As you’d expect, my consigliere and I have been talking almost non-stop since his arrival, with occasional comments from Elaine.
One of our topics Wednesday involved genetics and whether there are genuinely “good” and “bad” people. My consigliere explained that early in his legal career as a public defender he became convinced that genetic do play a major role in how people turn out.
He reported seeing examples of people with serious criminal backgrounds adopting out kids to well-funded, upstanding homes. Thing is, he pointed out, often the child – upon reaching adulthood – would be drawn to the same kinds of behaviors as the (biological) parents. They run off the rails similarly, in his experience.
(Continues below)
This is not to say adopting is bad…but it led to another topic: Haters.
We’d been rehashing some of the Eric Hofer book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements and how it applied in present times.
I think the three of us came to a general consensus that for whatever reason in today’s world, there are just plain haters. These are people who just have to hate someone, something, some cause. And usually for unfathomable reasons if you could just talk them through the logic of what was being said.
But, you can’t, of course. The True Believer (turned Hater) has lost the capacity for introspection, self-criticism, and critical thought. You’d think it would have left them with more time to be productive in other areas, but that time is swallowed up with hate related tasks.
How many people do you know who can’t stand not to bash Trump, these days.
I trust you saw the story on the News Busters website that had this dandy quote in it about a CBS lawyer fired for – well, you’ll understand when you read her reported comments about the LV shooting Sunday night:
““If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” wrote Geftman-Gold on Facebook, perhaps referring to Sandy Hook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
What makes this so interesting to us is that she must have felt OK to talk/think this way right there in the midst of CBS. This caused my consigliere to wonder “Did she feel this was an OK thing to post because of the water cooler atmosphere of CBS?”
A fair point.
Hate drives ratings. We have seen plenty of that in the monetization of racial and sexual differences, now politics, too. So again, we return to the too much capacity, not enough real news to fill it problem.
[I will skip the mass trashing of the MSM anti-Trump campaign and won’t ask why people like Piers Morgan was ever allowed to be an anchor in America…but we sense that there has been a long-term slow-growth trend of rising anti-Americanism within the (nominally) US mainstream. Where this shit comes from, I have no idea, but it is evidence that someone or organizations are pimping the anti-American spew at the highest levels. We do wonder how many embeds are left, however…]
So back to point: Haters are out there. And when you find one it’s easy to see:
You will be talking with something, like, oh, sports. And then they will suddenly turn the conversation into an exposition on American racism. Oh boy…
Or, you will point out that the reason aid didn’t get distributed faster in Puerto Rico was the local truck drivers didn’t show up for work (80% stayed home) so the relief supplies (10,000 containers) just sat on the docks. In the midst of this, the genuine haters will turn from the recovery differences between cultures in Puerto Rico and the USVI – and suddenly it will be about Trump.
Now, if you ask a person who’s a Trump hater, if Bill Gates should show up to reboot your computer, they will laugh and explain for weeks how stupid you are. “Gates is the company president – he isn’t expected to turn on everyone’s computer. People have to do that themselves….”
What the haters don’t realize is that the same President who has continued to be admired by millions in Texas, for example, and it getting high marks from the State on recovery efforts, is the same guy who is dissed in a pseudo-state where the containers were stacking up for a lack of drivers.
But that’s just one angle of how the hate game is played. But ;like genuinely good, and genuinely bad people, I’m beginning to thing that yeah, some portion of the population has a very bad case of the True Believer, True Hater disease.
The one we don’t talk about…
Divorced Dad Notes
Like me, my consigliere went through a less than optimal divorce experience some years back. Turns out despite the spousal biasing, he’s now got a great relationship with his elder son – 28, or so.
The younger son is coming along, too. Age 22 and seven years after the break-up.
Comparing notes on how such things work, we’ve concluded that “normalization of father-son relationships” may be a decade-long process, or age 25, whichever comes later.
Asked if he’d ever consider marriage again?
