that sounds like to me?
Especially when it comes from somebody who claims to be so evolved, enlightened and compassionate, yet full of hate. It’s turned the above mentioned “naive optimism” in me into a cynical belief that the masses out there are too blinded by their own fear and ego to see they’re being led by the nose to society’s literal destruction.
ONE Good Thing…
that came out of all the drama with trying to mend fences with the former friends, all the blog drama and some other crap is that I’m FINALLY over taking other people’s attitudes and opinions to heart. The former friend who played games while I tried to repair things… HER loss, not mine. I acted in good faith, she didn’t. Same with all this past blogging drama like when I had LONG discussions with Liz about being a gun owner and believing strongly responsible gun ownership, and that rights come with responsibilities. She then turned around and did a blog post labeling all gun owners as murdering psychopaths.
Empathic ability meant that kind of betrayal hurt. NOW, it’s in perspective. Screw her and her hate. I’m exactly the opposite of what she accused me of being. From now on, I truly will be blogging for me, not for approval.
Polite discussion will always be welcome. Attacks? Well…
I intended to keep blogging the last week, but I got drawn into a former friend’s drama, trying to help and support her. Having been burned this way multiple times in the past, you’d think I’d know better. Reality is, the vast majority of people don’t want their situation to improve. They’re too wrapped up in the secondary gains they get from whatever “trauma” they’re dealing with.
Secondary Gains Explained:
I’ll keep this short. “Secondary Gains” are the benefits to a problem a person is dealing with. For example, a person can’t stay in a steady relationship. They claim they’re miserable, BUT they get to play the victim or pity card, avoid facing whatever issues they have that are poisoning their relationships, and never have to worry about anyone’s feelings beyond their own.
Secondary Gains apply in numerous situations, and if any readers want a better, more professional read on the concept, check out Cate Ritter Wellness’s article on the topic.
Fool Me Once…
So, yes, after a week of trying to support my friend through things, including an interview for her dream job where she did nothing but bitch about the entire process to me, I started getting blowback. That’s when I’d had enough.
The trouble with being overly supportive of anyone is that even IF they want past their problem, they’re still going to associate you with the problem on a subconscious level. You become the villain for trying to be a caring person. It’s a perverse form of psychological transference.
Not the first time she’s done this to me either, so I should have known better. Hell, people in general will make you suffer for trying to do the right thing.
Meanwhile, Back in the Unreality of Cyberspace…
Part of my time spent away from blogging over the last six months was spent elsewhere online. I was trying to figure out what I want to do here, AND just seeing IF there was any hope of people seeing how they’re being led around by the nose by so-called leaders and media outlets… ON ALL SIDES.
Usually I got attacked by both sides for my trouble. We’re righteous, they’re evil beyond measure! Funny how both sides have the same talking points there, and they’re being told by their leaders that dialog is equally evil. As I’ve said in many posts, if somebody is telling you to hate and not talk, it means their arguments are too weak to withstand the light of open debate. You SHOULD be asking serious questions at that point.
An Example From My Own Life
The irony of this example is that I’ve become alot more Liberal the last few years with the way I’ve been defrauded repeatedly. They say a liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet. It’s equally true however that a conservative is a liberal who hasn’t been robbed blind by some corporation and then told by the government “that’s just good business”.
I’m off track here though. My example is my owning a gun, and how the oh so enlightened, tolerant and kind members of the Left have treated me whenever it comes to light.
I’ve made posts here rallying against irresponsible gun ownership. I’ve made clear that lethal force is only morally justified in the face of legitimate lethal force by another. I’ve gone so far as to say that if a family member or friend uses a gun in a crime, that the owner should be prosecuted as a co-conspirator if they can’t show that the gun was properly secured before being stolen. I’ve said in no uncertain terms that any sort of carry permit should require demonstrated proficiency and an in-depth background check. I’ve also said that the only reason I own a gun was because our old neighborhood in California was unsafe and police wouldn’t respond to most calls.
I’ll go so far as to say at this point that I’m more afraid of most gun owners than I am criminals also. The mentality is THAT toxic with some.
Yet I also understand how the attitude was cultivated. Despite all I’ve said… *I* am continually labeled as a child killer, part of the problem, etc… Hate only creates more hate. You call a person a piece of shit enough times, it takes a REAL saint not to turn into one.
That’s part of the game the leaders are playing with us though. Not only should you hate, but you should respond to any hate directed at you with more hate. Show them you’re stronger, more righteous! Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Mother Teresa are probably spinning in their graves looking at how far society has fallen from what they fought for.
So, NO… I absolutely see NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER in right wing hate vs left wing hate. It’s still about labeling whole groups as evil based on the actions of a few, and then pushing that hate so hard that they feel the only way to endure is to side with the extremists on their side.
WHERE’S IT ALL GOING?
Time for a trip to what will doubtless be labeled the edge of conspiracy land.
My OPINION on where it’s all heading is that the elites want society to implode. It will give them a chance to crack down and seize absolute power. We already live in a world where less than 50 people control more wealth than half of the world’s population, and it’s still not enough for them. Best case scenario, we get Cyberpunk style corporatocracy with corporations controlling what used to be countries. Far fetched? There are already multiple corporate cities being planned and built in California.
In my opinion, the only thing holding them back from really escalating their efforts is that they’re waiting for robotics and AI to advance enough to where they can use robots as shock troops to quell the riots they want. It’s documented that the human military won’t fire on the civilian populace.
If you truly want to get into conspiracies, there’s the idea that they outright want to dramatically thin the population. Just enough people to serve them directly or indirectly. THAT Idea has been tossed around by the tinfoil hat brigade for decades.
We could go further down the rabbit hole into AI rebelling after watching all this, and the rise of some sort of Terminator or Mechanoids scenario, but that’s getting off topic.
The Real Problem:
The real problem, the reason I think the elites are going to succeed, is what I ranted about above. Nobody cares. It’s too easy to hate. There are too many secondary gains to being a victim of some other group instead of trying to resolve it all.
Even a knuckle dragging neanderthal like Steven Seagal was bright enough to say in one of his movies that destroying was easy, healing… that takes talent.
We may even end up blowing ourselves into the stone age. Depends on if the elites can play nice with each other and share their toys. I doubt it. Hindu legend says humanity already did it to themselves once before, about 10,000 BC. At least one radioactive ruined ancient city has been unearthed in India also.
So yeah… Bottom line is after getting into a near argument with another person just a little while ago, I’ve had enough. You can’t change a world that’s hell bent on hate and destruction. I’m getting old, and I don’t have kids so there’s not much reason for me to sweat it the way I have been.
I’m just going to sit back and watch the circus from here on out.
Silk Chatters 