Month: November 2016

I asserted that true Leftism inherently requires the sacrifice of a core self, in a way even the military–which offers an unchanging code it takes seriously–does not.  A soldier can say “this mission does not accord with our core values; or with the law”, as the drone operators did a few months ago in asserting that our policies in Yemen were CREATING, not destroying terrorists, and who were punished by our government for it.

Superficially, though, Leftists are granted the “identity” of identity politics.  I read, in what seems too farcical to be made up, that Tinder lists some 37 “genders”.  Each of these is an identity, are they not?  They are shallow identities, but they are labels one can use.

But who are you?  Is this really a question anyone can or should be able to answer in anything approaching a serious fashion with mere words?  You are THAT.  You are what you are, and limiting your description to what you do with your penis or vagina or mouth is absurdly reductive.

But people have been conditioned to accept this.  You are black.  You are white.  You are gay.  You are straight.  All have political consequences.

Our future, if we are to have a future, requires reconnecting with what is deep within us, and becoming multidimensional in awareness, as we clearly are in reality.

German Sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies proposed about a century ago that the distinction between “Gemainschaft” and “Gesellschaft” was a useful heuristic tool.  Both are untranslatable, but roughly Gemainschaft is a community of like-minded people who feel, ideally, a sense of mutual loyalty, who share beliefs and customs, and who feel a sense of belonging and home (Heim).

Gesellshaft would be more like the people you interact with on a business or professional basis.  It is the people at work, your clients, your suppliers, the Rotary, your country club, the people on the bus, train, or subway.

Modern academics have in some cases used these terms to describe what appears to be a gradual shift from being “nested” somewhere, from belonging somewhere, from there being something important that can be gleaned from where you are from, to a “thrownness”, to feeling like a bob going up and down on an endless and unpredictable tide.

I was dreaming last night about being lost somewhere in a generic southern California town.  There were tourist shops and cheap watches, hot dogs, traffic problems, and a continual hustle and bustle.  I felt the unanchored quality of my own life.

By and large, this is not a problem in the small towns of America, the ones who elected Trump.  They are born, live–sometimes leave and come back–and die in the same small place.  They inherit beliefs and habits they pass on to their children.  This is Gemeinschaft.

Southern California–really all of California, which I know well and grew not to care for–is Gesellschaft.  Everybody is hustling for something.  They want money, thrills, fame.  It is not a place for nesting. Your home is an investment, your job a vehicle to wealth.  Everything and everyone has a price.  It is a truism that they are superficial, plastic.  This is because they have nothing else.  Everything else was drowned in the flood of people coming there wanting to forget their past lives and who they once were.

Leftism, as it exists in this country, is an answer to “Verworfenheit”.  It is not a system for rectifying wrongs, or for ameliorating poverty and pain.  What it provides is a sense of certainty, a culture that is transferable across widely diverging groups.  It provides stability in a sea of change.  It soothes those aching with confusion about the future, about what is right and wrong, and about who they should be.  It asks of its votaries their core self, but in exchange it offers simple answers which have merely to be downloaded at regular intervals.  Each day, it will tell you who you are and what you believe, and this is a huge relief to people who have no other reference points, who are lost in the flood.

I do not think it overstating the case that this election was a resounding rejection by those who “cling” to traditional moralities based on principles and outcomes, of a creed based on nothing but mutable daily political tasks, ones quite often motivated simply by the need to mobilize hate in order to energize their base and keep them loyal. 

One paradox was a runner, who ran halfway to the finish line, then halfway again, then halfway again, such that while in continual motion he never actually reached the finish line. He approached it asymptotically.

Morally, in Europe, you have one group of formally decadent people, who believe that the “truth is always in the middle”, and another group of traditional, tribal people, who believe that the truth is absolute, knowable, and known with no defects by all adherents of the one true faith.

Inevitably, absent a moral renaissance–a rebirth, or reawakening–the center of gravity is Islam.  They give their first halving, by saying they will accept swimming pools and trains segregated by gender.  They give their second halving by telling their women not to “provoke” the wild beasts.  They give their third halving by allowing Sharia in some places.

At some point, they stand one foot from the finish line, and only self delusion and recollections of past glories prevents them from realizing they have lost all claim to virtue–to true Liberalism–they once possessed, and have instead sunk into the pit of a brutal creed hatched in the unforgiving deserts of 7th century Saudi Arabia, one which hates gays, hates women, hates diversity, hates “progress”, and which demands of its votaries complete submission in all aspects of their lives.

We truly live in an extraordinary period.  The Islamists are TELLING us what they want to do, and nobody–or few–have the balls to stop them.

