Month: June 2020

To what extent is Virtue Signalling–extrinsically oriented moral posturing–exacerbated by the desire for likes–for attention, for “waifer thin” praise–on social media?

I know Greg Glassman.  Very smart guy.  Conscience challenged, to say the least, at times–I’ve heard stronger words used by people who know him well–but very bright.

Let me ask one question: what did more damage to the black communities in, say, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, LA, and Detroit: the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer, or the riots sparked, seemingly, by white Antifa agitators?  Were the riots not a disease themselves, that will push retail stores out of black communities, diminish investment, and cause blighted abandoned buildings in areas which already had plenty of them, all of which will work to increase joblessness and following poverty?  The police did not do that.  Racism did not do that.

And although the data is still coming in, I will ask a theoretical question which awaits data to answer: what did more harm to the black community, the advent of COVID-19, or the decisions of various governments to prevent them from working for two months and counting?  In LA, they may not get the right to work back until August, and yet the Democrats are still talking about addressing “racial injustice”.  How about they address the atrocity they are committing NOW first?

In order to fix ANY problem, you have to be able to discuss it.  Imagine trying to develop a plan to fix a water pipe without being able to mention water, or pipes, or solder, or couplings.  It gets exponentially harder, doesn’t it?

It is the same with the black community.  What is the goal?  I think we should want them all middle class.  Prosperous.  Economically on par with white people.  Not stuck in run down, crime ridden, hopeless places that never really change.

But this means they all need to become BOURGEOIS.  And the fucking Communists HATE the Bourgeoisie.  They WANT black people poor, because they represent what remains of an oppressed group.  All of their propaganda requires an oppressed group.  That is the root of this whole 67 genders thing: they are CREATING, ex nihilo, previously unsuspected “oppressed” groups.

If we did nothing, however, but accept that economics is destiny, and work to improve the black community economically, then just about all their problems would disappear overnight.  That is why the Democrats sabotage the blacks every time they say they are going to help them.  They give them medicine that always has a dose of poison.

It’s a sick game, once you really understand it.

And I will defend Greg.  That is clever in my view.  The riots are a disease.  Not the protests, which are justified, but the breaking, stealing, burning and shooting.

There are always three broad options: 1) remain more or less the same; 2) radical change; 3) gradual improvement within an existing paradigm.

Radical dissatisfaction tends to breed a call for radical change, but most of the time the violent and sudden is too spasmodic, too chaotic, for anything genuinely good to result.  What I think in general tends to happen is a reversion more or less to the status quo ante, but slightly worse.

The paradigm I always use for political change is the French Revolution, which supposedly opposed among other things political repression, and which instead perfected it.  None of the French kings had ever conducted anything quite like the Terror, although I’m sure true repressions happened often enough.  The Bastille was largely empty when it was stormed.  Bastille Day recollects what amounted to a symbolic victory over, really, nothing.  At least one of the prisoners released was a serial pedophile who presumably went back to it.  No victory there.

And of course the whole thing led first to Napoleon, then to a restoration of the monarch, at least according to my recollection.

The winning strategy is not to replace an undesired order with chaos, but to soften the order, and mold the edges, reshape it, revision it, and allow in new light and new behavior and standards.

America is a good example.  We started with slavery.  We ended slavery.  We had Jim Crow.  We ended Jim Crow.

The next logical step is universal individual moral growth.  To become a nation of responsible and morally conscious savants.  But that requires the notion of individual moral conscience, and the political Left, because it is foundationally on a continuum between neurotic and psychotic, does not recognize such a thing.  They argue for “social morality” because it takes the lens off of them as individuals–it basically allows them to stagnate while fulminating daily about “progress”;  and because such a notion continues to allow for the expression of violence in the (false) name of morality.

Morality, really, is a fine mask.  If you are constantly talking about the Good, people are less likely to ask if you ARE good.  I am realizing I myself have been wearing that mask, too.  It is pure neuroticism that has driven much of my work.

But that, too, is changing slowly.  I am sincere about my work.  I just haven’t been clear sighted.  My pain has made it too hard.  Again, though, that is changing slowly, and slow change tends to be lasting change, sustainable change.

Riff on Modest Mouse.

