Month: June 2018

Trauma leaves a mark, which “sounds” emotionally like a car alarm that never shuts up, and “looks”, emotionally, like a light which won’t stop blinking.

This becomes a part of what you call “life”.  It is what life IS, to you. And contemplating the notion that it will ALWAYS be like this is what leads, I think, to self destructive behaviors, to addictions of all sorts.  It’s not just that it bothers you now, but that it may bother you forever.  And much of this happens at a preconscious or unconscious level.  You may not know why you are wild and reckless, but some part of it is likely just wanting the fucking thing to STOP.

Kurt Vonnegut called smoking a socially acceptable form of suicide.  But it is a slow suicide, not an honest suicide, but it is still trending in that direction.  You are feeding the part of you that wants to die, because life is painful.

Many who live choose the path of death early on. They don’t do it consciously, but there is some part of them which is always tearing things down and tearing them up, which is relentless in its own domain.

To want to live is to feel affection for life, for yourself, and for everyone else.  This is the natural goodness Peter Levine talks about.  I am getting occasional whiffs of it.

I was thinking about what Obama left behind him:

A $9 trillion increase in our national debt, with nothing to show for it.

A healthcare bill which was passed on a strictly partisan basis, which failed in all the ways it was predicted to fail, and which delivered none of its alleged benefits.  We were not able to keep our doctors, most of our premiums tripled, many policies were cancelled outright, and it nearly forced a massive consolidation of health insurance providers, which were blocked by the courts on an anti-trust basis.  The numbers of insured increased a bit, but only because having a policy was made a legal necessity, causing people who may well have had a reason not to be insured, such as excellent health and an adequate bank account, to get health insurance anyway.

A Middle East on fire.  The deal with Iran merely delayed their pursuit of nuclear weapons.  It did not end it.  For this we gave them massive amounts of literal cash, and apparently access to as much as billions, all covertly.

The war in Syria would likely have ended long ago if Obama had not fanned the flames by funding, training and arming what became ISIS, one of the most horrifically violent groups of human beings ever seen.  There is nothing in the worst parts of human history which was foreign to them.

A completely lawless Libya, and a greatly expanded war in Yemen.

A huge regression in race relations, and in respect for law enforcement, all in tandem with a metastasis of violent and radically intolerant hyperpartisanship.

The subversion of multiple Federal agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the ATF, the Department of Justice, and the EPA.  He rewarded and promoted partisans who favored his political goals over integrity, professionalism, the rule of law, and common decency.

A stagnant economy.  He presided over the worst recovery since the Great Depression, despite the Fed pumping $50 billion a month into its member banks for 4-5 years.

This is a short list.

People remember him, who supported him, as a “classy” guy.  But I was thinking this morning about this whole birth certificate issue.  He could have had it released at any time, the original. Public documents can be made public and to argue otherwise is to betray, in my view, imbecility.

There are only two possible conclusions for this decision.  The first, and most likely, is that he had something to hide, most likely that the Communist drug dealer pornographer Frank Marshall Davis was his father.  And if we grant that, it becomes much easier to believe it was his mother who posed for all those nudes with him.  That he was 20-30 years older than her also adds to the fucked-up-ness of it all.

The second was that he was playing politics, that he saw the “Birther” tag as a way of scoring partisan points, and if he made it go away completely that it would cease to be a political asset for him.  This is possible.  But that is the opposite of class.  That is an asshole move.

All in all, it is a blessed MIRACLE we got Trump.  Look at all these goons in the street. Imagine if nobody was fighting back.  Imagine if our President was egging them on.

And I get completely how vast a disaster this was for the radicals.  They spent 3 decades or so building up their apparatus, doing it quietly, disingenuously.  They learned to pretend to be normal people.  They learned to keep their true views private, and their public rhetoric moderate and unobjectionable.  And under Obama they got themselves embedded everywhere in the Federal apparatus.  But they need a leader who supports them.

