Month: November 2015

As I think about it, none of the characters really ever figured out how to mourn the suicide of their friend.  Tom Berenger was trying, and what was ironic about him is he was on paper the most superficial of the group.

I feel that there are countless ways to avoid mourning the pains of life, and most of what we call culture, today, consists in them.  The magazines, the TV shows, everything on your phone, social media: they exist, and profit from the fact that you don’t want to “go there”.

And this group, which united in their radicalism at the University of Michigan–which I will recall to your awareness, if it was ever there, was the home of Tom Hayden, originator of Students for a Communist Society, the SCS–remains all these years later, after so much life experience, fundamentally superficial, although still searching for deeper feeling.

Yes, they say they love one another, and on some level this is true.  They are open with each other, to the extent they are able to be.  They can be themselves with each other.  But all of them at some point found refuge in intellectualism, and found companionship with those who sought the same comforts in the same way at the same time.

It is not different in principle than friendships founded on a mutual admiration for the Lord of the Rings.  It was founded on escapism.  It is easy to conceal escapism when claiming to care about the tragedies of the world, but if your activism makes them more and not less likely, avoiding them is not the true source of your caring and action.  Caring about the real world is not what truly motivates you.

I am of course a bit cynical.  I have been “betrayed”–I use the word loosely to try not to sound too much like a drama queen–many times.  It seems logically likely that I have often failed to perceive the very real words of genuine companionship and caring that have been offered me over the years, and I am perhaps overanalyzing this movie, which after all was not a great movie.  It had a big effect on me when I first saw it, though, some time in my teens, which is why I chose to watch it again now.

It is deeply comforting to make blanket statements about “the world”, but of course no such thing exists.  There are countless ways to be foolish.  I continue to discover new ways–both in myself and others–daily.

This treatment of techne is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techne

Techne is differentiated from episteme.  Roughly, they differentiate how to do things from “what is true”.  The first is for plebians, the second for the elite.  Plato was concerned with episteme.  His sandal maker with techne.  This is a rough distinction, the further differentiation of which does not interest me.

For my purposes, I would differentiate a telearchy, as I call it, which is an emergent order based upon shared common principles understood as ends, and ontology, which is a fabricated pseudo-reality created and extinguished with words.

In  my view, something is real, but it is in constant motion, making a full knowing impossible, and not worth the pursuit.  What we can know is what we can see, and what we can see are practical results, which would include the observation that having an internal moral compass in general makes people happier, and that living in a group of people with shared moral values also works to make the aggregate happier.

I cite principles, because as Orwell showed and subsequent reality has amply validated, it is quite possible to be a part of a group with mutable values.  What he suggested and what I will echo is that in such a situation, individuation is impossible, and so too is the happiness enabled by moral freedom and following consistent choice.

Practically, and this is the point of this post, episteme continues to be sought,but in the form of machines.  Machines are real.  Human inner consciousness is not.  It is not true to say that no techne with regard to improving the contents of human consciousness is being pursued–Positive Psychology as one obvious example seeks this–but it seems the overall thrust of our global social order has in general given up on the elevation of the human race through moral growth.  Our growth is to be through machines, and in particular through the consideration of society as one large machine, to be manipulated by “experts” using techne, but really feeling episteme, or perhaps, rather, the acute need for and lack of any sense of ontological grounding.

They feel lost, so they must fix the rest of us like butterflies on pins.  That is George Soros’s project, and as he recently revealed, even as good a mind as that of Bill Gates at least claims publicly to believe in this farce of global warming, and that we must be all pinned for our own good.

Pondering this a bit more, what I realize is that the basis of the friendships is a shared memory of shared passion.  They were brought together by Soviet propaganda which enabled them to form a tight emotional bond in what felt like the flames of conflict and principled effort.  Their main focus, politic, provided them with a sense of purpose, of meaning, and victory–unilateral US withdrawal from South Vietnam, enabling a North Vietnamese victory, and following massacres and enslavement of the South.–deprived them of that.

