It's not hard being cynical when after being judged by others your whole life, it is now your turn to judge

 

It seems the older I get the more cynical I get; I suppose it is because I have nothing to lose but my life, and my existence doesn’t mean much to anyone—admittedly mostly by nature and by choice. Of course things were different when I was (a lot) younger, and there was a time when people didn’t feel like they had to walk around on eggshells all the time; instead, today you must beware of certain people who don’t just break eggshells, they stomp on them until they are crushed into tiny little bits—and they are applauded for it if it falls in line with a certain "narrative" or agenda.

But those people, I don’t care what they think, just what they do, and what they do is emblematic of the hypocrisies of our times. The Johnny Depp case truly brought this into laser-sharp focus for me, since it doesn’t matter what an evil individual Amber Heard is, she will always have her defenders who don’t think what she did is important, but only what she “thought.”

A lot of people are scared of being “canceled” in their own little worlds, but in my “world” what I “think” doesn’t matter, only what I do, and generally no one is around to see what I do anyways. Thus I am perfectly free to call things as them as I see them; I suppose that some of my views would get me “canceled” if I wasn’t just a microscopic plankton cell in the ocean, but then I again I am not afraid of standing my ground if someone accidentally finds me. If someone came up to me and presented all the "irrefutable evidence" supporting Heard’s claims, I would just say “bring it on,” because in previous posts on the case I have exhaustively analyzed the “evidence,” and can only shake my head about how blind people can be when they don’t want to see.

 My cynical idea about human nature probably started before those white kids held me on the ground stuffing grass in my mouth because people who “looked” like me were just “animals.” The closest “relationship” I have had with another human being was with my mother, and my overriding desire was to be as far away from her as possible, which of course wasn’t an option when I was kid. Not that there wasn’t a “backstory”: I was to “blame” for her life trajectory not going according to the original “plan.” I had to be “perfect” to justify my existence, and I wasn’t “perfect,” and it didn’t help that I came out as a “blue baby” and the effect it had on my early development.  

Still, you would have thought a mother would be more “caring.” Instead, I grew-up in a constant state of fear and dread, which caused me to do some regrettable things and question my psychological state. I recall after a visit to a psychiatrist, Dad suggested following his advice; Mother, probably unhappy by my response despite her glaring when asked if she ever hit me, merely responded that the psychiatrist was the one who was “crazy.”  

I wonder what a psychiatrist would have said about a visit I had to a barber shop.  Mother decided that my hair wasn't being cut short enough, so one day she accompanied me to the barber shop. She pulled up a chair in front of me and watched as the barber cut; when he stopped at the usual length my mother told him to cut more, and he would cut off a little more. But she wasn't satisfied; the barber could see I was becoming more and more distressed, but for every little bit he snipped, she only took a maniacal glee in telling him to cut more, more, more until I had a Marine cut.

So life when as it normally did; even when I was at school, always in the back of my mind was “What did I do now?” It’s not that I never “did” anything. I wasn’t allowed to have “things” like books or food, so if I had, say, a book, I hid it; but it was just a matter of time when Mother found whatever it was she was looking for and was waiting for me.

I managed to survive despite living in constant fear because there was one thing my mother had no control over, and that was an instinctive desire to just stay away from any human contact that might be painful, which in turn required avoiding  commitment to the feelings of another. Again, it wasn’t “hard” to do, because my parents didn’t like living around the people who “looked” like me, so there was no one to commiserate with, and the white people I went to school with were no better than “friendly” if they were in the mood to be, but not “friends”; there is a big difference between the two.  Excluded from one world, the world I felt safe in was the one I fantasized about from the history books I read, conquering territory where my “subjects” would be the local fauna. Of course others thought my real “calling” was to be dead or in jail.

My life trajectory changed when I enlisted in the Army, but it didn’t change me at all—I remember one colleague joking that I was “everybody’s friend” with a ton or so of irony. What the Army did do for me was completely free myself of a constant state of apprehension and learn what it meant to live a “normal” life. When I left the service to go to college, that alone which I’m sure was a “shock” to some people who “knew” me, but I no longer cared how people judged me—it was my turn to “judge” them now.  Given my childhood, females were certainly not immune from my judging—especially those I encounter in a superstars-in-their-own-minds place like Seattle, where hypocrisy is right next door to bullshit. And I did I say I didn’t care?

So, we live in a world where we can certainly say without much opposition that this so-called “dam” in Libya…

 

 

…was only waiting for the proper time to end-up like this…

 

 

…releasing floodwaters that killed at least 5,000 people. There is not much debate about who is to blame and why. But unfortunately we live in a world governed by the vagaries of human nature which can seem like a busted dam flooding over everything sensible, where “hurt feelings” are enough for some people who are just too self-involved and desirous of harming other people without fear of consequence. Republicans, for example, no longer concern themselves about avoiding the appearance of racism and corruption, they just act like they are racist and wallow like pigs in a pigsty of corruption.

In Texas, the state senate just “acquitted” in a farce of an impeachment trial probably the most corrupt attorney general in the state’s history, after super PACS donated campaign funding with a little “wink-wink” you know what we want you do about this Paxton “problem.” Meanwhile, in the worst gerrymandered state in the country, Wisconsin, Republicans have turned a once proudly progressive state into one of the most backward, threatening to cut higher education funding unless diversity programs are abolished.