Trump can’t wave a wand and make these people go away.  It seems most likely he learned early on that vast changes in vast organizations rarely succeed.  Gradualism is the way.  But that he is pursuing his agenda quietly, seriously, and on a daily basis I have no doubt.

It is the knowledge of this dripping which is driving the Left insane.  They can’t stop it.

This whole “children being ripped away from their mothers by evil Trump” thing will blow over.  The people who usually forget can be expected to forget.  The media which can only fan flames in one place for so long will move on to something else. 

But this particular spasm, where I could feel the waters of emotions rising, rising, rising, will fade, and more people will wake up.  They will shake their heads, and wonder why they were so hysterical, why they were shouting so much, NOW, when they didn’t care about the same problem when Obama was President.

Relaxation tends to follow tension, in even moderately healthy people.  You can’t be completely wound up all the time.  It’s not possible.  Even on the Left they only rarely reach fever pitches like this.

This whole thing might have been fantastic if it had happened the last week of October.  But it is June.  I can’t say of course if the media had been holding this in their pocket, and pulled it out to counter Trump’s success with North Korea, and the very ugly charges in the IG Report which make it no longer really possible for reasonable people to deny the FBI has been politicized, or more generally that something we may as well call a Deep State in fact exists.  There is a referent.  Trump was right.  He’s right about a lot of things.  He speaks the truth.

You can’t run long term campaigns purely on emotion.  It fizzles out.  This is why John Wooden taught his player to avoid the highs, so they could also avoid the lows.

We are in an informational war.  We have two cultures which have evolved next to each other, one based on our history, certain foundational principles, and ethical ideals like fairness, hard work, responsibility, tolerance and the like.  The other, of course, manifests more or less as a collective neurosis which abhors all unwanted truths, which refuses to demand of itself consistency in behavior or principle, and which is maintained through a continual drum beat of outrage and self congratulation.

Small daily truths, spoken from on high, as Trump’s position gives him the ability to do, are anathema to these people.  Trump is no monster.  On some level they have to realize this.  Who he is does not even REMOTELY warrant the revulsion, anger, and violence they direct at him.  Truth is like a bell which exorcises demons.  It is unbearable, physically painful to them, and he keeps speaking it clearly and regularly. 

And my best guess is that when this wave finishes sweeping over us in a week or two, a lot of people are going to wonder “what just happened?”  Why did I call my friend a fascist?  Why did my blood boil so hot?  I call myself generous and tolerant, but I don’t want to remember all the ugly, nasty, awful thoughts I just had. None of this makes sense.  Where did it come from?

Yes, it is awful that Trump supporters and people who work with him are being attacked again.  But in the long run, this works to our favor.  It is indefensible.  All of these charges of bigotry and corruption are not even good lies.  They have no serious basis for even the most open minded of people to consider them remotely justified.

If we keep doing what we have been doing, the tide will begin turning.  Yes, the maniacs will get worse, but at some point the knife edge will have disappeared, and their screamings will be met with equal and even superior responses so often they will begin to realize how it feels to be a target, and some may just begin to feel some remorse.  One can hope.

It’s a hard fight, what we are doing.  Not easy.  Painful.  Difficult.  But very, very much worth it.  We can built not just a great nation, better than we have ever been, but a great world, too, and a great future for humanity.

It occurs to me  that it would be an interesting practice if bars offered vending rooms, where you pay, say $10 with a card for access, so you can just sleep off your drunk there.  You avoid the risk, as a bar owner, of a lawsuit, and it’s very convenient for those who have overconsumed.

I dream a lot of dreams.  It is apparently a very common male fantasy to own a bar.  One of my concepts is a “Bar at the end of the world”, which would be cantilevered, like Falling Water, over a chasm of some sort.

Another is “On the Good Foot”, where we specialize in old school soul, and play James Brown at the top of every hour, and everyone has to get up and dance if they want to keep getting served.

To follow up on a comment I made a few weeks ago, Communism is in effect the Ancien Regime under new management. The core oligarchic claim is retained, the right and duty of the rulers to dictate the beliefs of the ruled, and their right to demand submission by force is unchanged.

