Little Rants
-
HighlyIrregular
- Posts: 609
- Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:20 pm
- Location: New York
- Formerly: BarIII
Re: Little Rants
In NY you can't get a blood test without a doctor's prescription. In most states including PA, you can (I think a doctor has to approve it but he doesn't have to examine you first). The companies that do blood tests directly for people say they're not available in NY. But that's not my rant. My rant is that I tried taking advantage of PA's law on this and I paid a company for a blood test and they never sent me the requisition that they were supposed to send me. Customer support ignored me. Today I complained to my bank which will "attempt to recover the funds based on the information that you provide in the dispute process...within 90 calendar days." I'm out over $100 until then and they may not even recover my funds, but I will NOT use that company no matter what. I don't trust them, despite their A+ BBB rating.
Re: Little Rants
Four Big Problems Hiding Under the Surface of the U.S. Jobs Market
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/dion-r ... pnext_pos1
Why Inflation Is Holding Above 3%: Explaining the Latest CPI Report
https://www.wsj.com/economy/what-to-wat ... k-a8f4a76c
You can find a similar 3% inflation number from 1996. Recently from 2020, It came from a very high number of near 10% and has remained at the same with no decrease yet, suggesting it could get worse (or not better, and considering the 1990s, the economy was beginning to "fake" prosperity with new banking regulations leading to excessive spending from loans, both for buying properties as well as education, which ultimately is what lead to the 2008 crash; with people still not paying off student loans, and having degrees that taught them nothing of relevance to the current job market. Most all specialized professions are never up to date with college materials.)
If you also want to make a comparison to the 1990s,
"17 dot-com companies bought ad spots the following year for Super Bowl XXXIV"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Did they anticipate collapsing?
Not to mention, if more and more people are simply exiting the job market and many people are now retiring, the social safety net (Social Security) will only increase the bigger problem of the economy that is irreversible.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-ex ... iness_pos1
PDF: Myths About the US Economy
https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2018-0 ... ptions.pdf
GDP vs median houshold income seems to have split off around 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_G ... income.png
American Dream ("subsequent improvements with each generation.")
https://qr.ae/psIhz6
***********************
Warning: This is mostly a product placement site. . . "Buy gold and silver and some bullshit crypto called Swan."
Is Economics pseudoscience? (Discussion from 2012)
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/c ... backwards/
How Would a New BRICS Currency Affect the US Dollar? (Updated 2024)
https://investingnews.com/brics-currency/
$72 Billion swallowed up by crypto scams
https://www.instagram.com/nextbigideacl ... HBjXqoOAJ/
Perhaps the Nigerian Princes along with Brics disruption to the Petro Dollar, will disrupt global economies even more?
***************************
Speaking of Grifters:
I love getting random messages from people on Linkedin who have an invested interest in being evasive and indirect.
It's especially nice when it's so blatantly obvious they are trying to deceive you, that your curiosity about what they are peddling leads to some interesting results. Searching what little keywords they use leads to their various Facebook profiles, and one name drop leads to a rabbit hole:
Prosperity of Life,
aka Polaris Global,
aka Born to Prosper,
aka Liberty League International,
and the co-founder Shane Krider was banned from Arizona:
Prosperity of Life – Is it a Pyramid Scheme & Scam? The Truth Unveiled (Update 2024)
https://www.gripeo.com/prosperity-of-life/
Liberty League Called a $5 Million Scam
https://www.courthousenews.com/liberty- ... lion-scam/
This guy made a ton off of it
A Brutally Honest Prosperity Of Life Review – Must Read Before Joining
https://alexfordlive.com/prosperity-of-life-review/
Maybe the structure of the "company" leads to various other cults that spin off from them, kind of like religion?
*****************************
It's amazing how people prop these grifter idiots up on a pedestal:
Kevin L. Zadai, 30 minutes in:
Died during dental surgery and told no one about it until Jesus came to him to give him music lessons when he wasn't profoundly good enough (and still isn't. . . It's some coma-inducing new agey BS.)
https://www.skeptical-science.com/relig ... -24/?amp=1
The kinds of material '78 books' could just as well be gleaned from L Ron Hubbard or Marshall Applewhite (he hasn't quite made his way into Jim Jones territory.) If you look up Kevin Zedai on annas-archive org you will find the more popular books, and realize he's just imitating the likes of Joel Osteen.
High ratings in books doesn't suggest they are even remotely good (and the reason he doesn't use an editor and self-publishes, to keep his material's artful "integrity" intact. . .) If he self-publishes in that way, he shouldn't be charging as much as full price for the crap, and I don't se why he doesn't just build his own printing factory and mass produce the stuff as well? ? ? (Business ideas. . . are important for a fully functional BS-empire ecosystem.)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/1 ... in_L_Zadai
A comparative analysis is he offers people a cure using placebo and brainwashing ("You can do it!" while wafting crack pipe smoke into the audience's room.)
His college/"Uni" he got his 'Doctorate' at is no longer in operation and when it sold off to a Korean company and seems to have been abandoned and without electricity for over a year because they couldn't replace the transformer, and it appeared to have been ransacked based on google street view, and sold for a little over $2 million (which is unusual for a school that normally would generate that much in a year if it's successful.) Not much else you can do with a useless theology degree other than grift off of people, and now the guy wants to offer people "education" as well.
Warrior Notes School of Ministry. . . (Imagine impressing someone with that. . . Doesn't even call itself a college or university, and yet they claim to give people Doctorates as well?)
https://www.warriornotesschool.com/
"He's so inspiring!"
********
It's similar to someone calling themselves a 'Doctor' with some non-accredited Naturopathy degree, and scamming people by selling them supplements. Fear makes people fall for scam artists, but also lack of understanding about basic bioscience is more likely to cause people to squander money in narcissistic navel-gazing, while thinking of themselves as enlightened.
And the fact that people can say the kinds of crap they do with a straight face and pretend like they shouldn't pass judgment, suggests the level of incredulity that exists in this world. Being even remotely aware of it causes existential depression.
**********************
Again, some click-bait bullshit on Facebook, saying Green Boots (who died in 1996) had remained in situ on Mount Everest for 18 years (not 28) and that his body disappeared. . . Where the fuck does it say that anywhere, as apparently only they have the "scoop" (of BS.)
To think that much of human "progress" is derived from pathological social development.
Why climb Everest? Because of mom, study says
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/na ... le1038713/
The "Scoop": The body of "Green Boots" disappeared?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/tsewang ... reen-boots
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/dion-r ... pnext_pos1
Why Inflation Is Holding Above 3%: Explaining the Latest CPI Report
https://www.wsj.com/economy/what-to-wat ... k-a8f4a76c
You can find a similar 3% inflation number from 1996. Recently from 2020, It came from a very high number of near 10% and has remained at the same with no decrease yet, suggesting it could get worse (or not better, and considering the 1990s, the economy was beginning to "fake" prosperity with new banking regulations leading to excessive spending from loans, both for buying properties as well as education, which ultimately is what lead to the 2008 crash; with people still not paying off student loans, and having degrees that taught them nothing of relevance to the current job market. Most all specialized professions are never up to date with college materials.)
If you also want to make a comparison to the 1990s,
"17 dot-com companies bought ad spots the following year for Super Bowl XXXIV"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
Did they anticipate collapsing?
