kimberlysteele | The Demonic Infestation of the Left Part II: A Righteous Honeymoon

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The Demonic Infestation of the Left Part II: A Righteous Honeymoon

For Social Justice Warriors, the bargain was struck. The point of entry was the brainstem, the realm of motor instincts, urges, and sheer will to survive. The Hebrew letter Qoph means "the back of the head". It is attributed to one of the Tarot trump cards called The Moon. There is another lunar card called The Priestess, but this is absolutely NOT the same moon as the Priestess. The Priestess is the illuminated side of innocence, purity, and mercy. The Moon is the darkness to her light, the cruelty to her kindness, the Sea Witch to her Little Mermaid. If the Priestess is the young girl, the Moon is the old hag.

The Crossroads

The crone lives at the crossroads where parasitic infection meets addiction. As awful as "parasitic infection meets addiction" sounds, the initial foray into an addiction is almost always exceedingly pleasant, gratifying, and satisfying in a way that makes us humans spend an inordinate amount of time trying to replicate it once its halcyon days have passed. If you've ever tried opiates, you might be familiar with the comforting, warm-blanket-and-a-hot-cup-of-cocoa sensation the opiate family provides. Opium tinctured with alcohol, a.k.a. laudanum, was "heaven bought for a penny" to Romantic poet Thomas DeQuincey; beautiful dreams for a few short months that quickly morphed into a living hell. Falling in love feels the same, often with similar results.

For me, going vegan at age 38 provided a big boost in my physical health and stamina, a rush of energy, and a small army of new BFFs to help me enjoy my newfound moral superiority. The trade off was that I became an officious, self-righteous prick determined to push my diet upon all and sundry for a time. Fortunately, I realized the error of my ways before I alienated every family member and non-fair weather friend. Not all are so lucky. Needing to be right is a hell of a drug, just ask the Seventh Day Adventist fellow I met at a cooking class who preened about like a pigeon, attributing his robust, young, genetically-predetermined health to his perfect diet and being right with God. Hubris is never pretty and for him, there was an excellent chance of his life going wrong in ways he never dreamed possible in all his supreme arrogance.

Baby Boomers, blessed with idyllic postwar childhoods, thrust themselves into passionate young adulthood. They championed sexual revolution, worked in the city and made homes in the suburbs, and looked forward to an enlightened Star Trek future. They had easy, conflict free lives. They had plenty of money for one spouse to stay home. A single, middle class income was the only ticket necessary to the American dream of a house, a car, more than ample food, and vacations once or twice a year. They deserved it because they were the Good People. They didn't pay attention as the houses got larger, the jobs got scarcer and more cutthroat, and the cars multiplied like roaches as garages swelled to accommodate them. They didn't notice the arbitrage of labor to Third World countries. They voted in the era of Reagan's excess, not the be-uncomfortable-like-Jesus Christian guy (Carter) for whom there would be no American morning. The pork went down smoothly, aided with sips of pricey pinot noir and gleeful nihilism. Meanwhile, a swarm of undulating tapeworms split into two battalions, one seeking entrance into the intestines and the other swimming towards the brain...

Birth of the SJW

Boomer children and grandchildren grew up to become today's Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). Generation X and Y have grown up monumentally angry without ever being able to divine what exactly angers them. Had they any power of self-analysis outside the societally-approved Freudian Psychoanalysis 3.0 thrown about as an expensive but necessary companion of copious prescribed antidepressant drugs, they would be able to put their finger on what ails them:

-Kept indoors long enough, any creature goes insane. Humans are no exception.
-Imagination has been replaced by online games and porn.
-Success is measured by meaningless standardized tests and the amount of house you can mortgage later for being a good little test taker.

The resulting case is an extremely entitled human with a large ego who thinks she is the Main Character but in reality is a Non-Player Character, parroting the latest cacomagic as sold by CNN, Target, Nike, and Sephora dutifully. She's depressed. Who wouldn't be? She's never had any protection from religion -- those old fashioned customs like masses, holy water, and prayer are relics of the past. She has never been taught to appreciate the luxury of potable water or fresh fruit in the wintertime. She doesn't have interest in let alone understanding of the way things work, for instance, her typical biophobic upbringing divorced her from appreciation of how food grows, how heat becomes electricity and then heat again, or how her country was founded by complicated and difficult people. So she hates, and hatred feels GOOD. She allows herself to hate a little more. She makes the decision to bully. Bullying is better than sex. Her programmers tell her to carry a sign. They tell her to block traffic and to be brave as the oppressors attempt to commute to their bourgeois jobs. They tell her to scream to get her voice heard, and if that doesn't work, to spray paint a vile expletive on the window of a shuttered local business. And if that doesn't work, to learn how to make a pipe bomb...

