1. Though I don't believe in the supernatural, ghost stories scare the hell out of me at night. There's an attraction/terror. I tease myself with them, then get scared and angry that I scared myself. What's underneath this? What am I truly afraid of? I don't know.
I have similar fears of ghosts. I sometimes can only sleep with my head under a blanket and of course I cannot have my foot stick out. I think it is the fear of loss of control. The fear of a power that cannot be contained. When I -- as a foreign student -- lived in South Africa in Cape Town one stormy night, I was sad, depressed, cried a lot because I was lonely, and drank too much, There was a storm outside and rain was just hitting my windows hard, the old frames of this old converted motel (now an official apartment complex) shook... and I heard banging and knocks and could not tell which door was affected. Eventually, my gay neighbor Brian and then best friend called my phone (we had phones still connected like during the motel times) and asked if I was ok. He heard the same banging on doors (his door) and when he got up, he claimed there was a dead woman hanging in his hallway (a ghost) and he thought at first it must be because of me. I told him I was ok. But this story still scares me.
On the other topic. Yes, this is what I find often a dishonest conversation. It is a form of whataboutism. It is minimizing and dismissing of concerns. It is hedging, because you do not want to lose followers and appear reasonable. In times like this, it never leads to a conversation in good faith.
Regarding your first point, I'm in roughly the same boat. Rationally, I don't believe in the supernatural, but I have the same neural circuitry as other humans, and my supernatural fear circuit can get tripped under the right circumstances, and then my notions of rationality provide no effective defense.
I've made four trips to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies, and in that context, my materialist reality tunnel melts into irrelevance. When you're in the jungle, an hour's walk from the river and a couple of hours' boat ride from the city, with the shaman singing his icaros and the sounds of the rain forest enveloping you as the ayahuasca teases your mind and torments your guts, the idea that spirits don't exist is simply laughable and clearly contrary to experience.
Anyway, I don't want my supernatural terror response triggered, so I don't feed it. I avoid most supernatural horror media. Movies and TV shows are bad enough, but video games are the worst. The only supernatural stuff I'll take in is Cosmic Horror like Annihilation or The Void.
1) What are your favorite (or, I guess, unfavorite?) ghost stories?
Are you talking mostly about books/stories or movies? In college, I remember reading a Henry James story called “The Jolly Corner” which (in my memory) is as much about our fascination with ghosts as it is about ghosts.
I’m trying to think of my favorite ghostly movies (comedy/romance aside). The Changeling? The Others? Stir of Echoes, maybe. The original Candyman. Kwaidan, Ugetsu, Kuroneko, Rashomon. And the Shining, of course (the book and the first movie).
2) As far as the “both sides” thing goes:
It becomes more and more obvious to me, now that I’m not tribally “progressive,” how aggressively woke arguments depend on obvious (obvious!) falsehoods.
For instance, nobody who has actually read either Roe v Wade or Dobbs (tellingly, Roe v. Wade is confusing, pretentious, and blurry, while Dobbs is lucid, accessible, and persuasive) could believe that Roe was a sincere attempt to interpret or apply the Bill of Rights, or that Dobbs “bans abortion.” The reasoning of Dobbs has nothing to do with anyone’s religious beliefs.
The recent revision of American history, in which the founding fathers were uniquely and grubbily evil, is another example. An even better example is the invention of the “don’t say gay” bill; progressives just made something up from whole cloth, and everyone assents to the lie.
As far as I could tell, the entire progressive critique of Trump (who was so easy to honestly critique) was: he urinated on a prostitute, he has a strange penis, he’s sexually attracted to his daughter, and he answers to the President of Russia.
Then there are the seemingly universally accepted ideas that everyone is racist, that whites are awesomely privileged and powerful in 2022, that it’s a great time to be a man or a boy, that all men and boys are would-be rapists.
