Month: August 2011

It occurs to me that a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books is the need to solve a mystery for which too few clues have been provided. Harry is constantly confronting situations he did not anticipate and for which he could scarcely have prepared, and which he survives by some combination of instinct, courage, and plain luck.

Is life itself not often a mystery, too? By this, I mean: is it not often the case that you are not sure what you are supposed to do, and who you are supposed to be? For my part, every day is an adventure, because I am making it up as I go along.

As I look at my own past, it seems you have the innocent stage, the banal stage, the sex stage, then the confusion age. You are small and happy initially, because you don’t think about much, and life is about playing, cake, friends and naps.

Then the Gilligan’s Island stage. I have nothing against Bob Denver or the others, but that show is banal. It is trivial. It gives the mind nothing to digest or even chew on. And I watched it daily for years.

Then girls, the chase the apprehension. Excitement, then what?

Ah, you have to find fulfillment. Fulfilling relationships, fulfilling job, fulfilling life. But it never quite gets there for most of us. No doubt there are exceptions. But for most of us, it always seems like there is something missing.

This is, in my view, the Duhkha of Buddhism, the “suffering” which is not really suffering so much as the consciousness of a gap, of a lack, of something you want and need but can’t get, the feeling of Tantalus, never quite able to get that sweet fruit.

We need to be clear that this is nothing new. This is not a disease of modernity. There is nothing new under the sun. Buddha saw this clearly 2,500 or so years ago.

In response to the Existentialists who want to find in this mystery cause for anxiety, angst, I would respond that this is rather a problem to be solved, and that technologies to do so already exist, and have for some time.

To my mind, the “condition of modernity” created by academics, consists first and foremost in indefensible metaphysical pessimism, which finds in the notion of materialistic evolution cause to deny free will–and consequently to enable the notions of impartial history to gain sway, even though such notions are necessarily implemented by specific, time-bound and decision making individuals–and to deny the concept of life continued past their physical deaths.

Both of these assumptions are prone to empirical invalidation, and it seems to me, and has long seemed to me, that progress in philosophical debate is unlikely until the premises upon which our current intellectual malaise are predicated are invalidated from within the scientific paradigm of truth.

This is both possible and necessary.

Few thoughts.

Intellectuals, in general, are not useless: they are harmful. They are people who are hoping that some hapless soul will cry out in the night “help me, help me. I don’t understand Habermassian hermeneutics and need someone to save me”. Discussions of both such philosophical doctrines and the load bearing characteristics of various construction materials are equally dull, but one makes a practical difference in the world.

So in much the same way that leftists practically need to create physical crises to advance political policies that otherwise would be laughed out of the room, so too do effete, useless intellectuals need to manufacture crises that only THEY understand, such as the fundamentally exploitative nature of Capitalism, or the true imperialistic history of the United States.

Since they need such emergencies, they are quite willing to lie to get them, to abuse the truth, and even to abuse the very people they are supposedly trying to save. Van Jones lied: he never abandoned his radical pose, in his own mind–which we might well term his romantic, sentimental AND angrily self righteous self image: that of the knight in shining African American armor riding off to save his African American princesses.

He lives in a fantasy world, a world that does not and never has existed. Rodney King got beaten–unlike his several passengers, who were arrested without incident–because he charged a police officer, and repeatedly refused commands to stop fighting. The guy was tased twice and hit with a baton in conformity with police protocols before he ever even hit the ground. The guy is something like 6’4″ and weighs something like 280. You take a guy like that, and put him on PCP, and it’s no wonder the officer in charge on the scene said he seriously considered shooting him. And he was stopped initially for leading police on a high speed chase, through numerous red lights, and for being a combative drunk, who later blew over a .20.

I mention this because Yale educated Jones says that the King verdict–which was eminently defensible legally and morally–is what led him to become a Communist.

What we need to understand is that leftist narratives are primarily created and propagated by people who are utterly incapable of achieving business or personal success through the normal avenues of having USEFUL ideas, a good work ethic, and people skills, all of which are harnessed in the direction of economic usefulness. Adolph Hitler never had a real job, and I don’t think Jones has either. His whole life has been political organizing.

Who is empowered by such organizing? Not the people. Rather, HE IS. Leftist organizing is about the empowerment of the intellectuals. The growth of the State is a growth in the power of those who don’t and can’t actually do anything useful. They cannot stand the idea of being left out, and the only way they can be included is if they lie, cheat and steal so as to control the systems of power and wealth creation.

Nobody wants to pick them for their kickball team, so they figure out how to get the teachers to put them in charge. It really is that simple, in many ways.

Obama is a good example of this. Being capable of doing nothing, he nonetheless entered his office believing he could do anything. He did not know what he did not know. He still doesn’t. This is the worst sort of ignorance.

We can only pray that God will save us from the people trying to save us.

The tactic the Left uses, of necessity, is creating crises to which they can plausibly claim more government is the answer.

