Damian M. Schloming ideas and information

Naomi Wolf on rape: "...ours is increasingly an age of geopolitics by blackmail."

This website is to allow me to present intelligibly my thoughts and insights on various social, political, historical and even scientific issues I've been studying in the past two years. 

Some of which I have background knowledge of due to having been involved with and interested in various political movements many years ago. 

My political viewpoint leans towards libertarian, except that I am not completely happy with the way some of them think. Libertarians want limited government and civil liberties. As a matter of principle, that is excellent. But then libertarians seem to suffer from this ingrained bias of Western Culture that you can somehow intellectually decide that government "should be" a certain way and then the perfect society can then be achieved by some legislative body sitting down and crafting some written rule decreeing that that is how society is to be from now on.

 

Actually, I think government and the larger society it is embedded in is more like some kind of living beast that you can train or that can morph in one direction or another, but it can't be so easily manipulated or changed as we think. Written rules don't have the exact effect they literally intend, but instead enforcement of the rules and all sorts of other considerations regarding government bureaucracies results in all sorts of ripple effects or unintended consequences. As a result, the most free society does not necessarily result from the one with the nicest and most free sounding written constitution or constitutional rights guaranteeing liberty. A very good example of this issue is the liberal Warren Court expanding all sorts of fifth amendment procedural and technical criminal protections for defendants. Liberals saying they want to do this might be arguing this is to help the poor. The opposite is the truth. This is to help defense attorneys, and why is that a bad thing? Because criminal procedures and technicalities of the liberal Warren Court only resulted in defendants having protection IF they could hire an expensive enough attorney to do a good enough job PRESSING them. Public defenders are part of the corrupt court system, they deliberately do a bad job so as to make sure well heeled defendants find it worth their while to pay extra. Huge sentences ALSO give well heeled defendants more incentive to pay extra. Thus, defense attorneys representing rich criminal defendants have a vested interest in maintaining the strict sentencing policies responsible for Mass Incarceration. Furthermore, there was a law school bubble which burst, and now law schools are doing poorly because lawyers are not finding it worth their while to spend so much money on a law degree. Fact of the matter is, those liberal Warren Court protections indirectly increased legal fees for defense attorneys, thereby contributing to the upward pressure on college tuition and law school tuition, simply because the amount of money attorneys could make from a law degree made it more worthwhile. 

It also is true that the regulatory state increased in many other ways, increasing demand for attorneys in other spheres besides the criminal justice system. But I am going to talk about the criminal justice system here for now to use it as an example.

This is just one example showing how a policy that, examined in the most superficial way you think it's designed to help criminal defendants overall in the long run has the exact opposite effect. Because these protections are ones that only can be accessed by those with the money to pay for top dollar attorneys. And, it isn't always necessarily related to the facts of the case. The attorney usually has an incestuous relationship with everyone else in the court system, so much so that basically if you pay the right attorney enough money, you will get off because he is friends with all the judges and prosecutors, and parole officers, etc.

And for me to say that could lead to others thinking it is rather awful to have a court system so incestuously corrupt. Except, these are all nice people who know each other and court systems have ALWAYS been like this, more or less. And they always will be this way. Government is incapable of being perfect. Understanding its inherent imperfections such as this are necessary when it comes to avoiding passing laws which interact with such a culture in a way to produce very bad outcomes.

 

After all, we have always had government and, for some reason, it would appear if we always have had it, that is because we need it. The inner workings of government are so awful, you discover after you observe it, it can easily lead many to think we should just abolish it. But, given that that is impossible, the best alternative is to understand it as inherently flawed, and realistically think of how to make things "the least bad."

This is what I have thought for a long time, yet only recently have I stumbled across some law professors who subscribe to a movement called "legal realism." It turns out they think exactly the way I do, and see the same flaws in our society (or in the thinking of popular culture which leads to wrong-headed policies in our legal system) that I see.

Oddly enough, they seem to describe themselves as leftists yet they are not the kind of ordinary mainstream leftist most people would understand to be "of the left." Which is strange because I never would have thought of myself as a liberal -- but not a conservative either. But maybe this is because of certain strands of liberalism I have been exposed to which are quite awful. 

In any case, why categorize oneself? As I study and learn more about society, I like to share various insights and not limit myself to any one "box" or "category" that I pigeonhole myself into.

OK here is the reason why I was saying

September 07, 2015  /  Damian Schloming

"Symptoms of my bipolar disorder." 

Reason 1.