“Well, I have only one requirement in a new wife: Her jet has to have standing headroom.”
Elaine and I are 3-months from 18 marvelous years together and it doesn’t seem like more than a few days. Magic.
Perhaps, third times are charms. Or, we were all just much slower learners than we ever thought possible.
Super Phone Deal?
Since he’s going to Mexico from here (Cancun area) he went shopping for a cell phone that would allow calling in the US and Mexico.
Said the best deal he could find was the one you may still be able to snag at Wal-Mart. The WM is phasing out of T-Mobile, but their deal was a 4LTE plan that was one GB of data per month (not much!) but unlimited calling in the US and Mexico. (Sounds like telecom zillionaire Carlos Slim did his countrymen a solid on this plan) $22.50 per month with a direct billing agreement discount. Not sure how much longer it will be available.
It’s called the “Simple Mobile” plan – and sure, maybe Skype and a hot spot works here…but Cancun? Seemed like one of those things to pass along.
Mexican workers not only are often skilled craftsmen but also skilled shoppers…
OK, time to size up markets….write when you get rich,
George@ure.net
You should listen to Paul Harvey’s “If I were the Devil” from 1965. Pretty relevant to current events and the media.
I got a chuckle out of your comment about kids in a divorce, I can not count the number of times I seen it happen one parent or the other will do every thing they can to poison the minds of the children against the other but in the end the kids are smarter and come around because it is their Mom or Dad!
PS, I think you have more smart people than you think listening to you, I was watching FBN this morning and they talking to a guy hawking Bitcoins and one of the other guests compared them to trading Tulip bulbs!
You’ve got that right! There is a classic book out there about that behavior (unfortunately can’t remember the title off the top of my head) and it discusses ‘madness’ by groups – and there was another very fine book about how the Japanese were prone to the same behavior as the Europeans written in 1905 (but my memory of titles is ‘shot’) – end result – people can be so gullible!
I am not sure if this is the book your referring to..but it’s a good one.. I love philosophy and who would have guessed that many of the ancient philosophers had the answers hundreds of years before Christmas. I think Plato should be mandatory reading once a year.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-norms/
Christ…not Christmas hate auto correct..and live it at the same time
Our adopted kid’s counselor says that in his experience, genetics accounts for 95% of how kids turn out. Hard to swallow for a behaviorist like me.
I found out I was adopted at 55. After both sets of parents were gone. It explained a lot of the family dynamics I didn’t understand. I always thought I was a failure at weight control; when, in fact, I had done better than my biological sisters. A book called “The Primal Wound” described my brother’s and my opposite reaction to adoption, my feeling my whole life that something wasn’t right. We aren’t puppies, we are born complete humans and don’t always fit easily into a contrived family.
Our youngest is adopted. His birth mother is my wife’s youngest sister. From the very beginning we were determined that he was going to know who is Aunt was and what her relationsip with him is. I think knowing you are adopted is critical to a successful child getting into adulthood. He is far different from my other kids. Like his Aunt he has gotten in more trouble than our other 5 kids, combined. But he has a base to draw from and has adapted well to being a responsible adult. I am sad to hear when adults find out they were adopted. It is a shock and a betrayal to the person, that had they known, they would have been able to tell their siblings, like our youngest tells his, Mom and Dad chose me, they just had you!!!
Mexicans can teach Donald a thing or two on the art of the deal. They taught me to negotiate pricing at a garage sales where as I had been to timid to do such a thing. I also learned to make everything last and never throw anything away that someone else may be able to recycle. I am mentioning this now in my “older years” because it one of those things ‘I regretted not knowing when I was younger. Garage sales were treasure chest troves at one time, precious metals gemstones sterling flatware was pretty much up for grabs if you knew what you were doing. And I didn’t. In fact way back when, it was considered bad taste to buy used anything from someone’s garage sale or for the fact anything used. It was a mind set and had to a lot to do with ego. Treasures are still to be had, just a rarity, now that I do know what I’m doing. So if you want to know how to stretch your dollar watch how the Mexicans are able live on very little and do it well. Even the cars they drive, you can be sure there was a deal made.
