Month: February 2017

I have not followed this thing closely, so what follows may not be all that clever, but fuck it.

As Jonathan Haidt posits in his Moral Foundations Theory,  moralities the world over seem to be built from 6 basic building blocks, the essentials of which we are born with: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, Leftism claims to care about Care and Fairness primarily.  What is missing is a sense of the sacred, and a sense of loyalty to that sense (rather than to specific people and causes).  There is for them, as one obvious example, nothing sacred about the flag or America, or even democracy and freedom.  They will use these words sometimes, but they don’t mean them, or even in my view understand them.

What seems to have happened in Standing Rock is that the Federal government and the people behind the pipeline solicited questions and concerns for several years, and never heard word one from the Standing Rock Sioux until the pipeline was more or less at their front door.  The pipeline had been rerouted multiple times based on feedback from other tribes, or concerns about undiscovered graveyards and the like.

Additionally, as all the Standing Rock Sioux know, the water intake they currently use to provide water for their reservation will soon be decommissioned and a newer one 7 miles downriver from the pipeline installed.  What they also know is that the pipeline is being built in clay 92 feet below the river bad, which is considerably more distance than is required, and than is normally done.  So both the risk of a leak, and the risk to their water in the event of a leak, have been meliorated.

What seems to me to have happened is that the tribal chief got the bright idea of shaking down the oil company, by staging protests they knew would draw national attention (no doubt they called the reporters to make sure), then more or less asking for protection money to keep the pipeline rolling.  But the pipeline people didn’t give in.  What instead happened is hippies started showing up en masse.  From second hand reports I read, the chief has wanted them gone for some time.  They are a bit embarrassing, and likely making life around there much less peaceful.  But he can’t tell them to leave.  They came to support him and his tribe.  So he is kind of stuck.

Now it was obvious to me that Obama ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to do whatever they did to stop construction–the Commander in Chief is after all in charge of the Army, of which the Corps is a part–and that Trump would start things back up, which he will.

But here is the point I wanted to make: it is not OK to be a proud white person in this country among leftists.  It is not OK to hold your religious beliefs as sacred and untouchable.  It is not OK to love this country, warts and all, and view patriotic effort as a sacred duty.

It IS OK, however, and even extolled, that one feel guilt for crimes you didn’t commit, which your parents didn’t commit, which no one in the entire history of your family committed, and with which you have no connection other than the fact of your birth in a political entity called the United States.  It is also OK to support others–literally anyone else but white people–in their own sacred sense of their own place and people.  It is also OK to feel more loyalty to THEM than to your own people.

So what seems to have happened is that mythic nerve was inadvertently struck, and hordes of aimless, lost, confused white kids are showing up to protect people who do not really need protecting, and who really don’t even want to be “protected”, but who don’t know how to end the party.

Some of these kids are so emotionally involved that they will spend years in jail, for real crimes, for nothing.  The pipeline will be built.  There won’t be any spills, and even if there are, it is a manageable problem.

It is very important to know who you are and what you believe.  And it is very important to develop an internalized sense of self worth, such that you can differentiate between people who really need you, those who are using you, and those you are both using and being used by as fellow codependents.

They say some wounds never heal, and this is likely true for most of us, but it hit me today that their texture does change, and that they are best viewed as a thousand mosaic squares–some of them black, and which will always stay black–but some of which are colored and interesting.  Scars–and I have more than my share–are not just indicative of pain, but of learning, of deepened experience, of potential wisdom.

Two thousand years later, Jews still mourn at the Wailing Wall.  The loss still stings.  But the question can and should be asked: who would they have been if that had never happened?  Not who they are, certainly.  It what ways did Jewish culture evolve for the better?  There is no more animal sacrifice.  That to me is good.   And they are a race of geniuses, having a share in something like a third or more of all Nobel Prizes, despite being considerably less than 1% of the worlds population.

I was contemplating my belly the other day–that is the word, regrettably–and I was suddenly aware that it had a thousand little communities, a thousand different, differentiable, places, contacts, textures, colors.  This image is where I pulled that visual from the first paragraph from.  I realized that far from being monolithic, all parts of me partake in this sensation of being composed of many small pieces.

For their part, the Buddhists break space, time, and self into small pieces as well.  Everything is both discontinuous and connected, depending on your perspective.  But so often you have to push things to one pole to see the other on a spectrum, or to see the spectrum at all.