One reason I had a big incentive to claim I had bipolar disorder was, having bipolar disorder results in you being able to claim you have "protected status" and people can't discriminate against you AND have to accommodate you in some ways. And that was a whole other issue as well. I knew I was brilliant in math and somehow needed some kind of remedial work or some extra "leg up" to help me "catch up" to other math students who had a far better background than I had, even if less inherent ability, and I felt intimidated by the other students, not sure of myself regarding how to find students I could study with -- in the Harvard Math Department, they said "you just have to find other students to study with" -- and I was too shy. Also I do think I might have suffered from a problem of other students systematically shunning me because in one course not only was I able to find someone to study with but I proved to be so brilliant, a whole study group formed around me, where it was like they were relying on my mind to help them get their problem sets done in time. It was like I hadn't studied the subject matter anymore than they had, yet if you observed the study group, it almost looked like I was a section leader, I figured it out so much faster than all of them and I was spending most of my time explaining to them all. (Sort of like, we'd start to talk about the problem, and then I'd suddenly in a flash just "know" what the answer was, I'd say "oh wait, I KNOW, and then I'd slowly start to explain to them, and they wouldn't get it, so I'd have to explain explain explain slowly and somewhat impatiently, over the course of maybe several minutes, and it was sort of a step by step process because each problem consisted of several steps.) That happened once -- and then in all other math courses I took subsequently, despite a lot of individuals knowing my ability, for some reason I could not find any other students to study with. And, the way my mind worked, I was only good at math when I could talk about it verbally with others. Otherwise, that part of my brain just didn't engage. So, the way it worked, I felt like saying I was bipolar was a "face saving" way to try to convince the Harvard Math Department to figure out some way to accommodate me so I could continue to operate at my full potential, as I had in that one study group. E.g., help make it easier for me to find others to study with. Because, otherwise, they were refusing to and had this "sink or swim" mentality: "You have to find other students to study with, or else." They also knew, it seemed, that my mind was such that I somehow wasn't going to be able to be able to concentrate or learn studying solely on my own. Now I could have explained my "home schooling upbringing" left something to be desired -- but I didn't want to at that time. I instead wanted to say I was bipolar. Meanwhile my grandfather had disinherited my mother and was threatening to bypass her in the will and leave the money directly to me and my twin brothers -- which gave her an incentive to try to get us declared incompetent in order to control the money. That, at least, could be a superficial explanation as to what was going on here.

Reason 2.

I was still living with my parents, and wasn't going to talk about THIS:

Otherwise, I would have said I wasn't bipolar. The only reason I once went to the hospital was I was stuck with my parents, they were behaving like this, and I had to run away from home somehow, get out of there somehow, and I did not have on campus housing at that time, so that was the ONLY WAY. Meanwhile, afterwards, I wasn't going to talk about it to anyone at Harvard UNLESS or UNTIL I got on campus housing. But then the problem was, what precipitated my sending the email to 17 people at Harvard complaining about Murray Somerville and Seth Moulton was my senior tutor and a bunch of people at Harvard giving me all sorts of awful bureaucratic trouble regarding reserving on campus housing. They said I couldn't get on campus housing because I missed a deadline, and when I asked what the deadline was, they said they had no clue. Or, at least, five different bureaucrats had five different contradictory stories regarding which deadline I missed and neither of them knew when it was. 

(From a document my twin brother wrote):

....I went back to the front house. My twin brother was there and he seemed bothered by something. 

 

Apparently, he felt that my mother and father hadn’t been treating him well recently.  The last summer he had gone to Germany for a couple of weeks and after a few days he ran into a group of kids who drugged him and stole some of his money. Apparently they drugged him so severely that when he woke up he could not even remember who he was or where he was.  If the dose he had been given was a little larger, it would have killed him. Anyway, when he returned from Germany, he was apparently very shaken by this experience. He was not same person he was when he left for Germany.  The first day when he returned, his speech was incredibly slow and halting and when he tried to describe his other experiences in Germany he would sometime pause for a long time to remember the word he was trying to say.  When the fall term at Harvard started, he began performing very badly and got into a state of severe agitation.

So finally, I asked my parents to look after him a little and try to help him manage his time.

