Saturday, May 30, 2009

Why Can't a Democrat Be More Like a Man?

Before getting into today's featured rerun, I just wanted to mention a funny observation yesterday by Taranto. As I have said before, I am a conservative because I am a liberal. In many ways, I am the same liberal today that I was when I was younger, except that it's now called "conservative." Likewise, what we mistakenly call "liberalism" is pure leftism, which is a different animal entirely.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of race or ethnicity. Taranto posted an excerpt of a typical All in the Family episode, which ironically demonstrates the reversal that has taken place in the past 35 years. Back then, Archie was the bigot and Meathead was the liberal. But today the roles are reversed: Archie expresses the race-obsessed leftist view, while Meathead expresses the view of the typical bewildered conservative who doesn't understand the significance of race or ethnicity:

Archie: What's the matter with this? I call this representative government. You've got Salvatori, Feldman, O'Reilly, Nelson -- that's an Italian, a Jew, an Irishman and a regular American there. That's what I call a balanced ticket.

Meathead: Why do you always have to label people by nationality?

Archie: 'Cause, how else are you going to get the right man for the right job? For instance, take Feldman there. He's up for treasurer. Well, that's perfect. All them people know how to handle money. Know what I mean?

Meathead: No, I don't.

Archie: Well, then you got Salvatori running for D.A. He can keep an eye on Feldman. You know, I want to tell you something about the Italians. When you do get an honest one, you really got something there.

Meathead: Aw, c'mon, Arch.

Archie: Well, then here you got O'Reilly, the mick. He can see that the graft is equally spread around, you know. You got Nelson, the American guy. He's good for TV appearances, to make the rest of them look respectable.

As Archie might say today, with a Wise Latina on the bench, that's what I call a reasonably balanced court: two broads, four real men, three castrati, a spic, a mick, two waps, a darkie, and two kikes. However, there are six mackeral snappers. Now, that's a problem. Just yesterday I heard Christopher Hitchens on Hugh Hewitt's program, saying that we needed to do something about that and appoint a pagan, I mean atheist, to the court. (Somehow, I think he's overlooking the obvious.)

*****

One of the most interesting works of anthropology I’ve ever read is The Human Animal, by Weston LaBarre. LaBarre was both an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, and this book deals with exactly what I attempted to outline in Chapter Three of my book, that is, how primates and proto-humans eventually evolved into proper (some of us, anyway) human beings. Being that it was published in 1954, many of the details in his book have undoubtedly been superseded by more recent research. And yet, he captured the big picture in a way that few people even attempt to do these days.

I'm guessing that few non-Raccoons would cite LaBarre as an influence these days, but if nothing else, he’s a very entertaining writer, full of pithy and astringent comments, asides, and insults. Interestingly, he was a militant atheist, but that doesn’t necessarily bother me. So long as someone has a piece of the truth, their overarching philosophy is of no consequence to me, no matter how shallow or ignorant. I have no difficulty accepting whatever parts of Darwinism comport with perennial truth. I only reject those parts of of it that are not true and cannot possibly be true. Darwinism can never account for our humanness, but it may be able to explain something about how we arrived there, at least horizontally (but never vertically, which would be a strict metaphysical impossibility).

Chapter 6 of The Human Animal deals with sexual differences and the evolutionary circumstances that supposedly allowed humanness to emerge. In an evolutionary tradeoff, human brains grew so rapidly that women had to give birth earlier and earlier, to the point that the brain's incomplete neurology could only be wired together in the extra-uterine environment. (For those of you in Rio Linda, that means after you're born.)

The resulting infantile helplessness (and maternal preoccupation) meant that the family unit switched from the mother-infant diad to the mother-father-infant triad. These symbiotic relationships further modified all of their members, as they adapted to -- and became intersubjective members of -- each other, thereby creating the "interior unity" of the family (which in important ways, mirrors the dynamic interior unity of the Creator; out of all the gods and animals, only the Christian God and human animal are principially intersubjective, a momentous point to ponder).

LaBarre notes that “a society’s attitudes toward women and toward maternity will deeply influence its psychological health and all other institutional attitudes.” He wrote in 1954 -- well before the degradations to womanhood brought about by the feminist movement -- that “It is a tragedy of our male-centered culture that women do not fully enough know how important they are as women.” Sadly, today so many women only know how important they are as men. This is a tragedy of monumental proportions, in part because it also results in men not understanding their own role in terms of being men.

