Month: May 2016

I think Target has perhaps another week to issue a strong statement and win people back.  I think they have certainly cost themselves an ENORMOUS amount of goodwill, and some of it they won’t get back.

I was thinking that if they ran an ad campaign that netted them a 5% increase in business, that would be a counted a huge success.  What about an ad campaign that COSTS them 5%, 10%, or more, permanently?

Target is a family store.  Moms take their kids there during the day.  They have done an excellent job marketing to this demographic.  We bought many of our baby clothes there, and at least one of our strollers.

But the thought of sick men being ALLOWED by policy into the women’s bathroom is going to trigger every last instinct of protection in most mothers, every last feeling of outrage in many men, and who is going to be happy in large enough groups to counterbalance this?  No one.  Mass layoffs and store closings are the most likely outcome of this poorly considered policy which at best will help .03% of the population, a number which is almost certainly much too high, since the true transgenders have been using the other bathroom for some time anyway.

As many people point out, the only people it really helps and enables, are sexual predators.  Unless they are a coveted demographic–and it’s hard to see how they would buy much, when what they want is in the bathrooms for free–this policy has to be seen as idiotic and anti-moral from every perspective I am able to wiggle my head into, other than that of pompous and unreflective political correctness, which is to say the repetition of the pronouncements, today, of the Commissars; and it is hard to see or say why a profitable business would be listening to  Communists in the first place.

Before posting this, I checked the Target website, and saw nothing.  They are making a HUGE mistake.

As a trauma survivor myself, now that I think about it, if I might be permitted to add my voice to the chorus of whiners: why the FUCK do people abuse this word?  Triggering is a very specific thing, and it is quite real, but it is being USED to mean any word or phrase which annoys anyone in any way.  Worse yet: which MIGHT, in the judgement of people who are offended all day every day, offend someone.

This belittles the real suffering of people who, by and large, NEVER are the ones doing the whining and demonstrating.  It is insulting, inaccurate, and both bullying and hurtful.  

Another movie about solitude. I am actually feeling increasingly well.  I am getting moments of peace.  But I understand McCandless quite well.  I had similar stories when I was his age.  He was running from horror.  From unmediated terror.  From the feelings of small children who are placed in hopeless, helpless situations that completely overwhelm them.  Thinking takes the place of feeling.  Idealism takes the place of living.

He met many kind people, but he could never BE with them.  For people who have undergone great terror at an early age, there is always a place which does not reach out and connect, which CANNOT reach out and connect.  The loss of social identity and place is the defining feature of trauma.  The social sense, instinctual social sense, is displaced by the need for survival.  He thought that somehow if he could survive some great ordeal that the path back home would be opened.  That he would surmount his fundamental isolation, which he felt even with his sister.

For the attentive, it is not so hard to see why people are crazy, why most all of us are crazy.  The question is what to do with this knowledge.

For myself, it is a twofold question.  On the one hand, on an abstract level–the level where I find what peace I find, most of the time–it is how to help humanity.  This is where Tolstoy (and all intellectual “Humanitarians”) lived.  But this is an effort to achieve an end–reconnection–which cannot be achieved in the abstract.  Such people are mad, but appear saintly.  The two are often–likely usually–confused.  Saints are those who speak the right words while wrestling with–and failing to surmount–quite ordinary demons. This is why Lao Tzu counseled us to renounce sainthood.

The more important question is how to bring deep relaxation into these troubled place, how to find genuine peace.  I have learned to sleep at night, but I still often shake.  My journey will continue.

As far as McCandless, I feel he found peace in the end.  I agree with his sister, that he did what he felt he had to.  Where does one turn for genuine wisdom in this world?

For a start, I personally look to the work of Peter Levine, and Lawrence Heller and Aline LaPierre.

Most of modern literature: fucking useless.

Actually,  I would add Kum Nye.  It is a great practice. I cannot speak to why it has not been better propagated, why it languishes in obscurity compared to inferior practices we can find prominently displayed in every bookstore.

I finally finished the 127 hours of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this week, and started William Jame’s “Varieties of Religious Experience”.  I have a major intellectual crush on James.  The clarity of his thought and exposition, the honesty and rigor of his approach, and his genuine humaneness and concern for the humanity of his subject, are all thoroughly entrancing for me.

To the point here, he quoted a Frenchman–Bernaud, I believe was his name–as saying “Good humor is that philosophical stance which seems to say to Nature that we take it no more seriously than it takes us.”

It is amazing how fast moods and emotions pass once they are entered into honestly. It FEELS like emotion has a logic and a terminus, that certain states are bound to last, that the next states can reliably be inferred, and that we “know where this is going”.  We know nothing of the sort.  Great exultations can come immediately out of great melancholies, and LAST.  For a time, at least.  Then we–I–can laugh at the foolishness of the whole thing. Storms, however intense, blow over.