It stands to reason that all people who understand what a terrible thing this COVID-19 was, and how terrible the government reaction remains in most cases, would want to hear good news.  They would want to report that cases are declining everywhere, even in places that are open for business, like Texas and Georgia.  They would want to report that–MIRACLE, HALLALUJAH, LET’S ALL CELEBRATE–deaths have dropped precipitously and there is no sign of a second wave of death, even if improved testing continues to turn up new cases of unknown infectiousness.  It seems that you can still test positive a good three weeks after you are no longer contagious, so new cases do not even mean the disease is still traveling much, if at all.

Now look at your local paper, if you can stand to.   Do you see, or have you seen, daily plots of deaths?  Are they still reporting them?  Is there a solid graph showing a decline?  Are you seeing one on the nightly news?

Now, I’m a so-so news consumer.  I go to perhaps 5 places daily, and perhaps another 5 intermittently.  I don’t have cable news at all.

But I don’t think anyone is trying to contextualize all this.  It’s hard to gin up fear and panic with numbers which don’t support it.

So most of the media outlets seem to have reverted to Obama era race-baiting and shrieking.  They call for justice, but they are not calling for black people to be allowed back to work en masse.  They want the race narrative, and want to avoid the ugly questions about whether or not any of this was necessary, much less better in any measurable respect than much less draconian, much less abusive, much less tyrannical solutions.

They want black people thinking about racism, and police violence, and they want them NOT thinking about the fact that their bank accounts–if they had them to begin with (next time you’re in your local ghetto, count how many banks you see, and how many check cashing places)–were emptied in the past couple months because the government told them they were not allowed to work.

Think about this: in the worst periods of the Civil Rights struggle, I don’t think ANY Southern white racist told an entire city worth of black people they were not allowed to work.  Not for two months and counting.  We would remember that.  Movies would have been made about it.  The Great Birmingham Labor Lockout of 1965.

But no, nobody cares right now.  Obviously, white people are locked out too, but a disproportionate number of us are working from home.  Most of the people in black majority neighborhoods are in the service industry.  They don’t make much money even in good times.  This whole thing has to have been catastrophic for many of them.

And here’s a thought: George Floyd was a long term drug user.  He went to prison 2-3 times for cocaine possession and dealing, and seemingly committed an armed home invasion another time for drug money.

But the claim made was that he had straightened out.  And maybe he did.  Maybe he did.

Then the stress of being fucking broke in a world where there wasn’t a fucking thing he could do to earn honest money caused him to relapse.  As I understand it, he tested positive for both Fentanyl and Meth in his autopsy.

It’s  not hard to see that lockdown as a contributing factor in his death.  After going to jail just about yearly from about 2000-2010–and getting out of a four year term in 2014 if memory serves–he had no arrests for the last six years.

As I said at the outset, this whole thing is going to make a LOT of addicts relapse. It’s going to push a lot of suicidal people over the edge.  We may or may not be allowed to see those statistics at some point, but probably not before everything is fully opened back up.

All this, for a disease with a .4% mortality rate among the INFECTED, and when it seems fairly clear now about a third of us have some form of natural immunity at the outset (based on military and cruise ships where everyone was likely exposed).

You take away the lies, then take away Cuomo and Whitmer and others forcing sick people into nursing homes, and you get a bad flu year, nothing more.  Perhaps more young people died and were sickened than usual.  That’s a bad flu.

But not only did no data exist supporting this whole labor lockout, but none COULD exist because it’s NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE.  We literally copied the fucking Chinese, whose data even now is clearly doctored and untrustworthy.

It does seem clear now, though, that home is the worst place to be, if there is someone sick in your home.  And that’s precisely where millions of people were locked by State Decree for months.  You do that, you take what might be a one-off infection and get the whole damn home sick, and you kill grandpa and grandma, if they live with you, as I think is common in both Italy and China.

I think much of the appeal of Communism, especially in the modern world, is that it represents a way of expressing intellectually emotional longings.

If you feel lonely, alienated, disaffected, then it is not really that hard to blame the “system”.  And Communism, really, offers nothing more or less than an alternative to that “system”, as seen mythically.

In reality, of course, breaking things does not make them better.  Destruction does not lead to creation of anything good.  Everything good is built on the foundation of something not quite as good, and that in turn on something worse.  But you always start with the foundation.  You don’t raze the foundation, then wait for a miracle, which is more or less the actual Communist process.

Anger underlies all this.  As I have argued, feeling misunderstood, feeling that your social relationships are superficial, FEELS to some part of each of us as an assault, an attack, perhaps a rape even, an invasion of unwanted energy.