Their shared sense of self was based largely on the comaraderie which shared difficulty, shared apparent danger, shared uncertainty, shared desire, enables.  Such larger selves are always temporary constructs, when the cause itself is temporary. This is why they drifted apart.  The war ended.  They got straight.  The fog of war disappeared.  As William Hurt points out: they never really knew him at all.  They still don’t.  They don’t know each other, really.

What they love is a memory, of a time when everything felt fresh, when they felt alive and well, and open to whatever life brought.  We all need times like this.

But the residue of this era is precisely why sanity is impossible in our media.  Most of the people running our media either lived in that time, or wish they did.  They reference, in the process of ignoring the gaping holes in Obama’s story while intentionally misrepresenting the very talented history of Ben Carson, who actually DID grow up a poor black, this memory of purpose, of meaning, of living for something bigger than a paycheck.

It is very romantic, and then as now, quite morally wrong.  I cannot help but feel that if they had something else to cling to, they might be capable of telling the truth.  I don’t think most of them are bought. I don’t think they need to be bought.  They come up with the bias naturally.

And I don’t think Tom Berenger–who along with the husband whose wife cheated on him I found the most likeable characters in the movie–is going to see his lover ever again. which I suspect he knows, and knew.  I actually excuse this sin.  I do not think perfect monogamy is healthy for everyone, all the time.  I personally would make prostitutes legal everywhere, but in my dream world they would be in Temples consecrating them as holy, as in the ancient world.

One of the reasons so many white Americans got syphilus–which the Americas shared as their part of the Columbian exchange–is that Indians would often share their wives.

Sex is neither moral nor immoral.  It all depends on the context and the emotional maturity of those involved.

I think it’s 50/50 William Hurt imitates Alex in killing himself, likely even the same way, in the same house, with the same woman, probably AFTER he makes a fortune with Kevin Kline.  Absent his cause, and the inability to find a new one, he has nothing to live for.

I think the woman Kevin Kline slept with, if she gets pregnant, does in fact prove a loving, if neurotic, mother, but that her child always feels a sense of lack he or she would not have felt with a caring father in the house.

Jeff Goldblum, of course, continues to be an obnoxious womanizer, writing bad fiction for a time, then doing bad journalism again for the money, incapable of deep connection, unable to love any woman foolish enough to fall for him.

We do all need deep friendship, but one based on a stable foundation of mental wellness, which includes the ability to meet our own needs endogenously, as it were, to be emotionally open, and to be committed to firm and unchanging values.

http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/jeffrey-lord/2015/11/07/carly-carson-donald-and-media

You can call it what you want, but it is quite real and prevents sanity.  I will have more to say in my next post.

One of my most peculiar traits is a profound political conservatism combined with an absolute openness not to the politics of the 1960’s, but to the idealistic sense that the world could be changed for the better.  The hippies put poor Vietnamese in cages, broke their families apart, killed many of them in hunger and disease and outright execution, and reversed the land redistribution that had already been done in the South.  Their open embrace of Communist propaganda, which they framed idealism, made the world a much, much worse place.  To this day they refuse to admit this.

But the idea that society can be made less gray, that authenticity matters, that love is important, that all of us need to feel free to be ourselves, all of that I agree with.

The attractive thing about this set of friends is that they can argue, joke, and vent, and still be forgiven, still be a part of the whole thing.

This is what I want to create.  This is the feeling I want more people to have.  This is a feeling I want to have.  Part of my solitude is my recalcitrance and lack of trust.  In old pictures of me I looked suspicious when I was 3 years old.  Part of it is my uniqueness, or relative uniqueness.  All the people who embrace the same social radicalism I do also embrace the politics.  I can’t do that.  Hippy chicks and me don’t get along.

But part of it is our society.  We are atomized.  We live by clocks and routines, and thus social unnaturalness and dishonesty come easily too.  This can and should be changed.  Again, I am going to do what little I can do.  When I have some success, I will post it.  It seems at this exact moment I need to keep a focus on resolving my inner troubles.

