Month: March 2011

I was thinking about violence in media, how it has an effect of increasing rates of depression, and social alienation and cynicism, and lack of empathy. These are all negatives, which are not balanced by any positives.

If there were something in our food supply that was doing that–say, making people depressed–the Left woudl be all over it, especially if they could blame the “corporations”, say Monsanto.

Given, then, the research that is available, why are so few people, particularly on the Left, saying anything? The answer is that objecting to it would require moral judgement. It would require speaking in a cultural voice, which has at its root a vision for a shared cultural order, over and above the political order. For people for whom everything is political, this is impossible. If it is not demonizing Republicans and corporations, then it has no use.

But we live in cultural orders, not political orders. Culture gives us meaning. Police can only give us physical order.

I’m not sure if I spelled this right, but it’s close.

An interesting analogy of Socialism is Durrestad. It was a market town at the mouth of the Rhine very roughly 1,200 years ago. The Vikings raided it annually for a number of years. Eventually there was nothing left to steal, so the town was abandoned, and eventually disappeared.

Sooner or later, someone has to produce something, and if you take everything they make, they stop making it, or they make it somewhere beyond your reach.

Some thoughts on the social democracies of northern Europe, especially Scandinavia.

One, it works to the extent that people are moral, carry their own burdens and are virtuous. People appear to be happy there, by and large, and as much as conservatives may hate that fact, there it is.

To my way of thinking, the desire to take care of fellow members of your social order is desirable. If we define that as “socialism”, then socialism is desirable AND achievable, given sufficient moral elevation.

The problem is in the sequencing. Scandinavians have a very homogeneous cultural order, by and large, and it is characterized by honesty, hard work, and attention to detail. If you took away these virtues, their experiment would fail tomorrow.

In large measure, that is why socialism has failed here. You have to have a receptive “surface”. If you give money to people, they need to value it, and use it creatively.

What has happened here is that large segments of our population have come to believe that the government has money, and that the job of government is to give it to them. They have a sense of entitlement, without balancing responsibility. And that responsibility is not just to those writing them checks, but to their communities as a whole.

Government, to be clear, is not and never can be the same as a cultural order. It is a legal order, instituted by the implied capacity for violence, in the forms of seizing property, and jailing you.

For government to help, there must be an underlying cultural order, and to the extent government tries to play that role, what little cultural order remains is undermined.

It is a truism that “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime”; but a corollary is that if you give a man a life, he loses his own; if you expect him to live, he will generally do so.

I have called the Scandinavian system “sybaritic leftism”. My reasoning is that it is based upon the conception that life is supposed to be easy. People who grow up with that belief, atrophy. All of the Scandinavian countries have shrinking populations. All of the European countries do. The only fully industrialized nations that were continuing to grow, last I checked several years ago, were the United States, Israel, and South Africa.

It seems to me that excessive ease has a tendency to breed contempt for life.

These are a few scattered thoughts, not fully collated into a coherent pattern. I’ve read where some people want to die mid-sentence. Blog posts can end

The word Hell comes from a Scandinavian goddess, not of Hell as we conceive it, but a cold place. Women that died of old age or sickness went there. If they died in childbirth they went somewhere better, I believe the female equivalent of Valhalla. She was the daughter of Loki, and she is light blue.

You didn’t know you didn’t know that, did you? I didn’t. What else don’t you know you don’t know?

I was thinking about Christ’s teaching that “if you have but the faith of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” I had two thoughts.

First, it occurred to me some time ago that he himself moved literal mountains. Cities have been created, and civilizations dedicated to teachings which owed their existence to him. For all we know, he may have faltered throughout his life, been uncertain, and sometimes wrong, but in the end what he created has endured, and changed the landscape of the planet. You cannot understand modern culture without Western Civilization, which itself cannot be understood without reference–for both good and bad–to Christianity.

Second, I was visualizing myself as the mustard seed, pushing out of the ground. That seed cannot in some respects be said to have “faith”, but rather a way of being such that it either produces its natural fruit (please bear with the awkward metaphor), or perishes. It must have water. It must have nutrients in the soil. It must be planted neither too deep, nor too shallow. At some point, it must have sun. Many factors have to be in place for that seed to become a mustard plant; but unless it dies, become a mustard plant it will. It has no chance of becoming an apple or potato. It has a destiny. It has an internal structure. To complete the metaphor, it has an identity.

It would be pointless to compare mustard plants with apple trees. Both are what they are. They are useful to human beings, and for our part we do much better in conditions of ecological diversity. We also, in my view, do much better in conditions of cultural diversity.

