Month: May 2013

This morning I woke up thinking, among other things, about Achilles.  Like most, you likely think of him as a fierce warrior, the greatest of the Greeks by general agreement, killed treacherously from a distance by an arrow.

But the tale told in both the Iliad and the Odyssey can be read quite differently.  He had been given two fates: one a long, uneventful, and forgotten life, and the other the one which he actually lived, in which his fame–his “Kleos” (if I’m spelling that correctly) would live forever.

He had chosen the quiet life.  He had decided that the goals of his culture–roughly fame and fortune–meant nothing if they could be taken away on a whim.  They were not intrinsically a part of who he WAS, and thus he had decided he need not participate in this system any longer, need not draw his sense of self from the reflection of himself he saw in the eyes of others, but rather from his own experience.  This, at any rate, is what I understood.

What changed this sober and rational decision was powerful emotion brought on by the death of Patroclus, and if memory serves the desecration of his body.

So he fought as no Greek has before or since.  And he died.

Then we see his shade in the underworld, in the Odyssey, where he says he would rather be a slave to the worst of masters than be king of all the dead.  He is proud to hear his son fought well, but it’s hard not to hear in this a final rejection of all the things which Greeks, then, held dear, even though on their lights he was first among them.

One senses that he would have been very content to be reborn as a sailor, or fisherman, or farmer, devoid of all heroic qualities, but capable of enjoying life in the most mundane tasks.  I see him taking special pleasures in the breezes blowing by him, the rising and setting of the sun, and in his family.

What do you value?  Why?  Do you feel you have gotten to the root of anything?  Would you want to?

We need to remember that large segments of the American public is functionally insane.  They are led there and reinforced in their lunacy by a news media that has also lost all sense of decency and moral proportion.  They pursue policies which hurt those they claim to help, and which are quite obviously hastening the demise of the United States, which has been the most noble experiment in truly Liberal government in human history.

Why?  Even they cannot answer that question, although of course they can cite lists of what is wrong with the status quo.  They simply cannot offer solutions to those problems which could ever work in the real world.  That fact is hidden by the fact that they can continue to claim that their policy proposals have not yet been taken far enough.  This is of course a lie for any student of history or contemporary affairs.

All of which is a long winded and tangential way to say that Republicans need to invoke Joe Biden when speaking of these scandals in the same way Bushcheney was a single word for Leftist propagandists for 8 years, such that one would have thought Cheney was the President.

The Dem’s have two obvious candidates for 2016.  Hillary, between being shown as a long term and habitual liar by coming out as bisexual, as she apparently plans to, and her patent involvement in both abandoning our troops while in harms way and lying about, should be an easy target for competent Republican strategists.  Start taking her out at the knees now, and never let up until she either drops out or loses the election.

Same with Joe Biden.  Make sure that every unsavory thing about Obama that actually gets known in public is tied to him.

My two cents.  I believe in goodness, but if I were a political operative facing these horrible human beings, I’d make Saul Alinsky look like a saint.   We need to hit them hard and  often, knowing most of the media complex is shilling for them.

This is disjointed.  Unlike the author I am capable of intellectual cohesion, and the maintenance of a defensible thesis over long periods of time.  But that would require more effort at the moment than I am willing to expend.  It is what it is.

First off, I was gratified that those in the bookstore displayed the decency to more or less shove him off as a pervert when he asked for books by Sade.  If you have not read him, he “still possesses the power to shock”, as one contemporary review has it.  No matter what you think you have seen in movies, or how strong your stomach is, trust me that there are images that have not yet occurred to you.

The author has a strongly Muslim name, Hussain Ibish.  I see that in fact he is active in the cause of eradicating Israel.  Some might frame that as being “pro-Palestinian”, but this is the same thing, without the bullshit.

Muslims tend towards misogyny.  Just today I read in my Facebook feed about one Muslim teaching men how to beat their women properly, and another claiming that women who work outside the home should be sexually abused.  In my personal view, their subjugation of women–who after all have good ideas in profusion, daily–is a core element in the failure of Arabs to have achieved anything–hell, I’ll say it–INTERESTING (outside, I will add, of the generally condemned Sufi communities).  Obviously Islam encourages this.

I will note that by his lights he cannot condemn me for such blanket statements, and by my lights telling the truth as I see it is always desirable.

With regard to his content, then, I would submit that absent short bits of coherence, the essence of this very long read is “I”m a pervert.  I get my rocks off imagining women being tortured.  Fuck you.  Oh, and blah, blah, blah, you have to accept me because I am verbose and obviously educated.  I invoke the tolerance card.  And I reiterate Fuck you.”

