Month: March 2019

It is impossible to bring the truly new while fully protecting the old.  Even men of peace need a sword.

Pondering this a bit more, and leaving out large amounts of contextualizing history, one result of the Christianization first of the Roman Empire, then of Europe, then much of the world, is that sacrifice, both animal and human, disappeared from most of the world.  This applies particularly when one factors in Islam, which in my view could not have existed without Christianity.

The only area where sacrifice remains common in my understanding is South Asia.  From what I have read, it is still practiced enthusiastically at least in Bengal and Nepal.  Perhaps in parts of Africa not under Islamic control, and of course Haiti and other places which practice voodoo.  In the feast of Eid, I believe, it plays some small role in the Islamic faith, when it is combined the Hajj.

I suppose it can be asked if this is a net benefit, when our current system slaughters millions of animals a day, probably, using industrial techniques.  But there is, I think, a qualitative difference between ritual killing, and killing for food, even if our particular system alienates us from the process of food production.

And will wonder aloud why the land of vegetarians is also the land which has kept this practice.  I will wonder aloud as well, as I have before, why the land which rejects eating meat has by far the largest number of people formally rejected from society, and denied basic human rights, the Dalits.

As I have said before, the situation of most Dalits is actually arguably worse than that of blacks in the Jim Crow South.  And there are two hundred MILLION of them.

Personally, I tend to reject Large Stories.  Most of us are vastly better off trying to learn deep relaxation, the process of digesting experience, and of living peaceful productive lives and, where necessary, fighting productive lives.

If God is in me, I do not need to abase myself again before any other God, much less any human being.  Abasement is for humans, not God–and not Buddha either, for that matter.

It is perhaps a mild exaggeration to say that the civil religion of political Liberalism worships the innate dignity of all humans, but only a mild one.  We need to keep what is good in this creed, and that necessarily means opposing with all means necessary the lunatics who would bring this progress to a halt, and throw us all back a thousand years or more.

What if there does exist a spiritual realm, and agents from that realm have regularly appeared on Earth, in order form religions they themselves viewed as more or less useful jokes?  That the outer forms are ridiculous, but that they lead over time to actual, measurable improvements?

Much of true contemporary Liberalism is rooted in Christianity.  Even when actual belief falls away, the forms of love, tolerance, charity, peace, and kindness remain.  The religion was a means to this end, even if many of us cannot fathom just why an infinite God would choose to manifest his only Son in a specific place, at a specific time, to teach something, and be sacrificed on an altar by people committed to sacrifice, so that sins God alone specifies as sins could be atoned?  I think this notion is silly.

But on a deeper level, it contains sacrifice as a chosen individual act.  It includes committing oneself at a soul level to something foundationally important beyond ones tribe and ones family.  You cannot separate these images from Christian dogma as a whole or, of course, Christ’s teachings as we have received them so many centuries later.

In their own way I think both Trey Parker and Matt Stone take the process of living seriously.  They obviously engage, in their own way, with deep questions.  I might even posit that in their hearts most comedians are vastly more serious than the rest of us.  Not being serious is their outer reaction to being very serious.

William James argued that if religious beliefs support a better life, then for all we know they are true.  If no one can say for certain how the world really works, then a set of beliefs which alter people’s behavior in the direction of greater generosity, greater joy, and less violence are good, as we would commonly define it.

The Book of Arnold stops baby fucking and clitorectomies, from what I recall, and something else too I believe.  General Butt Fucking Naked becomes a convert, and ceases his violence.  This is what Elder Price–who in his heart in this way remains dedicated to serving the greater good–comes to realize.  If it takes threatening to unleash the Kraken, so be it.

I don’t think it is overstating the case to sense that both of them must feel some secret admiration for Mormonism, as a practical adaptation to life, as something which works for its adherents, even if many of its beliefs–as they clearly note in the play–are impossible for most of us to accept.

It would not even greatly shock me to learn that both of them take up with some religion later in their lives, although I certainly would not bet on it.

