Month: May 2013

Well, I finally got around to watching it.  I just finished it, so my thoughts will be a bit scattered.

One thought I had yesterday is that I think we all need to regularly express ALL the emotions.  We understand sadness and anger, love, joy, sexual desire.  But what about revulsion?

I read that there are, on one typology, 6 basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, and sadness.  Horror certainly caters to the fear element, but also both surprise and disgust.  I would submit that in our sanitized world, where all convenience store clerks are taught to say “have a nice day”, that some primal part of our selves craves the dissolute, the insane, the repulsive.  Cannibalism certainly fits the bill.

On a perhaps deeper level, do we not all sense that crimes are happening, even now, that particularly in wide open places may never be punished?  I have in mind particularly pedophilia, but wife beating, and cruelty to animals certainly also go on.

Think about the Texas of 1973.  This was an era when the reality of pervasive pedophilia/sexual abuse of children and minors was still widely rejected.  Children would tell their stories, and be abused for it.  Catholic priests were still routinely molesting children.  Actual racism was still present, and blacks had to watch their steps, lest they have violence visited on them.

There is a line from Conan Doyle’s story “The Copper Beeches” which has always stuck with me:   They are traveling to the countryside on a very beautiful day, watching farmsteads go on by from the train window.  Watson says “Are they not fresh and beautiful?”

Holmes replies: “Do you know, Watson, that is is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject.  You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty.  I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with crime may be committed there.”

You hear country music throughout, even in very grim places, like when the gas station owner is tying her up.  They seem both to be hinting at undiscovered crimes–and here I have Tobe Hooper and the other author in mind (what do they know?)–and to be explicitly pointing to the violent nature of life, as in the description of the  process of slaughtering cattle, which of course was a large industry in Texas.

All living beings, in some ways, depend on the death or use of other living beings.  The smallest fish eat plants, and the larger fish eat them.  Humans are theoretically at the top of the food chain, but countless bacteria within us are always trying to survive and thrive at our expense.

And to the point of this movie, there is a bloodlust that is superior in some ways to the external trappings of our civilization.  Humans can be food for humans.  We can move sideways, and have in many cases.  There were many examples of cannibalism in Napolean’s march on Moscow.

Few thoughts.  It will keep percolating for a while.

From here: http://www.examiner.com/article/fact-check-on-glenn-beck-s-documentary-was-hitler-more-liberal-or-conservative?page=1#comment-15055766

I will add, that it is worth reading the actual NSDAP platform: http://www.hitler.org/writings/programme/

You neglect the obvious fact that Lenin and Mao–ALL Communists in fact–ALSO outlawed labor unions.  Does that make them conservative?

Conservatism has two principle strands: respect for the past–and for coherent moral narratives based upon them–and free markets.  Hitler completely repudiated the moral ethos of the German nation, and under him markets absolutely were not free.  They were much more like the relationship between Barack Obama, Wall Street, and Big Business generally, like GE, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Culturally, National Socialism (I did not see you note that the full name of the Nazi Party was “National Socialist German Worker’s Party; or that its principle constituency was the working and lower middle classes) did invoke the German past.  In that it did not try to completely invalidate every aspect of German culture, it was less radical than Communism; but clearly what it brought was revolutionary, not a part of actual German history.

And again, economically, the only difference between Communism and National Socialism is that in the former all means of production are controlled in ACTUALITY by the State, and in the latter they are only controlled in PRINCIPLE.  In both cases the right to the possession of the results of ones own efforts is non-existent.

I continue to view the efforts of the Positive Money people to educate people in Britain about the nature of our financial system favorably, and continue to view their proposals unfavorably.  Here is a comment I left today on their new website.  What I did not mention is that, as of the last time I read their proposal, the idea was to do gradually something almost identical to the deflationary process that initiated our own Great Depression.  In conditions of high levels of debt, deflation is devastating.  This means, inescapably, and as a simple matter of exercising logic, that any serious solution must first eliminate that debt, which my own proposal does.

