When a blackout hits the city, a blind man can give you some excellent advice.
When I was getting my disability my forensic psychiatrist told me that if he had not seen my Federal records, he would have sworn, as a professional, that I could not have done the things I was on record as doing.
I pointed out to him that the records were only part of it, a lot of it had not been declassified yet. I did not add that much of it never would be.
The point here is not me but you.
I am your blind man in a blackout.
I didn’t know I was handicapped. But all my life I have had to really develop abilities and observations to make up for what I couldn’t do, just as a blind man develops skills that seem almost superhuman, but are actually just concentrating hard on developing and using his other senses.
I have only known this since I was judged disabled, so my observations about THAT are recent.
The result is that I am almost unbelievably bad on a lot of things, but what I am good on, I am REALLY good at.
But it’s not all good. All my life people have been seen me do complicated things, and then lose their tempers when I couldn’t do simple things, like remembering. All through my childhood and into middle age, I had people roaring at me.
But it occurs to me that this has another side to it. You have seen me lose my temper here and apologize for it. Only today did I realize that that tendency is exactly the same one that caused people to lose their tempers with me.
You see, a normal person, if there is such a thing, loses his temper if a person functioning at a high level like me forgets something for the fourth time, and causes enormous inconvenience.
On the other hand, I have the same impatience with a lot of things that seem obvious to me but are really special Insights and skills that I developed to make up for my disabilities.
To understand this, think of following a blind man in a blackout. Compared to him you would be a bumbling fool. It is quite conceivable that he would lose his temper: “For God’s sake, man, do you have to knock every damned thing over?”
This gives me an intolerance of the lack of insight of other people, but the insight is the kind I would not have if I had not HAD to develop my abilities in the areas where I presume to give YOU advice.
I think this insight can be useful to anybody. My case is not unique, it is just a more extreme case of what everybody faces. You have strengths and weaknesses that are not at my level of actual clinical disability, but they are there.
Once again the reason I notice this is because it is so extreme in my case. But because of this I can give you some good advice.
You have disabilities you wish other people would understand better. But you have therefore developed strengths in other areas to make up for it.
The result is that you get a lot of pointless bullying when you screw up AGAIN. But another side of this is that you don’t do a lot of pointless bullying, as I do, when someone is in one of your strong areas and seems like a damned fool to you.
Most important, though, is the part of that bullying that you get from YOU.
I spent most of my life kicking MYSELF for forgetting something AGAIN. All of the vicious and agonizing treatment I received from others unfairly was less than what Old Bob did to Old Bob.
A German philosopher once said that if we criticized others the way we go after ourselves we would be classified as sadists.
Give others a break.
The best practice for this is to start by giving YOURSELF a break.
#1 by Epiphany on 11/17/2011 - 7:32 am
The cities will be abandoned to the Blacks and the Hispanics, who, will not get along with each other too well!
#2 by Epiphany on 11/17/2011 - 8:18 am
Perhaps, we should advise Whites NOT to go to College at all, and begin to see if they can teach themselves things. All one gets in college is Egalitarian Brainwashing!
Another important thing for our people is to encourage Home Schooling!
#3 by Gar5 on 11/17/2011 - 9:31 am
We beat ourselves up because we want to succeed in doing something.
If did this too much we’d sap our self-confidence, and if we did this too little we’d underachieve.
So then, we must sweat the big mistakes and laugh about the little ones. Granted that we LEARN from them.
#4 by Genseric on 11/17/2011 - 10:25 am
Many hard-working, blue collar Whites (and Whites in general) are hard on people. As you say, they are hard on others because they constantly beat themselves up much worse than anyone could ever imagine.
I wonder if the [White] western world would have all the niceties it does if it weren’t for this seemingly genetically-inherent quality? If everyone gave each other a break all the time, would we have landed on the moon, achieved all the hard work and developed all the innovation and inventions our race has achieved?
Some might think your disabilities spurred your spidey-like senses to be tingly ALL the time. And that you are cursed in a certain sense. I maintain that it is more of a blessing, a gift, to embody the pinnacle of the spirit we all hold inside us. The spirit we either choose to embrace or ignore as a people.
While it is important to give others some down time from criticism and outbursts, we must remember that BUGS wouldn’t be what it is WITHOUT that highly critical input.
Keep up the absolutely STELLAR work, Bob. You are simply out of this World. I’ll never hold it against you.
Thank you for everything.
#5 by Genseric on 11/17/2011 - 10:43 am
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#6 by Coniglio Bianco on 11/18/2011 - 1:06 am
Your code isn’t encrypted.
#7 by Dave on 11/17/2011 - 11:18 am
The underlying issue regards what tethers each of us to reality.
For example, I once knew a guy who got trapped in mean third world country, he was made a prisoner, then spent six years as a prisoner, and then almost died of hunger and exposure in prison (spending months in the hospital to recover) after he was finally rescued.
