Month: September 2012

Posted on this page. In my view, this was a reasonable conversation.  The constant problem one faces with most conventional academics is the ASSUMPTION about certain aspects of the universe, specifically that consciousness is synonymous with the body.  This assumption is never examined, which means that it is simply posited in discussions.  Since this assumption appears wholly unwarranted, this means that error must attend all such discussions, necessarily. 

This is a reasonable discussion, although I do not share the
materialistic bias of both, as in my view since the proof of
non-locality it has been impossible to justify a view in which things
simply are where they are, and not somewhere else. It is a source of
on-going interest to me how many leading academics continue to hawk 19th
century physical models. I will give you the end of the story:
Einstein failed. His version of mechanistic physics was disproven.

In
my own moral system I question both the possibility and desirability of
final answers to moral questions, such as “is homosexuality wrong?” I
posit that proper answers to moral questions are local (contextualized) ,
necessary (no need to render a decision on homosexuality absent a need
to render a specific decision) , and imperfect. The quest for the
exact, mathematically correct answer is inappropriate in a non-linear
system, which is what human behavior is.

I posted the other day
that “philosophy is what we do on the way to something else”, and what I
intended was that as I grow in what I will call my understanding it
increasingly seems to me that the point of reason is not intellectual
clarity, but a subjectively pleasant emotional state. Mr. Krause, for
example, feels a sense of satisfaction in the sense of order his very
pleasant but static system creates.

I say static, since if we are
not different in principle than rocks, then life is an illusion. Free
will is an illusion. Nothing CHOOSES anything. There are no random
events in the world. Nothing MOVES but rather is moved.

Quantum
physics, of course, posits constantly randomness, but no orthodox
materialists that I have debated really want to deal with the
implications of the theory, although certainly some very bright men,
like Richard Feynman, both understood the details and refused to examine
the implications.

These rough topics are near and dear to my
heart, since in the end, our ability to succeed as a human race is going
to require dealing EMOTIONALLY with the results of our ontology, which
for the scientistic is clear beyond doubt, and amenable to coherent
analysis as something OUT THERE, which I do not think it is.

I posted this the other day: http://www.moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2012/09/vulgaron.html
I
came up with the word “vulgaron”, which is one unit of vulgarity.
Logically, if scientism is correct that all observable phenomena are
measurable, one ought to be able to measure vulgarity, correct? But
will not one hundred people rate things each a bit differently? And is
this process made precise through statistics? Of course not, it is
formally complex, and the result of mutable subjectivity.

And to
the point, the worth of our lives is the worth of our emotional lives,
and it seems clear to me that the scientistic impulse Acts To, in a
Hayekian sense, reduce our trust in our own emotions, our spontaneity,
and thus many of the most simple joys in life.

Obviously science
builds things, but looking around, at oceans of “Fifty Shades of Grey”
being sold to housewives, the prevalance of torture porn and zombie
parades, the rates of anti-depressant use, can people really say we are
on the way, now, to building a better society:? I don’t see it, and the
core problem is the neglect of philosophy, which in my view links one
emotional state with another. That is its primary purpose.

A response on HuffPo.

When Democrats talk of “cost control” what they are talking about is
healthcare rationing.  Why does America have the best and most
specialists in the world?  Because we PAY for them.  With regard to the
insurance industry, what do you think will act more effectively to cost
cutting: free market competition, or really, really sincere bureaucrats
who promise really, really hard that they won’t hire extra people to
build their budgets, offer wage increases unrelated to market realities,
or let their workers unionize.  Wait, that last one is already a fait
accompli.

We need more competition, both between health CARE providers and health
INSURANCE providers, which some of you seem not to realize are two
different groups.

83% of doctors have thought about quitting because of Obamcare, at a time when we need MORE doctors. 

KFC estimates it franchisees will see their profits cut in HALF by
Obamacare, and it is easy to generalize to SMALL business in general
that this law will be DEVASTATING.  It is a cost increase with no
corresponding benefit to the business, which will, yes, hurt business
owners, but when they close their doors, are any of you so stupid as not
to realize that MASS unemployment will be the result? 

All you have to do to decipher the truth where leftists like Obama are
concerned is take their statements and invert them: he intends war on
the middle class, a war on women (whose struggles to survive are already
much harder than those of the average man), a war on small business, and generalized decreases in access to healthcare, at inflated costs.

