Category: Personal

People Trapped by Their Decisions

This is an eye-opening take on a heartbreaking situation. The woman being interviewed in this video is fighting against the incursion of biological men in women’s spaces. She describes the people who are fighting against her have motivations they are not being honest about. While not public knowledge, they have transitioned their children, so they have to fight for “trans rights” until the day they die. She says she has become a “standing reproach” to these people, and likens them to the Japanese soldiers in WWII who would never surrender after the war was over. They are forever compelled to attack her, because to agree that she makes a good point — any point — would mean they were wrong, and lest they have to face the fact that they have done irreparable damage to the very ones they had responsibility to protect from such abuse.

I’m not here to get into any of that argument. I simply realized it has a wider application.

This was my last post to Facebook, before I deleted my account.

I can’t get into details… at least not yet… but imagine, for a second, the length, breadth, and depth of the betrayal that would lead someone to make such a post. That might be captured by the image of being stabbed in the back, face, and heart. Got it? OK.

Now imagine the “support” system that has to be in place for someone to have implemented such a betrayal, not just of a person or a family, but an entire mid-sized church. The friends and family that had to have colluded. Got it? OK.

The people who played a part in committing this betrayal are still going around telling people that they were falsely accused, that there’s “another side” to the story, lying about that “side,” and blaming the entire problem on others (including me, I’m sure), despite the fact that scores of us who know the details about what happened are crystal clear about it. We have the figurative and literal receipts proving “our” side. I helped dig them up. Over the past couple of years, I’ve often agonized over the question, “How can they be like this?”

That’s where the video comes in. When I watched it, it was an aha! moment. I finally realized that the people who worked to enable this giant betrayal, this… gargantuan rug-pull, this… 40-year-long con will never — can never — admit to any wrongdoing or their part in it. The soul-crushing disappointment of facing the reality of being such a narcissistic sociopath would be too much. So they are going to go to their grave sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling, ignoring the plain facts of the situation, and avoiding their own consciousnesses over their multiple, decades-long moral and ethical failings

They have to live in a headspace where they say things like I’m “misinformed,” because if I’m not, it has soul-crushing implications. They’ll live the rest of their lives in an ivory tower of their own imaginations, locked away from the generational spiritual and emotional harm they’ve inflicted on hundreds of people, including some of their closest, so-called friends, because to admit they’ve committed such grievous injury would be impossible to reconcile with their their supposed beliefs and ethos, and their carefully-curated public image.

Neuro-Atypicalness

I follow Dave Plummer on YouTube. He’s one of the OG Windows programmers. A true hacker in the best traditions of the ethos. Turns out, he’s on the spectrum. He wrote about book about being out on “far end,” so to speak.

Can you be a “little bit” autistic?

He’s written enough about his neuro-atypicalness on Twitter to resonate with me, so I bought the book. The whole first part is explaining how things “work” for him, and I got tired of going, “Well, yeah,” and set it down.

I just picked it up again, and skipped ahead to the next part, and he hit me with this:

“Much of my life was spent presuming that, as an intelligent individual, my version of the world was the right one and that all I had to do was sufficiently educate, convince, and cajole the other person until they “got” my version.

Which is exactly what I was referring to in this post, where I was trying to convey how futile trying to persuade people has been for me over my lifetime. I’ll give an example.

One of my earliest memories of this type of conflict happened in the late 90’s. I was working for a bluechip Fortune 250 which no longer exists. It was a special place, and it was destroyed in a textbook corporate raid, but at the time, I had established myself as someone who knew what they were doing with computer systems, and — at least I like to believe — had the respect of the leaders of the various IT subsystems of the company.

The company was pretty big, but the IT staff was relatively small. By comparison, the company that bought and pillaged us was about the same size, but had an IT staff four or five times as large. We were having a big meeting with most the IT people, and the subject of DNS came up. I was frustrated that I couldn’t spin up hostnames in our DNS system, and had to ask and wait for someone to do it for me. Now, the person in charge of the network had had enough foresight to make various sub-domains based on sites. For instance, our technical center was ctc.arvin.com. So hosts could be given names like pdm.ctc.arvin.com.

I made the point that the local site IT admins could be given permissions to be able to create new names in their local subdomains. I was trying to get them to allow my own site’s admin to be able to do this for me, without needing to involve corporate, and wait. I remember pointing out that the system was designed to work this way, implying that it would be easier to let them do this themselves.

One of the big 3 IT bosses said that the local site admins wouldn’t be able to do that. I thought that was silly. After all, the DNS admin tool in Windows NT was really easy to use. My prototype and testing facility’s admin was one of the most talented IT guys I’ve ever met. Still. Thirty years later. So I was imagining that the rest of the site admins were at least competent “computer people,” which wasn’t the case. Like, at all. The other sites — the manufacturing sites — were having their IT needs met by someone who just got picked because they had an inkling of what was going on, and had the bandwidth to setup the box. A couple years later, I would be meeting some of them, and they turned out to be HR people and shipping clerks. I was confused by the disconnect in the moment, but I dropped it. But after I met some of these other people, I finally got it, and was able to fill in the gaps in that story. It was an honest clash of multiple levels of high-flying expectations dashed on the rocks of reality.

It took me a long time to see that my whole approach lead people to think that I thought they were stupid. In this particular case, I’m sure I made the managers in the room feel like I was calling the site admins incompetent. No, I just made bad assumptions, and gave people the benefit of the doubt. This is a very different thing, but people can’t see it that way when they feel they’re being indirectly accused of not being unqualified. If I had understood the proper context of the other sites, instead of extrapolating from the one I was familiar with, I wouldn’t have suggested it in the first place. But despite being a trained mechanical engineer — where every single problem I ever solved started with identifying my assumptions — I still sometimes can’t see that my assumptions are bad. It’s probably because I’m just rushing to get to the place I want to be.