Whatever religion it is will need to encompass within it the humor of South Park, certainly.  They will need a God who can stand to be mocked.

https://www.infowars.com/us-army-takes-50-tons-of-gold-from-syria-in-alleged-deal-with-isis/

True, not true, partially true?

Life is throwing yourself into “What’s Next”, without knowing what that is.

I’m watching American Gods, and of course it is absurdly violent, and intentionally transgressive.  He copied Garp, but the blowjob in the graveyard was new.  So too the reverse birth of a Stereotypical White Male (SWM).

They reference, accurately, the Nordic practice of offering human sacrifices to Odin, Woden, Wotan, namesake of Wednesday.  They would be hung from trees, where they died from strangulation.  Our method of hanging is vastly kinder than the old practices.

In doing so, they reference sacrificial violence more generally.  There is something in this sort of thing like a car accident, where many of us don’t want to look but still find it oddly fascinating.  I was tempted to turn it off, then thought “well, let’s see where it goes.”

I have violence in me, of course.  We all do.  I need to understand it, to get to its root.  And with violence of this sort, there is this crawling in the belly, this visceral something, which is qualitatively different from my workaday world.  It is something fascinating and horrible.  This is the darkness which dwells in all our bellies.

And I thought “I need to understand my culture, where it is.”  And obviously media of this sort both reflects latent tastes, and creates them.  Everything over time has gotten more violent, more explicit, more ugly.

I think this speaks to two things.  First, it speaks to the sanitization of our world.  In our society, we rarely encounter death.  We do our best not to think about it.  But then of course it spills everywhere into our popular culture.  If you look at recently hugely popular shows, they were very violent, and filled with death: Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, the Sopranos. (or so I hear: I have read about them, but not watched them for the very reason that this sort of violence is injurious.  Still, I need to Grok this at a soul level, so I am going to watch the first season of this show, then give it up.)

Ironically, perhaps, I watched a play last night dealing with the Islamic practice of washing dead bodies before they are buried.  It is intended to be a gentle practice, which allows the souls of the dead to present themselves to God as clean and pure.  It is an act of love, and a ritual role which some Muslims play, often over many generations.

And it dealt more or less directly with all the death and bloodshed in Iraq, much of which we were directly or indirectly responsible for.  We certainly supported Saddam in his war with Iran, and we certainly armed him.  And it seems we knew he would use gas weapons, which we may well have sold him: https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/26/exclusive-cia-files-prove-america-helped-saddam-as-he-gassed-iran/

And I think we all need to remember how much death and destruction happened to the Iraqis during the sanctions, during the second war, and during the large scale Islamist atrocities which happened first in the 2005-2008 timeframe roughly, then again under ISIS, which Obama in my view certainly armed and trained, knowing most of them were hard core radicals.

I watched the first ten minutes of the movie Pompei last night also, where Roman soldiers massacre a group of rebelling Celts, then enslave one small boy who survives to fight as a gladiator.  He is eventually brought to Rome.

There is an interesting parallel between the Romans, who lived in wealth and affluence largely unaware, or at least uncaring, about what their troops were doing far away, and modern Americans.  We do a lot of nasty shit all around the world.

Here is the thing: the anti-Americanism among the Left tends to favor war mongers, because the rhetoric used to oppose our wars is rooted in the belief that America is evil, and our system foundationally unjust.  This, of course, is a lie.  And people who see this as a lie react by reflexively supporting our wars.  I did, certainly.  Fuck these people, I said, we have the right to defend our legitimate national interests.

The middle, though, is gone.  What alone will help to prevent these things are people on both sides willing to do rational, honest calculus, where we do not abjure our right to protect our nation, but also do not reflexively support wars in places far from home, where our soldiers kill and die for reasons which–if we REALLY stop and think about it–are not directly tied in any meaningful way to our true national security.

To my mind, respecting and loving our troops means giving them only meaningful missions, only asking them to risk and die and kill, for truly legitimate reasons.