It is odd to recollect that modern day Turkey–or most of it–was for some 1,000 years a place where Greek was spoken.  So was Syria.  I knew this, but have never really thought about it.

As I think about it, this notion of deriving pleasure from making people happy explains a lot of Trumps behavior.  He loves doing guest bits on soap operas and WWF, because they make people laugh and smile. They are entertaining.  And the whole deal with The Apprentice was making an engaging show which people enjoyed watching.  With, in other words, making people happy.

Trump, unlike most Leftists, has never considered himself a saint, a messiah, or even a positive influence in anything but business.  He is what he is.  He says what he thinks, and always has.  Part of that is the New Yorker in him, and much of it is simply how he’s put together.  He has healthy self esteem, doesn’t feel the need to apologize for who he is (although I think he likely does laugh and smile sometimes at some the things thrown at him he knows are true), and these are all good traits.

What I DON’T think is really a big motivating factor for him is a need to always be the center of attention. Yes, his towers have his name on them.  Yes, he has enjoyed the limelight for decades.  But I think he sees himself as part of a bigger show, one with many more personalities he is happy to welcome onto the stage.

He is not a narcissist in my opinion.  He thinks about other people a lot.  He is unquestionably at times selfish, especially in his infidelities, but he is capable of recognizing the many individual worlds he shares this planet with.

He differs in this, in my view, from Barack Obama, who was some combination of convinced by others and by himself that he was unique, wonderful, and a gift to humanity, despite patent intellectual mediocrity, muted passion, an unserious attitude, and an aversion to hard work.

I have had dreams of the last 3 Presidents, and had one of Trump last night.  I have written about them, and will not again here. I do feel I am powerfully psychic, potentially.  I am about a 75% believer in astrology, even though I admit I have no idea how it may work, and 7 of my ten planets are in water signs, including both Sun and Moon.  I also have a water trine.  Lots of feeling.  Lots of perception.  But those abilities are kind of on hold.  If I can’t manage my own emotional world, how the fuck could I manage an assault of the worlds of those around me?  That will all need to remain mostly latent for a long time, and perhaps never be fully expressed in this life.  I would view that in any event as more a curse than a blessing.

Be that as it may, what I saw was a man who dedicated his life to showing people a good time, who is at his happiest watching over a landscape of people eating great food, drinking great booze, in a beautiful setting, laughing and having a good time.  This is the outcome he loves.  He is married to his work, and that is the only marriage he has ever truly recognized.  He needs a woman–a beautiful woman–at the end of the day to help him wind down, but he is an extremely driven, extremely passionate man.

For her part–and I have never seen the wife before–I think Melania is often lonely.  After his fashion he does love her, but his work is his true love, and if she does stay in New York, it will be because she may as well, for all the time she will spend with him.  I think that tape may have hurt her too.  He may have already been married to her when that discussion happened.  Certainly, she must wonder what has changed.

Trump is obviously no angel.  He is a hard driving man, but in his own way he is an archetype of the self made man.  This is an American archetype, the tycoon.

In effect, what Trump is trying to do is take this sense that everybody should be happy and having a good time and apply it to practical politics, and apply it nationally.  We should all welcome this with open arms.  It is good.  It is a good passion to have in the White House.

I am trying to lay off politics a bit, but can’t resist a couple more comments.

First, though, on politics: what it occurs to me is that political obsessions are the perfect deflection mechanism.  There is ALWAYS something to be mad about, something to be passionate about, something to take your focus away from inner core dynamics and push them to the periphery, and instead focus on something always changing, always evolving, and which can and does continually provoke emotions.  Politics in this sense is much like sports.  And as far as that goes, our political opinions matter, practically, about as much as our sports opinions, which obviously is to say not at all.

Obamacare: what SHOULD have been done originally is obvious.  Rand Paul has sketched out a path to middle class freedom from the tyranny of bad policy.  It is all simple.  But by design Obamacare also created a complex system of rewards for voting Democrat.  Subsides were handed out, Medicaid expanded.  It seems to me that the most politically effective way of ending Obamacare without creating a massive rallying cry for the Democrats, is to figure out either a path to migrate the people who did benefit from Obamacare to something at least decent and defensible; or to simply grant this money to the budget and find cuts elsewhere.  That process could take some time.  It is highly detailed and complex, as all large intrusions of government are.  I am perhaps making excuses, but if there is a delay, my HOPE is that this is the reason.

