Month: August 2019

There is always something you have not seen, with your emotional eye. Great, real dawns are in you. Hang in there, and keep the faith. Sometimes staying alive is the best you can do, and this is always enough.

For all intents and purposes, the Hindus particularly have long argued that we live in Maya, which could be translated “virtual reality”.

What if we all squid creatures living in an intelligent soup, taking bets on how quickly we can enter then escape the game? Wake up, you win. The faster you do it, or perhaps the more style you bring to it, the better.

Brain interfaces, though: those are LOST style points. The part that sees will never touch a computer. This is the wrong direction.

The path to God has not become shorter in response to our decadence. Nor has technology made it more efficient.

Can you imagine yourself as a Nazi?  Being young, and enthusiastic about Hitler?

I’m asking myself that question while watching the documentary on Leni Riefenstahl “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (it may be, and probably should be the the other way around.)

Most of those close to Hitler never really said their piece to any cameras before they died, and certainly not 50 years after the war, not that I know of, not outside of a war crimes tribunal.

It’s really interesting seeing how she want from a dancer (by today’s standards, I might add, a pretty bad one; no callback for her from Alvin Ailey), to a rock climber, scaling steep rock faces barefoot with no rope on camera, and surviving literal avalanches on film, to watching Hitler at a rally and finding him on the lectern, and in person, “hypnotizing”.  He cast a spell, in her view, and of course many, many people have said that.

She’s a nice old lady in this film, who was really a strong woman, and proto-feminist.  That’s precisely why Hitler liked her: she was constantly doing dangerous, difficult things.  Goebbels apparently, on her account, wanted her for his mistress.  This sounds plausible, since he did eventually have an affair with another German actress. Goebbel’s diary says she went out with them socially, regularly, but as she says, he WAS the master of lies.

But I keep hitting pause on the film.  I keep looking at the storm troopers, at Hitler, and trying to grasp how such a monstrous thing happens.

If you will pardon the word, I think the Germans of 1933 felt like the n—–rs of Europe, and Hitler promised redemption.  If I could put the whole thing in one phrase, as succinctly as I can, I think that is what I would say.  Where there was shame, loss, economic hardship, and many real war wounds from WW1–from starvation, from combat, from loss of loved ones, from overwork–he promised a ready path to not just recovery, but getting back at all the bastards who put them there.

You have to screw your brain into this mindset, to get how all that happened.

I have long made lists of films I want to watch.  It was on Netflix, but I cancelled my Netflix DVD account after they made that awful film about the Central Park Five.  So I use a combination of the library, and just buying the films outright.  This one I bought, as VHS.

But apparently I’m going, now through a list from when I watched, I think, the Sophie Scholl movie.  I get a lot of ideas from the previews.  In any event, I watched Night and Fog last week, by Alain Desnais, which ANYONE who wants to call the detention camps on our border “concentration camps” needs to watch.  It’s short, only perhaps 35 minutes, and well worth the time.

I watched Nanking, which I think is a must see for most people, and certainly anyone who has never heard about what happened there.  Watching it, it occurred to me that there is no equivalent to that in any war our soldiers have ever fought.  We have never been rapists.  We have never been mass murderers for the fun of it.  We have never committed the sorts of crimes nearly every other nation on Earth has committed, and particularly the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Germans, the Russians, the Turks–actually, the list is pretty much every nation on Earth.  Britain, I’m not finding anything, other than the OBVIOUS fact that they felt the need to invade nearly every fucking nation on Earth, with all the death from battle and starvation that implies.

Eye of Vichy is on the list also, about German propaganda in occupied France.

Propaganda is a hugely important topic.  When anyone is GENUINELY talking about truly fake news, like CNN, like MSNBC, like the New York Times, they are talking about propaganda.  Characteristically, the propaganda organs started the meme that everyone else was propaganda.  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

Jacques Ellul, as I commented likely 5-10 years ago, wrote a masterpiece on it, which is properly translated PropagandaS.  There are different sorts.  I considered for a time writing a long piece on propaganda like the others on my Goodness Movement website, but abandoned it, I think, for lack of energy.  It’s a huge topic.  I do think I’ve quoted him at length though here from time to time.