 

 At first they did well and his performance improved, but my parents are impatient and volatile people and after a while they began pressuring him to do exactly what they told him to do and at first he did and then he began to resist a little and then his performance deteriorated.  They then began to put up more pressure and by then he couldn’t help but resist.  After a month, my father decided to become what he called confrontational along with my mother and that didn’t turn out very well.  I remember coming home once to relax a little.  I was down stairs and I could hear them upstairs being confrontational with him which basically meant screaming at him and calling him names.  I remember being horrified hearing how they treated him. I couldn’t imagine going through being treated like that.  My father was calling him a piece of shit and my mother was screaming at him telling my brother to listen to my father because my brother couldn’t think abstractly according to her.  What was going on was exactly what I feared what might happen.  My parents are volatile people and sometimes they would behave this way in the past when we were younger and they were involved in our lives.  But they became less so when we grew up and were able to take care of ourselves and I thought since my parents were older they had grown out of that phase in their lives.  Still, when I asked them to look after my brother last fall, I specifically told them not to make the mistake of becoming overbearing like they were in the past and not to get over controlling and telling him every little think to do.  I said that the danger of them becoming involved in managing his time was that they would do exactly that and that they would have to risk the tendency they had of getting out of control.  I said this was important because my brother was in a fragile state of mind and he probably couldn’t take it.  They agreed with me completely and at first they were good and I thought that it would work out. Unfortunately as time went on they regressed back to being their former selves.  When I talked to my brother the next day, he was in terrible shape mentally.  Finally, after a week of my parents being confrontational with him, he collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital and have his whole semester and whole year at Harvard whiped out. 

 

This was very hard on him because he had always been successful.  When he was young he began playing the organ and was a prodigy.  Today he is probably the best organist of his generation.  And so he was the one who was always treated very well and who was the big success. In fact when we were younger, it was me who was the defective one. I was the one who had the speech disability. I was the one who had trouble in school. So by the time of my Federal Reserve interview, he was living at home recovering from his hospital ordeal. And at this time, our positions were reversed.  I was the one who was successful academically.  I was the one who got flown down to the Federal Reserve and that night I was returning after a very good time at the Federal Reserve in a very good looking suit with a beautiful Gianni Versace tie.  Now it was my brother who was the one who was defective.

 

Apparently, my mother wasn’t treating him well and I knew she wasn’t treating him very well because I remember how I was treated when I was in a similar position.  So as soon as I got in the house, I was telling everyone everything that was happening and then I went up to him and started telling him the good things that happened.  But he was sitting on the sofa now and with his head down and he looked like he was in a catatonic state.  Regardless of what I said to him, his face didn’t change expression and he just gave one syllable replies in a monotone voice. He sounded the same way people with downs syndrome sound. He was abnormally unresponsive not like his normal self that I used to remember during the days when things were going well for him.  Anyway, after a while, he began saying things, complaining about how he was being treated.  I actually didn’t hear what he was saying but I knew he was saying something on the lines of what he was actually saying because of the way my mother snapped back at him and the way my father started to lecture at him.  Anyway, I took him by the arm and tried to get him out of the room to talk to him but he wouldn’t leave the room. So finally my parents decided to go upstairs instead.

 

 I told him that there was really nothing wrong with him and that my parents were not right: things were not his fault.  I said that they had treated me the same way when I was in a similar position and that it was not natural how they were treating him.  He then told me things about how they treated him.  Apparently on our birthday, my mother told him that his birthday present was not getting thrown out of the house.  Apparently they had been treating him like this ever since he got out of the hospital saying it was all his fault for him having to go to the hospital.

I talked with my brother all night about what was happening to him and he told me about a lot of things I didn’t know about.  The next day, Damian went over to my grand parents and spent the night there.  I slept Saturday night May 20th but then on Sunday night I again spent the whole night talking with my brother again.

For the whole weekend, I spent most of the time talking to my brother and talking to my Grandparents about what was going on with my brother and I forgot all about the Federal Reserve and in fact I felt very unhappy about the whole situation.

-------

Now I ought to point out, my parents have later explained, in somewhat vague terms (this is "conspiracy theory" material) that they had to do this and other things, because Lucas and I were in danger of being killed otherwise. And subsequent events do tend to provide a great deal of support to such claims. And I do remember, at the time, my mother basically continuing to maintain that Harvard was doing was terrible, that they want to cover things up, even while she was behaving in a manner seemingly that amounted to aiding and abetting Harvard in a lot of ways. E.g., a lot of seemingly contradictory and inconsistent behavior. 

Furthermore, the fact that this sort of thing goes on can be surmised from merely reading certain things Hannah Ahrendt says about totalitarian regimes, wherein they are not content to rely on traditional state means but have figured out a way of terrorizing people from within. And she also goes onto say this is not plain old gangsterism but, in particular, it's American Style Gangsterism, which was exported to Germany after World War I. E.g., the mafia is used, and parents get word through the mafia that they are to engage in behavior with respect to their own children which is incriminating in some way, or else the children will be killed, and once they have complied, they then can be perpetually blackmailed. 

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