But discussions about politics doesn’t rise to the same level of hypocrisy as those on a more “personal” level, especially for women more so than blacks.  That is where it helps to be someone who lives, works and plays alone where you can look things straight in the eye and not fear someone is going to “cancel” you, because there is nothing to “cancel.” I remember someone once telling me I was not “chivalrous”; I guess that is one way of saying that I don’t let “politics” get in the way of the facts. Are those prostitutes operating on Aurora Avenue North “victims,” like the two I encountered? Do they even think they are themselves? Most of them probably don’t, if a security guard on Reddit who says he converses with them is to be believed; the money is “good” whether for living expenses or paying for drug habits.

Meanwhile, accusers are coming out of the woodwork even after the Depp verdict was supposed to have a “chilling effect” on accusers. If anything, the “chilling effect” continues to be the silencing of the accused. If gender activists want to take down a "powerful" man, look for women in their past who are willing to do their part for the "cause" and be accusers, because that is all that is required--because, you know, women never lie, even when they do because just having a  "feeling" is, at least, "true."

Most of the accused don’t have the money to pay for the best representation, as Depp did, and they are at the mercy of a mainstream media that is firmly on the side of women at any and all cost. They don’t care if there is a possibility that some of the accusers are lying or fabricating stories; but some people do care, and I for one know about the lies (like the how I got those welts around my neck story) are told because the consequences of telling the truth may only bring more “punishment.”

The Russell Brand story has been gaining some traction because of a “documentary” with four women accusing him of various abuses, such as not wearing a condom; like we saw from Heard in the trial, the “grosser” the story, the more “believable” it is supposed to be. Brand by his own estimates must have had sex with thousands of women, yet the makers of documentary only came up with four accusers (less those who were approached but didn’t have any “dirt” to divulge).

It seems that the documentary was aired by the British network before it investigated the veracity of the claims first, but what was the mainstream’s media’s response to that? To demand a “real” investigation of Brand instead of those who released a documentary of unsubstantiated accusations. And of course the “timing” of this is suspect, since Brand has been spouting “politically incorrect” commentary that needs to be “silenced.” and the fact that few people are being swayed by the MSM’s attempt to rehabilitate  the public perception of Heard from something other than a liar and domestic abuser, which apparently predated her relationship with Depp.

TUG called to our attention on his “X” page the Alice Sebold story. Earlier this year New York’s attorney general approved an award of $5.5 million to a black man named Anthony Broadwater, who served his entire sentence before his release from prison in 1999 after being refused parole multiple times for refusing to admit that he raped Sebold when she was a student at Syracuse University in 1981. Sebold claimed that she was brutally raped and beaten bloody by a black man, or at least that is her story, since the “beaten bloody” part wasn’t in the police report.

Sebold couldn’t precisely say what the man looked like other than that he was “black,” but one day she claims that she was walking near the campus when she encountered a black man who she didn’t like the way he “looked” at her, and she decided he was her “rapist.”

Oh, it gets “better”—or worse, depending on your point of view. I have mine and I don’t care who knows it. The man turned out to be Broadwater, who worked as a handyman. He was arrested and put in a police line-up where Sebold picked out a different man as her “rapist.” She was then informed of this and became convinced that she picked the wrong man because they all “look alike.” During the trial Broadwater was convicted based on Sebold’s testimony and a microscopic hair sample that was later found by the Justice Department to be “junk science,” worthless as evidence.

Broadwater remained on the sex offender list after his release, and was basically living at street level until Timothy Mucciante, who was the executive producer of the a film adaptation of the case from Sebold’s “memoir” Lucky, discovered serious discrepancies with Sebold’s account of the trial, and after he was fired for noting such and not wanting put any more money into the project, he hired a private detective to look into the case. It all ended when 2021 Broadwater was exonerated of the crime; he had always insisted on his innocence.

Meanwhile, in this MeToo and gender-victim obsessed country, Sebold got rich off her “story.”  She didn’t turn out to be much of a writer, but she didn’t need to be. She authored The Lovely Bones, which sold millions and made millions more for her from a film adaptation. Most critics praised both the novel and the film; however, one critic of the book, Edward Helmore for The Guardian, noted after the Broadwater’s exoneration that in his original review

I had a fundamental objection to it. I just didn’t believe it. Although a work of fiction is not true or false in the usual sense, there is no doubt that a novel can be entirely made-up, and yet fundamentally true. I didn’t believe a single word that The Lovely Bones said about human beings. I said, rather briskly, that 14-year-old girls were not like that; that Sebold thought people were defined by race (“Indian, and therefore mystic”) in absurd and damaging ways; that the novel went straight to courting emotion without troubling to be truthful.

He was suggesting that Sebold had a little bit of that racial stereotyping in her. So did Lorraine Berry in the Los Angeles Times, who while not questioning her story, did suggest that Sebold was being disingenuous in asserting she wasn’t “aware” that racial justice was an issue in 1981 when she accused and helped convict the “wrong” black man. People noted her “apology” to Broadwater was “passive” and self-serving, as if she was passing the blame to others instead of herself as the only witness against him.

Sebold didn’t seem to realize that this case wasn’t just about herself, but about race in this country, especially white women accusing black men and that ugly history. Lucky was pulled from shelves to be “revised,” although it isn’t clear that has been done yet. What is clear that this is proof that being white is the “thing” in this country, whether you are male—or especially female, where being “questioned” isn’t an “option”—unless, of course, the evidence is just too great for social media to ignore.

So that is where I am at. I am far too cynical at this point not to question what I see and what I am told. I just sit here by myself, with the only people I encounter on the street who want to “talk” are bums asking for money or junkies asking me if I have any drugs to sell. Of “normal” people, if I am of any consequence to them it is fear that I might break into their cars when not just seeing some “Mexican” who is probably “illegal.” Like I said, I have a right to “judge” others, because they have put that “right” in my hands on a silver platter.