And i’m just feelin’ kinda “meh.”

I have nothing personal against Wikileaks… I just don’t think much of them.

First of all, their whole thing is to reveal secrets of criminal gangs (aka governments). I have a real hard time seeing that as anything but begging to have your ass handed to you on a fucking plate.

Apparently, the founder/operator of Wikileaks spends a significant amount of resources to keep his location and personage secret, because revealing the secrets of organizations that routinely steal, imprison, and murder is very dangerous business.

I can’t honestly lend my support to people who spend massive amounts of energy charging headlong into the oblivion of the state, which is how Wikileaks comes across to me.

I came up with this quip a couple days ago that has set some people off:

It’s hard to see how Wikileaks matters if you’re afraid to expose your own family’s secrets.

For me, this is coming out of uncovering some pretty heavy duty secrets in my own history and within myself… and exposing those secrets takes real courage, because those things are going to change real things within my own life.

If I spent time reading Wikileaks, it wouldn’t change a damn thing.

I realize this is a little disjointed–it’s late and I really ought to be sleeping anyway… but I just have one last thing to point out about Wikileaks (kind of an argument):

When it comes to arguing against the government, the argument from morality is entirely sufficient. If you are debating with somebody who will not agree that initiating violence against others is immoral, no amount of evidence will change their mind, and if they agree to it, evidence may be helpful but still not necessary to close the case that government is immoral.

As it happens, however, we are practically drowning in evidence that the government is immoral from the hundreds of millions of lives destroyed in wars to the millions incarcerated in a horribly violent prison system, from entire economies being destroyed to the futures of the unborn being sold off to the highest bidder… the amount of objective evidence that the governments themselves admit to is absolutely staggering! The exact numbers may never be known but no sane person will contravene this evidence.

Wikileaks is, to my mind, a particularly weak form of evidence. I’m not sure how you can fully reliably verify these leaked documents, especially since they take on electronic form (please note that I am not saying that I believe they are forgeries, but that the possibility is quite high). Also, you’re dealing with government documents, so you’re automatically in crazy-land. Furthermore, leaking secrets is an age-old political tactic that is used to attack one’s opponents.

Wikileaks may help some people shake off the shrouds of indoctrination, which is great for them… but real change does not start there.

Real change starts when you make changes to your actions in your personal life. Going to therapy, getting good relationships, working to know yourself, acting with courage, being honest with yourself, acting in ways that evoke self-pride… these are the things that matter.

There is sadness for the countless GLBT people out there who must hide their identity for fear of punishment by others.

There is anger towards those who drive certain poor souls to suicide.

There is annoyance about there being a “day” for something like this. It seems that every cause has to have a “day,” and I recognize the need for people to change their minds about this… but whose mind has ever been changed by a day of observance?

You know how this all will change?

Reject bigotry in others.

Don’t associate with people who nurture those intolerances.

If you care about your relationship with them, then challenge them, try to help them if you can, but also remember that life is short and bigotry is not a position to be argued out of.

It is a sign of deep damage, an irrationality lodged deep within their history that only a lot of hard work on their part can dislodge.

The alcoholic all too often doesn’t stop until he hits rock bottom… so too must go the way of the bigot.

Show some compassion by having the courage to face up to the rotten people in your life.

Looking for a therapist is a difficult thing. You’re looking for somebody that you can build a trust relationship with that can help you with your most difficult struggles, your most embedded thoughts, and your deepest feelings.

Knowing who to trust is really difficult if you have a history of being subject to untrustworthy people and have not been taught how to deal with such individuals.

One of the things I have noticed with some people on my facebook friends list is that they give Reasons X/Y/Z why they do not start looking for a therapist, and then say that self-therapy is the way to go.

For me, there is a considerable gap in their credibility.

The gap comes from a combination of my own experience with therapy and what I’ve observed about these people.

Throughout my adult life, I have spent considerable time and resources in therapy, looking for the right combination. All told, I have seen 6 therapists prior to finding my current therapist. They weren’t all entirely bad, but they were all more or less not very helpful in my goal of seeking healing and self-knowledge. The first 3 were sought out in my 20s and I ended up spending a lot more time and money with them before figuring out that they were not helping me (my family was also a tremendous impediment to self-knowledge). For the latter 3, I had access to FDR and was able to spend less time and resources on them because I had been doing some work on my own and had gained a little in the way of self-knowledge… but I still needed a good therapist, even after two and a half years of being around FDR.

