Asking questions

The rise of the useful idiot interviewer happened slowly and eventually gained a wide audience. You didn't need to do your homework but just be affable and entertaining. Joe Rogan became the poster boy for "I am just asking questions" while being constantly gobsmacked by everything your latest guest says. 

The problem with this is the interviewer doesn't hold anyone to account. There isn't the kind of pushback you need to have because the knowledge or the research isn't there to back you up. Some years ago, Rogan interviews Jordan Peterson who just proceeds as usual to word salad his way through the whole thing except with greater ease than usual. 

These podcasts are relatable to people who wouldn't normally watch dry interviewers like David Frost talk to Nixon. They ask goofy questions while playing their shtick persona for an audience who I suspect is more there for their folk hero than for the guest in question. 

Theo Von and Andrew Schultz did much the same thing and captured young impressionable males looking for role models to emulate. They helped feed into the bro culture that helped get Trump a second term most everyone now regrets.

Imprinted

I sometimes see comments like this: 

"How can I stop imagining myself as a woman" which signals distress and a lack of self-acceptance. 

It is also precisely what Ray Blanchard pounced upon in the 1980's with his scared patients when he basically renamed what was then known in the manuals as transvestic fetishism (which admittedly focused more on clothing than imagining oneself having a female body) . 

But here's the rub: human sexuality is very complex with many scenarios possible. One involves the imprinted child who crosses into puberty with the wish to be female since early childhood with the rest being variants of what my friend Jack Molay years ago coined as Crossdreaming. In other words, what might my life be like if I were the other sex. 

Some of these variants are only temporary exploration or escapism and aren't very deeply rooted in the psyche. However other cases are much more persistent and involved fighting uphill to be accepted within societies that reject them. 

Small wonder so many wanted to be healed or went underground. 

Gender criticals point to this trauma as signs of mental illness which most assuredly wouldn't exist had gender variant people not been taught this is what it indeed was from the outset. 

Even today gender conversion channels like The Metaphor of Gender preach a soft-pedalled and genteel gospel of gender variance as something to be healed and no, not everyone needs to transition.

The key for all these cases is to put their desire for gender variance into context and determine a landing point by repairing the underlying trauma around it. 

It isn't the gender variance that needs curing but the psychology which associates it with an illness thus fostering shame, guilt and in older people secrecy. 

Ray Williams, as an example, contorts himself into a pretzel by accepting he has a sexual illness that he now celebrates by trumpeting "hurray I have AGP!" 

It is precisely this type of outlook that I do not believe to be the healthiest of approaches.

Failsafe

I could not fail at anything in life. I simply didn't allow it. However life had other ideas. 

Surprises aren't always destined for failure, they are lessons that what we digested as mandatory isn't always correct. Things we were taught early on in life end up not aligning with our circuitry and yet we still adapt for fear of rejection. 

To do this we build a workable personna and make sure to not let our guard down. We then follow a plan handed down by others which we discover along the way isn't exactly right for us. 

This isn't just my life; this is the lives of many people who bought into scripts. 

What happens after a while is that we realize we must relax the body as well as the psyche and jettison the mask. We become authentic and finally begin to look properly after the self. 

We do this not just because we want to, but because we absolutely must.

The power of stupidity

 

We bleed

Gender variant people represent a slice of the general population with the same types of personality traits we find elsewhere. In other words, we aren't special in any measured category and possess strengths and weaknesses as the unique individuals we are. 

You prick us and we bleed. 

This is the primary reason why I don't think of gender variant people as a block but as distinct individuals who fall within the mosaic of humanity. I have seen so much variation from person to person over the years to justify my saying this.

Interestingly, it would greatly benefit society to think this way rather than herding people into camps.

All this to say that I don't care about anything else more than whether you are a decent person with a moral compass.

Everything else pales by comparison.

What the world chases after

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did not measure success by the conventional standards of the world. 

Financial wealth or societal validation were not part of his reflection. Instead, he defined it as the overcoming of one's inner chaos which could be achieved through embracing adversity. This was a catalyst for personal growth which would accompany the creation of a unique sense of purpose as well as an incorruptible value system. 

The world often looks at success through a faulty prism and many of the characters we laud with having achieved it, are deeply flawed and perturbed individuals with narcissistic qualities. Their personal lives are also often in complete disarray.

In contrast, those people who reflect deeply and weigh the morality and consequences of their life decisions are less likely to succeed by the metrics of a world that values knee-jerk action. However they often tend to personify the best qualities of humanity which include empathy and charity. 

We want to seek internal balance and in so doing must necessarily abandon much of what the world values and chases after.

Typiquement Montréal

 

                                             Rue Laurier

From the wrong angle

Back when I was thinking about magic bullet theories regarding what factors (outside of deliberate choice) made people gender variant, I didn't fully realize that I was attacking the issue from the wrong angle. 

Instead I should have focused on what stops them from being that way. In other words, I should have focused more on the fabricated rules that prevented a natural spectrum from being both visible and viable. 

I was operating from the wrong coordinate system that I had been raised under which was tainted with bias and artificial structure. 

The human condition is naturally full of variants which if left alone surface and thrive naturally provided the person isn't traumatized. The problem is that society doesn't appreciate wild cards spoiling the models they want everyone to subscribe to. 

The ingredients which go into making a human being are so varied and complex at every level of development, that it is entirely expected that the process would produce great variability; one that we see replicated everywhere in organic systems. 

Instead of welcoming this entirely natural diversity of outcome, most societies (with the notable exception of many native cultures) simply rejected them. They forced people to comply and stigmatized and traumatized them for not obeying the rules. 

Therefore when conservatives talk about an epidemic of gayness or transness they are really referring to a loss of control of the rules they favour. They don't want the natural variants exposed and call them unnatural when the opposite is true. 

Regrettably until we educate ourselves the baseline of many if not most humans is inadvertent stupidity; one which emphasizes both a lack of critical thinking and unquestioning conformity as a baseline operating system. Today people openly trumpet their idiocy with gusto and even pride.

It is our own responsibility to fix that.

Falling behind

The Trump regime is now only barely able to gaslight a decreasing part of its own population. Everyone else in the world has moved on. 

Europe, Mexico and Canada for example are making other arrangements but the tough talk is what the regime is going with as they bargain that it will look good at home.  This despite the horrid polling. The US is also gambling that the bond market won't crash as world confidence in their country declines by the day. 

This is massive hubris that is entirely unwarranted 

China for its part has seen astronomical progress over the last 40 years and is now seeing the fruits of investment in technology and its workforce. The country has lifted a huge chunk of its population out of poverty and threatens to show the world what looking after your people looks like. 

No the Chinese aren't perfect on human rights but then most countries have skeletons in their closets. 

As the western world figures out how to mitigate the consequences of Neoliberal policies, the selling of more socialist approaches is becoming more palatable even in the US with its DSA candidates. 

This is because people are getting fed up of falling behind.

Desire

My desire to want to slap people in public has waned dramatically which is very good news for me. 

However, it's not because society in general is getting better behaved, but because I am learning to, better than ever, tune them out and live internally in peace.

To belong

One of the challenges we have as human beings is to find our community. We need a clan to belong to which can bring security but also potentially present us with a trap. 

In order to belong we need to define ourselves as being members and sometimes shoehorn ourselves into a model that may not feel quite right. 

This is human nature in spades. 

My instinct has always told me to be wary of groupthink precisely because the draw to belong can potentially cloud our judgement. It's wonderful to feel part of something bigger than ourselves but that invariably comes with some warning stickers 

We love labels and categories so we can fit in with the flipside being that they can serve as criteria for exclusion and even banishment.