The problems described are quite real, but the proposal simply transfers
power from banks to the government.  Whoever has the power to create
money has the power to create wealth from nothing.  Why is this
intrinsically better when done by the government?  Why not anticipate an
expansion of the symbiotic relationship that already exists between Big
Business and Big Government?  Because your panel somehow becomes
ethically superior?  There is no functional difference between banks
creating money for themselves, and money being created by government and
parceled out to chosen corporations.

The logical solution is to
end money creation outright.  This is the ONLY equitable solution, the
only solution that does not recreate a de facto master/slave
relationship.

My proposal to do this is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

Again, posted on the “right wingers are murderers/Leopold and Loeb” blog post.

I will add that the “essentialization of the Other” is very much alive among the most robust, most strident, most self satisfied cultural nihilists/comfortably ensconced Humanities professors.  They simply consider anyone who views our cultural heritage with fondness, or the egalitarian project with scepticism, as being  a very appropriate object of hate.  Hate, per se, is not rejected, merely rationalized.

You have not even made a token effort to consider the benefits of free markets on actually living, actually laboring, actually suffering human beings.  You have posited them as evil, and made of anyone who supports them a psychophilosophical riddle, when the reality is that we are simply more knowledgeable, more decent human beings than your elitist cabal.

What if you could somehow know that your purpose in life was to travel ten years through thick jungle, and endure great difficulties in so doing, only in order to get to a complex machine, find one small screw, and turn it one quarter turn?  What if you then had to travel another ten years out of the jungle?

What if your purpose in life were to wait in place for a ball to come bouncing down a chute, and to stand where there is a gap in that chute, lean over, and allow it to roll over you.  If you were not there, it would fall.  You can’t know where the ball comes from, or what its end goal is, but you do know that if you do not stand your turn in place, that life will be worse for many.

It is impossible to know what our purposes are in life, of course, but I would submit that there are countless inflection points, “butterfly effect” points, and that the purpose for many may come and go unnoticed, but none the less critical for it.  One can never know what small effort, what seemingly insignificant act may make a large difference.  You can’t live life sweating every last detail, but at the same time, don’t ignore them either.  Do what you can.  Then do it again.  Eventually they will lay you in the ground, or send you into the sky, and your assignment will change. But the process will not, in my view.  How we live today, in this world, is how we will live in the next world.  We just know more there, and get a LOT more support.

That, in any event, is my orienting belief.

In response to this article: http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek?page=full


I will admit in advance I only scanned it.  I have read in full many pieces like this.  Their point is to so overwhelm the reader with seeming erudition that basic questions are missed, like “does socialism work?”  This is such a common tactic with the left that I would submit their propaganda would be impossible without it.

I have one simple question: what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?  And if that is the point, is not the question of how to do this an empirical and not a moral question?  Is it not obvious beyond any possibility of discussion that free markets create both wealth and the possibility of leisure–at least in a post-tribal society, and certainly in a crowded world–far better than any possible alternative?

The salient malignancy of socialism is that the egalitarian creed rejects morality outright.  Morality depends upon the notion of progress, and progress in turn depends upon the notion that some people have developed more than others.  This does not mean they were born that way, but that the very concept of a meritocracy depends upon the notion of people who are morally qualitatively different, even if equal before the law.

Unless you can answer my first question–again, “what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?”–then I will assume based on long experience that, despite your capacity to produce seemingly useful words, that your project is one of destruction, not creation; death, not life.

All apparent logical contradictions between contextually valid statements are resolved in motion.

I’ve never read Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus, but I’ve always liked the geometric conceit of it.  I’ve also of course spoken of my fondness for Descartes and Spinoza’s use of the concept of geometric proof.  I’m slowly working my way there.  I think this would be worth including.

I will add, that we need not “pass over in silence” (schweigen) such statements.  They are arrows.  We need to look at where they are pointing, the “that”.  The “moon” is not the moon, but that doesn’t mean there is not a bright orb that brightens the sky on a  regular basis.  The only difference is in the materiality of the perceptual domain.