I am not sure, even now, what would have happened if we had not invaded Iraq.  Saddam clearly had nuclear ambitions, and he clearly had aggressive intent.  Could and would we have contained him without the invasion?  If he had gotten them, would that necessarily have represented an existential threat to the US?  I don’t know.  No one does.  But we need to remember all the people we killed in this process.  This is the least we can do.  As Lao Tzu taught 2,500 years ago, even military victories should be mourned as a funeral.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the anti-war faction would do the most to gain traction if it rejected its reflexive anti-Americanism.

The second point I wanted to make was a sense I have that ritual murder, ritual violence, is the expression of the action of the amygdala.  It is the answer to the chronic overactivation of the fight or flight instinct, and that of shame.

In college and graduate school, I became fascinated by sacrifice, and very interested in the work of Rene Girard, who talked about this a great deal.  What does it mean, for example, in a Jewish context, to take a sheep without flaw, bring it up on an altar, say a prayer, and then slit the sheep’s throat, allowing its blood to stain the altar?  Nearly every nation of antiquity did this.  The Romans, the Greeks, the Celts, and as far as I know, the Africans and Asians.  Many tribes in the Americas practiced human sacrifice, including the Inca and the Aztecs and perhaps even those who lived in Chaco Canyon.

My feeling is that such sacrifice becomes necessary socially when a culture is highly conformist and governed by fear of being different. It is not natural to suppress your natural instincts, your natural joy, your own unique way of being.  Individualism, in this sense, is the antithesis of the sacrificial instinct.

But when you live in fear, you live in rage, and you live in shame.  All go together, neurologically. Perhaps I might call this the Satanic Triumvirate.  When we hurt, you want to hurt.  When you feel pain, you want to deal pain.  This is the primitive part of our psyche.  When you feel shame, you want others to feel shame.  You want to lash out.  To keep group solidarity, you have to engineer regular intervals in which this instinct can find expression, and ideally you want that expression to reinvigorate group solidarity.  Ritual group sacrifice serves this purpose, sociologically.

America, today, seems to be in a spasm of Conformism.  Not everyone should be alike.  Not everyone should experience the same conditioned responses, exactly, in reaction to the same conditioned stimuli.  We are being manipulated, by whom and to what exact purpose other than power, it is hard to say.

The opposite of this process is silence and listening.  All of us need to be alone sometimes, and we need to make contact with our bodies, which is the root of who we are, our literal embodiment.

I myself am often overwhelmed by what I feel and see and sense.  I am a pool of water in a ceaselessly churning land.  And I am still two thirds dissociated.  To keep moving in the direction of awareness, there can be no path but learning to digest experience very ably and quickly.

In a radical shift from this dire description, I will offer a very healthy meditation, an accompaniment to the first set of Kum Nye lessons.  If everyone did this every day, we would all be better for it.  We would begin remembering who we are, and this chronic fear, shame and anger would subside.

May this nourish you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGvd9u1nt3I&list=PL75C38908CCDB5476

Edit: And I will note this post is outwardly at odds with my last. But I am not rejecting war, and I am not rejecting violence.  When dealing with violence of others, sometimes violence in return is the only viable solution.  What I am saying, though is that we all need to listen more.  Being willing to listen does not mean giving in, and if only one side is listening, then peace does not stand a chance, but particularly for those on the Left who think all good resides on their side, and their side alone, I would ask: in the end, are you REALLY willing to give peace a chance?

This meme is trending apparently.  I saw one today that had a picture of Pinochet, which said that “if throwing people out of helicopters is wrong, we need to keep doing it until it is right.”

This is not quite humor.  It certainly transgresses that line I spoke of two posts ago.  But it bespeaks an enormous well of frustration.  It signals the complete break-down of truly liberal communication between people of differing views in our country, a break-down engineered BY the Left to prevent infection among their carefully indoctrinated troops of actually good ideas, accurate history, and genuine appreciation of everything we have built in this country.

