Beware the honeyed tongue, poison sweetly flavored kills just as sure.

Yesterday I posted about my love affair with words. Today I have to warn against them.

Beware the honeyed tongue, poison sweetly flavored kills just as sure.

In order to do this right I have to lay some truths out about myself and the environment I was raised in. I was born in nineteen eighty eight to, let’s call them JR and KP, JR was a soldier and he and my mother divorced when I was quite young. My mother ended up remarrying, a man called CW, and I rarely saw JR again. JR lived in Germany with his new wife (who I love dearly and has been an amazing mother to my little brother and sister, Step mom I wish we had been able to be around one another more) and as you can imagine throughout my childhood I had separation issues due to the absence of my birth dad. Many of my issues were compounded by my step dad; CW has some ideas of masculinity that are really unhealthy. My mother had issues that she worked through during my younger years, not helped by CW’s emotional abuses, and then as I grew older she took on other peoples crazy. All throughout this I was raised in the church and exposed to various hypocrisies and tragedies that were reinforced by the family environment. So yeah I have issues with my parents, all of them. I, however, love each and every one of them dearly. They are family and, with very few exceptions, they were doing the best job that they knew how to do.

I don’t tell you about my past to drum up sympathy or anything like that (It isn’t meant to cause guilt in my parents either) it is so that maybe you will understand why I chose to write this.

Family issues run deep, they scar, and often they open up… vulnerabilities. When we have a perceived instability or inadequacy, in parenting there are a few things that we tend to do. Some of us go out and look for someone to fulfill that need, some of us say “fuck it, you are all morons and I’m out”, and some of us actually take the time and the effort to work through and past the issues. I chose the second option for the most part, I distrusted the adults in my life and was angry for a long time, that anger caused its own issues but it also protected me from many of the predators that may have taken advantage of me, not sexually but emotionally. Slowly I worked through to that third option, I still deal with the anger, but I no longer am disgusted by the adults of my childhood, I have accepted and embraced their humanity and consequently my own. Those that take the first path, who seek to fill that void with either a religion or another human, tend to have a vulnerability that is particularly open. This is why I am writing this, so on to the meat.

There is a man who fancies himself a philosopher, in reality he is a political and atheistic cult leader. He takes people of a vulnerable age, early adult hood, and appeals to them using reason and libertarian ideals. He tells you that you deserve to be free and that there is no god (he is strangely silent on polytheism) and he mixes in an appealing form of anarcho-capitalist economics. And then he dives into your childhood, he asks about your parents and examples they set, he asks you bear naked their humanity, their imperfections. A common trope for this man, on his online radio show, is to take a call from a boy whose father was absent, or “abusive” in some way, and whose mother was likely single, he will talk to this person about the father and seek to open wounds again, and again, creating an attitude of vulnerability, before attacking the relationship with the mother. He will look at basic human imperfection, for instance yelling or the passive use of guilt, and explode that into a scathing remark upon the moral faculty of a mother who is struggling to raise their child. He will encourage you to sever not only your relationship with your parents, but to encourage your significant to sever their relationships with their parents. All of this is done wrapped in a package of “peaceful parenting” and soothing fatherly voice.

This man is a “gentle” man, he speaks quietly and calmly and always with a tone of empathy, however his critiques of women, single mother hood, parent relationship shows an underlying hatred of women. He uses the tenants of logic and empiricism to support systems of thought that encourage misogyny (that is not a word I throw around, to cry wolf at a puppy is useless). He will often speak of the hypocrisy of single women, and with much venom he will engage in almost slanderous diatribes on women, it is not uncommon to hear him claim that women should be only in the home, and that without a man all children are doomed. I have heard him deride a working mother he accused her of not only abandoning her children, but also of despising her husband, because she worked. This was a woman who not only left work early or exactly at five for her kids, but from the time she got home until they were asleep she did not touch her work computer.

The lack of honor in this man’s word, to expose a vulnerable and searching population to words of vile character is the least manly activity one can participate in. To manipulate language to turn the hearts of children against their parents is not only reprehensible it is evil. I cannot express the anger I feel knowing that a person who is hurting and unable to express that hurt is being manipulated into demonizing the people who love them. Dr Laura from the fucking talk radio is less vile than this man.

I refuse to link to his stuff, if you want to find him and are intelligent I have given in the words here all the tags you would need to find him, if you do I ask you to listen carefully and to guard yourself against him. I wrote this as a warning about a dangerous man who uses my favorite tool, words, as a weapon against the vulnerable. Please be aware that words can reap as well as they can fertilize, they can kill what they grow.

Beware the sweet talking philosopher; he seeks only to separate you from your family, your friends, and your money.