Ironically and cruelly enough, though, Communism actually accelerates and deepens social alienation.  Communists have no use for individuals, or personal feelings, or one to one sensitive and emotionally probing discussions.  They substitute anger and violence for connection and profundity.

This is why gangsters are so popular with Leftists, starting perhaps with Brecht’s Three Penny Opera, which gave us Mack the Knife.

But the whole things starts with a longing for something else.  Something new, over the hills.  A way out of loneliness and despair.  A bright shining light that has room for you too.

The siren’s song of this myth–and I mean it in both senses–is strong right now.  We were just gut punched by our own governments, and that is no doubt creating all sorts of emotional craziness and longing for the release provided by bad ideas.

Enough on that.

I will also discuss briefly a template I am considering.  Within Kum Nye different energy centers–chakras–are considered to have differing speeds and qualities of energy.  Gut energy is grounding.  It is what connects you to the land, to a place, to a rooted sense of self.  It is slow and cthonic.  This, in any event, is my present understanding of the theory.  The gut provides the lasting, defining emotions and emotional energy.

The head–the brow chakra–in contrast is fast, light, ephemeral, constantly changing.  It provides the energy for abstract thought.  But it is the opposite of grounded.  It is forever “up in the air”.  It is a bird, a butterfly.

Given how much our present society prioritizes both the abstract and the visual (via TV and most media generally), which are both mainly processed energetically in the head, it is very easy to lose touch with the lower tones, and lower speeds, of the lower chakras.  And in point of fact, most of us seem to have done so.

The work of Kum Nye, in large measure, is restoring balance, by providing a steady supply of stable energy which creates an affective home of sorts in which you can live.  It is a portable home, a reliable home.

All the energies of all the energy centers can be balanced and even, or spasmodic, constricted and choppy.

Energetically, the thing with Communism is they invoke the gut energy, but in a fitful manner characterized by rage, destruction, and violence.  They don’t do it consciously.  They rationalize it using their head energy, but what is really sought unconsciously is a release of energy they are otherwise completely disconnected from.

The heart chakra, of course, is love and connection and innate wisdom.  It is the source of the best feelings.  But what I am arguing is that people who need love–and we all need love–find themselves tearing down the world for reasons they themselves don’t really understand emotionally, even if they have glib and wrong answers intellectually.

We are seeing this on our streets today.  We are seeing this, too, in the lockdowns imposed by people trying to destroy America in order to, as they falsely claim, save it.  There is no love there.  There is no good there.

Logically, any major cultural trend increasing the perception that the world is dangerous is going to help the people who claim they will make it safer.  With few exceptions, all eventual tyrants get their start on the safety bandwagon.  I would go so far as to say Socialism could equally be called Safetyism, or Securityism.

Self evidently, it is largely a lie, and for non-conformists it is the most dangerous system possible.

But weak, fearful people are the ideal audience for Socialist rants, and spending 8 hours a day watching violent TV is more or less a perfect means of building those people.

[Edit; obviously, conservatives appeal to fear too.  They appeal to the fear of other nations, of war, and of economic disaster.  The type of fear I am referring to here, though, is fear of your neighbors, and of “Life” writ large.  Anomalous, unanchored, atmospheric anxiety is what I am talking about.  And it does seem to have been shown that conservatives have less mental problems than Leftists, which makes sense for a number of reasons.]

Actually, on that note, I saw a crowd today listening to someone talk in a park.  I saw that most of them were wearing masks, and inferred it was left wing something or other, probably race related.  I may have been wrong–it would have been good to validate my hypothesis–but I didn’t feel like it.

But why are masks seemingly a bigger thing with Democrats?  It is virtue signalling, yes, but I think much of it is simply cowardice.  They are vastly more afraid of their own shadows, figuratively and literally.

This is a large problem.  One of the obvious solutions, to my mind, is to mainstream the considerable evidence that we survive our physical deaths, and that mind is non-local in ways which can be studied as “psi”, broadly understood.

There can be little doubt for anyone who has done the work to understand the state of the science that the Cartesian-Newtonian Paradigm, as I saw Stan Grof call it in a talk I watched last night, really needs to give way to something suitable for current understandings of the best evidence.

In my view, many political religions depend ultimately on philosophical pessimism.  For all people certain that their own death is eternal, the temptation to live on through “society” can be nearly overwhelming.

All of these are old ideas, much trodden over in the 20th century.  If God is dead, everything is permitted, we hear.  If we are just machines made out of meat, then as individuals we are not perfectable, we hear.  No individual morality is possible.  This is why socialism, as a sustainable  perfection of the machine, comes to assume such mythical dominance among atheists.