Smashing the Patriarchy

Social justice seeks to right perceived wrongs. Righteousness itself is their addiction. The consequences of their righteousness are not considered. At one end of the spectrum, there lies an ideal of Christian marriage that peaked in the Greatest Generation, the one that spawned the Boomers. The Left was not wrong to paint Christian marriage in the bleak tones of repression, frustration, and sorrow. Divorce used to be nearly impossible to obtain. Being gay wasn't legal. For quite a few people, traditional Christian values sucked. The Left rushed into the fray with the Final Solution for Christian family values: their opposite. The Left threw its weight into the entertainment industry, using its many cronies there to promote eternal dissatisfaction. For the oppressed black people, they ushered in the welfare system. Suddenly, it was far more financially beneficial to be a single mother. Black families, also once fans of Christian marriage, were utterly destroyed, condemned to multi-generational ghettoes. US prisons, expanded under Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, happily took in black men among others in their continuation of the Confederate plantation system hybridized with the Victorian workhouse.

They're Having a Riot

The Left found its fetish in the destruction of the ideal Christian nuclear family. It did this in three ways: it "freed" the oppressed with welfare so that the father had no role save sperm donor in the new Utopia. Secondly, it sowed the seeds of discord and consumerism via its domination of the entertainment industry, including infotainment in the form of news. Thirdly, it demoralized and gelded three generations of males via pornography, sucking away their last reserves of virility and motivation.

The inevitable result was Washington Middle School in Green Bay Wisconsin. Kerstin Westcott, a Golden Apple-winning, veteran teacher who walked away from nine years at Washington, testified that student bullies regularly:

-threatened her and other students
-fought with weapons
-vandalized cars
-spouted constant verbal abuse
-fought until bystander teachers were sent away in ambulances with serious injuries
-tortured other students
-sexually molested other students in front of crowds
-masturbated in front of teachers
-pinched, slapped, and punched other students in the chest and groin
-pantomimed crude sex acts in front of students/teacher
-set fires
-bought, sold, and used drugs

In other words, they exhibited most of the behaviors we associate with classic demonic possession. I would venture to say that Washington Middle School, which is demographically 51 percent Hispanic, 16 percent black, and 20 percent white, is rife with demons running amok. Washington is far from special in its basketcase school status. Teachers may blame the school administrators and look to them for reform, but the root of the problem lies squarely in fatherlessness. Remove the father's power and there's ample space for demons to rush in. Modern day demonic fatherlessness, that monstrous creation of the Left, cannot be stopped by a paltry set of rules dictated by a school official.

Revenge of the Nerd

The trouble with bullying is that it feels fantastic and doesn't beget regret. Once upon a time, when I was in high school, there was a popular bully who talked smack about misfits, nerds, and geeks just loud enough for the misfit, nerd, or geek to overhear her. This was her favorite form of torture and it was devastating. I was born with an unfortunate talent for ad hominem attacks, so one day when I was in a bitter mood, I did the same to her. My verbal arrows were aimed at her Achilles heel, which was her boxy, corpulent figure. She became so upset, she cried for the teacher, who promptly shushed me. But I wasn't done. I lowered my volume but continued my tirade, spewing poison-tipped barbs I knew would cause her emotional pain for the rest of her life. She got a hefty dose of her own medicine and I am nearly certain she never used her talking smack technique again, but she wasn't the only one dragged down by our interaction. Bullying masquerades as justice. For the weak, especially those who are told they are oppressed and deserve handouts, it's a power trip. Power feels good, especially when you view the Other as worthless, fat, stupid, and deserving of your wrath. Wrath has its price: it is a crappy place to live. Being hated for being just another bully as well as a nerd only added to my malaise as a teen. Considering my greatest fear back then was the predicament of being misunderstood, joining in the bully's fray only made a bad situation worse. I could have displayed far more bravery by rising above the bully and refusing to dignify her situation with my words. Make no capitulation to demonic obsession and the infection is defeated.

Power feels great. Righteousness after what seems an eternity of not having the courage of one's own convictions feels like heaven, like the greedy heights of an addiction. The peak of any addiction, however, is the prelude to hell.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The following is more relevant here than in last week's post, given this week's relation to bullying and wrath, and how it breeds.

