Month: May 2016

Since I insulted Zuckerberg personally–he deserves it–it will be interesting to see if this post remains.  It was in response to someone calling me a big poopy head for insisting that people with beards not use the women’s room at Target, and that I should boycott Facebook since Mark Zuckerberg also supports the rights of the TQIPOTAQE.

I don’t plan to use the restrooms at Facebook, nor do any of my children. I do use Facebook as a means of political education and propagation, and as such it has been and remains quite useful. That Mark Zuckerberg’s ethical system consists in platitudes, cliches, slavish conformity to anti-rational zealotry, and a healthy dose of anti-empirical atheism, is not my problem. 

I do not boycott Hollywood because most of them are lunatics.  Unreason is in the air and water. It cannot be avoided. 

Your argument is a non sequitur. Combined with your ad hominem, your non-argument is par for the course for the Left. The reason those terms are in Latin is because they were recognized as the last recourse of exhausted minds well before Christ was born. Your form of public ignorance is very old, because it is very easy. Vanity is easy to feel, easy to express. Heartfelt and serious engagement with important topics is work. It feels like work, and most people are lazy. You are lazy, as you show here. 

The point is made that ONLY the rights of .03% of our population matter. Why would this be so? Why would not the rights of mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, not to watch men dressed as men follow their daughters and granddaughters into the womens room matter? You live in a propaganda world, one where only those rights matter which have been stipulated that day by the media elite you worship without reflection, without knowing. If they decided the rights of mothers mattered tomorrow, you would agitate in that direction, because without knowing it, you believe nothing. I believe that everyone has a right to stake their claims, but that not everyone has the right to, or CAN, have them met to their equal satisfaction. 

What we are seeing are claims to power, and power mongering is something we should all fear and oppose.

As I think about it, this election can be framed very simply: will we, or will we not, ratify the de facto invasion of our country by economic refugees who bring with them the same habits of mind which ruined the countries they are fleeing? If we vote for Hillary–and both not voting for Trump, AND voting for anyone else counts as a vote for Hillary–we will get the legalization of the illegals over some time period, and a continuation and likely expansion of the invasion. Kerry has already started the globalist cry for a border-free world. If we vote for Trump, we have every reason to believe that this invasion will be curbed, and eventually stopped. 

This really is an election about the future of America. Trump is getting nominated for the very simple reason that most Americans have done this math, and come out with him as the only credible answer. In my own view, if we don’t contain this invasion NOTHING else matters. Whatever your pet issue is, you can forget about it, because the people who win will be those who promise the most free stuff to people who speak English–if they speak it at all–as a second language.

And to be clear, I have nothing against people who speak other languages.  I have studied many of them.  What I object to is the cultural importation of certain expectations that have ruined most of Latin America.  Mexicans have a country: it is called Mexico.  They are trying to escape what they created, much as the Venezuelans would, if we shared a border with them.  We do not need to endorse and support stupidity.  America is a globally dominant power because as a people we have hewed to certain principles, including hard work, honesty, patriotism, and self sacrifice.  Those nations which have failed, have failed because they held in superior esteem values like tribalism, the abuse of power, and a superior regard for the well being of their immediate family and friends than the society as a whole.

Much of the world considers work, particularly manual work, to be something which superior people do not undertake.  America considers work the essence of virtue.  This is why we succeed.

The human mind is designed to deal with either/or’s, with duality.  Clean/unclean; safe/unsafe; move/stay put.

It occurs to me that what we call evil is actually best understood as a natural energy taken too far.  Evil is a healthy expression of self, of individuality, taken to the point where it is unhealthy.  It can be very useful to be cruel to oneself at times, but almost never to others.  But not never.  Physical Therapists, and drill instructors have to be mean to get people past their self imposed and inaccurate limitations.

But if we are all cows, doing emotional grazing, there is a circle within which the grass is green and healthy and nourishing.  Only if we stray beyond that circle does it involve us in manias, drain us of happiness and emotional wealth, and cause us to want more the more we eat.

I really feel that for my own purposes it will be most useful to consider any form of religion which conceives of God as judging, feeling anger, and punishing as one inspired by Moloch.

This is most religions. 

Whatever worships beauty, love, light, and laughter, that is true.  Outer forms matter no more in religion than they do in other social conventions.