Not to mention, if more and more people are simply exiting the job market and many people are now retiring, the social safety net (Social Security) will only increase the bigger problem of the economy that is irreversible.
https://www.wsj.com/video/series/wsj-ex ... iness_pos1
PDF: Myths About the US Economy
https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2018-0 ... ptions.pdf
GDP vs median houshold income seems to have split off around 2000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_G ... income.png
American Dream ("subsequent improvements with each generation.")
https://qr.ae/psIhz6
***********************
Warning: This is mostly a product placement site. . . "Buy gold and silver and some bullshit crypto called Swan."
Is Economics pseudoscience? (Discussion from 2012)
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/c ... backwards/
How Would a New BRICS Currency Affect the US Dollar? (Updated 2024)
https://investingnews.com/brics-currency/
$72 Billion swallowed up by crypto scams
https://www.instagram.com/nextbigideacl ... HBjXqoOAJ/
Perhaps the Nigerian Princes along with Brics disruption to the Petro Dollar, will disrupt global economies even more?
***************************
Speaking of Grifters:
I love getting random messages from people on Linkedin who have an invested interest in being evasive and indirect.
It's especially nice when it's so blatantly obvious they are trying to deceive you, that your curiosity about what they are peddling leads to some interesting results. Searching what little keywords they use leads to their various Facebook profiles, and one name drop leads to a rabbit hole:
Prosperity of Life,
aka Polaris Global,
aka Born to Prosper,
aka Liberty League International,
and the co-founder Shane Krider was banned from Arizona:
Prosperity of Life – Is it a Pyramid Scheme & Scam? The Truth Unveiled (Update 2024)
https://www.gripeo.com/prosperity-of-life/
Liberty League Called a $5 Million Scam
https://www.courthousenews.com/liberty- ... lion-scam/
This guy made a ton off of it
A Brutally Honest Prosperity Of Life Review – Must Read Before Joining
https://alexfordlive.com/prosperity-of-life-review/
Maybe the structure of the "company" leads to various other cults that spin off from them, kind of like religion?
*****************************
It's amazing how people prop these grifter idiots up on a pedestal:
Kevin L. Zadai, 30 minutes in:
Died during dental surgery and told no one about it until Jesus came to him to give him music lessons when he wasn't profoundly good enough (and still isn't. . . It's some coma-inducing new agey BS.)
https://www.skeptical-science.com/relig ... -24/?amp=1
The kinds of material '78 books' could just as well be gleaned from L Ron Hubbard or Marshall Applewhite (he hasn't quite made his way into Jim Jones territory.) If you look up Kevin Zedai on annas-archive org you will find the more popular books, and realize he's just imitating the likes of Joel Osteen.
High ratings in books doesn't suggest they are even remotely good (and the reason he doesn't use an editor and self-publishes, to keep his material's artful "integrity" intact. . .) If he self-publishes in that way, he shouldn't be charging as much as full price for the crap, and I don't se why he doesn't just build his own printing factory and mass produce the stuff as well? ? ? (Business ideas. . . are important for a fully functional BS-empire ecosystem.)
https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/1 ... in_L_Zadai
A comparative analysis is he offers people a cure using placebo and brainwashing ("You can do it!" while wafting crack pipe smoke into the audience's room.)
His college/"Uni" he got his 'Doctorate' at is no longer in operation and when it sold off to a Korean company and seems to have been abandoned and without electricity for over a year because they couldn't replace the transformer, and it appeared to have been ransacked based on google street view, and sold for a little over $2 million (which is unusual for a school that normally would generate that much in a year if it's successful.) Not much else you can do with a useless theology degree other than grift off of people, and now the guy wants to offer people "education" as well.
Warrior Notes School of Ministry. . . (Imagine impressing someone with that. . . Doesn't even call itself a college or university, and yet they claim to give people Doctorates as well?)
https://www.warriornotesschool.com/
"He's so inspiring!"
********
It's similar to someone calling themselves a 'Doctor' with some non-accredited Naturopathy degree, and scamming people by selling them supplements. Fear makes people fall for scam artists, but also lack of understanding about basic bioscience is more likely to cause people to squander money in narcissistic navel-gazing, while thinking of themselves as enlightened.
And the fact that people can say the kinds of crap they do with a straight face and pretend like they shouldn't pass judgment, suggests the level of incredulity that exists in this world. Being even remotely aware of it causes existential depression.
**********************
Again, some click-bait bullshit on Facebook, saying Green Boots (who died in 1996) had remained in situ on Mount Everest for 18 years (not 28) and that his body disappeared. . . Where the fuck does it say that anywhere, as apparently only they have the "scoop" (of BS.)
To think that much of human "progress" is derived from pathological social development.
Why climb Everest? Because of mom, study says
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/na ... le1038713/
The "Scoop": The body of "Green Boots" disappeared?
https://allthatsinteresting.com/tsewang ... reen-boots
Re: Little Rants
It's kind of absurd when an educator of our schools has to ask "What Pope?" in reference to someone who killed off two Medici family members on Easter Sunday, and when you provide the specific Pope and link information to them, they go on mentioning about accountability, and how likewise the USA should face reparations for slavery (as if that actually resolves the issue,) but moreso seems to deny that the original question was about how the Roman Catholic church is finally facing the music in regards to not skirting accountability, when it was directly addressing the conduct of a comedian in reference to his jokes about the RC church.
***********************
In regards to reparations for past misdeeds by governments (historical and present territories where they had influence.)
Does the increased number of accusations (after the silence of many people from decades ago who seemed compelled to jump on the grift wagon for money) made against the R.C. church demonstrate a prevalence of complicit interest in being honest when profits are on the line; and why that might be a problem. The African Princes were proud to advertise their profession as slave traders and retrospectively, could easily be perceived as a geopolitical issue for territories, considering the historical prevalence of the period much as those who died during the holocaust had zero representation, because the "heroes" of the war were equally complicit in false science and hypocritical ethics.
*** They practically repeat their statement about holding institutions accountable while denying this is not a recent thing, but I entertained the idea further ***
Though the nature of the comedy skit probably revolves around the Church having a coming to Jesus meeting with those who were personally affected in contemporary society, the argument could further extend to the idea of how practices of trauma lead to social issues --> A further question could be, does something which personally affects people cause trauma, and what benefits them?
Does religion create a trauma bond with the idea of a "god" (father?) Does welfare create worse problems for people overall, if the society around them continues to crumble due to issues stemming from injustices that become an ego projection of other social support system failures? Would a politician that got into position through populist appeal to the pathos/emotional side of things, have an invested interest in resolving the problem, if they would much rather gloss over the issue once in position (think of the problems that people are facing in the West Coast, or consider how Putin has remained in power for so long.)
Did inherited wealth and how society perceived social positions of the earlier elected Presidents, lead to a replacement of social servitude using class stratification as the main exploitative element? Were those who became enslaved or were servants to the wealthy classes before chattel slavery, behave much differently from how the world currently operates using "third world" labor practices, and a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age era (and of those people who were so wealthy, how many generations after them could hold onto that wealth?) Thomas Jefferson inherited extreme debts due to the fickle nature of how farming worked, in addition to his extended land and slave ownership (and yes, he did most likely take advantage of the social arrangement he acquired, and it probably would be considered questionable today as it was then, even if people assumed what he was doing was just part of the routine of being a wealthy land owner.)
The vast majority of farmers were not slave owners and most everyone who fought during the Civil War was in similar positions to tenement farmers following the war, with some slaves so dependent on the way society existed for them that they suffered from Stockholm Syndrome (so perhaps a comparison could be made to "Cage Free" eggs found in grocery stores, where the marketing term only applies to the idea that the birds aren't enprisoned; only they technically are because they have been conditioned to remain in exactly the same position as had they had a cage enclosing them.)