If anyone ever tries to gaslight you about your observations about the demonic influences on the left, and to tell you that there's just no comparison to what's on the right, here is a subreddit that you probably could make a drinking game out of:

"Who said this quote? An SJW or a White Supremacist? Take a shot for every guess you get wrong."

https://www.reddit.com/r/StormfrontorSJW/

Right, and the point being that it is impossible to tell which one said it: SJW or White Supremacist. There has been a little bit of gaslighting pushback on my blog in general, not surprisingly from leftward perspectives, certainly not as much as I expected. The telltale sign that the Left are about to "lose bigly" is a recent comment I saw from a usually sane pal of mine that claimed BLM was on the "right side of history".

Generation X and Y have grown up monumentally angry without ever being able to divine what exactly angers them.

I resemble that remark.

Most people I know in the GenX age group would put it as:
1) The baby boomers.
2) Parental divorce/alienation and its fallout, as promoted by...
3) The baby boomers.
4) Endless bad jobs and outsourcing, blaming...
5) The baby boomers. With increasing understanding the Silents were not innocent bystanders of these things coming to pass.

For me, at least, any real understanding of my generation's predicament came from Strauss and Howe back in the 1990's, and JMG since about 2014. JMG got me out of the habit of using the baby boomers as an all-purpose thoughtstopper, if nothing else.

As to the patriarchy, with modern phenomena like the manosphere and MGTOW/Hikikomori taking off I'm not sure that marriage itself is a viable institution any more. I'm not sure what the basis of a future can be, so I can understand the yearning for apocalypse.

I am a Gen Xer (born in the early 70s) had an inappropriate and undue amount of anger considering my circumstances. For me personally, I now understand it to be an issue of karma and my past lives, one of which where I starved to death and another where I was hung from a gallows after being railroaded by an angry mob. After all, the Boomers could not have ruined things as they did if our generation had simply refused to play their games. Gen X is and was lazy and materialistic as generations go. It's unfortunately easier to buy into an existing scheme than wipe the slate and make your own.

You're definitely a bit psychic because I will be discussing the Hikikomori in my next post. Heterosexual marriage isn't necessarily the answer -- it used to be a one-size-fits-all solution applied with far too heavy a hand -- however, we need to come up with something better than demonic incel MGTOWs (Men going their own way for those who don't know the acronym) who insist that they are owed attractive straight women as life mates because they bother to exist.

I only mention this because clarity is important. Incel and MGTOW are pretty different things, honestly. The latter implies voluntarily bowing out of a rigged game that the former feels like they are doomed never to even be able to compete in much as they desperately wish they could. One is a lot easier to come to peace with than the other.

I don't think it's surprising to see these two movements arise given the social reality that's given rise to them. A whole lot of people can end up snared in an anger pit. Unforunately, SlateStarCodex's blog is gone due to the NYT doxxing threat, or else I'd link to the single best explanation of the entire phenomenon that I think has ever been written. If I can find a reproduction I'll copy / paste the most relevant parts.

One short summation of a point from that article is more that there's a feeling of betrayal by what expectations society allowed them to develop in that our modern morality tales teach men to emulate behaviors that doom them to failure with women. While the manosphere is relatively recent, like 2010 recent, feminist blogs have been complaining about the phenomenon of the "nice guy" since at least 2001. I even remember seeing these rants in their early days. It's disillusioning in a harsh way to realize that the way you were socialized is actually repulsive, and the ensuing anger and self-loathing is a hell of a thing to have to overcome. In other words, a perfect gateway for malevolent influence.

Thanks for the correction. What was the NYT doxxing threat? I'm out of the loop.

The odd thing about the current nice guy zeitgeist is how utterly reversed things were just a hundred short years ago. It used to be women who were considered man-crazy and hysterical. If a woman failed to land a good man via her looks, family, and connections, she faced a lifetime of ruin. Or if she had a baby out of wedlock, she landed a fate like Fantine's in Les Miserables. "You'll be a spinster" used to be a real and terrifying threat for a young woman. When I was a young woman, there was still an idea that I had to have skills just in case the man didn't arrive for me, died, or was generally bad. When I learned to type, there was still the specter of "learn how to type because you could end up a spinster".

I remember my mom, born in the late 40s and in the south east, would say to me that if a woman wasn't married by the time she was 19 she'd be an old maid.