Geesh! I don’t have to go Mexico for training, I got it from my depression era parents and Grandparents. Common Sense ain’t so common!
I sent you a note about an EQ dream via email. Hopefully that is still your address. Kansas City.
Funny how some of the haters are “jump on the bandwagaon” or else plain oblivious to themselves. My neighborhood, in a suburb of Kansas City, has a “Hate has no Home here” sign in almost every yard, but they are some of the most hateful, nasty folks around – the Nice world of Johnson County. Fine to be mean-if you do it JOCO “NICE.” You need to fit the narrow stereotype. So hypocritical.
I live in Johnson County and I’ve never seen those signs. Guess I don’t get out enough!
As often as you’ve mentioned your Ex, directly or indirectly, this year, George, I’ve wondered if she keeps up with your column or if just through the kids?
When we moved to Colorado while I was in the 5th grade I came face-to-face with, at least discrimination, if not outright hatred for being a Texan. Even back in the 60s this prejudice existed among the young people who were taught by their elders. How many times did they ask me to say “pineapple”? Hard to say but I learned to just roll with the punches – and this was in the second school I attended there, not the first which was more inner-city/older neighborhood while our new house was being built in a much wealthier neighborhood. Draw your own conclusions there.
You learn to fit in – and deal with “no such things as Snow Days” up there. Over time my accent morphed into no real accent at all, or perhaps just “Mid West”, but eventually returned to normal once back here in “Texus”. Everyone runs under the radar to some extent in their lives and it’s become a survival skill of major importance over the past decade or so.
I’ve addressed the subject of “hatred” here before in differing with, I think, Warhammer in that it paints too broad a stoke to differentiate between a real enemy that’s demonstrated true danger to one’s existence vs. something as superficial as mere appearance – much like “Love” has been used to paint over all the massive pitfalls of that concept. Had your STD shot lately? Hugged your local pimp-daddy or drug lord today?
When you’ve got something good going – i.e. “America” – and you’re faced with someone that is actively trying to tear it apart – Hillary, BLM, radical “Mooslems” or even some guy running around in bedsheets when it’s way to far out from Halloween – and it’s obvious that you aren’t going to sit down and have a decent exchange of ideas with them then, I maintain, there is room for hatred – of the ideology at the very least. It all depends on how deeply ingrained that thought process is. As dedicated as the German forces were in both wars if a vote were taken on both sides and it was held binding over all the officers’ standing orders a lot more time would have been spent in the Biergartens fraternizing than on the battlefields. The scene in the end of “Band of Brothers” where the German soldier and the American were guarding a road together comes to mind. The German explained to the American that this was his third or fourth war, can’t remember exactly, which blew the mind of the American. Even going back to the Christmas Rebellion, I think it was called, in WWI, maybe Christmas Truce, which exasperated all the higher ups shows what can be accomplished with dialogue on the lowest rungs of society. The old query of “What would happen if they threw a war and nobody came?” definitely comes to mind. BUT when somebody blows the s**t out of your people in some place called Pearl Harbor there’s definitely room for a little judicious HATRED.
Assimilation into one’s host society shows deference to them being there first. Over time that host adapts to the new influences and things change. Politicians, especially, with whom time scales are about as long as their election periods, try to throw people together according to their benefactors’ wishes rather than allow for the assimilation process that takes a generation at least to play itself out. This social renovation appears, more often than not, like outright assaults on people’s well being rather than anything else. The logical result? I’ll let you fill in that blank.
” You learn to fit in ”
So true.. I dumbed myself down to fit in.. I regret that now and tell all my grandkids not to do that..
That’s why I make such a good rancher. It’s always been my dream job and all the best jobs I had before it were where I worked alone, for the most part, building something.