What if someone were blessed with the power to make everyone else around them more intelligent?  What if this person, themselves, were of very average intelligence, but that if they sat in a room with a group of people everyone’s IQ went up 50 or 100 points?

Creativity is nothing more or less than seeing what was already possible.  Everything we have built in the modern world was physically possible 5,000 years ago.  It was the ideas and knowledge we lacked.  Everything we will have built 100 years from now, if we survive, is possible now.

So much human misery depends entirely on human stupidity, and emotional dysfunctions of various sorts.

And actually, this raises the question: how much better would thinking actually become, once we consider that emotional blocks of various sorts have long impelled highly intelligent people into functional stupidity?  Keynes was a genius, but he was also a fucking imbecile.  He sought to create a plausible veneer for the establishment of Fascist economics, and that in turn because he did not grasp the value of political freedom for the masses, in turn because he did not recognize the possibility of individual moral development, this in turn because on some profound inner level he was completely stuck in a primitive state emotionally, all his life.

Complex systems are built from simply ideas.  The concept of “truth” might seem simple, but it isn’t.  Justice, honor, loyalty.  All the Platonic Ideals: complex ideas.

And I want to clearly differentiate them from complicated ideas.  It is quite possible to have within ones own mind an absolutely uncomplicated clear conception of honesty, such as “always tell the truth.  Never lie, cheat or steal.”  But in practice, all human persons, being mutable biological entities with differing genetics, differing environmental influences, and in my understanding of the world, differing soul histories, will SLIGHTLY amend these codes, and then they will also amend them in reference to their actual behavior.  Yes, tell the truth, but Suzie doesn’t need to know just yet that Bobbie cheated on her.  Yes, tell the truth, but not that she looks fat in that dress.  Yes, tell the truth, but fuck the IRS.  Etc.

The principle in play certainly creates a system, and a relatively stable one at that, but one that is formally Complex.  Good philosophy has to incorporate within itself motion and time.

We know, now, that the world is Complex.  What I am waiting to see is the merging of philosophy, and specifically moral philosophy, with Complexity Theory. I have indicated in my Goodness essay and elsewhere how I see this working.  It is stupid and clumsy to say that abstraction are either true or not true (and I would include this abstraction, since obviously I do believe in truths, even if my approach is ideosyncratic): rather, what TENDS to be true is in general the phrase I want to see, what becoming a specific belief tends to engender.  As I put it: Becoming approximates essence.

Edit: Think of the color red.  Chances are very good, in my view, that if we could somehow measure the exact frequency of color you imagined, it would differ infinitesimally from the color I imagined.  This does not mean the color red does not “exist”.  It can of course be defined somewhat scientifically, but even there, at what nanofrequency do we draw a hard line?

Practically, accepting the notion of approximate virtue brings back into play 90% of the moral certainly possible when it was thought virtue was somehow encoded in the universe, that it “existed” in some way outside of human decision paths as exercised within complex, moving systems.  And 10% doubt is a good thing.  “Trust yourself when all others doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.”

Moral relativism is of course a rejection of any form of firm morality, which makes such theorists future victims of those not lacking in certainty.  This is of course the present condition of Europe, which has morally disarmed itself.  It has no means of defending itself intellectually from those who do not brook difference or feel any need for compromise.

This election is done.  I at least am going to drop it.

I will say I thought about this, looked at the idea that her goal was to force the election to Congress, and thought about it some more, and my conclusion is that she is just a functionally stupid, very unserious human being.  She’s a ditz.  She didn’t think this thing through.  Seriously: who polls at 1% of the vote and goes to dozens or hundreds of campaign stops and says “we are going to win”?

By honest tallied–USA Today by this metric is fake news–Trump has 307 Electoral Votes. Even in the extremely unlikely event this is reversed by fraud in the recount to 380–10 for Wisconsin and 17 for Michigan–he still wins. To flip the results they need to come up with over 100,000 voted in Pennsylvania. I can see the Usual Suspects saying “100,000? Are you fucking crazy? We can add a few hundred here and there but a difference that big and a full blown investigation is s certainty and we are not going to jail for her, not now, for nothing.”

And keep in mind all the Electors that matter for us are Republicans. Given that Trump is trying to make good with Uber-Never-Trumper Mitt Romney, and given his overall moderation thus far–one might even say wisdom and good sense–what peg do any residual Never Trumpets have to hang their hats on? What valid excuse can they offer for failing to perform their fiduciary duties?

And more generally, the lack of integrity and respect for our system–indeed, the FUND RAISING Jill Stein seems to be doing on the backs of mourning Hillary voters, to whom she is dangling false hopes–will almost certainly sour all but the most deluded, hard core Democrats on their own Party, AND on the Green Party. These are not serious people with substantive policies who love our country. That train left long ago. These are envenomed radicals who recognize no restraints or rules in the pursuit of power.