In some areas of the country you can still find a few remnants of the 'Indian Normal School,' or what would have once been called that, and it was where the "savages" were uprooted from their lands and told they were benefiting from the education (to proselytize them.) For a very long time it was said that the Native Americans had a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction, when of course the complete dejection and abuse from historical events following many major wars fought in the name of political identity, were taken advantage of (and then quickly "forgotten" about.) In families where intergenerational trauma creates lasting impact, you can find similar parallels of how neglect and abuse creates a trauma bond. If people are brought up with an idea that is at odds with healthy boundaries or regard for who they are as an individual, a bunch of abnormal behavior will develop.
***************
Consciousness & Christianity |How we trauma bond with “god”
The curse of slavery has left an intergenerational legacy of trauma and poor health for African Americans
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/ ... americans/
Also, a discussion has been brought upbon the topic of euthenasia.
The commodification of the practice is as though someone is flipping through a magazine and glibly decides to end their life, akin to the depth and soul searching that has been lacking in society. It wouldn't surprise me if the aberrant nature of human development has resulted in stunted self-soothing, where people externalize their suffering through an echo chamber of constant deference while wishing to internalize the pain through a stunted scalpel in need of replacement. The inability of our society to stop creating labels and lazy efforts to distinguish the inequity of social malaise, such as having some interminable point of servitude to a system neither designed for nor optimized for careful self-reflection, is not doing a service to society. If by assuming, society is really making any progress the only approval people get is in the feigned expression of "empathy," and "understanding," when we are practically acting as some drug pusher with the panacea used to put ourselves into some catatonic stupor
https://www.boredpanda.com/dutch-woman- ... 45F_lGwfmA
****************************************
I often suspect the founding fathers had always intended for a concentration of wealth ruled by the intellectual elites, was intended. Their main concern was that outside influence that gradually undermined the processes of government, would sabotage what they believed was an ideological representation of Democracy (that a true Republic would undermine the consensus through political bias, while yet unchecked powers prone to their own limited circle of influence might also require scrutiny over time, with due diligence to establish some political stability.)
Over time it was seen as "easier" to "fake it till you make it," all the while getting rewarded for appearing successful (think of Jack Welch's effect on business and likewise economics, where data is dissiminated with deceptive tactics to sell whatever message people want to hear,) and it followed after the period where banks were left unchecked because it was believed the credit system would weed out things that they assumed didn't work (basically the Pareto Principle would reward the "earners" but likewise the problem seen with Jack Welch's ideology, it rewarded people who gamed the system and took credit for things that don't belong to them.) This toxic nature of rewarding people unwarranted has created an issue where a significant margin of society has been required to remain subservient to those who gain the most visibility and traction on account that other people can be dependent on them for careers or academic success (think of the "casting couch" as if it applies to who gets published by not calling out the negative ethics of people within academia (and you will see some very notable "experts" from Cornell and Harvard that got weeded out for the data frauds that they are, in what's called "P Hacking," and in countries like Britain someone without any degree can pretend to be a Doctor in Forensics Science and operate for decades under false representation by paying people 1/6th of what he would be making through grift.)
Politics likewise seems to be an easy way for people to get millions by being useful idiots while still getting elected to office after it's highly suspected by the Oversight Commitee that foul-play was involved (and this seems pretty standard, unfortunately,) which is a similar reason why politics rewards con men who have a significant advantage with influencing people through marketing and sponsorship (since "no one in their right mind" will bother to base their vote on sound reasoning and arguments, but rather whoever smiles a lot since they know one random photo of their facial expression will influence the pathos of the crowd; and the electoral office is likewise manipulated to keep their career trajectory appearing "successful. . ." so they go along with the lie and cover for the stooges that are already in high-office.
The problem is that the "founding fathers" also knew the threat of Plutocratic with a centralized (private) bank (which of course stems from what they witnessed when visiting Europe and seeing the populace disenfranchised, which would likewise influence how France would then deal with the Aristocracy following America's lead, yet were still fearful of the oligarchical influences of large corporations who were capable of rallying standing armies could also use lobbyists to benefit their interests. During the nation's founding, there was significant concern that companies like the Hudson Bay Company could affect the governments that resided within their borders, and the way corporations operate is trending towards monopolistic tyranny (so rather than efficiency it's merely greed and profit incentive, and not representation, since no one in their right mind wants to spend more for less.) An argument could be made in favor of John D Rockefeller reducing the cost of oil as some arguments suggest he wasn't practicing predatory pricing to drive out competition and then hike up prices; though in this case I'm going to assume the Quora AI robot is correct:
"John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, used several methods to maximize profits, reduce costs, and eliminate competition. He employed aggressive business tactics, such as vertical integration, where he controlled all aspects of the oil production process, from drilling to distribution. This allowed him to lower costs and improve efficiency. Rockefeller also engaged in predatory pricing, undercutting competitors' prices to drive them out of business. Additionally, he formed alliances and agreements with railroads to secure lower shipping rates, giving his company a competitive advantage. These strategies helped Rockefeller amass significant wealth and dominate the oil industry during his time."
And of course, he also established the "charitable donor" image because he could then use for tax abatement.
I tend to think favorably of Keynesian economics though it also seems to fall prey to companies like Enron or the Bernie Madoffs (the "human element" of why even well-designed systems will fail, or how testing the limits of imperfect systems can result in what happened at the Chornobyl reactors, and that safeguards can be overruled if people are unable to predict if it will fail completely.)
And the illusion of success can often be misattributed to other factors that result in why those systems work, whereas they otherwise wouldn't. It's similar to why people can too easily conflate the success of a political party to factors that lead up to problems, when the person who might have jumped ship or was only keeping the (false) image of success together, might have been setting things in motion that kept people from recognizing the image was a very different one from what was going on behind the curtain (such as what also happened at Boeing.)
Any economic model can also not reflect factors that reduce poverty on their own which becomes a concentration of who has access to things that build wealth (ergo, the argument made by the Luddites was not so much the fear of technology but the fear of how that tech gets used, which ultimately undermines their way of life, and perhaps this was also the main component to how in the USA the South vs the North saw what was happening to them on a political stage, and would fight for their state despite not favoring slavery per se) and a similar argument is now made with AI, being that it will not democratize society but will render those who are most likely to exploit the potential of it, or perhaps appeal to the majority even if it meant people only saw one side of the coin. A person who would have made money with many businesses might no longer find ways to leverage the expenses if more than one of their businesses is impacted. A person who has total control over wealth can also not be accountable to their actions unless people stop believing in it, and yet inequality will often lead people to abuse power if they can take away the very instruments of wealth creation by only encouraging the practice of inequality that gives people more power who they believe will benefit the models of "success."
I looked up some arguments for issues with Keynesian economics:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-probl ... -economics
IMF was also known for negatively impacting global economies with the intent to profit off of them.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-peopl ... MF-is-evil
Margaret Thatcher was known to take power plants owned and operated by the government and then turned them over to private enterprises under the impression that the cost of electricity would go down, and it became something of a disaster when the companies would then intentionally try to profit more.
https://qr.ae/psCivT
***********************
In regards to reparations for past misdeeds by governments (historical and present territories where they had influence.)
Does the increased number of accusations (after the silence of many people from decades ago who seemed compelled to jump on the grift wagon for money) made against the R.C. church demonstrate a prevalence of complicit interest in being honest when profits are on the line; and why that might be a problem. The African Princes were proud to advertise their profession as slave traders and retrospectively, could easily be perceived as a geopolitical issue for territories, considering the historical prevalence of the period much as those who died during the holocaust had zero representation, because the "heroes" of the war were equally complicit in false science and hypocritical ethics.
