tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post1496416834829433965..comments2024-03-26T06:17:49.527-07:00Comments on Had Enough Therapy?: Good-bye, Therapist in ChiefStuart Schneidermanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12784043736879991769noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-32295203602295093962017-01-23T09:49:34.804-08:002017-01-23T09:49:34.804-08:00Here's my coda for obama's presidency
OBA...Here's my coda for obama's presidency<br /><br />OBAMANDIAS<br /><br />I met a blogger from a Beltway land, who said<br />Two cracked and polished screens of glass<br />Lie in a Rose Garden. Near them, in an Oval office<br />Half stunned, a shattered redeemer sits, whose lies<br />And upturned nose, and sneer of cold disdain<br />Tell that this Messiah ill his nation's spirit read<br />Which yet survive, clingd to time honored things<br />The hands that prayed for her and the sons who bled<br />And on the prompter these words inscribed<br />"My name is Obamandias, Bringer of Hope<br />Look upon my Change, ye righties, and despair"<br />Nothing besides remains. Round the wreck<br />Of that colossal Self, unbounded and malign<br />The vain and empty dream didst fritter away <br /><br /> <br /><br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-80828249195188903342017-01-23T09:23:56.807-08:002017-01-23T09:23:56.807-08:00IAC: Buraq Obama was less an "attuned" b...IAC: Buraq Obama was less an "attuned" being than he was an a-tooned being. He is, and was, a caricature.<br /><br />BTW, fun fact: the name Buraq (Kenyan Barack) has an interesting etymology. Buraq (Hebrew "lightning") was the name of the horse that carried Mohammed to Jerusalem.<br /><br />If diplomatic events evolve as expected, Buraq turned out to be Osama's weak horse, more Mr. Ed than Lightning.Trigger Warningnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-72693126640005690322017-01-23T06:43:26.862-08:002017-01-23T06:43:26.862-08:00Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between ...Sebastian Haffner, who grew up in Germany between the wars, has some relevant thoughts. He notes that during the Stressemann chancellorship, when political stability combined with economic improvement for a while, some people were not too happy...<br /><br />"The last ten years were forgotten like a bad dream. The Day of Judgment was remote again, and there was no demand for saviors or revolutionaries…There was an ample measure of freedom, peace, and order, everywhere the most well-meaning liberal-mindedness, good wages, good food and a little political boredom. everyone was cordially invited to concentrate on their personal lives, to arrange their affairs according to their own taste and to find their own paths to happiness."<br /><br />BUT<br /><br />"A generation of young Germans had become accustomed to having the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions…Now that these deliveries suddently ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned how to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful and worth while, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation. They were bored, their minds strayed to silly thoughts, and they began to sulk."<br /><br />and<br /><br />"To be precise (the occasion demands precision, because in my opinion it provides the key to the contemporary period of history): it was not the entire generation of young Germans. Not every single individual reacted in this fashion. There were some who learned during this period, belatedly and a little clumsily, as it were, how to live. they began to enjoy their own lives, weaned themselves from the cheap intoxication of the sports of war and revolution, and started to develop their own personalities. It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis."<br /><br />In America today, we seem to have quite a few people who like having "the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere"David Fosterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15464681514800720063noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-30777323014459351792017-01-23T04:45:13.434-08:002017-01-23T04:45:13.434-08:00Trigger Warning @January 22, 2016 at 7:20 AM:
Yep...Trigger Warning @January 22, 2016 at 7:20 AM:<br /><br />Yep. I know way too many professional colleagues who think and talk like this. Very New Agey. I'm not sure what the New Age is about, other than their imagining themselves priests and priestesses in some kind of evolutionary movement. Strange, exclusive vocabulary and soaring poetry in one-sided "conversation." <br /><br />"... not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual..."<br /><br />I think this quote captures the conceit and condescension. Religion is for suckers, for drones like the pyramid-builders. High New Age spirituality is yet another subjective experience where each person is chanting, hallucinating, and pretending to be on a higher intellectual and eternal plane than the others. <br /><br />In the Starhawk sense, they're all trying to outdo each other's amateur cosmological rubbish. What they don't see is that they have more in common with L. Ron Hubbard than Jesus of Nazareth. <br /><br />And so they took the vessel of Barack Obama, and poured all of their subjective, glorious wants, needs and desires into him, and he became their Messiah. <br /><br />They constructed him as such a Christ-like Messiah: fully human, yet fully divine. That was a metaphysical narrative of the Obama years. That's why he won the Nobel Prace Prize after accomplishing nothing. Not only does their Messiah achieve this high honor as a participation trophy, he goes on to keep us at war for all 8 years of his presidency. No matter, it's the good intention that counts!