Yet the restraints which, say, Louis the 16th had on his power are eliminated. Traditional moral codes are gone. The church is gone. Tradition itself is gone. The second, third and fourth Estates are gone.

Rather, power of and for itself is the only true dominant principle.

Pondering this, I got to thinking of a recent series of assaults I endured from a thoughtless Leftist, who was telling me how awful America is.

And it occurred to me that the essence of conservatism–when the word is used, as it currently must be–as a synonym for a true Liberal–is conservation. It’s reasonable to ask what is wrong with our nation, what we are doing wrong, or have done wrong, but it is also worth asking what WORKS, what is going right.  What, in other words, needs to be changed, AND what is worth keeping?

There is nothing in any liberal democracy which requires complete destruction. All of us, all modern liberal nations, have evolved. There is no historical nation these people can point to who are blameless. Certainly no European nations who are or have been powerful, and certainly no Asian or South American nations. Anti-Americanism depends entirely on ignorance, a reckless disregard of facts, and an absolute spatial and historical decontrxtualization.

Then it HIT me. The dominant emotion of the Left is disgust. Disgust, unlike resentment, is a primary emotion. Sade was addicted to the feeling of disgust. This feeling is what connects all this. Leftist do not feel pity, say, for blacks, but rather disgust with people they NEED to be hateful, so their disgust makes sense.

I may have said this before,but if so I forgot. There is something deep and relevant here.

Empathy really has two components. The most natural, easy, real and obvious is sympathy, where you feel what other people feel because you have felt it.  When they are happy, you are happy with them, when they are sad, you can relate, because you have been there.  Your capacity for empathy is closely related to your own capacity to feel your own feelings consciously and openly.

And it is possible to feel honest empathy for big problems.  You can care, actually care, about world hunger, or water scarcity, or the plight of women, and either be aware of it with no present capacity to do anything about it, or you can work to alleviate these problems.

The world is filled with misery.  It seems many Americans, particularly young Americans, are completely unaware of this, and assume–to the very limited extent they think of anyone else at all–that most of the rest of world lives basically the same as us.   This is, of course, ludicrous.  Injustice, racism, sexism, misogyny, abuses of all sorts, and profound poverty are more common than their contrary, in much of the world.  I read, for example, that African Americans, as a group, would be the 18th wealthiest nation in the world.  As a group, they are doing MUCH better than nearly all Africans, economically.  But you would never know it.

And misery has to be contextualized.  I felt genuine pity and rage when I saw the Yazidi women in cages in Iraq and Syria, in a war Obama clearly furthers, if he did not start it outright.  They put them in cages and set them on fire.  They made many thousands of them sex slaves, even ones as young as 10, which was the Koranic age set by the example of Muhammad. I feel pity for all the girls who are forced into sex slavery all over Asia.  I was talking to a woman who had worked with Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, and there prostitution is a family business which goes on, generation after generation.

I felt pity reading about the orphans in Brazil, which are probably still a big problem, who were living homeless in the streets, and being hunted down and killed by police death squads.

I am a student of history, which in no small measure is a study of human misery, most of it completely unnecessary, most of the result of arrogance, greed and stupidity. I am no fan of arrogance, greed and stupidity, and can be counted on to oppose it where I see it.

Which brings me to the place I was bound to go.  It feels like there are interrogators who have lined us up and are going down the line with clipboards and asking everyone:  DO YOU FEEL EMPATHY FOR THESE MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS, YES OR NO?  If you answer yes, of course, with no reservations, then they move on.  If you say “Yes, but . . .” anything, then you are yelled at.  YOU ARE A MONSTER, A MURDERER, A RAPIST, A CRIMINAL.  YOU ARE A HATEFUL EVIL HUMAN BEING.  THERE ARE NO NUANCES HERE. YOU ARE WRONG, YOU ARE WRONG YOU ARE WRONG.

