Month: October 2016

It seems to me the very notion of the importance of emotional depth has been increasingly lost on most of us. What we consider deep is all too often ideological morality plays, with simplistic messages, intended both FOR simpletons, and with the aim of making our dialogue less nuanced, less precise, less probing, and less interesting.

Ponder Jon Stewart for a moment.  He is the model for most millenials.  He is, or was, seemingly all they seek: simple answers for complex problems, and a moral high ground bought through mockery.

I would like to amplify on an earlier comment.  In the same sense that Liberal is related linguistically to Liberty, conservative is related to conservation.  Protection. Preservation.

And what are we preserving?  Some conservatives object to any deviation from the notion that America is a Christian nation.  I am not one of those.

Most of us, now–and the so-called Alt Right would belong in this camp–want to preserve the idealistic notions embodied in our Constitution that we should be free from ruling elites who are accountable to no one, and that all are equal under the rule of law. We should be free to speak and act as we choose, within broad boundaries, and the government has no business interfering with either.

I readily grant that it was an elite who created the Constitution, and who early on were the only ones allowed to vote.  But the system itself is INHERENTLY amenable to peaceful evolution.  An Andrew Jackson, if he had not been the one, would have come along soon enough.

And the question today is where we go from here.  The past is the past.  The Constitution can be amended, and has been.  But that process has been skipped now for 85 years or more.  Many many things have come into being without the consent or vote of the people.

This is the essence of what tyranny looks like.  It was the SPECIFIC outcome the distribution of powers between the Federal government and the States was intended to prevent.

What we seek to conserve, to preserve, is at root the rule of law, which has been perverted increasingly blatantly, increasingly openly, for the lifetime of most of those now living.

You cannot reject the rule of law, and not expect the unscrupulous–like Hillary Clinton–to abuse it.

Donald Trump was married to Ivana in a ceremony conducted by Norman Vincent Peale (who said of Trump, that he was “kindly and courteous in certain business negotiations and has a profound streak of honest humility.”).  


I am going to call this ironic, because of a thesis I am about to advance: the creed of Positive Thinking, which Peale did so much to advance, is almost inherently one which leads to what might be called “emotional exclusionism”.  This exclusionism, or dissociation, is a big part of the psychic split which Trump has done so much to make visible.


We have all met people who were deeply committed to putting the brightest possible light on everything, of always staying upbeat and positive, and of smiling as much and as often as possible.


We have an older gentleman in sales at my company who embodies this now somewhat Old School ethos.  Friendly to a fault, vivacious, always laughing, everyone is terrified to drive with him.  He doesn’t pay attention and he flies into rages at everyone.  You get to the destination, all smiles and positivity again.


It seems to me that in America we have a tendency to confuse pretending with reality; that if we just believe something is so with enough will, it becomes so.  In its most extreme form this manifests as things like The Secret.  There may or may not be something to it, but there is clearly not a core correspondence between what we HOPE will happen, and what actually reliably does happen, unless hard work and a good plan are part of the hoping. 


But this habit accustoms us to confusing surface reality with deep reality.  It makes us more reluctant to go negative places consciously.  It enables an insult driven campaign like Hillary’s to accuse Trump of being insult driven, and not cause any cognitive dissonance.  “They started it” is often a de facto admission of unprocessed feelings of aggression and rage.


And we seem to have internalized a sense that everything has to be OK all the time, and that it is not OK to talk about deep feelings, especially those of anger and rage and fear and disgust. It is OK to EXPRESS them on the political Left, but as feelings one OWNS as one’s own, as not inherently connected to the external world, not so much.


It is unquestionably the case that Trump’s appeal depends on mass anger on the part of the marginalized majority (hey, that’s a good phrase), who can likely be counted on to turn up to vote in droves, but it is equally the case that the HATRED and FEAR of Trump can best be explained as psychological projection.  He has become a lightning rod for all the feelings the “enlightened left”, the culturally sensitive, always willing to take it up the ass for the team Left, cannot express openly within their group, lest they lose their Club Pass.