One of the keys to understanding male-female differences lies in examining the different ways in which we are permitted to love. As a child we must love in one way, but in order to become an adult we must love in others. The process is significantly more complicated for males, because our first love object is the mother with whom we are merged. Male identity must first be wrested and won from this primordial union, otherwise there will be no manhood, only biological maleness. In other words, our love must transition from male-female, to male-male, then back to male-female. Many things can go wrong along the way, as you might well imagine.

On the other hand, female identity is coterminous with their union with the Great Mother, both literally and archetypally. They only have to transition from female-female love to female-male. As a result, their identity is much more secure, because they never have to renounce the primitive identification with the Great Mother, at least totally. For example, I would guess that some 90% of sexual perverts are men. Still, things obviously can and do go wrong in female psychosexual development, for any number of reasons we don't have time to discuss here.

All men know that women can magically produce children out of their bodies. This is another reason that women are generally more “grounded” and secure in their identity than men are. It would also explain the essential restlessness (and sometimes rootlessness) of men, along with the psychological adaptiveness of male homophobia. (A couple of days ago we were discussing the hobo archetype, the man with no roots, or whose "roots" are in motion; there is a reason why they are almost always male, whereas the female usually has a much stronger nesting instinct.)

Femaleness as a category is secure: its undeniable signs are menstruation, maternity, and an obsession with shoes. But manhood -- as opposed to mere biological maleness -- has no such obvious visible markers. Rather, it is something that must be constructed and achieved. The adaptive mechanism that allows males to become men is culture.

What connects mother to infant is very concrete: the breast and all it symbolizes and implies ("breast" is a psychoanalytic term of art that is more analogous to "cosmic source of all goodness," if viewed from the infant's omnipotent and boundary-less perspective.) Likewise, what originally connected male to female was the evolutionary change that made females sexually available year-round.

But what connects man to man? “What connects father and son, male and male, is the mystery of logos and logos alone...” It is through this shared pattern of cosmic meaning that “father can identify with son and permit his infancy, within which son can identify with father and become a man, and within which a male can perceive and forgive the equal manhood of his fellow man.”

(In rereading that passage, it has a couple of very powerful ideas: permit the infant to live [both literally and symbolically, and both internal and external], and forgive the manhood of fellow men; few cultures have fully succeeded in doing this, certainly not in much of the Islamic world, where they blow up their children in order to blow up other men.)

At the foundation of the State, writes LaBarre, “is our struggle to find both paternal power [an aspect of the vertical] and brotherly justice [the vertical prolonged into the horizontal] in the governing of men.” This is why something psychologically noxious happens when government becomes mother. A similar thing happens when God becomes mother or mother becomes God. It interferes with the primordial basis of culture qua culture, which is to convert boys to men. If that fails to happen -- as with the left -- then civilization either cannot form or will not be able to sustain and defend itself, since there will be no men or manhood, only Democrats -- or women and children.

This would explain the (until recently) universal practice of various male initiation rituals, in which boys are sometimes brutally wrenched away from their mothers in order to facilitate male “rebirth” and full membership in the fellowship of men. Again, femaleness is given by biology, but maleness must be proven, not just to oneself, but to the group. If appropriate models are not given for this drive, we will simply have pathological versions of it, such as the urban youth gang or the NBA, which are all about proving one’s manhood, only to other female-centered boys.

In fact, this is why so much contemporary rap and hip hop is so perversely male. In a matriarchal culture so lacking in male role models, these clueless boys are constantly trying to prove that they are what they imagine a man -- and themselves -- to be. This is why they are such pathetic, brooding, aggressive, and hyper-sexualized caricatures of manhood. (And ultimately this results from female sexuality reverting back to the mother-infant diad, with no real role for men except George Gilder's "naked nomad.")

Other males -- we call them liberals -- often take women as their role models, with predictable results. They regard auto-castration as the quintessence of civilization and sophistication. They aren't really assertive in a male way, but a catty or bitchy way, like the New York Times or their quintessential shemale, Obama.

