Month: May 2014

“Bailout” Bevin (which admittedly sounds better than “I kind of like Obamacare McConnell) may or may not be a better politician, but his presence will mean that someone else gets the shot at Majority Leader.  I don’t know who that is.  He or she may be worse, but the very fact that someone like Bevin was able to knock off someone like McConnell would show clearly that the smart money is on conservatism.

I will add as well the definition of politics as the art of the possible can be read in two ways.  Conventionally, it means, effectively, that compromise is inevitable.  You can’t get everything you want.  You have to play the cards you are dealt.

But I would submit that sometimes it can also mean PROBING the limits of the possible.  Sometimes it is the job of the leader to push out into the unknown and find out how far things actually can be pushed.

In poker, playing the cards you are dealt sometimes means winning without even having a single pair, if you are brash enough.

McConnell has more or less been held hostage by terrorists most of his career.  The method of the Left is to seek always to hurt, to maim, to weaken, to intimidate.  And they are good at it.  A minor error on the part of a Republican can hurt far far more than an egregious error on the part of a Democrat.  Having a complicit media allows that, having a well honed propaganda apparatus allows that.

McConnell knows what he knows.  He has made mistakes in his career and regretted them.  He has inadvertently thrown bones to his enemies.  He plays safe, and that is how he has survived.

But we are on a path to destruction.  Only a fool would deny it.  It is time for risk taking.

Can there be any doubt what our media would prioritize?  As far as that goes, can there be any doubt what it IS prioritizing?  This story won’t see national media coverage, but a blatant and public racial epithet would.

Here is the problem with what passes for morality in our present day: it views all “crimes” through the prism of ideology, and not through empathy and compassion.  Racist epithets are class crimes.  They matter more. Merely inflicting physical violence on someone who is defined as a member of the oppressive class, even if they have never committed a crime, never will commit a crime, and cannot even be conceived of as guilty of anything beyond mere existence, is not noteworthy.  Nobody cares.

Ideology is psychopathology; it is perceptual psychopathy.

It occurs to me that by invoking context and perceptual motion, one of my principle goals is to invent a morality that goes beyond all ideologies, so as to get at the root of true goodness, which is based on empathy and perceptual awareness and fluidity.

I don’t think this is true.  I think hate is giving a part of yourself to someone else as a means of avoiding personal responsibility for your emotions and life.  And I think you come to NEED that person (that group, that idea, whatever the focus of your hate is) because they orient your world, they give you a sense of meaning.

What if Hitler had killed all the Jews?  Would he not have found a new target?  Would the violence have stopped?  I don’t think so.

One sees relative peace in some Communist nations, like Cuba and North Korea, because everyone has been so abused and beaten that they live in constant fear, and this fear creates compliance.  But this is a sort of violence as well.  It is a hatred as well, one which never ends because it never CAN end.  If it ended, the raison d’etre of the haters would be gone.  That it doesn’t end is what makes Communism so attractive an ideology for people who are lost and alone.  You never need fear an end to the violence.  The war will never end, even if people stop fighting back.

I have felt hated all my life, and it occurs to me that hate is a RELATIONSHIP.  It is a connection between in here and out there, between one person and another.  But it is a compulsive, needy, driven connection, one filled with constant tension, fear and pain.

I see this now, and I see it fading, as it should.

Like many Americans, I sometimes buy things when I don’t know what else to do.  Today, though, it occurred to me that I should give money to charity, which I did.  I gave $25 to Operation 300 (please check it out), and bought a T-shirt.  Then I put $50 more into Kiva, which remains my favorite cause.  You can’t call it a charity, because all they are doing is brokering no-interest loans to people working hard to improve their own lives.  They are doing the job predatory banks will not.

This is a better way to go.  Particularly if you look at all the people on Kiva, you see how absurdly easy your life is.  I won’t tell you to HTFU, but I would say that with attention and time it becomes easier to realize gratitude on a regular basis, and this is a worthwhile goal.  I am pursuing it, and would encourage you to as well.

It is quite possible the first black slave in America was enslaved by another black.  Certainly, most of the Greek slaves were other Greeks.

Kiev was likely a Viking slave trading center.  Russ is a Scandinavian word, brought by the Vikings whose trade in Slavs gave us the word slave.

Nearly every major city in Ireland, including Dublin, were founded as Viking slave trading ports.  The tribes of Ireland were constantly at war with one another, and whenever one prevailed, they would sell off the losers as slaves.

And keep in mind the Jews were slaves at one time.  They never forget it, and this memory perhaps in part explains their cultural resiliency.

Most of what we know about the Roman Republic comes to us from a Greek slave, Polybius.

Blacks have no monopoly on having been slaves.  We need to treat people as individuals.  There is no such thing as a “group”.  There is no such thing as a “class”.  These are linguistic fictions created by and for short sighted and stupid intellectuals.  They are not without use, but like anything else quickly become pernicious when taken too far.