This of course is not original.  But what is new, is that I mean it, for me.

To what extent is speaking a form of dissociation, where abstraction is involved?

Does the same impulse which once cast children into fires now work to create artificial intelligence?

Whatever we are as a civilization, it is clearly not sane.

One of the things Trump has brought into sharp contrast is that many people of many different specific views have been hiding in one of two camps, and assuming that everyone around them shared roughly the same world view.  This has been shown to be completely wrong.  There are many sorts of Democrats, and many sorts of Republicans.

For my part, I wonder what any Republican could possibly claim to stand for who thinks voting for Hillary will help anything.  I at one time threatened to vote for Hillary if John Kasich got the nomination.  But that threat was made based on the condition that Trump got the most votes, and got outmaneuvered at the convention.  Now that the Republican base has spoken, and it HAS spoken, what refuge could there possibly be in someone who wants to ban guns, who lies nearly as often as she speaks, who views the American people with contempt, and who is likely suffering from a debilitating illness?  The Supreme Court?  We KNOW what Hillary will do.  How could that possibly be better for anyone over any time horizon than Trump, who is a moderate in all respects?

I am realizing that the main reason Republicans cannot stand up to Obama effectively, cannot withstand even mild propaganda attacks, is that they AGREE with much of what is being said.  That being so, who becomes principled standing alongside them?  In what respect is Never Trump something other than an effort to vindicate the broken status quo?  All these Never Trump people would have been FINE with John Kasich or Jeb Bush, who in their own ways are vastly less principled, vastly less concerned with American exceptionalism and well being than Trump.

No: we are dealing with mass idiocy.  It has taken this odd and unexpected, but welcome, development to make this obvious.

I would start running ads with persons of color. I would enlist black supporters to talk in paid ads about how and why they support Trump, about how and why they feel abandoned and let down by Democrats.

I would enlist legal Mexican immigrants to talk about why the people coming here illegally make them mad.  I would reference and quote Cesar Chavez on the same topic.

I would keep the faces of persons of color in my ads for several months.  Trump is not a racist.  This term is used by both conservatives and leftists for the same reason: demonizing his moderation and common sense.  His most important task is skewering the inaccurate perception that his nomination represents something other than fury at the abandonment of genuine love of the American people by both parties.

In my view, this work would pay huge dividends.  Hitting Hillary is going to be easy.  That is not the task.  The task is showing how the Democrats have been lying to people for half a century, using them, abusing them, and throwing them out.  Why are so many Mexicans being brought in?  Because the Democrats are increasingly feeling they don’t even need blacks any more.

Sitting atop a ladder today thinking, as I do, I was pondering about the transition from being monkeys to being humans.  As I have said on numerous occasions, I very simply do not believe Darwinian accounts of speciation through natural selection can possibly be true.  At the same time, I see no compelling reason, whatever our actual ancestry, and whatever the actual mechanism, to discount the obvious fact that we are animals, that we have animal parts, animal instincts, and that it is in fact useful to compare ourselves to animals.  It has the potential to be useful as what I call a Tubaform.

We know, or seem to know, now, that we have multiple nervous systems, effectively.  I got to comparing and contrasting my foggy recall of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which I read many years ago, in what was never quite a Freudian phase–I have always been partial to Jung–but one in which I took his work seriously.

And I got to thinking about his concept of Sublimation.  I continue to believe that the fascinating thing about Freud is that he was always right on the verge of something true, but never quite got there.  Part of the problem was that he lacked our current knowledge.  Part of the problem is that he was never able to return to his quite accurate child molestation thesis of hysteria, for reasons of vanity, cowardice, and careerism.

What if we call Sublimation “contingent dissociation”?  From a materialistic perspective, from that of assuming that our bodies “speak”, that all of us are affected in primal and often obscure ways by our genetic heritage, personal experience, and animal responses, this makes perfect sense.

What if we also follow William James and take religious experience at face value, and posit that non-animalistic experiences are also possible, that a sense of the transcendent is not a lie, but an important insight into higher truth?

There is something very useful here.  I was thinking about what is needed to herd people into a city.  It is contrary to our natural instincts, in my view.  Everyone in a city has to suppress–dissociate from–primal impulses.  But these impulses do not go away.  We retain the urge to hunt and kill.  We feel anxiety when we are confined.

