Month: July 2016

Here is the thing: notions of collective guilt–and superiority–are inherently bigoted, and bigotry is the overarching rubric under which racism specifically falls.

ANY narrative which starts EITHER “white people are. . .”, OR “black people are. .  .” should be objectionable to anyone concerned with avoiding bigotry.

Self evidently, the entirety of leftist propaganda and practice DEPENDS on bigotry, on prejudice, on anger and hatred visited on groups rather than individuals, but this fact is unclear to most of them.  They are mentally ill.  The land they live in can only be occupied by the sick and demented.

It is a land very much like that of the Inquisition, in which the only way you can be acquitted of guilt is to admit it, and ask to be punished.

To be clear, I reject bigotry, and I am painting “the Left” with a broad brush, but the thing about ideology and ideologues is they choose what they believe.  They choose to join the group.  It is not inappropriate to make general statements about members of the KKK.  And it is not inappropriate to make general statements about the lunatics who keep telling us they want to save us, who can’t balance their checkbooks or do a single honest days work.

 

I can sometimes be heard talking in my sleep saying “Don’t wake me.  Don’t wake me.”

I have long enjoyed sky-watching.  I like sunrises, sunsets, great cloud formations, the moon in all its phases, and the way winds waft across the landscape and enrich the experience.

Looking at the sunrise this morning, I was struck by the beauty of some shadow patterns in the clouds, the shadow of one cloud on another.

And it struck me that the only possible variation in darkness requires the presence of light.  Pure darkness is pure formlessness.  Any form requires a contrast.

In the Harry Potter books, Voldemort feels the need to observe the outer form of a duel when he attacks Dumbledore in the 5th book.  And I have long seen how evil needs the contrast with goodness, with culture, to support itself.  The Devil, we are told, is an impeccable gentleman.

Darkness, then, is the movement away from form, and Light the movement towards it.  But in our world we need both.  As Lao Tzu said, light requires heavy and up requires down.

That was the first thing I wanted to say.

Secondly, it seems to me that the process of healing trauma is that of imagining in the gut a completely new world, a new sort of experience, unlike any other.  This applies at least to those of us unable to remember a world in which we did not feel constant fear.

And there is a homology with this in genuine religion.  To take seriously the presence of God, and the necessity of service for optimal well-being is, in our present society, liminal, insane, out of bounds.

It is tempting to hope that emotional and spiritual growth can happen steadily and gradually.  It can do so over long periods of time, but there are periodic qualitative gaps which can only be crossed with faith and imagination.

This is the role, I think, that crazy ideas like those mentioned in the previous post play, for me.  And rationally, I still do mean everything I said.

I am an odd mix of conservative and hippy.  I’m not even the pot smoking conservative type.  Those usually call themselves Libertarian.

But as I calm down and begin to work in a more consistent way I am seeing with greater clarity how crazy our lives are.  Yes, of course the conservative arguments that free markets and property law are effective at generating prosperity are accurate; and those of the socialists that a centralized State, granted vast powers, can or should alleviate human problems of alienation and disconnection are invalid.  Manifestly, large governments and Socialist States are vehicles of disenchantment, moral and social alienation, and social decay.  Truth and connection must be found locally, among people–self evidently–you know.

I spent two hours watching a video “Packing for Mars” the other day.  While I did not find most of the more sensational claims credible–such as that we have and have long had bases on Mars–the underlying theme that there is an elite, that there are people with access to power and technologies unknown to the rest of us, resonated with me.

I do believe we have underground cities.  I have seen them in my dreams, and building them would be perfectly congruent with the many fears which must visit all thinking people of global pandemics, an EMF attack, nuclear war, environmental decay, etc.  The money is there, and the will must likely also be there among a power elite not to risk their own futures on the vagaries of present policy and chance.

