As I was researching various extremist hate sites like the falsely named "Jews for Palestinian Right of Return", most of which are run by the same people registering multiple sites which constantly reference each other in order to build a false legitimacy, it occurred to me that there's a slight but very significant difference between being a legitimate detective and being a fringe conspiracy theorist.
It's all about seeing patterns for what they actually are versus seeing patterns which aren't really there. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. But it ends up turning reality on its head, making the true, false, and the false, true. But how do we tell the difference between the two? That's the $64,000 question.
I think some key terms should be named here as we go forward:
Cognitive Bias
Epistemology
Research Methods
Gnosticism or Secret Knowledge
Logical Fallacies
False Conspiracy Theories
Criminal Conspiracies
Obviously this is a huge issue which one Facebook post isn't going to adequately address, but we can at least try to start the process of understanding what false conspiracy theories are and how people process information in ways that inoculate them from believing in them or towards believing in them.
In other words, this is both a cognitive issue as well as a sociological issue. I personally don't care much about individual conspiracy theories as much as I do about why and how people come to believe in them. Some are quite harmless, like not believing we landed on the Moon, while others are incredibly dangerous, like the anti vaccination conspiracy theory which costs people's lives.
Also, as I posted above, there are real criminal conspiracies which have happened many times throughout history and to this day, such as Watergate, Tuskegee medical experiments, the Holocaust, etc. So I'm not in any way saying that no conspiracies have ever happened. That's a charge which is typically laid down by fake conspiracy theorists in order to discredit anyone who disagrees with them. That, by the way, is itself, a classic logical fallacy. That's why I put the term in the list above.
Anyway, this post is already too long and I've got a lot more to address about these phenomena, which I'll be writing on my blog, and then posting here and on Twitter. This has been a lifelong interest of mine, primarily because I come from a family which leaned/leans heavily towards conspiratorial ways of thinking, and I learned early on how dangerous that is on multiple levels, not just cognitively, but emotionally and spiritually as well.
Lastly, the takeaway from all of this is this:
It's OK to not know everything. You'll be fine with your limited knowledge.
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Whispers in the Night Air
Stop kissing me with your poison tongue
I don't need that kind of love
Some lisps I love, but not this lisp
Whisper into someone else's ears
You know I love my Icons
Holy and unholy
Reflections of my
fractured self
Bastard child of the Holy One
Slingshot sanctification
Unseen yet Wholly seen
I don't need that kind of love
Some lisps I love, but not this lisp
Whisper into someone else's ears
You know I love my Icons
Holy and unholy
Reflections of my
fractured self
Bastard child of the Holy One
Slingshot sanctification
Unseen yet Wholly seen
Monday, January 22, 2018
Chord Structures
Breaking out of the trance is never easy.
Chord structures must be broken out of
over and over again
till the Siren is not silenced
but replaced by a better voice.
Chord structures must be broken out of
over and over again
till the Siren is not silenced
but replaced by a better voice.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
A Stranger in My Own Eyes
I never knew you.
You never knew me.
The quiet storm
never calmed.
The surface was seemingly tranquil
but the undercurrents
swept us both away
from each other
and ourselves.
I think we once wanted
to know each other.
At least I want to believe that.
You reflected me
in strange and dangerous ways.
The mirror we both looked into
was never warped.
The mirror was never fractured.
We simply reflected onto each other
the warps and fractures
we both shared.
You never knew me.
The quiet storm
never calmed.
The surface was seemingly tranquil
but the undercurrents
swept us both away
from each other
and ourselves.
I think we once wanted
to know each other.
At least I want to believe that.
You reflected me
in strange and dangerous ways.
The mirror we both looked into
was never warped.
The mirror was never fractured.
We simply reflected onto each other
the warps and fractures
we both shared.
Monday, January 15, 2018
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Most folks today like to believe that they'd be on the side of Dr. King back in the Civil Rights era, but people conveniently forget that he was the most hated man in America when he was assassinated. The vast majority of White Christians thought he was a dangerous troublemaker, and of course, in a way, he was a very dangerous troublemaker.
But that's exactly what he needed to be in order to be faithful to his Christian calling. He called out and openly confronted America's racist history and continuing racist policies, both domestically and internationally. He also tied racism and classism together and recognized that the underprivileged and poor came in every shade of color.
Dr. King was a man of peace and non-violence to be sure. That was his trademark. But he was no passive actor in any sense. His commitment to justice for EVERYONE was fierce and unyielding. He struck the rhetorical ax to the root of evil policies across the board, from the backwoods lynchings to the Vietnam War. He was unrelenting in his holy calling to call evil by its name and overcome it with the power of love.
But you can't cure a disease if you refuse to acknowledge that it exists in the first place. We still are unwilling to do that, and so Dr. King's message rings as true today as it did fifty years ago. We must NEVER stop dreaming his prophetic dream.