Emotions do clearly have a logic, which is tied to thought–which can both amplify and diminish them–but one must always grasp that the logic can only be appreciated AFTER a change which was completely unexpected.  A leads to B, and B leads to F, which leads to 7, after which Hummus and the color orange.

The constant is a patient connection to them.  If we live in a “sea of mood and emotion” as some song puts it, the task is to learn to swim. I believe I have said this before.  Now I have said it again.  I forget myself.

I don’t know why I live in these places, at times.  It is so odd, so different.   But it is my path.  I have no idea where it is going, and this is OK.

From what is righteous anger a release, an escape?  From the peril of confusion, from living with dread and fear, from what is deepest and most true in us. We have all failed.  We have all “fallen short of the glory of God”, which is to say, we have all lied to that Spirit within us which speaks, which consists entirely in, truth.

This applies to everyone.  It is inevitable, in this world.  It is the nature of this world, which teaches not perfection, but return.

I have taken to granting my demons space on Sundays.  Demons are merely angels we fear. They speak what we dare not, express what we dare, exist how we dare not.  And from this I do not infer the obvious and imbecilic, that “freedom” consists in doing what we will, regardless of consequence.

No: the hatred and horror are already there.  Truth is in seeing them, recognizing the roles they play in our journey to something larger, and genuinely peaceful.  What final use can there be in self deception?

It is equally true that being shattered and broken has its time and place.  One must have the tools to pick up the pieces to build something new and more beautiful and useful.  Until that time, it is merely the pain of an abused dog, which cannot understand the rules which might have kept it safe.

All of us “exist” in many times and places.  Seeing what was that still is, in itself is a liberation of sorts.

If we posit of God benevolence and a desire for human peace and goodwill, both Islam and Leftism have to be viewed as partial atheisms.  Practically, so too do Christianity, Judaism, and most other theistic religions.

My reasoning is simple.  Let us take as paradigmatic of the simultaneous rejection of God and moralities based upon either God’s commands, or conceptions of the good based upon conceptions of God, the famous phrase “If God is dead, then all is permitted”, which Dostoevsky seemingly had Dmitri Karamozov say in its purest form.

Islam says “if this person is not a Muslim, then all is permitted”.  Leftists say “if this person has not conformed to our intolerant tribe, then all is permitted.”

The first case is obvious enough.  Beginning with the example of Muhammad himself, permitted acts include murder, rape, sexual and other slavery, conquest, theft, desecration of the temples of other faiths, and pedophilia.  Literally every major sin which any religion has come up with is explicitly permitted.

In the second case, and particularly in the modern world, these sins, too, are all permitted, but they are first put through a disguise of necessity, a disguise of “rescue” or benefice, or hidden entirely.  The Left, as one example, has NOTHING to say about the pervasive use of rape and sexual slavery by ISIS, but somehow finds it useful and relevant to boycott States which have passed laws reiterating long standing and common sense standards, ones which prohibit men who look like men from indulging a variety of perversions by using the women’s rooms.  In North Caroline, the main person who opposed the law was and is a registered sex offender.  Nobody on the Left wants to know this.

In the 20th Century, and TODAY–in China, North Korea, Cuba and other Leftist hell-holes–murder is permitted.  Rape is permitted.  Slavery is the lot of most, whether it is called that or not.  Empire is a goal, one which China achieved in its invasion and on-going violent suppression of Tibet.  North Korea failed in its invasion of the South, but was only stopped by military means.  Cuba, of course, tried to foment insurrections, and started many bloody and useless civil wars until the Russians stopped sending checks.  Countries like Angola are still paying the price for their mercenary and utterly amoral actions.

Theft, of course, is the NATURE of Leftism, as is the suppression of alternative views, religious faith, and all idols but that of the Great Leader, and the violent sadistic joke of his regime.

Pedophilia, who knows?  One reads about Soviet camps where many forms of abuse were seemingly endemic, but only Islam lists a founder who found it acceptable to marry a 5 year old, who he first fucked when she was still playing with dolls.

We live in aN Alice in Wonderland world, where the most basic conceptions of decency have become entirely dependent, for a great many people, upon their POPULARITY.  If they have not seen something condemned, they are incapable of a visceral reaction.  It is a matter of apparent empirical fact that one feature of the Left is that it has lost its capacity for disgust.  Conversely, if they do see something condemned, they react with all the reflective thoughtfulness of dogs salivating for a steak.  It does not matter if the propaganda target is innocent or guilty: they are guilty because they have been accused.

Thus: partial Atheism.  Leftists, of course, reject God in the main to begin with, but their own self conception rests upon a sort of piety, itself dependent upon the idea that they wish humanity in the main well, that they have visions for a “better tomorrow”, and that compassion is their most important virtue. These are of course all lies, and blatant lies when we see people engaging in acts of violence in the ostensible name of compassion, as we did a day or two ago in Germany.  Perhaps I should call it conditional amoralism.

The psychological root, of course, is sadism, the suppression of personal and other identity in group violence.  I am here speaking mainly of the cognitive aspect of the whole thing.