For my part, I post things like what I just posted–about a possible global conspiracy worthy of some action film starring some action hero, except that he keeps it from happening–and wonder how things will end up for me. What if I’m right? What if people will start disappearing? What then?

As I view it, whether there are global conspiracies or not, whether we die from a solar flare, or nuclear war, or global warming or cooling, or by a global plague of sparrows, die we must. We all die, somehow, somewhere. Given this, do the details really matter all that much? I can certainly picture better and worse ways to go, but in the end I do what I do because that is who I am. I MUST give voice to what I think and feel, and the consequences are beyond my control, in large part.

It seems to me when you have attained that level of identity, you have become a mustard seed. Given a good environment, you can go far.

Apparently using this word will locate me on the far-left or far-right, which is normally about the same. Be that as it may, I found this link interesting. It is alleged that a technology exists which can cause earthquakes, and that both China and Japan were threatened with it. Massive earthquakes have happened in both nations.

Now, to posit something like this as possible, one must posit a “them”. One of the chief defects of conspiracy theorists is failing to see that while small cabals can clearly cause decisive effects, this does not imply that everyone in any given “them”–the White House, the intelligence community, the military, Wall Street, Communists, or whoever–is in cahoots with them.

Specifically, it is my hope that someone in the intelligence community reads this–you guys read substantially everything, don’t you?–and initiates an investigation. Self evidently, the Japanese have an interest in figuring out what happened here, as does the rest of the world.

From what I read, the Fed is using this as a pretext for yet more money printing for those initiated into the club, weakening the rest of us, and giving them a means for owning yet more of the world.

This is scary stuff. A life lived in fear is a life half lived; but a life lived in willful ignorance is a life half dead.

Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying this is what happened. I’m not saying HAARP can control the weather, or that it can cause earthquakes. I don’t know, and I’m not sure this is important enough for me at this point to devote the time to forming a firmer position. All I want to do is point out that this is a possibility. Sometimes things are just coincidences, but it just seemed strange to me that this happened at exactly the moment Obama was dealt the most decisive reverse of his Presidency, unless you count the elections themselves.

You have to keep your options open. As .38 Special put it, hold on loosely, but don’t let go.

I’m wearing out tonight.

First, my thought was to see if Reggae and the word for King were related, since as I understand it the Rastafarians had a special attachment to Haile Salassi (however you spell it). Looks to be wrong. Worth a shot. I enjoy philology, because that’s just how I roll, yo. (I’m never afraid to be ridiculous; we are all ridiculous every day, but most of us never have the liberating experience of realizing it.)

Historically, ceramic jars were mouse-proof containers. Prior to them, there was no good way to store grains. This is not a big point, but I found it interesting.

Finally, historically, Rome was an enormous source of wealth to the world, as it consumed a lot of material. This created economic growth everywhere. Indirect trade with Rome more or less germinated the Viking Age.

By extension, the growth of a great “consuming” power, leads to wealth for others. The United States is a huge source of wealth for other nations, whether we do “Fair” Trade or not. Any time you create a market, you create a reason to expand production. Any time you expand production, you create wealth.

We have created middle classes in Japan and Indonesia and South Korea and many other places. That we get no credit for this in some quarters is due to the fact that you can’t simultaneously understand economics and be a leftist. Some degree of imbecility is required to WANT to join the club.

OK: sitrep: I am drinking and taking off some meandering voicemails I left myself, which I am going to leave largely unedited because there are so damn many voicemails and I have other things to do, and just don’t want these epiphanies or meandering imbecilities–however they get scored eventually–unuttered.

I wonder if our confessional culture is not in some measure a predictable response to the demand for the renunciation of individuality. What I am contrasting is the behavior of game show contestants who are expected to be perky and self revelatory, and the Maoist practice of group confession.

When you go to a psychologist, it involves telling a complete stranger details of your personal life. The analogy is with physical medicine, in that the parts and pieces of your internal life are assumed to be thing-like, such that they can be put without psychological effect out into a relatively committment-free environment. You can depend on the shrink as long as you pay them. Fail to do that, you are on your own.

Add to this the TSA intervention, which is seemingly intended to eradicate the physical barriers between our bodies and the State. I have talked about this repeatedly, and want to be clear that the symbolic importance of the TSA’s warrantless strip searches cannot be overstated.

I wonder to what extent the people who embrace “confessional culture”, in which all personal boundaries are eradicated, and the private made public, are in league to some extent or other with more generalized efforts to remove the locus of moral order from the individual to a police state. The ideas are congruent.

One need not view this through the prism of conspiracy theory. Ideas with legs will permeate all aspects of life over time, especially when propagated by people in pulpits of various sorts. What I think orients this social system is moral imbecility, which is to say an inability to articulate and follow codes of conduct that are not constantly reconciled with external Others.

