Month: October 2018

You can bring a pig to water but you can’t turn them into a horse.

I just watched the Truffaut version.  I had never read the book. 

My takeaway is that it is ultimately superficial.  Bradbury, as a literary man, seems to think of literature as an end in itself, and a published novel which pleased someone to be inherently valuable.  I see no strong basis for making this claim, EXCEPT in contradistinction to, in being less bad than, a television addiction.

We all know TV makes people stupider.  At least that seems to be true, and a great many of us think we know that.  The internet, perhaps, is even worse.  I was playing yesterday with the idea of “Twitterthink” as something to be compared and contrasted with Doublethink.  I may develop that later, but I’m not at the moment sure what I myself think and feel about all that.

Be all that as it may, is Justine by Sade really a book whose loss human civilization should bemoan?  Lolita?  Anything by Sartre?

Here is the problem: the problem arises within the proposed solution.  We are told by public intellectual, by “literary sorts”, that we need to think, and to think we need to read.  But if I spent the next five years reading, say, everything by Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the remaining books on common Top 50 lists of various sorts, would I REALLY be that much wiser? 

I very much doubt it.  I think that, in terms of learning how to live intelligently, the Captain is not entirely wrong in calling it all retrogressive.  Postmodernism came out of all that.  Political fascism and totalitarianism came out of all that. 

The books, you see, created the book burners.  The book burners are merely the descendants of the book writers, who were also lost.

There is no merit in being publicly and articulately lost.

Vastly better to, say, memorize the books of Tarthang Tulku, the Dhammapada, the Bhagavid Gita, even the Bible, which I will note was unrepresented (although a similar theme emerges in “The Book of Eli”).  Certainly, certainly, certainly, the Tao Te Ching.

And my paradise is not a host of hypnotized islands of human beings wandering all day reciting books, but sitting in meditation, seeking to transform all their attachments into active energy and joy. It is singing, dancing, celebration, creation.

Why do we admire the people we admire?  Rather, why do good minds choose to fill themselves with mediocrity?  I read and listen to good books to further my education (I am at present slowly working my way through David Copperfield), but not out of any hope they will make me much wiser.  I do think the thesis, I believe of Stephen Pinker, that books build empathy is likely true.  This is to the good.  But empathy only goes so far, and meditation will build it more reliably, more deeply, and in most cases faster.

There was a time after the Second World War when much of the West seemingly fetishized authors.  We can ask why, and I think the answer is BECAUSE THAT WAS ALL THEY HAD.  They had already killed “God”, they were examining an unimaginably horrific conflict, and all they had left was aesthetics and creation.  Then they killed aesthetics, because they couldn’t come up with any more ideas, and to a great extent that is where things stand today.

These are my views, at any rate.

If certainty is an analgesic, dogmatic ideology is heroin.  It is the last stop.  It is a cessation of fear through a cessation of life.  It is a creeping coldness, which some come to love and need.

Life is uncertain.  But we cannot allow this fact to cause us to constrict what remains.  If you shrink from what may be, you lose what is–all of it.

We are surrounded by waves in an endless sea, which vary in direction, and vary in intensity.  We bob up and down, we are moved here, and moved there.

But in the end, we can always choose what we see.  We can widen and we can shrink our perceptual horizons.  We can destroy or ignore miracles, or we can feed them.  This is a choice given to all of us.

We are told “always believe the woman”.  I ask why.  What group of human beings of any sort is ALWAYS truthful?

But things become more clear when you change the categories.

How do you feel about “always believe the men”?

Or “Always believe the white person”?

Or “Always believe the person in authority”?

Or “Always believe the black person”?

There is a reason our court system evolved to work the way it does.  When evidence must be produced to support claims, then you get less false claims, and are entitled to feel better about the ones which survive.

I do think that many men have gotten away with terrible crimes.  I know several women who can say this.  This is awful.