And I was feeling today this constant tug and pull I used to go through–still go through on occasion–with my mother in particular. She would define reality in some way that was fundamentally skewed and wrong, and I would have to fight not to be sucked into her delusion.  It was a tug of war, and very tiring.

I would describe this, though, as a sort of assault, of emotional abuse, even if it was not consciously intended as such.

When you fail to see someone as they are, to accept them as they are, to impose your world view by simply refusing to see theirs, you are attacking them, and it should in my view be processed as an attack.  Anger is a very acceptable and healthy response, even if the other person simply cannot grasp why you are angry.  To back off on your anger is to accede to their world view which does not have any room for you in it.

When white Southerners in the Jim Crow era forced blacks to use different water fountains and swimming pools, and forced them to sit at the back of the bus, they were not looking at blacks as people just like them.  They were viewing them through a narcissistic lens of alleged intellectual and moral superiority.

It is this failure of humanity, of communion, which is what makes racism wrong.  It is a perceptual distortion, an error.

And Political Correctness is simply one more iteration of this prejudgement, this disconnection from the currents of human social and emotional life.  It is racism without the race.

As I keep saying, until we can define why things are wrong, we cannot be sure we are not making the bad worse.  The only argument the Left has against racism is that it is anti-egalitarian.  But they cannot say why egalitarianism should be the sole moral value.  They simply stipulate it, since it is all that is left once individual moral autonomy and possibility of growth is rejected.

And in point of fact they are quite willing to accept slavery in the name of egalitarianism.  They have even developed a term “chattel slavery” to denote the kind they oppose, and by extension the forms they are quite willing to accept.  Anyone who uses the term chattel slavery needs to be kicked vigorously in the ‘nads.

No one capable of clear thought can accept any part of this monstrous project.

Clearly, machines are capable of vast quantitative work.  In theory, they can master oceans of quantitative information.  They can do prodigious amounts of physical work.

But they cannot do qualitative work.  They cannot be truly spontaneously creative in the way that someone exuding life force can.  Life exists, apart from the machines of our bodies.  What is best in us comes from that spirit.  What is worst, from the needs of our machine.

The task is to perfect spirit, not the machine.

As I have asked before, who really wants to live forever without purpose?  And I would argue that if you confine yourself to a machine, you are unable to fulfill the task of spiritual evolution which is the only purpose worth pursuing.

One can only hope that small glimmers of hope ones see here and there that knowledge of the spiritual world is breaking through are warranted.  There is so much compulsion, so much short-sightedness, narcissism, and viciousness in the circles of most of our elites.

Halo 4 came with the box, so I’ve been playing that.  My understanding is that moderate amounts of video game playing–perhaps an hour or two a week–is good for cognitive development.  I can certainly see how this would be, given the complexity of the interactions between the controller and the game.

Most of these games come with stories.  For those who have not played them, they are in some respects literally presented as movies.  You get credits at the beginning and a literal rolling of the credits complete with music at the end of major story lines.

Halo 4 begins with a discussion between a doctor who apparently took children at an early age to modify them mentally and physically, so as to create the perfect storm troopers to suppress an apparently incipient rebellion.  Her interrogator is questioning the morality of this, but within the story line these storm troopers intended for one purpose were retasked to fight aliens, and were successful.  The main character, apparently, in all the Halo iterations is Master Chief.

The interrogator asks if Master Chief is a sociopath, and his “creator” responds that he is calibrated to succeed and even thrive in the most hostile environments.  The interrogator asks again: but would you not agree that in some important respect he is not right?

We then get a cut scene, and fade to a space battleship under attack, and we wake up from suspended animation as Master Chief.

Would it be too much to call this brain washing?  Perhaps.

But as I have from time to time, I would suggest that the emerging figure best adapted to modern life is the sociopath, who is devoid of the emotions of mourning the past, who lacks all sensitivity to what is being lost in terms of interpersonal connection, who is in important respects a machine who can be plugged as a gear into a massive colossus which, the faster it moves, the less it cares about any deep purpose in human life, other than conformity to a role within the machine.

Take an aspiring CEO.  That person, in Stanley Bing’s infamous formulation in “What would Machiavelli do”, cares about three things: work, weird sex, and golf.  Self evidently, none of these are intrinsically meaningful, even if this person might be enormously economically productive, may see his or her picture on the covers of magazines, may be lauded as a pillar of the community for making politically motivated charitable donations.

We do, in my view, need to worry about the emotional disconnections of many of today’s youth, their callowness, hollowness, unreflective cruelty.  Perhaps it has always been like this.  For recorded history, violence–actual violence–has been a constant.

Still, emotionally detached and alienated kids are fertile ground for cultural nihilists, and never before in human history (other than the past century or so) have there been so many people who long so desperately to betray and destroy their own culture, their own people, their own countries.  The Mongols left literal mountains of bodies, but they never despised themselves, even if they fought among each other.  There was always a tribe which was connected to the past.

The tribe we need fear today consists in precisely those who want to destroy the past, and in so doing destroy the future.  They want an eternal moment, where no freedom need be feared. 

I don’t know why I titled this strategy.