Month: March 2015

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/david-horowitz-the-lefts-destruction-of-inner-city-communities/

Our problem as both a nation and a world, is that nice people lack the bullshit detectors they need to realize that the people calling for justice and peace and prosperity in nearly all cases either intend the opposite consciously; or worse yet, achieve the opposites without naming them or claiming them, and continue to do so year after year, decade after decade.

The people who call bullshit on all the nicey, nicey stuff aren’t popular.  Many people want the world to be all sunshine and rainbows, but it just fucking isn’t.  Not yet.  And it will never be until the overwhelming bulk of people have the emotional courage to see what is plainly in front of them and call it by name.

I reposted one of my pieces today and noticed that I referred to the fact that John Keynes married a Russian women.  Someone else recently commented on my grammar as well, so I thought I might say something.

Here is the thing: nearly every piece on Goodness Movement was written in one or two sittings.  Those sittings in some cases were 12-15 hour days, but they were of a piece.  My psychology being what it is–somewhat fucked up, but with I think significantly above average reality testing, which is a documented positive of depression–I can’t mull these things over, and do them gradually.  I have to get them out all at once, or they don’t come out.  And one outcome of this is poor editing.

I am trying to fix this.  I am trying to implement gradualism in my life, peaceful progress.  But it has not happened yet.

I should add, I think, that sometimes I actually don’t care what proper grammar is.  I have a style I have evolved that I like.  I think anyone who thinks grammar is of intrinsic importance should read Shakespeare and tell me how his prose would be improved with a good editor (because, you know, people reading me immediately think of Billy Boy).

While I’m at it, here is the Keynes piece again: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/keynes.pdf

I am going to try again to stop reacting emotionally to stupidity (as I see it) masquerading as knowledge, and grotesque narcissism disguised as philanthropy; at least, I am going to try and stop reacting UNPRODUCTIVELY.  That is to say, I am going to try and write one place, and not another; to one audience–me for now–and not the world at large.

We’ll see how it goes.

You know, I am on Facebook too much.  It is like I am looking for something, but never find it.  It is fear, of course, that keeps me from setting sail, finally, but I am for the time being indulging myself.

And even though I am censored on most left-wing websites–I can’t post on Salon, Media Matters, HuffPo, Daily Cause, and probably some others I’ve forgotten–I still see links from time to time to leftwing propaganda, where for instance they are still trotting out the tired theme that conservatives are all racist.

And I sometimes call them on it.  Some part of me prefers fighting to living.  And I look at them, and wonder how there could be ANY connection between the education I received–which valued reason, and perspective taking, and self restraint, and respectful dialogue and above all an effort at UNDERSTANDING other people and their ideas–and what is on display daily.  The hate.  The unreflective, reflexive hate.

There is no difference, in my view, between people who hate one group they don’t understand, and other people who hate some other group they don’t understand.  It is still hate if KKK members hate blacks they don’t know, don’t talk to, don’t interact with, and know nothing about; and it is still hate if left wingers hate Republicans for their alleged racism–which has no signs, which is not present in any recognizable form–and who hate passionately, and with ZERO desire to understand, to interact with, to learn about people who think differently than them.

As I have said often, there seems to be some part of our organism which craves aggression and violence, and the subterfuge of the Left is perhaps the worst because it claims not to be subterfuge at all.  Still, it is not different in principle than Christians who kill in the name of Jesus.  They may be doing the right thing, but they can’t do it in the name of Jesus.

Hate is hate.  This is a simple enough concept.  If you are hating, then you are playing the same role as the people you condemn for hate.  If you are a Leftist, you are simply too disconnected with your feelings, too self righteous, too self absorbed, to fully grasp what you are doing; and of course a full and effective propaganda apparatus has been developed around you to protect you from self awareness, until such time as hate and conformity become the only things remaining of value to you.  The transition from Sybaritic Leftist to Cultural Sadeist is not all that hard.  Resentment is easily fed in a world where you have been taught life is supposed to be easy.

All this for Rosebud.

