Month: February 2012

Abstraction is violence. I have recently realized this. It is a way I personally process anger. It is confining. I read a Sherlock Holmes story once where Holmes commented that the mind becomes channelized and “freed” with confinement. Logically, he said, he ought to lock himself in a box.

Feelings expand, like wind and light. Abstractions, though, are hard. They have firm places and times and shapes, at least to me.

One wonders–I wonder–about how people like George Bernard Shaw could discuss with such apparent equinimity the mass murder of social misfits. The reason is that, as I believe Oscar Wilde commented of him, that he was incapable of poetry. He was hard, despite his mechanical virtuosity with wit.

Secondly, I was watching in my mind the progress, as on a graph, of the mathematical interaction of different “channels” within a personality. As I have said earlier, I think the most useful way to think of the “unconscious” is that we have multiple personalities. Most of them just sit there, mute, dumb, until a specific circumstance–normally an affective circumstance–calls them into action. They sit there like statues, then come to life.

Channel A is our conscious life. For people who are largely integrated, who do not have long term unprocessed negative emotions like anger, lust, resentment, sadness, and the like, if we posit say four channels, they all more or less progress in tandem, pari passu.

But when you have a negative unprocessed–unaccepted, I think is the word–emotion, then the lines get curved and distorted. They start to circle around the actual center of gravity, the emotion that won’t go away, the personality that won’t untie its own knot and go away.

Finally, I think the foundational problem of “modernity”–that problem simultaneously created by and diagnosed by our imbecilic thought leaders–is that of retaining form. We all need tribes. We need groups. We need certainties. But we are told we can’t have any. And the people who tell us this fail to see that they themselves have formed a tribe consisting of those who oppose tribes.

The problem is not how to create: the problem is how to prevent what might be termed uncreation, dissolution, and even destruction.

This is intended to be emailed. Please copy it and email it to your usual suspects.

Please put aside your preconceptions for a moment.

The following statement is both simple and true, even if you haven’t yet thought of him in this way: Ron Paul is the most politically conservative Republican to have had a serious shot at the nomination since Calvin Coolidge declined to run, and chose to return to Vermont, nearly a 100 years ago.. And RON PAUL CAN WIN. National polls consistently point to his support extending across the spectrum. Romney doesn’t have this, and neither does Obama. Both CNN and CBS have found this, recently. Here is the CBS poll: http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/09/Who-Would-You-Vote-For-in-November-if-the-Candidates-Were.gif

Here is a poll from the Des Moines Register showing Paul winning over Obama decisively in the Buckeye State, something of a national bellweather: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120218/NEWS09/120218015?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150568275387677_21286437_10150569344772677

In my view, the situation is not complicated. According to recent budget projections, in 2011 we are projected to take in $1.9 trillion, and spend $3.3 trillion. This is a gap of $1.4 trillion, or about $116 BILLION a MONTH. There are various ways of doing the accounting, but this is the rough reality, and we all know it. Our national debt already exceeds $15 trillion, and is equal to the entirety of our annual economic output. Debt loads this size have historically inevitably led to economic catastrophes. Obamacare and the entry of the Baby Boomers into our Social Security and Medicare rolls will only accelerate this process, which is already unsustainable.

What in your estimation constitutes a rational, proportional response to this situation?

Mitt Romney has pledged to cut $20 billion from our annual budget (5% of a very small part of the budget), and in effect appoint a committee to study the issue. Does this sound like a solution that is on par with the size of the problem?

Supposed “conservative” Newt Gingrich called Paul Ryan’s budget plan–which is at least trying to wrestle with the problems we face, “right wing social engineering”. Here is what is interesting about that statement: Ryan’s plan doesn’t even balance the ANNUAL budget until 2040 . During that period, our debt will continue to increase, year on year. Predictably, Gingrich makes no commitments at all with respect to budget cuts.

Ron Paul has pledged to cut annual expenditures by $1 trillion his first year. He is going to abolish the Departments of Education, HUD, Commerce, Energy, and Interior. He is going to abolish the TSA, which is strip searching everyone who flies that it wants to.