And I am left to recall they had this opportunity for outrage when the pictures were first published–if I am not mistaken, by Breitbart.  Back then, especially if it was Breitbart, these same people would have dismissed–indeed DID dismiss–these claims out of hand as “right wing propaganda”.  They are not interested in human rights abuses committed by their people.  This is why they took no interest in ISIS, or Obama’s role in helping create that horrible, true monstrosity (which seems to have become irrelevant, since I have not read about them in some time).  This is why they don’t care about Pakistani rape gangs, or the crimes of Communism, or any common sense abuse of human dignity, common ethical standards, the rule of law, or anything else which would outrage anyone with a truly intact sense of empathy.

Here is what I am thinking: what they are truly doing is interacting with their own notion of self, via an imagined, puppet, interlocutor.  In Martin Buber’s terminology–and he may have discussed this specifically, although I can’t remember, having read the book long go–it is I and I via Thou.

What I mean is that they are interested in themselves, exclusively.  They are profoundly selfish, unempathetic, morally retarded people.  But nobody wants to think bad things about themselves. So they create this abstraction, the “Great Cause”.  At this exact moment in time, before they forget about it and move on in the next few weeks to something we have no idea we will be arguing about passionately at the moment, it is the separation of criminal parents from their children they have brought along in the commission of their crime.  Rather than ask to immigrate legally, most of them are abusing the provision of the law that allows them to ask directly for asylum if they show up on our border.  Since most of them just want jobs–jobs that have been wanting throughout Latin America because of systemic corruption, laziness, and a persistent tendency to vote for socialists in their governments–they are not truly refugees from anything.  They are simply demanding we give them something for nothing, which is not something any nation can do forever without courting disaster.

Be that as it may, imagine this screen in the mind of the typical Leftist, where they watch the movie of whatever social ill, or alleged social ill, they are presently focused on.  They visualize themselves sitting in that movie theater, crying.  And they react to this image by saying: oh what a wonderful person this is.  Look how MOVED they are by human suffering.  I really like this person.  He is a good person.  Most people are not like him.  I bet conservatives don’t cry like this.  They are not like us: noble, good hearted, generous, loving, compassionate.

Then there is this subtle flip.  Obviously I do a lot of emotional work, and I have noticed often there quite sequences where the middle segment is invisible until you slow it down a lot.  This is particularly true with long conditioned reflexes.

There is this moment where their unconscious says: you don’t give a flying fuck about those people.  You are unhappy, confused, angry, and emotionally isolated.  This happens in a nanosecond.  Then they respond with “I HATE CONSERVATIVES”.  It is self loathing, but it is directed outward.

Ponder how often you have interacted with self proclaimed “Liberals” and the MOMENT you disagree with them, they become enraged.  They go into a limbic response, into fight or flight.  What are you, then, to them?  You are an existential threat.  They have built a fragile bubble within which to live and which allows them to manage inconvenient, unpleasant, and ugly emotions.  You threaten that.  This is the core reality.  They use the language of love, but they don’t mean it.  They use the language of compassion, but they CAN’T mean it.  They lack the emotional depth for it.

I lay in bed at night and ponder, at an emotional level, how far we as a people–and I mean the West generally, and would probably include now most Chinese and Japanese–have deviated from honest, direct humanity.  I SEE, some days, how the relentless news cycle, the relentless distraction, the relentless superficiality, and constant hustle and bustle, separates us from our own core, authentic selves, and from one another.  We don’t just separate because we lack time: we lack time, all too often, because we make ourselves busy, precisely to make “bad” feelings we lack the cultural intelligence to process, go away.  This is perhaps the true root of Nazism, and is certainly the true root of its many progeny, including Antifa.  Emotionally intelligent people do not make cartoons of their enemies, put on masks, and then threaten them with violence in the streets.  These can only be the results of the willing acceptance of the worst impulses human instincts have to offer, those of tribal violence, emotional dis-integration, and the overall rejection of everything good the frontal cortex has to offer.