And finally, the idea that some essence of a person is born in “the right body” except in rare exceptions in which the physical body must be corrected or replaced: it’s as insane as any cult belief cherished by Scientologists, yet it’s now an article of faith among the educated elites who are our bulwark against the “chuds.”
So no, the other side is not always as bad—or bad in the same way.
I don’t think about ghosts much. But the loss I’ve felt the last year or so has been overwhelming. I’ve not lost friends or family…only bc I have very few friends and my family is very small and like-minded. But I’ve all but lost my career…which was one of my great loves. Seeing my colleagues turn on each other, on patients, has been awful. The way we once had conversations about cool things in medicine that, in THEORY, should work against a problem - those conversations are now potential misinformation. No one was ever going to put these theories in motion after one conversation, but the academic conversations that I loved are now gone. The colleagues I once found interesting and stimulating are now people around whom I must guard myself. It took me a long time to realize I was mourning this loss of tribe, of belonging. Because, now I simply do my job and keep to myself. It’s unbelievably isolating. You are not alone, yet…it feels so much just that.
I totally believe in the supernatural and had several experiences as a kid. Children are wide open to “the other side”. I’ll never forget going home after my brother died at 23. I was well into adulthood. A mom. I lay in his bed in my parents house asking him to visit me. I freaked myself out. So convinced he would actually materialize I then begged him not to. Not yet. I’m too scared. As if I had any say
I have to fast forward so many sections of films I stream to skip those parts! For a window into what an ex-wife of a man who thinks "he's a woman" experiences these days, consider reading my memoir, In the Curated Woods, by Ute Heggen. It's been reviewed at womenarehuman.com, 3 excerpts published there as well. When you find out your husband has that secret life which erases you, it's a real life horror show. Cluster B personalities are a horror show! And you're right, Josh, its a tsunami--I was told in the 1990s that the "transsexual" diagnosis was so rare. I didn't find it plausible then, and can't believe the trajectory its taken since. I bet my ex-husband, now COO of a tech company, is mad that he's just not so rare and special any more~Ute Heggen
I have a theory that people who have diametrically opposed conflicting viewpoints actually have a lot in common. How so? Take a belief in ghosts or siding with a right or left political position. I've never met a person who disliked the position he or she held on any subject. Arguments happen when one person says, "I disagree with your viewpoint and you should come over to mine." That person is asking the other to abandon the comfort zone of their position on ____________ (fill in the blank) and adopt a position that makes them very uncomfortable. This explains why nobody ever "wins" an argument on politics or religion because nobody wants to leave their comfort zone. I longer argue with anybody on anything because I know what I'm really asking the person to do and that's just unrealistic.
I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts but I do believe in the supernatural or paranormal or whatever we want to call things that are 100% outside of rational explanations. As for regular human beings accepting crazy human made ideas such as “I can’t define what a woman is,” I think it’s a mix. One part peer pressure, gotta go with the team. Another part mass hypnosis. And then there’s the part that’s just okay with or oblivious to lies piled upon lies… and somehow believes or says it believes this is good. So yeah, I go back to the supernatural and old time religion that tells me there’s a force that hates us and wants to spiritually destroy us. Yes, there are rational theories to explain human behavior but I think there’s something more and despite what my old time religion tells me it feels like this more thing is winning and that can and does feel crushing.
"3. I’m discovering I’m much more alone politically and morally than I thought."
I think a lot of us are now all discovering that we're not so alone in our supposed aloneness, because of our political and moral compasses. I consider myself right-wing. But I'm not a conservative. I do have some traditional views on relationships: I do the "womanly" things in the house, my other half does the "manly" things in the house. I don't care if other people want to contest what those two categories entail or to whom they should or should not be attributed; in reality we all know what "womanly" and "manly" duties are. We always have. I'm not a ''trad-wife" (I'm not a "wife" at all - I'm not religious so I have no desire to have a church sanctify my relationship and not being a fan of government intervention, neither do I wish to have my relationship with my other half certified by the state, so I'm technically single despite being in a 14 year long committed monogamous relationship) but I will always be on hand to make my man a sandwich, make sure he has clean clothes...and provide blow-jobs, lol.