I travel a fair amount.  There are certain strip malls you see in every city which could be in ANY city.  You have no way of knowing if you’re in Memphis,  Chicago, or Albuquerque.

It seems to me that many political views are like this, particularly on the Left.  The whole project has been oriented around quality control, which here means homogenization, and the availability of outrage when it is politically useful.  Large segments of our population have not had an original, individual, personal perception in their entire lives, and since they spend all their time with ideological others, they don’t realize this.  Their beliefs are just background, assumed, and never examined.

I like to fuck with people like that, and they don’t like it, not one bit.  It’s not my job to bring peace to the complacently and arrogantly wrong.  A sword: yes, a sharp, really fast one, to separate quickly vanity from fact, reason from illusion, assumption from truth.

Of course I’m not changing minds, in general, although I have won a few converts.  It is to show the morally and mentally alive how easy it is.  Upon such people our world depends.

I like Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series.  In Shikasta she has an agent from a highly advanced alien civilization incarnate to do useful work.  This is more or less the avatar concept of the Hindus, where, say, Vishnu will periodically show up and do something useful, as a dward, or a fish, or as Krishna.

This got me to thinking about Boddhisattvas, the enlightened ones who keep coming back.  What must that be like?  You are a general, trying to combat darkness, so you develop a battle plan that might involve 100,000 lives.  Ponder that for a moment.

We know so little, yet we think we know so much.  The arrogance of this modern age is horrifying.  It is death, death, death.

I invented this word the other day.  It popped into my head.  It is one unit of vulgarity.  I propose it as a heuristic device to see the difference between quality and quantity, between the intrinsically unmeasurable, and what can, is, and should be measured.

How do you measure vulgarity?  Surely every person will see things differently.  Nowadays, virtually nothing is beyond the pale.  Yet, not one hundred years ago, Rhett Butler saying “damn” was scandalous.

I was in the Toledo Art Museum the other day.  I am no art connoisseur, but I find walking the floors to be highly stimulative of thought.  In that trip I developed an idea that had first come to me in the Indianapolis Art Museum, which is one of the best museums I’ve seen.

Science treats emotion as artifact.  It is accustomed to “objectivity”, to measurement, to the idea that things exist “out there”, and that they can somehow separate ALL physical occurences from subjectivity, from an inherent inability to measure.

Scientism, the materialistic atheist fundamentalist creed, holds that our bodies, our minds, are objects. They are complex objects, but not different in principle from chalkboards or cockroaches.  This creed has social consequences.

Our emotive lives are all out of whack.  I see signs all around of the inability to mourn, to process deep emotion, to feel deep joy, to express anger in mature and useful fashions.  All of these things are necessary for us to negotiate our connections with one another.  When we do not exist as in-dividuals, when we do not privilege our own emotions above interpretations offered by others, or a fear of feeling at all–simply, when we lack spontaneity–we diminish as spirits, as people.

What I felt in the museum was a tide sweeping emotions out to sea, to be examined by specialists with no emotional ties to the topic, under microscopes.  And please step out of your clothes, Mrs. Smith, we must take accurate measurements and shame is not anything we recognize.

What we NEED is to use science for what it was intended: making things.  What we NEED is to learn how to express emotions more wisely, with greater freedom, with greater intimacy.  And almost NOTHING in our culture is building this.

What does one see in most of the art from roughly 1918 to the present?  Cries for help.  Confusion,  Anger.  Lust.  Willfulness.  Treachery.  All of these things are supported by the IDEAS of our intellectual elites, which posit, in effect, that meaning is a thing, and that we don’t have it, and can’t figure out how to manufacture it.

What is needed to counterbalance this flow out to sea is a tide inward, which focuses on quality of feeling, of hope, art in the good sense, justice, freedom: all the things which leftist tricks have removed from our national dialogue.

I will add that as I suspected I was not quite able to do justice to the sentiment.  It’s frustrating: I can see and feel things, watch them flow, feel them in my body, but as much as I write, words sometimes fail me.  I guess that words, too, are in the end quantitative.  That would make sense.

