Month: August 2014

Someone had recommended this movie to me, I think in the course of discussing radically different sorts of movies.  Another one had been Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man”.  That movie I made it through.  It disturbed me, but I think it was a useful disturbance.  Among other things, I think it got closer to the actual brutality of America’s history than probably any Western (if we call it that) I’ve seen.

Naked, though, I gave up on.  Dismal, dark people filled with despair and metaphysical pessimism.

The point I wanted to make about it, though, I have made many times: despair is the inevitable result of giving up in principle on the notion of individual moral growth, which is to say on the notion that individual pain can have meaning, and can be transcended.

Despair, then, and I am obviously developing a series of equivalencies, is a feature of egalitarianism, aka socialism.  Heroin use is a product, in part, of socialism.

Pain has always been a feature of human existence, but not necessarily QUALITATIVE pain, which is a term I haven’t used in a while.  By it, I intend primarily resentment and self pity.  Thewliss’s character no doubt has suffered, but he can’t figure out how to do anything with it, and he feels relentless self pity, from which flows his contempt.

Some people consider misery deep.  I don’t.  Misery in the process of transmutation is deep.  Completed misery is wisdom.  Open ended, submissive misery is simply demonstrative of a lack of skill in being human, in doing the work that we are called on to do here. It is burying a talent (did you know this word entered the English language through that parable?) and waiting for the master to return.

I will add as a random factoid that it is highly interesting that Thewliss was cast as Lupin (Lupine: I assume everyone eventually catches that, but maybe not.), given his comment on being a werewolf.  I suspect his role in this movie was what won him that role.

I will add as well that this post and my last post, on the fact that the British government–the power elite, the people who guard their nations commitment to the eradication of individual Goodness, and the notion of personal empowerment and development–countenances almost openly the widespread Muslim abuses of young girls, are related.

Thewliss is in despair because he does not believe in anything.  Likewise, the only absolute value of Socialists is conformity.  Rape, murder, torture, misogyny, racism, elitism: none of these are wrong, when done by people not within the group.  Self evidently, you cannot even claim egalitarianism is an absolute value for them.  They tolerate the intolerant constantly.  No: conformity is the only absolute, which is to say an eager abandonment of the notion of individual conscience, which is to say the notion of individual moral growth, and the following necessary conclusion that people and peoples can be found at differing stages on this path.

Only sloppy, cowardly thinking permits the continuance of such darkness. But continue it does. 

I need to pass along and post political stuff from time to time.  I am going to try again and stop doing it on Facebook.

Here are a couple of excellent videos: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/easy-meat-inside-the-world-of-muslim-rape-gangs-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

I am increasingly of the opinion that Islam is very simply not compatible with tolerance and human decency.  Particularly in the second video he talks about how it is commonplace in many western European countries for very organized, demonically evil efforts to be made to destroy young girls through sexual torture.  The girls targeted are usually 12-13 and socially marginalized.  Exactly like individual sexual psychopaths, Muslim men have well tuned antennas to who to approach, flatter, get drunk, and gradually drag down a path to where 13 year old girls are having to sexually service ten men in a room.  It is planned.  It is coordinated in groups.  It is socially accepted, and perfectly consistent with Islamic doctrine.  Muhammad himself took sexual slaves–to be clear, women who were captured in combat, and whose husbands were quite often killed.  He married his favorite “wife” when she was 6, and had sexual intercourse with her when she was 9.

Ponder the profound psychopathology of that.  Of the man who stood at the very center of everything Muslims (Slaves of God) hold dear.

As I have said, good has been made of Islam, in my view most notably through the Sufis.  And clearly not everyone who is a Muslim finds the idea of sexually abusing children attractive.  But many, many do.  And there is nothing in their culture which one can point to to tell them it is wrong.

I really don’t think Islam and everything that is good about our civilization–human rights, equality before the law, property rights, individual conscience–are compatible.  It will have to be one or the other, and even though cultural suicide is always an option, it is the option not just of cowards, but of people who have lost all capacity to speak of or for human Goodness.

By being a janitor in hell.

It seems to me that what we  might term the moral sense has as its objective the creation of a feeling.  You do good things to feel good.

But when it comes to abstract systems–like the economy–the connection between action and consequence can easily be obscured.  It is very possible to do something that makes you feel good which works on balance to hurt people you never see, never know, and whose fate you never learn.  And they never connect their misery with you.

The moral sense must be tied to learning, to a developed sense of responsibility to work diligently for understanding.

This is why my third sacred principle is Perceptual Movement.  I don’t tie it down too hard.  What I mean is continuing to learn on every level which presents itself, in every language it presents itself in.