From my own experience in therapy (almost at 10 months as of the time of this writing), I have experienced tremendous growth and am incredibly more relaxed and free to pursue my own life goals with the burdens of history lightened or removed. The depth of the work I am doing with my therapist, and the degree to which she is able to help me maintain presence in the sessions, is something that I just know I could never do on my own… and the main reason I know this is because I had not done this on my own.

Don’t believe my own self-reporting on my level of relaxation–ask my friends if I’m a better person to spend time around.

I believe that self-therapy ought to be a backup strategy if a professional therapist is not available… and by “not available,” I mean that you would be choosing between food and therapy, or you’re living in a country where finding a therapist in your native language is impossible, or some other extremity not covered here.

I also have absolutely no respect for the position that all therapists are corrupt, because this is simply not true. Either you have to explain how several people at FDR and elsewhere have found good therapists that they have found invaluable, or you have to admit that your standard of freedom from corruption is impossibly high.

Now, perhaps most therapists are corrupt… and this may well be true. Certainly the fact that I have spent significant time with 7 therapists throughout my adult life is a strong indicator of this fact, but I would hesitate to apply “corrupt” to every single one of them.

It so happens that I agree with Daniel Mackler on the point that many (if not most) therapists have unresolved issues from their own histories, but this is far from a reason to not seek out a therapist. I experienced this with 2 of the last 3 therapists that I saw prior to this one, and while it sucked, I got back on the horse eventually and found a good one.

Regarding religion and politics, the best therapist is one for which these things don’t matter. I don’t know what my therapist believes or how she votes (though I can take some educated guesses on these points), but the moral principles within the session are universal, logic and empiricism rule the day, and the art of the relationship is entirely open for exploration and discovery.

Be on the watch for absolute language which condemns everyone.

My particular absolutism was that any therapist I went to would reject me out of hand. The result of this was that I rejected all therapists out-of-hand… putting the onus on others for something I am doing myself is projection.

This is still something I struggle with, but I bring it up with my therapist, because it is a part of me that is self-rejecting, or is rejecting another part of me.

To sum up, my opinion on self-therapy is that it is a backup strategy to be employed if you are in an extremity where there are simply no other options. It is not to be relied upon as a primary strategy if you have not already spent time in therapy.

The effectiveness of self-therapy is severely limited until you have gained enough self-knowledge.

They show a family eating hot dogs.

“Remember the meal”?

Hot dogs?

Really?

Regarding the stain, I can see why people wouldn’t want to remember stains! After all, if my experience with stains, marks, and accidents is any indication of what most people experience, the experience of creating a stain is itself a stain. It’s always negative, full of reproach and hostility, sometimes even violence.

However, there is another way to look upon stains. In one of his recent podcasts (I think it was a parenting podcast), Stef talks about a coffee stain on the carpet. But when he sees it, he doesn’t see a stain because that was made the night he and his wife brought their daughter home from the hospital for the first time. He sees that night, with all of the joys and challenges it evokes, and the memory of his daughter at that time.

Having that sort of perspective does take a lot of self-work in order to understand your experience of stains and–if necessary or possible–surpass that experience.

But of course, it’s not required–nothing is.

I agree to your point about the customer. But the other side is missing too much for my taste: Google is only attractive to advertisers if it pleases a lot of people – and if they are outraged about their privacy, it will have an effect in their desired direction. Most of the time this will not be the conscious rationale, because people are not self-knowledgeable to this degree. And that is certainly most important: If you get worked up on something, find out what it is really. It is most often not what you first think it is.

My reply:

I did think about Google’s actions pissing off their advertiser’s targets, but opted to not mention it because I was mostly speaking to the people who (to the best of my knowledge) were experiencing rage “second-hand”.

My opinion about target audience attractiveness is that I don’t believe that Google Buzz will turn enough people off to Google for it to make a difference. In fact, it will tend to weed out people who weren’t very good targets for the kinds of advertisers that Google wants to attract.

I would put forward that Google made this calculation prior to releasing Buzz. The reason I believe this is because Google did not immediately retract Buzz when news of trauma victims came out, which was pretty much immediately after it was released.

In witnessing the very strong emotions that were circling Buzz, I found it difficult to feel the same way. It’s certainly not the case that I have difficulty feeling anger (or even rage), but something about it all seemed “off” to me.

I could understand individuals who were reconnected with dangerous people from their past feeling a great deal of anger–or even rage–but I could not quite understand the level of anger from people who were not affected as directly.

After thinking about this for a couple days, I came across an idea that made a lot of sense, and I would be open to feedback around it as well.