Again, male sexual development is inherently more complex and hazardous, for men must first love and identify with the female, only to make a clean break of it and then return to the same object as an adult. Many things can go wrong with this process at each step along the way, as the road is filled with conflict and ambivalence. It explains why men often have the harder time growing up. Still, that's no excuse to elect one president.

Someone once said that men marry women hoping they'll never change, while women marry men hoping to change them. Someone wants to change us, big time. But a big part of manhood is preserving and defending the precious things that were created and handed down to us by our forefathers.

We are about to elect a feminized man whose official policy is to surrender to our enemies, so we have moved well beyond the theoretical to the actual. In the triangulated war between liberals, Islamists, and the left, only one side can win. Our side will lose if we run out of real men because we simply do not create enough of them. We will lose if we allow the new cutural ideal of the feminized adultolescent male to become the ideal. We will lose if we forget that an upright and noble man with the capacity for righteous violence is at the very foundation of civilization.

Liberals sneer at such men, which is to say, men. I found a typical example by a college professor at dailykos, called A Pacifist’s Agony. S/h/it writes that “I've always hated the term ‘war crime,’ since it's an insidious tautology. It implies that some wars are not crimes, and some of the atrocities committed during war are excusable by virtue of their context. I believe that if there can be any single concept by which a civilization ought to be defined it's this: there is no context that can justify the intentional killing of a sentient being who does not wish it. Period.” (Somehow, I'm sure there is a loophole for abortion.)

The professor's job is not to educate students but to make them “politically aware,” which in practice means to arrest their developmental journey toward adulthood, and especially manhood. It is a form of spiritual and intellectual body-snatching; for the boys, it means a fantasized acquisition of manhood, for the girls, contempt for it. Before being undictrinated, students are “not particularly politically aware,” but by semester’s end, if all goes well, they will be “different people. They now understand the direct relationship between their own deliberately inculcated ignorance and the crimes that are committed in their name.” They will have inverted reality, so that they imagine themselves to be Morally Superior to the primitive and murderous men who protect and defend them.

This is why the left must constantly attack and undermine America, for that is what allows their sense of moral superiority to flourish. But the attack brings with it the unconscious fear of father's retaliation, hence the hysterical fears of murderous retribution for "speaking truth" to Father -- fear of spying, of theocratic takeovers, of Al Gore's world melting. When leftists say that George Bush is the world's greatest terrorist, they mean it, although it goes without saying that they have no insight into the unconscious basis of this hysterical projection of their own fear converted to anger and persecution.

Oddly enough, the professor agrees with me that our civilization is threatened: “Chomsky's right. It's over for America. Not just this war, but the American idea. And right now, the peace I'm enjoying in my living room, every selfish mile I drive to and from my home, the electricity that's powering my computer, and the privilege of education that allows me to articulate these thoughts is bought with the blood and dust of all the Hadithas that have made a moment like this and a person like me possible. And it's more than I can bear.”

It’s a fascinating thing about truth. One of the things that makes a fellow believe in a deity, really. As every psychoanalytically informed psychologist knows, there is the patient, there is the truth, and there is the truth they would like to deny, which is why they are in your office. Truth has a life of its own, and has a way of insisting its way into the patient’s discourse, try as they might to prevent it from doing so.

The truth is true, and doesn’t actually require anyone to think it. But this is not so of the lie. The lie is entirely parasitic on a thinker. Furthermore, the lie knows the truth, otherwise it could not lie about it. Pacifism is just such a lie, for it contains the truth to which it is a reaction:

...the blood of men who are far better than I, men who stand ready to do violence against the forces of evil that have made a moment like this and a person like me possible. And it's more than I can bear.

Yes, that would require growing up and facing the Truth.

*****

Speaking of manly men, even Spidey needs a little nap sometimes:

40 comments:

Martin T. said...

I've often wondered what a 21st C. Western male initiation rite would look like. Boy Scouts come close (of course its the mama scouts now because there are no daddus to volunteer)

fadeck: below the medeck and above the sodeck

julie said...

It is a form of spiritual and intellectual body-snatching; for the boys, it means a fantasized acquisition of manhood, for the girls, contempt for it. Before being undictrinated...

I'm reminded of the reasons why people castrate their male pets - not only to keep them from reproducing, but to modify their behavior so that they remain both more puppy/ kitten-like and more docile. More socially acceptable. Which is all well and good with pets, but frankly horrific in humans.