But here is the point I would make: nobody does anything which makes no sense to them.  If you want to understand them, therefore, you have to understand their logic, their premises, their “facts”.  This is the only reliable path to understanding, and I will stipulate as an absolute principle that when we are dealing with human behavior, there are no real mysteries.  This is cop out.  Everything is comprehensible, even if odious, even if foreign to our every instinct.

Ponder, as another example, the practice in some mountain areas of Pakistan of gang raping women who are believed to have committed sexual indiscretions.  There is a logic to it, likely a sinister logic, which relies on repressed sexual instincts, a cultural conditioning which views women as objects to be owned, and some traditions which stem from a thousand or more years ago.  Who knows how common incest is in such places?  Who could protest, who could protect the girls (and boys, for that matter, although that seems more an Afghani thing).

Human evil is something to be understood, fought, and eventually teased out of all human societies.  The worst mistake you can make, though, is to think you know all you need to know, and that the solution is simple.  It is never simple.  Nothing is simple in dealing with most deep forms of human behavior.  Trauma is not simple.  Lust is not simple.

[Edit: I wandered around quite a bit here.  Beer or two, but mostly just flowing from one idea to another.  This thread is my mind on a daily basis.]

I don’t think silly little routines are that silly for most of us, if they are not harmful, and if they reliably produce a positive feeling.

For years, where I used to live, my kids and I would make an X on the door when we left.  One of my kids started it, and we kept it up.

One of my daughters, when I dropped her off at her mom’s house, she would wave and say goodbye, and I would pretend not to notice.  Then she would do it a second time, and I would say goodbye, I love you.  We did this every time for perhaps ten years.  It was a routine.

You could look at this and say it is fully arbitrary, which it is, which indeed most human rules of social engagement are, to at least some extent.  Suits are arbitrary, and could just as easily be karate gi’s, or for that matter even dresses.  Men could wear dresses, and women suits. Dresses, then, would be masculine, and suits feminine.  Those who point out it could easily be one way versus another are right, in some sense.

But we all are wired to want consistency.  We are wired to want patterns in our existence.  It would bother a lot of people if you changed Christmas to July, and American Fuck You Britain Day to December 25th.  Or 23rd, just to fully fuck with the system.

People with OCD take this too far, but could you not see a parallel between a person washing their hands repeatedly and a bird building a nest, one twig at a time? I suspect we all have the wiring for OCD, and that in small doses all of us find it gratifying.

This is the nature of ritual.  I took a class in college with a guy named Frits Staal, who wrote a book on ritual (and the Agnicayana which I mentioned somewhere not too long ago) called “Rules without Meaning”.

What I would argue is that the meaning derives precisely from regularity and predictability.  Walter Cronkite, for example, was a soothing presence for many years.  No matter what the news was, there he was to tell about it.  He was a fixture, something regular.

Catholic Mass is no different.  Despite all the revelations about not just pedophile priests, but a Church which more or less wittingly, consciously allowed them to commit hundred more crimes AFTER they had been identified, the vast bulk of those termed the “faithful” continue to come every Saturday night or Sunday, to receive the Eucharist, to sing the hymns, to perform the ceremony.

In a world of randomness, ritual creates order, or at least seeming order.  It is perhaps one of our most important bulwarks against it.  I would argue ritual is actually more important than belief.

Which, in turn, makes me think of the Bridge over the River Kwai. Alec Guinness in effect creates a religion of his bridge.  He is its chief Prophet.

And here is a larger point, I intended to make several days ago before some bright shiny object (best line from Third Rock from the Sun) distracted me:

The Beatniks, then later the hippies, the “counter-culture” of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and beyond, really really thought that creating a new culture would be easy.  All we had to do is all drop acid, or all get hip.  All they really needed to do was love the world and nature and Vishnu and Hari Krishna and Buddha and a revamped Jesus Christ and all would be well.  The squares would all become wheels.

In the only truly interesting passages in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” Hunter S. Thompson talks about this, how he and the people around him in the first half of the 60’s really thought that they didn’t need to do anything, that this cosmic, holy shift would just HAPPEN.

When it didn’t happen, all of them started drifting apart, as groups, and within their own psyches.  The old Hunter S. probably never forgave the younger Hunter S. his naivete.