I proposed some time ago dropping small fusion bombs down a chute of sorts, deep into the earth, where the energy released could be put to productive use through turbines and heated water. It’s probably a dumb idea, but may be close enough that it can be smartened up by someone with a more extensive engineering background than me.  It has long been my understanding that nuclear fusion, of which the hydrogen bomb is obviously the best example, is vastly more efficient than fission.

Here is an alternative idea.  As I understand the matter, the problem with solar and wind is that they are intermittent.  And wind towers are ungodly expensive, kill a lot of birds, and are ugly as bear shit.  Being intermittent, they cannot be relied on as steady power sources, which means in practice that countries like Denmark, which have tried to adopt wind technology, have to “borrow” nuclear power on a regular basis from countries like Germany.  If Germany did the same thing, they would have regular blackout, which is not a very good solution to solve a problem–Anthropogenic Global Warming–which does not even exist.

Long ago I wondered about giant batteries, but this is apparently not feasible.

Here is an alternative: what if you built large underground reservoirs of some material like water, or something better yet to be invented, which takes in and holds heat.  Run pipes of it through the sun in places like Nevada, such that it absorbs the radiant heat, then put it back into its “thermos”.  This material–let’s say it is water–can then be evaporated at a steady rate.  It can HOLD the energy it takes in, and release it in controlled ways.

I am no expert in physics, but perhaps a system can be designed in which the heat itself creates the suction to pull it in and push it out.  This is another huge problem with alternative energy sources: wind in particular takes more in fossil fuels to create (i.e. physically building the turbines then shipping them on the back of a truck somewhere to be erected with cranes on sites cleared by bulldozers) than it will ever generate out on a wind swept prairie.  It does make tree hugging hippies (not that there is anything wrong with that) feel good, but if the goal is reducing dependence on fossil fuels, it is an abject failure even on that level.

It seems to me–and I concede in advance and openly that I am perhaps being ignorant and stupid–that the focus on converting energy to immediate use, like photovoltaic solar cells, obscures the fact that energy can be taken up and stored in many forms.

Pondering, it seems to me that if emotions and thoughts BOTH arise from primitive sensations–our gut alone, as Peter Levine noted in a quote I posted a few days ago, has the “intelligence” of a cat brain, and is thus functionally an animal within us that both is affected by AND affects our actual brain–then they are equivalent.

It may be that there is no difference in perceptual sophistication on this level between an unintelligent person who expresses trauma through recurring feelings and images, and a much more intelligent person who is able to dissociate the feelings entirely and instead think obsessively.

The former, actually, would be more advanced.  I am perhaps myself somewhere in them middle.  I remarked long ago that my thinking seems to be a way of running productively.

But if you NEED thought, it cannot have an end.  You do not work, say, the way you work to build a house.  Once a house is done, you stop building (unless you want an addition, and that, too, has an end).  With thinking as an aim, there is no limit to the number of words you can inflict on the world.  Trust me, I know.

And this linkage is interesting.  I wake up most days and the thought comes in my head “everyone hates you”.  I can and of course do dispute this cognitively, but that is not where it comes from.  What happens, I now realize, is that some primitive sensation in my gut gives rise to the feeling of disgust, and that in turn crystalizes as the thought.  Rather than interrogate the thought or the emotion, I am now focusing solely on bodily sensations, and it seems to be alleviating this problem greatly.  I am getting moments, and even hours, of honest calm.  It is a beautiful thing.

The infernal thing about PTSD is you can never relax fully.  If you’re on a lake, chilling, drinking beer, some part of you is still scanning the horizon, watching, preparing.  You are never off.  If there is a bump in the night, you have to investigate it.

Certainly, there is survival value in this.  In the wild, or in combat, or in a hostile environment, constant vigilance is needed.

But I think the way to do it is how animals do it.  They are completely relaxed most of the time UNTIL some signal appears to them.  They are not waiting for the signal, but respond when it appears.

If you can’t relax effectively, you can’t work effectively.  This is what I have concluded.

Peter Levine, on a related note, talks about how fear and anger and sadness and every emotion we are capable of feeling actually FOLLOW kinesthetic sensations.  The knot in your stomach becomes what we call fear.  It happens first.

This opens up an extraordinarily interesting possibility: by attending to our bodily sensations, by listening to them, feeling them, opening them up, challenging them, investigating them, we gain control of emotions.  We become able to get all the good things emotions give us–fear, for example, being a signalling mechanism that something is wrong–without having to go into them fully.

Further, we become sensitive to and better able to feel those sensations that give rise to the feelings we want, like belonging, emotional satiety, contentment, happiness, pleasure.