But he was just a happy-go-lucky guy with some bad luck in his past because he had no education and he was just trying to make money in a stupid way. He was this rock hard muscled guy who carried his cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of his tee shirt and he looked dangerous, but he always resisted when we tried to egg him into fist fights.
He could not comprehend the idea of “fair” and “unfair”. He never participated in our bitching and whining. After a while I realized that he could not comprehend bitching and whining. It was not that he had an attitude, he just didn’t get it. He couldn’t process it. I realized that all those years he spent in prison mashed the whole idea of bitching and whining out of him to the point he could no longer even process the feelings associated with bitching and whining.
This guy got whupped into reality. He got mashed into reality because he took too many beatings on a no choice basis and somehow it made him cross an invisible boundary where he began to see things clearer than other people. The guy had no education. He wasn’t able to articulate anything, yet he saw clearer.
Robert Whitaker isn’t like this guy, but the same principle applies. Something has to force you into a closer relationship to reality than other people.
Somebody compared Robert Whitaker to Bruno Latour, the famous French sociologist. But he got Robert Whitaker wrong. I had guys like Latour pegged even when I was a freshman in college. Underlying, they are tricksters, like so many famous artists. What they do is take somebody else’s ideas and articulate them differently in a stylish and impressive way, making them accessible from a different angle. In Latour’s case it is the ideas of Thomas Kuhn. Latour just grabbed those ideas and made a career out them. He is an academic huckster.
Robert Whitaker is not like that at all. Robert Whitaker is a real outlier in the world of intellectuals. He is an old timer in the Southern tradition and he is a survivor who is heroically attempting to rescue that tradition from the academic corruption that wants to obliterate it.
There are no inconsistencies in Robert Whitaker’s thought. I look and I look for errors in logic and there aren’t any. His observations are multifaceted and highly textured and organized in a flawless consistency that is the product of his own authentic and original mind.
This is called “the real deal” when it comes to intellectuals and there are darn few of them in any era or generation. Robert Whitaker is very tolerant of his students, but real intellectuals are always like that because they are tethered to the world as it is.
#8 by Frank on 11/18/2011 - 1:46 am
Dave;
When were you a college freshman, and what did you read of Bruno Latour at that time which enabled you to “have him pegged”? How does “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” lead into what Latour discovered in “Science in Action” and “Pasteurization of France”.
Sounds like “wordism” to ask the above, right? Perhaps Kuhn was also just a wordist?
Perhaps we don’t so much speak words/grammar as words/grammar speak us?
I recall making a comment regarding Latour in this space, but don’t recall comparing Bob to Latour. I was making a statement about how Latour saw networks of actants come into being and gaining power by their use of words to gather allies and also destabilize the networks of enemies.
Sounds an awful like what Horus calls “Full Spectrum Practical Politics”, no?
Outside of the words you put in my mouth, there was no “comparison” of Latour and Bob … but rather fascination with how well Latour’s thinking about network formation meshed with using talking points as nodes for our own “work” in practical politics. Latour may be “classified” as a sociologist, but what he DOES is nothing less than lay out game plans for practical politics, albeit in a different manner than usually encountered.
#9 by shari on 11/17/2011 - 11:45 am
It’s a hard “learning experience” to judge both yourself and others in a reasonable way. It’s a double bind if you are tied up in pc wordism. Don’t say this word and don’t say that word. Don’t ask the wrong questions.
#10 by James C on 11/17/2011 - 12:59 pm
If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitaker’s disability, I doubt there’d be a BUGS today.
Many fine, brilliant men have failed utterly to stop the “progressive” disease that has been destroying us.
If you weren’t who you are, you wouldn’t be who you are, and then who’d have created the Mantra?
#11 by Scythian on 11/17/2011 - 4:14 pm
I know Bob has written about his disabilities before, which made me think some time ago that a genius figures out things that no one else does, and can’t figure some things that everyone else does. Ahh, if only I were more disabled, I could do so much more for my people; you know, the ones not eligable for “affirmative action”.
I recently saw this young teenage girl in a book store who seemed quite odd, but I instantly got this overwhelming impression that she was very smart, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Sure enough, she and the woman she was with sat down at a table next to me, and after a time I realized the young girl was blind.
It made me think later of a TV program I think I saw of a young teenage boy who was “cured” of blindness. The young boy spoke and looked a bit horrified and upset that he had been “cured”. His mother was crying at the trauma they had inflicted on her son who’d spent a lifetime blind. I imagine one who spends a lifetime blind envisions the earthly world alot more beautiful than it actually is? Maybe Jesus went to the blind man and whispered in his ear ‘don’t worry about it, your world is more beautiful than what the rest of us see’? To which the blind jumped for joy and said ‘ya see!, I knew the sheeple were telling me abunch a bullshit!’
#12 by Harumphty Dumpty on 11/17/2011 - 11:10 pm
I think I’ll just say that I feel so very pleased to be among such fine company as I find on this site, and to be under the guidance of such an exceptional man as Bob Whitaker!
Well, I guess I do have one question. Genseric, what are all those numbers about?? Lol! I’m almost afraid to ask! 🙂