Month: November 2011

This morning, walking the dogs, I was watching the clouds scoot across the sky, pushed by steady winds. It felt like change. “Good change or bad change?”, I wondered. Then it hit me: Change. That is the word. The ridiculousness of my question made me laugh out loud.

We spend so much time defending our five feet of earth, don’t we? Our own skies, our own views, our own interests, our own, our own. Yet we will all be swept away like clouds one day too, won’t we? Flow is the only reality, and there are those who accept this, and those who lie to themselves.

Everything that Socialists claim to want–decreased work weeks, better retirements, increased access to healthcare, an end to poverty, a more “humane” world–could have already been achieved, had we not granted 90% or more of our national wealth production to the banks, some of which they kept, and some of which they simply wasted.

The Federal Reserve, and fractional reserve banking system it enables and parts of which it represents, is the reason we have such high divorce rates. It is the reason poor fathers cannot provide for their children; the reason stressed out fathers and mothers cheat on one another and become emotionally unavailable because exhausted. The Federal Reserve is the reason we consign our parents to “homes” that are nothing of the sort, where they are fed horrible food, and in too many cases treated like profitable cattle.

The Federal Reserve is the reason so many children grow up in single parent homes, and never see their (usually) mother who is working all the time, and not very helpful when she is home, as she lacks the energy.

One could argue the Federal Reserve is the reason we so fear terrorism: it has enabled a fundamentally unstable financial system, that can be attacked reasonably easily, causing widespread, rather than local, damage.

The Federal Reserve is the reason for the empty eyes and shattered hopes one sees in some parts of town, and the reason so many of them wind up in jail, or dependent on Democrats very happy to make them so.

This is not a small, tangential problem. It is at the HEART of substantially every economic, political, and social problem we face.

These bastards have to be reigned in. I see Ron Paul has the support of the military, and unlike Rick Perry is not doing himself in–he of course has the help of the complicit media in making sure his message is not heard. It will be interesting to see if the organizing skills of the Left can be brought to bear to get Paul elected. The media are only polling active Republicans right now as to their preference.

The sheer extent of the LIES one sees in the media can be discouraging. I take comfort from a precommitment I have made to never quit, no matter what.

Mixed bag below. Topics change.

I have a LOT of stuff on the internet. I use the term “Cultural Sadeism” from time to time, and this essay here is where I developed it.

Cultural Sadeism is what I referred to in the previous post as the yes/yes operator. It is the reason Apollinaire referred to Sade as “the freest man who ever lived.”

It is the rejection of rejection. It is the rejection of form, and instead consists in relationships of power only.

No sadist can exist without a target. They are a pool of water without a container, endlessly flowing until the moment of contact when they can EITHER be abused or abuse.

Plainly, some serial killers/rapists/Communist leaders always want to be in control. Yet who are they in the interstices? They are nothing. They are less than human. This is where their energy comes from; they must push back from their void, their black hole, sucking them into nothingness.

This is my view. Sade himself, clinically, was BOTH a “Sad-ist” and a masochist. He was fine with being whipped himself. And one has to sense a certain masochism in behaving in such a way that he KNEW he would be locked up.

I will add as a footnote, as it were, that while I have never seen any reason to read Foucault, it is very interesting that he obsessed in his work about power relations, and in his personal life enjoyed homosexual bondage.

It would not be unwarranted, I think, to look to the lives of self declared “philosophers” first, and see if there is anything worth imitating, if they live happily and actually free. Only then might it warrant examining their work. Read the biography, then the theory. If the two do not connect, then you are dealing with someone who can and should be ignored.

Philosophy is about life. It is about building structures in which you can live. It is an artisanal trade no different than baking bread, pouring concrete, or fixing television sets. If it is not useful, then it should be ignored, no matter how pretty it might seem to be. It will not feed you, and instead will likely lead you both to hunger and an inability to feed yourself.

No amount of blood can ever bring a vampire to life. They cling: they do not live.

