In my metaphysics, I never stop creating. I never stop being. It’s all a great and enjoyable adventure, even when I am getting the shit beat out of me. I’ll win in the end. Then start again, hey: is it not a great game?
Laugh: the universe appreciates it.
In one form or another, it is clearly still with us.
I will add that most people don’t know the song “Mack the Knife” is an adaptation from a Bertolt Brecht play in which a literal knife-killing gangster is used as a figurative moral equivalent to Capitalist exploitation.
Brecht, of course, was a Communists of sufficient piety that he was allowed to come and go from East Germany as he pleased. They never had cause to doubt his loyalty, and were never disappointed.
Leftists don’t feel like they are missing anything. When someone protests when the Ten Commandments is taken down, they feel that is the way things should be. If someone says abortion is murder, they ignore them, since babies are not morally different than any other organ in the woman’s body, making a mastectomy and a late term abortion morally equal. They are fine with this because they lack that foundational virtue of truly Liberal culture: empathy, the ability to see things from the perspective of other people.
As I noted a few posts ago, empathy levels in one student population, using one standard test, have dropped 40% in thirty years. This seems like a finding that one could apply across the country. I say this based on dealing with these creatures often in their own environments. [Someone asked in a comment how I do it. The answer is simple: I’ve been under attack all my life. Nothing they can dish out holds a candle to what I’ve been through countless times. And I like sparring, because it makes my mind stronger.]
They are like members of Saddam Hussein’s tribe in prewar Iraq: they thought things were pretty good because they and their were in charge. This they called freedom, and it was plenty. You don’t screw with Saddam, but why would you? He’s got your back. As long as you take care of Obama he will take care of you (this is the feeling, but the population for which this is ACTUALLY true is much, much, much smaller than it realizes).
Cultural homogenization and autocracy go hand in hand. This is the root of my objection to gay marriage. I could care less on many levels, not least of which is the fact that I’m not gay, so it doesn’t affect me. But what I don’t like is the effort not just to reach a legal framework for gay marriage, but the thinking behind it which feels NO empathy for the religious sensibilities being trampled on, NO remorse for attacking them violently, and which in the end lacks a coherent morality outright.
What we need is a reason to live. Getting legal recognition for men kissing in the chapel does not serve that purpose. Fucking is not living.
What I wanted to say here, though, is that I have long thought that conservative politicians should play offense as well as defense. We know that virtually all reporters for all networks and all news mediums are looking to create usable gaffes and errors. You can only NOT screw up. You can’t win.
But here is an idea: they approach you, proposing an interview. Make it a condition of the interview that for every two questions they ask, you get to ask one. You get to interview the interviewer. You get to try and figure out who they are. They sit there as if they are impartial information discoverers, but of course this is a patent lie in most cases. What ACTUALLY characterizes the situation is passive aggression. They smile and laugh while they attack you.
But in my solution, you get to ask questions like: So, Ms. Maddow, it is my understanding that if we factor in Social Security and Medicare funding that should be getting put away, but isn’t, our true annual budget deficit is $5 trillion. Do you agree? If not, what do you think it is and why?
Or: at what point, if any, does abortion become murder? If the baby is born, and the doctor sets it out in the cold to be eaten by wild wolves–which is not morally different than simply letting it die, which Barack Obama voted for–is that wrong?
Or: you opposed the existence of Guantanamo Bay as a holding center for hardened terrorists when Bush operated it. Has your opinion on the wisdom of Bush creating that base changed in the last four years, and if so how?
Or: can you honestly say you understand how the Federal Reserve works?
Fair is fair. Fuck things up if you want to win. Do not play by other peoples rules: they make them that way for a reason.
Edit: hat tip to Demo Dick Marcinko there. I did read a number of his books, a number of years ago. Whatever else he was–and I’ve talked with people who worked with DevGru and heard there is some diversity of opinion–he was himself. Saying “fuck you world, I am me” has some value, in a great many cases. I’m not a Randian, per se, but I like freedom, and I like people who use it creatively.