I'm too rough around the edges to be a proper lady. But I'm definitely a woman. I don't believe that trans is a real thing but up until recently I was always of the mind that it was a respectful thing to refer to self-identifying transgender individuals by the name/pronoun they stipulated. Not because of any political reason, but because if I was interacting with someone like Rose of Dawn (with whom I appeared on a couple of political podcasts a couple of years ago) I simply thought of her as a woman and regarded her as one. I think because she is someone who a/ put the effort into looking as feminine as possible (I didn't even realise she was trans until the second time we were on a podcast together because we only had avatars on screen and her voice seemed to be the same as mine which is probably of a lower register for a female anyway) and b/ she never demanded anything when it came to how she was addressed...and she like Blaire White speaks out against all the awful nonsense being perpetrated by these trans-activists out there.
In current year however, I find myself in a very similar position to you Josh, when you appeared on the Mythcon stage alongside Blaire White. What previously would just have been a respectful interaction based on human decency, has now been bastardised by others into the demands for requirements in how we address people. I like you, do not take kindly to being summoned into action or given orders as to how I speak. I do not intend to speak untruths. I am not the type to be easily coerced into compliance. So I now have that same conundrum: in current climate where I am committed to remaining truthful, I must also be consistent, or else my principles are rendered null and void. I do not wish to upset or be rude to those people who I do not see as being activist-grifters. I do not wish to be a horrible person to those who do not deserve such mistreatment. But I also feel bound over to stick to my guns. It's a shitty conundrum for us to be in.
Some of my beliefs seem left-leaning, but when looked at through the 'Overton Window' these notions are now rooted on the right. Free speech has become the domain of the right. I guess I'm more libertarian than anything, with a desire for small government, a reduced social safety net, lower taxation, governmental power spread to smaller community units where those directly affected by legislation can actually have a real say in how it affects their lives.
I'll always be pro the legalization of marijuana - especially because I'd love the legal means to obtain it in order to alleviate my fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis. But I also think it's just something that doesn't need to be controlled by the government. That's not a conservative opinion, but it IS libertarian. I'm a weird mixture of wanting traditional values but also basic freedoms. I don't know exactly where my political home is, but I'm enjoying finding fellow travellers who are at least on a similar path to me, and occasionally frequent the same dodgy lodgings along the way.
Here's to us at least not getting tied up in any awkward Norman Bates motel moments along the way, and instead meeting up for some cocktails on the veranda at some old maid's colonial boarding houses in Savannah, GA instead. The Shirley Temples are me, y'all!
Josh, I hope things are good with you, that you have time out in the garden, and all. Gay men have a great deal to say now. When the (gay male) principal at my sons' school had a meeting with me, in which he quickly declared his orientation, but, as we were discussing my 9 year old's suicidal ideation (he said he wanted a gun, he wanted to jump off the roof, run in front of a car) which I felt was from his cross-sex ideating father, this principal made a big point about how he doesn't understand "being trans" any more than I do. At the time, the thought bubble above my head was, "right, because it's bunk." I wish the ex-wives like me had the agency to raise the alarm back in the 1990s, when the trans trend started its exponential leaps. We were called bigots, homophobes and, in my case, threatened with accusations that could cost us custody of the children. I am trying to be direct, honest and responsive. Who are these women you write about?
Sep 24, 2022·edited Sep 24, 2022Liked by Josh Slocum
For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
I'm sorry that's not much to give you and I'm sorry again if that sounds like I'm preaching at you (although that book was written by someone called "The Preacher").
I guess the only scrap of comfort that I can give you is the assurance that you are not the first to walk this path, so you are not alone. And that, as you are walking the path you are standing up and not curled into a ball begging for mercy.