There is a profound difference between hereditary, landed wealth, and hereditary industrial wealth.  The very rich tend to stay that way, but not to anything like the extent people imagine.  Of the 100 richest families 100 years ago, perhaps 10 are still on the list.  Money made can be lost, and often is, usually by the grandson of whoever made the money.

I will ask, further, if you the reader have created a company with employees.  For most people, the answer is no.  Yet, this is the path to wealth.  It is a path fraught with hard work, much worry, and frequent failure.  Leftists only want to look at the end result, success, and not what it took to get there and how FRAGILE the will to such success is.  All you have to do to make it stop is add just a bit more weight to the struggle, and it will stop.  People will stop innovating and creating. 

Most jobs in this country are created by small businesses, which are created by innovators, by people who see a need and work to fill that need (borrowed from the movie Robots).  They seek, in other words, to get paid for being public servants, for making something available that was not available before.  This is a reliable motivation, but again it is one that is easily destroyed.

I see leftists wail about the “corporations” as if they were all equal.  They are not.  The large corporations are the ones they usually intend, and it is thus highly ironic that the policies of the Democrats tend disproportionately to favor such corporations.  It is hard to kill trees, but easy to kill small upshoots on the ground.  Obamacare, as one example, is going to be a forest fire that kills much that is not already mature.  It is going to vastly increase unemployment, as it will lead to many small business bankruptcies.  The claim that requiring companies to increase coverage is somehow going to save them money is one best told as a joke.  No serious person could consider it for a moment.  In this world you never get more for less, and anyone who tells you you can is selling something: here what is being sold is continued Democrat hegemony over our national dialogue on domestic policy; what is not being sold is useful, helpful policy that will increase national happiness, and decrease the misery of any but a few.

We need the people who know how to build businesses.  We need them happy and motivated to continue as paid public servants.  What happens when we punish them through unnecessary regulation and excessive taxation (both subjective terms, but in my view we are far past excessive in both realms) is they STOP.  They stop creating and innovating.  America has the most healthcare specialists, and the best specialists, in the world.  Why?  Because we PAY them.  When we stop paying them, which is the end goal of Obamacare, we will stop having them.  Simple enough.

The rich can go on strike.  And since they are the ones who create the jobs, this will lead to far less economic opportunities for EVERYONE, but most of all for the poorest, least qualified among us, which is to say the already poor.

That is more or less what has happened under Obama.  He hates the profit motive, and hates the private sector.  He is only comfortable with government parasites, and those who live off government largesse, like large highway contracting companies.  People are not stupid: we all KNOW taxes will go up.  They are already slotted to increase a LOT in 2013 to start “paying” for Obamacare (there will of course be a large shortfall, not least because Obama getting reelected, combined with the taxes, will lead in short order at least to another recession), and it is clear he wants them much, much higher, as they are in Europe.

I need to go.  I will post further on this topic.  One thing that I want to document and need to make the time to do is that it seems clear to me that at tax rates above about 25% or so net receipts from top income earners go down.  What I think happens is that the proportion paid by the wealthiest 1% shifts down, meaning that a larger burden falls on the middle class.  Tax cuts for the “rich” mean tax cuts for the middle class, and vice versa.  I will document this–assuming my thesis is correct–when time permits.

Moshe Feldenkrais came up with this term “reversability” to denote a well structured neurological adaptation to gravity, our constant enemy and friend.  It connotes a lack of fixity and groundedness such that whatever stimulus happens to come down the path, the system–you–can react in an optimized way.  It implies a lack of nervous attention on any one given point of focus, a lack of spasmocity (I think I invented that word just now: a lack of spasms, lack of contractions and releases in unchosen ways, which I think most of us do regularly without seeing it), and the ability to react as a wholistic Gestalt. 

Emotionally, there are many things to be upset about right now.  Depending on your politics, you are upset at Obama, or upset at the Republicans.  You can worry about cosmetic testing on animals, the euthanization of animals at animal shelters, the meat industry, Islamists or peaceniks, our war in Iraq, or the plight of our veterans.  You can worry about global warming, pollution, dolpins, baby seals, or the economy.  You get the idea.