<br /><br />And meanwhile, the Democrat Party Obama led became a spent carcass, and lost so much power and influence within the earthly realm. And what of the high mindfulness of their high priest? Obama didn't spend his days in the White House running a Osho-inspired madrassa, nor a Shinto pagoda shrine. The One spent his time playing golf with celebrities, vacationing in exclusive enclaves with the uber-riche, and working on his NCAA bracket. In this, he was as pedestrian as a regular TMZ reader. But somehow the fawning continued to worship their imaginary friend, and the rest of us continued to be hypnotized idiots in their eyes. "No bother," I can hear them say... "these people around us haven't evolved to the higher consciousness." The higher consciousness they had achieved, of course. And the conceit grew, and dwelled among them -- the beautiful people. <br /><br />Once again, it's heads I win, tails you lose. This isn't the New Age. It's merely the next Gnosticism.Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCDhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18222603717128565302noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-75470406553912695302017-01-23T04:27:06.543-08:002017-01-23T04:27:06.543-08:00This comment has been removed by the author.Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCDhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18222603717128565302noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-57318939376074700462017-01-22T09:34:02.279-08:002017-01-22T09:34:02.279-08:00Brendan O’Neill: No, the extraordinariness of Obam...Brendan O’Neill: No, the extraordinariness of Obama’s presidency lay in its replacement of politics with therapy. Its transformation of the president from a politician who does things for people into a person who makes people feel things. Its turning of the commander-in-chief into therapist-in-chief.<br /><br />This statement makes me very curious. What does it mean to "makes people feel thing"? Things they want to feel, or things they don't want to feel? And why is no-drama Obama the king of feelings?<br /><br />In fact it took the artists community, Will.i.am and crew to take Obama's election primary rhetoric into a song "Yes we can". At least that worked for his primary win in 2008.<br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY Yes We Can - Barack Obama Music Video Uploaded on Feb 2, 2008<br /><br />It seems like Donald Trump is the King of Feelings, on one side he wants to receive adoration and wants to bless his followers with his greatness. He can't help repeating himself over and over about how he's a winner, and now we can all win so much that we'll get tired of winning. And on the other side he redirects negative energy into identifiable scapegoats who are the source of your negative feelings, and if you can find a way to banish them behind walls that they will no longer cause problems.<br /><br />Brendan O’Neill: The treatment of Obama as a kind of ‘magical negro’ for America’s history problem and for white intellectuals’ feeling of guilt over the origins of their societies and their lives reduces him to mere symbol, almost to the level of an innocent, incapable of being judged politically and morally.<br /><br />Since it seems like Trump's rise is full of more magical thinking than anyone, hype without substance, maybe this magical thinking is a mirror of the Left's magical thinking about Obama as racial healer. Both sides are dominated by the beliefs that feelings are more important than reality.<br /><br />And now we're in a new round of "therapy" where you're free to express your deepest hatreds in contempt and mockery of others, and this is acceptable behavior, because that's what therapy teaches.<br /><br />It allows "jokes" like from Carl Paladino before Christmas as his wishes for 2017.<br />artvoice.com/2016/12/23/want-2017-lot-different-opinions/<br />----<br />1. Obama catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford. He dies before his trial and is buried in a cow pasture next to Valerie Jarret, who died weeks prior, after being convicted of sedition and treason, when a Jihady cell mate mistook her for being a nice person and decapitated her.<br /><br />2. Michelle Obama. I’d like her to return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.<br />----<br /><br />Unfortunately Paladino hasn't learned the new lesson of Trump and he apologized.<br />http://www.wben.com/Paladino-Says-Comments-Were-Mistake-Won-t-Step-Dow/22972431<br />---<br />I wanted to say something as sarcastic and hurtful as possible about the people so responsible for the hurt and suffering of so many others. I was wired up, primed to be human and make a mistake. I could not have made a worse choice in the words I used to express my feelings.<br />---<br /><br />For myself, it is actually refreshing to see someone who admits he has a spiteful side, lashing out at political rivals, and wanting to provoke outrage, at least in that moment of narcissistic rage. But its also a chance to see yourself. The real problem to me is people who are unable to see their own malice and blame it on someone else. <br /><br />So Paladino teaches us that having a public reputation sometimes means you have to swallow your pride and admit you are part of the problem. But for the world of anonymity, online and mob behavior, individual resentment can do great wrongs, with no personal accountability.<br /><br />Of course Trump will never learn this lesson. And that's our collective problem now. Ares Olympushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09726811306826601686noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-434605584346815892017-01-22T08:23:56.273-08:002017-01-22T08:23:56.273-08:00Can anyone say all of this does not reflect the ri...Can anyone say all of this does not reflect the rise of women to power--in the corporate world, in religion, in academia, and especially in government? <br /><br />Consider the fact that we almost elected a president who told us we had to empathize with our enemies. sestamibinoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8078379512095504946.post-90729480165993584782017-01-22T07:20:15.786-08:002017-01-22T07:20:15.786-08:00This is how it began...
"Barack Obama isn...This is how it began...<br /><br />"Barack Obama isn't really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway[...] Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us <i>evolve</i>." (ital. in original)<br />--- M Morford, SF Gate, 6/6/08<br /><br />President Starhawk. :-)<br /><br />And so it ends, across all 57 states...Trigger Warningnoreply@blogger.com