Read this thread when you get a chance, Josh.
https://twitter.com/lone_rides/status/1540486553931218950?t=qxymjhD1_EJ1ciQQMWnWiQ&s=19
I have similar fears of ghosts. I sometimes can only sleep with my head under a blanket and of course I cannot have my foot stick out. I think it is the fear of loss of control. The fear of a power that cannot be contained. When I -- as a foreign student -- lived in South Africa in Cape Town one stormy night, I was sad, depressed, cried a lot because I was lonely, and drank too much, There was a storm outside and rain was just hitting my windows hard, the old frames of this old converted motel (now an official apartment complex) shook... and I heard banging and knocks and could not tell which door was affected. Eventually, my gay neighbor Brian and then best friend called my phone (we had phones still connected like during the motel times) and asked if I was ok. He heard the same banging on doors (his door) and when he got up, he claimed there was a dead woman hanging in his hallway (a ghost) and he thought at first it must be because of me. I told him I was ok. But this story still scares me.
On the other topic. Yes, this is what I find often a dishonest conversation. It is a form of whataboutism. It is minimizing and dismissing of concerns. It is hedging, because you do not want to lose followers and appear reasonable. In times like this, it never leads to a conversation in good faith.
Regarding your first point, I'm in roughly the same boat. Rationally, I don't believe in the supernatural, but I have the same neural circuitry as other humans, and my supernatural fear circuit can get tripped under the right circumstances, and then my notions of rationality provide no effective defense.
I've made four trips to the Peruvian Amazon to participate in Ayahuasca ceremonies, and in that context, my materialist reality tunnel melts into irrelevance. When you're in the jungle, an hour's walk from the river and a couple of hours' boat ride from the city, with the shaman singing his icaros and the sounds of the rain forest enveloping you as the ayahuasca teases your mind and torments your guts, the idea that spirits don't exist is simply laughable and clearly contrary to experience.
Anyway, I don't want my supernatural terror response triggered, so I don't feed it. I avoid most supernatural horror media. Movies and TV shows are bad enough, but video games are the worst. The only supernatural stuff I'll take in is Cosmic Horror like Annihilation or The Void.
1) What are your favorite (or, I guess, unfavorite?) ghost stories?
Are you talking mostly about books/stories or movies? In college, I remember reading a Henry James story called “The Jolly Corner” which (in my memory) is as much about our fascination with ghosts as it is about ghosts.
I’m trying to think of my favorite ghostly movies (comedy/romance aside). The Changeling? The Others? Stir of Echoes, maybe. The original Candyman. Kwaidan, Ugetsu, Kuroneko, Rashomon. And the Shining, of course (the book and the first movie).
2) As far as the “both sides” thing goes:
It becomes more and more obvious to me, now that I’m not tribally “progressive,” how aggressively woke arguments depend on obvious (obvious!) falsehoods.
For instance, nobody who has actually read either Roe v Wade or Dobbs (tellingly, Roe v. Wade is confusing, pretentious, and blurry, while Dobbs is lucid, accessible, and persuasive) could believe that Roe was a sincere attempt to interpret or apply the Bill of Rights, or that Dobbs “bans abortion.” The reasoning of Dobbs has nothing to do with anyone’s religious beliefs.
The recent revision of American history, in which the founding fathers were uniquely and grubbily evil, is another example. An even better example is the invention of the “don’t say gay” bill; progressives just made something up from whole cloth, and everyone assents to the lie.
As far as I could tell, the entire progressive critique of Trump (who was so easy to honestly critique) was: he urinated on a prostitute, he has a strange penis, he’s sexually attracted to his daughter, and he answers to the President of Russia.
Then there are the seemingly universally accepted ideas that everyone is racist, that whites are awesomely privileged and powerful in 2022, that it’s a great time to be a man or a boy, that all men and boys are would-be rapists.