America is far from perfect.  But we are pretty damn good.  Democrats of a generation or two ago, Democrats who in many cases fought in World War 2, Korea, or Vietnam, understood this.  They were not anti-American.  They simply had differing notions on the proper role of government.

But this crop is anti-American.  They hate this country as it exists currently, all while using relentlessly and shamelessly all the benefits it provides to make themselves rich and comfortable. 

They want, in other words, to become elites BY talking about their concern for the plebes.  It is not incidental to the process: it IS the process.

Here is a list of Latin American countries by GDP: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Latin-America/gdp-per-capita

Numbers one and three had equivalents to helicopter rides.  Panama of course has the canal.

Wikipedia on Uruguay: “Uruguay is ranked first in Latin America in democracy, peace, low perception of corruption,^[11] e-government,^[12] and is first in South America when it comes to press freedom, size of the middle class and prosperity.”


On Chile: “The modern sovereign state of Chile is among South America’s most economically and socially stable and prosperous nations, with a high-income economy and high living standards.^[11][12] It leads Latin American nations in rankings of human development, competitiveness, income per capita, globalization, state of peace, economic freedom, and low perception of corruption.^[13] It also ranks high regionally in sustainability of the state, and democratic development.”


Who is at the bottom?  The disaster nobody wants to talk about, Nicaragua, the nation which went the farthest to become fully Communist, and which foolishly put Daniel Ortega back in office.  As you may imagine, there is no short summary of the disaster this nation has become.  It is extremely poor, Ortega is killing political opponents, and seems to be rigging the elections.  Here is an excerpt: 

In April 2018, demonstrations opposed a decree increasing taxes and reducing benefits in the country’s pension system. Local independent press organizations had documented at least 19 dead and over 100 missing in the ensuing conflict.^[109] A reporter from NPR spoke to protestors who explained that while the initial issue was about the pension reform, the uprisings that spread across the country reflected many grievances about the government’s time in office, and that the fight is for President Ortega and his Vice President wife to step down.^[110] April 24, 2018 marked the day of the greatest march in opposition of the Sandinista party. On May 2, 2018, university-student leaders publicly announced that they give the government seven days to set a date and time for a dialogue that was promised to the people due to the recent events of repression. The students also scheduled another march on that same day for a peaceful protest. As of May 2018, estimates of the death toll were as high as 63, many of them student protesters, and the wounded totalled more than 400.^[111] Following a working visit from May 17 to 21, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights adopted precautionary measures aimed at protecting members of the student movement and their families after testimonies indicated the majority of them had suffered acts of violence and death threats for their participation.^[112] In the last week of May, thousands who accuse Mr. Ortega and his wife of acting like dictators joined in resuming anti-government rallies after attempted peace talks have remained unresolved.^[

Summary: helicopter rides work.  Dialogue, of course, is better.  I continue to await signs of any sort that the Left is willing to listen.  I very much doubt I will see any in coming days.  Where all this will lead is anyone’s guess.  I vastly prefer peace, but I have been trying to reason with Leftists for many years.  I’ve been doing politics on the internet for probably 15 years or so. I know their particular disease very well from long personal experience. 

How many kids are there out there who ALMOST shot up a school?  Who wanted to, but couldn’t get a gun, or who chickened out at the last minute, or who were reported and with respect to whom the system worked by pulling them out and detaining them and watching them carefully?

These kids graduate from high school, and they enter the wider public sphere.  They may never in their life commit any single act which brings them much attention, but is there any reason to suppose they don’t commit countless acts of minor and incidental violence and cruelty?  Do they not wind up on the internet?  Do they not drive?  Do they not enter into relationships with women or perhaps other boys?  Do they not enter corporate America, perhaps many in the tech sector, which more or less values social incompetence and emotional stupidity?

