Month: August 2015

Holy crap: I had 100 posts in July.  Somebody get this man a life.

When I turn really intellectual, I think it is often because I am feeling really emotional.  Today in my Kum Nye practice wave after wave of feeling kept sweeping over me.  I am a deeply emotional person.  I am a water creature.

And I understood in an instant the emotional appeal of materialistic Scientism: a core stipulation is that emotions are not real.  When you are hurt, and hurting, that is not real.  It is atoms in motion, or so it can be thought.

The alternative is that feelings do exist in some spiritual way, that they are out there somehow, and that they do not have an Off switch, that they must be walked through, as through a room filled with veils that prevent you from even seeing where you are going, where logic is of no use, and only motion can carry you through and direct you.  You cannot see the end of the journey.  You cannot see the end.  You are without triangles and squares, and the Pythagorean theorem has taken acid and dissolved into rainbow-hued water and disappeared laughing down a drain.

The orientation in emotion, must come from emotion.  It is a world in itself with its own logic, and whose mastery is a skill that is quite beyond anything that could be captured and frozen in a book, of any sort.

Calling abortion an issue primarily about a woman’s right to her own body is, it seems to me, to suggest that women CAN and should control the disposal of babies, but not the creation of them.

The moral logic as it exists today, it seems to me, is an artifact of a period before birth control, before legal protection for many women’s rights, and before the viability of women raising children on their own.

It seems a certainty that the overwhelming majority of the some 90,000 black babies–I just happen to know this statistic–aborted every year were not the result of rape or incest.  They were not the result of an abusive, controlling husband who insisted she had to get pregnant.  It seems likely most of them are the result of the heat of passion, and an indifference to pregnancy, which is to say an indifference to the life of a prospective child, combined with easy and cheap access to abortion.

We have been conditioned not to view fetuses as human, but at what cost?  We had a miscarriage with my wife’s first pregnancy, and she was an emotional wreck.  She cried all day after she went in for a D and C, as they call it.  I myself dreamed I met that child once: it was another girl, and she was quite wonderful.

All of the beautiful things in life come from sensitivity, from caring, from connection, from openness and receptivity.  All of the bad things, from closing down, shutting down, detaching, disengaging.

Is it not worth asking an open question as to whether or not babies are such a wonderful possibility that MAYBE, just maybe, their lives should be treated with some measure of kindness and respect? Maybe not by force of law.  Maybe not by banning abortion. But by pointing out that a great evil is being committed, and no one wants to admit it or even talk about it outside of the people who have been in shock since 1973.

Is that insanity to suggest that, that maybe we have been coarsened by all this, rendered less feeling, less open, less beautiful?  Or is it insanity pretending that treating them like meat is perfectly acceptable?  Why NOT eat them?  It is the next logical step, considering that they are not human and that we are supposed to treat all our impulses towards compassion and protection as inherently ideologically flawed.

I think I was at one time notorious in some circles for my debating style.  I call it the scalpel and cudgel approach.  I make factual, logically consistent, relevant arguments, then I hit them on the head with a personal attack.

I have almost entirely given that up, but find myself engaging with someone who just won’t stop, who I am suspecting has a more than superficial interest in the topic, that of 9/11 Truth.  I think he is a paid or volunteer propagandist.  Why, I don’t know.

But I wanted to comment that I think I understand why I developed that strategy.  The Left’s basic approach is to be annoying, to deal in personal attacks, and overall to wear you down such that you do some combination of lose your cool–so they can portray you as irrational and anger-prone–and simply stop engaging.

The only way, emotionally, I ever found to deal with that was to stay in the discussion on the level of reason that mattered, but to trade punch for punch, low blow for low blow, so I did not feel a sense of helpless rage.  I wasn’t helpless.  And I always remained on topic, and always offered rational, fact based arguments, presented as articulately and as simply as I could.

And I will say that this strategy is important for anyone who is going to go 15 rounds with professional agitators, liars, and propagandists.  Donald Trump may lose popularity, he may not be even a remotely good ideas as President, but he will not run out of energy.  He is giving more than he is taking.  That, in my view, is psychologically important.