And finally, the idea that some essence of a person is born in “the right body” except in rare exceptions in which the physical body must be corrected or replaced: it’s as insane as any cult belief cherished by Scientologists, yet it’s now an article of faith among the educated elites who are our bulwark against the “chuds.”
So no, the other side is not always as bad—or bad in the same way.
I don’t think about ghosts much. But the loss I’ve felt the last year or so has been overwhelming. I’ve not lost friends or family…only bc I have very few friends and my family is very small and like-minded. But I’ve all but lost my career…which was one of my great loves. Seeing my colleagues turn on each other, on patients, has been awful. The way we once had conversations about cool things in medicine that, in THEORY, should work against a problem - those conversations are now potential misinformation. No one was ever going to put these theories in motion after one conversation, but the academic conversations that I loved are now gone. The colleagues I once found interesting and stimulating are now people around whom I must guard myself. It took me a long time to realize I was mourning this loss of tribe, of belonging. Because, now I simply do my job and keep to myself. It’s unbelievably isolating. You are not alone, yet…it feels so much just that.
I also ask, because I wonder for myself: What WOULD be enough?
I totally believe in the supernatural and had several experiences as a kid. Children are wide open to “the other side”. I’ll never forget going home after my brother died at 23. I was well into adulthood. A mom. I lay in his bed in my parents house asking him to visit me. I freaked myself out. So convinced he would actually materialize I then begged him not to. Not yet. I’m too scared. As if I had any say
I have to fast forward so many sections of films I stream to skip those parts! For a window into what an ex-wife of a man who thinks "he's a woman" experiences these days, consider reading my memoir, In the Curated Woods, by Ute Heggen. It's been reviewed at womenarehuman.com, 3 excerpts published there as well. When you find out your husband has that secret life which erases you, it's a real life horror show. Cluster B personalities are a horror show! And you're right, Josh, its a tsunami--I was told in the 1990s that the "transsexual" diagnosis was so rare. I didn't find it plausible then, and can't believe the trajectory its taken since. I bet my ex-husband, now COO of a tech company, is mad that he's just not so rare and special any more~Ute Heggen
I have a theory that people who have diametrically opposed conflicting viewpoints actually have a lot in common. How so? Take a belief in ghosts or siding with a right or left political position. I've never met a person who disliked the position he or she held on any subject. Arguments happen when one person says, "I disagree with your viewpoint and you should come over to mine." That person is asking the other to abandon the comfort zone of their position on ____________ (fill in the blank) and adopt a position that makes them very uncomfortable. This explains why nobody ever "wins" an argument on politics or religion because nobody wants to leave their comfort zone. I longer argue with anybody on anything because I know what I'm really asking the person to do and that's just unrealistic.
I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts but I do believe in the supernatural or paranormal or whatever we want to call things that are 100% outside of rational explanations. As for regular human beings accepting crazy human made ideas such as “I can’t define what a woman is,” I think it’s a mix. One part peer pressure, gotta go with the team. Another part mass hypnosis. And then there’s the part that’s just okay with or oblivious to lies piled upon lies… and somehow believes or says it believes this is good. So yeah, I go back to the supernatural and old time religion that tells me there’s a force that hates us and wants to spiritually destroy us. Yes, there are rational theories to explain human behavior but I think there’s something more and despite what my old time religion tells me it feels like this more thing is winning and that can and does feel crushing.
"3. I’m discovering I’m much more alone politically and morally than I thought."
I think a lot of us are now all discovering that we're not so alone in our supposed aloneness, because of our political and moral compasses. I consider myself right-wing. But I'm not a conservative. I do have some traditional views on relationships: I do the "womanly" things in the house, my other half does the "manly" things in the house. I don't care if other people want to contest what those two categories entail or to whom they should or should not be attributed; in reality we all know what "womanly" and "manly" duties are. We always have. I'm not a ''trad-wife" (I'm not a "wife" at all - I'm not religious so I have no desire to have a church sanctify my relationship and not being a fan of government intervention, neither do I wish to have my relationship with my other half certified by the state, so I'm technically single despite being in a 14 year long committed monogamous relationship) but I will always be on hand to make my man a sandwich, make sure he has clean clothes...and provide blow-jobs, lol.
