Month: February 2018

The Left likes to style itself as nuanced, as the side which avoids simplistic differentiations into good and bad, right and wrong.

But if you look more carefully, it is the conservatives who are willing to, as an example, admit honestly where America has fallen short of its ideals, but who are still fully engaged by the ideals embodied in our founding spirit and expressed concretely in our Constitution.  It is the political Left which wants to make of its enemies simplistic caricatures who are inherently evil.  There is no conversation wanted or needed.

Everything in their world is simple.  You want to end poverty?  Give poor people money.  You want to end gun violence?  Ban guns.  You want peace?  Get rid of all your weapons.

None of these political platforms are ever discussed honestly.  They are simply stipulated.  Being the intellectual equivalents of sugar cookies, they are tasty, simple, and easily washed down with a bit of cold milk.

But reality is complex.  It does not take much education or much experience to see this.  Conservatives are the only ones TRYING to solve real problems.  That is my honest view.  No one can claim to be trying to solve problems who is unwilling to engage with and understand alternative viewpoints. 

And as I have pointed out often, it is quite impossible to reach the age of 18 in this or any other industrialized nation without having had the simplistic propaganda of the Left fed to you daily for many years.  We GET what they are saying.  That is not the problem.  And speaking louder is no solution to the problem of intellectual incoherence and dishonesty.

I am a proud conservative.  I am proud to be INTELLECTUALLY superior to those who would want to argue with what I believe.

I got cable a month or two ago, after largely passing on TV for some 15 years.  It has long been a bit absurd for people to accuse me of being brainwashed by Fox, when I literally had no means of watching it.

I will tender an observation or two.

First, it is difficult to watch TV on nearly any channel for more than ten minutes without seeing someone shot, and/or handcuffed to a chair in some form, and interrogated.  You see it in ads for TV, with this show “The Alienist” making plain appeals to those fascinated by the horrific.  You see violence during the day, on substantially all networks, and with no honest or serious concern for viewers under 18, 15, 10, or even 5.

And of course most parents don’t care.  Family friends of ours were letting their kids watch “300” when they were under age 10.

There is a part of our brains which is unable to fully and completely separate fantasy rendered realistically from reality.  It is in fact our emotional involvement with the actors portraying fantastic scenes which makes watching TV, watching movies, an emotional experience, which pulls us out of mundane homes, while sitting on large couches, eating fatty highly processed food, drinking alcohol, and makes us feel–SOMETHING.

And this violence, of course, is interspersed with clever ads telling us that things and experiences will complete our lives, that everyone else is happy, and we alone something else, but that buying and buying and buying, sooner or later, will fulfill us.

Most Americans are being indoctrinated/acculturated by this medium up to 10 hours a day.  Many wake up to TV, eat to TV, and go to sleep to TV.

Now, obviously many commentators have pointed out how ludicrous, stupid, and complacent this feature of our culture makes us.  It makes us afraid, manifestly, as well.  But is it not worth asking how we can change this again? TV is not satisfying.  It can’t be.

And one particular recurring theme I would mention that I think is directly relevant to mass shootings, is that of the Man Wounded Seeking Revenge. I can’t recall the first movie which used this theme.  Some innocent guy–who just happens to be a total badass–is hurt by some group.  They kill his family.  They betray him.  They hijack his ship.  And from this flows the rationalization of an hour or two of violence, of people being killed in as many creative ways as the writers can concoct.  Pencil through the eyeball?  Fantastic.

This pattern, of reacting to wrong with massive violence, is in fact the logic of the mass shooting.  Some group called on Leftists to shoot Republicans in the wake of the shooting in Florida.  Same logic.

Always your enemies are somehow different in kind from you.  They lose their humanity. 

I can’t emphasize enough how much I think the REPEATED, continual reinforcement of this theme must be affecting our collective psyche.

Ponder, just for a moment, how our nation would change IMMEDIATELY, if all TV programming on all channels ended today.  Or even if we only broadcast actual history (rather than “Ancient Alien theorists believe the use of the circle in antiquity must imply alien visitation”), nature channels, and socially and emotionally complex dramas where most of the violence was psychological.