RE: born good or bad
From what I have read, it is proven psychopaths are born that way based on MRI screenings. Their brains are different from the average due to “holes” or missing areas. As such, they are not “curable”.
Sadly, it seems that a high percentage of psychopaths reach the tops of their chosen career paths (usually politics, military, big corporations) because of their charming ruthlessness and cunning.
I experienced growing up with several born damaged people in my immediate family. There was no cure, nothing ever improved for them or those who continued to have contact with them, and all ended badly. It is tragic that such folks exist and inflict so much harm on others.
I think I know what you report your reading from.. and from what I have read they are finding ways to treat some of these people if they catch it in time..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4059069/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21646569
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1107289
Yes I believe there are true evil people.. of everyone I have ever met.. there was one.. that I couldn’t stand to even be anywhere near them. and out of the thousands of people that i have met along the road of life there has only been a couple dozen that I would claim were truly evil in nature the rest in my opinion were just a commodity of their upbringing and environment.
oh I don’t have any degree’s or any professional experience.. I just love to read and read more than the average.. I worked with people for most of my life..
Oh and I read the crap that the average runs from..
Not to mention that most psychopaths are business leaders..
https://hbr.org/2004/10/executive-psychopaths
HATERS.. or are they subject to environment..
I worked a long time around a lot of different people from every walk of life..
are there true haters… in my opinion YES there are people prone to be evil .. maybe its chemical or the tendencies are hereditary this I don’t know. the vast majority are influenced by environment.. the mother from the hood cares about her child as much as the mother from beverly hills.. take a group of toddlers before they have been taught to hate and put them in a room together rich poor white black asian etc.. and they will play good as gold.. now take the same children years later after they have been subjected to the sins of the fathers and put them in the same room and you will see a dramatic difference in behaviors..
I few years ago I read a paper on a social experiment from a more expensive college. ( no college is better or worse.. it is up to the child to take what is needed from the course of studies.)
the results was scary at best.
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/970108prisonexp.html
https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html
this isn’t the paper I read but it is about the paper I read.. take Abu Ghraib the jailers there weren’t all bad.. they lived in an environment where it was socially acceptable.. the same with Nazi the soldiers weren’t all bad. they were in an environment where the actions that they took was considered acceptable .. I once knew a woman that was a prisoner at Auschwitz I knew a gaurd that was from Auschwitz.. a woman that escaped from that region .. the same goes for the refugee’s not all of them are bad.. they have been raised in an environment where.. Women haven’t any rights, children are just commodities.. and things they do are socially acceptable.. ( when was the last time you ever seen an old man wearing a suicide vest.. HMM never is my guess )
Now take today take the television.. switch it fro any channel you want to any channel.. watch the news .. I counted last night over two hundred negative comments on our president.. and what I could see and recognize there was approximately fifty negative subliminal messages portrait ed as well.. in one half hour.. on network television.. you switch it to what ever channel you want and you will see the same thing repetitively..
Now lets flip to network television programming.. some super race.. where the goal is to cheat and lie and backstab those around you to get them to support you till you win the big prize.. now lets go to another channel.. there we see someone eating human flesh and another one hacking on someone with an ax..
another channel someone is ripping someones throat out.. another how some child killed his parents.. another one someone raping a young woman.. this is in the course of one hour of prime time television.. the only positive show on the Morgan Freemans program on Nat Geo and the DIY channel..
the rest wasn’t worth the time to even turn the channel to.. take sports.. where mulit millionaire sports figures are allowed to basically openly disrespect the very flag that allows them the freedoms that they spit on.. I personally won’t buy or support any company that supports the NFL and I have been calling them stating that as well.. one person calls there are a ten thousand that won’t..