But self evidently, given my own commitments, I think the feelings of the conservative majority in this country are healthy, and the ugly vitriol being heaped on us by the Left is not.

We can’t talk any more, and that is not the fault of conservatives.  The Left starts off assuming the most ugly things possible about us, doesn’t have any interest in listening, and abuses us as often as possible, both directly, and amongst the cult members, as a unfunny running joke.


“Ha, ha, ha, he thinks we should have BORDERS.  Fucking hilarious. Where do these fools come up with this stuff?”


One hopes that there remain ACTUALLY sensitive souls–and I have met a few, but very few–who are capable of both retaining a core commitment to the broad idea of Progress, but also seeing and claiming a landscape of failures perpetrated in its name.

It is a truism, it is obvious, in inner work that internally directed violence breeds dissociation.  You can yell at yourself “STOP DOING THAT”, and it will work for a minute.  It really will.  I’ve done it.  You have likely done it.

But the cost is internal conflict which breeds anxiety and emotional inefficiency.  If you bully some part of yourself into submission, it doesn’t go away.  You can’t kill off parts of yourself, at least not without an addiction of some sort.  Drug addiction and alcoholism can be used to manage this dissociated part.  In effect, you strike a deal where one part of you remains in charge, provided the other part can get sedated later.  It is upset and angry at the violence, and the booze or drugs calm it down.

But mental HEALTH is a process of integration, of bringing disparate parts which came into existence to manage different–and sometimes opposite–problems into communication with one another, and then eventually, to use my term (I think, although I may have stolen it from Dan Siegel), coalition. The parts work together harmoniously and even pleasurably for what is good for you, genuinely good for you.

Societies are no different.  You can shout down one segment, but they don’t go away.  You have not convinced them. You have on the contrary alienated and angered them.  And they may stay quiet for a long time, but whatever apparent harmony might appear to exist in the relative silence, it is phony.  It is fake. It is an illusion conjured into existence for the gratification of the bullies and accepted by the bullied on the surface.

But the cause of building bridges has not been served.  You have a deep, deep split.

Donald Trump OBVIOUSLY did not create a split in our society.  I have to hang my head sometimes and wonder how people can be so FUCKING STUPID.  It is particularly egregious when you consider that it is the LEFT which is always talking about sensitivity, and caring and compassion and understanding.  It is the LEFT in general where the “mental health professionals” congregate, and where most of the patients originate.

But you see, this split exists within them too.  They don’t own their undirected rage.  As a general rule, they are able to act as if actual conditions in the world FORCE them to be angry all the time; and not realize that their own psychological debilities, their own lack of integration, is what DRIVES them into lunatic politics in the first place.

Democrats are not “Liberals”.  They haven’t been for a very long time.

Here is the thing: genuine Liberals–who are the large sections of Red which constitute well over 90% of the land mass in our country (which is to say “conservatives”, who “conserve” Liberalism, as opposed to supporting Socialist tyranny)–have been getting called names for decades now, but it has been particularly awful and continuous in the Obama years.  Yes, race absolutely has something to do with it: the term RACIST is used every fucking time anyone disagrees with Obama about ANYTHING.  It is not that actual racism is present, but that it is a convenient cudgel with which to batter the offending individual or group.

Over and over and over and over the politics of division by vilification is used against all white Americans, all Christians, all men, all successful businesspeople–even black people and other minorities who don’t conform to racist Left wing stereotypes, even rape victims who don’t conform to their assigned narrative–and this process breeds anger.  It is inevitable.  You insult someone baselessly for a long period of time, what do you THINK is going to happen?

And it is the height of disingenuousness for these fools to act surprised.  Where did THAT come from, I wonder?  Must be racism again.  NO, IT ISN’T FUCKING RACISM: IT IS A PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY REACTIONS TO YOUR CONTINUAL EMOTIONAL WARFARE ON GOOD PEOPLE.

