Month: July 2018

I read they are keeping Paul Manafort in solitary confinement.  Knowing nothing else, one would assume this is to “break” so that he can either give them dirt on Trump, or MAKE SOME UP.  These are Communist/authoritarian tactics.

Reading the comments on the story, the ghouls are applauding. They keep talking about “Russian collusion”.  How are people this fucking stupid?  I’m serious.  This is not a run of the mill cognitive error.  This is not an easy mistake to continue making for 18 months.

1) ZERO evidence has been produced that Russia influenced the election in any way, despite what likely amount now to hundreds of thousands of hours of determined–even desperate–effort.

2) MUCH evidence has been produced of corruption within the CIA, FBI, and DoJ generally.  We can trace the genesis of the dossier which led to Mueller’s appointment, and it is all FAKE.  It is not just fake, but fabricated for the EXPLICIT purpose to which it is being put, which is to damage and sabotage Trump however possible.

What fucking hope should any sensible person have about the future of this country when lies like this have legs that last this long?  Has everyone lost their fucking mind?  Or is it just the troglodytes on the comments page, who are hoping to drive  away in despair anyone who has any vestige remaining of decency or the capacity to think?

Trump’s winning notwithstanding, I am wondering if I don’t need to find some new island home somewhere.  So much stupid.  It boggles the mind.  Truly.  These are college educated people buying lies that should not pass a five second sniff test.

It occurs to me, as I wake up, that abstraction is a defense strategy, but as such things go, it is a reasonably healthy one.  I am not openly abusing people, most of the time.  And if I do, it is in an intellectual way, in which I try to stay on topic.

Well, if I’m honest, yes I do like to do my best to kick left wingers in the nuts sometimes.  In my considered view, they deserve it, and as pathetic an excuse as it is, most of the time they start it.  However, also in my considered view, this approach does not improve the world in any way, or change any minds. I am able to use abstraction to back off and ask myself if what I say am doing matches any perceptible, connectable outcome in the real world.  I am able to use abstraction to develop a reasonable approximation of how far unprocessed emotions caused me to deviate from effective action.

But, and I’ve said this many ways, there can be rage in abstraction.  Marxism consists in nothing else.  As an individual, if I look at a person sitting in front of me and see only my picture of them, this is violent.  It is a sort of violence.  And it is no different if I look at a “society” the same way, or any part of it, say a “class”.

100 years ago wounded intellectuals expressed their violence through extensive rationalizations that resulted in millions of actual deaths.

Now, though, it seems the husk has fallen away.  The rationalizations have fallen away, and the violence amounts to “you’re not like us, therefore you must die.”, which, of course, is the most primitive tribalism imaginable. Abstraction and principle have nothing to do with it.

It is an odd fact of modern Leftist intellectual thought that much of it has been devoted to its own destruction.  It is almost as if, at an only mildly preconscious level, they said “we are tired of hiding our anger and rage; let us evolve a means of getting at it more quickly.  If we evolve new ideas, we will need to defend those ideas, but if we attack the notion of truth, the need to defend any idea disappears.  This short circuits this particular loop, which only ever existed to enable us to lie to ourselves and the world about who we are. As long as we maintain group unity, we no longer have to go through that exercise any more.  Our hate can shine forth pure and true, and all we have to do is call it justice and tolerance, which is easy because words now only mean what we intend them to mean.  This is a beautiful solution.  It sparkles on the outside, and we can hide as many dead bodies on the inside as we want.”

At some point, of course, all the Communist regimes evolved into de facto postmodernists.  The gap between their stated aims and the reality of what was actually happening was too much.  They lied to the outside world, of course, who were kept in the dark about many things, but among the core elites, they simply revalued words such that all potential contradictions disappeared.

The manic and completely unhinged rage of the Left as it exists now–which is more or less synonymous with the Democrat Party, since senior leaders Maxine Water and Nancy Pelosi are doing far more than their share to stoke it–is vastly worse, vastly more pernicious, than anything Joe McCarthy ever contemplated.

For now, the Left lacks the power to drive everyone they don’t like out of every place they occupy, but when they are threatening to put a knife through the heart of liberal lions like Alan Dershowitz, you know that if they had the power, they would be hounding people everywhere in the country, ruining them, forcing them to leave the country, destroying their reputations and everything they eve worked to build.

There was nothing like that in the 1950’s.  That would have been too far even for the John Birch Society, which rightly–as history shows us–predicted an on-going infestation of leftist authoritarianism in our politics and our universities and eventually society.  They were not beating people up in the streets, even people who manifestly deserved it. 