Confused?  Ah, my work here is done.

Perfection is the goal; and perfection is not the goal.

I think I get where the humor is in Zen Buddhism.  If you are laughing, you’re in touch with your inner One Hand.  Clapping.

I would not say I am a classic “artistic” type: by and large I pay my bills on time; I show up where I am supposed to on time; I have no weird fashion quirks; I don’t owe anybody any money.

But I am a bit disorganized.  This is in part an inevitable result of having large quantities of ideas on dozens of topics every day.  Well, I’m fixing that.  I am implementing David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system, which I like in no small measure because of the lack of focus on technology.

Anyway, I dug into a container literally filled with ideas–something like a 1,000 sheets of paper–and this was on the top:

“What I want to do is bring to the task of thinking the mindset of a serious craftsman, and create objects both functional and esthetically pleasing.”

I like that. 

I SAID that, you say?  Ah, but sometimes I think I’m either stupid or a dick, so my agreement with my own ideas is in no way a foregone conclusion.

I am going to permit myself a public bit of self expression wrapped in being cryptic.  Let’s call it the Yin and the Yang, because the Passive and the Aggressive just doesn’t sound right.  Open and Closed doesn’t quite work either.  How about “one foot moving forward, one foot moving backward, with Me suspended in the middle”? I am, after all, an ueber-Pisces.  There’s one thing you didn’t know about me.

In the early days of CrossFit, which is seemingly almost a household name now, I experienced what I would now call a death and rebirth experience. It was an odd thing, brought about in no small measure both because of my psychological strengths, and my quite profound and sundry short-comings/stupidity.  The outcome of that experience, arguably, is what put CrossFit on the path to the success it now enjoys.  It was never certain it would grow as large as it has; that was certainly far beyond the wildest hopes of the founders.  I know this.  This story has been so thoroughly buried that it is now known by few.

I experienced something like this with Holotropic Breathwork.  I nearly got booted from the training, and was definitely in limbo there for some hours.

Which of course brings me to Achilles (perhaps on my gravestone–which I won’t  have, since I plan cremation; oh, maybe it could be written on a piece of paper and burned–they should put the proper Latin for what I intend by Pater Non Sequiturum.)

I have not read the actual Iliad, other than simplified versions that were not direct translations, but I did listen to an excellent series on it from someone (I’m sorry, I don’t remember the name: she teaches at Northwestern) from the Teaching Company.  Even without reading the prose, I was absolutely fascinated by the story.  I had always thought it was a retelling of the Trojan War story, soup to nuts.  It is not.  It is about a period of the war in which the greatest warrior first rejects all Greek conceptions of war–first by isolating himself and rejecting the traditional enticements of booty and fame, and then by going too far in his violence, becoming almost the embodiment of violence itself, remorseless, pitiless, tireless.

He dies three times: first, by rejecting his role in society as a fighter and leader; second, by violating rules of conduct of war; and third, most importantly, by accepting the inevitability of his own death.  He had been given a choice, and had chosen being forgotten and living a long life, until stirred back into action by Patroclus’ death.  He had literally shed his skin in the form of armor, and taken on another skin.

Please do not laugh immediately when I say I am no Achilles.  Yes, this is obvious.  But in a deeper sense, i would argue that we are ALL Achilles.  We are all here to fight battles.  We have the choice to stick to the tried and true, to emulate and follow the models society sets before us; and we have the choice to feel and fail and die trying to win our own worlds, our own sense of self.

For my part, I have no desire to consciously and consistently violate the rules of others, but I would submit that being willing to do so while chasing something else–to stray onto someone else’s sacred land chasing a deer or following a cloud–is an inevitable and ineluctable element in trying to learn how to cross over into death and rebirth.

Take this for what it is worth.  I felt this needed to be said. I  do not share much of what I say to myself here–it is probably half and half–but some things I feel may have or grow wings, and are only able to do so with traction–earth–water, and the light of other spirits.