I think we have all encountered the “head only” man or woman, who just doesn’t “get” emotions.  They don’t react like normal people, and thus normal reactions puzzle them.  Emotion is a foreign language to them, one they don’t speak and really have little interest in learning how to speak.

Such people are not emotionless.  What they are is emotionally stupid, which usually means that most of the time they are acting out in anger and with malice while pretending to themselves they are enlightened and good.  It is a lie enabled by their own internal deceit, which is to say their own internal dissociation and lack of integration.

This is the landscape I see.  And onto this you have to layer the greedy and power hungry.  The headless people (who present as head only, but are in reality limbic and brain stem only) answer to them readily.  Say the right sorts of words, and the usual suspects will jump to attention and go into action. You can USE these people to get rich. You can pass laws to protect the rich if you say they are to protect the poor, and that anyone who opposes them is awful.  You can say you want to protect the weak while protecting the powerful.  You can say you support justice while shitting on the actual rule of law.  Everything is possible when people NEED YOU emotionally.

I was pondering again this morning Haidt’s moral foundations and it occurs to me that the only real attachment Leftists have is to Authority.  A genuine sense of Fairness would involve balancing all sides, and they have no interest in that.  They don’t care about the opinions of anyone who disagrees with them.  What they do is pick one side and bully it to victory. I have in mind specifically gay marriage.  There was no national dialogue.  There was one side shrieking and the other side shouting back, or separating from the discussion.  Fairness would be if you force a Christian to bake a gay wedding cake, you force a black baker to bake a KKK cake.

Actually, here are some actual cases: not baking a cop a cake for his retirement.

Not baking a Confederate flag cake, but baking an ISIS cake.

Again, why the fuck is the government in the cake business to begin with?  As I’ve established, Liberty is not an important value to the Left, but Fairness supposedly is.  The essence of Fairness is one standard applied to all.  Why are these blatant contradictions not objectionable to them?  Simple: fairness is not ACTUALLY one of their values.

As far as Care this is easy: do leftist economic policies work to care for the sick and poor and elderly?  No, not really.  What helps is economic growth and well being, and their policies accomplish the opposite.  Poverty has existed in the ghettos for many decades.  If they ACTUALLY cared, they would ask what is not working and fix it.  Instead, they continue to push things that don’t work–like Head Start–and ignore and even ban things which do work, like Charter Schools and educational vouchers.

Look at this: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/220912/de-blasios-war-minority-education-arnold-ahlert

These charter schools DEMONSTRATED that black kids from broken families and bad neighbhorhoods can SUCCEED if given decent educations.

The 6,700 students at her 22 Success Academy Charter Schools scored in the top 1 percent in math and top 7 percent in English on the most recent state test. These are students who come overwhelmingly from poor, minority families, who overcame the achievement gap progressives regularly bemoan.

They succeeded.  So what happened?  The Regressives rolled the negroes back into schools where they can now be expected to return to being at the bottom of the heap in test results, and graduate barely able to read, and completely unable to take on jobs in the technology sector, at least without Affirmative Action.  These assholes create the problem then claim they have the solution.

I could go on, but the point is that CARE is not an actual value of the Left.  They are not primarily trying to help people.  They don’t think about.  You go to any left wing website, especially around election time, and their sole focus is polling data, and how to manipulate people into voting Democrat.  They don’t care about issues and more or less directly ban debate, because they don’t care about RESULTS.

This is an anti-humanistic agenda.  These people are mentally and emotionally ill.  They are sick.  And they breed like fucking rabbits.

There is no right and wrong, and our side is always right.

That is the shortest summary I have come up with. Note it is “and”, not “but”.  Doublethink needs to be in the foundational statement.

And it occurs to me from a nervous system perspective, in order to countenance patent logical contradictions you have to take the front cortex off-line.  You retain the use of language, but an emotional disconnection from semantic content.