Both Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Defense Minister, and former Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell have gone on record as saying that the US government has vast amounts of data making it unambiguously clear that aliens have been and continue to visit our planet, and that this fact has been concealed not just from the American people, but possibly top leaders.  In my own opinion, one the reasons Trump is feared by the elites of both parties–by what we might term the Superparty, which exists in an unannounced collusion to ensure the victory of one of their candidates in every election–is that he is unpredictable, and that given access to State secrets may choose to reveal them.  He wanted the release of the 28 pages of the 9/11 Report made a part of the Republican platform, but he was shot down.

And as I have said often, given a sane financial system, most of us would only need to work a fraction of what we do.  We are driven around the treadmill by seeming psychopaths, whose thirst for power–whose inability to find inner satisfaction with life and their present human condition–drives them to an obsessive lust for money they don’t need and can’t hope to spend.

It is an odd thing looking at this world, looking at the gaps between what is possible and what is being expressed, between what sane people want, and what we are being given.

The fact that the North Koreans were able to torture and manipulate people into accepting their lunatic creed is well known. The essential feat was seemingly convincing people to mean it when they affirmed that a 4″ stick was the same length as a 6″ one. This symbol serves well for their fanatical belief system in general.

I got to wondering in what conservstive–really, Liberal–brainwashing would consist. And it seems to me it would need consist solely in effective psychotherapy, in the building of mental and emotional health.

That is the difference.

It should go without saying that a Police State worthy of the name has to have the police on board.  They need to feel comfortable abrogating peoples rights–ideally, of course, those rights have already been disappeared legally–and with invoking fear in the public.

It would seem an obvious step in the seasoning process for this would be first invoking fear in the police themselves, making them feel under assault, in danger, and prime them for overreactions, violence, and a feeling of contempt and disgust for most of the public, for most of the people they supposedly exist to protect.

I am not a sufficient conspiracy theorist to think the Dallas shooter was part of a conspiracy, that he was brainwashed or selected like in the  Parallax View, then killed to cover it up (although I can’t rule it out, of course, any more than I can rule out the allegations by a former Canadian Defense Minister that our government is currently working with several species of aliens; the world is a vast and strange place). What seems vastly more likely is that the people who fund and control what has become a Communist front group–Black Lives Matter–KNEW that sooner or later somebody or multiple somebodies would take to heart the relentless violent rhetoric against police.  They talk about killing cops continually, and our PRESIDENT, our fucking PRESIDENT supports them in this.  Given millions of angry people, and hundreds of millions of guns, why wouldn’t something like Dallas happen sooner or later?

And this is a dual bonus: one, they make cops paranoid, and more prone to overreactions, but two, they get to point to guns, as Obama did immediately, the asshole, and push gun control yet again.  Both are needed for a police state.

I would like to expand on all this a bit, and take it in a slightly different direction.

Like all bureaucratic organisms, police departments exist to perform a job, in theory.  Police of course do a very public job and in most places do it reasonably well.  In this they differ from many bureaucracies.

But like bureaucracies they are prone to losing sight of the end goal.  The end goal is public safety.  Safe streets.  Freedom from violence and theft.  It is a very subtle evolution, though, from those laudable goals, to a demand for respect and fear.  “Fear me”, they say, “and I may leave you alone.”.  It is a short step from law and order to the use and abuse of power for its own sake.

When we look at the Stanford Prisoner Experiment–which I now realize is very relevant to the issue of police/public relations generally–what we see is that it is virtually impossible not to become adjusted to, and to some extent addicted to, the exercise of power.

And psychologically normal people cannot but react to this in a variety of ways, which include all the possibilities in any situation of predator/prey interactions.

They can stand up for themselves without panicking, using mature psychological defenses, frame the situation in a way which is not existentially threatening, and emerge with few or no scars.

More commonly, people likely go into some mild or severe form of fight or flight or freeze.  In the case of being arrested, it is a literal confinement, a textbook case of being mobilized to run or fight without the ability to do either.  This leaves scars in many people.  I think most black people particularly in this country walk around with mild to severe trauma as a result of their dealings with the police.  For my part, I don’t doubt for a moment that blacks get treated differently.  Proportionately, they empirically commit a lot more crimes, visibly do a lot more stupid things, but there is a circle, I think, in that by getting arrested more, they get traumatized more, and this creates more crimes and more arrests.  Once they are familiar with the prison system, they are conditioned to a known evil, and they do not fear it as much, which creates fewer fears of being punished for committing crimes.  In some places, doing time is, I think, a bit of a status symbol.  That is the opposite of the effect we want.

