Month: November 2017

How can anyone feel empowered who does not believe that some significant portion of their destiny is within their control?  And to be clear, for most of human history, most people were not free.  For this reason people learned to control their experience by learning to manage their thoughts, actions, and feelings, and this equates, itself, to empowerment.

There is nothing more disempowering than to believe that your destiny–all of it–is out of your hands, particularly when tied to the idea that the world is in general hostile to you.

I seek clarity of thought daily, because I see so little of it out in our public domain.

It is, to me, a psychological, psychodevelopmental truism that children need to individuate from their parents.  They need, in our culture at least, and I would stipulate this as universally desirable, to become their own people.

But in the same sense that Freud mistook the often very real sexual interest abusive adults took in children for their own fantasies–a politically driven but largely conscious error that still haunts us–I would assert that many parents have great difficulty in relinquishing the role of parent.

I was reading about the incoming class at Harvard a couple years ago, and most of these kids talked to one or both parents daily.  They never truly left home in some respects, not least because the parents did not want to let them go.

I would submit this is a two way street.  It is sad to see your kids go, but they are like an evolving work of art at loose in the world, taking continual new shapes and sizes and directions, which you cannot and should not try to control.  Build a strong foundation.  Instill common sense, pain tolerance, resilience, and curiosity.  These become their guides, not you.  Shit will happen, and shit should happen.  If they survive, they get better, hopefully, or at least different.

There is so much about life on this earth we do not know, but that it is about discovery, learning, and growth is to my mind an absolute fact.  Why should any parent keep their children from the game because they themselves never learned how to play?

I do think a certain amount of healthy selfishness is an absolute necessity for anything even approximating genuine liberality and generosity.  If you do not have a life of your own, you necessarily have to take it from someone else.  Their problems have to become your problems, because you have nothing else.

There is, in this sense, a fundamental homology between all-too-common helicopter parenting, and the leftist political orientation which underlies it.  They go together.

Put another way, the Democrats–even the ones who truly believe they are well-meaning–cannot let go of the blacks.  They cannot renounce their racist paternalism.  They cannot say “without us, they will still be absolutely fine.”

Life is about letting go.  Hold on to what is truly your own–your way, your truth, your path–and allow everyone else to do the same.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jfp0_vIn2U

He argues that Republicans are openly predatory.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but I’m sure in his mind he considers this something they can deal with.  Blacks can organize, get smart, fight back, punish people for trying to take advantage of them.

He argues, though, too, that Democrats are actually worse, because even though they too are predatory, they pretend for a time to be the friend of the black man and woman.

What do they want, the interviewer asks, the Democrats?  They aren’t getting rich.

Votes.  He says, although of course any member of Congress who gets through a term or two always seems to manage to be vastly more well off financially when they leave than when they got there, even though they are only “serving the people.”  It really is great work, if you can get it.

And how do you get it?  By promising the sun, moon and stars.

And when you fail–and this is very much the case after 8 years of Obama, the first two years of which included Democrat majorities in Congress–what do you do?  Do you take responsibility?  To take stock, and ask if what you are doing is working?  FUCK NO.  What you do is blame facts and reason themselves as racist.  You make it so you cannot be held to account on any standard whatsoever other than lack of popularity, which you ensure through relentless propaganda campaigns.

I have asked before, and will ask again: where are the black leaders who are not just using the plight of blacks to line their own pockets?

Malcolm X was not shot by racist whites, like Martin Luther King Jr.  No, he was shot by blacks.  In my view–and the full back story has to my knowledge never been told–his crime was his honesty.  He was calling the corrupt corrupt.  He was calling liars liars.  He was calling fake leaders fake leaders.

If I myself were black, there is no doubt in my mind, the way I am wired, that I would be a huge Malcolm X fan.  He was the only one telling it like it was, not just to white America–which MLK Jr. also did–but to black America too, telling them to wake the fuck up, and stop entrusting the hen house to one fox after another.

And I will underscore his point that all the other black leaders he know had the support of white Democrats.  An honest black leader does not, thus, just undermine corrupt blacks, but the whites who use them for their own elections and reelections, and to satisfy their own lust for money and power.

It seems psychologically obvious that much of the affection millenials feel for the notion of Socialism is quite literally a desire for lifelong paternalism: they want to leave their actual parents house at some point, but never lose that feeling of being continually protected and sheltered by other people.  They never want to grow up, in other words.  They never want to risk and lose, and hurt, and cry, and learn from it.