Small wonder, now that I think about it, that we are a nation of morons.

But what do we do about it?  This is the question, is it not?  How do we turn away from making things worse by making an already damaging system exponentially more harmful by making it fully immersive, via VR?

Who is still talking about this?  The Left talked about violence in the 1960’s (perhaps), 1970’s, and I’m pretty sure 1980’s, as I recall.  The Alan Alda’s and Sally Struthers condemned it, because politically much of it was unabashedly patriotic, and unabashedly in the service of black and white moral causes.

But all that has stopped.  We have famous actors like Alec Baldwin and directors like Martin Scorsese calling for the movie based on Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” to be made readily available because of its “artistic value”.  This is where we live.  More or less pure cruelty and violence counts as art, because violence is somehow seen as profound.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Violence is only profound to the walking dead.

I ask again, though: how can or could we start talking about this again?  How could we put a mirror to ourselves, and try to learn something?  This would have been the job of intellectuals and academics and political activists, but it seems that, across the spectrum, EVERYONE seems to like the status quo?  Why?  Can I ask that question?

I’m beginning to get the rudiments of honest self regulation starting up in me.  I have always gotten things done more or less by whipping myself into compliance.  It is very unpleasant, and it sets up conflicts within me which over time make me vastly less efficient.  I can’t enjoy work under those conditions; I can’t open up to it, and let it open up to me.

And I am realizing that, while you can’t undo the past, and what is done is done, it is equally true that the past is present to our understanding.  We can inspect it and learn from it.  By understanding the past, we can engineer better futures.

And in the same sense that an apology cannot be sincere if the behavior does not change, likewise regret–as the inner form of an apology, that from which an apology flows–cannot be sincere if no effort is made to learn from past mistakes. 

People, all of us, are pattern forming organisms.  We repeat ourselves.  The power of habit has enormous survival advantages, but only if those habits are adaptive.  Sometimes we enter life with good habits.  Sometimes we have to earn them.  Such of course is my own case.

If this is a crime, when committed by entities not legally allowed to operate in the US, why not indict the CIA and the FBI, or at least their Directors?  How is it that Rod Rosenstein, who is clearly GUILTY of it, is the one announcing it?

I will say again, future historians, if the record of this time is not erased, will wonder how so many people were made so fucking stupid.

How about if we compare the number of mass shooting deaths in the past twenty years, with the number of people killed either directly–by execution or exhaustion in a concentration camp–or indirectly through starvation or preventable disease, by the North Korean government the same people calling for gun control are praising?

How about we recollect the point of the second amendment, and compare the death tolls of rogue individuals with those of rogue governments?

I was told once, by a clever person, with regard to a woman I kept criticizing, “Methinks thou doth protest too much”.  He was implying I had a crush on her.  He may have been right.  I never did decide, but there was SOMETHING there.

And yesterday, I was reading a column arguing that a lot of evangelical ministers who can’t stop talking about homosexuality must have latent homosexual urges themselves.  This sounds plausible to me.  I remember reading about a hard core KKK member getting caught in public having sex with a black man.

So, obsessively, I first went to the obsession the Left has with Trump.  Here is the thing: to become a Leftist you have to renounce everything you knew, all semblance of home.  You have to kill all your natural impulses to love: to love our flag, to love “your race”, to love people like you, to love your community (if it is not politically compliant), and to love any and all traditions which somebody somewhere decides to take from you by taking offense at them.  You have to renounce everything in principle, never knowing concretely what “they” are going to take from you today.  You have to become a simulacrum of an authentic human being.  You have to become Other directed.

What does Trump symbolize?  The opposite of all of that.  He is Inner Directed.  He is an unapologetic patriot.  While not being racist, he feels no need to apologize for the white race, for our history.  Thus, he embodies everything the Left has suppressed and left for dead within itself.  This is why the strong emotion.

Then, trying to be honest, I had to ask about my own obsession with the Left. I am well aware of the continual, almost manic focus on these people.  I bore myself sometimes.  I’m thinking sometimes, “shit, here I go again.  I’ve probably said this ten times or more.”