*** They practically repeat their statement about holding institutions accountable while denying this is not a recent thing, but I entertained the idea further ***
Though the nature of the comedy skit probably revolves around the Church having a coming to Jesus meeting with those who were personally affected in contemporary society, the argument could further extend to the idea of how practices of trauma lead to social issues --> A further question could be, does something which personally affects people cause trauma, and what benefits them?
Does religion create a trauma bond with the idea of a "god" (father?) Does welfare create worse problems for people overall, if the society around them continues to crumble due to issues stemming from injustices that become an ego projection of other social support system failures? Would a politician that got into position through populist appeal to the pathos/emotional side of things, have an invested interest in resolving the problem, if they would much rather gloss over the issue once in position (think of the problems that people are facing in the West Coast, or consider how Putin has remained in power for so long.)
Did inherited wealth and how society perceived social positions of the earlier elected Presidents, lead to a replacement of social servitude using class stratification as the main exploitative element? Were those who became enslaved or were servants to the wealthy classes before chattel slavery, behave much differently from how the world currently operates using "third world" labor practices, and a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age era (and of those people who were so wealthy, how many generations after them could hold onto that wealth?) Thomas Jefferson inherited extreme debts due to the fickle nature of how farming worked, in addition to his extended land and slave ownership (and yes, he did most likely take advantage of the social arrangement he acquired, and it probably would be considered questionable today as it was then, even if people assumed what he was doing was just part of the routine of being a wealthy land owner.)
The vast majority of farmers were not slave owners and most everyone who fought during the Civil War was in similar positions to tenement farmers following the war, with some slaves so dependent on the way society existed for them that they suffered from Stockholm Syndrome (so perhaps a comparison could be made to "Cage Free" eggs found in grocery stores, where the marketing term only applies to the idea that the birds aren't enprisoned; only they technically are because they have been conditioned to remain in exactly the same position as had they had a cage enclosing them.)
In some areas of the country you can still find a few remnants of the 'Indian Normal School,' or what would have once been called that, and it was where the "savages" were uprooted from their lands and told they were benefiting from the education (to proselytize them.) For a very long time it was said that the Native Americans had a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction, when of course the complete dejection and abuse from historical events following many major wars fought in the name of political identity, were taken advantage of (and then quickly "forgotten" about.) In families where intergenerational trauma creates lasting impact, you can find similar parallels of how neglect and abuse creates a trauma bond. If people are brought up with an idea that is at odds with healthy boundaries or regard for who they are as an individual, a bunch of abnormal behavior will develop.
***************
Consciousness & Christianity |How we trauma bond with “god”
Spoiler
Show
Before we explore this topic: let me just say that I trauma bonded with “god.” Not everyone knows what trauma bonding is, but most people have experienced what it is, especially if you’ve been in a toxic relationship.
So what is trauma bonding, and how do we end up trauma bonding with “god?”
Trauma bonding happens in a relationship when both abuse + love exist in the experience of the relationship. In a nutshell one begins to associate often unconsciously, abuse = love.
The chain of trauma bonding:
Child experiences abuse + rejection + love growing up.
Child associates love with abuse.
Child learns to shut down their feelings.
Child blames themselves when bad things happen.
Child internalizes that love hurts and is “hard” or has to be worked for
Child grows up and meets a partner that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically).
Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs.
Adult blames themself for partner’s behaviors
Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner
Partner reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection
Adult makes excuses for partner and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents.
My experience and framework with trauma bonding
This is literally my experience with “christianity” and until I came into the conscious community that opened me up to the facets of psychology that helped me make sense of my childhood, I thought this was normal.
I grew up not knowing that I had a subconscious belief that “I deserved rejection” when I “made my parents mad.” I lived in a perpetual reward/punishment paradigm and this is honestly something that is rife within the world that we live in. Humans are inherently performance based creatures, and I believe that that proclivity is the fallen condition of our fallen consciousness.
I am going to go into how I trauma bonded with “god” reinforced by toxic and abusive theology that only kept me on the perpetual hamster wheel of working for love and trying to be good enough.
How I trauma bonded with “god” through the chain of trauma bonding
The “gospel” that subconsciously appeals to many people who are co-dependent is one that is replete with our ‘inherent badness’ and our need to cling to a “god” who will only love us when we meet the criteria or abuse us forever in hell if we don’t comply.
The modern Christian message is a form of Stockholm syndrome. “You were born broken, now beg me to fix you. I’ll love you ‘unconditionally’ if you’ll believe and obey me. That’s how you show me your love. If you don’t “I will utterly destroy you.”
The trauma bond began when I was love bombed by christians who taught me a God of love, but required so much after I was baited into the church with “love.” Afterward the adult aspect of the chain of trauma bonding began.
Child grows up and meets a partner (God) that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically). Examples-(threats of eternal hell fire, rejecting me based on my behavior, one moment God loves me and I’m forgiven and the next moment he takes his presence away from me because I’m not holy obedient enough).
God is not actually abusive or toxic or a narcissist, but the way certain theologies present God can certainly make God seem that way. I had to unlearn toxic theology in order to truly find the gospel that is actually good news.
When I projected my subconscious image of my abusive relationship with my parents onto God, especially because of bad theology and unquestioned groupthink, I shut my emotions down.
Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs. This would be our feelings of sadness or anger or anything we need to work through to make sense of our moment to moment experience. If we embrace a toxic view of God’s love that is given to us in increments correlated to our ability or performances to be pleasing to God we don’t communicate our wants and needs to God and especially the church that indoctrinates us with these toxic ideas.
So what happens when God is unapproachable and is uncaring or indifferent to our feelings wants, and needs? We look externally towards things, people, or substances to meet our unmet wants and needs. We are literally conditioned to deny our feelings as invalid, especially if they don’t immediately line up with the bible. The church then turns around and shames and criticizes the person and triggers that cycle of trauma bonding all over again. When I sin “God is far from me” and “doesn’t want me” because “He can’t look upon sin, and I’m nothing but a sinner.”
When I have tried to put language to an experience that did not fit in with the paradigm of the church they wrote me off by calling it “psychobabble” and didn’t really offer any real help other than pray and read your bible more.
Adult blames themself for partner’s (God’s) behaviors. God never leaves us or forsakes us, but when we are given a bi-polar image of God that is contingent upon our keeping God in a good mood, we can often interpret difficult emotions as our repelling God from us. What did I do or not do for God that I now feel this way? or let’s say a normal life hardship happens, immediately with a toxic view of God we can quickly look to our behavior and start taking inventory as to why God has “removed his blessing” and this bad thing has happened.
Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner (God). This is where legalism is born. Striving is birthed in the idea that we lack something and now need to make up for our lack. I flesh this idea out more in my first blog post on this. When we have a deeply imbedded belief of being “not good enough” our first reaction is to immediately do something so that we “are good enough.” This happens when we go all the way back and learn that relationships are a little mix of abuse + rejection +love growing up. We are taught things like “gotta take the good with the bad” and or “God is love, but he’s also hate, or wrath, or justice in the form of retribution.” When we get this version of a hot/cold “god” who we have to walk on eggshells around we end up with a trauma bond with “god”.
Partner (God) reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection. This one here is the saddest of the chain in my opinion. I say this because this expression of the toxic trauma bond cycle is where many Christians suffer a great deal. When we view God with this toxic lens reinforced by religion and really shitty theology, we do things like interpret life in this way. We do it dualistically making every moment either an “act of kindness from god” or an “act of rejection from god”, and we measure it by putting our religious devotion on a scale wherein we determine our worthiness. Religion reinforces this part of the trauma bonding cycle by preaching the lies of God being distant or his blessings being delayed based on how well we do or do not perform.