Fannie Mae (FDR) and Freddie Mac (Great Society) failed because they made large volumes of loans that were indefensible from a business standpoint. They were virtually guaranteed to lose, since nobody was checking to see if the loans were viable. Moreover, they were backing up large volumes of Wall Street securities, implicitly using the Federal government to underwrite the risk of very shaky loans. Once this link was lost, with the failures of FM and FM, the securities were downgraded, they could no longer be sold, large companies got into unmanageable cashflow problems, and went belly up. This created general problems that, likely not due to accident, came to a head just before the election.

Left wing programs create economic chaos, which is then seized upon to create a year of Christmas’s for political fellow travellers, further regulation of Wall Street, and an expansion of the welfare state. The Depression was the same thing. Even then, in private, the conversations contrasted “reform”–socialism–with recovery, with the latter losing every time.

Here is Obama’s problem: he has no crisis. What we are in is malaise, and he used his political capital, created in the last crisis, to propose fixes that fixed nothing. Based on past history, we should be recovering, but we aren’t.

And taken honestly, we are not doing well, but we are not doing that bad either. Some 90% of Americans are gainfully employed. We are by far the world’s most powerful economy and military. We are motivated, honest people, in general.

So we are a boat that is afloat, and moving, but not at the pace it should. Obama has no platform from which to hyperventilate and scream out that we MUST do x, y, z. He will of course try to sell the imperative nature of his ideas, but we are not in a panic mode. What we are wanting and needing–and not seeing from him, because he doesn’t have them–are well thought out, serious proposals that take into account valid economic principles.

When the limelight comes on him, it will show a lot of the flaws that he has been trying so hard to hide. Of course, absent a complicit media, he would not have been elected, so any amount of serious coverage can only hurt this very mediocre, unprincipled man.

At times I will distinguish between myth and philosophy. Myth is the basis upon which philosophy operates. Myth creates the starting points of any analysis. If the “rich” control everything, then what should be done? Many answers are possible, but they flow naturally from unquestioned first assumptions.

My previous post, that of Sammy Davis, is a myth: this is an appealing story to me, and I see no reason to justify it.

There is an element as well, though, in philosophy in which truth claims are not made, per se, but rather tendencies towards concrete outcomes pointed out. What is the effect on a personality of a philosophy consisting in the belief–the myth–that nothing is worth dying for? What about the belief that dying in battle is the best way to die? Or the belief that some things are worth fighting for, but that the best way to die is in bed, old, and surrounded by people who love you?

One can tease out endless if/then constructions from basic premises. One good use of philosophy is in pointing out, particularly, non linear outcomes from basic premises. There is this tendency among many “philosophers” to want to isolate what they do from empiricism, from validation. They want it be “pure”. Why? Is it not useful information to know that people who believe X tend to experience the emotive state of Y more often than people who believe Z?

As I see it, metaphysical room exists for many competing truth claims, and in analyzing what we will CHOOSE, in the end, to believe to be true, concrete outcomes are irrelevant only to intellectual aesthetes.

This is one of my favorite Medal of Honor stories. Read the citation at the bottom.

This is the image in particular that I love, even though it is just part of his very courageous action that day:

He struggled to his feet and returned to the howitzer, which was burning furiously. Ignoring repeated warnings to seek cover, Sgt. Davis rammed a shell into the gun. Disregarding a withering hail of enemy fire directed against his position, he aimed and fired the howitzer which rolled backward, knocking Sgt. Davis violently to the ground. Undaunted, he returned to the weapon to fire again when an enemy mortar round exploded within 20 meters of his position, injuring him painfully. Nevertheless, Sgt. Davis loaded the artillery piece, aimed and fired. Again he was knocked down by the recoil. In complete disregard for his safety, Sgt. Davis loaded and fired 3 more shells into the enemy.

The cannon is on fire, not really ready to be fired, and he fires it anyway. It knocks him on his ass (one of the rounds broke his back, which he did not realize until the action was over, at which point he fainted, which is not in this story), he gets up and DOES IT AGAIN. AND AGAIN, 4 MORE TIMES. Beautiful.

What they also did not mention here is that the rounds–this is my recollection, but I believe an accurate one–were flechette, anti-personal rounds. His heroism may well have kept their remote position from being overrun.

That’s the way you do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5etFfRefGhk

In general, I avoid self disclosure, as I am not an exhibitionist. It may seem at times like I am sharing, but most of the time I’m not. There is a lot at play that is invisible, and which I intend to stay that way.

This I will grant: I am extraordinarily sensitive, to the point that I have to tame the flood by willfully limiting the flow. Having done this my whole life, I am good at it.

As I put it to someone once, though, I feel like I am a 12 cylinder car operating on 3 cylinders. The difference in performance is pain tolerance. I have a very high pain tolerance, but imagine being able to see and feel the pain of everyone you meet. Being able to feel their joys, too, would not counteract this.