I play a lot, although my play probably would be between inscrutable and mind-numbingly tedious for most.

Anyway, I was playing with this yes/no operator. It seems to me that three basic cultural statements can be made: no/no, yes/no/yes/no, and yes/yes.

In a no/no system you are defined not by what you ARE, but by what you are not. This is a very strange place to be, but I would submit that it is the lot of most leftists. They are not imperialists, sexists, racists, bigots, homophobes, Islamophobes, etc. But what ARE they? What do they believe on principle? As it turns out, nothing. An act which will draw no comment at all when done by a Democrat becomes horrific when done by a conservative. Does anyone seriously think Bill Clinton never made unwanted sexual advances to anyone? Kennedy, Ted, John or Robert?

Or take the example I cite in my definitions of terms: Cuba. On Cuba are different types of prisons. The regime itself runs political prisons where “soft” torture was practiced–and may well still be practiced–for many years on persons whose sole crime was to question the regime’s good intentions. They lock people in what amount to small doghouses and leave them there for months. Sometimes they block the air holes, so they can barely get enough to breathe. This elicits no comment from the Left.

Yet Guantanomo Bay, which houses the worst of the worst, generally people who have committed or tried to commit mass murder against civilians, and who are housed better than most Americans are for much lesser crimes, is somehow horrible

Wait, it’s not horrible. Obama inherited it, he hasn’t closed it, so now it is OK. It will become bad again if a Republican is elected and does not close it.

No, you are not a Republican, or conservative, or bible pounder, or “truther”, or “birther”, or idiot, or Fox News whore, or any member of the long lists of things it is undesirable to be. But who are you? You don’t know. This causes anxiety.

An intact culture contains both markers for what you ARE and what you are NOT. If you want to say Americans value freedom, and that we are not barbarians, then you have included both. In the flow of events, both markers have to be present for FORM to exist.

The Yes/yes marker inverts the No/no marker by saying that there ARE no rules. You define yourself by what you do, and you do whatever you want.

Psychologically, as discussed in the book “Willpower”, humans tend to lose all restraint once they pass certain “bright lines” of rules they have. As long as you don’t cross a line, you control your behavior. Once you cross that line, though, behavior does not become SLIGHTLY less controlled, but the control evaporates entirely. The You who made those lines is gone, and you are now someone else.

As Voltaire said in Candide, the perfect connoisseur is not the person who rejects everything. And self evidently they are not the people who accept everything. They are characterized by standards that they hold to diligently. This is the task of culture.

Imagine a culture in which we all hold to our own chosen lines, and stray no farther. This would be wonderful. We need freedom, but we also need restraint. Yes, and no.

I would like to add an analytical category between Sybaritic Leftism and Cultural Sadeism: to whit, Soft Sadism.

We hear this term “codependent”. That means that one person is seriously dysfunctional, but that their dysfunctions are enabled, facilitated, allowed to continue without consequence by, someone else.

That person, too, is mad.

I see socialists, and they NEED the poor. The poor are their raison d’etre. Without the poor (oppressed; somehow disenfranchised in reality, or more commonly plausibly enough that the facts can be created to support this need), they have nothing to do.

This is a form of cruelty. If you need me to suffer to feel alright about yourself, you are an idiot, and a mild sadist. You don’t realize that you want me to not succeed, consciously, but it is there all the same.

That is why Sade is so “liberating” for many leftists: he says what they come to feel, that the sense of power is itself liberating in some ways, and that you need no longer even PRETEND to care about others.

If the Left gave a flying fuck about the poor of Detroit, Detroit would not be Detroit. But this is, of course, a counterfactual statement. What they really care about is power, and there is no extent of OTHERS suffering they are not willing to countenance to get and keep it.

Suffering lays as a blanket keeping the wicked warm in the cold winters of failed worlds.