A couple weeks ago, I came across a link to a recording of the last castrati. There was something deeply, resoundingly disturbing in hearing that, and knowing that the singer was a man in his fifties. I can't comprehend the mindset that finds childish (as opposed to childlike) men, in any aspect, to be any kind of ideal.

Van Harvey said...

Two biggee's for a Saturday morning,

"The resulting infantile helplessness (and maternal preoccupation) meant that the family unit switched from the mother-infant diad to the mother-father-infant triad. These symbiotic relationships further modified all of their members, as they adapted to -- and became intersubjective members of -- each other, thereby creating the "interior unity" of the family (which in important ways, mirrors the dynamic interior unity of the Creator; out of all the gods and animals, only the Christian God and human animal are principially intersubjective, a momentous point to ponder)."

and,

"Femaleness as a category is secure: its undeniable signs are menstruation, maternity, and an obsession with shoes. But manhood -- as opposed to mere biological maleness -- has no such obvious visible markers. Rather, it is something that must be constructed and achieved. The adaptive mechanism that allows males to become men is culture."

Isn't the materialist, the sensory oriented, thrill & stimulus addicted (in more ways than one these days), rejecting the vertical 'third' of becoming Human? 'Men without chests' comes to mind.

Van Harvey said...

"They aren't really assertive in a male way, but a catty or bitchy way, like the New York Times or their quintessential shemale, Obama.

Again, male sexual development is inherently more complex and hazardous, for men must first love and identify with the female, only to make a clean break of it and then return to the same object as an adult. Many things can go wrong with this process at each step along the way, as the road is filled with conflict and ambivalence. It explains why men often have the harder time growing up. Still, that's no excuse to elect one president."

A hoot! an Ahhh, and a Hoot!, what a cosmos!

will said...

>>I've often wondered what a 21st C. Western male initiation rite would look like<<

I think it involves getting a tattoo.

Van Harvey said...

" there is the patient, there is the truth, and there is the truth they would like to deny, which is why they are in your office. Truth has a life of its own, and has a way of insisting its way into the patient’s discourse, try as they might to prevent it from doing so.

The truth is true, and doesn’t actually require anyone to think it. But this is not so of the lie. The lie is entirely parasitic on a thinker. Furthermore, the lie knows the truth, otherwise it could not lie about it."

Truly a blast from the past.
Love the title (Shaw would be appalled!).

QP said...

Why peeps are stockpiling:

"Update on Recovery Act Lobbying Rules: New Limits on Special Interest Influence," from the Whitehouse.gov Blog.
White House moves to restrict free speech and stifle dissent from Obama policies

Gagdad Bob said...

I like this essay on female privilege. Been saving it for a while, but never found a good place to work it in.

Gagdad Bob said...

The new post-masculine man will Speak Softly and Carry a Big Teleprompter.

Anonymous said...

Bob sez:

"Femalness as a category is secure: it's undenible signs are menstruation, maternity, and an obsession with shoes."

Ahem at the risk of having my head chopped off and everything I MUST strongly disagree about the shoes obsession thang.
VERY STRONGLY DISAGREE in fact. I don't need many pairs of shoes to feel like a proper woman.

Theofilia

julie said...

The interesting thing about the female privilege essay is the comments. How quickly it shifts from being tongue-in-cheek humor to an attempted smackdown by an outraged feminist (and thereafter, it's all about her). It's amazing how leftists will charge in to prove the point being made (though they're usually trying to invalidate the point, one way or another) - and yet not see at all that that is precisely what they are doing.

goddinpotty said...

It's pretty amusing for someone practicing the manly profession of psychotherapist to call the most powerful man in the world a "shemale". You really want to go comparing the length of your dick to Obama's?

As for the Democrats being the party of girly-men, maybe you can explain the fact that the Republicans have so many closet cases and former closet cases (Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Dreier, Glenn Murphy, Edward Schrock, Kirk Fordham...there are so many they had to documentary about them_. When you combine this fact with George Bush's famous codpiece photograph (that gets so many rightwingers a little stiffy of their own), the whole party starts to resemble a Village People album, a parodic version of masculinity that fools only those too stupid to get the joke.

Gagdad Bob said...

I guess we just disagree. But thank you for giving us some insight into the sorts of things liberals fantasize about.

