Month: May 2018

The way the Democrats want to define the school shooting narrative is an updated version of the old “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Specifically: “How many children have to die before you realize your policies are wrong?”

To answer this question in any way is to accede to it, and to LOSE to it. And I for one am tired of losing.

We need to ask Democrats to define, in detail, their own policy proposals and, critically, WHY THEY THINK THEY WILL HELP.

We have to “do something” they say.  Guns are bad, they say.  This is an emotionally rooted argument.  It depends upon the juvenile, even childish notion, that large problems always have:  1) easy fixes; that 2), are just a matter of passing a law.

But in every case many laws are broken many times before the shooting.  Many people KNEW this kid in Texas was trouble.  The girl he shot was telling her parents she feared for her life.  Is it really asking too much for the fucking school and fucking cops to visit his house, speak with whatever parental substitutes he might have, and find out if he has access to guns, and if so, to remove said access?

Never let other people define the narrative.  If you answer within someone else’s paradigm you lose.  And make no mistake: the hard core Leftists who have captured the Democrat party only think in Zero Sum terms.  Their win is always a loss for most of us, including most of the idiots who keep voting for them.

I have plenty of vitriol for Republicans too, but it is at least POSSIBLE to be an honest Republican.  It is not possible any more to be an honest Democrat, in my view, not if you toe the national line the Party leaders are pushing.

There is no psychopathy which cannot be hidden in abstraction.

Corollary: clear thinking is characterized by internal consistency, and intact modeling of the observable, external world.  If either internal consistency, or a real world referent are absent, the thinking is disordered.

Corollary 2: no thinking which presumes reason to be paramount meets this definition, since emotion clearly intrudes on all decisions and all perceptions.

Corollary 3: Rationalism, as the philosophical equivalent to Scientism, is inherently irrational and disordered.

Corollary 4: If presently thinking depends upon empirical notions currently unobservable–e.g. “God”, which as a term can be variously defined–but notes and includes in the thinking this fact, it can still be rational and reasonable, provided a means is pointed to to make the assumptions empirical, eventually, in some form.

I would comment as well that the God, as one example, of the Catholic Church, who is rendered quite human in many ways, and the details of whose existence are enumerated in many ways which are necessarily recalcitrant to observation, is no different in principle than the History of the Communists, or their present evocations of “white people” or “privilege”.

All of this is, from a formal perspective, nonsensical; or, to be generous, ideosyncratic and non-communicable.  I would add: ponder the word “nonsensical”.

Perhaps this makes sense.  Perhaps it doesn’t.  I am not imposing it on you, and you are free to modify these words, and what they represent to you, in any way you choose.  By all means: make it better if you can.

I have been having very interesting dreams lately, very qualitatively varied ones, dreams truly different in tone and content.  Some part of me is trying to school the conscious part of me.

I was a psychopath in my dreams last night.  I looked at the world as a predator.  My immediate problem was simply getting in control.  And it was simple: you have to secure means of violence, people to support you, and money.  A police department is actually one obvious place.  If you are going to be a psychopath, hide among those tasked with catching them (like the East Area Rapist).  All of these were logistical problems.  There were no moral considerations: only practical ones, like what you can get away with, and how you can get away with it.

What I feel is that at true psychopath feels about his or her victims roughly the way a lion does when killing and eating a gazelle: nothing–other than, perhaps, the satisfaction and pleasure of a successful hunt.  People exist for them.

But you can’t show this.  There is this hidden world, in which an elaborate act is conducted.  You can see CLEARLY that the world is yours for the taking, but learn early on that you can only trust this “knowledge” with certain select people, and your trust in them must be earned.

In my own case, what I feel is this is the flip side of my trauma.  Trauma sort of resets the psyche, by taking the frontal cortex off-line, or at least off-line intermittently.  What is left is much more primitive, and more or less clinically anti-social.  If you were to somehow convert a tiger to human form, and grant it speech, it would be a psychopath.  Concern for others not of its kind–and for a disconnected human, no one is of his or her kind, other than perhaps some few others dissociated in the same way, like Sade’s group of friends in 120 Days of Sodom, or Leonard Lake and Charles Ng–is simply not something that is present in predators, or at least in most predators, most of the time.

There are grades of dissociation, though.  What I feel is that the heart is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.  Morality, honest morality, is based on empathy.  It is based on feeling what others feel, and upon wishing them well the same way you wish yourself well.  It is based, to some great extent, on connection with others, and viewing their welfare as being as nearly or fully as  important as your own.  It begins with a primitive sense of your own value, of your own worth, of your own loveability.  No one who lacks this sense can spontaneously love others.  The model for the love of others is the love of yourself.  You cannot be cruel to yourself and genuinely love others.