THE COLONY .. a great show that I think was backed and produced as a social experiment similar to Naked and Afraid and dual survival.. my thoughts are that.. these people are put in situations so that they can see how people will react and whether or not society can overcome and survive in the event of a calamity..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD1YAMMzoRw&list=PLQsXkC-Dbmm7DSqh0kLcawAJZ2ubX_YqL
Will mankind revert back to violence or could he survive as civilized
Ive found in life, the people who have most been my detractors, were people who were usually jealous of my successes. The most dangerous of them were the ones who pretended to be a friend, to gather information on my life, then would use that information to appear like they were an expert on my life and then use about 1 inch of fact and merge it with a mile of lies, and then tell people that sordid ugly charachterization behind my back. Ive had two people like that in my life. Both were the black sheep of their families. Jealousy and viscious envy are mankinds worst enabling emotions.
Corporate life is another place the above types can be found. I dont miss corporate America one bit. It was never the work, it was my supposed peers that could be the most opposition to my sucesses, but usually behind my back.
In regards to genetic imprinting, let me just say that our genetics, in all probability, is a result of a request from the soul. Whatever condition the soul is in, for its progress through creation, is the pattern for the parents they select for their next incarnation. So, yes, the child very much follows the pattern of the parents. The soul group we belong to, determines our soul level, and ability to access a higher level, and life time for ourselves. Can this be overcome through a set of adoptive parents ? Who, albeit well meaning, still requires a great deal of determination and resolve. It is in great regard, we hold the parents willing to greatly aid these children, whom are taking the chance to enter into this plain, and risk it all, to gain an advancement onto the next level of spiritual life.
As to haters. It would appear that globalist forces are manipulation the media, and the government to gain more control over money, people, and property. That we allow this brainwashing to control our actions is both discouraging and worrisome, in that, our nation is on the threshold of door to door urban violence due to these unscrupulous individuals. I can only ask our one infinite creator to intervene and put aside the coming genocide of the innocent.
Anyone who is a ‘True Believer’ about ANYTHING is first, gullible. Nothing in this universe is perfect, especially anything conceived by human beings. Not gods, not science, nor theories, nor results . . . financial ‘instruments’ are a construct of humans, so what does one really expect?
boy I wonder.. am I stepping into a philisophical discussion here about religion.. not gods.. well we won’t go there.. ( I do believe i have seen enough to give me a belief ) science is nothing more than the best guess scenario A scientific hypothesis is the initial building block in the scientific method. Many describe it as an “educated guess,based on prior knowledge and observation..theory is.. the big What if thought or question… time is something that people can perceive, but really doesn’t exist at all only our perception of time… results.. isn’t anything more than meeting a probability threshold that can be debated or cancelled out..
Many haters are just people who have been lied to all their life, and have no knowledge to back the rationality of lies they have been fed since childhood. As children, they learned that when they were wrong to get emotional to cover it. Another angering force is to know that something like 9/11 was nothing like the government reported, yet they have no evidence of what really happened because all the “evidence” is still classified. For most people having this gap in their knowledge base is crazy making, so they will just grab onto anything convenient to fill it, or they will just believe what the government says until someone brings forward the truth, which usually never happens. Again, they will get emotional when this aspect of their narrative is threatened. I can trigger this in just about any American just out of the USA less than a year.
Americans are the most misinformed culture in the world, for example the reader above that doesn’t realize that Pearl Harbor 1) was caused by cutting off supplies of petroleum to Japan with USA/British foreign policy, and 2) Roosevelt and the Pentagon were informed that Pearl Harbor was going to happen days before it occurred but let it happen anyway to get the USA involved in WWII because the British were about to get their arrogant asses kicked. The reader should be hating Roosevelt and the pentagon, not the Japanese. There are numerous books out there documenting all this. They actually found the radio operator alive and well in Iowa who encrypted the intelligence about the attack and sent it to Washington. He never spoke of it because he knew nobody would believe him.
