Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Much Sorry with Delays
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How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
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Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
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Thursday, February 15. 2007

Candidate for Best Essay of the Year: Cultural Marxism

I wish one of us had written this piece. Cultural Marxism, by Kimball at Am. Thinker. A quote:

Both communism and the New Left are alive and thriving here in America.  They favor code words: tolerance, social justice, economic justice, peace, reproductive rights, sex education and safe sex, safe schools, inclusion, diversity, and sensitivity.  All together, this is Cultural Marxism disguised as multiculturalism.

Read it all. It gives the history of almost everything we view as subversive and destructive to the values we hold dear. I am just not sure how Freud fits into this, though.

Posted by Bird Dog in Best Essays of the Year, Politics at 18:25 | Comments (24) | Trackback (1)

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What we learned from the Duke Rape Case
A quote from a Duke prof about what he learned from the so-called rape case (from an excellent summary piece at Durham in Wonderland):America, and the world, is sick with white supremacy and racism; heterosexism and homophobia; patriarchy, sexism, and tra
Weblog: Maggie's Farm
Tracked: Feb 16, 22:03

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Habu:
It's a darn good piece. Just needed to find time to post it. Thanks for your persistence. We re not retired, ya know.
#1 BD on 2007-02-15 18:50 (Reply)
have to read it, but off top of head, Freud releases the individual from responsibility for the self?
#2 buddy larsen on 2007-02-15 19:04 (Reply)
To the contrary, the illumination of unconscious processes is intended to give a person a deeper, fuller responsibility for his actions, and to be less driven by emotion - conscious or unconscious. As he put it, "Where Id was, let Ego be."
#3 BD on 2007-02-15 19:16 (Reply)
BD,
As one guy told me once. " If we were dogs I wouldn't get between you and your bone"

I just thought it was a dandy article and thanks for highlighting it. I think Maggies Farm is a great place with a super format and contributors, but I reckon there's still plenty of acreage to accomodate more folks.

Habu
#4 Habu on 2007-02-15 19:18 (Reply)
H:

Darn right. We cannot cover the waterfront alone.
#5 BD on 2007-02-15 19:27 (Reply)
Yep, BD, that's the ideal--but I meant the normative (just to cast about for the link between the cultural left and Freud).

"It's not my fault, I had a bad childhood" governs many a sentencing phase. And the "Twinky Defense" works a jury real good.
#6 buddy larsen on 2007-02-15 19:36 (Reply)
Just playing the obstreperous ass here, but BD I just have to say, has the positive of psychoanalysis, of which there is, done much in giving a saner world? Being ignorant about this kinda thing, really, it just seems to have given more excuses. I always found it too smart for its own good. In my younger years I did do quite a bit of reading of Freud, Jung, Maslow (sp) (preferred by the USAFR by the way, they love hierarchy) and who was that British gent who thought smearing shit on a wall was therapeutic, but gave no thought to those who had too clean it off.

I like lessons that force me too be stronger, that force me to act as a responsible person. Lessons that allow me no personal pretext for evading my duty to the group. IOW's, no man is an island. And, oh yeh, screw that to/too bastard.
#7 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-15 21:01 (Reply)
No, not a saner world. It is/was just a medical theory/treatment. It just offers a treatment for individual unhappy people with lousy relationship patterns. But anyone who uses psychoanalytic theory to make excuses for behavior is abusing the theory - and Freud would be extremely upset about that particular abuse. If there is any one thing he believed in and pursued, it was taking responsibility for one's thoughts and feelings and actions. "Excuse" was not in his lexicon. He was a stern guy.
#8 BD on 2007-02-15 21:15 (Reply)
Come on BD, F., taking responsibility, for his mistress perhaps? For the greater glory of Ego vs Id. None of us are immune too our base (a lot in that term) it just takes the proper treat.
#9 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-15 21:46 (Reply)
L:

Freud was never psychoanalyzed, but my guess is that he would take responsibility for his choices, and not blame them on anything. Are we all corruptible? Not sure. All temptation-prone? For certain. Therefore we pray "Lead us not into temptation..."

But what's your beef with psychoanalytic theory? Most of it holds up pretty well.
#10 BD on 2007-02-15 21:58 (Reply)
I think perhaps an insightful essay might be one that explores the causes that contribute to the cessation of a Renaissance era. I know from observation that the Renaissance that began in America in 1968 is starting to collapse (I hope). The problem clearly being that those who lead, do not have the ability to own up to their failures; this is due to the same an ingrained arrogance and ego that led them to believe they were qualified to be "change agents" in the first place!
#11 apple pie on 2007-02-15 22:15 (Reply)
Fox news had a story on this book--a comic book natch--being distributed to San Francisco kids, somewhere in K-12.

http://www.addictedtowar.com/book.html

About the time I was watching the report, I came across this on instapundit.

http://www.knowledgeproblem.com/archives/001923.html

The comic book won't be talking about the totalitarians, or what they do to people, will it?

But look at the comic book website--very slick, very big production.

We got trouble, right here in River City.
#12 buddy larsen on 2007-02-15 22:35 (Reply)
And that is a worthy prayer, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

No, he wasn't personally psychoanalyzed, but would it have furthered his thesis to have confessed his own fallible experience and psychoanalyzed that, nothing like personal experience to make a point. But perhaps this is the crux "and not blame them on anything." I guess I have too say, he had no need too do so, having never publicly admitted his humanness.

