Month: May 2016

Here is an essay which seeks depth without even a rudimentary attempt at empathy: http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

It seeks to find the consoling harmony of pattern in something which the author is plainly at a loss to understand.  I get the sense that this started as a letter to the beloved uncle in the Screwtape Letters, trying to fathom just why the days propaganda was somehow found unacceptable, as if lies were somehow objectionable, as if embracing national decline were somehow something to be rejected.

And it occurred to me that it very much feels like we are at war, because we are.  A well organized army of cultural subversives works each and every day to indoctrinate our students, to pollute our media, to confuse our political leaders.  Their goal is to undermine every shred of historical connection to our past identity, to past mores, to common sense ways of doing things, to fondness for what our ancestors did, to the capacity for the exercise of principle based reason.

The emotional basis of so-called Progressivism–what I tend to call Regressivism, as it is the more accurate term–is that we must change daily whatever was.  We do not need to do it intelligently, or collectively–and in fact it is better if the government forces it on us.  The daily goal is something other than what is, and what was.  The daily goal is to cease being who you were, and to mutate into something else on command.  Your very essence is to become mutable.  You must be whatever the Party or Cause, or Moment needs you to be.

Such a creed, such a practice, eliminates the possibility of a stable sense of self.

And the more I think about it, the most important virtue which Cultural Sadeism undermines is loyalty.  When I say loyalty, do not the words “old fashioned” come to mind,. as in “old fashioned virtues”?  You stick to you and yours, come thick or thin.  You adhere to your tribe, to your people.

And why is this virtue old fashioned?  Because it is NOT mutable.  Because it cannot be made to change on a dime, the way pseudo-virtues like compassion and tolerance–both very trendy–can.

But here is the thing: loyalty is absolutely essential for us as social beings.  We need to know somebody has our back, come what may, no matter what.  If we don’t, we languish.  We feel alienated, alone, uncertain, abandoned.  So what Leftist propaganda does is eliminate personal relationships–more correctly, it makes them contingent on circumstance and whim–and ask people to place their faith in a system of belief and practice which cannot feel anything for them because it is monolithic, regimented, and bureaucratic.

People love Bernie Sanders because for the first time in a long time, they feel like he cares about them.  But their nominee will be Hillary, because that is what the mass of unaccountable people we call the System wants.  Their loyalty is to a system that doesn’t give a shit if they live or die.  This is what systems do, of course, which is why personal loyalty is so important.

We have literally reached a point–in fact, we reached it some time ago–where Americans in large masses are simultaneously ignorant of their own history and that of the world, and have been conditioned to view with contempt all the very real, historically unique innovations of our forefathers.  They loathe themselves, and loathe all the rest of us who refuse to join them.

Persons of common sense, common decency, and possessed of a sense of responsibility are bewildered where all this self contempt comes from.  They read history, and understand that we are historically unique, that much of the world has ALWAYS looked up at us, and that even if like all other nations we have committed crimes, that our crimes pale in comparison to those committed everywhere else in the world and in history, and that virtually all criticisms of our nation stem directly from Soviet propaganda, which is to say from intentional misrepresentations, distortions, lies, and malice.

This is where Donald Trump comes in.  In a war you need a wartime leader, and in a war, the tendency to aggregate power is strong.  After all, there is existential risk.  It is never certain the nation will endure, and if it does, it is because of a collective effort.  This is hard-wired in all of us.

Thus, to make a long story long, the Left has itself to blame for Donald Trump.  If they want to wage a long term war against humanity, sooner or later the remaining humans are going to declare war back, and it will not be pretty.  People like me enjoy it when he speaks obvious truths in the face of congenital and habitual liars.  We enjoy the prospect of someone taking seriously not just the invasion of the United States by Mexicans–who are fleeing the wreckage of the nation they destroyed–but the concept of the nation state itself.  Someone who says: we are Americans, and that is something to be proud of.  America is worth defending.  Obama has been saying the opposite for 8 long years now; he has been waging war on our past, and us by proxy, for both terms.  Sooner or later, somebody has to tell the sons of bitches to stop, and that is why Donald Trump will be our next President.

He is no saint, but I don’t think he is the pick of the elite, and he has always seemed to me to have working class sensibilities, regardless of his actual past.  We need people who want to build.  We have had far too much of those who want to tear down, and call the rubble progress.

People are interesting.  Life is interesting.

I was confronted with a problem yesterday, and surprised myself in approaching it with interest, with curiosity.  If what I fear may materialize actually does, it will be a shitload of work for me.  But there is a beauty in not giving a fuck.  I touched that beauty, and appreciated it.

I felt this thing.  It was a confusion, and a turning, and caused me to view the world in a strange way.  And THEN, I felt like having a drink.

And it hit me that for all addicts this is likely the process.  The feeling hits, and so fast they can’t see it happen they say: I need drink, or a hit, or a fuck, or whatever their thing is.  Nobody craves being high, I don’t think.   They simply know from long experience that the anticipation of it, and the experience of it, is sufficient to silence whatever that initial, infinitesimally small, micro-feeling was, which of course is the root of the whole thing.  That is where it starts.  I felt this clearly tonight.  I certainly have within my consciousness the Buddhist notion of causal chains.