But it is also awful, as I’ve said, engineering a system in which women can blackmail and extort men any time they want, requiring only modest skill in dissimulation.

All women know that other women can be petty “triflin'” bitches.  They fuck with each others minds continually.  And so I can’t say it surprises me too much, although it does a little, how vehemently so many women have come out in support of Kavanaugh.

No ones career should be forced to hang at the end of a rope created by a few crocodile tears and a small bit of planning.

I am struck from time to time how I am living out the future of my past.  We are in Future land.  We hit the Dick Tracy watch and kept right on going.  Flying cars are being worked out.  Hoverboards exist.

But it’s hard to process the feeling of this.  I almost said “to know how to feel”, but that’s really an odd phrase, isn’t it?  As if we can choose how to feel.

In the face of all this uncertainty, though, I think anger and intellectualism are safe refuges.  They take us OUT of this place and time, but in doing so they create some stability.

I see something every day to be angry about.  Don’t you?  Don’t we all, on every particle of the political spectrum?

And is not the news nearly 100% abstract?  Are we not always reading about people in some other country or city saying things we have not witnessed?  Has the whole world, outside of our small circle, not become abstract, and do we not even then make our own small circles abstract?  When you see a group of girls–it seems more often to be girls, although of course I am generalizing–sitting around, together, but each on their phone texting someone else–they, too, have become abstract to each other.

A robot is an abstraction of a human being. It is what a human being would be if you took all emotion, and all physical need out of it.  Does this abstraction make it perfect?  Of course not.  Not to me.

Abstraction and the cult of efficiently go together.  Jacques Ellul pointed out, back in the early 1960’s, how the cult of efficiency was a peculiarly American form of propaganda.  We ingest it, and we rarely question it.  Well, the hippies did, and the slackers do, but they more or less oppose it because they want to remain perennial children.  They have nothing creative to offer as a genuine alternative.

But I think this whole background needs to be noticed.  It is the backdrop of much of the rage so many people feel about so many things.  Fear leads easily to rage, and it is really impossible for anyone who thinks and feels not to wonder where this is all leading, if our world will still exist anything like it does today in 20 years.

So we shout and scream at each other.  Anger both presumes and breeds certainty, and certainty–even a little, even for a short time–is an emotional analgesic.

Trump renegotiated NAFTA, as he said he would.  We have new, and although I have not studied the details, presumably better deals with both Canada and Mexico.

China reduced or eliminated a variety of tariffs, which is what victory in a trade war–or threatened trade war–looks like.  China needs us to pay her bills, and keep her people from accomplishing a successful revolution against her tyrants and ruling oligarchy.  Trump rightly judged their position, and took steps to do what no American leader has done, ever, which is open up their market to American exports.  The goal, remember, is INCREASING free trade.  I keep seeing imbeciles fail to grasp this.  It is not complicated to understand that if one side enacts a host of barriers to trade, that trade is not free. And if they pay no consequences for those barriers, there is no reason to change them.  Trump got this calculus, did some math of his own, and implemented policy which is even now acting to bring those walls down.

North and South Korea are removing landmines on the border, which amounts to demilitarizing the Demilitarized Zone.  This is plainly a wonderful sign of an incipient peace.  South Korea’s leader also visited North Korea, and if I am not mistaken, I think Kim Jung Un came to Seoul.  Both of them deserve Nobel Peace Prizes, but Trump certainly has earned the right to share it with them, as I believe Jimmy Carter shared the prize with Begin and Sadat.

And I will continue to note that Barack Hussein Obama, leading light and Prophet of the Democrats, said it would take a “magic wand” to create the economic growth which Trump HAS in fact enabled, through tax cuts, regulatory reduction, and an overall positive view of business in general, all of which are the opposite of Obama’s approaches, which yielded the worst recovery since the Great Depression, and for the same reasons.

From all of this, we are to take away that Trump is Hitler, that he is horrible, that he is fascist. 

