Month: October 2015

I think this is a good motto for me.

We live in a world where many words have been converted into NewSpeak, such as “homophobia”, “Islamophobia”, “Racism/ist”, and in my view most notable “hate”.

We know the left does not oppose hate per se, because it is uniquely gifted in practicing it, and preaching it, and inflicting it.  It is FOUNDED on it.  Without hate, they have nothing.

I woke up this morning feeling I have never actually hated anyone, myself.  I have always said hate is a lot of work, and it is not repaid, at least for emotionally well people.  If I disagree for one moment–or even express insufficient enthusiasm–for the propaganda de jour–soon to be de jure, if the actual haters get their way–then I am called a hater.  They take the notion of hate, then add the appropriate propagandistic appellation.

Do you think the failure of blacks to thrive is in some measure their own fault?  Then you are a hater and a racist.

Does it make you uncomfortable seeing two flamboyantly gay men adopting a little boy?  Then you are a hater and a homophobe.

Do you take Muslim radicals at their word when they say they want to destroy America?  Then you are a hater and an Islamophobe.

We all know the drill.

The actual point I wanted to make, before I got preachy, is that I think hate is a combination of fear and disgust.  We have six primary colors of emotions, and hate is a mixture of those two.  I don’t know that Ekman has said so–although he may well have–but it would seem to me that hatred and happiness are physiologically incompatible and likely opposites.

You cannot be a genuinely happy Communist, at least a practicing Communist.

I got deep into some childhood stuff last night, really to the heart of my shaking, which has always lacked pictures, and I can tell you that my previous post was a much less unpleasant process than going to my diary and writing.

At root, evil is an avoidance.  It is avoiding dealing with horrible traumas through the mechanism of enacting them.  But it is circular: the trauma makes its presence known, a sadistic act is committed, temporary peace is bought, then it all starts again.  It can never heal, and the farther down this path one goes, the harder it becomes to stop, because the pain is accumulating.

Talking about evil is in some respects for me an avoidance, but it is also I think a necessary process for me to go through, to wrap my brain around what happened to me and why.

Through an intrinsic ability for deep concentration, I was able to hide myself well enough to survive the floods.  Now, it is time to being planting seeds, and watching living things grow.

As should be obvious, I am somewhat sympathetic to New Agey sorts of things.  I believe in chakras and energy meridians, feel there is something to astrology, although I can’t explain it, and of course believe in the survival of death and psychic phenomena of all sorts.

But I cannot accept this simplistic understanding that the world is a kind and wonderful place, or that some sort of miraculous improvement in the human condition will come about by any means other than clear thinking based on very unemotional, clear eyed fact gathering and following effective action.  We cannot just sit on our duffs and expect good things to happen.

I read today that Obama is trying to undermine US sovereignty: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/10/02/obama-administration-and-un-announce-global-police-force-to-fight-extremism-in-u-s/

This is no longer paranoia: there was a press conference. I will note that we ALREADY have the Department of Homeland Security, which to my knowledge, and despite an enormous budget, has not stopped ONE terrorist attack, while simultaneously failing miserably to do its job protecting our borders.

I read the Chinese are killing people and selling their body parts: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3257383/Thousands-religious-prisoners-China-livers-kidneys-corneas-ripped-ALIVE-sell-transplant-tourists-claims-new-film.html

Many of the bodies used in these “human corpses as art” seem to be Falun Gong.  I was talking with a woman on a plane, and at the exhibit she went to they even had fetuses in all stages up to the new born,which she found quite disturbing.  She said all of them looked Asian, and it is my assumption that the Chinese, in tandem with truly horrible human beings, are “harvesting” them as needed and selling them for profit.

And while I am being dark, can I ask: do we even know who the buyers are of baby parts that Planned Parenthood is selling, or what their purposes are?

I will recall this story to your mind: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/05/18/11755862-thai-police-arrest-man-after-babies-bodies-found-roasted-wrapped-in-gold-leaf

I read this shooter in Oregon wanted to be welcomed into Hell: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/oregon-college-shooting/oregon-shooting-umpqua-gunman-chris-harper-mercer-what-we-know-n437351

It is no doubt comforting to be able to ignore evil in the world–and that is the word, used to describe something very very old–but serious, responsible, genuinely spiritual people do not get to do this.  We have to learn both to know about the horrors in the world, and to care about them, but to not let them get to us.  We need to both know and to forget.  We need emotional skill and considerable fortitude.  There is no other way to do it right.

http://www.infowars.com/fbi-far-more-murders-committed-with-knives-than-assault-rifles/

Both abstract ideas and emotions have their own languages.  And I think it is important to understand that the answer to a question which is expressed in emotional language may never satisfy those who want it expressed in abstract language.

Specifically, a sense of meaning is exactly that: a felt sense, an emotional state, and way of being in your body and interacting with the world.  What is the meaning of life?  This.  This is how you do it.  Do you understand?

I am strongly tempted to say that the purpose of all human activity is emotion, either freedom from “negative” emotions or the enjoyment of positive ones.  Our minds are harnessed to that end, when usefully employed, and it seems one of the precise defects of Western culture that we have pursued abstraction as an end in itself; that we have supposed that all “true” philosophical premises must exist in the intellect.

Deconstruction can be seen as a reaction to excessive intellectualism, but it merely substitutes an incoherent intellectualism for a previously coherent, even if unsatisfying, intellectualism.

Universities pay people to at least pretend they are doing something, and sitting around feeling, as useful as it may be in reality, does not lead to words, and the production of words is the task of people in the Humanities.

Most of our wisdom is in the body.  That is where we find truth.  That is where we experience states we cannot talk about, and which cannot thus be thrust into the philosophical realm, but which are nonetheless both real and relevant.