I have been attending particularly to feelings in my solar plexus lately, and it is astonishing how quickly I am becoming more optimistic and sensitive to feelings of space.

And what I am realizing is that these sensations give rise not just to feelings but to thoughts.  Thoughts are the products of unprocessed, unaccepted, unrecognized physical sensations.

Ponder that most meditation seeks to attain a thought-less state.  How can this be done when the body is not fully integrated?  This is the genius of Kum Nye.  Peter Levine is the first mainstream author I have seen mention this system.  Kum Nye necessarily precedes meditation.  There have been a number of reports that meditation actually makes many people more agitated over time.  Why?

I would guess that the underlying body energy remains unmodified, but its expression in thought is eroded, so it has no outlet.  It gets bottled up.  To be clear, this energy is not positive, but until it is identified and “pulled in”, it remains.

And I think of a Sartre, who was compelled to write.  I think of intellectuals, compelled to think, even if everything they think turns to disaster, as happened with most French intellectuals of his period.

This is unidentified traumatic energy, unprocessed horror and sadness, which is remembered viscerally, and which comes out in both emotion and thought.

It is an interesting perceptual move/exercise/heuristic to consider all religions as metaphysical and cultural hypotheses. We tend to think of science and religion as opposites. Why?

I would like to quote a very interesting passage from “In an Unspoken Voice” at length:

The most intimate sense we have of ourselves is through proprioception, kinesthesia, and visceral sensation.  Proprioception is afforded through special sensory receptors in the joints that signal the position of all the parts of the body with respect to gravity. Kinesthesia is the sense of the degree of tension in your muscles.  And the visceral sense arises from receptors in the gut that are integrated by the enteric nervous system (a neuronal system in our gut with more nerve cells and complexity than the entire brain of a cat has).  Without these internal senses and without an expanded “non-trance” perception of the external world, we simply are unable to know ourselves and realize it is YOU who is focusing on these events whether they are interesting, pleasant, beautiful, ugly, dangerous, dull and so on.  Without the unimpeded perceiving of these sensations, it simply is not possible to know WHO you are and what you want and need in life.  This is a strong statement, admittedly, but hopefully you will become convinced about its veracity through experiencing the following exercises yourselves. [he then goes on to describe exercises in Somatic Experiencing].

Ponder this.  Ponder a philosophy class on Existentialism in which people submit to tapping into their primal nervous system apparatus, in which they chant VOOOO until some of them start shaking or have other powerful visceral sensations.  Ponder a class where the answer to who you are is: THAT.  The teacher will at that point be fully superfluous and useless, as indeed most philosophy professors are in practice.

Who you are is not an intellectual question, or at least at best perhaps one third an intellectual question.  The felt sense of self has NOTHING to do with cognitive operation.  It has to do with the EXPLANATION, with the words you use, with the conceptions you offer, the contextualizing.  It ENDS there; it does not start there.

I have argued that much of “modernity” can be seen as a poor resolution of grieving, but I would add to that that the better word and concept is probably trauma.  The two are related, but different.  Bolshevism only truly came into its own following World War One.  Communism, likewise.  Fascism likewise.  Millions dead, for nothing, for fuck-all, for the vanity of kings and would-be kings.  For NOTHING.

Surely nothing would be a better master, since It is at least honest.

There is a lot to digest here. Chew on it.

Seriously: ponder the statement “Substantially everything you have been taught about how to live, and what to do and what matters is almost completely wrong.”

Do we not look often with sentimental attachment to primitives, to the “noble savage”?  From this perspective, is not their salient trait a continued attachment to the entirety of their selves, of their primal apparatus, and not an effort to paint over and wall off primitive instincts that gain in power because, having lost consciousness of them, we lose control over them, and they in turn begin to control us?

Food for thought.

Fascism is social engineering. It is making the trains run on time, and eugenics, and government control of the economy.  As I have said from time to time perhaps the most brilliant piece of propaganda the Left ever came up with was positioning Fascism on the right.  Yes, Hitler fought the Soviets, and Mussolini fought the very Communists among whose ranks he once was.  But they differed in the specifics, not in their embrace of totalitarianism, not in their belief that a ruling elite could remake the world.

If we return to the original French Revolutionary Assembly, who do we find on the right?  Monarchists.  If the National Socialist German Worker’s Party–which by the way got most of its support from the working class–had truly been a creature of the right, they would have been seeking to reimpose the monarchy, and return things to the way they used to be.  That was the furthest thing from Hitler’s mind, unless we consider that his actual goal was returning to an imagined glorious, pre-Christian past that clearly never existed as he imagined it.

There is no functional difference between a bright shiny future, or a bright shiny past, if both exist in radical difference from the actual present.