America: can you wake from your fucking sleep already?  Do you not GET that you are being lied to by horrible human beings who want your vote but don’t give a flying fuck otherwise if you live or die?

Quick to believe, slow to doubt.

As far as Ford, though, she plainly lied when she said she was unfamiliar with the polygraph test, and when she told that story about needing a second door.  Her boyfriend in the 1990’s detected no signs of traumatized behavior.  Certainly, it can be delayed but, again, she is not even alleging she was raped.  She was, on her account, held down against her will, in a sort of involuntary wrestling match with a stronger opponent.  This is not rape.  It is not being molested as a child.  It is not being beaten regularly.  It is not being shamed regularly.

It seems likely that this whole thing will soon end, as it should, with Kavanaugh finally being released from the Democrat Inquisition, and their sundry Torquemada’s.

Prefer to believe, hesitate to doubt.

I get why psychologically normal women would be unable to comprehend why anyone would willingly submit themselves to the emotional work and difficulty of making a false rape or abuse claim.

But not all women are psychologically normal.  There is no reason to think there are fewer female sociopaths than male (although this claim is made, it is impossible in my view to back empirically), and given a strong enough moral justification–as they see it–many non-sociopaths could make and presumably have made, false claims.

Believe at first, but ask questions.  If the answers do not add up, ask more questions.  To ask people to do otherwise is to invite a culture of abuse.  It is to invite a ready means of blackmail and extortion, against which we will have removed all remedies.

If conservatives were not the adults in the room, there would have been blood shed in the streets already.

Antifa CLEARLY has an unconscious identification, not with the Communists, but with the SA, the Sturmabteilung, the Brown Shirts.  Their shirts are black, like those of the actual Mussolini Fascists, but I think their hatred of Hitler is really an unconscious desire to be released from the constraints of civilization and finally, finally, finally be able to vent this pent up rage within them that they cannot dispel with marijuana, video games, LARP’ing, or endless internet rants.

They want to be MEN, but they cannot say that.  That is sexist.  They want to be RIGHT, in a world where they dispute the notion of right and wrong.  They want to fight the good fight, while rejecting any standards which would in the abstract, absent tribal feelings, justify such a thing.  They want to belong, in a world their own ideology has denuded of all markers of belonging.

In their dreams, they want what the Communists and Nazis “had” in early 1930’s Berlin.  They want passion.  They want romance.

But they ARE the Nazis, and they have no Communists.  The real Liberals are the Republicans, who continue to value civility and negotiation as ideals, even if the lunacy of the Democrats and Left generally make these generally unreachable goals.  We continue to hope we can return to rational argumentation, to civil discourse, to congenial disagreement.  We continue to hope our experiment, our UTOPIAN experiment, of generalizing political freedom, will not end in suicide.

They are out in force tonight.  I look at this, though, as a blessing.  I am given the opportunity to confront fear directly.  It is a beautiful thing.

I do feel, though, that there are huddled rooms all around the country where they are yelling and plotting, and feeling ALIVE even though their work is pure evil.

What can you do but remain steadfast?  What can God ask of any of us but that we do our best to remain faithful?

In order to see the beautiful, you must see the ugly. In order to see truth, you have to understand falsehood like the back of your hand.

This is all good.  I feel like we passed a Rubicon of sorts last week.  The energy changed.  A spell broke, for many.

I read that some Republicans are cheering because so many people are #walkingaway.  Some Democrats are saying “I have never seen this level of engagement.”

Both narratives can be equally true.  I suspect, though, that the high Democrat engagement is happening in places where there were already a lot of Democrats.  Added energy adds little, if they were going to win anyway.

To my mind, far more significant are the seemingly large numbers of people who are abandoning the Democrats because they have become nakedly ugly.  I have never seen anything like the Walk Away movement in my lifetime, in either direction.  The Democrats are walking on thin ice, which is already cracking in many places. 

We will see.  We will see.