I’m not sure where to go with this.  Here is another idea: utilizing volunteer police officers the same way we use volunteer fire fighters.  We put cameras on them that cannot easily be dislodged, provide them basic training, and rotate them often.  We make blacks the police of their own neighborhoods.  What I think would happen is that arrests would happen a lot less.  A lot more things would be talked through.  A lot more patience and tolerance would be shown by people who do not see the same shit year after year, and who have not undergone the conditioning which inevitably follows the power they are granted.

This idea is a bit far out, I know, but shit aren’t most of my ideas?  I’m OK with that.  I actually think it has a lot of merit, not least the political merit of decentralizing power, and the use of power, and the relative empowerment of the people.

In a free country, you are innocent until proven guilty, and free until there is some compelling reason you should not be free.

I see people say “well, if Eric Garner had cooperated, he wouldn’t be dead”.  That is likely true.  It is CERTAINLY true that if those 5 cops had not decided he needed to go to jail for selling cigarettes he would be alive.

In my own view, we need a whole lot less things you go to jail for.  In particular, I think we need to legalize substantially all drugs.  A great deal of petty crime–like petty theft, and robbery–is related to drugs.  Make the drugs easier to get, and you reduce the crime.  Have an intelligent long term vision, such as helping addicts heal their emotional wounds, as Portugal did, and you get even better returns on investment.

I really think we need to move beyond simple moralisms, where if you stay on one side of a line you are “good”, and if you cross to the other you are “bad”.  Who you ARE is what you think and feel most of the time, most of the day, and particularly what you choose to feed and what you choose to starve.

There are many awful human beings who have never broken or even contemplated breaking a law their entire lives.  Heinrich Himmler, as one example, was very scrupulous about everything.  He kept the receipts for his hair cuts.  I don’t know why I remember that, but it was the sort of detail that reveals the man.

And many people who break the law–even major laws, such as those prohibiting car theft and robbery and even murder–are actually good people who exercised bad judgement over a very short period of time.

I am not arguing for moral relativism.  Some things are clearly wrong, but the public policy question, the practical question, is how we build a better society.  We cannot assume that punishment, per se, works to do that. In fact, I think it manifestly does not.  We cannot and should not assume that visiting hatred and pain and humiliation on people who enter the world traumatized does anything but reinforce all their worst existing impulses.  We can of course jail such people for life, but it is expensive, and it is a waste of life.  It is unnecessary, if in at least some cases those people might have contributed to society, rather than being forced by a court of law to spend their lives taking from society.

People operate according to knowable psychological principles.  They have reasons for what they do, and most of the time those reasons are ex post facto justifications for feelings which preceded them.  Those feelings, in turn, arise from primitive sufferings which they do not know how to bring to awareness, and whose existence they don’t even suspect.

I would stipulate, for example, that the feeling of shame causes behavior which justifies it.

And it is a truism that cops are psychologically very similar to the criminals they jail, just as most fire-fighters have more than a little in common with arsonists.  Among other things, they like breaking stuff.

My point is that if we are to survive, we all need to be more psychologically sophisticated.  We need to bring what we know about human mental health into the public domain.  This does not mean going easy on psychopathic killers and rapists, but it does mean asking basic questions about motivation, figuring out who people are and why they do what they do, and making intelligent decisions on that basis.  Sometimes, that decision might be a course of psychological treatment, of a sort that can over some period of time prove itself effective, something which must be continually measured, and changes made regularly.  In my own view, virtually everything starts with trauma, and the fact that most therapies have not address trauma is the reason most of them fucking suck.

Can one blame cops for getting shot?  Of course not.  Can one blame them for creating an atmosphere in which people WANT to shoot them?  Yes.  Clearly.

I keep saying this in many ways.  This one is slightly different.