Rather, behavior is based upon the limbic system and brain stem exclusively.  In effect, you become an obedient animal willing to do and be whatever is necessary.

That is what we see in Cuba, in North Korea, and in China, among the core ideologues. It is a formal system for dehumanizing people, to putting them in retrograde motion in the direction of reverse evolution or atavism.

A savage is merely an animal in a human’s body.  It is someone incapable of reason and abstract planning, and self evidently tolerance is a principle originating in the social brain, the uniquely human part of our neuroanatomy.  Leftism breeds savagery, formally.

It occurs to me that the sense of shame, too, is a function of a sense of sanctity.  Sanctity is the sense that some people and institutions are inherently worthy of respect, that they matter, that they are important.

In the case of America, the person who occupies the office of President is not sacred–they are, in theory, subject to the same laws the rest of us are, which is what differentiates them from rulers–but the OFFICE of the President is sacred.

And that office has plainly been defiled.

If you go through life respecting nothing and no one, then you cannot respect yourself either.  Nothing matters to you.  Life is pointless, when the markers we are instinctually driven to look for and identify are missing, after a miserable and imbecilic acculturation process.

That is how you get Beavis and Butthead.  We live in a Beavis and Butthead world, and Hillary is their obvious candidate.  Everything is funny, when nothing matters.

Love–psychologically honest love–cannot exist in such a bastardized world.

The sacred matters.

It occurs to me this morning that this word simply does not resonate with people who do not value sanctity and loyalty, with people who unthinkingly adopt the Dalai Lama’s soporific: “kindness is my creed”.  Being unfailingly kind even to the cruel, even to the abusive, is stupid.  It is not protecting the weak from bullies.  It is not protecting your own people from those who would abuse them.  It is not confronting in an honest way the rapists and killers and thieves of the world.

Inherently, in order to privilege being nice above all else, and to reject in principle all other principles, cognitive dissociation is absolutely, fundamentally necessary.  You have to learn not to see, not to process, not to touch, emotionally, much of what happens in the world.

It is perhaps not overstating the case to say that what the press does is GRANT PERMISSION to see to people.  They have granted permission to see Trump, who is imperfect, but not to see Hillary or Bill, who are horrific human beings who are disqualified in every possible way.

Human beings are complex creatures, and we have many instincts.  Jonathan Haidt’s work in this area, as I have said, makes a great deal of sense to me.

To repeat one or more past posts, he posits six foundations of moral reasoning, as he calls it, but we might well also call it ‘Instinctual bases of human interaction”: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.


As he says, self identified Liberals only stress the first two.  Liberty, loyalty, Authority and Sanctity are not important to them.  Conservatives value all roughly equally.


And on this basis one can readily explain the vast difference in the emotional charge generated among conservatives about the charge that our system has been corrupted.  Clearly, the DoJ was pressured to not press charges on Hillary.  The FBI cooperated.  The IRS corruption scandal has gone virtually uninvestigated and no one has been punished.  We read in Wikileaks Hillary has a plan to use an Executive Order to allow murder victims to sue gun manufacturers, which would of course put them out of business in short order.


We see, daily, the prostitution of media integrity to left wing narratives and a more or less open campaign to get HIllary elected, not least by not focusing on her many serious crimes, and instead building up and fluffing even the most flimsy and ridiculous charges against Trump.  They mock factual objections–such as that airplanes had a uniform design in the period in question–as if “mere facts” should count when they have leveled a charge.


For those paying attention, I need not go on.  Our system is broken.  It has been corrupted.  Let us look one at a time at the values the Left does not care about.


1) Liberty.  Christians should have the right not to be forced to support abortions.  Or gay marriage.  Everyone should have the right to own a gun until they prove unworthy.  People should be able to speak their minds in all times and places, within very broad lines of decorum.  They should be free from abuse by the government, such as in the use of the IRS to punish and harass political enemies.