Van Harvey said...

gulpinpotty said "You really want to go comparing the length of your ..."

Not surprising that you reduce being male to that which dangles in your potty.

"The truth is true, and doesn’t actually require anyone to think it. But this is not so of the lie. The lie is entirely parasitic on a thinker. Furthermore, the lie knows the truth, otherwise it could not lie about it."

Burns, doesn't it?

julie said...

It's amazing how leftists will charge in to prove the point being made (though they're usually trying to invalidate the point, one way or another) - and yet not see at all that that is precisely what they are doing.

(I just thought it bore repeating)

Unknown said...

Meet godinpotty everybody!

ge said...

Alfred Deller was not castrated but he sang countertenor range, movingly, magnificently,...ditto our old pal Klaus Nomi

Anonymous said...

Bob, by now you might know that my above comment about shoes didn't carry venomic energy. Guess I just can't help reacting to something that doesn't at all imply to me.
I recall once upon holding my precious first born baby in my arms and in-laws guy friend made a very strange (to me) sounding remark. "You're just a mommy now."

Like hell I was just a mommy! I missed her when away for a couple of hours from her. I kissed her ittybitty socks when folding laundry, but I was not just a mommy!
By then I had few years of Hatha Yoga practice under my belt. I'm pretty sure by then (before the remark) I placed my hands on her tummy when she was crying to sooth her and she did setll down within minutes. I did that bec. I knew about "solar plexus" healing power. That was the only time she cried that hard and that's what I did to help her. By then I had some wild and wonderful soul experiences. No, I'm not just a mommy. And no, I don't need many shoes and the latest in fashion to feel like a lovely woman.

Theofilia

Anonymous said...

Bob, by now you might know that my above comment about shoes didn't carry venomic energy. Guess I just can't help reacting to something that doesn't at all imply to me.
I recall once upon holding my precious first born baby in my arms and in-laws guy friend made a very strange (to me) sounding remark. "You're just a mommy now."

Like hell I was just a mommy! I missed her when away for a couple of hours from her. I kissed her ittybitty socks when folding laundry, but I was not just a mommy!
By then I had few years of Hatha Yoga practice under my belt. I'm pretty sure by then (before the remark) I placed my hands on her tummy when she was crying to sooth her and she did setll down within minutes. I did that bec. I knew about "solar plexus" healing power. That was the only time she cried that hard and that's what I did to help her. By then I had some wild and wonderful soul experiences. No, I'm not just a mommy. And no, I don't need many shoes and the latest in fashion to feel like a lovely woman.
"cherom" insists

Theofilia

David Thompson said...

Julie,

“The interesting thing about the female privilege essay is the comments. How quickly it shifts from being tongue-in-cheek humor to an attempted smackdown by an outraged feminist (and thereafter, it's all about her). It's amazing how leftists will charge in to prove the point being made (though they're usually trying to invalidate the point, one way or another) - and yet not see at all that that is precisely what they are doing.”

I’m glad you followed the comments, hopefully to the end. The final dozen or so exchanges with Jean K are, I think, quite revealing.

A similar doctrinaire pattern emerges in this discussion about the word “pussy” and its various connotations.

JWM said...

GE:
Well, if anyone wants to do cheap shots, I actually used to have a reord of The Deller Consort back in my classical music buff days. Now my niece has it. Counter tenor. Hitting impossibly high notes without going into falsetto ala The Beach Boys. Even at a time when I loved vocal music, I could take counter tenor only in very small doses.

JWM

JWM said...

Lynn:
Potty boy is John Kerry on a Hog?
My guess is something like Michael Moore in a Prius.

JWM

julie said...

David, I had missed the second page of comments the first time through. Oh, my. I love this gem:

"Because really, all reasonable people believe that."

Wow.

David Thompson said...

Julie,

It does get quite striking. On the one hand there’s the vehemence with which the “privilege” belief is advanced (and the belief that anyone who questions it, even politely, must be either stupid or a Very Bad Person); on the other hand, there’s a remarkable inability to explain why the belief is held.