He is going to lower the corporate tax rate to 15%. This will have ENORMOUS and IMMEDIATE stimulating effects on our economy.

Self evidently, he will reverse Obamacare, and substantially every Executive Order Obama issued, along with implementing a legal framework removing the ability for the Executive Branch to impose laws without consulting Congress.

He is going to audit the Federal Reserve. For those who complacently assume that the Fed is benevolent, consider the following: our next generation aircraft carrier, the Ford Class, will cost some $10 billion each. Ben Bernanke, without asking any elected officials’ approval, created (just in the second round of so-called “Quantitative Easing”), from scratch, $600 BILLION–the equivalent of 60 state of the art aircraft carriers. And we don’t even know who got the money. We have no way of knowing. But we can assume it went to the already rich, and not to ordinary Americans, who will be hurt by the inflation that clearly will follow whenever the economy recovers. This is absurd.

With regard to foreign policy, talk with a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Ask them what good we are doing there. Ask them if they think we should be there. If you can find one who thinks that we are protecting America–now, after 10 years of war–then go buy a lottery ticket because it’s your day to defy the odds. Paul gets more donations from active duty military than all the other candidates combined. They are tired of fighting, and it is hard to blame them. It is impossible to measure progress. They sweep an area, destroy weapons caches and arrest some people, then three months later things are the same as before. Although only one percent of the population, veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars constitute 20% of the suicides.

Or if Iran is a concern, ask yourself: what exactly are we supposed to attack, and what will be the military benefit of it? Can we, with even the best of military strikes, one using ground penetrating bombs to enter deep down bunkers, PERMANENTLY prevent the Iranians from getting nukes? Of course not. To suggest we can, without a regime change–which no one is seriously pursuing–is ludicrous. What will happen is we will give the Iranian government vast increases in their domestic political support–pushing us further from our goal, which is not a nuke-free Iran but rather peace in the region, with the two not necessarily being contradictory–and simply DELAY them. We move one step forward and two back.

Again, ask any combat veterans you know how eager they are to attack Iran, and what difficulties they see. The only way to do it right is to conquer and occupy the nation, and I think most would agree that the threat at this point will not justify that enormous expenditure of American lives and wealth. The Iranian leadership may talk nuts, but most of them will prove in my view in the end attached to their own lives and positions.

With regard to electability, Ron Paul consistently places within a couple points of Romney when matched against Obama. He can count on everyone right of center to vote for him simply because they cannot stomach Obama. But he also appeals to large swathes of the Left, who share with the Right a fear of government power grabs, and who have a distaste for foreign wars.

To repeat, PAUL IS ELECTABLE.

Here is the question: do you want to sacrifice genuine conservatism–low taxes, huge decreases in the size and power of the Federal Government–for a one or two point advantage in the polls, and for a candidate NOBODY–except the banking community–is enthusiastic about?

Please ponder this carefully before you vote in your primary, and please pass this email along to everyone you think might have an interest in reading it.

A VOTE FOR ANYONE BUT PAUL IS A VOTE FOR THE STATUS QUO, WITH ONLY MINOR AND COSMETIC VARIATIONS.

End note: I have ignored Rick Santorum because his social conservatism–for example his deep opposition to homosexuality–will simply not play outside a small core demographic that doesn’t even comprise, in my view, the majority of the REPUBLICAN party, much less the national electorate.

I think most people, in reading whomever, tend to assume that apparently coherent bodies of thought are in fact coherent, and do not contain contradictions. This is rarely true, although few pay sufficient attention to notice this.

My last post contains a contradiction. If you saw it, good on you, and if not that is not unusual. Always trust your instincts. If they are wrong, you are honing them through practice, and eventually they will be mostly right.

Oh, I’ve been drinking, so don’t take this too seriously, but why can’t we fashion global economies in which people can stay out until 2:05am and be fine the next day? As it happens, that is my challenge. I have met this challenge more times than I care to count, but I am unusual.