And yesterday, driving to a job site, I also felt an odd feeling.  It was fear, but it was wandering, uncertain, primal, primary.  It was a child seeking a breast.  It was a tentacle seeking something to grab.

And then some worry popped in my head, and the whole feeling vanished and was replaced by the thought.  And it hit me that thoughts, when they are not relevant, not needed for the task at hand, are really the crystalizations of sensory impressions which seek resolution.  These feelings don’t want to wander: they want to land, and the way they land is in a thought.

I felt all this.  I saw all this.  And it was instantly obvious to me that the people who meditate trying not to think, to let thoughts be, or to drive them from their minds, are existing at a level a layer or two abstracted from true reality, which is in the body.  If you want to stop thinking, then calm  the body, calm the sensations.  They are all children: let them rest, let them sleep.  And when they sleep, you know peace.

Do less and do more.  This has always been true, but I am seeing it with my own eyes, feeling it with my own heart.

Bill Clinton appears to be a serial woman abuser, a rapist, and a sex addict.  Based on his apparently close relationship with Mark Epstein, who liked underage girls, he is likely a pedophile, of the 13-14 year old sort, again not something uncommon among addicts.

Here is the thing: there is room for disagreement among people of good will about what is true and false.  But where the Clintons are concerned, there really isn’t.  Bill is an abuser of women, and Hillary is an accomplice, and not uncommonly his enforcer.  She abuses the women Bill has abused.  They are awful human beings, even if Bill–like many sociopaths I have known–has a talent for seeming likeable.  He has a goofy smile, a seemingly affable manner, courtesy, charm: all can be perfectly consistent with being a sick human being.  And nobody disagree that he is very, very smart in a formal analytical sense.

When one contemplates the erasure of his and her past, which has been executed with such diligence by a leftist press which in another circumstance would have these stories on the front page 24/7 until the ideological non-compliant was driven from the public sphere, one is FORCED to admit once again that the Left believes NOTHING.  All crimes are justified by the rhetoric used to defend them.  If it is “for the people”, “for the future”, “to oppose the evil Republicans”, then no crime is too far.  And if it is committed by the other side, no crime, and no lie to make it seem worse, is too small.

This is not ethical principled behavior, to state the blindingly obvious.  Jeff Bezos–whose Amazon I am going to boycott for his patent political advocacy in the Washington Post–seems to think he is doing some sort of good, but no one at any level, with regard to any topic, can claim to value the good who does not habitually treat lies as lies, and truth as truth.  Bezos fails on both scores, badly, and nearly daily.

How can it be that the Left says we are to “believe the woman”, but fails to listen to a score or more of Clinton women?   Granted, evidence has to be weighed in the balance, but the preponderance of evidence–not least the admission of receiving blow jobs in the Oval office and lying about it–implicates both Bill and Hillary in a web of deceit and wrong-doing which is frankly disgusting, and contrary to every genuine spirit of Liberalism.

Here is what popped in my head: Capitalism, so called, is the best system ever devised by the mind of man for directing aggressive energies in creative, productive, and PEACEFUL directions. Can and should we criticize the IMF for allowing the figurative rape of nations? Yes. It was created by Communists and does little but help keep the fiction alive that our banking system is just and acceptable, when it is plainly neither.

But the historical alternative is not peace and justice. Capitalism, so called, is not an historically aberrant intrusion into an unbroken history of peaceful and cooperative coexistence.  It is s vastly less bad alternative to breaking down people’s doors and taking what they have built by force. On the one side of it we have conquest and rapine as universal facts. On the other, we have Socialism as a state sponsored version of the same theft and rapine. It simply adds hypocrisy and self deception to the list of crimes.

I would quibble with many things Ayn Rand said, but her defense of Capitalism as a uniquely advantageous form of peaceful and productive coexistence, without the diminution of life energy, is right on the money.

I find it amusing.  Most people do, including I suspect many black people.  It’s just funny.

Blazing Saddles came out in 1974.  In that period, 42 years ago, it was quite reasonable for most people to assume that the fortunes of black people in this country were on the rise.  Mel Brooks was saying, in his frequent use of the N- word “look, I can’t stop ignorant people from saying that, but between you and me we know they are stupid and ignorant and ridiculous.  Me, as a Jew, I know a little something about bigotry.”

Nobody who was an actual racist would find that movie funny.  EVEN THEN most white people knew genuine racism was reactionary, ridiculous, unnecessary, unfair, and wrong.  Not all, of course.  From what I hear racism in most big cities, particularly Union cities like Chicago and New York, is still alive and well. 

But most people in this country are happy to give everyone a chance. They were then, and are now.

But 42 years, and all that has changed is that movie could not be made today.  It would be attended by protests, with fury, with outrage.  And for what?  That movie did not cost anyone their life, and has generated millions of laughs.

What has happened–ALL that has happened–is that fascist speech police have gradually made it more and more difficult to talk about the lack of black thriving, to talk about the real problems besetting black communities. 