I was feeling very lonely tonight.  I work from my home, and I spend huge amounts of time alone.  Sometimes too much even for me.  And I realized that this is actually progress.  To feel lonely is to accept that you have a need to be with people, which is something I have had a hard time doing consciously.  As I read about developmental trauma, a common feature is an inability either to recognize or consciously support ones emotional needs.  It is much easier to suppress them, and pretend they either don’t exist, or treat them as unwanted nuisances.

Tonight I was thinking I am not OK with being alone all the time, and this in turn implies, paradoxically, the possibility of not being alone.  It is hard to be with people when you have suppressed the need for their company deep in your psyche.

It is amazing how often you can open up new and really interesting vistas by embracing “negative” emotions, letting them in, letting them expand, giving them free reign, and LISTENING to what they have to say.

They have been outside the gate for a long time.  They have been waiting because they are couriers, and they have messages they have to deliver, and they will not leave until their work is done.  This whole process is utterly logical.

is an allowing, and not a doing.

I keep getting moments of happiness and some part of me keeps stamping them out because I can’t justify them. With the right allowing happiness is possible in nearly any circumstance, and with sufficient effort, impossible even in the best circumstances.

Another phrase I will offer, that I developed to help myself, is that positive feelings never need to be justified, and most negative emotions require regular feeding.

I will offer in this regard as well the differentiation made in Kum Nye between emotion and feeling.  Feeling is what is going on in your body.  Emotion is the result of how you think about a situation, and the feelings that flow from that.  A principle task in Kum Nye is decoupling the images and thoughts from the actual feelings.  Our body has prodigious wisdom, and can maintain equinimity in nearly all circumstances, IF ALLOWED TO, which for most of us most of the time it is not allowed to.  We react to our thoughts about the crimes and malfeasances of others, sometimes for a very long time.

I’ll occasionally run into Been There/Done That military types in bars, and getting the straight dope from people who have been there is one of the reasons I dislike and distrust the media so much.  There are oceans of things going on they don’t suspect, or refuse to investigate, much less report.

One interesting thing I learned is that not all U.S. Embassies get Marine guards.  What makes the difference in almost all cases is whether or not they have a CIA station there.  Embassies without CIA activity are guarded by locals, as was seemingly the case in Benghazi.  There was CIA activity in Benghazi, but not in Stevens compound.  The two SEAL’s who were killed, and the people with them who were not killed, were from that activity, which was at a distance of a mile or two.

What he pointed out that was interesting to me is that two members of the Delta Force got commendations for their actions in Benghazi: http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/25/delta-force-commando-awarded-second-highest-milita/#.Vjqs7zQ2xnA.facebook  I had not known this, and it contradicts what I thought I knew, which was that there was no response from Tripoli.

The other thing I mentioned was 9/11.  Here he got defensive, and what I realized as we discussed it is that most member of the military seem to assume that if someone questions 9/11 that they are questioning the military and their loyalty.  That I am lumping patriots quite willing to die for their country with people who are trying to destroy it.  Some do.  Some people spouting these things are incapable of nuance.  But I am not one of those people.

He had participated in Jade Helm, and said it was just a training exercise.  I don’t doubt this.  I don’t think the guys on the ground are thinking they are preparing to invade Texas.  But somebody somewhere IS testing methods for using some element of the military to suppress by force domestic dissent.  You don’t need many conspirators for a conspiracy.  You just need a good cover story.

And the other issue with the military is they have by and large sacrificed immensely.  They know people who have died, their families suffered, they went through traumatic stress that in many cases continues to haunt them, and they worked HARD, much harder than civilians can imagine.  48 hour days are not uncommon while deployed.  Going for many months working 20 hour days 7 days a week is not uncommon.

These people do this for love.  They don’t show it, but most hard core soldiers are very sentimental, and extraordinarily protective of those they love.

To state that 9/11 was an “inside job”, or that people other than Islamists associated with Bin Laden carried out this attack is to question the entire structure and point of the “War on Terror”. It is to moot their sacrifices to an unknown extent, and murky what had been clear waters.  I have realized I have inadvertently committed acts of cruelty on several occasions by sharing my ideas with recently returned soldiers.