You are not Google’s customer

Google is primarily a deliverer of advertisements (to the tune of 97% of their revenue).

You, as a gmail user, are the target of those advertisements… but you are not the customer.

Google does not have to please you–they have to please the people who pay them money.

There is no reason that this wouldn’t occur to the vast majority of people as we live in a society where “free” is all too often not to be questioned.

However, as we can see, with Google Buzz… “free” in terms of dollars and cents does not mean there is no cost.

I’m not saying it’s evil or wrong to use Google, or even that what they’re doing is evil or wrong. However, I think it’s important–especially those of us who strive for self-awareness–to be empirical and rational, as much as we can.

If you opt to use a service that isn’t charging you any money, then you very likely have little to no guarantee as to your privacy. Email is certainly valuable, and that service is providing that value in order to get something out of you.

Knowing what that something is will help you make an informed decision as to whether you ought to be using it.

Using Google’s services is completely voluntary. There is nobody holding a gun to your head, requiring you to use their email, or online applications, or web browser. However, just be aware that these things are presently for the benefit of Google’s advertisers, not yours.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with that–it’s just a fact to keep in mind as you walk through life.

I had heard a few good things about 9, and one of the things that intrigued me was the parallels to the Mecosystem.

Basically, the movie is about an apocalypse between humans and machines, and the last traces of living humanity are captured in a set of 9 ragdolls, created by the scientist who created the original machine that declared war on humans.

There are definitely some interesting parallels to the unconscious and the Mecosystem. However, I had a hard time seeing the distinctions between most of the numbered characters. Even the title character, 9, did not stand out particularly well, as he was rather similar to 2 (who got “killed” pretty early on).

The great machine-brain (GMB) bothers me somewhat. It took me some thought to figure out that GMB most closely resembles an automatic unconscious process that has been left in place by a heavily scarred and violent history, and that 9′s curiosity “provokes” it into a rage, though of course its rage has nothing to do with 9 in particular. That, plus the one comment made by some character to the effect of, “it’s not fair that we should have to clean up the mess left by those before us,” resonates with a feeling that I would wager that just about everybody has when they start to dig into self-knowledge… but I never really got a sense of why 9 was so driven to defeat the machine, as opposed to running away.

The parallel to GMB in our lives is never truly defeated, and is actually another character in its own right in the Mecosystem. I could be wrong about this, but there isn’t a character that is just Pure Rage that must be either disabled or destroyed in the personality (with the exception of those for whom self-knowledge at any depth is impossible).

GMB is also placed at complete odds with the soul, and though it was originally seeded with the creator’s intellect, it was “corrupted” and “lacked a soul,” which is the explanation given as to why it was so turned towards evil.

On the whole, I’m not exactly sure why I am disappointed. I think I was expecting more subtlety and perhaps more internal conflict. The conflict that was there was fairly one-sided, with 1 pretty much providing all of the conflict through his “rules”, and 9 refusing to listen to 1.

There wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue between the numbered characters that wasn’t directly relevant to the action or plot. I think I would have liked to have seen some kind of negotiation take place among the numbers, instead of one number being a hero, then another number being another hero… etc.

Lastly, the conflict between “humans and technology” is just plain old hat, and incredibly inaccurate. The conflict isn’t between biology and machinery, the conflict is between those who inflict violence on others and those who do not.

I do realize that the above is quite a lot to expect of a movie nowadays, and that staging a negotiation is quite difficult and probably would not appeal to a mass audience.

Technically speaking, the visuals were stunning, and the voice acting was rather enjoyable, but unless I missed something, I don’t think I’d want to see this movie again.

He was pretty clearly intending to cross the street, but I figured it was probably going to be pretty difficult as there aren’t any aural indicators that it is OK to cross, so I made a loop around the median and pulled back up to the intersection, parked my car, and asked if he’d like a hand.

As we crossed, he commented that he was just talking to somebody on the phone about “good people” in the world, saying that there don’t seem to be too many.

A part of me wanted to say that there are more good people in the world than it seems, but I didn’t… and in retrospect, I think that was right, because the blind guy is going to have experienced a lot more about just how good people generally are, because his disability puts him in a position of vulnerability that the majority of us just take for granted.

I don’t recount this to pat myself on the back or anything, though I do feel proud that I stopped to help out. What struck me about this guy, and what I felt somewhat sad about, is that we do live in a world where somebody taking the time out of their day to help somebody out is considered a novelty.

So let’s make some more good people… we have our work cut out for us!