When we are 18 years old we have a narrative by which we live our life, we know how the economic system works, how the government works, what science knows, what happened historically. Because I have the ability to tolerate having my world devastated and have researched heavily all my life, I can say that at least 95% of the narrative this patriotic midwesterner held at age 18 has been proven to be deliberate lies. Today I still hold that this is true for 95% of Americans, they have just traded one false narrative in for another false narrative.
And then don’t forget mind control. Mind control was used in this last election, susceptible people were programmed to overlook anything negative about Clinton, and to demonize Trump. Had Clinton won, we would simply have a bunch of rabid Clinton fans, which is not a problem. As it is, no one was expecting Trump to win, so there was no plan to handle these programmed people, and now they look very illogical and erratic. I say these people were programmed, because after the elections I had a young lady who was in the USA during the campaign break down in front of me and cry in fear because she KNEW that Trump was going to put her in a FEMA camp and kill her. This is not campaigning, this is mind control. And now there is nanotechnology AI that can be injected into a racist person that will cause that person to start loving the minority they originally despised, or to make the average Joe really love his government. The possibilities are quite frightening.
Perhaps that [former] CBS lawyer should start an initiative to pass a law which restricts gun ownership to only law-abiding people? Oh, wait, we already have, literally thousands of such laws. In most jurisdictions, “murder” is against the law. People who’re going to break that law aren’t going to care about breaking lesser laws, irrespective of how many laws they break.
Hey, I know, maybe we should ban guns?
I made my first firearm at age 14, in a HS metalworking shop, using tools with which I’d no experience or familiarity, in a matter of a couple hours. Granted, it was smooth-bore and black powder, but using my homemade black powder, which I made from stuff I bought off the shelf at the local drug store, it would still throw a projectile rather impressively, with predictable accuracy out to about 60 feet. [I’m pretty sure manufacturing either a firearm or an explosive nowadays would land a body in the graybar hotel, but I’m old enough that when I was 14, you could still walk into most hardware stores and buy gunpowder in 25lb bags for a few dollars, and dynamite, over the counter…]
I am SO TIRED of the “ban guns” rhetoric from sheeple who can’t recognize the reason for the existence of the Second Amendment, the reason their shepherds want guns gone, and the sheer impossibility of the desire that’s been force-fed them until they believe it is both good, and doable.
It’s easy to fall into the “hate trap,” especially if one doesn’t learn to recognize it. I learned this recognition thing when I read a forum exchange once that began:
“I hate [President] Bill Clinton.”
The gist of the exchange was:
“Do you know Bill Clinton?”
“No…”
“You can hate a person’s policy or personal politics, but how can you personally ‘hate’ someone you haven’t met and don’t know?”
I have borrowed and regurgitated the essence of these forum posts many times over the years in debates and exchanges, with respect to Messrs. Bush and Obama, and a number of (mostly conservative) talkers. However, to recognize and avoid the “hate trap,” one must first become aware of it. Most folks refuse to recognize the trap, but for the ones who do, an avenue of reasonable debate and discussion opens up…
Maybe the containers in PR wouldn’t be piling up so badly, if the local gov’t hadn’t thrown the U.S. Navy out of the islands, 15 years ago… ;-)
I’m firmly convinced, Man (the species, not the gender) absolutely requires religion.
Those who do not recognize an organized religion will gravitate toward a pseudoreligion like global warming or animal rights – or “hate culture” because it fills a void which MUST be filled… by SOMETHING. Once enthralled in a pseudoreligion, ANY pseudoreligion, it’s darn near impossible to “reach” the affected person, and any discussion, no matter how grounded in provable fact or logic, is seen as an attack on said person’s True Belief, and summarily dismissed.
I struck up a conversation with a woman in a store about 5 years ago. We got on the subject of the Muslim issue. She said that all Muslims need to die. I asked her if she was a Christian. She said “yes”. I told her that Jesus said “Love your enemies.” She replied “I can’t do that.”
It’s not your Religion they need it the sense of community! Family.
Religion sets us in boxes and prevents open dialog with the all.