I will never forgive the anti-war left for stealing a hard won victory in the Vietnam War from our troops, and from the long suffering South Vietnamese, whose lives were torn apart and in hundreds of thousands of cases ended outright.  Where was the outrage when the victorious Stalinists started ripping husbands from wives, children from parents, and sending them to gulags where many died?  Is it bad to rip a child from its screaming mothers arms?  Not if you are a Communist, or a fellow traveler.  That is part and parcel of the job.

No, this is new, unique.  It is a mania vastly worse than even that of the Civil War era, because in that era both sides at least understood the situation clearly, and differed on matters of principle.  One side maintained the nation must be preserved and all secession treated as treason; and the other held that the States were superior to the Federal government, and that secession was inherently implied, if not specifically authorized, by the Bill of Rights at least.  And I will note their case never saw the Supreme Court.  The legal status of their secession was never settled.  This is why Jefferson Davis was never tried for any crimes, and was eventually released.

No, now the Blue Meanies scream and shout and shriek for roughly the same reason that children do, when their mother tells them no.  I wish this were a gross exaggeration, but it isn’t.  How are we, as a nation, to create a situation in which emotional and intellectual children can be encouraged to grow up, to become sane, rational, mature, sensible adults?

I don’t know.  We will just need to see how things evolve.  It does seem likely that the trickle of desertions from the Democrats has become a torrent.  Chuck Schumer sees this, but he is surrounded by idiots.

I was in Best Buy the other day, and wandered into the gaming section, and listened to one of the “super real”–or something like that–headphones they had on display.  It was playing something blatantly designed to tug on your emotions.  Such things of course are a staple in most video games.  They occur at key moments, but they occur regularly.

And it occurred to me how this whole thing is like an emotional sledgehammer you get used to being bludgeoned with continually.  All nuance is gone.  And as I’ve said before, this is a push: you are not reacting naturally and organically to something or someone in your actual physical environment, but rather to something engineered, non-organic, and designed to be emotionally and visually addictive.

Why would not an addiction to strong stimulation, to overwrought emotions. to wild swings this way and that, not manifest politically?  Why would it not make it easy to people who have learned to inhabit this world to consistently take the most extreme positions, even on issues they know nothing about?  Why would it not reward ignorance with the stability of certainty, and replace warranted caution with reckless anger and rage?

Clearly, this happens.  The same morbid little trolls who do everything in their power to hurt people on the internet are in the next shooting and maiming people and creatures on their video consoles.  It is one simple continuum.

But more subtly, they might be watching horror movies, or watching thing blow up, and heroes deliver simplistic and absolutist moral tales about violation and revenge.  Always revenge, any more.  Most Americans are addicted to this notion of revenge, and that it would play out against Trump supporters should surprise no one.  We have been trained to need villains, and if for whatever reason you can’t accept they are outside our borders, then they must be here, and the rest flows logically.

There is a phrase “sometimes you win and sometimes you learn”.  Logically, learning, if done properly, leads ultimately to more winning.  And “winning”, logically, can consist in learning.

It is important to measure what you know in some way.  Winning is when you test it and can prove you do in fact know what you thought you knew.

But in the end, the ultimate metric is your relationship with yourself and others.  How harmonious is it?

What I feel is that so many of us freeze our energy at a certain point, and only allow outward movement.  The foundational notion of Kum Nye is that energy in motion will always evolve and organize itself.  The motion is first.  The learning is second.

But an openness to learning is what enables the movement in the first place.  You have to say “I don’t know what I know, and I don’t know what I don’t know.”  This is where it begins. 

And how this is done is by regularly sitting down and listening.

I don’t think most people remember humiliation as humiliation.  I haven’t, until recently.  But I was humiliated, often, for many years.

For many men, I think it breeds hypermasculinity, or at least an obsession with hypermasculinity.  For me, I read a lot of military books, and studied a very violent and often physically painful martial art.  I had an obsession with weapons from a very early age. I wanted to be in the military, but I have very bad eyes, and a bad back (scoliosis).  When I enlisted, the eyes kept me out, but the back likely would have too.

And as I contemplate it, the whole of military training, as it exists here in any event, but presumably everywhere, consists in the “indoctrination” phase of ritual humiliation.  This humiliation is intended to generate a compensation in the direction of hypermasculinity.  Death before dishonor, which is to say, any form of figurative castration.  To stand out in any way, in a military formation, is to be castrated, to be made to feel inferior.  This applies, obviously, to women as well.  Women can and obviously do feel “Male” feelings.

But what is interesting to me here is how these things are hidden and transformed and forgotten.  Marines no doubt remember everything that happened to them, but they remember it with pride.

WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION NUMB NUTS!!!! 

C. Lee Earney obviously earns his living in this movie, and indeed earned it in real life as an actual drill instructor, humiliating people.  His job is to attach them to an image of themselves which is more powerful than their fear of death.  This makes them willing to die for abstractions.

And consider Spartan training.  Young boys–I forget the age, but it was between 9 and 13 when they entered the Agoge–all had a man who was their master, and this relationship seems often to have been sexual.  The end result: effective warriors.  The means?  Perhaps making these boys feel like little bitches with something to prove to the world.  That would be quite sufficient to generate a powerful drive to fight and kill.

I need to ponder all this for myself, but put it out here for you to ponder too.

Meister Eckhart once wrote, if memory serves, “Nothing is sweeter than to have suffered.”  I read that many years ago, but it stuck with me.  It justified the pain I inflicted on myself, and it explained the pain I could not otherwise explain or, until recently, even feel.

There are two aspects to this.  One is that suffering teaches.  When you are happy, you tend to be complacent.

At the same time, misery is not the goal.  The point is to HAVE suffered, for it to be past tense, for it to have been an education you undertook and completed.  Self inflicted wounds are not the same as those inherent in life, and inherent in doing the work of inner healing and the growth of wisdom.

And stupidity, emotional stupidity, is a form of pain.  Once you get through it, a second wave of regret comes upon you, and cannot but do so. This regret, this pain, justifies or at least explains much stupidity: it is protective.  To grow beyond it is to face a wave not entirely unlike nausea.  You have to rewrite your past, and to see what might have been, but you could not then see it.

I woke up this morning after a, for me, not bad night, considering I didn’t drink.  And it took me a good thirty seconds to a minute to remember where I live and how I got here.  I live in a contingent place, not a home.  I live alone, and it occurred to me for the first time ever that I might have a roommate or two again, not to pay the rent, but for company.  I have mistrusted people at such a fundamental level for so long, and needed such a large protective buffer, that this has never occurred to me, believe it or not.

We all grow older, and some part of this must be seeing with new eyes the past.  I don’t really know how I could have done things that differently, given who I was then.  It is a miracle I can see any of this now, in fact.  My destiny, absent the excruciating work I continue to do, was numbness alternating with anger, profound blindness, and irremediable solitude.

Slowly, slowly, slowly the clouds lift, and you see not just what is, but also what happened.  This process, too, is a life within life, which is the point of human existence.  Finding out who you REALLY are is something very few are ever able to experience.  I live in rocky terrain, but there is sunlight too, and the occasional waft of fresh air.

Like most Americans, I’ve never really been much of a fan of soccer.  If you are talking football or baseball or even basketball, there are lots of stats, lots of different formations.  There is a lot to know to comment on it well.  Now, this may be true of soccer, too, but less so, it seems to me.  It is much more like hockey.  You just watch a puck or ball move around randomly for a while, then every once in a while the damned thing goes in.  If this happens six times in a game, that’s about as good as it usually gets.

But I was watching a local match more carefully the other day, and there were these guys in odd costumes beating on drums.  There were lots of people singing.  The shouting was nearly continuous.

And it occurred to me if you feel the need to go yell, you can go to a soccer match.  If you want to sing some song with 500 other people, you go to a soccer match.  If you want to be beat on a bongo, or blow on a horn for 90 minutes, you go to a soccer match.  Whatever energy you need to let out, you can do it there, and it DOESN’T MATTER, really, what is going on on the field, although of course winning is better than losing.

When everyone is in unison, they are connecting to one heart.  It is this feeling of one-heartedness so many of us sorely lack.  It is certainly the reason fan is short for fanatic, why so many people get so emotional about for profit athletic entertainment business operations with clever branding.  The Pittsburg Steelers ARE a team.  There are also no doubt hundreds or thousands of people involved in managing the day to day business affairs.  The actual players are likely one tenth or less–probably much less–of the operation.

People need synchronizing symbols.  There is an energy when a group of people is activating their energy at the same time in the same way.  There is a truly mythic and ritual energy in sports, for a great many people.  And this is healthy.  The games themselves mean nothing.  The ritual, however, is important for many.

I am tempted to say, and I don’t think I am exaggerating here, that if you took away the sports team from many people, the reaction would be indistinguishable from that if you burned down a devout Christians church.

People find reasons to believe.  No, that is not quite right.  People find ways to find one another.  That is much closer.

Ponder, meditate on, the spectacle of being lectured on the value and importance of empathy by people exhibiting textbook narcissistic grandiosity, and emotional disconnectedness.  How does this work?  How do they not see the problem?