Anonymous said...

jwm,

Musical interlude or not, just poipin' in with note on "tenor". Not in response to what you wrote bec. I don't know whatchya talking about.
But if you ever want to hear and see something which could raise the hair on your head, have a listen to Luciano Pavarotti's (solo) Nessun Dorma on youtube. The one recorded from the 94' Los Angeles 3 Tenors concert. I watched him sing the same song in various other concerts and it is only this one from 94' that 'something' extraodinary happened after that last crescendo note. . . you will witness Pavarotti's -- with eyes open -- his few seconds long goosebumpy soul-moment.

Theofilia

julie said...

...there’s a remarkable inability to explain why the belief is held.

Indeed - in fact, in this particular case her assumption taken on the status of Absolute - it is an unquestionable fact, as concrete as the blue of the sky or the chemical composition of water. Disagreement therefore equals either madness or willful obfuscation.

I'm working my way through the comments on the Tuppence thread. Again, very interesting.

julie said...

Rereading the post, after reading HvB,

...father can identify with son and permit his infancy, within which son can identify with father and become a man, and within which a male can perceive and forgive the equal manhood of his fellow man.

Yes, that does stand out in a host of ways...

julie said...

(Spidey is just precious; I can only imagine how much energy he expended getting to that point :D )

Anyway,

But the attack brings with it the unconscious fear of father's retaliation

Is this fear due to the lack of proper maturation? By which I mean, if they never properly go through the male-male stage does that mean they've never learned to not fear father's retaliation? Or am I not even off the mark?

Just trying to grasp the mindset.

Gagdad Bob said...

Anger that is unconsciously projected returns in the form of fear. It's no different than if you had physically attacked someone bigger and stronger than you. The unconscious mind doesn't distinguish between fantasy and reality, so it's as if the attack really took place.

Gagdad Bob said...

Perhaps I should add that in a healthy father-son relationship, the father will allow the son's aggression, without over-reacting to it, so that the unconscious fantasy can be countered by the reality principle. But if the child has a father who, say, brooks no aggression, then it will be driven underground into unconscious fantasy. Likewise, the father cannot be too permissive, for then the child will think that his anger is omnipotent and can "murder" the father. It's a delicate balance.

julie said...

I think I get it. Thanks.

Gagdad Bob said...

Just try to imagine it from the baby's perspective, i.e., "What will happen to me if I express anger at the source of life?"

Gagdad Bob said...

I can't tell you how common it is for a patient to make an accurate statement about their (asshole) parents, and then to immediately "take it back" due to the fear of reprisal, i.e., guilt...

julie said...

Ah ha - I think I see how that works; the illustration helps.

John Holmes said...

Turd worshipper said,

"You really want to go comparing the length of your dick to Obama's?"

While you're playing to stereotypes, don't forget Obama is only half black.

ximeze said...

Perhaps I should add that in a healthy father-son relationship, the father will allow the son's aggression, without over-reacting to it, so that the unconscious fantasy can be countered by the reality principle. What a hoot, no wonder Leftard heads explode when confronted with Darth Cheney. It's not just that he owns them with stuff like that AEI speech, he's their Sire & that's what they really can't stand. How delicious.

wv:lolson

hoarhey said...

Having had neighbor leftys frothing at the mouth over Bush's NSA directives and their perceived inability to enter a library without Bush personally spying on their every move, why then is it okey dokey for Obama to be doing the exact same things and everything's cool?
I heard him say he's "workin' on it" to get rid of all the unconstitutional Bush directives and that he'll be "workin' on it 4 years from now if any reporter even asks, and that if he wins another term he'll be "workin' on it" eight years from now since for him it isn't about doing what he campaigned on but about power.
Their guy is in and so all the bad is now good. Mommy would never hurt us. ;*)

ximeze said...

Even in the realm of urban vinyl, figures exist based on the intentionally unhip. Toys in homage to slackers and Subgeniuses who sang about science fiction? I am, of course, referring to Devo

Fontessa said...

As long as you are going to wander willy-nilly in that minefield of women and their shoes: you might take write about the importance of red shoes (without mentioning Dorothy please) and shoes with bows on the toes.

Northern Bandit said...

goddinpotty:

I really wish you and people like you would stop coming here. I scroll through the comments looking for the latest reflections from a Julie, Van or Will. It's lovely.

When I come across your deposits I immediately know what it would feel like for someone I don't know to break into my house and take a dump on my kitchen floor.

You add nothing whatsoever to this site, and your mind and its excretions makes me vaguely ill.

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