You are right that things seem incredibly different these days compared to those old days. Always have to be careful not to rose tint my glasses looking bacl then, because there really were problems even in spite of the prosperity.

Regard the NYT doxxing: the full story is actually on slatestarcodex.com, and is all that remains of the blog as of a couple weeks ago. Still hurts, he was my favorite blogger.

The short of it is that he doesn't reveal his full name because he needs to keep both a personal sanity distance from his writing as well as make it difficult for his patients to find his personal details. The NYT did an interview with him about the blog and its community. Then they told him they would print his full name in the article. He asked them not to, and the reporter dismissed his concerns and said more or less "tough shit, that's just tbe policy."

Its especially galling since there are other instances where NYT has respected the wishes of subjects.

Young men find themselves in a similar position to young women of a hundred years ago... the shoe is on the other foot. It used to be young women who were seen as desperate and sexually greedy by default, hence the phrase "land a man". The women who rose above those attitudes were some of the great innovators of their time, for instance, Jane Austen and Elizabeth I were both spinsters.

The New York Slimes... ugh. Sorry they cancelled your favorite blogger. They obviously made him into a target because they didn't like what he had to say. Anyone who subscribes to that rag is an idiot; it isn't fit to line the cat box.

What's the "nice guy"? (I'm out of that loop.)

It's a single man who makes a great deal of effort to be polite and considerate to women he wants to mate with and gets uniformly rejected for being "too nice".

Though I would point out that my husband of 20 years was a classic nice guy. He did old fashioned things like open doors for me, even the car door, back in the day, wrote me romantic poems and songs that I still treasure, and brought me flowers. Had he done slimy, not-nice things like cheat on me or verbally abuse me I would have been out of there fast. I knew I was attractive and I would not have settled for anything less than a nice guy. There were rich guys I dated who weren't nice and those interludes never got anywhere, if you get my drift, because I found them to be an insult. My husband was poor and also a nice guy. Niceness obviously won the day, so don't let society tell you it's a bad strategy. My parents have been married since God was a boy and my father is the OG Nice Guy.

"Nice guys" do superficially nice things, but are resentful / angry / entitled underneath. So for example they'd hold open the door for a woman, then get mad at her for not being grateful enough, or buy a woman a drink, then get mad at her for not wanting to have sex with him. It's "nice" in apostrophes because while they consider themselves to be nice, they aren't.

Basically it boils down as seeing other human beings as transactions. They believe that life should follow an orderly, convenient if-else structure based on an underlying binary code like a smartphone app. They often get locked into repeating loops, such as the "I'm not tall and only tall men get p*$$y" and the p*$$y in question isn't truly thought of as belonging to a living, breathing, emotional fellow human being.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of female equivalents to the "nice" guy who do truly crappy things based on the assumption that other humans are transactions and owe them something.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200113023414/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/31/radicalizing-the-romanceless/

Not anywhere near his actual best article, but possibly the best one on the subject, and mostly hilarious anyway. Relevant points of connection are the entirety of sections 1-4. If you are like most people and don't have the time to read the entirety of a SlateStarCodex article, stopping at the end of part 4 is probably sufficient.

However, the quote that applies most broadly to the entire social situation in-total as it relates to leftist purity tests and witch hunts:

As usual with gender issues, this can be best explained through a story from ancient Chinese military history.

Chen Sheng was an officer serving the Qin Dynasty, famous for their draconian punishments. He was supposed to lead his army to a rendezvous point, but he got delayed by heavy rains and it became clear he was going to arrive late. The way I always hear the story told is this:

Chen turns to his friend Wu Guang and asks “What’s the penalty for being late?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“And what’s the penalty for rebellion?”

“Death,” says Wu.

“Well then…” says Chen Sheng.

And thus began the famous Dazexiang Uprising, which caused thousands of deaths and helped usher in a period of instability and chaos that resulted in the fall of the Qin Dynasty three years later.

The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down.

The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re down.

Funny how SJW women see things almost exactly the same way from their point of view. They think of themselves as the innocent ones, systematically victimized by The Patriarchy for thousands of years. Since they won't be "heard" anyways, they think their only recourse is to do as much damage as possible on their way down.

I had a realization.

The Strauss & Howe generational schema assumes that Prophet and Nomad (Boomer and GenX) generations are different at a deep psychic level, from which their responses to life emerge. But GenX weren't and aren't the "barnstormers and inventors" the schema said would emerge.