The MINDSET they teach cops in the Academy, the one they enter their professional lives with, is control.  They teach them that they have to establish and maintain from the outset an absolute sense of dominance which is clear to both sides.  They are, in other words, to make every person with whom they come in contact, who they suspect may have committed a crime, feel inferior.  They want you to feel like shit.  They want you to feel shame and fear.  These are the emotions their training implicitly teaches them to invoke.

From a militaristic perspective, this makes sense.  You establish relative dominance, which you support with the clear display of weapons coupled with the  relatively unchecked power to put handcuffs on you and lock you in a cage, and you teach people to feel the fear of animals confronted with a superior predator.  Their fear makes them compliant.  This is not in principle different from a tiger showing its fangs.

The cops like it because they are the Alphas on the block, and they have a lot of other Alphas to share their Alpha-hood with. And in general their methods work.  People with something to lose fear losing it, and they keep their mouths shut, by and large, and their hands visible.

But when this mindset backfires, it backfires badly.  I think a lot of Officer Involved Shootings would not happen if the people concerned were treated with more respect, if they were treated as human beings, if they were not treated as a possible lunch for a hungry predator.

In most healthy people there is a desire to push back when someone pushes you.  In traumatized people, in the sorts of people who populate our jails and commit most of our crimes, this urge can be extraordinary.  It can reach the point–often does reach the point–where they DON’T CARE about the consequences.  This guy in Dallas planned to die.  He knew it was the only likely ending.  That price was obviously worth it to put fear back into the cops, to show them he too was a human being, he too had feelings, and his people had the right to demand to be treated fairly and with respect.

And obviously how can we expect cops to react?  They will do more of what created this problem in the first place.  They will be even more abusive, even less trusting, even more militaristic, as if the war being waged was ON the American people, and not on their behalf, which is supposedly the mission.  They exist as Public Safety Officers.  They exist not to victimize us, but to protect us.

But the mindset they develop is that of hunters, who enjoy the chase.  They are not looking for reasons not to arrest people–most cops on most nights–but reasons TO arrest them.  And again, this is the good cops.  The guys who make the most arrests are viewed with respect.  They are supposed to make the streets that much safer, but given how unsafe many streets are where the most arrests are made, one wonders.

And how do we put a cost to all the lost creation, all the lost labor, of the vast numbers of blacks who enter a revolving door relationship with our jail system?  They go in for something stupid, like petty theft, committed because nobody ever taught them right from wrong, or how to get ahead honestly, or who imbued them with the slightest hint of self respect, and they quickly learn they don’t matter.  Their lives don’t matter.  They are human shit.  They know this, because they have to put up being treated like shit, over and over, by men with guns and nightsticks.

How does any good come out of this?

I understand and have participated in the defense of the police. I have pointed out often that more whites are killed by cops than blacks, and that most blacks who are killed are killed by other blacks.  I have pointed out that a lot of COPS are black, as for example were half the cops charged in Baltimore, who if they are guilty of anything it is surely not racism.

But what I would add to this is that there has been no national self reflection, no asking of hard questions, no asking why our policing is done the way it is.  I get that if Obama calls for something most sane people will immediately feel the need to do the opposite.  He is a disgustingly disingenuous, hateful, divisive and opportunistic human being.  He disgraces our highest office.  But it is the American people’s disgrace, since we put him there.

At the same time, though, these questions do need to be asked.  I have seen 6-8 videos in the last year where excessive force was clearly used.  Shoot first and ask questions later no doubt works to keep cops alive.  If I could be certain I would never be held accountable for bad decisions, then it might be my policy too, if I were lacking in a sense of honor and decency and professional integrity.

But that policy does not work to keep people alive who have committed no capital offense, and who in most cases are reacting the same way that dogs react when you keep yanking their leashes.  “Yanking your chain” is in fact a common police saying, or used to be.  If you deal with people like dirt, sometimes that alone is going to cause a reaction which results in one or both parties getting shot.  Since they are the ones who took the oath, and since they are the ones who are the supposed professionals, police need to accept a much larger share of the responsibility and the blame when things go south.

https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow/videos/10154304212146800/

As Trevor Noah points out, in what I thought was a reasonably balanced piece, saying you are against cops killing innocent–or at least people not guilty of a capital offense who could and should have been dealt with with more skill–people is not “anti-cop”.