What I wanted to respond to were a couple bits that harmonize with my own views, and a few examples of the sort of inanity that characterizes the Leftism cult.  Here is one bit:

Indeed, we could reasonably posit that his work laid the cornerstone for
the entire anti-humanist project. Surely Sade’s most important
contribution, at its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to
absurdist logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its
implosion, and anticipating the backlash against it that culminated in
the sixties and seventies. What he bequeathed us was nothing less than a
slow-growing but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep
in the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism.

What absurdist logical conclusions?  There is nothing inherently contradictory about the use of reason to govern human affairs, or the desire for progress in the material and moral realms.  What he is actually doing is STIPULATING that he, Hussein, should not be held to the standard of intellectual coherence; nor can his political beliefs be analyzed for consistency.  Put another way, he himself is rejecting Humanism and reason, and failing to justify it.  He is simply showing that Sade did it.

No sensible person has ever claimed that people cannot commit daily logical fallacies over the course of a lifetime, and never care or notice.  All you have to do is spend five minutes on the Daily Cause.

But I do want to underscore that he is quite right that Sade’s project is anti-humanist, anti-rationalist, and even anti-pleasure.  Sade did not seek pleasure: he sought EXPERIENCE, and many of the experiences he chose (mostly in his imagination, to be clear, although not entirely) were awful.

Leftism, likewise, is an irrational project which in its ostensible aim of improving human life sustainably has not only failed every time it has been tried, but failed predictably, and at HUGE cost in human well being.

Who are those who keep proposing it and pursuing it?  The Irrationalists, whose philosophy has failed them, and who perforce pursue power.

We need to be clear: Sade was a broken man, a splintered man.  His sense of self was shattered early on.  Without having studied his life with much care, my best guess is that he was abused as a child, likely a libertine uncle.  Rather than try to pull himself together, he instead “rationalized’ his destruction through destruction.  The sense of self is obtained in motion.  He was unable to proceed in a genuinely creative direction, so he chose destruction as his creation.

At some point Hussein talks about the purported Sadeiam nature of the NRA proposing more guns.  He simply stipulates this as symbolically significant.  In reality, more guns–empirically, according to scientific, rational data of the sort we expect in a society still governed by Enlightenment principles–equate to less crime.  80% of gun homicides happen in the half of the country that does not allow concealed handgun carry.  To help you out, that is a rate that is 4x higher than in those States which make carrying a gun legally possible.

In this, he abuses reason.  But he has already SAID that he is fine with abusing reason.  Why not listen to him?

Here is an interesting quote:

And Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand’s ideas,
though she pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle.
Rand essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and
therefore some elements of Sade’s legacy. She notably claimed to have
been the most implacable philosophical enemy of Kant, a title that
surely belongs to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Rand.

I actually more or less agree with this.  The Nietzchean influence on Rand–and she very definitely did read him–seems clear to me.  John Galt is an Uebermensch, in the proper fashion.  Nietzsche, at least as I understand him, never intended crime per se to be the mark of his hero–he was not a proper Sadeiam, as this author tries to suggest–but rather obstinate creation of the highest order while surrounded by mediocrity.  The Uebermensch DOESN”T CARE what ordinary people think.  He owes them nothing, and he gives them nothing.  He is superior to them.

This was the interesting part of the Nietszchean project, and that of Rand, to my mind; resurrecting the notion of qualitative difference in a materialistic world in which all life devolves in the end to mindless atoms.

He then goes on to say this:

 Sade’s contempt for property and the rationalist philosophical system
derived from its defense indeed places him well to the left of the
Jacobins and most other French revolutionaries.

Again: I came up with the term Cultural Sadeist after a fair amount of thought.  It is the right term, in my view, to describe what I see.

Here he drops into farce: “Is anything, in this sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party
slogans such as “keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare?”

What Tea Party members are saying this?  Medicare is broke.  I’m sure as hell not saying it.

And I will submit again that definition is one of the most basic requirements for the use of reason, and all he has done here is equate alleged sloppy thinking with Sade.  Plainly, he is simply trying to get in gratuitous shots for the Cultural Sadeist camp, but it would be equally valid to say that A=not A is “Sadean”.

He tried to argue that somehow totalitarianism is an end product of rationalism.  This is stupid.  Only an academic could be this dumb. There is nothing “logical” or rational about Fascism or Communism (note how he tries insert Stalinism rather than the correct word for the global malignancy he plainly intends, and still defends), if we take as our orienting intent the improvement of human life.  Neither did so.  Quite the contrary.

Here is how reason works: you determine what you want to achieve, which includes a clear definition.  If you do not achieve what you said you wanted to achieve, then your means was irrational.  If you nonetheless continue to use the same means, you are worse: you are a Democrat or a Frenchman.