The only way that GenX can loathe the boomers so much...is if we're just like them, but slotted by fate into a time period with different rules. It's the only way I can explain why we as a generation played their games regardless of negative outcomes.

We wanted to be them, but fate had other plans. No wonder the two generations can't stand one another!

Yep, exactly. Both the generations are greedy, entitled, lazy, divorced from nature and with it, pragmatism. Both want good fortune to fall into their laps so they don't have to lift a finger or get a mental workout. The Boomers are only different in the sense they were on the end of the Good Fortune pump that had been sucked dry once Gen X came into adulthood. I would argue that Millennials are even more identical to Boomers in their entitlement and greed and that's why the Millennial/Boomer feud is so vicious. Gen X was the generation nobody gave a crap about, full of latchkey kids from semi-broken and broken homes, whereas Millennials and Boomers were treated as The Chosen Ones regardless of what the parents marital status was.

Do you think the Post-Millenial/Homelander/GenZ generation are archetypally different, or are they Baby Boomers 4.0?

I think it is somewhere in the middle. Boomer greed and entitlement dies hard. Gen Z will grow up much differently because their lives were shut down by the other three generations over COVID. I believe Gen Z will come to hate Millennials the most. As they come of age, their rivalry will look a great deal like the Boomer/Millennial catfights of the last five years. They have brought Gen Z into a rapidly dying model of suburbia-driven capitalism and then aided in its collapse via virtue signaling, paranoia, and mask-wearing. There's talk of TikTok being banned as the cold war with China escalates. Millennials are desperately trying to stave off a collective fall into poverty, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the house of cards the American economy was built on is teetering on its last card. Gen Z kids will cling hard to its dopamine stimuli in the form of social media, and when they finally lose cheap, reliable internet access and with it the only form of community they ever knew, there is going to be hell to pay.

Heterosexual marriage has been great for me ;) It still works, obviously, but with so many caveats that when I talk to my single friends who would like to have some kind of stable family-type relationship, I don't know what to tell them.

What it really comes down to, for me, is that I'm religious. My husband is religious. We live, as a family, embedded in a family-and-marriage-supporting religious context. When my non-religious friends are like "where do I even look to find a good husband/wife?" I have no idea. Really. I can't help them find what I've got, because I'm not sure it even exists outside a deep commitment to a religious community, apart from blind luck.

It'd be interesting to see some further discussion about whether there are viable alternatives for... everyone else. Particularly in the US, where we have dropped the concept of "extended family" like a hot potato. I meet people who long for family, but haven't spoken to their siblings in years (not because they hate them, but because they've "lost touch"), don't know their aunts and uncles, aren't even sure how many cousins they have... I don't even know where to start. I mean, there have been plenty of cultures where the nuclear family as we know it was not the norm, and things still functioned. But I'm not sure it can be done with *no* genetic family. People who do keep in touch... are often almost apologetic about moving somewhere to "be near family".

And obviously there are some people who are better off cutting off contact with family, for various reasons. What are their options? We're in a strange place, as a culture, where traditional family still exists, and still works-- but only if you live in a minority subculture where it's normal. But for most of the population, we've killed that off, and not replaced it with anything.

This is great for business, of course. People who have no family support network have to buy *everything*-- they don't have a brother who helps you fix your car, or a Mom who helps out with the kids. They've got to pay someone for fifty thousand large and small things that no normal person would have dreamed of paying money for sixty years ago. Not to mention, the loneliness does wonderful things for the booze, netflix, and psychologists market.

From what I've seen of the "alternative lifestyle" scene... polyamory doesn't seem like a viable option. Is it possible to have something like the Bruderhof, without their religion? Not sure.

Heterosexual marriage has been great for me too! When my husband and I married 20 years ago, we were both atheist. My family was never very religious, though my parents both believe in God. He had soured on religion after being brought up by Evangelist fanatics.

As far as that dreaded question "Where do I look to find a good husband/wife?" I would point out the collective astral plane is extremely trashy right now, and the average person who isn't doing any form of banishing ritual and who doesn't have a positive relationship with a deity or deities is going to have lots of astral gunk sticking to them.