One immediate change people might consider is the automatic use of handcuffs.  The sting of being arrested is, I think, made much worse by the use of handcuffs.  Some people clearly need to be cuffed for the safety of the officers.  But most people don’t.  Most people, if you tell them you will face a lot of jail time if you act up, will behave fine.  Every time you put cuffs on someone you assume they are violent.  But most people are not violent.  Most people were not going to attack the cops.

You could do something as simple as say “if I don’t cuff you, can I trust you?” and even though in some cases the cop may regret it, I think on balance there would be a lot less fear of, and hatred of, cops.

And we need to be clear that even though cops make noise about public service, and even though many of them would be willing to risk their lives to protect people, most of them are addicted to their jobs.  The cops in small towns are bored.  And the risk cops are not in general willing to take is the risk of being shot in order to keep some suspect alive.

Personally, I view the main difference between a cop getting shot by a criminal, and a cop who is made a criminal by the act of shooting an innocent person (like the drunk guy in Mesa who had no gun at all) is the size of the funeral, and the number of attendees.  They are not usually the heroes we make them out to be.  They like their jobs.  Most of them are highly cynical, detest most of the public, and keep mainly to their own.  Cops almost always hang out with other cops.

We need them, to be clear.  The choice is not cops/no cops.  At issue is how they do their jobs, the authority they have, the training they receive, and the expectations we place on them. Specifically, if they do something stupid, they need at a minimum to lose their jobs.  This would seem common sense.  It would help public relations, and in the long run likely get a lot fewer people killed–on both sides, I am inclined to honestly say, even though we are all theoretically on the same side.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness

I am very close to feeling calm, and I was recalling today a study I read some years ago that 100% of people who had exceptionally poor relationships with both parents had serious illnesses in their 40’s.  When I read that, of course I was a bit worried, since for all intents and purposes I am an orphan with two living parents with whom it is simply impossible to communicate at more than a superficial level.  I Googled, something, and the study above came up.  This quote is relevant to my own experience:

Imagine for a moment that your body receives its stress hormones and
chemicals through an IV drip that’s turned on high when needed and, when
the crisis passes, it’s switched off again. You might think of kids
whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early
adversity as having an inflammation-promoting drip of fight-or-flight
hormones turned on every day – it’s as if there is no off switch.

I have not been sick.  Other than a minor surgery to fix a muscular injury, which really doesn’t count, I have been 100% free of physical ailments, even though I’m sure my ACE score is 3 or above.  I don’t really want to know.  I have had more than one therapist look at me in wonderment at my relative stability, given my history.

And here is why I think I have not gotten sick: I chose, at age 16, to fucking FIGHT for sanity.  I didn’t know what to do.  I did not know where to go.  I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I knew something was, that I did not process the world like most other people.  My entire adult life has been oriented around the task of gathering wisdom and learning, on the deepest level I could reach.  This has been everything to me.

And I really think that has made the difference.  You can see my battles here.  What do I have, 3,000 posts or more?  This, even though I’m not really sure more than one or two people read it, and I’m not sure even they read it regularly.   This blog is the fight, or part of it.  This blog is a part of the not giving in, the telling my unconscious that I will continue, I will fight on, I will never quit.

No one can heal me.  The scars are much too deep, and in any event it is unfair to ask anyone else to carry your cross.  I am the one who needs to do it, and I am DOING it.  It is not theoretical.  I am feeling better every day. One day soon I will greet the sunrise without fear.

Where chronic feelings are concerned, like anger and anxiety, the feeling precedes the explanation.  People who are angry will find things to be angry about.  People who are anxious will find things to be anxious about. 

But both functions are intended as tools to help build a better, freer life, not dictators to diminish life and make it compulsive.  This point is important.