As I say often, this is my think out loud blog. I can and do change my mind. That bit of poetic metaphor is not far off, though. The kings of old who did so much to oppress the poor of their lands are not so very different than the kings of Detroit City Hall, who live well, without doing ANYTHING to help the plight of their subjects. That their subjects continue to vote them in is testament to their powers of deception and guile, and, of course, naked corruption.

We’ll be at well over a 100 stories on unsustantiABLE allegations by women who are presumably partisan Democrats soon. Yet most people don’t know the names Rezko, Ayers, or what Obama’s preacher for all those long years was saying quite openly, and in a manner he cannot fail to have heard or understood.

To the point here, if Herman Cain had issued the “birth certificate” that Obama has, he would have been torn to shred. The EVIDENCE of forgery is present. The EVIDENCE of Cain’s misdoing is not present.

In any event, would it not be interesting to redo the posted certificate, to the same level of precision, with Buckwheat listed as his father, and Rosa Luxemburg as his mother? Or some other combination?

The extent of media complicity is truly breathtaking. We are borrowing $125 BILLION a MONTH, and they and their children will suffer the same fate the rest of us non-rich will when our economy collapses. Nothing good will happen, but for the 1% which includes both the rich and the government bureaucrats who grant them their power and immunity from scrutiny.

Keep in mind that “individual” means “Undividable”.

Watched Die Hard 4, I guess it is, when hackers take over the country. Young techy dude asks McClain: Why are you doing this? Mclain (net, paraphrased): “because the work needs to be done, and it isn’t getting done. Trust me, I have better things to do, but I’ll be damned if I walk away from the responsibilities just dropped on me.”

Can there be any better summary of the benefits of liberty, as combined with an accurate assumption of generalized personal responsibility? An attack of any sort comes anywhere. Local people organize, and respond, without external direction or prompting. They understand a problem exists, that it needs to be solved, and that the solution falls first to them.

Our system WORKS, if the people composing it understand the value of being free.

If you lack a belief in the capacity of all of us for progressively greater moral perfection, as seen in models (spiritual or religious) whose lines continue well past our physical deaths, then it is hard build a very large space for your life, in my view. To be able to grow–note, not necessarily to do so consciously, but to imagine it as possible–is important for optimal psychological health.

With Freud we see the sum total of human life reduced, in the end, to instincts no different in principle than those of squirrels. With Ayn Rand, the fundamental unit of human experience is elevated to the principle, but for all that retains a certain continuity with concept that to be is inherently to be selfish. For Freud, the point of life was self replication through sexuality. For Rand (to be clear, I have not read her in depth, but rather summaries of her work, which seemingly proceeds quite rationally from her basic premises; I have also spent a lot of time watching the behavior of her fans, which is interesting), it seems to me to be self replication through creative, nonsexual output. Both have always seemed constrained to me. I have not read Rand for the simple reason that I do not share her premises, so no matter how wonderful the edifice she builds on them, I will not be able to inhabit it.

People lacking an individual moral future, a clear path towards moral [I will note, too, that I differentiate this from psychological improvement, since historically improvement consisted mainly in the remediation of dysfunction; this has changed in recent years with the advent of “Positive Psychology”, but the system itself still FEELS constrained. This may be unhelpfully uncharitable, so I am noting my subjectivity on this topic] growth, are disproportionately affected by calls for SOCIAL perfection.

In a very real sense, the choice between Liberalism and Socialism/Fascism/Communism is between the notion of individual growth and eventual perfectability, and the rejection of that notion, by, to be clear, individuals.

There is no “Society”. This is a reification. There ARE individuals, who are always and necessarily the locus of decision making, and thus the logical center of moral improvement. You cannot improve a “Society”, without improving the behavior of the individuals. Do they stop to help you when you break down on the highway? Are they honest? Can you leave your door unlocked? Are they intelligent, erudite, and principled? All of these traits can ONLY be expressed by individuals. The “society” is a demographic, statistical abstraction from countable individual behavioral acts.