Neil Gorsuch: I read he was privately defending what we might call the Thin Black Line, from Trump’s warranted comments on judicial activism.  He is quite right, of course, that the judiciary should not be politicized.  But I wonder about his intelligence in apparently not grasping that it IS politicized.  As Thomas Sowell apparently said in 2003 “One of these days the 9th Circuit is going to rule the Constitution unConstitutional”, and the specific ruling which proceeded it was no better.

The actual law is very clear.  There is no ambiguity.  Foreigners are not protected by our Constitution, and Federal law grants the President very broad discretion in deciding who he is going to let in.  All forms of discrimination–of discriminating one sort of person from another, of making or perceiving a difference–are allowed.  We all must grant that in complex situations sometimes it is necessary to treat people as groups, in the manner the Left does ubiquitously and daily, albeit in their case to uniformly affirm the absolute virtue of anyone who is not one of us, and the uniform and absolute corruption of all white people.  Nothing racist there, obviously.

And the Supreme Court, where Gorsuch may land, is blatantly politicized as well, and has been at least since the time of FDR.  The Four Horsemen stood their ground for a time, but the tide was too great.

We can applaud the sentiment, but again I wonder about the wisdom of someone protecting a boat which sailed long ago.

As far as Trump, he faces a gale force wind.  I was in Wally World yesterday and every single magazine and tabloid at the check out lanes had something in exclamation points, and in general negative about Trump or his daughter and her husband.

I said the fighting would be house to house, room to room, and I hoped I would be wrong.  I was not wrong.

But Trump has the passion, the courage, and the habit of determination that should get us all through this period, get much useful work done, and hopefully at some point a grand national party to celebrate.

I’ve been pondering who the alcoholics are in my last post.  Blacks, obviously, since the Left–which consists in large measure in white kids (and the “adults” they become biologically) who grew up in comfortable homes and relative affluence–presumes to speak for them, but never does anything which actually HELPS them.  And for their part, many blacks continue to vote Democrat, in a never ending acquiescence to being hustled again and again.

But more generally, the people codependent people logically flock to are those who they can claim most need them, who are most marginalized.  As I was reading today, Muslims seem to be the new in-group, despite the fact that Muslims themselves are racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and like to kill gays.  This doesn’t matter.  A grand cause has been found, a mass movement, someone NEEDS US, the Left cries.

All of this is grotesquely pathological and psychologically unhealthy.  To call it unprincipled would be too generous, since the very concept of a consistently applied principle other than Us/Them eroded decades ago.

Basically the Left as it is evolving consists in fuck ups, people who are not American, people who hate us, and dysfunctional, mainly white, people whose sole source of meaning in life comes from knowing there are people out there they can “stand up for”, even if those people are bad people, and even if they don’t actually need that “help”.

Ponder this analogy. I  think it has a lot of psychological merit, and explains a lot.

And consider too that the politics that flow from this mindset are purely emotionally driven, and have NOTHING to do with improving any human life, lightening any real burden, with genuine tolerance or compassion, and that the whole thing is dripping with self loathing and following hatred of everyone else and the world.

When we speak of codependence, we usually speak of an unhealthy relationship based on unspoken lies, in which one unhealthy person gets their needs met by caring for someone else who cannot or will not take responsibility for their actions. The benefit to, say, the drunk father, being cared for by his daughter or wife, is obvious.  But what is the benefit to the care-giver?

One, they get a simple morality.  Their job is to care for this person, and they become virtuous in doing it.  Two, they are able to marginalize their own lack of emotional development through constant attention to the other.  They don’t have to be authentic because they are needed.  Three, they get to feel superior to the person they are caring for.  This is not hard, but this silent condescension is I think an important aspect of it.  They are handed self esteem on a plate.  These are on the plus side of the balance sheet.

But they are trapped on the other.  Outside of this relationship, they are helpless and alone.  They have a world of inner turmoil that has been at a slow boil all their lives.  They have to live in a complex moral world where the right decisions are often not obvious, and integrity demands considerable perceptual work be done to even approximate a diligent goodness.  And the world doesn’t care about them at all.