To take gay marriage as one example, most Leftists do not GET the fundamental principle that somebody has the right to disagree with them.  Really, I could say ALL Leftists, since I would use this inability as a defining feature, differentiating them from genuine Liberals.  They cannot balance the principles of Care and Fairness with the idea that someone else might have the right to say they are wrong, that homosexuality is inherently an emotional illness, or sin before God.  I have often–really, generally–been misunderstood by Leftists on this point, because they don’t have this category “Liberty”, or this principle “right to your own opinion” with which to balance the argument.


For my own part, I will stand with whomever is being abused and bullied by the government, which in recent years is clearly the Christians.  At one time it WAS the gays, and I would have stood with them then.  That was before my time, as it was long ago.


2) Loyalty.  Conservatives are willing to offer up our loyalty to the government, in exchange for the same.  We expect our government to look out for the American people, to have our best interests at heart, and to pursue our national interest honestly. We expect specifically that it will not sell its soul to the highest bidder and defraud the American people, pursue agendas contrary to our interest, and otherwise show contempt for us.


And as I have said before, loyalty as a virtue is conspicuously absent on the Left.  It has been replaced by conformity, which is a very different value. Loyalty in some respects is inherently a bit tribalistic, but we all need tribes.  That is why the word has come back into use, as in “finding my tribe”.  You look out for you and your own, first and foremost, and only later others.  This can have negative consequences, obviously, but it is also very important for mental health.


In important respects the rejection of the notion of reciprocal loyalty is inconsistent with mental health.  You can pretend otherwise, and many do, especially New Agey sorts, but at a deep gut level, it is necessary to belong, and to need to do nothing to belong.  Loyalty, at root, is a family emotion.  To lack this virtue is to lack a family.  The Left attempts to mimic this with a tribalism based on hatred and violence, but in the end membership is highly conditional on you doing and saying exactly what everyone else says.  To belong is to violate your sense of self, and there is no belonging, there is no rest: you belong as long as you are marching in the direction and at the pace of everyone else.  That is not healthy.


3) Authority.  Somebody needs to be in charge.  We want freedom, but we also need leadership.  If nobody is in charge, you get chaos.   Chaos is a bad way to live.  The Middle is the best place, and particularly when the States had first say on most things, Authority was distributed in this country sufficiently that most people could live according to laws they found congenial.


4) Sanctity.  This is the value most violated by corruption.  This is the value that Leftists DO NOT GET.  Our system depends entirely on the integrity and honesty of the people running it, and those people have shown themselves dishonest and lacking in integrity.  They do what is politically convenient, not what is right. Probity is gone.


The importance of sanctity is something best seen on a soul level, on a deep level.  We see Leftists daily demonstrate their fundamental callowness and superficiality by mocking everything and everyone, even very important institutions.


Again, to use a recent example, when Joy Behar, a woman interacting with other women, in front of an audience largely composed of women, calls victims of sexual assault “Tramps”, she is demonstrating an inability to hold sacred space, to grant those women their right to their time and truth.  She KNOWS on some level they are telling the truth, and some flippant and unserious part of her simply dissociated psychologically and launches in the profaning of what they had to say.


If nothing is sacred, then everything is profane. Life is banal, and 1 is equal to 2.  That is no way to live.


At root, Donald Trumps message is THIS STUFF MATTERS.  The American way of life matters.  It is a beautiful thing, and it is in danger.  Liberty is at risk, and we owe it to our children to put in place a government and system which takes its responsibilities seriously, which holds them as a sacred trust.

I get little poetic fragments.  I like that.

It occurs to me that Hillary has been practicing keeping her cool and composure her whole life.  She is never honest with anybody about anything.  This means she has ALWAYS kept whatever feelings she might have been capable of to herself.  She just stands there smiling maniacally because she is 100% phony.