I'm too rough around the edges to be a proper lady. But I'm definitely a woman. I don't believe that trans is a real thing but up until recently I was always of the mind that it was a respectful thing to refer to self-identifying transgender individuals by the name/pronoun they stipulated. Not because of any political reason, but because if I was interacting with someone like Rose of Dawn (with whom I appeared on a couple of political podcasts a couple of years ago) I simply thought of her as a woman and regarded her as one. I think because she is someone who a/ put the effort into looking as feminine as possible (I didn't even realise she was trans until the second time we were on a podcast together because we only had avatars on screen and her voice seemed to be the same as mine which is probably of a lower register for a female anyway) and b/ she never demanded anything when it came to how she was addressed...and she like Blaire White speaks out against all the awful nonsense being perpetrated by these trans-activists out there.
In current year however, I find myself in a very similar position to you Josh, when you appeared on the Mythcon stage alongside Blaire White. What previously would just have been a respectful interaction based on human decency, has now been bastardised by others into the demands for requirements in how we address people. I like you, do not take kindly to being summoned into action or given orders as to how I speak. I do not intend to speak untruths. I am not the type to be easily coerced into compliance. So I now have that same conundrum: in current climate where I am committed to remaining truthful, I must also be consistent, or else my principles are rendered null and void. I do not wish to upset or be rude to those people who I do not see as being activist-grifters. I do not wish to be a horrible person to those who do not deserve such mistreatment. But I also feel bound over to stick to my guns. It's a shitty conundrum for us to be in.
Some of my beliefs seem left-leaning, but when looked at through the 'Overton Window' these notions are now rooted on the right. Free speech has become the domain of the right. I guess I'm more libertarian than anything, with a desire for small government, a reduced social safety net, lower taxation, governmental power spread to smaller community units where those directly affected by legislation can actually have a real say in how it affects their lives.
I'll always be pro the legalization of marijuana - especially because I'd love the legal means to obtain it in order to alleviate my fibromyalgia and psoriatic arthritis. But I also think it's just something that doesn't need to be controlled by the government. That's not a conservative opinion, but it IS libertarian. I'm a weird mixture of wanting traditional values but also basic freedoms. I don't know exactly where my political home is, but I'm enjoying finding fellow travellers who are at least on a similar path to me, and occasionally frequent the same dodgy lodgings along the way.
Here's to us at least not getting tied up in any awkward Norman Bates motel moments along the way, and instead meeting up for some cocktails on the veranda at some old maid's colonial boarding houses in Savannah, GA instead. The Shirley Temples are me, y'all!
Josh, I hope things are good with you, that you have time out in the garden, and all. Gay men have a great deal to say now. When the (gay male) principal at my sons' school had a meeting with me, in which he quickly declared his orientation, but, as we were discussing my 9 year old's suicidal ideation (he said he wanted a gun, he wanted to jump off the roof, run in front of a car) which I felt was from his cross-sex ideating father, this principal made a big point about how he doesn't understand "being trans" any more than I do. At the time, the thought bubble above my head was, "right, because it's bunk." I wish the ex-wives like me had the agency to raise the alarm back in the 1990s, when the trans trend started its exponential leaps. We were called bigots, homophobes and, in my case, threatened with accusations that could cost us custody of the children. I am trying to be direct, honest and responsive. Who are these women you write about?
Ute Heggen
For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1:18
I'm sorry that's not much to give you and I'm sorry again if that sounds like I'm preaching at you (although that book was written by someone called "The Preacher").
I guess the only scrap of comfort that I can give you is the assurance that you are not the first to walk this path, so you are not alone. And that, as you are walking the path you are standing up and not curled into a ball begging for mercy.