Obviously, these sorts of unhealthy relationships do not develop overnight.  Mild alcoholics can become more severe, and then yet more severe, especially if somebody is picking up the messes they leave.  Constantly the decision has to be “in or out”.  And if the decision continues to be “in”, rationalizations have to enter, boundaries have to become blurred, the difference between right and wrong made problematic, lies have to be told.

I have been alienated from my brother since childhood, because we lived in a home where we both hid.  But I remember a specific moment, sitting at a kitchen table, in a “family meeting”, where I basically gave him a simple decision: side with me and sanity, or side with them and lunacy.  He chose them, and I have had little honest to say to him since.

These moments are like what Edward de Bono called “catchment areas”.  When rain falls on the ridge of a mountain, if it falls 1′ one direction, it flows down one side, into a river far away.  If it falls 1′ the other, it can flow into an entirely different system.  The Continental Divide is a great example of this.

Likewise, seemingly small decisions can have enormous consequences.  One small lie, can lead to another small lie, which leads to bigger lies, which leads to an entire world view built on sand, which requires continuous reinforcement.

I have from time to time mentioned “Judgement in Nuremburg”, and the Nazi judge, played as I recall by Burt Lancaster, who asked Spencer Tracy “How could I have known it would lead to all this?”  Tracy replied “you knew the moment you sentenced the first innocent man to jail.”

What I am feeling in the current emotional landscape, which is being emoted with political language, is that the Left is a big fucking codependent family.  This is their only family.  This is the only home they know.  They have spent countless hours lying and rationalizing and ignoring their own acknowledged moral standards, their own truths.  They sided with the alcoholic.  They cared for him because they needed him.  And now they don’t know what to do.  They don’t know who they are.  They have no benchmarks for honest moral judgments.  Their assumed superiority is unmasked as simple cowardice and self delusion.  And they stand naked to all the feelings that this cult allowed them submerge in outwardly rational activity oriented around what they were able to convince themselves was useful activity.

Where can they go?  Well, for starters, they could return to genuine Liberalism, to standards of thinking and behaving, to demands for honesty and integrity, to effective policy.

This is a whirlwind we are living in, a demented, demonic whirlwind.  I don’t know when it will stop, and it seems likely to get worse in the short and medium terms.  But it is sick as hell, and we can only thank God these fascists are not operating under Hillary’s protection.

I have always assumed, as I think most people do, that the psychic damage of having an alcoholic parent comes mainly from seeing them drunk, from their failure to do their jobs as parents, from alcohol induced emotional instability.  No doubt this is a big part of it, although I do think every alcoholics relationship with alcohol is personal and unique.

But the more I think about it, substance abuse in any form is really just an Emergent Property of a dysfunctional system.  Alcoholics drink because they don’t know how to manage their emotions, those particularly of fear, pain, shame, guilt, sadness and anger.  People talk about angry drunks.  Well, those people were already angry.  The alcohol just brought it out.  They drank to let it out, because they did not ever develop the emotional tools needed to process it and express it in healthy ways.

I have long said I am the child of two alcoholic parents who didn’t drink, and I continue to believe this is a reasonably accurate description.  There are many people in this world who are vastly more fucked up than the worst drunk you ever met, and have simply learned to hide it from the world, and in most cases from themselves. I would go so far as to say that in some families, the drunks are the healthiest ones, because they have retained an awareness of unbearable contradictions everyone else has simply learned to conjure away in reverse hallucinations.  They appear to the world satisfied and happy, but on the inside it is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  And the children of those families are asked: but your parents are so NICE.  What is wrong with you?

This is a virtually impossible question to answer for those who have not lived it.

I have spent most of this week alone, silent, living with who I am at my core, doing simple chores, sleeping a lot, and it seems to be bearing fruit.  The buzzsaw at my core seems to be winding down.  It is, after all, tired after all these years.

If you have no cave to retreat to when you are hurt, you learn to carry the cave with you.

I am realizing more and more that the process of emotional rehabilitation and growth is mainly doing less, not more.  You do not overcome fear.  You simply let it go away.  You do not overcome anger, or indolence.  You simply stop being angry, and start allowing your life energy to be productive and useful.

The act of relaxation is being alert and aware, but without any added complicating emotions.  It is being present.  That is what I am working on.

I thought I would do my small part to spread awareness of the plight of a badass women currently, apparently, incarcerated by the fucking Danes because violence, even in a great, noble cause, scares them, because they are pussies (no insult intended to this woman who has much bigger balls than I ever will):