“Society” is a creation of the intellectuals, who are little able to differentiate between their fantasy lands between their ears, and actual human beings. In general–and Obama is a great example of this–they are utterly lacking in empathy, because they see individuals as small cogs in a large machine, and not as intrinsically valuable on their own. They see no spark of God anywhere.

When I was in Europe as an exchange student, the graffito (I think that is right) “No Future” was commonly seen. Now, this was during the period of Reagan and the end of the Cold War, when many of us feared a large scale nuclear war. The forests of Europe were seemingly dying. Many feared (in my continuing view, irrationally) nuclear power. The list was long.

But at root, it has long seemed to me that what they were really referring to was purpose. “No future” could as easily have translated to “no purpose” and “why live?” Would the best and brightest have found solace in their institutions of acculturation, which for most of them were their family and school? Not if their family was not religious. Only in socialism could they find that solace, and then only by renouncing their individual identity, for submersion in a whole LESS than the sum of the parts.

This situation is unacceptable, and unsustainable. If we are to worry about any environment, I think our moral environment is the most important, as taking care of that will most reliably lead to taking care of our physical environment. Many if not most of the most “pressing” environmental concerns–such as “global warming”–are, properly understood, efforts to express coherent morality in a condition in which that is the only means by which to do so conceivable within that person’s moral and ontological world.

This is the point of “Goodness Movement”. I have not solved all the problems of the human race. You have to solve your own problems, you ridiculous human being. So do I, and I am ridiculous, too, in my own way.

Here is the thing: if you move forward daily, relying on certain core principles, and helpful metaphysical beliefs (the interconnectedness of life and the survival of death are both excellent ones, and in my view the most empirically defensible ones), then you will never get too far off course. If you want to reach the North Pole, and keep moving, always staying within 5 degrees of the proper direction, you will get there eventually.

This quote is useful on many levels: Our task is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. Thomas Carlyle.

Look around you. Are you caring for your children properly? Your spouse? Your parents? Your community? Are you educating yourself? Are you taking time in silence to feel what you really feel, and choose more carefully how you behave, upon the basis of principles that are important to you?

My confidence is complete that with enough people of goodwill–which I define very broadly as being a genuinely nice person–things will work out. Just avoid both complacency and pessimism. “Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now”, as TR said approximately. “Then do it again”, which I said. “And again.” Me again.

See how that works?

I am continuing to listen to Dr. Goldberg’s Teaching Company series on “Listening to Great Music”. Of course, he has difficulty saying too many nice things about the music of Mozart. What I found interesting is that he was very sickly all his life, and that he died at age 36 or so, of causes that are still undetermined. But he virtually every disease that you could get in his day and age along the way, including smallpox, which permanently disfigured his face.

He had major father issues. His father was very demanding, and in the end he had to run away from him. I wonder if his musical output, prodigious at substantially all times after perhaps age 20, was his version of escape. I wonder if he learned to use his will to create beautiful places he could not find in his own life.

As I see it, you can use will for creativity. Will, per se, does not create, but what you can do is clear a figurative, imaginative space, and wait patiently for it to be populated, with ideas that seep up from the ground. The trick is keeping the space pristine long enough for this to happen. This is something, I feel, that Mozart did well. In his own words he “wrote music like cows piss”. It did not feel hard to him, but I wonder if that was because that exercise of his will was habitual, and necessary to maintain any semblance of psychological equilibrium

Random musings. Time for bed.

And calling them “Obamaville’s”. These are his people. They are the radical losers disconnected from common civility and decency, pragmatic problem solving skills, and the way of life of most ordinary people the world over, including most Americans. They are rudderless people who, without anger, have no purpose to their lives at all.

OF COURSE violence will happen. The entire concept–that of denying the use of a public space to any but fellow travellers–is in its very foundation violent, being intended to limit the civil rights of others, while preaching loudly about the importance of civil rights.

As I say often, it would be humorous, if these people really didn’t want to hurt people.