But cultures are like evolving projects where every passing person leaves some little thing, and the whole thing grows, slowly, unevenly, and completely irrationally, but where at all times there are ideas, and themes, and special places and times, which all of us can root ourselves in.  The Hippie Culture/counter-culture had none of that.  They have Woodstock, where everybody was high for 3 days, utterly unprepared for the basics of life, and where most of the people who were there can’t remember most of it.

They have no Christmas.  They have no First Communion.

And to be clear, the French Revolutionaries tried to create all that.  They created new festivals, a new calendar, new ways of addressing each other.  None of it worked, because it was inorganic.  It was unconnected to the past.  So they tried to force people to accept it, through violence.  In effect, this was the policy of Pol Pot, too, who wanted to simply kill everyone who wasn’t on board with everything new beginning in Year One.

Civilizations need time to grow.  They need solid seeds, and they need time.  And they need trust.  In all these revolutionary projects. they are asking literally everyone to abandon what they know, in favor of what some borderline or actual sociopath with zero people skills or empathy thinks they should embrace.

From Burke onward, I think all intelligent people have recognized that cultural change happens from within.  What was, is turned in a new direction, but without getting rid of the old.  This is the essence of Conservatism, as I understand it: you do not reject change, but you simply do not accept the need to fully separate from, to build walls against, the past.

Take the  Civil War monuments.  OBVIOUSLY they are not hurting anyone.  Smart people look at them and learn from them.  That was a nasty, long, vicious war.  Americans killing Americans, and the blacks not all that much better at the end than the beginning, and a generation of skill, intelligence and talent killed particularly in the South.

All Americans could look at these monuments, at Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, and remember and realize the perils of abandoning dialogue, and embracing violence.  We can remember that that war seemed easy from BOTH SIDES.  The South seemed to think they would have us licked in a month, and on the Union side only Winfield Scott seems to have understood that Richmond was much farther than 50 miles (or whatever it was) from Washington.  The route to Richmond began in Mississippi.  The war would be long.  He knew that, because he was a man of immense intelligence.

Once violence starts, it is so hard to stop.  This is what I think all conservatives see, or at least should see.  Sure, you can pop that little sissy with the big mouth.  Then what?  There are no easy enemies in developed countries filled with educated, skilled people.  There are no easy wars among roughly equal enemies.  We don’t want to be shooting each other in the streets, and if I had to guess, I would suspect the Leftists have an advantage on the cyber side, which is a very important terrain of battle, perhaps critical, although of course we have a lot of veterans with skills in this area.

I guess what I am saying, is we can study HISTORY, what actually happened.  We can look at people who were happy one moment war broke out, and burnt out shells 4 years later.  We can look at prosperous communities that were struggling to feed themselves after the fire of war came through.

We can say: they were not so very different from us, were they?  We all think more of ourselves than we probably should.  It’s most likely adaptive in most contexts.  But where violence is concerned, look, look, and look again.  “Violence is the last recourse of an exhausted mind” is a quote a friend of mine once shared.  This quote was apparently a favorite of his father, who was Mafia.  Even the Mafia would prefer intimidation, or bribery. Or both.  Because they are SMART.  No smart person goes to violence as anything but the last possible alternative.  Asimov’s version, which I think I recall correctly some four decades after reading it, is “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent”.

OK: this last little rant is off topic, but given how hard Democrats–foolishly, for all the reasons I just mentioned–seem to be wanting a civil war of some sort or other, I thought this all worth saying.  They are dressing up in all black like Italian Fascists.  They are carrying clubs, wearing helmets.  They are attacking random people.  As groups, these Antifa gangs could be rolled over by equal groups of veterans in a heartbeat, but in many places the government seems to be on their side.  All of these things should give thoughtful people pause.

When it goes to violence, if it goes to violence, some genuinely good, deep, important part of our national soul will have suffered a deep wound, and none of us who ACTUALLY love this country can or should countenance this lightly or easily. It’s an ugly tragedy, if it comes to that.  It’s a major loss.  

Remember when the Left was freaking the fuck out about the repeal of Net Neutrality?  I don’t even recall what great disaster was supposed to happen, but did it happen?  I see no signs of problems.  Perhaps I am missing something, but usually when they stop talking it’s because there is actually nothing to talk about.