Time Stand Still, by Rush

I turn my back to the wind
To catch my breath,
Before I start off again.
Driven on
Without a moment to spend
To pass an evening
With a drink and a friend

I let my skin get too thin
I’d like to pause,
No matter what I pretend
Like some pilgrim —
Who learns to transcend —
Learns to live
As if each step was the end

Time stand still —
I’m not looking back —
But I want to look around me now
See more of the people
And the places that surround me now

Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger
Experience slips away…

I turn my face to the sun
Close my eyes,
Let my defences down —
All those wounds
That I can’t get unwound

I let my past go too fast
No time to pause —
If I could slow it all down
Like some captain,
Whose ship runs aground —
I can wait until the tide
Comes around

Make each impression
A little bit stronger
Freeze this motion
A little bit longer
The innocence slips away…

Summer’s going fast–
Nights growing colder
Children growing up —
old friends growing older
Experience slips away…

The innocence slips away…

Giving Up

For all of my adult life, I’ve been convinced that the right thing, the correct thing, the moral, ethical, or “good” thing would prevail on its own merits. I’ve been under the spell of the notion that the world was a just place, and if people could just be shown the right way to do things — the way that leads to the easiest overall effort and clearest understanding — they would accept them and want to do them in that way. I now realize this is a complete and utter delusion which has been foisted on me because of my personality and, if we’re being honest, a bit of neural atypicality.

I have often rued the days where I blundered through meetings at work, pointing out why certain decisions sucked, and how we could make things better, and in the process, making everyone mad. It took a couple of decades to even work out that I was, in effect, calling everyone stupid. No matter how right I was, people got their backs up and worked against my ideas just out of spite over wounded pride. I’ve seen it more times than I can count, and that’s not hyperbole.

What I’ve finally figured out is that the same thing has been happening in churches. Indeed, why should church have been any different? It’s filled with selfish, stupid people, just like everywhere else. Well, to be fair, we’re supposed to care more about “rightness” than the working world. But, no, when push comes to shove, people abandon correctness for feelings, and hide behind sentiment and platitude, because holding people to account is hard.

Maybe those other people already understand that holding out for the right thing is too much trouble, and therefore accept acquiescence more quickly and easily. Maybe they don’t want to get involved to save their sanity. Maybe. In Christian theology, there’s an infinite supply of forgiveness, so we must always be willing to forgive. There’s always an opportunity to take the high(er) road, because there’s always a higher road. Perhaps at the expense of sanity, but, sure, it’s always available. So at least in church circles, the fallback position not only saves time and sanity, it also makes you look “holier than thou.” Win-win!

Realizing that my own attitudes work against me in business, I’ve tried to reset and work with people in moving them towards more “correct” positions, but that hasn’t worked very well either, so I’m doubly screwed. Turns out most people aren’t even open to thinking that whatever it is they’re doing could be improved. After being in “leadership” of a church beset with spiritual abuse for 40 years, and suddenly being able to speak directly to a game-changing crisis, I skipped the pleasantries and went straight for the “correct” approach again when it mattered most, and lost again. And no one wanted to hear it. No one cared. Everyone just rolled over. I guess they have that choice, but then they don’t get to complain to me when the barking dog they’ve turned their back on bites them in the rear again.

So I’m done. I’ve already removed myself from that situation, but now I’m also removing my concern about it. I can’t change anything. I never could. Turns out, I couldn’t even budge the needle. I’m sick of trying to point out ethics and morality to a bunch of people who shouldn’t need the lesson in the first place. I’m tired of trying to hold people accountable for things when no one else will. So they all get what they’ve accepted, and I don’t want to hear any more complaining about it. Ever. Congrats, everyone. You win. I’ll shut up now.

Pain

Pain is realizing this is true, not just for society, or the world, but for our personal lives as well: family, friends, church, hobbies… everything. Sure, growing up and growing older should involve maturation and changes in direction and perspective, but no one told me I would be betrayed by my own body and my closest friends and mentors.

I’ve had two personal, related “911’s” — events that shook me to my core and changed everything — that struck at the same time 4 years ago — and I’m still trying to figure out how to get through it all and get better. The medicines I take for my health problems keep me continually off-balance, and make it nearly impossible for me to marshal my inner fortitude to make the changes and do the work to address the long term issues.

It’s just… hard, man. Really hard. No one really understands, nor do I really want them to. I don’t want to put that on them. There’s nothing they can do about it. I’ve never been stoic. I’ve moaned and bellyached to everyone who would listen my whole life. This time, though, there doesn’t seem to be anything ANYONE can do about it, because there’s no one thing that’s wrong. If there’s a way out, it’s through a dozen small things done with a measure of discipline that I have never been able to muster, even at my best.

The outlook is bleak, and we’re on the precipice of a second civil war, and at the verge of the End Times.

Lies and their Debt

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”

It’s a quote from the HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster. You can see the truth of it at first glance, but the REAL problem here — in the disaster, and in personal life — is that the narcissistic, sociopathic, and avaricious (extremely greedy) people who tell the most, biggest, and longest-term lies are often NOT the ones who pay the debt.

Class Action Jokes

I’ve gotten emails about being in 3 class-action settlements against Verizon, Anthem, and Walgreens. I usually click through them and just see what happens. The Verizon one started distributions today. My take? $12.15. On a prepaid, digital-only card that the plan administrators probably are getting kickbacks for using. This stuff is all such a joke. There ought to be a law that says if the settlement won’t yield, like, at least THREE figures of money for people, the lawyers don’t get to file and make all their filthy lucre.