When you are being insensitive you are by definition not aware of it.  You are ignorant, and ignorant of your ignorance.  Stupidity feels just the same as wisdom.   It is merely the case that the former is corrected by time and circumstance.

We do have many millions of current and former military and law enforcement who absolutely love this country, and who remain willing to defend it.  Our problem is that the battle that matters most is being fought on the airwaves and on the internet.  We lost the Vietnam War over here.  We won it over there, but it didn’t matter.

If a society has no boundaries, it is not a society.  If judgement is impossible–if you cannot be reasonably sure those around would reach the same conclusion in the same situation–you do not have a society. Groups of people who do not share beliefs do not share a culture.

Within the American system, there is legally no root morality, no root culture, no inherent assumption BUT freedom.  All of our Constitution is concerned with freedom from tyranny.  It was assumed, because in those days it was true, that everyone was quite capable of determining their own moral views, which were normally those associated with religion, and their interpretation of that religion.

America is thus peculiarly vulnerable to an infection of propaganda oriented around “freedom”.  All we can assume to share with other Americans is a concern with our laws–or at least a rhetorical concern for our laws, and their underlying assumption of freedom.

What is missed in all this propaganda is that every “right” asserted potentially removes the right of another.  Men who assert the right to use women’s bathrooms remove the right of women to not fear having a man in the stall next to her, making her uncomfortable.  It may be that self declared transgender “women” feel more comfortable using women’s bathrooms.  It is certainly the case that most actual women prefer them using men’s rooms.

Practically, what has been happening for many years now is that aspiring fascists like George Soros fund groups whose job is it to be perennially offended about some commonsense and historically well rooted feature not just of our society but societies the world over, and then make a lot of noise about it, which is then covered by left wing media.  Large splashes are made of miniscule problems.  Compare, for example, the number of transgenders in Houston with the number of women.  The number can’t be less than 1,000 to one, but the women who don’t want men in their bathrooms can’t count on the funding of the professionally aggrieved.  Common sense loses all too often battles it would have won absent effective brain-washing and media management.

As I’ve said before, who loses, at least potentially, in gay marriages?  In my view, children, adopted children.  We can’t ask the question if gay couples raise equally well balanced children.  It’s not allowed.  Asking what is best for the children is a reasonable question.  Asking if being raised by two men is best is, therefore, also reasonable.

How many of you truly grasp that all this is leading us into a vast array of atomized nothings, who believe nothing, are willing to defend nothing, who have been taught since birth to give ground instantly in every cultural attack?  Who suffer the depression, fears, and anxieties of the weak, and morally malformed?

I-Pods won’t save the pod people.

There are real problems in the world.  The people Obama funded and trained in Syria and Iraq are throwing homosexuals off of roofs.  They are raping women, children, and probably men.  They are torturing people.  Fidel Castro is still jailing–and as needed torturing–dissidents.  Nut-job in North Korea still has nukes.

Most of the world still has a standard of living that is well below the worst of our “poor”.

Most of us are stuck with choosing between a consumer lifestyle and family and some version of leftist activism or at least moral support.  These are our meaning systems, and they both suck.

I continue to have as an ambition putting together an acceptable answer.  I have discovered one way not to do it, but expect more success with my next attempt.

Posted here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/opinion/in-houston-hate-trumped-fairness.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

I don’t of course regularly read the Ragged Lady, but I do think they have on occasion let my comments through.  Still, I’m not going back to check, so I’ll post it here too.

If you have a penis, you go in the Men’s room.  If you have a vagina, you go in the women’s room.  We all know that some men who have penises like penises, but I can live with that.  It is a fact of life.

What is not a fact of life is that men with penises should be able to unilaterally declare they “feel” like going to the bathroom with women.

This is not hate.  You people have so corrupted the English language that it is regrettably no exaggeration to call it Orwellian.  Racism, sexism, hate, X-phobia: none of these things mean anything any more.  They are simply hateful labels placed by hating people on the necks of people they want to club into submission.