Here is the thing with me: I would LOVE to be a Leftist.  It would make my life so much easier.  Almost all the women who interest me are Leftists.  I am a non-conformist by nature, and obviously a cultural critic.  I have never seen myself having a 9 to 5 for forty years, then retiring sensibly.  I have always felt wanderlust, and felt some kinship with the people who just can’t fit themselves in boxes, who can’t bring themselves to fully internalize–dare I say it?–bourgeois values.

In some respects my rational mind and my romantic mind are in conflict.  The rational mind has to win, logically, but that does not stop me from feeling what I feel.  So it puts me in an odd place.

And a big part of this odd place is wondering daily how so many otherwise interesting and intelligent people can be so fucking stupid.  I don’t get it.  I write obsessively about it, but at root I still don’t get it. 

So I remain a tribe of one.

The notion that you can be whatever sex you want to be is rooted in the notion that all truth is created by language.  All you have to do is declare black white, and voila, “reality” has been altered.  It is a magic spell  As I said some years ago, the “vibe” of Deconstruction is that of men in thick robes waving braziers of thick incense over a mass of people crowded into an old church. It is mysticism without spirit, a mystery bred in fear which never left it.

I was contemplating this morning the change in sexuality since the 1960’s.  Is there any more Mick Jagger in contemporary sexuality, when the most advanced tell us that it shouldn’t matter who has male parts and who has female parts?  I use Mick specifically because he was, and presumably still is, bisexual. He was willing to fuck anyone, but ONLY IF HE FELT LUST FOR THEM.

We are not being told ugliness is beauty, and beauty ugliness.  We are being told our every last natural impulse is fake, and the political demands of the moment the only truth.

In my mind, nothing further from natural love could be imagined.  It is the logic of the machine, where all parts accept their role in the whole without question, where individual volition and choice don’t matter, where “freedom” is merely a lie from yesteryear, and the manic compulsion to treat people–including oneself–as objects the only truth.

On his own account, Mick couldn’t get no satisfaction, even thought he tried, and he tried, and he tried.  But he no doubt had some really great sex.  What is there now, when so many people think playing dress-up amounts to a type of sexuality?  Sex in such a world comes to be, or so it seems to me, not a personal act but a political one.  Everything is political.  This is the main feature of the totalitarian mindset.

Fucking is natural. What we see on display today is not.  Everything, in all spheres of our lives, seemingly, is moving us steadily away from life and nature as they are, into manufactured realities on untold danger.  Opportunity, too, perhaps, but what we had was already enough.

Remember that “gun control” is synonymous with government monopolization of the effective means of using force.  Inherently, less guns owned by citizens, the less possibility of resisting potential tyranny.

Now, we are being bred to be risk averse, to be complacent, to do what we are told even when it is idiotic, to “trust authority”, and the like, and all of these matter too.  But large numbers of Americans continue to exist who were brought up like I was, and who think like I do.  And many of them are veterans and LEO’s.  Many of them are YOUNG veterans at that.

And I will share this video, too, because the propaganda organs of the Deep State will not: https://www.infowars.com/video-second-shooter-reported-in-florida-massacre/

Could she be covering for someone she wants to protect?  Possibly.  And possibly she is telling the truth, and this whole thing was manufactured based on the ready availability of a plausible patsy, and some hired psychopath managed to kill everyone he saw, then get away undetected.

I think the election of Donald Trump has made the existence of something most reasonably called “the Deep State” obvious.  The CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and others all colluded to interfere in our election.  They then participated in an “insurance policy” designed to, at worst, provide a major distraction to Trump, and hopefully help in mid-terms, and at best, enable an utterly cynical de facto coup through impeachment and conviction for crimes they knew he did not commit.  Mike Pence, of course, would then still be President, but Pence is not Trump.  And the whole thing would have raised such a stink they could use their howling propaganda organs to engineer a return to plan in 2020.