What makes this confusing is the habit all of us form, to some greater or lesser extent, of pretending.  We pretend, to ourselves and others, that we feel what we think are morally appropriate emotions.  We cry when we are supposed to cry, feel compassion when we are supposed to feel compassion, say the “right things” when we are supposed to feel the right things.  Much of this is simply habit, social habit, which greases the social wheels, but which is disconnected from core truth formally.  Some people can be nearly 100% sincere, but others closer to 0%.  The outer form will look the same, even if the inner core can be clearly felt by those with the capacity to do so, and the willingness to see what is there, versus what they hope would be there, what they have been taught to feel SHOULD be there, and what would be there, if the people in question were 100% personally integrated.

This is the role of so-called Virtue Signalling.  I do think this is a good term for the purported moral activity of vocal leftists.  They are not just signalling to the world: they are using their words as an ersatz morality to serve in the place of moral feelings they don’t feel.

To take one concrete example: no one who is perennially enraged can possibly be acting from a place of genuine empathy.  It just isn’t possible.  Empathy is not something you can just turn on or off.  People who are genuinely open and receptive to what is going on in the world are likewise open to the feelings of the people they, at some level, feel might be responsible for some suffering they see.

And this is particularly obvious in large abstractions like “white people”, or “capitalism”.  What is happening is that they are reacting in emotionally programmed ways to ideas that are not even remotely the same as people, and which are utterly recalcitrant to being accessed through heart-based affect.  What such abstractions are are “PERMISSIONS”, for them.  They are permissions to open up the floodgates of horrible, nasty, violent, socially unacceptable emotion.

But there is no empathy there.  And I would stipulate that no political or economic philosophy which makes face to face negotiation and understanding between individuals unnecessary or even impossible, can possibly be understood as good.

The value of free markets is that prices are determined locally, between people who at least in theory could know each other.

And the value of what I might call “free market morality”, which is to say the continual negotiation of human relationships based upon a common interest rooted in mutual understanding and empathy, is that it can evolve, and can remain real for long periods of time.

Calcified moral systems, like religions and inflexible philosophies, create the continual opportunity for, and temptation to, hypocrisy, which is to say pretending.

Within my own world, the words YOU MUST, and YOU CAN”T were imprinted on my brain so deeply that they define me in some respects, or at least have.

In my youth I took a deep interest (to the extent such a thing is possible) in the Dada movement, which more or less a structured system of destruction.  It is an emotional impulse to tear down.

And I realize now that in my own case I was seeking this psychopathy, because there, at least, the ground is cleared.  YOU MUST and YOU CAN’T are gone.  Of course, you lose everything else, too, don’t you?  But I could not find a choice.  Many of us, when we look deeply, cannot find a choice.  It eludes us, because certain words and affects are carved into our very souls, or so it seems.

And again, all of this exists at the level of affect.  You can say whatever words you want.  I know one guy, who was molested by diabolical, evangelical Christians, who has taken to calling himself a “Positive Nihilist”.  He is an asshole.  He pisses people off and does socially destructive things, as a matter of principle.  It does not connect him, and it will never heal him.  He is not smart enough to find his way out (I may of course be wrong, and hope I am), but I understand well the problem he is trying to solve, in his own inchoate and ineffective way.

Within my Kum Nye practice they talk continually of finding your way, eventually, to a heart based life.  HeartMath, of course, takes that as their starting point.  I was feeling some weird anxiety the other day, and did my EmWave2 for 20 minutes, and I really did start to feel an alteration in my felt sense of how and who I am.  I stay in my head, because “down there” is just too fucking complicated.

But this dream feels like clear progress.  I got what I wanted; now I don’t need it.  That is how life works sometimes.

Few thoughts.  I don’t know if this makes sense, but some parts of it hopefully do.

It seems impossible for me to believe this has not been done, but one obvious beginning of an answer to school shootings is a “scorecard” to be created by behavioral specialists like Gavin de Becker which indicate the probability a given kid will become a shooter.

Both the Parkland and the Santa Fe shooters apparently sported Fascist and/or Communist signs.  The Santa Fe kid also apparently wore some satanic images.  He wore a trenchcoat every day. He apparently spent a lot of time alone in an abandoned mobile home.