Why don’t we, as a globe, party every night, go to bed happy, and carefree, and wake up with a job that is not too demanding?

I am not someone opposed to discipline, but rather someone who asks, very simply, where the twenty fold increase in our shared productivity went.

Fuck bankers. Is that too simplistic?

Oh, I do feel it is democracy or banks. The two cannot coexist, not if the “people” grasp what fractional reserve banking is really all about.

Edit, next day, clear: have you not read that hunter/gatherer societies only work perhaps 10-15 hours a week, and spend the rest of their time telling stories with one another?

We assume that life is meant to be a grim business, one filled with competition, hard work, and very little spontaneous fun. I interact with very successful people on a regular basis, and the cost of success quite often seems to be becoming hard on the inside, and deceptive and disingenuous. The more success you find, the less able you are to be happy, innocently. There must always be some victory over some other.

I have been arguing for several years now a very simple logical progression: if inflation is theft, and if inflation has been 20-fold since the founding of the Fed, then that means there should be 20x the wealth there actually is in the public sphere. Most people should own their own homes, outright (no mortgage). Most people should be able to pay cash for cars. But they don’t and they can’t.

I am certainly not lazy, although I am equally certainly undisciplined. I work hard, but irregularly. An average day, if I count blogging–which is work–and all the reading I do, I put in 12-14 hours. I don’t watch TV.

This I point out because my goal is not to be some child taken care of. I pay my own bills, and have worked continuously since I was 16. But more generally, can we not imagine a better world?

Such a dream feeds the utopian idiocies of people like the Greeks, who use debt to be paid in the future to fund “life” now. They want drama, excitement, fun.

There is nothing wrong with this, if we both remember that life is work, and that bills have to be paid.

I agree with this completely:

“Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called “diversity” actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct our sins, we should understand that racism will endure until we stop thinking in terms of groups and begin thinking in terms of individual liberty.”

– Ron Paul, 2002

I will append to this that segregation, and all the other State sponsored systems of racial discrimination, are exactly that: STATE SPONSORED. You cannot enforce any form of anti-competitive activity without using the government, in both its ability to enforce and to IGNORE laws.

I like this phrase. So often, we look to both virtue and vice as things that are DONE, and not as things not done.

But it is wrong to ignore wrongs when you have the power to act. More subtly, it is also cruel to fail to SEE people as they are; and also to fail to carry one’s one weight, thereby forcing it on another person, who may actually see carrying that weight as virtuous, when in fact it weakens both people, and detracts energy from actually useful tasks.

To be is to work. Sometimes “work” is doing nothing–but you can never really do nothing, outside of dreamless sleep. Me, I like the words “process”, and “experience”. To be still and aware is to act purposively.

And, to repeat, to fail to be aware is to be cruel, sooner or later, certainly.

I am putting out a series of short ideas. It’s Tuesday, but it’s already been a long week.

To the point: it seems difficult to me to overestimate the importance of Rousseau’s sexual masochism. He sought, and found, older women to be his dominatrixes, to tell him what to do, to punish him for wrongs, real and imaginary.

What a short leap it is from the desire to be sexually and psychologically dominated to wanting to bring into existence a rationale for the eradication of personal agency and autonomy, supposedly under the direction of a “General Will”, but of course in reality under the domination of those who arrogated that silly abstraction into concrete positions of power for themselves, as for example Robespierre, Lenin, and Ho Chi Minh did.

When you are dealing with emotionally ill philosophers, you can I think in general dispense with their philosophies without much effort at working through them: they are wrong in their foundations, and as such, wrong in their conclusions, absolutely without regard to the brilliance of exposition and reasoning that might take place in the middle.

As should be obvious, I am rarely short on words or opinions. If there is a topic you would like me to deal with, let me know.

Anonymous comments are enabled.

The first victim of the sadist is always himself. This point is generally missed.

I may expand on this later; perhaps not: if the point can be made to YOU, then I think it already has been.

Is what we call gratitude something other than feeling lucky? Is the opposite something other than going through life feeling like you have been unlucky?