Fisk is half way to self beatitude by way of over wrought pseudo-contrition.

(It’s is for his readership to be contrite — not him.)

At a certain level, even Fisk sees the absolute absurdity of where he’s taking his moralizing.

But all of this is but a part of the MSM replacing the clergy… every screed a new sermon.

DNW:

Of course there are some masochists among them. Robert Fisk sort of wrote the book on that. But, as I said, most don’t actually want to suffer. That means that some do.”

Acknowledged. Yeah; and Beat-me-baby-Fisk, is a good example.

Of course there are some masochists among them. Robert Fisk sort of wrote the book on that. But, as I said, most don’t actually want to suffer. That means that some do.

neo-neocon Says:
August 7th, 2014 at 2:20 pm

DNW:

Most liberals don’t actually want to be punished. They want to feel good about themselves, and speaking ill of their country and their race (terrible white men!) makes them feel as though they have the moral high ground. Actual punishment would be a problem for most people. That’s what NIMBY is all about.”

Possibly. But we do know that masochists and nihilists exist. And it has become clear that there are a startling number of ways in which some human beings seek psychological relief and emotional gratification: and the price that they are willing to pay, or have you pay, for it.

Now, these self-destructive outliers are either disordered or not. If on their own say so we grant that they are not disordered but “merely” another mental kind, it does nothing to address the affiliation and affinity problems.

Grant for the sake of argument that it is improper to call them “sick”. Nonetheless, their manner of social being and their working out and expression of their idiosyncratic notions of “the good” and the satisfying, are still antithetical to and subversive of the lives of those who do not share their quirks.

Here’s the deal: You cannot trust that their idea of the good, is the same, or even socially compatible with yours.

It’s the moral reciprocity problem all over again.

But then for liberals, reciprocity is NOT taken as the foundation principle of affiliation.

The essay was Clio and Crisis, C. Vann Woodward.

“Style in History: Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, Burckhardt” was another text.

To quote Woodward:

” Whether the revision of Negro history is undertaken by black historians or white historians, or perferably both, they will be mindful of the need for correcting ancient indignities, ethnocentric slights, and paternalistic patronizing …

The Negro historian under present circumstances labors under a special set of pressures and temptations. One that will require moral fiber to resist is the temptation to gratify the white liberal’s masochistic cravings, his servile yearnings to be punished. This is indeed a tempting market, but historians would do well to leave it to the theater of the absurd.”

Most liberals don’t actually want to be punished. They want to feel good about themselves, and speaking ill of their country and their race (terrible white men!) makes them feel as though they have the moral high ground. Actual punishment would be a problem for most people. That’s what NIMBY is all about.

two great examples for you, one from literature, one from history. history first.

look up the source of flagellation

Flagellants are practitioners of an extreme form of mortification of their own flesh by whipping it with various instruments.

Flagellantism was a 13th and 14th centuries movement, consisting of radicals in the Catholic Church. It began as a militant pilgrimage and was later condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical. The followers were noted for including public flagellation in their rituals.

Flagellation (from Latin flagellare, to whip) was quite a common practice amongst the more fervently religious. Various religions, like the cult of Isis in Egypt and the Dionysian cult of Greece, practiced their own forms of flagellation. In ancient Rome, eunuch priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, the Galli, flogged themselves until they bled during the annual festival called Dies sanguinis (Day of Blood). Women were flogged during the Roman Lupercalia to ensure fertility.

the best literature example to embody what you are referring to, i guess, would be from “confessions of a reluctant messiah”
And he said unto them, “If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?”

And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.

The essays included a final one by C Vann Woodward in which he remarkably adverted to the danger to up and coming minority historians of feeding the appetite of masochistic white liberal males for flagellation, rather than serving truth to the best of one’s ability.

I wish I had read this many years ago. Because it demonstrated that what I thought I had stumbling discovered over the years concerning the psychology of the liberal male through my own observational and deductive powers, had been casually and explicitly laid out as a taken-for-granted socio-psychological predicate by one of America’s premier historians many, many, years before.

Some people are twisted enough to want to be punished. And many of these demented son-of-bitches have the legal status of political peers.

That we may not be able to do anything about for various reasons.

But if we grant them status as moral peers, and treat them to their face as if they are, it is our own damned fault.

You gotta be
Cruel to be kind in the right measure
Cruel to be kind it’s a very good sign
Cruel to be kind means that I love you
Baby, you gotta be cruel to be kind

nick lowe