As an example, my comments on the Guardian were finally let through, on another computer. On THIS computer, though, no comments are visible. Here is the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/14/derrida-biography-benoit-peeters-review#start-of-comments
It may be a technical glitch, but I have refreshed multiple times, and can’t get any comments to come up.
I know this is possible because I remember reading some years ago that the San Francisco Chronicle was using this technique to censor conservatives WITHOUT THEM KNOWING IT.
We all remember, don’t we, what we were taught in school? To respect the opinions of others, to engage with them creatively and substantively in the hope of a synergistic improvement in the views of both of us?
What happens when people get into universities, now, is they become ILLiberal. They become little fascists, who want to kill all thoughts that take them away from their new and improved identities as pod people. And some of these people have high IQ’s, which means that they can deploy their destructive emotions effectively in the intellectual realm.
When you look at people like Paul Krugman or Barack Obama, what you need to see is a little child inside, raging against a world it doesn’t control and furious about it, and just wanting to smash everything. And I will readily grant neither is likely aware of this. As I have said, that is the role their politics plays: an effective cover for their real intent. It hides it from them, and from onlookers.
Update: Sure enough, I got home and comments were enabled. What they have likely done is hide either all comments–which seems to be the case–or just mine, which would be more work, I would think.
Fuck you Terry Eagleton, you power mongering, morally vacuous cowardly piece of shit.
Once made fit for tyranny, a man is soon fit for little else.
Corrollary: Once you have accepted the loss of your identity, from where would the desire to rebuilt it come?
This is very abstract, but I think there is something there.
What is the point of freedom? Historically, it has almost always arisen as a desire for RELIGIOUS freedom. Religion and identity are closely intertwined. The freedom Americans sought cannot be understood apart from the desire to practice religion freely. The need for freedom depends upon the fact of intellectual and behavioral diversity. Obviously, if everyone thinks and does the same, there is no need for freedom to be different.
William James, at the beginning of his lecture series published as “Pragmatism”, pointed out that virtually everything worth knowing about a man can be known if you understand his sense of the world, of how reality is constructed and what his role, if any, is. Do you believe in God? This is a big question.
True Socialism depends on atheism, on the sense that the notion of quality is empty. All men are equal because all are composed of atoms that will one day be somewhere else. There is no nobility of soul, because there is no nobility, and there is no soul.
ONLY once these basic postulates are granted does their project make sense. What it is is a controlled collapse, a controlled descent, a prolongation of what the adherents of this doctrine feel is the eventual certainty of moral nihilism and the necessity of suicide.
And as I say often, this whole thing rests upon an empirically false foundation. There IS a God. We can research these things in scientific ways, through investigations of mediums, through studying psi, through personal experience in altered states.
I sometimes imagine a sane society, one with beautiful cathedrals filled with the sincerely pious, worshipping based upon UNDERSTANDINGS built from personal experiences. We can create, even now, the sorts of ceremonies seen in Avatar. We can create Lothloriens. We can bring Spirituality into the universities. Other than the piggish and brutal bigotry of academics, there is nothing to oppose it.
We will all be held to account one day for what we should have seen but didn’t. This will be an unpleasant experience for many.
Because it may not be clear to some, I thought I might follow up on the previous post. What leftists do is look at who is paying how much taxes, and then make empirically invalid assumptions based upon this analysis. Let us say that all the millionaires put together made $100 billion, and paid $25 billion in taxes. Your typical Democrat looks at this and says, “hey, if we raise the tax rate to 60%, we will get $60 billion in taxes.” This is LITERALLY what they do. That is how they run their numbers.
But this ignores the obvious fact that what made financial sense at a tax rate of 25% does NOT make sense at 60%. Let’s say, as one example, you sell some stock and have some cash. Make it one million dollars even. Do you put it in bonds to earn a reliable 3% income, or invest it in a carwash? Running a carwash is a pain in the ass. All employers will tell you that having employees is a pain in the ass, but of course a necessary one if you want to make a lot of money.
