An idiot challenges me on my condemnation of the idea that it might be a good thing to burn de Sade. On which, I repeat, if burning every last copy of every single word written by and about de Sade were possible and if by doing that all or even a good measure of the sexual abuse of people and animals in the word would be abolished, I'd strike the match to set it on fire and I would think it was probably the most worthy act I'd ever committed. If de Sade were not a writer who had championed a particularly anti-egalitarian, elitist wet dream of domination and submission with ejaculation, no one in the world would ever read anything he wrote. Having read some of him in the original, he was a crap writer. You can say the same about Henry Miller, Hubert Selby jr. and a number of other writers celebrated as icons of free speechiness. It's telling that when you reduce free speech to an automatic reflex instead of considering it within a context of its real existence in the real world, you'll use it to champion ass end, sludge dwelling expression.
The liberalish-libertarian defense of sado-masochism and such related sexual practices as bondage and discipline is the language of market economics, as a contractual agreement between an abuser and the abused. As I just stated, such an analysis is so reductively simplistic that it willfully ignores that it is essentially the pro-slavery argument that slaves were happy in their enslavement. Such slaves as might have been reduced to such an abject state by the terror campaign of the slave power are rightly seen as having their minds and spirits damaged by it. In the same way someone who would submit to their own degradation, abuse, torture, and injury aren't exhibiting any form of liberty or freedom, they are exhibiting mental illness. And what you say for them goes as much for the person who is sexually stimulated by inflicting the harm on someone for their self-deification.
In all such dishonest libertarian discourse, there is a simple test that will demonstrate that the person saying it is lying about what they're claiming. Would they be OK with being the object of sadistic sex abuse, themselves, would they be OK with their loved ones being used like that or even merely expressing the wish to be used that way? Would their well-beloved child being conned into such a relationship be OK with them, their mother or father, their sister or brother? That is assuming such people as who defend S&M and B&D are capable of normal human love of anyone other than themselves. It's the same question I've asked in relationship to the prostitution and porn industries. To date I've only had one person claim they would be OK with that and he was lying about it because he expressed outrage, elsewhere over my pointing out that he said he was OK with his own girlfriend being recruited into prostitution. If what he claimed were true, that it was perfectly OK with him, then he wouldn't have expressed outrage at me pointing that out.
Libertarians, ESPECIALLY THE LIBERALISH TYPE, are addicted to lying, covering up the morally unacceptable with verbiage such as the translation of even the most grotesque inequality and abusive practices with market-economics blather. That such blather arose in the very 18th-19th century atheist-materialist "enlightenment" that de Sade and those who abetted and identified him as a champion and icon of liberty constructed is certainly no accident. That their literary hero was a man whose entire reputation in literature is based in the denial of equality, in respecting the dignity of other people or even restraining their lust for perverted sex to the extent that they killed people to get off is, as well, a symptom of a massively present mental illness and of habitual lying.
Most of all it gives weight to my observation that people who don't believe in sin will have no qualms about lying. There was something basically wrong with the "enlightenment" just as will, with time, become apparent with any humanly constructed ideology. I think that the horrific flaws of that movement are based in their arrogantly naive materialism and assumptions about the total efficacy of scientific method. They might have had ignorance of the consequences of those as a partial claim of innocence, after the discoveries of physics, mathematics, logic, the experience of the biology based genocides of the 20th century, we don't get off on a claim of ignorance. That is especially true of people who claim to have an education, who have access to that information but who choose to ignore it. Or who, through laziness or ideological predilection don't bother to find that out.
But you don't have to have read the formal literature of formal logic or be familiar with things such as the uncertainty principle to understand that hurting someone "to pleasure" yourself is wrong and must be prevented from happening. They knew that back when they wrote the Mosaic books of the Bible.
Pope says it's better to be an atheist than a bad Christian.
ReplyDeleteOopsie.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/world/pope-atheists-again/index.html
Unlike you I read the Vatican report on his homily. I think it's funny that you don't notice that he's comparing being a hypocritical-pseudo-Christian to being a generic atheist. He didn't address the kind of hypocritical atheist of which you present yourself as a quintessential example.
DeleteI would also point out that what he says is among the things that makes being a "Christian" whose life choices negate the Gospel of Jesus is that it discredits Catholics who do try to follow the Gospel of Jesus.
Really, there are consequences to not reading the whole thing, including not having the first idea of what was actually said.
I am not now and have never been an atheist, AS YOU WELL FUCKING UNDERSTAND. I am a lapsed agnostic -- I used to not know, and now I don't give a shit.
DeleteBut you'll continue to lie about that because its what you do.
"
ReplyDeleteIf burning every last copy of every single word written by and about de
Sade were possible and if by doing that all or even a good measure of
the sexual abuse of people and animals in the word would be abolished,
I'd strike the match to set it on fire and I would think it was probably
the most worthy act I'd ever committed
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon."
In other words, it's not gonna happen, so stop preening about your moral ravery.
You not only put the "scat" in Eschaton, the "Simp" in simple-minded, you also put the "anal" in "bad analogy".
DeleteI believe I've noted before that in addition to not understanding how time works you really don't get the conditional mood, either. I'd point out exactly why that is the case but it would be throwing pearls before a swine.
I'm ever more convinced that the stupidest level of atheism and of the depths of fundamentalism are as much a decline in the teaching of grammar as they are a result of other results of TV replacing education.
Says the most incoherent bad writer (and thus the most incoherent thinker) it's ever been my pleasure to mock.
ReplyDeleteUnlike you, I've never pretended to be a writer. I'm a musician. Another thing you've pretended to be, only I am one.
DeleteAnd I can navigate both the conditional mood and the concept of past, present and future and the general phenomenon of change over time.
You've never pretended to be a writer? So I only dreamed all the stupid shit you written at your blog?
ReplyDeleteI am not and never have been a writer. I write things. My writing is like Woody Allen's clarinet playing, obviously not what he does. I'd say my writing is like your writing but your writing is more like the music making of the worst kid in the elementary school band who has never practiced a minute in his life. Or like a pathological liar, take your pick.
DeleteYou know, if Haloscan were still up I'd find the comment thread where NY Mary complimented me on my writing. She found it original.
DeleteSo I also dreamed the 40 plus years of checks I've cashed for writing professionally?
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing I didn't starve to death ages ago.
Robert Novak got paid as a writer for more than sixty years. As can be seen in his career and yours, there's always room at the bottom of the paid scribbling and lying racket.
DeleteBut you're making that sound negative.
ReplyDelete:-)
Liars getting paid to lie, yeah, that's bad. I've always said you had more in common with the Republican-fascists than you'd ever want anyone to notice. But I did.
DeleteHow are the eye doctors in that alternate universe you live in?
ReplyDeleteThere is no alternative universe. There's only the one you lie about.
Delete