Classic Liberalism is rational.  It is a proven means for the development of human freedom, and possibility of self expression. To the extent we face crises of meaning in our society, it is precisely because of the illogic and philosophical incompetence of idiots like Hussein.

And at last, the coup de l’imbecile:

Much of American culture is committed to
egalitarianism, and demands and expects certain social and economic
protections from government. But simultaneously, and often in the same
breath, it venerates extreme wealth, individual privilege, and the
prerogatives of the rich.

This dichotomy is
driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion of widespread
social mobility and the idea that anyone can join our morally
unrestrained power elite by hewing to the character-defining virtues of
hard work, while also incongruously courting the favor of fortune.
Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has
pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed
sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn Rand. Economic Darwinism
is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corporate amorality—as
well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as bailouts for
financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

I want you to read those paragraphs carefully, slowly.  You need to understand that these are the basic presuppositions–myths–of not just this man, but substantially all the academics working anywhere in this country anywhere close to the Humanities, of any sort.

It is STIPULATED that wealth is wrong.  Why?  Well, if they were able to use reason to defend their views, we might have some chance of finding out.  But they don’t.  They simply assume it.

The poor in America live better than 3/4ths of the world.  The 3/4ths of the world that lives in abject poverty lives that way in almost all cases because they have been pursuing some combination of socialism and outright Communism for most of the last century.

On the one pole you have Singapore, which did everything right and is very prosperous.  On the other you have China and India.  China, under the tyranny of the Cultural Sadeists, broke everything that had worked, killed tens of millions of its citizens through stupidity and outright murder, then after a half century of failure allowed Capitalism of a Fascist sort, and is achieving steady growth in the wealth of its richest citizens.  What is happening in China, in other words, is pretty much what he alleges is happening here, but isn’t.

In India, they installed a socialist regime after Independence, and saw between thousands and millions die annually of hunger until they opened up the markets for competition in the early 90’s, and have seen steady growth in the living standards of ALL their citizens.

This man, Hussein Ibish, demonstrated a PERSONAL interest in the work of Sade, which he confessed early in the piece, knowing that his invocation of politics at the end would cause the usual stupid people to do the usual stupid thing, which is forget this.

But I want to point out that Sade vividly portrays the rape, torture, murder, and cannibalization of children.  He kills and kills and kills in his books, the more lasciviously the better.

And he has the AUDACITY to condemn Ayn Rand as in any way REMOTELY similar to Sade?  Rand spoke CONSTANTLY about the ethical imperative to never use violence against anyone for any reason other than self defense.

What are we to take from this?  That like all Leftists he is a fundamentally fucked up human being.  Or, let me use his words:

But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment, still lurks in
the dark corners and liminal spaces of our culture, whispering that
reason often carries a very hefty price tag—and with ever more elaborate
punishments to come.

What punishments?  I don’t know.  Ask Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett.  They carry 120 Days with them everywhere they go.

The proper purpose of government is to protect individual rights by
banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using
force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. A
properly conceived political spectrum must reflect this fact. Whatever
terms are used to identify the positions of political ideologies or
systems must be defined with regard to the fundamental political
alternative: force vs. freedom—or, more specifically, rights-protecting
vs. rights-violating institutions.

I will add that the whole left-right continuum gets construed in various ways.  In the French Revolutionary National Assembly, it connoted on the right monarchists, in the middle what we should term liberals, and on the left bloodthirsty savages whose descendants became Communists.  Given that most people know little to no history, this continuum in popular usage is not very helpful.  For my own purposes, I use a continuum based upon no government at all on the right–which is to say people govern themselves based upon shared cultural values; government is as local as possible, which is to say each sovereign individual–and only government on the left.  It should be noted that as one moves from the right to the left “culture”, per se, as a dynamic artifact of habit and behavior within a relatively cohesive social grouping, disappears.  So then, too, does the sense of self, and possibility of conceiving of individual moral growth.  This is why leftism in its very essence is evil.

I get into discussions from time to time about whether or not Fascism is a “right wing” movement.  Clearly, if we draw a continuum from less government on the right, to more government on the left, it is barely more palatable than Communism, which is hands down the worst conceivable form of government, and certainly far to the left of traditional liberalism, with its checks and balances. 

But historically, who have been the people attracted to Fascism/National Socialism?  For one, the man who started the New Deal under FDR, Hugh S. Johnson.  For another, the man who coined the term “New Deal”. 