Adult makes excuses (use bible verses) for partner (God) and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents (perform for love). The excuses we make for God, or rather are conditioned by religion to make for this false and abusive toxic god are wrapped up in biblio-idolatry. We excuse this god’s toxicity by by-passing it with bible verses that seem to affirm god’s toxic behavior as his “justice” or “righteous indignation”. After someone becomes a christian and now begin to see God as their father, if they’re given bad theology, they see the Father as the bad guy, and Jesus is the good guy. They play good cop/bad cop with God the Father and Jesus. This is how Jesus and the Father are presented by certain brands of christianity.
Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory is one such example
“So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.
Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than ever we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile.” (“Good Friday,” God Matters, pp. 91–92) Fr Herbert McCabe
I believe that the reason many people gravitate towards this trauma bond view of God, is that they are subconsciously projecting their own childhood trauma on to God, that is then reinforced by bad theology that makes God out to be a cosmic narcissist and us the co-dependent feeble sacks of sinful blood and bones who merely exist to make this god happy at all times.
God then becomes merely a pragmatic utility to quell our ever present sense of unworthiness through our participation in a religious performance based system much like our familial performance based system. So that we get a sense of acceptance or love from this god who unbeknownst to us, reflects what we were taught love was in the context of our relationship to our parents.
Thus, we do not truly worship god, but we rather choose the abusive projection of our unhealed and unresolved parental relationships onto the face of God. We become again, like Adam & Eve and exchange the truth for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator. We then negate our humanity as they did, and hide in a fear of retribution, as they did. We try to cover up our shame with our own self-constructed leaves, as they did.
We actually exist for love and connection and union in the most healthy expression there is, the Trinity. However, we would never know it with abuse + rejection + love as our reference for “how relationships work.”
It is time to heal from toxic Christianity and purely experience the love of God; minus the abuse + rejection. Minus the anxiety, and self deprecation that come with a theology and or church community that only furthers the toxicity with micro-traumas, as you sit under teaching and messages that don’t bring healing, but subjugate you to further invalidate your very real human experience.
So what is trauma bonding, and how do we end up trauma bonding with “god?”
Trauma bonding happens in a relationship when both abuse + love exist in the experience of the relationship. In a nutshell one begins to associate often unconsciously, abuse = love.
The chain of trauma bonding:
Child experiences abuse + rejection + love growing up.
Child associates love with abuse.
Child learns to shut down their feelings.
Child blames themselves when bad things happen.
Child internalizes that love hurts and is “hard” or has to be worked for
Child grows up and meets a partner that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically).
Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs.
Adult blames themself for partner’s behaviors
Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner
Partner reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection
Adult makes excuses for partner and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents.
My experience and framework with trauma bonding
This is literally my experience with “christianity” and until I came into the conscious community that opened me up to the facets of psychology that helped me make sense of my childhood, I thought this was normal.
I grew up not knowing that I had a subconscious belief that “I deserved rejection” when I “made my parents mad.” I lived in a perpetual reward/punishment paradigm and this is honestly something that is rife within the world that we live in. Humans are inherently performance based creatures, and I believe that that proclivity is the fallen condition of our fallen consciousness.
I am going to go into how I trauma bonded with “god” reinforced by toxic and abusive theology that only kept me on the perpetual hamster wheel of working for love and trying to be good enough.
How I trauma bonded with “god” through the chain of trauma bonding
The “gospel” that subconsciously appeals to many people who are co-dependent is one that is replete with our ‘inherent badness’ and our need to cling to a “god” who will only love us when we meet the criteria or abuse us forever in hell if we don’t comply.
The modern Christian message is a form of Stockholm syndrome. “You were born broken, now beg me to fix you. I’ll love you ‘unconditionally’ if you’ll believe and obey me. That’s how you show me your love. If you don’t “I will utterly destroy you.”
The trauma bond began when I was love bombed by christians who taught me a God of love, but required so much after I was baited into the church with “love.” Afterward the adult aspect of the chain of trauma bonding began.
Child grows up and meets a partner (God) that is abusive (emotionally, physically, or psychologically). Examples-(threats of eternal hell fire, rejecting me based on my behavior, one moment God loves me and I’m forgiven and the next moment he takes his presence away from me because I’m not holy obedient enough).
God is not actually abusive or toxic or a narcissist, but the way certain theologies present God can certainly make God seem that way. I had to unlearn toxic theology in order to truly find the gospel that is actually good news.
When I projected my subconscious image of my abusive relationship with my parents onto God, especially because of bad theology and unquestioned groupthink, I shut my emotions down.
Adult shuts down their feelings, wants, and needs. This would be our feelings of sadness or anger or anything we need to work through to make sense of our moment to moment experience. If we embrace a toxic view of God’s love that is given to us in increments correlated to our ability or performances to be pleasing to God we don’t communicate our wants and needs to God and especially the church that indoctrinates us with these toxic ideas.
So what happens when God is unapproachable and is uncaring or indifferent to our feelings wants, and needs? We look externally towards things, people, or substances to meet our unmet wants and needs. We are literally conditioned to deny our feelings as invalid, especially if they don’t immediately line up with the bible. The church then turns around and shames and criticizes the person and triggers that cycle of trauma bonding all over again. When I sin “God is far from me” and “doesn’t want me” because “He can’t look upon sin, and I’m nothing but a sinner.”
When I have tried to put language to an experience that did not fit in with the paradigm of the church they wrote me off by calling it “psychobabble” and didn’t really offer any real help other than pray and read your bible more.
Adult blames themself for partner’s (God’s) behaviors. God never leaves us or forsakes us, but when we are given a bi-polar image of God that is contingent upon our keeping God in a good mood, we can often interpret difficult emotions as our repelling God from us. What did I do or not do for God that I now feel this way? or let’s say a normal life hardship happens, immediately with a toxic view of God we can quickly look to our behavior and start taking inventory as to why God has “removed his blessing” and this bad thing has happened.
Adult strives to be “good enough” for their partner (God). This is where legalism is born. Striving is birthed in the idea that we lack something and now need to make up for our lack. I flesh this idea out more in my first blog post on this. When we have a deeply imbedded belief of being “not good enough” our first reaction is to immediately do something so that we “are good enough.” This happens when we go all the way back and learn that relationships are a little mix of abuse + rejection +love growing up. We are taught things like “gotta take the good with the bad” and or “God is love, but he’s also hate, or wrath, or justice in the form of retribution.” When we get this version of a hot/cold “god” who we have to walk on eggshells around we end up with a trauma bond with “god”.
Partner (God) reinforces this attachment by alternating between kind acts + acts of rejection. This one here is the saddest of the chain in my opinion. I say this because this expression of the toxic trauma bond cycle is where many Christians suffer a great deal. When we view God with this toxic lens reinforced by religion and really shitty theology, we do things like interpret life in this way. We do it dualistically making every moment either an “act of kindness from god” or an “act of rejection from god”, and we measure it by putting our religious devotion on a scale wherein we determine our worthiness. Religion reinforces this part of the trauma bonding cycle by preaching the lies of God being distant or his blessings being delayed based on how well we do or do not perform.