I truly believe that I am capable of walking into a room and feeling EVERYTHING in there. I am not strong enough to do that.

I’m not sure why I am sharing this, but it feels right.

Meaning is emotive. It represents the capacity to convert work and difficulty into flow, love, and direction.

Truth is the reason you do it, cognitively. You can have a sense of meaning, without being able to, or needing to, explain it.

What both do, though, is simulate order. Your world is never fully orderly, internally or (of course) externally, by which I mean there is never complete congruence between will or desire and outcome. There are always rough edges, and breaks in the texture.

As I look at a life of freedom, it is a mystery. You can do anything you want. Think about that. You can go left, or you can go right (to borrow a dialogue bit from Battle:LA). You can walk into a bookstore and buy ANY book in there. You can walk into a clothing store and buy anything in there. You can drop everything, and join a commune. You could defect to North Korea, so that someone will always tell you what to do, and you will be more or less fed and housed.

Freedom is a seamless ocean, in constant motion, which is limitless in its possible permutations.

This thought tends to make peoples heads explode, so they need to retreat into codes of behavior, moral systems, religious systems, philosophical systems.

What a sense of meaning provides is a direction of movement. This is the most important element phenomenologically. It is the task you feel compelled to accomplish, because it needs to be done.

What a truth system does is determine the limits of the meaning system, the boundaries. You do this, but not that. It provides the principles by means of which the chaos of freedom is tamed, roughly.

These are out loud musings. I’m not sure if this makes sense or not, but it feels like this is about the right direction for this line–wave, cloud, funnel–of thought.

As I see it, there are two classes: the people who create money, and the people who create real products and services. The real conflict is between the two. Our national debt–that carried by the Federal, State, Local governments, and that carried by private businesses and individuals–is symptomatic of wealth transfer. Most of the money created to enable those bonds of debt represented wealth transfer.

The associated price increases are merely the effect of this transfer. Inflation, per se, ought in my view to be seen PRIMARILY as wealth transfer, and only secondarily as price increases.

The key point to be grasped here is that even if the wealth is moved from the people to the government–which has plainly happened in the U.S., which you can readily see if you just look at the land and buildings and things generally owned by the Federal government–it does not benefit the “people” in aggregate. It hurts them. It is EXACTLY the same problem as that criticized by leftists in claiming that “the rich” steal from the poor.

Key point: it is possible to sustain the moral dimension of leftist critiques of our class system, but only if the correct targets are selected. As things stand, ALL of their policies instead still support elites at the expense of the common man.

I don’t remember if I’ve said this, but my financial system proposal could very easily be framed as a Capitalist Revolution. What any Marxists reading this need to understand is that the task is not to make everyone a worker, but to make everyone a Capitalist. When you are a Capitalist, you have the money to determine your own destiny. This is what we want.

That is, in any event, and in my view, what GOOD people should want for their neighbors. I want to be happy, and I want you to be happy. What makes me happy may not make you happy, but that is fine, provided we are both free to follow our own muses. Moreover, with both of us creating our own experiences according to our own inclinations, we can learn from each other.

It has always seemed a species of madness to me that so many intellectuals want to immersed in tyranny, and that they spend so much time and effort talking about “Liberating” people, when they know full well that such liberations involve mass murder, mass torture, and the eradiction of personal freedom and creativity.

First off, I think we should leave it to the Left to use petty issues to castigate their opponents. Obama’s vacations are not the issue: it is what he does when he is in office. We should be grateful when he leaves, since every time he does, he stops making things worse.

But what I wanted to say was that I don’t think he is as recreationally oriented as we think. Yes, he golfs, but when I look at him in my mind at Martha’s Vineyard, what I see are a group of men gathered around a table mapping out a strategy, in exactly the way military leaders would. We don’t know who the other men are, but we can guess readily enough the sort of men (and women) they are.

What they are producing will appear to them the work of genius, and to the rest of us like crayon scribblings with dabs of feces.

The point, though, is that when he is on “vacation”, he can surround himself with people he would not normally invite to the White House. That is why he has to leave so often. He’s not lazy, except in his thinking.

I will add that this “bank” he is apparently going to propose was done during the Great Depression, and didn’t work then either. It will be another “stimulus” wrapped in the external trappings of being a business, which of course it won’t and can’t be.

Actually, I will add as well that when we hear infrastructuretechnologyeducation what we need to transpose in their place is ineedtogetmoneytomybasetogetreelected.

This is very simple propagandistic use of business terms to convince us to buy things we don’t need.

Mexico could probably use infrastructure. We have a national highway system that works well, and is not impeding our economy in the slightest.

We create new technologies constantly, in the private sector.

We spend more than 3/4ths of the world on education already, and much more than almost every nation that is beating us. The problem isn’t money, it’s how things are structured. What we need is competition among schools, to give children choices. Vouchers are a self evident and simple way of doing that.