But that's exactly what he needed to be in order to be faithful to his Christian calling. He called out and openly confronted America's racist history and continuing racist policies, both domestically and internationally. He also tied racism and classism together and recognized that the underprivileged and poor came in every shade of color.
Dr. King was a man of peace and non-violence to be sure. That was his trademark. But he was no passive actor in any sense. His commitment to justice for EVERYONE was fierce and unyielding. He struck the rhetorical ax to the root of evil policies across the board, from the backwoods lynchings to the Vietnam War. He was unrelenting in his holy calling to call evil by its name and overcome it with the power of love.
But you can't cure a disease if you refuse to acknowledge that it exists in the first place. We still are unwilling to do that, and so Dr. King's message rings as true today as it did fifty years ago. We must NEVER stop dreaming his prophetic dream.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Swallow the Pain and Exhale the Love
Everything sings pain into my soul
Everything slings arrows at my soul
It's easy for me to use excuses I use
to use, to use.
Musing on misuses of my soul
Inclined towards the pain
and away from the scars
away from the stars away
from the scars starred
in my scarred terrain
of pain.
Exhale the pain
and exhale the love.
Be Not Afraid.
Everything slings arrows at my soul
It's easy for me to use excuses I use
to use, to use.
Musing on misuses of my soul
Inclined towards the pain
and away from the scars
away from the stars away
from the scars starred
in my scarred terrain
of pain.
Exhale the pain
and exhale the love.
Be Not Afraid.
White Man's President
Donald J. Trump allegedly called Haiti, El Salvador and Africa "shitholes" or "Shithouses" in a small meeting last week in the Whitehouse with several Republicans and one Democrat in attendance. Needless to say, this is shocking by any normal standards, but we gave up normal standards the day we elected a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with it repeatedly because he was rich and powerful. We gave up normal standards when we elected a man who repeatedly has not only made openly racist statements throughout his life, but was successfully sued, along with his openly racist father Fred Trump, for racist housing policies in 1973 in Queens, NY.
I think what shocks people is the simple candor of his unapologetic racism (and misogyny and Islamophobia, etc...) and how his own staff have essentially become inured to these daily tirades directed scattershot at friends and foes alike. More than a few of his staffers now feel as though they're acting as babysitters instead of serious advisers to a sitting President. That's a truly terrifying prospect, similar to, but I would say is now much worse than, what the final days of the Nixon Whitehouse was like in 1973/74 when he was drinking heavily and having conversations with oil paintings on the walls. Thank God Donald Trump doesn't drink! Though I do suspect he's, considering his advanced age, taking a bevy of medications to help him get through each day. But that's only conjecture on my part based on his physical appearance and obvious erratic behavior as seen by everyone.
Now, my own ethnic background, strangely enough, is quite similar to Donald Trump's. My father's side is entirely German like Trumps's father's side. My German immigrant grandmother bought into the ethno-nationalism of Nazism and held to it till her death when I was a small child, very similar to Fred Trump's own Klan affiliation and arrest in the 1920's in NYC. But in my family's case, thanks be to God, my father became extremely progressive on most fronts (though he was terribly abusive towards my mother, I think in reaction to his own antipathy towards his mother, and I later learned that he inherited his mother's Antisemitism), was very pro Civil Rights, regularly had black college students over for dinner at our house in a VERY white neighborhood of Staten Island (terrifying our then racist neighbors that he was thinking of selling our house to a black family), tutoring Hispanic people in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in English. In other words, I grew up loving JFK, MLK Jr., Bobby Kennedy and listening to the protest music of the era as a daily part of my childhood.
But I could have grown up very differently. I could quite easily have become the mirror image of myself under only slightly different circumstances. It appears Donald J. Trump grew up under those slightly different circumstances. As noted above, his father was a well known racist (even Woody Guthrie wrote about him and his racism!), Trump was extremely unruly as a child and had to be sent to a military academy, where the extremely regimented and authoritarian environment was a perfect fit for his very bright social intelligence. He learned how to be physically and emotionally coercive towards underlings and that obviously served him well for several decades more. He may be incredibly unintelligent on actual knowledge and policy, but he's borderline genius when it comes to coercive rhetoric and emotional abuse. By the way, these are ALL classic predator qualities and that should concern us all.
Trying to understand racism and the many other extremist "isms" out there has been my life's work since my late childhood. What makes someone become a racist, after all? My exposure to this world began very early on, in my mid childhood when I learned that almost all of my white neighbors were racist and Antisemitic. I later came to call my neighborhood/town in Annadale, SINY the "Selma, Alabama of NYC" and it's sadly still largely the same to this day. But I was blessed by a combination of disability and disfunction which saved me from my environment, and I think my own story is a kind of mirror image of Trump's story in Queens, NY. The combination of my several ailments with my family disfunction forced me into interacting with people (kids) of color at a VERY early age. Though we lived in a upper middle class white neighborhood, my parents being separated forced my mom to bring me to the clinic instead of our family physician, and as y'all know, the public clinics are never in the good part of town.