Here is my actual point.  I had to get that rant out first, for my own emotional cleansing.

I get angry.  I want to punish people.  But what I see is that when I form that connection with others, I have stopped looking up.  I have taken my eyes off the highest aims open to me.  I enter into a fight of some sort with someone who I will beat, or who will beat me, or who I will wound and/or will wound me and we move on.  We make each others lives less pleasant, then go on to the next one.

This cycle never ends, as long as I am looking across at those opposing me, placing myself at their level.

Yes, the bastards cause no end of damage.  Yes, they need to be opposed.  But practically how often am I effective?  Would time spent being angry on the internet not be better spent at dealing with these issues properly once and for all in a book format I can then provide to people to accept or reject as they choose?

And I think more generally about punishment.  Socially, you need deterrents, which is what the threat of punishment provides.  But I don’t think it is EVER useful to judge people, to see yourself as better, to see them as DESERVING their punishment.

Let us say some psychopath kills someone you love.  This would be an unmitigated horror.  You would want to see them dead, preferably painfully, if you are typical.

But even if they are caught, even if they are put to death, rage is still an unpleasant companion.  So too is hate.  And bitterness.

Every so often I get these flickers of light, I get small instantaneous glimpses of a world where I pursue light every day, where I pursue qualitative joy, regardless of the darkness around me.  I get glimpses of constantly and consistently being my own best friend, constantly and consistently seeking in a balanced and daily way personal growth, felicity, fun, happiness, creative engagement, and ignoring all the wrong people in the world, ignoring all the countless opportunities for conflict, for punishing those who I feel deserve it precisely to the extent I have abandoned my own best prospects, my own best self.

Now, I want to be clear that I am not advocating simple minded anything.  I get angry too at people who say you have to be nice all the time, or compassionate all the time.  I think most of the time these people are compulsive, and preachy.  They want you to look up to them, and don’t want you to know how many fucked up things are floating around in their heads.  Yes, I am a bit of a cynic, but I have come by it honestly.  I have trusted many people who have failed me.  I tend to distrust anyone who is not an honest sinner.  If I can’t see where your self interest is being met, then I assume you have hidden it from yourself, and that wherever it comes out, it will likely be unconscious and destructive.

So kids, this post is all about being a fucking ray of sunshine.  I think that was the point I wanted to make.  I feel better now.

Like most people educated in my approximate fashion, I have read “The Myth of Sisyphus”. I was actually quite enamored of Albert Camus in high school, and once spent a summer doing a close reading of, and completely misunderstanding, because I was stupider, his book “The Rebel”.

He argues that all psychologically normal people have thought about killing themselves.  So he heard a shrink say somewhere.  And today I was reading someone’s account of an acute depression, where he thought about ending it all.

And I wondered again, what I wondered then, why this has never occurred to me.  I have never thought seriously about killing myself, ever.  I have had moments where I would have taken heroin,if I had it.  I have had moments where I understood clearly why people cut themselves to feel pain.

But I have never felt a need to end it all, even before I acquired the belief that suicide solves nothing, that it actually prolongs and amplifies suffering.

And I look at this, and it seems to me that I have been more or less clinically depressed since I was a small child.  Apparently even when I was 4 or 5 I didn’t like playing with other kids.  So I am told.  I would go sit off in a corner and do something by myself.

But I’m used to it. I often feel as if I am moving in a very low gear, but I also feel as if I can tow the weight of the world behind me. I have the strength.

And I think this is the reason: I have no contrast.  People who want to kill themselves know what it is like to be happy and care-free, at least relatively.  They have a better before.  I don’t.  This is the air I have always breathed, and I think it has made me strong.  The thought of walking into pain does not phase me.  Many mornings I wake up feeling that I am being lacerated with a sharp knife.  Then I go on.

When I get through this–and I will–I will be quite an interesting and capable fellow.

I have gotten to where I can bring up and live with a primal fear that seems to date to my first year or two of life.  Moving through it, to the extent I can, creates within me momentary whiffs of peace.