Most of these shooters–perhaps all of them–showed signs indicating that acting out violently was at least possible for them.  The signs need not relate directly to threats.  It was found many years ago, for example, that most serial killers start as small time arsonists and torturers of small animals like cats.  If you’re killing cats, you have problems.

Likewise, some sort of rough algorithm can and should be devised for both schools and local police to narrow down who is potentially trouble.  Now, this list might be scary long.  This is a point I have made.  Just about every school in the country likely has several kids who might fit the bill.  We are a fucked up nation.  That is the long and short of it.

But early action is likely our best solution to this continuing problem.  None of these kids snap overnight.  It is always like water boiling.  It takes time, and it is not invisible in nearly all cases.

God, I have no idea where all this is going, but thanks for the ride.

I will add, on a related note, that what I am feeling is that trauma is like a horror movie where you just had to stop watching at some moment.  By now, most Americans have been acculturated to watch in movies the most horrific scenes of torture, murder, grotesque images, and other violence.  I saw a kid at Infinity War who could not have been older than six.  It was likely a single mother, and I felt some pity for her.

Be that as it may, the first time you see something awful in a movie, you cover your eyes.  You look away.  You just can’t stand to see it.  It is just too emotionally painful.  You get over this with conditioning, but that moment still happens at least for the more sensitive among us.  Certainly it happened with me.  I hated horror movies for a long time.  As I have shared, I forced myself to watch the whole Saw series and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and then called it a day on horror movies.  Watching those was useful.  As I have also shared, it reminded me of my home, at the emotional shadow level.

But to my point, PTSD is the equivalent in some real world situation.  You can’t physically pull your body out of the scene, and you may not be able to cover your eyes or ears, but you stop processing emotionally.  There is an increase in tension that reaches a fever pitch, then POP, nothing.  It all goes blank emotionally.  It is like it is happening to someone else.

To make the PTSD go away, though, you have to finish watching the movie.  You have to complete the loop.  In the real world, whatever the stress was, it has presumably ended, and likely ended long, long ago.  Stress can reach a high pitch, then come down.  Everything calms down.  The movie ends, and people walk out of the theater chatting.  But you never get to see that part if you are stuck.

One hypnotic technique I have read about is double dissociation, where you watch a mirror of yourself watching the movie.  You don’t even have to see the scenes the double is watching, but you do have to see that double watch it all the way through to the end.  This may be very effective for simple trauma. 

Complex trauma is an emotional loop.  What you are “watching” is a cascade of feelings which were utterly overwhelming at one time, which had to be suppressed and buried.  In principle, though, it is the same, with the difference that it is a kinesthetic movie versus one that you can confine to the visual and auditory pathways.

I feel this.  I feel this today.  The movie is starting to come back to me.

The Left seems to default to the “we have to do SOMETHING” argument about guns routinely now.  When they say something, the only thing they are willing to consider is some sort of law which makes it less simple for law abiding citizens to own some types of guns. 

Problem number one with this, of course, is that they never hide the people in their midst–usually standing right behind the ones pretending they are interested in moderation, that they just want to ban “high capacity” magazines, or “assault rifles”–who are calling for a complete gun ban and confiscation.  They aren’t even trying to hide it.  The supposed moderates have zero credibility.

Problem number two is that there is no evidence this will work.  I personally don’t have a problem raising the age to buy a gun to 21, but as a general principle, the guns laws we have are poorly enforced, when they are enforced at all.  New laws will do nothing.  The Left, because it wants a gun ban outright, has shown–as far as I can tell–something close to zero interest in making the background check system more effective.  As things stand currently, the way it has been explained to me, when you go to buy a gun the FBI has 72 hours to stop the transaction if it gets flagged for some reason when the gun seller puts in the gun buyers name.  If they don’t get back with the seller, the gun gets sold, no matter what.

One obvious fix is using Social Security Numbers for background checks.  It would make it quicker and easier.  I might even support using finger prints as additional backup.  These are policy question with philosophical, legal, and logistical considerations.  But the Left can be relied upon to simply focus on “we need to do something”, without saying concretely what that something is, or how it is expected to help.

And this is the core point I wanted to make: doing SOMETHING is the battle cry of imbeciles.  Anyone who has ever done anything in the real world–the one where your mistakes become YOUR problem, versus the one where all mistakes and their solutions are abstract and free of consequence for the person making them–knows that it is as easy to make things WORSE than to make them better. 