The clinic I had to go to on a monthly basis (I was REALLY sickly as a kid) was across the street from the West Brighton projects, a notoriously dangerous public housing project on the North Shore of Staten Island. But through these constant visits I regularly interacted with other children who looked and talked VERY differently than me. They were black, brown, Asian, Latino/Latina, etc., and I loved playing with them each and every time. I even told my mom at one point that I wished I was black, much to her astonishment, because I liked how my black friends behaved with me in stark contrast to my white child neighbors, who mostly bullied me because of how different I was. Even as a child, I knew what it felt like to wear the skin of the "other", whether that meant skin color explicitly, or being targeted because of having long hair when every other boy had a crew cut, or not behaving in a masculine enough way for the other boys in my elementary school, etc...
I've never met Donald Trump, and by God's grace I never will, but he has lived an extremely public life, and so we can learn quite a lot from his public pronouncements, his many affairs while married, and his rare moments of speaking honestly about himself. The one moment of honesty, again extremely rare for him, was back in the 1990's when he admitted that he didn't like to think about himself reflectively, because he didn't think he'd like what he saw. That alone is unbelievably telling about his self perception and I would aver his deep seated self hatred, which, in denying (which he must), he can't help but project that self hatred outward towards anyone who looks or thinks differently than him, whether they be a wife, a child, a business associate, a self perceived enemy, and even an ally who doesn't serve his immediate needs of the moment.
How will this all end? With his impeachment by a new Congress next year? By his own staff pulling a 25th Amendment on his failing faculties? By us getting involved with a nuclear war with North Korea and potentially other nations, with millions left dead and dying from radiation poisoning? I would love to see him change and become a better man and turn this administration around and be more ethical on multiple levels, but I simply don't see ANY evidence of it anywhere. This Trump Regime, as I call it, is not only putting the American Experiment at grave risk, it's putting our planet's future at risk.
I watched most of the Sunday morning political shows this morning and it was remarkable to see almost all of them struggle with acknowledging the simple truth that we have a white supremacist/racist president and that the vast majority of the GOP is silently complicit as he rolls back almost every civil rights advancement made in the last 50+ years.
Barack Obama was our first Black President. Donald Trump is our first White President.
It's time we own this folks. It's time we own it.
I think what shocks people is the simple candor of his unapologetic racism (and misogyny and Islamophobia, etc...) and how his own staff have essentially become inured to these daily tirades directed scattershot at friends and foes alike. More than a few of his staffers now feel as though they're acting as babysitters instead of serious advisers to a sitting President. That's a truly terrifying prospect, similar to, but I would say is now much worse than, what the final days of the Nixon Whitehouse was like in 1973/74 when he was drinking heavily and having conversations with oil paintings on the walls. Thank God Donald Trump doesn't drink! Though I do suspect he's, considering his advanced age, taking a bevy of medications to help him get through each day. But that's only conjecture on my part based on his physical appearance and obvious erratic behavior as seen by everyone.
Now, my own ethnic background, strangely enough, is quite similar to Donald Trump's. My father's side is entirely German like Trumps's father's side. My German immigrant grandmother bought into the ethno-nationalism of Nazism and held to it till her death when I was a small child, very similar to Fred Trump's own Klan affiliation and arrest in the 1920's in NYC. But in my family's case, thanks be to God, my father became extremely progressive on most fronts (though he was terribly abusive towards my mother, I think in reaction to his own antipathy towards his mother, and I later learned that he inherited his mother's Antisemitism), was very pro Civil Rights, regularly had black college students over for dinner at our house in a VERY white neighborhood of Staten Island (terrifying our then racist neighbors that he was thinking of selling our house to a black family), tutoring Hispanic people in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in English. In other words, I grew up loving JFK, MLK Jr., Bobby Kennedy and listening to the protest music of the era as a daily part of my childhood.
But I could have grown up very differently. I could quite easily have become the mirror image of myself under only slightly different circumstances. It appears Donald J. Trump grew up under those slightly different circumstances. As noted above, his father was a well known racist (even Woody Guthrie wrote about him and his racism!), Trump was extremely unruly as a child and had to be sent to a military academy, where the extremely regimented and authoritarian environment was a perfect fit for his very bright social intelligence. He learned how to be physically and emotionally coercive towards underlings and that obviously served him well for several decades more. He may be incredibly unintelligent on actual knowledge and policy, but he's borderline genius when it comes to coercive rhetoric and emotional abuse. By the way, these are ALL classic predator qualities and that should concern us all.