The final ascendancy of such people–as combined with the Artificial Intelligence they seemingly fetishize, and perhaps will not be able to control– is the most pressing existential threat our children face.  The liquidation of political freedom in our lifetime is a very real possibility, and it is clear that well placed, well organized, well funded and highly motivated people are trying to bring it about.

Given that, the presence of a well armed populace as a counterweight to the government–the 2nd Amendment CLEARLY being a part of the “checks and balances” system we all learned about in school–continues to be an absolute necessity.  Yes, I get that technology at some point might make all our efforts in vain, but until that point–and it is hard to know where and when it might occur–it is absolutely vital that the citizenry be empowered by law to resist ACTUAL tyranny with force if necessary.

17 dead teenagers is a bad statistic, but consider, as one contextualizing statistic among many, that 2,820 teenagers died last year in car crashes.  The entirety of mass shootings in the worst year ever–which may well be the past year–doesn’t come close to the car crashes, heroin overdoses (over 20,000), or even cancer (1,140 for ages 1-14)

And to my mind, the biggest issue here is the death of our cultural bonds, the death of communal feeling, the ease with which troubled minds can detach and attack their peers.

As I think about it, in the old days, it was always possible to find some conflict, some us versus them.  The Dagos hated the Pollacks, and everybody else hated them.  There was always some group your group could hate, could dehumanize, could attack verbally and sometimes physically.  The Jews were a common target.  Still are.

In an age where this instinct can find almost no expression, could we say that these shooters are creating their own tribe of one, that they are trying to create a sense of self through violence, as seems to be wired in us evolutionarily?

Where does the hate go, if we don’t process it, don’t get to the roots of it?  You can indoctrinate kids not to hate, but what do they do?  Patently, they hate people they mislabel haters.  This is a willfully disingenuous ploy on the part of some, but most are quite sincere in their delusions.  The problem has been masked and displaced, not solved.

It should be possible for every single living human being to have a gun on their hip, and still fear no one.  That would be a civilized nation.  Obviously, most would not feel the need to be armed if they feared no one, but the point remains.

The core issue that needs to be addressed, in my view, is the pervasiveness of emotional poverty.

What we don’t need is another marketing bonanza for AR-15 dealers.

I continue to have very evocative dreams.  It is as if the multitudes within me are slowly waking up, and I am remembering what I couldn’t see when it happened.

I was dreaming of a bridge where people went to kill themselves, and some part of me decided to jump off.  Some other part of me was left to wonder, with my ex-wife, what happened, to process the unfathomable.

We say, sometimes, “why did they do it?”.  But I think we all know, at some level.  Many of us, at any rate.  There are some sufferings which seem to skip over the more fortunate (perhaps the braver, or more clever) among us, but they land all the more powerfully among those of us left.

Denial is a form of suicide.  Dissociation is a form of suicide.  Chronic anger is a form of suicide.  Chronic depression is a form of suicide.  You are killing a life within you which was possible, but which cannot now be, which you don’t or won’t allow.

I have been contemplating in recent months the similarities of the Buddhist and Christian messages.  The Buddha might well have said “I am come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.”  Christ  might have said “your life, however wonderful you think it is, is suffering, and I will show you a better way.”

Both had a human and a divine nature.  For the Buddha, it was called Buddha nature.

For me, it is almost like traveling backwards in time psychologically.  I am seeing what I had to pay as a cost of psychic survival, what I had to lose, to sacrifice.  One was my marriage, which I never talk about.

But to be clear, all this is to the good.  Good things are happening for me.  I feel better and better every day.  I still have some hellish nights, but they are getting fewer and farther between.  The combination of Kum Nye and Neurofeedback is working well.

I am realizing that I am extraordinarily emotionally perceptive. I  see and feel everything, to a fine degree of detail.  And what I am realizing is that to LIVE requires, particularly of the sensitive, the ability to process and digest experience.  You can only see, can only feel, what your unconscious–your guardian–feels you can handle.  Most people can handle very little, and thus see very little.

One quote I saw somewhere the other day went something like “Most of us are born geniuses, but it is quickly trained out of most of us.”

My work continues