It does seem obvious, though, that all this violence in media cannot but make people into emotional imbeciles.  And one sees this, of course.  One sees childishness, patronizing narcissism, glib superficiality, and even cultishness in the political and other domains.

When these kids take over, absent some sea change of some sort, nothing good can be expected, in my view.  But of course changes do happen.  Miracles do occur.  My own work is largely oriented around this observation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf1mLl0tQFQ&feature=youtu.be&utm_source
 

You know, as for me, I’m in it for the duration.  Whatever may come.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=277&v=3-gQ6oBDpB4&feature=emb_logo

How often do I do that?

http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv

The data below looks just at TV.  Ponder that children as young as–hell, I don’t even know, let’s say no later than 10 years old–are playing violent video games, and that in a game like Call of Duty you might EASILY kill 500 people a day, and do so for years and years.

Let’s call it a mere 100, which is ridiculously low, if you have played that or similar games.  That’s 36,500 murders YOU COMMIT each year.  In 8 years, that works out to 292,000.  And of course the game playing doesn’t stop at 18.  And this is layered onto repeat watches of 300, and various horror movies, and cop dramas.  And at 18 the damage is done.

Ponder all that when contemplating these nihilistic riots.  I think most of the white kids participating thought it was fun.  The kid who set the horses (yes, horses, not houses: he threw a firebomb into a horse trailer and posted a video of him doing it) on fire seemingly thought it was cool.  He posted about it on Instagram or somewhere.

Let me coin a phrase: induced contextual sociopathy.  You get where I’m going with that. Or if I’m talking about you, maybe you don’t.

In my own case, it was obvious to me how easy it was for TV to screw kids minds up.  I monitored my kids very carefully, and I watched a lot of their shows with them.  An awful lot.  I knew what they were watching, and Cartoon Network was off-limits.  I allowed PBS stuff, like Caillou, and Dragon Tales, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.  They watched Mary Poppins a lot.

All of this stuff is subtle.  It is a Strawman Argument to misconstrue media critics as believing that watching violence leads directly to violence.  In some cases it clearly does, like the boy who strangled his brother to death because he wanted to be Dexter.

But in nearly all cases it leads to reduced empathy, and I would suspect to a greater tendency to see the world in polarized terms, as Good and Bad.  It leads to a greater latent willingness to use force against people who are different, and it leads to a greater eagerness to have the opportunity to do so.

It leads to the sense that the world is a dangerous, violent and confusing place.  This, in turn, leads to reduced trust, reduced social contact, and increased rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide.

It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to argue that many of the political problems we have stem more or less directly from the media we consume.

I remember, back in the 70’s and 80’s, when things started getting worse and worse, how the Democrats, how the Alan Alda’s, how the PBS supporters, were pretty uniforn in condemning violence in media.  Where did they go?  Why did they disappear ? Did their hate of the Religious Right–which was also talking about it–overwhelm their native understanding that this stuff is bad?  Did they decide that to get the sex they had to put up with the violence?

Are we better off now that porn is normalized to the point that anyone with internet access can watch it endlessly at will?  A clever 6 year old could find anything.  Are we better as a society?

And to be clear, I’m not advocating censorship.  I am advocating INTELLIGENCE and high level, very vocal, very visible public dialogues about all this. We have data.  We have numbers.  And its all bad.  Why is this not better known?  Would parents not perhaps make different decisions if–rather than just have an age level on violent video games and movies–they KNEW what the long term psychological effects were likely to be?  What if they knew what violent media was doing to THEM?  The parents are not immune.  These images are really not suitable for anyone on a daily long term basis.

Here is a cut and paste from the website:

• An average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV by age 18 [15].
• Two-thirds of all programming contains violence [16].
• Programs designed for children more often contain violence than adult TV [17].
• Most violent acts go unpunished on TV and are often accompanied by humor. The consequences of human suffering and loss are rarely depicted. 
• Many shows glamorize violence.  TV often promotes violent acts as a fun and effective way to get what you want, without consequences [18]. 
• Even in G-rated, animated movies and DVDs, violence is common—often as a way for the good characters to solve their problems.  Every single U.S. animated feature film produced between 1937 and 1999 contained violence, and the amount of violence with intent to injure has increased over the years [19]. 
• Even “good guys” beating up “bad guys” gives a message that violence is normal and okay.  Many children will try to be like their “good guy” heroes in their play.
• Children imitate the violence they see on TV.  Children under age eight cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy, making them more vulnerable to learning from and adopting as reality the violence they see on TV [20]. 
• Repeated exposure to TV violence makes children less sensitive toward its effects on victims and the human suffering it causes.
• A University of Michigan researcher demonstrated that watching violent media can affect willingness to help others in need [20a].  Read about the study here: Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others.
• Viewing TV violence reduces inhibitions and leads to more aggressive behavior.
• Watching television violence can have long-term effects: 
• A 15-year-long study by University of Michigan researchers found that the link between childhood TV-violence viewing and aggressive and violent behavior persists into adulthood [21]. 
• A 17-year-long study found that teenaged boys who grew up watching more TV each day are more likely to commit acts of violence than those who watched less [22].
• Even having the TV on in the home is linked to more aggressive behavior in 3-year-olds. This was regardless of the type of programming and regardless of whether the child was actually watching the TV [23].

There is something about social media, and even the internet generally, which seems to shrink time and space, which is to say our perception of both, and we can’t be sure epistemologically if there is any other perspective which matters.  We can’t say time and space “exist” outside of observation.

Concretely, though, the Fear of Missing Out interrupts, continually, all day every day, any possibility of relaxation and expansion.  Of just sitting there, slack jawed, watching the clouds, or a stream, or birds flying around, or grass growing.

Ponder how the 2020 use of LSD is to be more productive, in order to be more “successful.”  More successful means more money.  But what does more money mean?  It’s all a silly game, whose nature hasn’t really changed since  Chaplin’s conveyor belt, or Lucille Ball’s.  Who is pushing it?

Kids nowadays are being taught to blame “Capitalism”, but as I’ve argued often, this is stupid.  The blame rests with the bankers and the dilution of our money, and following productive power.  We should have plenty of leisure now.

But what would we do with it?  We are wound up like coiled springs.  Most people “relax” by watching scenes of intense violence.  I have not and don’t plan to watch Game of Thrones, but I understand it includes regular scenes of torture made as graphic as their technology allows them.  No doubt VR torture scenes exist now somewhere.

I was driving down my street the other day.  It’s just a normal middle class street in a normal middle class neighborhood.  And it hit me–it was 7 or 8 PM–that in most of those houses most of those people were watching TV, and probably watching people get murdered.  Cops and robbers.  War.  Horror movies.  The kids are in their rooms practicing shooting people.

Not all homes.  Some were sitting around the kitchen table reading the Bible.  Many were watching sports, at least back when sports were on.  I tend to exaggerate bad things.

But still, that was not a fully wrong perception either.  And that people gather around the glowing altar nightly is really demographic fact.  The average American watches almost 8 hours of TV a day.

Dear God, I was expecting to see 4 hours and that would have been crazy to me.

But all of this, all of the blinking lights, all the things that would stop if the power went off, all of it takes us away from time and space, from stillness and quiet.

Small wonder we are insane.

Anyway, I will share something I just rediscovered: model kits.  One of the first things I can remember that made me happy as a kid were model kits.  I really liked particularly the Aurora model kits.  I had King Kong, and Godzilla, and a couple Neanderthal’s, and quite a few more.  I was very attached to them, and very proud of them.

I just started painting and assembling a Vought F4U-1A Corsair, the type of plane Pappy Boyington flew.  It is REALLY small: 1:72 scale.  It takes patience.  But it is really, really calming.

I am going to start including more things in my life that are slow.

As I’ve shared from time to time, I’m a bit down on the current Dalai Lama, for reasons I’ve probably articulated.  I will actually add an interesting anecdote from “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”, by Alexandra David Neel, where she relates a mendicant Saddhu mocking the then-Dalai Lama, for lacking the  power to protect Tibet.  Said Saddhu himself was able to push someone away without touching him, so he apparently had some powers of his own.

But this Dalai Lama seems like he could have a permanent show at Vegas, or a facsimile of the Potala built for him at Epcot Center.  Maybe that’s just me being an asshole.  That is a distinct possibility.

But one thing he said I liked was that a hobby of his is working on watches.  This requires enormous care and enormous patience.  I like that.

Oh, it’s an interesting ride, all of this.  But most of the time that you are looking at a screen, you are probably missing it.  You are not learning much about yourself or the world.  You might learn facts–or what are presented as facts–watching documentaries, but they won’t teach you to think, to see, or to feel honestly.  All that happens far from the blinking lights.