For whatever reason, playing Assassin’s Creed seems to bring me relief, and it occurs to me at this moment, after playing for 2 hours or whatever, that it is really no different in principle than all the countless abstractions and imaginings I have been using my entire life to take the sting out of emotions I could not process, which threatened to overwhelm me at an existential level.

I ask myself: when I do my Life Review–which I believe we all go through when we die–what will be the status of time spent playing video games?  On the one hand, I suppose it is like playing dice games or any number of other outwardly useless diversions.  On another, it seems to me no different in kind than what I did in graduate school, reading erudite but largely useless texts on various religious traditions, and philosophical treatments of religion.  I just went through my bibliographies, which I have kept for some 20 years, and threw them away.  I looked at them, and smelled dirt–the sort in which no life grows.

If I play video games, some good things seem to happen.  Certainly, that is how it feels to me.

What happens, though, reading Jacques Lacan, or Karl Marx, or Jacques Derrida, or Michel Foucault?

I would argue, in large measure, that in dealing with virtually any thinker of the 19th or 20th century that college kids study, you are dealing with orcs and goblins, elves and dwarves.

What concrete good comes from reading these people?  In what way do people get practically smarter?  In what ways do they learn to live with happiness, sang froid, and tranquility?

My oldest has gotten the bug to read the classics. I bought her “A Farewell to Arms” as something extra whenever school work gets old.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, of course, as a parent I am glad to see she is not a flippant, frivolous kid like so many seem to be nowadays.  At the same time, I know Hemingway was a lifelong alcoholic who killed himself.  What did he REALLY have to teach us about living?

In my crankier moments I feel nothing useful has been written in a thousand years, but then I look to people like Martin Seligman, and Mihaly Czikszenmilhalyi, and Anton Chekov, whose short stories I adore.

And I have discovered it is actually FUN to listen to the plays of Shakespeare on CD while reading along.  Shakespeare was and remains useful.  His work can enrich a life.

So to end this minor rant, I am still an anti-intellectual intellectual who likes to call himself a thought worker.

How many leftists does it take to change a light bulb?

They can’t, but it’s the Republicans fault.

It occurs to me this morning that most of my fulminations against Leftism arise from the sense that I was not loved as a child.

This does not mean my analyses are wrong: on the contrary, I think my particular exposures to psychopathologies, in many forms, make me better able to spot them than most.

It simply means that I have not been free, and we are meant to be free.

Most important emotional truths are simple.

I had never heard this term until I was talking with someone who did Alcohol Rehab.  It’s a term people in the business use for people who have stopped drinking, but ONLY stopped drinking.  They are still an irritable mess.

And I had not realized either that drinking and drug abuse both facilitate delayed socialization.  One author I was reading said that many drunks are ten years or more behind people their same age in their ability to manage their own emotions, and accurately read those of others.  Drinking, of course, is often an alternative to socializing, and not an adjunct to.

I have not had a drink in three weeks.  I’ve been using a GNC ZMA supplement to sleep, along with 5-HTP, both of which I recommend.

And I am just letting things flow.  I am getting in touch with much of the inner nastiness in my family.  It is a really hard thing to do, to separate actual malice, from pretended helpfulness.  It is hard to understand how much anger and hate can lurk in smiling faces, and the habit of appearing nice.

We all of us are capable of nastiness.  There are no exceptions, and I think those who most think they are the exception are the ones most likely to latch onto some grand project to save humanity which will bring terror, death and pain in its wake, and which can on some level be predicted to do such.

The Christian and Islamic fondness for painting vivid pictures of Hell is a type of aggression in my view.  It is an attack they can launch on children that feeds their capacity and need for cruelty, while being rationalizable as “for their own good”.  I think it was Richard Dawkins who spoke of religion as a form of child abuse.  He is a clumsy thinker, and tends not just to conflate all theisms together, but all iterations of each, in one formless lump (practically; in his polemics, of course, he attempts to use the Bible against believers); but in this respect, I think child abuse is a correct term.