Adult makes excuses (use bible verses) for partner (God) and is subconsciously trying to feel good enough for their parents (perform for love). The excuses we make for God, or rather are conditioned by religion to make for this false and abusive toxic god are wrapped up in biblio-idolatry. We excuse this god’s toxicity by by-passing it with bible verses that seem to affirm god’s toxic behavior as his “justice” or “righteous indignation”. After someone becomes a christian and now begin to see God as their father, if they’re given bad theology, they see the Father as the bad guy, and Jesus is the good guy. They play good cop/bad cop with God the Father and Jesus. This is how Jesus and the Father are presented by certain brands of christianity.
Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory is one such example
“So God the Son became man so that by his suffering and death he could pay the price of sin. This seems to be based on an idea of punishment as a kind of payment, a repayment; the criminal undergoing punishment ‘pays his debt to society’, as we say. It takes a divine man, however, to pay our debt to divine justice.
Now, I can make no literal sense of this idea, whether you apply it to criminals or to Christ. I cannot see how a man in prison is paying a debt to society or paying anything else at all to society. On the contrary, it is rather expensive to keep him there. I can see the point in the criminal being bound to make restitution to anyone he has injured, when that is possible; but that is not the same as punishment. I can see the point in punishment as something painful that people will want to avoid and (we may reasonably hope) something to encourage them to avoid committing crimes; but this is not paying a debt. It is impossible to see Christ on the cross as literally engaged either in making restitution or in serving as a warning to others. If God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than ever we are sometimes. If a society feels itself somehow compensated for its loss by the satisfaction of watching the sufferings of a criminal, then society is being vengeful in a pretty infantile way. And if God is satisfied and compensated for sin by the suffering of mankind in Christ, he must be even more infantile.” (“Good Friday,” God Matters, pp. 91–92) Fr Herbert McCabe
I believe that the reason many people gravitate towards this trauma bond view of God, is that they are subconsciously projecting their own childhood trauma on to God, that is then reinforced by bad theology that makes God out to be a cosmic narcissist and us the co-dependent feeble sacks of sinful blood and bones who merely exist to make this god happy at all times.
God then becomes merely a pragmatic utility to quell our ever present sense of unworthiness through our participation in a religious performance based system much like our familial performance based system. So that we get a sense of acceptance or love from this god who unbeknownst to us, reflects what we were taught love was in the context of our relationship to our parents.
Thus, we do not truly worship god, but we rather choose the abusive projection of our unhealed and unresolved parental relationships onto the face of God. We become again, like Adam & Eve and exchange the truth for a lie and worship the creature rather than the creator. We then negate our humanity as they did, and hide in a fear of retribution, as they did. We try to cover up our shame with our own self-constructed leaves, as they did.
We actually exist for love and connection and union in the most healthy expression there is, the Trinity. However, we would never know it with abuse + rejection + love as our reference for “how relationships work.”
It is time to heal from toxic Christianity and purely experience the love of God; minus the abuse + rejection. Minus the anxiety, and self deprecation that come with a theology and or church community that only furthers the toxicity with micro-traumas, as you sit under teaching and messages that don’t bring healing, but subjugate you to further invalidate your very real human experience.
The curse of slavery has left an intergenerational legacy of trauma and poor health for African Americans
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2019/ ... americans/
Spoiler
Show
African Americans experience much higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and negative health outcomes compared to Whites in the US. Michael J Halloran writes that the intergenerational cultural trauma caused by 300 years of slavery – alongside poor economic circumstances and social prejudice – has led to the poor state of physical, psychological and social health among African Americans.
In his 1952 semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, the esteemed African American author James Baldwin asked the question “Could a curse come down so many ages? Did it live in time, or in the moment?” In my work, I argue that the curse of African American slavery cannot be underestimated; the trauma of enslavement has been carried by African Americans through the ages and generations and is currently shown in many of the health problems experienced by a significant proportion of the African American population in the US. My research focusses on how intergenerational trauma provides an important explanation for the persistence of health problems among African Americans; complementary to the more apparent negative impact of poverty and prejudice on health.
The success, wealth and notoriety of African Americans like Oprah, Obama, Beyonce and Michael Jordan masks the comparatively negative physical, psychological, and social health conditions of African Americans in general. For example, research shows the incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, premature death from heart disease, and prostate cancer are generally double among adult African Americans compared to White Americans. African Americans experience significantly higher psychological stress and PTSD, and these are related to depressive symptoms, poor self-rated health, functional physical limitations and chronic illness. Similar comparisons of social health show homicide rates are higher, black men are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites (5 percent of the African American male population are incarcerated in many American states), and illicit drug use and rates of intimate partner violence are highest among African Americans.
Two valid explanations for theses outcomes have received significant focus in the research literature: poor economic circumstances and social prejudice. Indeed, the poverty and unemployment rate among Black Americans has been at least double that of Whites over the last 40 years despite an overall decline (see Figure 1) and Blacks represent only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income even though they comprise 13.6 percent of the US population. At the same time, research also clearly shows implicit prejudice is widespread in the US and related to negative health outcomes among African Americans like psychiatric symptoms, stress and cigarette smoking and a greater risk of heart attacks.
Figure 1 – Percentage of the US population in poverty or unemployed
*in link*
In line with these explanations, policy initiatives by successive American governments have sought to alleviate poverty, yet with short-lived success; the economic status of Black Americans and the economic inequality between Black and White Americans has changed little in the past 50 years. Similarly, it appears anti-discrimination laws and policies have been at best a limited solution to prejudice. For example, Black Americans are currently over-represented in the lower-paid service sectors, with lower job security, wages and benefits. And, African Americans still feel victims of prejudicial and unequal treatment as highlighted by the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement.
Contemporary policies directed to address poverty and prejudice may have limited impact as they primarily target the injustices of today and do little to consider the impact of past injustices on the current state of African American health. My research focuses on how intergenerational trauma can help to explain the poor current health of African Americans. I argue that the historical legacy of enslavement and transmission of the associated cultural trauma is an important sociocultural perspective to understand the present generations of African Americans.
The notion of traumatic effects of enslavement being transferred to successive generations starts with the idea that slavery was not only a dreadful individual ordeal but a cultural trauma to African American people; a syndrome which occurs when a group has been subject to an unbearable event or experience thereby undermining their sense of group identity, values, meaning and purpose, or their cultural worldviews and is manifest in symptoms of hopelessness, despair and anxiety (notably, among Indigenous people subject to colonization and genocide and Holocaust survivors). Indeed, there was little value or meaning to African American lives under slavery; they were callously tied to their capacity for labor or ability to reproduce. Moreover, their identity was literally supplied by whoever happened to own them as though there was “not even a separate identity the ego can claim”. As the eminent African American essayist W.E.B. Du Bois claimed, African Americans were effectively banned from any pursuit of a cultural life through laws to prevent reading, writing and most communal life.
At the same time, the symptoms of cultural trauma were evident during enslavement and found in many personal narratives from those times (e.g., Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Jacobs). Moreover, ongoing evidence of intergenerational trauma is then shown in the stories of many prevalent Black authors over subsequent years (e.g., Ernest Gaines, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker). In Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright laments “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it”.
The contemporary situation of African American culture is viewed similarly and described as being practically on the edge of self-destruction; labelled as a collective pathology with respondents in a recent study claiming enslavement legacies impact on current-day African American psychological functioning. Research findings also shows high levels of accumulated trauma and hopelessness among African Americans are correlated with negative health outcomes (such as high blood pressure) and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
The poor general state of African American physical, psychological and social health demands a comprehensive response from researchers, health practitioners, policy-makers and the community. The cultural trauma experienced by African Americans over the more than 300 years of their enslavement has been transmitted to the current generation and is related to their current general state of poor health. This perspective implies strategies to strengthen the resilience of African American cultural worldviews would remedy the negative impact of cultural trauma on their health. Indeed, interventions which harness cultural themes (e.g., racial, respect, cultural identity and values) act as a protective factor in the health of African Americans and significantly reduce anger and aggression in African American adolescent males.