For his part, Trump seems to have genuinely gotten his feelings hurt.  He has surrounded himself with beautiful women his whole life, and many, many intelligent women obviously enjoyed his company.  He wasn’t chasing black hookers in the projects like Bill was, to use and abuse then lose.  And even if he may have crossed some lines that “trigger” people in our hypersensitive times, there have been ZERO allegations of sexual predation until he took the lead as the Republican candidate.  With regard to Bill, he didn’t get the name Slick Willie in Arkansas for nothing.  If this is not obvious to you, this is a double ententre referencing his nearly continual sexual misconduct over decades.  Everywhere he has gone there have been rumors.  Some of his alleged mistresses have wound up dead.

Trump has NONE of this.  Trump is on his third wife because the first two had firm boundaries and were emotionally healthy enough to tell him to get the fuck out when he cheated on them.  Although she accused him of rape in the heat of and immediate aftermath of their divorce, Ivana says now that they are “the best of friends.”

If she were wired like a normal human being, Hillary would have left Bill long, long ago.  Bill was not someone who was just unhappy in his marriage, and reaching out for comfort.  No, he claims to have had sex with THOUSANDS of women while married.  Even if he were single, that would be profoundly unhealthy.  It reminds me a bit of Fellini’s movie “The City of Women”, where in the, forgive the use of the word, climactic scene, the Don Juan displays a statue of his mother, which he worships.  Mother issues: yes, sir, for sure.

But their relationship is simply a business partnership, which means she is really, really cold and calculating, as appears blazingly obvious. I think her main concern about Bill is that he hurts her politically; and it is all about her, and always has been.

Trump likes attention, but this is something you can see every day in nearly every person.  Everybody wants to pick the Derby winner, to be the track or football star, to be the smartest person in the room, to have the most beautiful woman, or richest and best looking man.  The guy with the biggest dick in the locker room knows it and is proud of it.

Trump enjoys his life.  He always has.  He loves the limelight. It makes him happy.

But it is important to differentiate this from clinical narcissism.  A clinical narcissist is someone who completely lacks empathy, who is unable to GET other people on a deep level.  Clinical narcissists can be outstanding at reading and manipulating people.  They can APPEAR warm and inviting, as Bill clearly often does.  It was his biggest asset as a politician.  Hillary and particularly Bill are clearly at least narcissists, and if they are guilty of a fraction of what they appear guilty of, likely sociopaths, with narcissism being merely one aspect of that disorder.  Sociopathy would explain why Bill is so fascinating to so many women.  He clearly draws them in, and always has.

The fact that Trump is bothered by the accusations against him show he has a conscience, and a core personality capable both of empathy and genuine outrage.

And I would say that in our modern world, genuine outrage is rare.  It would require non-ambiguous standards applied evenly.  And we all know that what is supposed to make us angry in one context we have to overlook in another.  When Joy Behar said “I apologize to those tramps who slept with my husband”, what is she doing if not showing grotesque emotional detachment from the emotional worlds of those women?   And none of them asked for it.  Two were groped or flashed by Bill, and one was raped outright against her will.  The final one, Kathy Shelton, was a victim of Hillary herself.

We see so much play acting in the public realm.  It is because people have forgotten how to feel, how to be real, how to be sincere, how to react in authentic, emotionally direct and real ways.  No, they are PROGRAMMED, and their faux outrage has all the reality of the Truman Show. It is a manufactured world, one built for idiots, by conniving bastards, for the decay of everything good.

http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=42529

Here’s an idea I haven’t seen: what if the hacks are being done by US intelligence officers pissed off that our system has been so corrupted? How could any sane intelligence professional want Hillary in the White House after what she has done?  She pissed on them.  She pissed on our system.  She holds those who risk and lose their lives for this country in contempt.  She wants pointless wars which are being paid for by the enemies of our nation.

Let’s hope this is legit.  The claim has been made of a tape of Bill Clinton having sex on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Pedophile Island” with a 13 year old.

We live in strange times.  But let’s remember–and I am more guilty than most of forgetting this often–there remain a LOT of very good, very strong, and highly competent people in this nation.

Never give up the fight.  Despair if you must, sit down for a minute, then get up and get back at it.