It is the triumph of what Riesman called, if memory serves, “other-directedness”, as opposed to internal directedness. One might visualize the latter as a compass that always points North. The other points in whatever direction the wind is blowing, and if everyone changes at the same time, it approximates moral order, but requires the cessation of individuality, and the links with the past needed for a sense of stable identity.

A rolling stone gathers no moss. In the Japanese idiom, as I understand it, unrolled stones are fascinating objects, which gather moss in individually interesting and unique ways. What some want for us–many, as an escape from a freedom they can’t use and don’t want–is a giant polishing machine, such that we are all moss and defect free, and perfectly alike.

One giant step in that direction is eradicating all sense of personal boundaries, as seen on Facebook and other places. To be clear, I myself offer up personal feelings at times, but I am not offering them to the group: I am offering them to God, and to spirits from whom nothing can be hidden anyway. I am offering them both directly, and as they may be used by you for your own improvement.

My ship is my own, though, and I am the Captain.

If you are panicking at every bump in the night, and every shadow, you are too worried. If you realize, on a cognitive level, that bad things CAN happen, that is appropriate.

Anyone who said a disaster of the scale now facing Japan was impossible, has been proven wrong. Countless thousands of people now dead were wrong when they thought “this person really can’t be that creepy; they can’t be thinking THAT”.

Churchill was right in taking Hitler at his word; Chamberlain and most of Britain were wrong. Those who said Lenin then Stalin then others had built a slave state based on forced labor, mass imprisonment, torture, and murder were right; those who denied it were wrong.

The proper use of perception is determining first what is possible, which is a VERY large category for people with any imaginative capacity at all, then what is LIKELY. Anyone who uses their perception properly will regularly find themselves in error, and make corrections making similar mistakes less likely in the future, if not impossible.

To imagine the worst possible is not at all the same as EXPECTING it. In my view all Americans should have at least one week’s worth of food and water, multiple flashlights, first aid supplies, and some means of defending themselves, preferably a gun. This is a basic list, to which much can be added.

To prepare for natural or “man-made” (that euphemism continues to astonish me in its brazen contempt for the reality of the situation) catastrophes does not require you to dedicate time each and every day to worrying about them. Worry is wasted energy. Thoughtful preparation is not.

If that guy across the street creeps you out, then listen to that instinct. That does not mean that all people walking the street at night are potential criminals.

I have recommended often the book “The Gift of Fear”. I think all women, in particular, should read it.

Perfect perception would consist in always doing just the right thing, just when it is needed, in furtherance of long, medium, and short range goals, which in our perfect formulation, will line up like the rings Odysseus shot through in the Odyssey. Self evidently, the smartest of us have our heads up our asses half the time (please note that to fail to perceive something you should see is a species of idiocy), so doing pretty good is the best most of us will get. Even Sherlock Holmes made mistakes, if you read the actual stories.

When he put out Shutter Island and Inception back to back, it got me thinking. Then I read where former KGB Commander Vladimir Putin called him a “real man”, for some extra effort to get to a “Save the Tigers” conference.

So I read through his filmography, and it is pretty obvious that he has committed himself romantically to radical politics, and social subversion. A credible case could be made that he is a Communist sympathizer.

All film is propaganda, to some extent. All art is intended to influence you in some way. Much of it is banal, some of it is profound; when profound, it can be so because it operates on you at a deep, unconscious level, for good and evil.

The point of Shutter Island was that your sense of sanity is precarious. You can be a lunatic and not know it. More insidiously, that you can be called out as a lunatic by authorities, and be forced, more or less, to comply with their diagnosis.
One thinks of the abuse of the Soviet and other psychiatric systems for the “treatment” of political dissidents, whose mental defect was pointing out self-evidently true facts about the monstrous systems within which they were imprisoned.

You identify with his character, then you learn that you are mad. I only saw the movie once, and my first reading was that a credible case could be made that his character was not in fact mad, but was made so by a carefully contrived set of circumstances and drugs. The author claims no, but to my way of thinking if he was trying to mess with peoples minds, why stop once he got out of the book and off the screen? I’d have to watch it again to make a confident diagnosis.

The point of Inception is that your dreams are not your own. The State–or anyone–can come into your mind, into the most private parts of your self, and control or at least influence them.

Both of these movies are thrillers, on the surface, but particularly in a theater, when you are deeply absorbed in them, they will also have effects that linger, that introduce ideas and doubts about who you are, and a following increased tendency towards decreased trust, increased alienation, and openness to the influence of others.

This case can be made with regard to virtually every movie DiCaprio has made in his whole career, which I am not going to take the time to do. No wonder Putin admires him.