Of course, the success of any strategy to alleviate intergenerational trauma and its effects needs to be considered in terms of the bigger picture of relations between Blacks and Whites in the US. The contemporary notions of collective responsibility for the past era of slavery and white privilege from the imposition racial inequality, however, is largely unacknowledged or resisted by most White Americans. As Martin Luther King put it: “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend the second rung of the ladder, a firm resistance from the white community developed”. Nonetheless, research suggests one way out this dilemma is to emphasize a shared worldview and humanity between African and White Americans to reduce the impact of intergroup tensions. Martin Luther King advocated similarly when he argued for a human-rights approach to alleviating the poor social and economic conditions of African Americans. A human rights approach has the potential to heal the past Black and White relations in the US and nullify any resistance there may be to those who would seek to alleviate the negative effects of intergenerational trauma on the health and well-being of African Americans.
This article is based on the paper ‘African American Health and Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome: A Terror Management Theory Account’, in the Journal of Black Studies.
In his 1952 semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell it on the Mountain, the esteemed African American author James Baldwin asked the question “Could a curse come down so many ages? Did it live in time, or in the moment?” In my work, I argue that the curse of African American slavery cannot be underestimated; the trauma of enslavement has been carried by African Americans through the ages and generations and is currently shown in many of the health problems experienced by a significant proportion of the African American population in the US. My research focusses on how intergenerational trauma provides an important explanation for the persistence of health problems among African Americans; complementary to the more apparent negative impact of poverty and prejudice on health.
The success, wealth and notoriety of African Americans like Oprah, Obama, Beyonce and Michael Jordan masks the comparatively negative physical, psychological, and social health conditions of African Americans in general. For example, research shows the incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, premature death from heart disease, and prostate cancer are generally double among adult African Americans compared to White Americans. African Americans experience significantly higher psychological stress and PTSD, and these are related to depressive symptoms, poor self-rated health, functional physical limitations and chronic illness. Similar comparisons of social health show homicide rates are higher, black men are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites (5 percent of the African American male population are incarcerated in many American states), and illicit drug use and rates of intimate partner violence are highest among African Americans.
Two valid explanations for theses outcomes have received significant focus in the research literature: poor economic circumstances and social prejudice. Indeed, the poverty and unemployment rate among Black Americans has been at least double that of Whites over the last 40 years despite an overall decline (see Figure 1) and Blacks represent only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income even though they comprise 13.6 percent of the US population. At the same time, research also clearly shows implicit prejudice is widespread in the US and related to negative health outcomes among African Americans like psychiatric symptoms, stress and cigarette smoking and a greater risk of heart attacks.
Figure 1 – Percentage of the US population in poverty or unemployed
*in link*
In line with these explanations, policy initiatives by successive American governments have sought to alleviate poverty, yet with short-lived success; the economic status of Black Americans and the economic inequality between Black and White Americans has changed little in the past 50 years. Similarly, it appears anti-discrimination laws and policies have been at best a limited solution to prejudice. For example, Black Americans are currently over-represented in the lower-paid service sectors, with lower job security, wages and benefits. And, African Americans still feel victims of prejudicial and unequal treatment as highlighted by the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement.
Contemporary policies directed to address poverty and prejudice may have limited impact as they primarily target the injustices of today and do little to consider the impact of past injustices on the current state of African American health. My research focuses on how intergenerational trauma can help to explain the poor current health of African Americans. I argue that the historical legacy of enslavement and transmission of the associated cultural trauma is an important sociocultural perspective to understand the present generations of African Americans.
The notion of traumatic effects of enslavement being transferred to successive generations starts with the idea that slavery was not only a dreadful individual ordeal but a cultural trauma to African American people; a syndrome which occurs when a group has been subject to an unbearable event or experience thereby undermining their sense of group identity, values, meaning and purpose, or their cultural worldviews and is manifest in symptoms of hopelessness, despair and anxiety (notably, among Indigenous people subject to colonization and genocide and Holocaust survivors). Indeed, there was little value or meaning to African American lives under slavery; they were callously tied to their capacity for labor or ability to reproduce. Moreover, their identity was literally supplied by whoever happened to own them as though there was “not even a separate identity the ego can claim”. As the eminent African American essayist W.E.B. Du Bois claimed, African Americans were effectively banned from any pursuit of a cultural life through laws to prevent reading, writing and most communal life.
At the same time, the symptoms of cultural trauma were evident during enslavement and found in many personal narratives from those times (e.g., Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Jacobs). Moreover, ongoing evidence of intergenerational trauma is then shown in the stories of many prevalent Black authors over subsequent years (e.g., Ernest Gaines, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker). In Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright laments “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it”.
The contemporary situation of African American culture is viewed similarly and described as being practically on the edge of self-destruction; labelled as a collective pathology with respondents in a recent study claiming enslavement legacies impact on current-day African American psychological functioning. Research findings also shows high levels of accumulated trauma and hopelessness among African Americans are correlated with negative health outcomes (such as high blood pressure) and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
The poor general state of African American physical, psychological and social health demands a comprehensive response from researchers, health practitioners, policy-makers and the community. The cultural trauma experienced by African Americans over the more than 300 years of their enslavement has been transmitted to the current generation and is related to their current general state of poor health. This perspective implies strategies to strengthen the resilience of African American cultural worldviews would remedy the negative impact of cultural trauma on their health. Indeed, interventions which harness cultural themes (e.g., racial, respect, cultural identity and values) act as a protective factor in the health of African Americans and significantly reduce anger and aggression in African American adolescent males.
Of course, the success of any strategy to alleviate intergenerational trauma and its effects needs to be considered in terms of the bigger picture of relations between Blacks and Whites in the US. The contemporary notions of collective responsibility for the past era of slavery and white privilege from the imposition racial inequality, however, is largely unacknowledged or resisted by most White Americans. As Martin Luther King put it: “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend the second rung of the ladder, a firm resistance from the white community developed”. Nonetheless, research suggests one way out this dilemma is to emphasize a shared worldview and humanity between African and White Americans to reduce the impact of intergroup tensions. Martin Luther King advocated similarly when he argued for a human-rights approach to alleviating the poor social and economic conditions of African Americans. A human rights approach has the potential to heal the past Black and White relations in the US and nullify any resistance there may be to those who would seek to alleviate the negative effects of intergenerational trauma on the health and well-being of African Americans.
This article is based on the paper ‘African American Health and Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome: A Terror Management Theory Account’, in the Journal of Black Studies.
Also, a discussion has been brought upbon the topic of euthenasia.
The commodification of the practice is as though someone is flipping through a magazine and glibly decides to end their life, akin to the depth and soul searching that has been lacking in society. It wouldn't surprise me if the aberrant nature of human development has resulted in stunted self-soothing, where people externalize their suffering through an echo chamber of constant deference while wishing to internalize the pain through a stunted scalpel in need of replacement. The inability of our society to stop creating labels and lazy efforts to distinguish the inequity of social malaise, such as having some interminable point of servitude to a system neither designed for nor optimized for careful self-reflection, is not doing a service to society. If by assuming, society is really making any progress the only approval people get is in the feigned expression of "empathy," and "understanding," when we are practically acting as some drug pusher with the panacea used to put ourselves into some catatonic stupor
https://www.boredpanda.com/dutch-woman- ... 45F_lGwfmA
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I often suspect the founding fathers had always intended for a concentration of wealth ruled by the intellectual elites, was intended. Their main concern was that outside influence that gradually undermined the processes of government, would sabotage what they believed was an ideological representation of Democracy (that a true Republic would undermine the consensus through political bias, while yet unchecked powers prone to their own limited circle of influence might also require scrutiny over time, with due diligence to establish some political stability.)