I find the idea of families being atomized across countries and continents appalling and sickening. I'm grateful for you echoing many of the thoughts I have had about the topic as it can easily feel I am the only one. You are dead on about the "buy everything" result of the atomized family equation. I was just at my parents' house yesterday and helped my dad with a couple of mundane household things. I have cut my dad's hair for several years now and since COVID closed my mom's favorite hair salon, nowadays I am cutting her hair too. My husband and I lived with my parents on and off for the last 20 years for financial reasons. We lived with them three years ago from 2014 - 2017. Nowadays, I am much happier in my own little house, and I am obsessed with my gardens though you can't tell from the weeds LOL. However, I miss living with them. I miss cooking lunch for them every weekday. I miss seeing them in the mornings.

There are secular alternatives, I think, and co-housing like what has been done in Denmark is one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cleTzREJNs
What co-housing reminds me of to some degree is the kind of neighborhood I grew up in. Everybody knew each other and if I misbehaved, I could count on being scolded by my neighbors. Nowadays with atomized families, you don't know your neighbors because it is always someone else moving in. Yes, people are LONELY as a result, and isn't that convenient if you're trying to sell them expensive counseling and happy pills for their dysfunctional lives?

As for polyamory, it's fine for a small percentage but for the most part, it is extremely problematic and fraught with jealousy. My thoughts are that there is a perfect vocation for the polyamory-inclined, and it has the advantage of being the world's oldest profession!

I'm willing to entertain the idea that there may be some tiny fraction of the population for whom poly is workable. But every time I read even the most sympathetic account of such a relationship, it looks like a sad, slow-motion breakup. I hope that's a skewed result based on functional people not talking about their intimate relationships with journalists, but have no evidence of it.

We, too, have availed ourselves of various family-dependent living arrangements over a decade of married life, for financial reasons. If we'd opted out of kids, we could have struggled along independently, but we had other priorities, and both his family and mine were willing to subsidize us for the sake of having grandkids, and having them nearby.

This is one thing I think many people do not understand about next-level family: kin networks: there is a sort of unspoken modern American ideal of total independence, moving wherever the good jobs are, not being "tied down"... but if we're honest, most of us don't belong to the class of people for whom that works. I'm not even sure it works for the people who DO it. Are they happy? How many people really *want* to move to another city every three to five years, in pursuit of a better job/lifestyle/whatever? Most people don't get a lot of fulfillment from their jobs, and most people don't make that much money. If you move every three years, and your kids do the same, nobody visits you when you're old. This kind of independence impoverishes us.

For the rest of us... wealth isn't money. It's connection. People. Who you know, and to whom you are mutually indebted. It's how many people you have in your life who will drop everything and come get you, if you call them from the roadside where your car just died. It's... my diabetes got hard to manage in my last pregnancy. Needed some indoor exercise equipment. Put out the word with the family... two days later, we rented a uhaul and retrieved a nice elliptical machine from my second-cousin's garage, where it had been gathering dust. The value of that is... what? If we sat down and calculated all the months of rent-free housing, all the home repairs, car repairs, rides, child care, hand-me-down clothes, random stuff (oh, hey, do you want this chest freezer?)... we'd go up a tax bracket or two. And in return, we're there for others when they call on us. Sometimes that means throwing the kids in the car right at bedtime to go pick someone up. This year it means having an extra kid staying with us for the summer. It means I always have a pre-cooked dinner or three stowed in the freezer, that can be warmed up in twenty minutes to feed family members who happen to drop by.

Technically, our income hovers around the poverty line, but we are resource-rich and want for nothing :)

In my case, I fell from the upper-middle class to the lower-middle when I married poor. We never had kids (mutual happy choice for us) but poverty and some bad financial choices on our part resulted in having to live with my parents. In contrast, I have many rich childhood friends who did what I was expected to do. They married other rich kids and moved a minimum of 2500 miles away from their parents.

Their parents are still here, dying alone. When one spouse dies, they are entirely alone. It's sad. The adult kids visit sometimes, some more than others. When my friend visited his one remaining parent, his dad, his dad wanted him to stay. But he couldn't do that because his life and his job and all of his friends are elsewhere. So what ends up with some of them is they learn to casually disdain their parents and see them primarily as a source of free money. They could never bring themselves to admit what I just said and would hate me for saying it, but that's because it's true. They've had to emotionally distance themselves from their parents because they are so socially distant from their parents. That's certainly the case with another friend of mine, who has a child who rarely sees her grandparents as they live across the country.

If I had chosen to have children, are you kidding? Of course I'd want my parents and my siblings involved in their upbringing! I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't understand people who have kids and then move away from their families. And this whole trend of shunting older people away to live in assisted living or nursing homes is weird and tragic. When one is on the other side of 80, the last thing one needs is a small army of new people to remember and deal with.