Me, I think I am beginning to connect with some energies that I should have connected to as a child.  They were withheld from me, denied me.

But I don’t quit.

I have been playing Assassin’s Creed IV, where I am both a pirate and an assassin.  Both nasty.  At one point, they even introduce the Crowleyan creed: Do what thou will.  Assassins are presented as champions of freedom, even if I spend all my time either blowing up ships, killing those defending it, and taking their stuff; or assassinating people for money and killing anyone who gets in my way.

Here is the point I wanted to make: it is strangely soothing, and seems to make me feel more calm, less angry, than I think I otherwise would.  Perhaps I am feeding the angry part of my gut.

But I think part of it is this: it is a self contained world, with rules, where you can gain a sense of absolute mastery.  No matter how many times you fail, you get to go again, and success is inevitable over some time horizon.  In this, of course, it is quite different from life.

Games are in some respects a retreat from life.  But they are also a microcosm where you can gain  or regain a sense of control that you have otherwise lost.  You have to be able to feel that emotion SOMEWHERE in order to carry it out into the world.

Now, at my age, I should of course have felt mastery many times.  In point of fact, I am very good at some things.  But in real life you can NEVER shrink things small enough to feel consistently in control–especially where people are concerned.  You can be skilled in dealing with people, and still misstep sometimes.

In a fantasy world, no harm is permanent, and growth is on-going.

For years I condemned violent video games.  For years I said they were awful and hurting people’s ability to socialize and empathize.  This may in fact be true for many people, particularly if they start playing hours daily at young ages.

But at my age, it is a welcome relief from the stresses of my day.  My children mock me, but then they mock me for lots of things.  I mock them.  We all love one another, so it’s all in fun.

I just thought I might put this out there.  I have not been posting because I am very much in some Primary Process–using that term loosely–work.

Few points:1

1) People like the Samuel L. Jackson character exist.  There are people who view humanity as a virus.  This is not an empirically valid argument: we are not killing off the Earth, nor is anything remotely like that foreseeable in the next hundred or more years, after which we will have made a collective decision one way or the other.  Global Warming is a farce.  It cannot and should not even be factored into the Gaia conjecture.

And I want to repeat, that this hatred must be seen as self hatred.  It represents the failure of intellectuals to deal with their own baser impulses, of aggression, greed, lust, sexual desire; as well as what I have termed Qualitative Repressions, which is their need for belonging, community, love, tenderness, and affection.

It is not different in principle, in my view, from the psychosocial roots of Fascism.  They want mass death.  They see the Earth as innocent and ALL of humanity as guilty, which is a long step past anything Hitler attempted.

2) Many people in positions of authority are complicit in these schemes of global conquest. It was interesting that they chose to more or less directly implicate Obama.

What a beautiful day, though, if instead of assassinating all the proles, as these elitists want, they themselves–ONLY the guilty–were put in their place instead.  Imagine the Earth the day after Eggsy’s triumph.  Most all the heads of State, gone.  Most all royalty, gone.  Most ueber-rich, gone.

The Democrats like to play the populist card, but you will not find anything in their playbook like William F. Buckley Jr’s claim that he would rather have the first 100 names in the Boston phone book running the country than the faculty of Harvard.  Democrats, CLEARLY, would want the eggheads (was Eggsy perhaps a play on this?).

3) Many of these people seem nice.  Sam Jackson (it’s my blog, and I’ve never understood the need for the middle initial) wore an OM necklace, and had pandas just like the World Wildlife Fund.  They seem nice because their ideology has enabled them to repress their inner feelings of rage and hatred, all while planning to vent them through proxies that enable them to sustain the lie.

4) The church scene was oddly gratifying.  It was, again, the zombie theme.  The all against all.  The primal rage and destructiveness that Political Correctness and the Cult of Nice have attempted to cull out of us, but which have simply submerged, to reappear in the vicarious enjoyment of scenes like that. It is the gut gone wild, the animal part of us, which having been without “food” for so long, no longer recognizes any boundaries.

5) The two balloons were testicles.

That’s all.