We can and should ask what the best solution is for these border families.  But one question we need to ask is to what extent we create a Moral Peril by not punishing, not disincentivizing these illegal acts.  There is misery down south, clearly.  There is desperation, clearly.  But there is misery and desperation in much of the world.  Much of Africa, if it were on our border, would be trying to get over.  Much of Asia, too.  We can’t take the whole world, and if we accept this logically, that there is no feasible way to accept EVERYONE who wants to come here, then we need to draw lines.  And one thing we need to make clear is that FAMILIES ARE NOT WELCOME.  Don’t risk the well being and safety of your kids to get here.  Stay where you are, and maybe even play a role in improving your own fucking country, rather than just call it a failed state and move here.  Yes, I get that this is hard.  I haven’t walked in their shoes.

But the flip side of this is that Americans have rights too.  By definition, people willing to commit crimes to get here are willing to engage in criminality.  Illegals commit crimes of violence vastly out of proportion to their numbers.  Mothers have the right not to have their children murdered, as has happened many times.

I read the Navy is contemplating building a quarter BILLION dollar facility to hold all these people.  Is this not money that could be put to use serving homeless veterans?  Could we not use this money to help the poor in other ways?

Every time you spend money on one thing, it is no longer available for something else.  Yes, you can borrow more, but this is how nations like Argentina keep fucking up repeatedly.  They don’t want to say no.  They want to try and do everything for everybody, and you can’t do that.  No sane adult should even try.

Well, that’s my rant for this morning.  I think there are some good psychological insights in here.

Edit: this was a completion of a post I started a week or two ago and had not time to finish.  The emotional tautology I=I, via Thou.  You could write it as I+Thou=I+Thou, where Thou is dropped on both sides, practically.

And self evidently, the movies being shown change.  There will be some new outrage in two weeks.  Count on it.  Everyone will feel the same feelings “spontaneously” and wonder why we are so awful that we are not mouthing the same words all of them are mouthing, feeling the same things they are feeling, and instead having the temerity not to agree with them fully, instantly, and with no conditions or reservations.

And I will add that I am willing to grant the word “liberal” to people who listen, who do not go into Amygdala hijack the moment they realize I don’t share their assumptions.

To take this concrete example, self evidently we can’t take in 5 billion people, which is probably the rough number who would benefit from being here, if their being here changed nothing.  That is the impossible limit on a continuum.  Short of that there is where it creates large problems.  Then smaller problems.  And there is a point where immigration, on balance, is a net positive.  There is a range which is negotiable, because all of us are guessing about the future behavior of this complex system.  This sort of negotiation is the point of Liberal society.  It is how we use our freedom of speech to find the optimal solutions to real problems.

And Milton Friedman, as usual, had a very interesting comment on this topic.  He notes that we used to allow unlimited immigration, but would never do so now (his now was probably the 1980’s).  Why, he asks.  And he then points out there is a huge difference between immigration to jobs, and immigration to welfare.  One helps, the other hurts.  One adds, the other subtracts.

And again, it is reasonable to ask what is most likely of those who disrespect our nation and its laws the moment they enter, in the very act of entering without permission, without being welcomed, without being invited, and particularly given how enthusiastically places like California add them to the welfare rolls because they are reliable voters.

I am increasingly feeling the underlying tension that makes me argue on the internet.  But I am also feeling how awful Leftists have always tried to make me feel for disagreeing with them.  They attack me.  They try to hurt me.  It is mean-spirited bullying, which has one purpose: securing my silence. 

Decent, sane people have no desire to engage in pointless arguments with emotional bullies who want to inflict emotional pain.  But this process causes such people–the good, decent people–to become silent, and that in turn allows the liars to dominate the discussion.  This rough dynamic is how we have gotten where we are at.  They force a choice between unpleasantness and allowing them to pretend there are no other valid views.  Normal people have no desire to get beat up verbally in public, so this dynamic works for them in creating the illusion of conformity and widespread support.

I will say more tomorrow or the next day.  I have some thoughts I want to share.

Compassion without wisdom is sentimentality, and the act of feeling is no act at all. It is solipsistic and masturbatory if pursued, as it so often is, as an end in itself.