Here, a generation later, we see Jack Kennedy saying: “Anyone who has visited these places can imagine how in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures that ever lived. There is something mysterious about the way he lived and died and which will outlive him and continue to flourish. He was made of the stuff of legends.”  and

“I have come to the conclusion that fascism is right for Germany and Italy. What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?”

Mussolini started as a Socialist/Communist, and National Socialist German Worker’s Party–the full name of the Nazi party–was every bit as socialist as one would assume from their name.  It redistributed wealth, guaranteed an income and education to all Germans, prohibited land speculation (and usury, if memory serves), and in general differed only from Communism in its unrepentant nationalism, and in that its economic system worked, once you factored in the wars it waged to steal from other lands.

Watched the new Star Trek yesterday, and it finally dawned on me that courage is not suppressing fear, but embracing it.  There was a book some years back titled “Feel the fear, but do it anyway.”.  I would append that with “and don’t forget the fear.”

To become truly brave, I think you have to have the self awareness to know when you are scared, and to do what needs to be done anyway.  But I think you also need to keep that fear present.  You should never reject any part of your experience.  And what I think true warriors do is use that fear for greater effectiveness.  They would in fact be weaker, less able, if they did not more or less consciously accept the fear flowing through them, and channel it into an adrenaline rush.

Put another way, certain types of people are attracted to certain kinds of fear.  Why do roller coasters exist?  Why are there always rock climbers in Joshua Tree and Yosemite?  Why go 70 mph (or whatever it is) down a ski slope?

Could I posit that “fear is excitement we resist”?  That might be close to the truth.

Ponder what early Buddhist life was like.  They were required to wander as beggars, owning only what they carried, which was a rice bowl and perhaps a few other essentials.  They were required to not eat after 12pm.  No doubt they had other tasks–perhaps the recitation of mantras or scriptures, and almost certainly meditation–but consider how hard this life was, at least physically.  For the true believer it was no doubt a liberation of sorts, living out the Buddhadharma, but put yourself in that position.  Imagine living in homeless shelters, wandering from town to town, constantly hungry.

“Life is Pain”.  This is what Cary Elwes tells Robin Wright as Buttercup in “The Princess Bride” (I will note in passing that his role in the first Saw is in this respect interesting).  What Horror movies do is reinforce the sad, sick, grotesque side of life.  Could we not find many horrors in cancer wards?  In third world hospitals, with cases of elephantiasis, and leprosy, and all the deformations I am told by world travelers are quite common in unsanitized, non-developed nations?

The point of Movie Yoga is not to intellectualize about movies, although of course that is in some measure what I have done.  But I know myself–the feelings come later.  When things happen to me, the feelings land in a sort of filter, where I can release them at appropriate times.

The night after I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre I got hints of some part deep within myself grasping that life is serious, at root.  This is an emotional truth, one that I think most modern Americans don’t get.  We feel lost in the superficial, because we are not confronted with the existential.

In a very real way, Leatherface is chasing all of us with a chainsaw, but he is far away.  Our deaths are far away.  There is nothing to PUSH us, there is no imminent threat forcing us to fundamentally reevaluate who we are, and what we stand for.  But I think people need that, they want that, they want structure, and they are not averse to turning to fear to provide it.

Obviously, Horror movies do not tell us how to live our lives, but I think they may create the momentary sense in some/sum that life does have gravity, that it is serious, and that the existence of the viewer is not pure foam. 

My two cents for today.

TH: [Pauses.] Let me see if I can put this correctly. It’s
messing with the First Amendment, it seems. It’s troublesome in that
way, and because there’s a problem with messing with the continuity of
the national psyche. It’s difficult any time you mess with the tribal
consciousness, the expectations of the country’s psyche. It seems like
censorship in a way that is not productive, constructive, or helpful.

O: There’s a quote from the documentary where someone said of
the early ’70s that all that bad karma had to go somewhere, and that
it’s better to channel it into films than into other places.

TH: It really is.

O: I think if you lose that means of expression for violent
thoughts and the darker sentiments of human existence, you’re in
trouble.

TH: It’s both a catharsis and a safe darkness. When I was
shooting in the ’60s, making documentaries for the end of the Kennedy
Title 3 Advanced Educational Programming, I saw things like effigies of
one’s boss that the employees could take it out on at lunch break and
have a release. I think there are potential problems with restricting
what anybody can see. It is, after all, a safe darkness and a place for a
certain kind of release.

I’ll ponder this a bit more.  It does seem to me both that we need a sacred and profane, and that this distinction, at carefully chosen times and ideally in ritually defined ways, needs to be broken.

The most salient characteristic of Horror, perhaps, is that it retains the sense of danger and submission, but never transcendence. It is one half of an ages-old equation.