I feel you on "our income hovers around the poverty line, but we are resource-rich and want for nothing". My husband is Mr. Handy. He can build an entire house as long as someone else actually pours the foundation. In my case, I have a decent head for business (a thing which surprised me as I never suspected it of myself growing up) among other things. We haven't burned the bridges with my family by moving far away, plus we live in a wonderful, lower-middle class neighborhood where everyone always looks out for one another.

In one of life's weird twists, if my parents' big dreams had worked out, we'd probably have grown up in a nice neighborhood in Tacoma-- as far from all my grandparents as it was possible to get. A drunk driver fixed that, right before Dad was set to go to law school, and well before I was born. Dad survived, barely. When I was little, he drove a cement truck, and the two of us learned to read together. It's one of my fondest memories. They moved back to the old deep-south hometown because they desperately needed the family support, and I grew up in bicycle distance of two doting great-aunts-with-cookies, one awesome great-uncle, and hordes of neighborhood children, in a county where most of my mother's dozens of cousins still lived. It was nice.

I married the other way around ;) Growing up, I was convinced we were middle-class, because obviously we were not going hungry, and what else was there but rich or poor? I was not familiar with "working-class" until adulthood. My husband's family is professional-class, and may still be a little taken aback by me helping their son to embrace a working-class identity. But they got grandkids out of the deal, so they're not complaining.

My Dad taught me to draw while sitting on his lap reading the Sunday funnies. Learned to play Chess looking over his shoulder. He cocked the Daisy Red Rider BB gun for me, and taught me to be responsible since it's necessary for shooting. Keep both hands on the tractor wheel, focus on the road ahead, it's necessary. Look to see that the dog has water, tell the truth, don't believe everything you read, or hear, or see. Learn how to think yourself, fix cars, or whatever needs fixing, look at it, see it as it is, not how you want it to be. Laugh a good laugh when you laugh, and stand up straight. "Dream the Impossible Dream" was his favorite song, and "Ces't se Bon". Gave me a copy of "Age of Reason" he had bought for 25 cents when he was in the Army Air Corps. He did all that, and more, with unconditional love. Few are as lucky as me, I also had a great mother and a great grandmother, all worked, middle class, no college. He was the measure of every man I ever met; I was indeed lucky. I met guys in the Marines who never had anyone love them, lived in foster homes. I think fathers are even more important to girls though, in my experience. I never had kids. Too old now.

Thanks so much for this.

Everything I learned about being a decent person, I learned from my parents. The protection of a loving, responsible parent while growing up is the foundation of human goodness.

I chose not to have kids and I'm sorry I could not pay the parenting I had forward. I think I will though in my future lifetimes. It's not the sort of thing a soul forgets.

Hi Kimberly

Firstly I'd like to thank you for sharing your insights, generosity of spirit and hard thinking here and on JMG's blogs. I value your contributions and have been praying for you since the shutdowns began.

Re the school behaviour described, this sounds not unlike some of the worse schools in areas of Sydney which are known (but not mentioned in the media) for being high in conservative religious families, both Christian and another Abrahamic faith it would be reckless in this environment to mention by name. As one of your other commenters suggested, I too speculate that the possession has infiltrated more than the two opposed groups you observe in these essays.

Best wishes,

lilly.

Thank you lilly for your gracious compliments and for your prayers.

How fascinating that the problem schools in Sydney are in the monotheistic religious areas. Obviously, it's not an issue of fatherlessness as both of those religions absolutely insist that Dad is present and accounted for. I recently did a video about Spirit of Place that talks about how monotheistic/unigod religions result in a form of spiritual handicap because their adherents are taught to discard 99.9 percent of their normal, everyday spiritual experiences as demonic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr7dRxQBksc

Discarding 99.9 percent of your religious experience while you are essentially "waiting for Godeau" to arrive (minus the last three letters of his name, hardy har har) is a recipe for spiritual illiteracy. With the current cruddy state of the astral plane, that kind of "oh I don't need to learn anything about religion, my Bible/Quran beams it all into my head" is a classic thoughtstopper and invitation to the demonic.

Well. I'm reading this from the other side of the pond, in Europe, and it is interesting to read a first hand account of this viewpoint, rather than getting it second hand.

Many of the active Druids I know in this country would consider themselves SJWs.

May I ask - is Trump seen as a saviour from SJWs? Are those changing their lifestyles to try to avert climate change seen as SJWs? And what about people who are wearing masks when they go out at the moment?