And I think of Carthage and Moloch, and the sacrifice of children, thrown into enormous fires.  You have huge, highly organized civil orders, and that in the middle of it all.  The Aztecs were the same.  The Romans often practiced sacrifice, and occasionally even human sacrifice, although mostly it was animals.

And I think most human societies have been based on what I would call animal orders, ones which were able to impose discipline by channeling and controlling animal urges.  Those who were what I might call the “Keepers of the Hate” were the priests, and were exalted because of the vital importance of their “work”.

I was thinking, too, that perhaps the most energetic exponents of “Goodness”–like me–are those simultaneously most afflicted with unprocessed anger, hurt, shame, and violence.  One can certainly make this case with regard to Christianity, if one studies the ACTUAL history.  The genius of Islam, of course, is that it channels those energies outward, into aggressive warfare.  Once the wars stopped, decadence quickly set in.

Id, Ego and Superego are all animalistic constructs.  There is a fundamental pessimism in Freud, made necessary by his atheism.  But what if we posit on the one hand, biology, and on the other spirit, and what makes sense of it all, what directs our attention and thus our actions, our self?

I have been watching “Sin City” over the past couple days, and just finished it, and it is triggering me in interesting and productive ways. It is helping me make contact with my own aggressive energies, and without owning and recognizing those energies, peace is impossible.

I have not reached the point I want to make.  Processing will continue.  I do think a bridge needs to be built between materialistic science and Spirit.  New Age people need to own their rage, and so too do the scientist who want to tear us–themselves–down to nothing but machines.

Progress remains possible.  We simply have to figure out how to survive long enough to allow it to happen.

We live in a supposed “information age”.  But we cannot reliably assume that facts which should be in the public domain ARE in fact in the public domain.  We in fact live in an age where propaganda has never been easier, where covering up inconvenient truths under both an avalanche of irrelevancies and outright suppression of speech is child’s play.  You can never assume that among the myriads of facts you are presented with daily are contained those which are most relevant.  In point of fact, I would bet against it.

I am banned from most sites.  I just had a long series of comments removed–all of which had previously been approved by the censors–after I posted this:

Segregation also worked fine in the South. Why did we stop? It’s almost like respecting the right of people to be different is important. Of course, that would be crazy talk, wouldn’t it? Segregation, as we all know, was wrong because we were TOLD it was wrong. How else can anyone decide anything of a moral nature?

Other than individual conscience, I mean, which is not something one sees on the Left. You are literally incapable of grasping the concept of difference of conscience. You are so wedded to the idea of forcing your ideas on others BECAUSE YOU FEEL YOU ARE RIGHT that you cannot see the abuse of power it is enabling, and has already often enabled.

My point, lost on the censor, as indeed most subtle points will ALWAYS be lost on censors, which is why free nations do not have them, and why the 1st Amendment is the 1st Amendment, was that many things have been legal over the ages.  Many criminal practices have been enshrined in law.

The conversation was over the right of the State to force bakeries into bankruptcy, or bakers into jail, for refusing to bake cakes for homosexuals who are very intentionally attempting to distress, anger, and exercise emotional violence against them.  The argument made is that “gays are a protected group”.  Well the Klan was at one time a protected group.  Did that make abusing the law in their favor right then?  Of course not.  It was odious in the Jim Crow/Dixiecrat South, and it is odious now.

As importantly, the Left–and seemingly increasingly large numbers of alleged conservatives–seems to only care about things when it is TOLD to care about things.  Rape is a major problem when it is in the news, and not when they have moved on to something else.  Me, I move much slower.  If something is wrong now, then it is wrong in the future, and was wrong in the past.  You cannot say it is a horrible, major, must fix thing that rapes happen on college campuses, and simultaneously ignore the mass practice of sexual slavery–which includes the buying and selling of women and girls, certainly, but likely also boys and young men–in the Middle East. Or, as I say often, the acceptance of violence of all sorts, including sexual violence and gang rape, conducted with legal impunity against the Dalits of India.

If you only think something is wrong when someone tells you it is wrong, you have no conscience. You are not a morally sovereign individual.  You have become, already, a subject of Oceania.  That you have no good excuse, that many options were still available, makes you all the more contemptible.