In both Great Britain and Australia violent crime went UP after the gun bans and confiscations.  If the goal is less violence, this is a massive fail.  And if someone breaks into your home in the middle of the night–home invasions were one of the crimes that went up significantly, in my understanding–brandishing a knife or machete instead of a gun, does that make the crime somehow less odious, less terrifying, less awful?  Of course not.  And given that that crime becomes more likely, this is a massive policy fail.

When you see this refrain “we have to do SOMETHING” what can reliably be inferred is that the person DOES NOT CARE about actual consequences, and is simply virtue signalling their submission to the dominant paradigm.

I feel narcissism, per my last post, is an effort for a person to make themselves whole, but an effort which fails.  It is a circle that never completes.  That is why it keeps on going.

And even where what I might term “clinical evil” is concerned–let us take as a concrete example the hockey coach who raped Theo Fleury 150 times–there is a process of trying to complete a broken self.  This coach was broken.  He would otherwise not have done those things.  What was done to Theo was likely done to him, in a cycle of meanness which no doubt goes back far, and which can and does restart spontaneously everywhere people feel afflicted, afraid, and in pain.

Obviously, I reserve the right to judge anyone for any reason.  But I also recognize that this is often not a helpful thing to do.  Sometimes there are better questions than “is this right or wrong?”.  An example might be “what don’t we understand about this yet?”

Or: if we were to accept this as normative behavior, what would the social consequences be, in the short, medium and long term?  Europe needs to be asking this question.  Even without absolutes, practical considerations–quality of life considerations–can easily and should be put into public and policy discussions.  A question there: If every third woman is getting raped in ten years, can this be called good by any standard whatever?  Is this fair to women?  Is this supportive of women’s rights?  Is this defensible in any way other than through mass deceit and censorship?  [no: the answer is no]

Few thoughts.  I am floating in an odd place.  I often feel unanchored, but this must be good, because where I WAS anchored sucked.

I feel love is a thirst for wholeness, a drive to wholeness.

My practice for this week includes a meditation on love, and it occurred to me that love is everywhere.  It is found in every activity where someone is trying to right some wrong, in themselves, mostly.

What we call evil is a person trying to make themselves whole by taking from someone else.

What we call goodness is a person who has found wholeness in themselves, and is trying to help foster it in others.

I feel today that compassion is the result of feeling your own pain, and not allowing it either to spiral into self pity, or get projected outwards as self righteous anger.

We do not feel compassion for those who are happy, do we?

If pain is the nature of human life, then compassion is a sharing which connects us, and makes it not quite so bad.

I feel, too, at this moment, how odd this blog is.  I’m fulminating about Mueller one minute, then posting things like this in the next.  I don’t claim to be consistent.  I categorically am not.  And I am no doubt often wrong.

But sometimes, I am right.

The more I think about it, this whole assault on Trump was supposed to be secret until the last moment, and then overwhelming.  They got Flynn, by not giving him a moment to breathe, reflect, and fight back.  They intended to get Trump the same way, but the operation was miffed.

Mueller was part of the con.  He likely knew he was scheduled to be appointed, if Trump won, several months before it happened.  But he, too, was supposed to act quickly.  They were supposed to mobilize all possible resources in such a way to overwhelm Trump and force a quick resignation.  It was likely assumed–manifestly inaccurately–that he really was a lightweight who was just playing a game he didn’t take seriously.  Why would Trump not just hit the road, if the road got too hard?  Of course, they were thinking he would quit all through the entire campaign season.

But now, Mueller has nothing.  His one guilty plea, by Flynn, may get vacated and has certainly been questioned.  Manafort’s charges may get thrown out, and he may get boxed in the ear by more than one judge.

Most discussion is focused on how Trump gets Mueller to quit.  The flip side of this is that Mueller HAS no way to quit.  He has accomplished NOTHING related to his core mandate, does not appear to be even close, has no way to get close, and also has no way to simply throw his hands up and say: Trump is innocent.  That would be much too embarrassing for someone who engages in competitive endeavors because he likes it.

So what to do?  I am almost starting to like watching him squirm, at least in my mind.  What brought this all together for me today was a headline on Yahoo showing Cohen with someone from, I think, Qatar, who is ACCUSED of corruption.  They can’t even place him with someone who is clearly guilty.

The whole thing has become a farce.  Mueller has egg on his face.  He is fucking up, and he can’t unfuck this thing, no matter how he tries.  And he stands a very good chance of making things even worse by trying to force things he should not be forcing.

Maybe he can feign a health problem. Or he could just do the stand up thing and walk away by concluding the investigation and exonerating Trump.  Don’t bet on that, though: he’s not a stand up guy.