I was James Bond (Sean Connery of course) fighting my doppelganger James Bond/self.  I got the worse of it, by a bit, but then I woke up.  I should say I think I got the worse of it: one of us got stabbed in the kidney, but we were entangled.  Gosh, maybe there is some psychology there.

Maybe a doppelganger symbolizes all of the unconscious parts of you, the things on autopilot, the parts which are you, but which aren’t YOU, the felt you.

Perhaps when you feel all of you, they disappear.  I think that’s close to the truth.  The shadows lose their last hiding place.

But awareness is not abstract.  People try and make it an intellectual thing, a philosophical thing.  It is more like being relatively more aware of your little toe.  It is not that you feel your little toe all the time, so much as your little toe is not hiding from you.  It’s like “hey, I’m here, but nothing to do.  All good.”  When you go looking for it, as for example in a Kum Nye exercise, it comes on line right away.  There is no separation.

You know, there is an existential power struggle going on in Hong Kong right now.  They have appropriated the American flag, anthem, and even Pepe the Frog as symbols.

The American Left could not care less.  They are obsessed with their made up fairy tales about “white supremacy”, privilege, gender this that and the other. These are really all just excuses for the open exercise of hatred, and emotional violence.

There are no good hearts there.  According to Egyptian tradition, they are bringing anvils which no amount of lying will ever make light or pure.  It is not a creed of goodness.  Quite the opposite.

Do many good people identify as Democrats?  I assume so, but I am speaking of the core of those leading what they intend as a “revolution”, which means political coup followed by mass bloodshed, countless tears, and a return to autocratic rule more suited to the 1st century than the 21st.  These people are everywhere, and they are open about what they want, now.  Obama gave them permission to speak, and now nobody can shut them up.

I follow the news, but if I have nothing to add, I don’t. Obviously he was killed. To form the odds he wasn’t, I would ask how many times the CCTV malfunctioned in the last year, and for how long. I suspect the answer is NOT ONCE, because CCTV is reliable. And if that is the case, I think even skeptics have to put the odds at zero. That’s where I put them.

What I wanted to comment is that there were apparently much clearer implications of the British Royals—I forget which one, as those people don’t interest me—than Bill Clinton.

As I said before, some years ago, I believe Lady Di was assassinated when it was learned by the Queen that she was pregnant by Dodi Fayed. “Not a fucking darkie”, I can see her saying in her innermost chambers to her Consiglieri. And some former SAS have claimed they played a role.

For me, it was based on a dream. But some of my dreams I believe.

Imagine the scandal is a British Prince was found to be fucking underage sex slaves. Not a good look, to put it mildly.

It’s always good to suspect the Clinton’s, but in this case we might want to cast a wider net.

The rain began long ago, and the flood has commenced.  We live in a sea of unprocessed, unchannelled, excessive emotion, most of it hidden.

The role of a culture is to allow for the free expression of emotion, as channeled by cultural habit.  There are places, ways, times to emote.  Whenever you see a culture which has the reputation for being spontaneous and warm–say the Spanish and Italians, or even the Arabs–you will also see cultural conservatism, robust Catholicism, or Islamic belief and practice.

If you look at the Swedes, say, they are cold, intellectual, distant.  This actually means there is a large swelling of emotion in them, but not expressed, not processed, not present but merely latent.  Such groundswells, such floods, lead people in all sorts of directions which make no sense, because nothing they feel is expressed easily or openly, least of all to their own consciousnesses.

In America, we are awash in consumerism, in habitual where not addictive media consumption–most of all sex and violence.  We are addicted to work, to “fun”, but have grown to lack a shared framework for the expression of experience.

The whole Trump Derangement Personality Disorder (as I have decided to call it) consists in a way OUT for oceans of feeling.  You have masses of people who have denied themselves obvious and simple love of country, expressed as patriotism.  They have denied themselves pride in their past or present.  They are by and large emotionally alienated, which makes their belonging to the Leftist cult a matter of intense personal need.  Without that, without that belonging, they have nothing.  This generates a terrifying latent fear of rejection and being left out.  This, in turn, creates the stimulus for shared, group, hate, even when–as it plainly is here–it is thoroughly, even determinedly, irrational.

Feelings are always there.  If you are not aware of them, they are driving you.  Even if you think you are distant from feelings, cold, calculating, rational, logical, they are driving you.  Most of all when you think they are doing nothing.