And I will add that though I talk about feeling constantly, there is a vast difference between chasing feelings out there, and slowly sinking and inhabiting the rich natural environment you inherited by being born human.

There is a compassion where you give the homeless guy twenty dollars because it makes you feel good, and a compassion where look him in the eye, and smile in commiseration, that we are miserable and doomed, but that you are glad you are alive, and glad he is alive, and glad to see him.

People have ways of surviving. Never interfere with this.

I just saw more clearly than before how the Left uses the notion of an ideological spectrum as a propaganda tool.  Someone was posting a link showing all the various news sites and rating them.  Daily Kos was far left.  Ann Coulter was far right.  Al Jazeera was centrist.

The claim made is that you can’t trust anything from either periphery.  But consider what that does: it immediately moves you from evaluating truth claims and logical claims on their merits to looking first and foremost at the source, and it moves you immediately away from the serious consideration of truly conservative views.  It moves people immediately to the Left who might have been otherwise willing to consider conservative views.

Much of the propaganda of the last 50, perhaps 90 or so years (remember FDR had admirers of both Mussolini and Stalin working for him.  The Mussolini fan led the New Deal, and the Stalin fan came up with the theory behind it, and the name itself), has been oriented around redefining what constitutes a “moderate”.

I consider myself a moderate.  I am not opposed in principle to government sponsored social welfare, I am no longer a reflexive hawk, I support the legalization of most drugs, I support our police and military, etc.  My policies, of course, I have discussed often.

What I DO demand, though, is sanity.  I want a politics grounded in mature, sober, intelligent, and responsible thought, backed by competent action oriented around concrete, measurable results.  This demand, alone, drives a wedge between me and much of the ideological spectrum, between me and most Democrats, and between me and many Republicans.

Our political system is ludetic.  It is a game, governed by game like rules, which is not fundamentally interested in using the power of government to reliably and responsively improve people’s lives.  My tax money is not really an investment in my own well being, at least not a lot of it.  I like having a fire department, and police, and highways.  But our Defense apparatus is grossly larger than what we really need.  We don’t need the ability to project power in Asia.  Global Communism is dead.

I don’t want to rant too long.  I have things to do.  But the core point I wanted to make is that all truth claims, all logical claims, need to be evaluated on their own merits.  Yes, some news sites seem to lack credibility.  But all the major news sources have prostituted themselves at times.  The New York Times, which used to be, somewhat but not entirely rightly, considered the gold standard, has whored itself out to political advocacy repeatedly.  Simply because something appears there does not mean it is true.

The process of comparing multiple sources is an old one, but remains, I think, a good one.

But nothing will EVER take the place of critical intelligence, memory (vitally important in our Memory Hole world made worse by the loss of paper records as primary sources), and to some great extent, time and effort, thought and consideration.

There is no website you can go to which will tell “the Truth”.  To claim otherwise is already to engage in lies. I have my preferences, but I trust no one completely.

And I will point out too what seems not to be an obvious point to many: conservatives do not seem themselves as slanting one way or the other.  We don’t take “The Truth”, then spin it to our needs.  The Left does that.

We believe that our views accurately reflect the world as it is.  If Truth is centrism, then we are in the middle, and most of the current world is in various far off places to the Left of us.  Islamic Mullahs would be to our right.  We are the Liberals.  We are the moderates.  We are the protectors of political freedom, philosophical principle, and the concept of absolute human rights.  Everyone else is lying, or trying to roll these things back directly, as with Islamic Fundamentalists.

I found a new ability last night: the ability to reset a dream which did not play out the way I wanted.  I just restarted it.  At the flexion point, I simply made a new decision.

Last night I also made deep contact with my unconscious.  I will leave it there.  I am using beer as an analgesic at the moment, but I think would otherwise still not be inclined to share.

This life, what we see, what we feel: it is all a miracle. I don’t know how it works, but this feeling is good.  It is information of a sort.

In our world a full heart should mean a full mind.  There is no real excuse for emptiness.