I have done the math with respect to suicides.  We have roughly 44,000 suicides every year.  For every successful one 25 attempts are made (roughly), which is 1.1 million.  But assume for every attempt made, 25 people are thinking about it: 27.5 million, or not quite ten percent of the country.  And no doubt sub-clinical school shooters–who really just want the pain to end, but want the world to feel their presence before they go–are well represented in this number.  Maybe many just think about it, reject it for whatever reason, then go on to die of a heroin overdose, or reckless driving accident, or actual intentional suicide.

Here is the thing with regard to the “debate” about school shootings: there should be ample common ground about the overarching social context.  Both self identifying “liberals” and conservatives should be able to reach common ground about the sickness of much of our popular culture.  We should be able to agree–without perhaps knowing quite what to do about it–that violent video games play a role in many if not all of these shootings.  We should be able to present to the public, from a governmental perspective, the data on violence in movies and TV leading to lifetime increased risks of depression, more subtle emotional suppression, loneliness, and overall sense that the world is vastly less safe, and less welcoming than it otherwise might be. 

The thing is, if we all secretly believe that everybody else is possibly a serial killer, then our lives suffer for it.  The data on this seems to be very clear, and to have been showing this unambiguously for a long time.

I remember back in the 1970’s, when people like Alan Alda were decrying the violence in TV and movies, when they were condemning movies like those featuring Dirty Harry.  All of that has evaporated, and now they are extolling the virtues of movies like Sweeney Todd.

Why?  This should be a bipartisan issue.  Is everyone potentially involved themselves addicted to violent media?

But to bring this point home, this is the obvious lie in the gun control debate.  Yes, of course the Left wants to take our guns, all of them, although they will settle for what guns they can get at any given time.

But if they were truly civic minded, if they were truly dedicating to improving things wherever and whenever possible, then these sorts of policy discussions would be happening.  This is one area where they could and should be able to reach across the aisle.  But no: they ONLY want to focus on guns.  This shows the lie underlying the whole thing.  They don’t care about kids.  They care about power.  This is always and everywhere and sickeningly true.

It occurs to me that humor would be impossible without taboos.  In a world which held nothing sacred, nothing would be truly funny.

There is a relation between humor and violence.  Humor acts to trigger violent instincts, but redirect them into laughter.  Laughter is an alternative to violence.  It is why so many comedians report that humor was their defense against bullying.  I just watched a video of John Cleese yesterday talking about this.

And in situations of chronic suspense, such as the unholy triumvirate so assiduously cultivated by Leftist propagandists, in which members of the cult continually feel anger towards the other, shame in who they are as individuals, and a fear of life which is only managed by inclusion in the group, no genuine laughter is possible.  Their humor consists in “he was so stupid because he was a RACIST”.  Ha , ha, ha.  Seriously, watch Colbert through that prism.   He is no doubt clever, but almost all his humor consists in insulting one group, and thereby affirming for everyone else they are in the right place, with the right people, and that they believe the right things, which assuages, for that moment, their anxiety d’etre.

And we have all encountered cruel laughter, laughter at the suffering of someone or something else.  It is the laughter of sadists.  What provokes this laughter?  The relief they feel at being able to act out their violent impulses, brought on by continual amygdala hyperactivation.  Laughter is always a relaxation.  It is a full body contraction, followed by a feeling better, more relaxed, happier.

To take one concrete example, Book of Mormon is hilarious because it puts into full view so many things we continue to feel some taboos about.  Racism, lying, people who don’t fit in, Clits, penises, anuses, homosexuality, whiteness, theodicy.

The trick is to walk this line between fully unexpected–which feels like an ambush, and which is thus a sort of violence–and the actually brutal.  It is a hard line to walk, and I do feel like most comedians most likely do have a lot of latent aggression in them for this reason.

And I think this explains why the Jews are so fucking funny.  One, they are always on the defensive, and have been for 2 thousand years.  Two, they have so many rules, they need to poke fun at them from time to time. Three, they have had so much grief, they have needed something to pull them back.

I can’t go farther on this line at the moment.  My brain just froze up.