I won’t dilate too much on all this, but I did want to offer one idea which has helped me, personally.  All their lives I have taught my kids to take calculated risks: not stupid ones, but ones where it is not certain things will go their way.  One of them has taken it farther than I am comfortable with.  I tell them to take risks, but I am terrified every time they do.  Going rock climbing scares me, even when it is introductory, and they are not leading, which is where most accidents happen.

My personal belief is that we choose the broad arc of our lives.  I believe in life after death, life within death, and logically this means that my children’s lives, like mine, are their own.  If they chose terrible fates, that was their choice.  They don’t belong to me.  Their lives do not belong to me.  I can offer them shelter when they request it, but both are relatively fearless, and while we enjoy seeing each other, they don’t come crying home, ever.  If life deals them a blow, they just deal with it.

My oldest was a bit upset the other day about a bad grade on a quiz, and I was dishing out the usual platitudes “life always has a path.  Failure doesn’t define you, etc.”  And she got MAD at me, because I was helping her accept a B in that class, and she wasn’t prepared for that.  She wanted to fight HARD to get the A, in spite of her fuck up.

I was proud.  She had no time for me helping her accept failure at any level.  One of her parents, at least, did something right, but part of that she was born with.  It’s not me, it’s not her mother: it’s her.

I can actually honestly say that as a parent my proudest accomplishment is giving both my children the space to become exactly who they are, and who they were meant to be, and watching them slowly become absolutely unique.  I–and their mother, too, although we each have different relationships with them–presented all the support they needed, and no barriers to leaving and growing far beyond the walls of the home they grew up in.

What did Black America get for electing America’s first ethnically African-American President?  Poverty rates in the black community were as high or higher in 2016 as they were in 2008.  Crimes rates seem to have gotten worse.  Dependency on government went up.  Unemployment remains horrible, although it may have been marginally worse in 2008 in the immediate aftermath of all that screwing up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here is his legacy: he changed our public discourse, by making Alinskyan methods of demonization, insult, and misdirection common, and practiced daily from on high.

Before Barack Obama, you would not get called a racist for no other reason than disagreeing with a Democrat preaching bad ideas which were known as such 50 years ago.  Now, it is the first recourse, followed by as many other non sequiturs as needed to halt the attempted dialogue from a position of assumed moral superiority.

No black people are helped by this.  On the contrary, this system of propaganda makes ACTUAL solutions to real problems impossible.  We substitute football players taking knees for substantive discussions and the intelligent, outcome-focused policy such discussions make possible.

The entirety of his intent, and his concrete success, as seen from the Luciferian perspective Alinsky so proudly embraced, has been to make dialogue less common, more coarse, and to mainstream violent and dehumanizing rhetoric.  Put another way, to push all genuine liberals out of the public space if they don’t want to be attacked.

What Obama built was language.  What he provided was language, a manner of speaking.  And this was what the talkers who put him in office wanted and expected.  He delivered.  But is it not ODD that nobody really tried to figure out how he actually benefited the group–blacks–one might most reasonably have expected would be his focus?  After all, what other difference could having a black President make?

This is the vital point: for people who confuse language with reality, no facts are ever needed, nor can they be, at the level of principle, which is why it is perfectly consistent of the complicit media to ask for no reckoning.  What they wanted, they got, clearly.

Just as Marx never left his library to do the muddy business of talking with workers, today’s media employees–I won’t use the word journalist, since it may still be possible to redeem that word someday–have all they need reading speeches, tweets, and public proclamations.  Their work is managing the dialogue, not learning about the real world, or real people, much less helping them in any way.

If you have to ask how hot 5 is at a Thai restaurant, it is too hot.

If you feel the need to compete with random strangers at the gym, you have already lost.

There is a benefit to combining stretching with the notion of Hygge.  As I mentioned a week or something ago, I’ve pulled out my old Bob Anderson, and resurrected for my own purposes the concept of stretching as pleasurable, as something to look forward to.  This is in marked contradistinction to the notion of “don’t go in the pain cave”.  I have his book too, and do do rolling which is quite painful sometimes, but I have decided to do random Bob Anderson routines a couple times a day, gentle to the point where I am almost just THINKING of the stretch.

Stretching is a bit like dealing with people.  You push too far, they contract, and everything gets harder.