Let’s say the carwash generates $100,000 in net income, and you pay $25,000 in taxes. You pocket $75,000.
If the tax rate is 60%, though, you only pocket $40,000, despite major headaches and a lot of work. So you put your money in bonds and wait for tax policy to become rational. You pay
At 25% taxation, it’s worth the risk. At 60% it isn’t. So in Scenario One the carwash is built, jobs are created, and taxes are paid on higher revenue. In this case the taxes collected are $25,000. In Scenario Two, you put your money into bonds. You make $30,000 in passive income, which is taxed at 60%. That generates $18,000 in taxes.
So in scenario one we collect more taxes, and generate more jobs (and of course the employees pay income taxes and FICA, so I am estimating on the low side). In Scenario Two we collect less taxes and generate NO jobs.
In a nutshell, this analysis is why California has been turned from the most prosperous State in the country into the one with the most poverty. I read a couple weeks ago that even prior to the bottom 60% of Californians voting for the top 40% to pay more in taxes, some 4,000 high net worth individuals were leaving PER WEEK. These are the people that spot opportunities to provide goods and services people want and need, and figure out ways to deliver them at prices they are willing and able to pay, and who is so doing generate both jobs and tax revenue.
Self evidently, if job creators leave, so too do jobs. Self evidently, if tax payers leave, all that will remain are tax takers.
And all of this is unnecessary. It is brought about by hate, and hate does not build.
The salient question, obviously, is “how much money did the government collect at the 91% tax rate”? I’m sure the answer is “not much”. Back in the 1920′, Andrew Mellon demonstrated clearly that if you cut tax rates on the wealthy you get economic growth, and they PAY MORE, both in absolute dollars and in terms of a percentage of the whole.
Yes, this is because they are getting richer, but SO IS EVERYBODY ELSE. We would not have had a crash if the Fed had not pursued inflationary then deflationary policy, and we would not have had a Depression if first Hoover and then FDR had not tried to engage in social engineering.
Leftists love punishing the rich so much that they are willing to suffer generalized poverty to do it. This is a moral malignancy.
Some time back in the 1960’s, large numbers of people starting drawing on that Goodwill, starting using it for their own purposes. I don’t blame the poor, but rather the people who USED the poor for their own aim.
I do blame the hippies, in part, since their claim was that they need not participate in civil society to enjoy its benefits. And when they eventually put on suits and ties, they brought with them a sense that they were entitled to a certain quality of life, and that their principle aim COULD properly be to enjoy life, rather than to build, and take joy in building.
When they raised their children, they taught them that they could have anything, do anything, and that their satisfaction was a proper aim in life: that selfishness was a virtue, in so many words, and this while robustly rejecting Ayn Rand.
Then of course you had the political cultists, whose sole aim in life was to use goodwill, to use the space given them by fundamentally liberal-minded people, to engineer destruction. No political cultist builds. Their whole aim is to destroy.
All of these things drew down our pool of Goodwill. They have caused mistrust, and hate. I have been chronically angry lately, even though I able to beat it back. I go through periods of acceptance, then see something like a handicapped person who is plainly just lazy, not hurt, throwing fits because they have to walk an extra 20 yards because somebody parked in their space.
We are not a nation of dignity, of reserve and calm. We are whiny and petulant. All of these things draw on our social fabric, make it less robust.
And if we look at this as a debt, it is every bit as large as our national debt. I have a plan to pay our national debt. How to pay our cultural debt, though?
My only idea is generalized deployment of Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, in countless little circles of 24 people, who use that work to regerminate seeds of true communal awareness and personal responsibility.
That, or we may react in creative ways to a general economic collapse. We need to remember Argentina did not disappear as a nation. It merely went from being a prosperous nation to being a poor nation, entirely due to the idiocy of its people and leaders.
Liberalism is when the freedom to express yourself creatively is checked only by regard for the rights of others.
Socialism is when the hatred of the rich overpowers concern for the poor.
Communism is when that hatred wins.