Over time it was seen as "easier" to "fake it till you make it," all the while getting rewarded for appearing successful (think of Jack Welch's effect on business and likewise economics, where data is dissiminated with deceptive tactics to sell whatever message people want to hear,) and it followed after the period where banks were left unchecked because it was believed the credit system would weed out things that they assumed didn't work (basically the Pareto Principle would reward the "earners" but likewise the problem seen with Jack Welch's ideology, it rewarded people who gamed the system and took credit for things that don't belong to them.) This toxic nature of rewarding people unwarranted has created an issue where a significant margin of society has been required to remain subservient to those who gain the most visibility and traction on account that other people can be dependent on them for careers or academic success (think of the "casting couch" as if it applies to who gets published by not calling out the negative ethics of people within academia (and you will see some very notable "experts" from Cornell and Harvard that got weeded out for the data frauds that they are, in what's called "P Hacking," and in countries like Britain someone without any degree can pretend to be a Doctor in Forensics Science and operate for decades under false representation by paying people 1/6th of what he would be making through grift.)
Politics likewise seems to be an easy way for people to get millions by being useful idiots while still getting elected to office after it's highly suspected by the Oversight Commitee that foul-play was involved (and this seems pretty standard, unfortunately,) which is a similar reason why politics rewards con men who have a significant advantage with influencing people through marketing and sponsorship (since "no one in their right mind" will bother to base their vote on sound reasoning and arguments, but rather whoever smiles a lot since they know one random photo of their facial expression will influence the pathos of the crowd; and the electoral office is likewise manipulated to keep their career trajectory appearing "successful. . ." so they go along with the lie and cover for the stooges that are already in high-office.
The problem is that the "founding fathers" also knew the threat of Plutocratic with a centralized (private) bank (which of course stems from what they witnessed when visiting Europe and seeing the populace disenfranchised, which would likewise influence how France would then deal with the Aristocracy following America's lead, yet were still fearful of the oligarchical influences of large corporations who were capable of rallying standing armies could also use lobbyists to benefit their interests. During the nation's founding, there was significant concern that companies like the Hudson Bay Company could affect the governments that resided within their borders, and the way corporations operate is trending towards monopolistic tyranny (so rather than efficiency it's merely greed and profit incentive, and not representation, since no one in their right mind wants to spend more for less.) An argument could be made in favor of John D Rockefeller reducing the cost of oil as some arguments suggest he wasn't practicing predatory pricing to drive out competition and then hike up prices; though in this case I'm going to assume the Quora AI robot is correct:
"John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, used several methods to maximize profits, reduce costs, and eliminate competition. He employed aggressive business tactics, such as vertical integration, where he controlled all aspects of the oil production process, from drilling to distribution. This allowed him to lower costs and improve efficiency. Rockefeller also engaged in predatory pricing, undercutting competitors' prices to drive them out of business. Additionally, he formed alliances and agreements with railroads to secure lower shipping rates, giving his company a competitive advantage. These strategies helped Rockefeller amass significant wealth and dominate the oil industry during his time."
And of course, he also established the "charitable donor" image because he could then use for tax abatement.
I tend to think favorably of Keynesian economics though it also seems to fall prey to companies like Enron or the Bernie Madoffs (the "human element" of why even well-designed systems will fail, or how testing the limits of imperfect systems can result in what happened at the Chornobyl reactors, and that safeguards can be overruled if people are unable to predict if it will fail completely.)
And the illusion of success can often be misattributed to other factors that result in why those systems work, whereas they otherwise wouldn't. It's similar to why people can too easily conflate the success of a political party to factors that lead up to problems, when the person who might have jumped ship or was only keeping the (false) image of success together, might have been setting things in motion that kept people from recognizing the image was a very different one from what was going on behind the curtain (such as what also happened at Boeing.)
Any economic model can also not reflect factors that reduce poverty on their own which becomes a concentration of who has access to things that build wealth (ergo, the argument made by the Luddites was not so much the fear of technology but the fear of how that tech gets used, which ultimately undermines their way of life, and perhaps this was also the main component to how in the USA the South vs the North saw what was happening to them on a political stage, and would fight for their state despite not favoring slavery per se) and a similar argument is now made with AI, being that it will not democratize society but will render those who are most likely to exploit the potential of it, or perhaps appeal to the majority even if it meant people only saw one side of the coin. A person who would have made money with many businesses might no longer find ways to leverage the expenses if more than one of their businesses is impacted. A person who has total control over wealth can also not be accountable to their actions unless people stop believing in it, and yet inequality will often lead people to abuse power if they can take away the very instruments of wealth creation by only encouraging the practice of inequality that gives people more power who they believe will benefit the models of "success."
I looked up some arguments for issues with Keynesian economics:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-probl ... -economics
IMF was also known for negatively impacting global economies with the intent to profit off of them.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-peopl ... MF-is-evil
Margaret Thatcher was known to take power plants owned and operated by the government and then turned them over to private enterprises under the impression that the cost of electricity would go down, and it became something of a disaster when the companies would then intentionally try to profit more.
https://qr.ae/psCivT
Re: Little Rants
Never heard of LexisNexis
Though I believe things like Onstar have a battery backup and seems to send location in the event the car isn't operable and you are stranded (or I assume in the event the car isn't being paid off and needs to be recovered) I wasn't aware cars were doing this stuff by tracking driving behavior.
It's mostly a data broker company.
Here's a better explanation of what the data tracking does, and it's the same thing as the "black box" used in most vehicles (planes are more recognized for this.)
https://www.camaro6.com/forums/showthre ... 5&t=444550
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One of the better explanations:
What kind of upbringing will make a person a narcissist?
https://qr.ae/psHvNG
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This is an accurate sentiment:
Why I Dislike Investing In The Stock Market Even In Good Times
https://www.financialsamurai.com/why-i- ... same-time/
Though I believe things like Onstar have a battery backup and seems to send location in the event the car isn't operable and you are stranded (or I assume in the event the car isn't being paid off and needs to be recovered) I wasn't aware cars were doing this stuff by tracking driving behavior.
It's mostly a data broker company.
Here's a better explanation of what the data tracking does, and it's the same thing as the "black box" used in most vehicles (planes are more recognized for this.)
https://www.camaro6.com/forums/showthre ... 5&t=444550
***************************************************
One of the better explanations:
What kind of upbringing will make a person a narcissist?
https://qr.ae/psHvNG
*********************************
This is an accurate sentiment:
Why I Dislike Investing In The Stock Market Even In Good Times
https://www.financialsamurai.com/why-i- ... same-time/
-
HighlyIrregular
- Posts: 609
- Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2021 2:20 pm
- Location: New York
- Formerly: BarIII
Re: Little Rants
Low end computer prices have remained about the same for 40 years. The specs are about 100 times better but they don't lower the prices. It probably makes sense but it feels like a conspiracy.
Why did stores stop selling reduced fat ice cream? My only option at Giant was a reduced fat orange creamsicle.
Why did stores stop selling reduced fat ice cream? My only option at Giant was a reduced fat orange creamsicle.