To help me get a handle on this, can you give me examples of acts you consider compassionate? Courageous? And both at the same time?

How do you view the Scandinavian system of politics, and why?

Many thanks in advance for your consideration of my questions.

From Helen, a 64 year old in the UK.

Hi Helen, thanks so much for your thoughtful comment. Yes, just as the US gets a distorted picture of Europe from our angle, you guys aren't seeing what's happening on the ground here. I have a friend who is an American expat living in Europe and it's always a bit frustrating when he gets irate about things happening in the US because it is no longer his country. He visits frequently but it's not the same thing.

SJW has unfortunately become a pejorative term. Personally, I am still an SJW in the sense I believe veganism is the most important social justice issue of our time, but veganism just like other social justice issues like racism has been completely corrupted by demonic obsession. For instance, I used to consider myself better than other people because I chose not to have children and stopped eating animal products. There are groups on Facebook dedicated to condemning and shaming people who become parents (because of human overpopulation) and/or eating animals. The people in these groups sincerely want to keep the planet clean and better for those of us who are already here, including the animals, but it quickly descends into toxic purity policing and political tribal warfare.

Is Trump seen as a savior? Yes, by some. He's seen as the Changer, mostly, and most of what makes him appealing to the masses is the idea that he's not a snob. He's a giant, orange middle finger from the lower classes to the elite. I see him as the first in a parade of Caesars, the inevitable result of an empire in decline.

The men who stood in front of an angry crowd to protect a policeman from violent rioters are a good example of compassion and bravery in action: https://www.wbtv.com/2020/06/02/black-protesters-protect-stranded-lmpd-officer-violence/

From my vantage point, the Swedish system of politics seems to be falling apart because of a general inability or unwillingness to discriminate and set limits. I don't know about other Scandinavian countries but Sweden looks like a hot mess.

Many thanks for your reply, from a fellow vegan (and also a Green voting Christian Kabbalist.) Ironically, my husband and I are seeking European citizenship (via his Maltese heritage) at the moment, so that we have the option of going to live in France, or Sweden, after Brexit kicks in. Sweden did not lock down over Coronavirus, and suffered more deaths than their fellow Scandinavian countries, but far fewer than England where we are not as community minded as the Swedes, who tended to self distance without having to be told to (whereas in England we didn't until told to, and then not very well.The behaviour of our leaders didn't help.) So I'm intrigued as to why you think Sweden is a mess - you may be able to see something from your vantage point which we can't see here.

How cool! It's always fun to find out people are vegan, and even more fun to find a Christian Kabbalist. My study of the Kabbala has mainly come out of the Tarot. I don't think people understand how deeply Kabbala and Tarot are intertwined: in my mind, they are one and the same.

I think Sweden's handling of COVID was a perfect example of how the opposite of one bad thing is another equally bad thing. In the US, government made the decision to vampirize the middle classes and small business owners using inflated COVID flu death numbers to provide a mandate. If you've read some of my other essays, you're likely aware that I am barely scraping by to save a business I started 24 years ago. The Swede's almost total dismissal of COVID is heinous because it shows their callous, brutal disregard for their elders. It's an obvious "let's get rid of the (expensive) elderly so we can import masses of foreign cheap labor to exploit in their place." I also find it bizarre how Sweden protects its reputation as an enlightened country at all costs, even when that means covering up stories of violence and rape because Muslim men are the usual culprits. Like over here in the US, the worst possible insult one can hurl is "racist", however, Islam is a religious choice, not a race. All this proves is that race baiting is a tactic of the intellectually bankrupt.

the worst possible insult one can hurl is "racist", however, Islam is a religious choice, not a race. All this proves is that race baiting is a tactic of the intellectually bankrupt.

It's interesting that it literally only works on white people, and that seems to be true the entire world over, regardless of religious persuasion.

From Sweden to the UK, who had one of the largest most widespread child grooming problem that explicitly targeted white girls because the perpetrators are like "It's okay, they're just kufar". For decades the police did nothing, and when they were asked why : "Well, we were afraid of being called racist if we had done anything to stop it."

Many thanks Kimberley. I really appreciate your replying.
Love,
Helen.

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The Demonic Infestation of the Left Part II: A Righteous Honeymoon

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I remember my mom would say...

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Found the archive link to the aforementioned article

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fathers influence on me

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schools; religious groups

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Interesting

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