If people had been allowed to sort out their differences gradually, in person, at their own pace, the pervasive decency of the American people over time would have eradicated the functional lines between blacks and whites.  We would not have black ghettos.  Most of them would be middle class, would value education, and would not feel helpless and angry.

What intercepted and prevented this natural organic growth was the Democrats, who developed a codependent, enabling relationship with the black community, by promising them the moon and the stars, by making promises they knew they could never keep, and which would have been damaging even if they could keep them, because you never help anyone permanently by doing for them what they can and should be doing for themselves (as William Boettker put it around 100 years ago).

So today, the outrage when one sees that bigoted old woman say “Up yours, Nigger” can be seen for what it is: useless. It helps no one.  No black child missing his father gets to see him more.  No jobs are created for people who barely graduated high school.  No crime is prevented.  It is all for show.

Mel Brooks was and is a genuine humanitarian, who works to improve the world through comedy.  None of the PC fascists are anything but unreflective and unhelpful haters.

As I have said repeatedly, Cesar Chavez hated illegal aliens. 

The perceptual flaw of all bigots–and I have in mind here the habitually aggrieved, and not Chavez, who I think we can all agree did not hate Mexicans–is that they think all people of any given group think alike, and that they are homogeneous: functionally, that they are fucking stupid, and that only through the intervention of “educated” leftists can their own actual self interest be made plain to them; or in traditional bigotry, that they deserve to be treated in the same way, regardless of personal difference.  In terms of the willed ignorance implied in both cases, they are functionally identical.

But think about it like a human being.  You may need to temporarily slough off some of your counter-intelligent indoctrination.  If you are standing in a line, and you watch somebody walk to the front and cut in, what is your emotional reaction?  If you are on the highway, and it merges, and one of those fucking Mercedes–it always seems to be a higher end car, with some rich prick in it–comes along and merges at the last second, again cutting in line.

It pisses you off, doesn’t it?

Pretty much everybody that is here legally can expect over some time frame to get the rest of their family here.  That tends to be how our system works.  But if we legalize millions of people who have simply slipped across the border, the whole line system goes to hell in a handbag.  It gets screwed up.  Who knows how long, now, it will take to get your grandfather or niece over here legally?  Do you want to trust them to coyotes, who may get them killed or arrested?

Donald Trump is not saying, and has never said “No Mexicans”.  All he has said is wait your turn, and if you have jumped in line, you go to the back, like any normal person would expect. It is fair.

But “fair”, of course, is not a word Leftists use except as a club, one invariably wielded with the intent to terminate with extreme hypocrisy.

I would add that the most racist thing I can say honestly is that it continues to amaze me that blacks are too fucking stupid to figure out, even now, the game being played on them.

This would be a double loss.  First, they would lose their friend, hate, and their very simple, very clear, very black and white world will dissolve into a million unfamiliar colors.  Second, they will lose their self image as righteous, as superhuman fighters for all that is good in this world.  They will fall into the profoundly de-energizing state of having to admit they are like everyone else, that they make mistakes, that they use their weaknesses to spur them into emotional crusades that distract them without healing or even strengthening them.  They will be forced to admit they are JUST LIKE US.

And they are, of course.  They are just much more fucked up, much angrier, and much farther into self delusion than most people are willing to go absent gross individual psychopathology.  Social psychopathology can manifest in many people, and remain relatively hidden.  That is what we have today, and it is fed, of course, by many individual psychopaths, and the magical boxes in all homes.

The same might be said of Social Justice Warriors (I need to think of a better term, but that for another day), who are both themselves without humor and that levity which makes life among people bearable, but also extremely concerned that everyone everywhere be on guard continuously, lest they fall short of the glory of Marx, who offers no redemption at all.

The feeling is one of continuous strain, of effort simply at existing.  There is no relaxation: only eternal vigilance.

And what is interesting about all this, one thing any way, is that by and large both the crimes and the victims are abstract.  If I call a gay man a “fag”–if I’m not friends with him and we both think it is funny–then something has happened between us which might be considered rude, which might warrant an apology, and/or a permanent sense on his part that I am an asshole, of the sort you don’t fuck.

But if I speak of “fags” in a group of heterosexuals, no one there can be considered the recipient of the insult.  No one there has a legitimate claim to grievance.  But this is precisely what most PC consists in: not an effort to improve manners, but to subject speech to rigid codes.  The crime is not that I have offended someone, nor even that I COULD have offended someone. The crime is WrongSpeak.  If Orwell didn’t coin that term–and I don’t think he did–then I just did.  Anti-Free Speech Nazis–I do like that better than SJW, although development will continue–feel free to appropriate it with your bullhorns, bullwhips, jackbooks, and torches.

Thus the crimes involved have all the concreteness, all the reality, of the sins of the Bible, of unbelief in a God I have never seen or spoken to.  The people punishing the crimes are quite real, but the crimes themselves rarely are.

And in point of fact, true reconciliation, which is what genuine Liberals want, is achieved person to person, not across a moat of reflective hate, reactive anger and defensiveness, and shouting.  Above all shouting.

Look at yourself.  Feel your body.  Is there a place in you which can say “Fuck it, just let people do whatever they want to do.”?  If not, you are likely what you hate, whatever that may be.