I suspect many people have defected and will continue to defect from the party of their parents and grandparents. It is no longer good enough that the Democrats were once the party of the New Deal and the working man. Their shift to both radicalism and complete functional indifference to what were their core constituencies is complete. Blacks can expect nothing. Working men and women can expect nothing.

We have literally transitioned from a prospect of never seeing a Republican President again to never seeing a Democrat again. We need a hack-proof election system, including national voter ID laws approved by the Supremes. We need to boot out a coupe million illegals and close the border, and with sound policy and economic growth, it’s Republicans as far as the eye can see.

In this respect, we should strongly encourage the Dems to adopt Keith Ellison as their leader. 

John Podesta referred to “wet work” in one of his emails a couple days before Antonin Scalia’s death, with that of course being a code word for assassination.  I thought initially “there is no way”.  It seemed too far fetched.

But watch the three videos linked here.  They are amateur, but focus not on the delivery, but the content:  http://www.dcclothesline.com/2016/11/26/pizzagate-was-merely-code-for-child-sex-trafficking/

John Podesta seemingly had, and presumably has, obsessions with both cannibalism and young girls.  That is not right.  Would someone capable of putting a picture of cannibalism on his office wall–and who when asked about it say “it’s better to be the one with the fork than the one being eaten”, or something close to that–not be capable of being an accessory to murder?  Why not?

This stuff makes me sick, but it seems to be real.  When I talk of Cultural Sadeism, I literally think some of these people read Sade for ideas, and certainly for inspiration.  These people exist.  Do not doubt it.

And on that note, how is it POSSIBLE that world leaders are not disgusted by the decades long cruelty and repression Castro visited on the Cuban people?  They were enslaved, tortured, and put in boxes which they were forbidden by law to label boxes or to complain about.  They were forced to suffer in silence within a sea of eyes watching them.  The Cuban regime is horrifying, and so much worse than anything Battista attempted or even contemplated that any comparisons would be absurd.

Fuck Fidel Castro.  He is even now getting his just punishments.

The Left has made White Equivalency equal to White Supremacy.  Unless we are willing to “own” our sins–without any reference to our extraordinary number of accomplishments, including ending slavery, and inventing representative,  Constitutional government–and confess ourselves inferior, then we are subjected to vicious bigotry and hate speech, particularly by our self loathing own.

I’m proud to be a white man, and the descendant of our Founding Fathers, of Newton and Galileo, Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, Shakespeare, Mozart, and Plato. I see no reason not to be proud.

Historically, it seems to be the case that Sub-Saharan Africa is the only major cultural area which never invented the wheel.  This seems to be the case because they invented slavery so early on, and thus had people to carry their shit, that they never really needed it.

Extraordinarily, many stupid young Americans seem to think white people invented slavery.  No: we ended it.  No other culture has objected to it, of which I am aware.  Even the Native Americans–many if not all of them–kept slaves.  And Muslims in large numbers are taking and keeping slaves even to this very day, not just in the Middle East, but in Africa and Malaysia.

I read Jill Stein is collecting more, and yet more, money to ask for recounts in three States where there is no evidence of fraud whatever.  The closest count was in Michigan, where Trump won by more than 10,000 votes, and that has been counted twice.

This is unprecedented in the modern era.  Nothing like it happened in the 20th Century, and as I said, Gore only asked for a recount in Florida, where it was extremely close.

PARTICULARLY given that Hillary made a campaign issue out of accepting the results of the election, the hypocrisy stinks to the high heavens.  It is unbelievable.  At a minimum, she is not making public appearances telling people to go home and accept the election the way she said was right and proper when she thought it was Trump who would be doing the losing.

This whole thing is destabilizing, and the opposite of graceful reconciliation.  Jill Stein is showing herself a partisan, unpatriotic hack. I have had a few nice things to say about her.  I retract those.  She has nothing to offer anyone, if this is how she stands on “principle”.  She is a shallow, disingenuous, self interested nobody.

And again, imagine if a different result occurs, perhaps by them stuffing unattended ballot boxes with fake Trump ballots, to enable them to fraudulently claim fraud? I think literal fighting in the streets, with real death tolls, is not beyond the pale.  We used the ballot box to fight our war, and we won.  To have it taken now for any reason will not be pleasant.  It will mean the government no longer belongs to the people.

These assholes should stop all of this right now.  It seems likely all of it is in any event useless, but it is certainly unprecedented, destabilizing, and the opposite of what THEY THEMSELVES proclaimed proper behavior.  Their lies are on full display for all to see.  No genuinely decent human being can any longer associate themselves with such a classless, disrespectful, whiny, contentious, criminal enterprise as the Democrat Party.