"Are we all corruptible?" No, of course not, plenty of examples of that, POW's, prisoner's of the gestapo, Christian's in Rome. I do not mock here.

I said, "obstreperous," I have no beef with psychoanalytic theory, it is way the hell smarter than I. It is just that it appears to work best with smart people who are able too appreciate its infinite nuances. BTW, I take no personal umbrage at being told to STFU, when I digress. Blogs are a big beer table, talk until you pass out, or get ridiculed out. Living old times there... You do a great job here, please do not let my occasional assholeness disturb that.
#13 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-15 22:43 (Reply)
hey, great book title, "The Occasional Asshole" --like "The Accidental Tourist".
:-D
#14 buddy larsen on 2007-02-16 00:14 (Reply)
L:

No way did I intend STFU. Quite the oppsoite, really.
#15 BD on 2007-02-16 06:18 (Reply)
BL, you are right. I had been pondering a title for my autobiography. Perfect.

BD, thanks, but I did mean the offer.
#16 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-16 07:09 (Reply)
agree.
excellent article.
#17 gumshoe on 2007-02-16 16:42 (Reply)
Probably off on my own self-referential tangent, but thoughts sparked by BD and LM's discussion...

Got a rotten marriage and view suicide as less of a sin than divorce? Get thee to a therapist. Tho your marriage will get worse and you will feel no happier, the meds will stop you killing yourself and keep you working. They will destroy what remains of your love life but your therapist will blame your head. If you "frivolously" go off them in hopes of rediscovering a bit of fun before old age clobbers you completely, the angel of death will return and terrify you back into taking pills.

The talk will discourage you from seeking love in all the wrong places. You will have no money left to get up to any trouble anyway and your conscience will become so guilty that you behave better. Your life will feel worse, but you will decide that you are such a miserable sinner that you deserve it. You will work hard, meet your responsbilities, act like a pillar of the community, be kind to children and animals. You will live for the occasional sign of approval from anyone who notices your greater self-control and ability to renounce any hope of romantic or vocational challenge or fulfillment. You will become impossibly dependent on and grateful to an increasingly sloppy doctor who will fall asleep more and more often as they tire of re-runs. You will occasionally re-read Freud and assorted psychoanalytic writers and wonder why their patients got better and you feel like roadkill.

Modern psychiatry isn't treatment, it's management of people so anguished and angry and disturbed that they'd be a menace to society as well as to themselves if not dosed with something and alternately clobbered and cajoled into resigned acceptance of their rotten situation in life. Into expecting nothing from anyone else, and blaming themselves for everything wrong in their life. Have you ever met a happy, productive and creative graduate of serious therapy? I haven't. Just a bunch of birds who've had their wing weathers cut, who waddle fatly trapped on the ground when they used to at least occasionally soar.

Better to have died flying too close to the sun like Icarus, and plummeted down once for all, spectacularly....
#18 Darla on 2007-02-16 21:59 (Reply)
Darla

I'm wordless, almost. As you insinuate, live as best you can. Life at its most M-fricking worst is better than the alternative. Life does offer hope, death none. The only sin is giving up. Please post more. If you find this BS please forgive, you have interjected real reality. Most unexpectedly, and I am without cogent reply.
#19 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-16 22:35 (Reply)
LM, you are kind. The problem is that mostly ministers and the mainline churches nowadays fail us spiritually and so we look to shrinks for a kind of care they are not usually trained or equipped to give. Despair is the ultimate sin, to doubt the providence and mercy of God. The evangelical churches are better, but even there someone suffering from true depression (as opposed to a fit of pique, or normal discouragement) learns to keep quiet lest they discredit the faith. Only God can bring us thru the valley of the shadow of death, and it is perhaps unfair to castigate shrinks for being unable to restore our souls or even our lackluster marriages, let alone help us rediscover meaning and purpose to our lives.

I wrote this not simply to howl, but to remind people that it isn't just abstract. The average "normal" person thinks people visit shrinks because they enjoy navel-gazing. Truth is, even clinical narcissists are not happy, and spend time, money and efffort trying to shed their snakeskin of old, horrible sins and weaknesses....
#20 Darla on 2007-02-16 22:54 (Reply)
Darla, thank you for the spot check on the abstract. I have no words of succor, other than just fight back. Hold your own, believe in yourself, which it sounds as if you do. As you are well aware I'm sure, shrinks are mortal, as ourselves. The church has history for helping, most lost now in this PC and convoluted world. Please write as you feel you must.
#21 Luther McLeod on 2007-02-16 23:37 (Reply)
"And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart,
And in our own despair, against our will,
Comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."
--Aeschylus
#22 buddy larsen on 2007-02-17 00:03 (Reply)
I used to have that verse over my desk, all thru college and grad school...a related idea is Oneill's about how we are all cracked creatures but that our very brokenness is something the light of God can shine thru. The sick realize their need of the Divine Physician. Those in darkness really notice the light...
#23 Darla on 2007-02-17 00:13 (Reply)
The "...against our will, comes wisdom to us...." is pretty much on that wavelength, alright. It seems like most of the world's goodness comes through people who understand suffering--and there's really only the one way to understand it. kinda grim but then it is a whole part of life. To be lucky is the only dodge.
#24 buddy larsen on 2007-02-17 00:25 (Reply)

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