Trying to understand racism and the many other extremist "isms" out there has been my life's work since my late childhood. What makes someone become a racist, after all? My exposure to this world began very early on, in my mid childhood when I learned that almost all of my white neighbors were racist and Antisemitic. I later came to call my neighborhood/town in Annadale, SINY the "Selma, Alabama of NYC" and it's sadly still largely the same to this day. But I was blessed by a combination of disability and disfunction which saved me from my environment, and I think my own story is a kind of mirror image of Trump's story in Queens, NY. The combination of my several ailments with my family disfunction forced me into interacting with people (kids) of color at a VERY early age. Though we lived in a upper middle class white neighborhood, my parents being separated forced my mom to bring me to the clinic instead of our family physician, and as y'all know, the public clinics are never in the good part of town.
The clinic I had to go to on a monthly basis (I was REALLY sickly as a kid) was across the street from the West Brighton projects, a notoriously dangerous public housing project on the North Shore of Staten Island. But through these constant visits I regularly interacted with other children who looked and talked VERY differently than me. They were black, brown, Asian, Latino/Latina, etc., and I loved playing with them each and every time. I even told my mom at one point that I wished I was black, much to her astonishment, because I liked how my black friends behaved with me in stark contrast to my white child neighbors, who mostly bullied me because of how different I was. Even as a child, I knew what it felt like to wear the skin of the "other", whether that meant skin color explicitly, or being targeted because of having long hair when every other boy had a crew cut, or not behaving in a masculine enough way for the other boys in my elementary school, etc...
I've never met Donald Trump, and by God's grace I never will, but he has lived an extremely public life, and so we can learn quite a lot from his public pronouncements, his many affairs while married, and his rare moments of speaking honestly about himself. The one moment of honesty, again extremely rare for him, was back in the 1990's when he admitted that he didn't like to think about himself reflectively, because he didn't think he'd like what he saw. That alone is unbelievably telling about his self perception and I would aver his deep seated self hatred, which, in denying (which he must), he can't help but project that self hatred outward towards anyone who looks or thinks differently than him, whether they be a wife, a child, a business associate, a self perceived enemy, and even an ally who doesn't serve his immediate needs of the moment.
How will this all end? With his impeachment by a new Congress next year? By his own staff pulling a 25th Amendment on his failing faculties? By us getting involved with a nuclear war with North Korea and potentially other nations, with millions left dead and dying from radiation poisoning? I would love to see him change and become a better man and turn this administration around and be more ethical on multiple levels, but I simply don't see ANY evidence of it anywhere. This Trump Regime, as I call it, is not only putting the American Experiment at grave risk, it's putting our planet's future at risk.
I watched most of the Sunday morning political shows this morning and it was remarkable to see almost all of them struggle with acknowledging the simple truth that we have a white supremacist/racist president and that the vast majority of the GOP is silently complicit as he rolls back almost every civil rights advancement made in the last 50+ years.
Barack Obama was our first Black President. Donald Trump is our first White President.
It's time we own this folks. It's time we own it.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
A Buck Short
Clearing into the fields.
You are my mine field.
Shielded, we are.
Ridiculous, we all are.
Dollars, billed far too late.
You are my mine field.
Shielded, we are.
Ridiculous, we all are.
Dollars, billed far too late.
By A Slim Margin
I was never your stranger
I was always you friend,
Frequently frequented.
Aspirated, frequently freaky,
always strange.
It's OK.
I understand.
You don't need a rhythm
or rhyme.
Time.
Rhythm.
Mime.
It's who I am.
I was always you friend,
Frequently frequented.
Aspirated, frequently freaky,
always strange.
It's OK.
I understand.
You don't need a rhythm
or rhyme.
Time.
Rhythm.
Mime.
It's who I am.
The Contours of Your Face
Gwenn
You were visually stunning.
Our last night together
will always mean everything to me.
I can't forget you.
You are my blessing and my curse.
A hint of heaven and a hint of hell.
Gwenn.
You were visually stunning.
Our last night together
will always mean everything to me.
I can't forget you.
You are my blessing and my curse.
A hint of heaven and a hint of hell.
Gwenn.
Minor Key Goddess
Why do I listen to you so?
Slippery lyrics, lilting, not so softly
against the hard edges of reality.
The cracks are obvious
or at least they should be.
Hellacious reality isn't the totality
of rhymes which don't have much reason.
But the Minor Key sings out to me
so strong and yet so weak
elegantly strange, absent
yet always present.
Tonal qualities resonate,
minor key hinted at
every single time.
Slippery lyrics, lilting, not so softly
against the hard edges of reality.
The cracks are obvious
or at least they should be.
Hellacious reality isn't the totality
of rhymes which don't have much reason.
But the Minor Key sings out to me
so strong and yet so weak
elegantly strange, absent
yet always present.
Tonal qualities resonate,
minor key hinted at
every single time.
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