I have long played a game with my kids, the idea for which I got from the movie “What about Bob?”.  When they start worrying about things, we play a substitution game.  Say they are worried about giving a speech in class.  I say “that’s nothing: what if an angry bear comes into the school and chases you”.  Their response is supposed to be something like: “What if it was space aliens with stinky feet”.  Then: what about a meteor strike?  What about a tree falling on the school?  What if a tree falls and the bear is ON it?  What about an attack of midgets?  Maybe there is a bee’s nest in the ceiling.  What if the Russians are hiding in the closet?  Etc.

What I have found is that worry is more or less an emotional spasm, a knot that should come untied with motion, but that motion is lacking.  You don’t set it down and move on.  You nurture it (that is in  part what my hell comment was about, but it was deeper than that).

By creating a whole list of things to worry about, you gradually overload it, and like a spring it seems to reset itself.  That doesn’t make the worry go away fully–and I teach them that a bit of worry is a good thing, because I think it is–but it takes away the spasmodic element of it.

I would like to suggest here that this could be combined with perceptual reversibility.  Pick something you are worried about, say the upcoming election.  Pick the OPPOSING side and worry from their perspective.  Say you are sane and worried about Obama being reelected.  Put yourself imaginatively in the position of an Obama supporter, and worry about Romney getting elected, and oh my god he wants to put all women back in the kitchen, pregnant, and take our coffee away.  He wants the poor to starve, and wars to be waged, and teachers to go unpaid, highways not to be built, the old to live on dogfood, and WHITE MEN to rule the world.  He’s mean, mean, mean, and Ryan is no better.  Oh my god, I better donate to the DNC and his campaign.

Then do it from the perspective of a Gary Johnson supporter, who hates both candidates.  Then do it from the perspective of an illegal alien, who is only worried about staying here and staying working.

Then if you like, you can place yourself in Mexico, worried to death about being decapitated in some drug war.  You can place yourself in Africa, cover yourself with flies and dust, and calloused, bare feet, and make yourself hungry and sick.

I think 20 minutes of this should be enough to liberate most anyone from most worries. 

It is useful to think of truth as a flickering flame: not because it is a source of light, but because it is inconstant.  Truth ebbs and flows.  Truths compete with truths in swirling patterns that grow and diminish, and that form complex beautiful patterns seen only by a few, and most not seen at all.

I was going to expand on that, but will leave it at that.  Instead I will write a bad poem:

Truth forms sludge on clocks
And wipes away vapors kiss
Light, light: again today.

Edit: that is what I propose we call Haikuu, which is where you get a Mulligan syllable.  “I believe I shall have another.”

I know, I know, this is serious shit, no joking around, fucking TRUTH, man, with a capital T.  Ah, but we also have T, T, T, T, T,  then a whole bunch you can’t see since you aren’t initiated.  Get on my website for the whole course.  This week only you get a 40% discount if you pay in advance.

I wrote somewhere that the tragedy of self importance is you stop playing.  You can’t be fully spontaneous when you are afraid of being ridiculous.  Stupidity, you see, is intelligence, except when it isn’t.  I will of course be the judge of that.

And that is ALL I have to say about that.

Once conformity is generated as a usable means of dealing with the vagaries of life, personal emotion is necessarily distanced.  The sense of self that attends paying attention to and valuing your own unique way of seeing and interacting with the world vanishes, and in its place comes a tyrannical hatred of common people.  You are better than them.

I look at the oceans of people Hitler gathered unto himself–the God–and feel their sense of absorption, but also feel the SUPERFICIALITY of that emotion.  Grand as it must have felt at times to be submerged in something epochal–and it clearly was that–I get in my imagination this itching, this nagging, this nattering in the back of the head, this sense that won’t go away that something has died or is dying, that can only be cured by re-immersion in groupthink, or what might better be called GroupFeel (which I double capitalized as it does sound like a swingers party): Groupemote, perhaps.

We want feeling.  Ways of thinking conduce to this.  Leftist patterns of GroupThink are oriented around the FEELING of belonging.  But it is a superficial feeling.  It doesn’t last.  It has to be constantly renewed, constantly sourced.  That is why leftists are so good at forming groups and at making all members do the same things at the same time.  It is an inherent advantage, in some ways, but the downside is that none of those people is acting as an independent perceptual unit, outside of the perceptual tasks assigned by the group.  This makes the whole stupid.  But if they can get and keep power, then stupid can live a very long life indeed.

Philosophy is what you do on the way to something else.