Month: July 2020

What does it take to go from the observation that some cops are bad, to the conclusion that all cops need to be banned?  How does this sort of fucking idiocy happen?  Minneapolis–and from what I can tell PARTICULARLY the black parts of Minneapolis–is already turning into a war zone more worthy of Mogadishu back in the day than a prosperous, supposedly educated global leading nation.

Here is what I perceive: proper thought should be endlessly articulated, in the sense of joints.  It needs to be endlessly particulated, in the sense of particles.  It needs to be malleable, in the sense that it can be impressed on the topic at hand, and come away with a reasonably complete composite picture, like an imprint in sand.

What fear does is disarticulate, and departiculate thinking.  The more fear, the less joints.  Imagine trying to live life with knees that would not flex, elbows that would not bend.  You would walk funny, and many things you can do now you would be unable to do. 

This is what that sort of thinking looks like.  If 1 part in 100 of something is bad, then the whole thing is bad.  Only perfection is acceptable, and since nothing is perfect, you have to reject everything.  Burn everything down.  Only then will perfection emerge. This is literally what some of these people think.

I had someone try and convince me the other day that because race riots happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago, that black people can’t get ahead now.  Should anyone really be confronted with such a fatuous, obviously stupid argument, much less be forced to respond to it? 

These kids in the streets: this is how they think.  As far as I can tell, fear–deep, profound, existential fear–must underlie all this idiocy.  Anxiety is the coin of the realm, and in such a realm, ideational disease is necessarily rampant.

 I fear my government 50x more than I fear this disease. We can manage the disease. What remains to be seen is if we can manage the disease of bad government, which is VASTLY more destructive. Not even close.

It occurs to me to comment that addiction really comes into play when it is an alternative to your “real” life.  You count the time until you can get back to what you really want to do.  It may be sex, drugs, or rock and roll.

And as I think about it, I think this represents, in effect, an affective split, a dissociation.  You have your face that you take into society, then your core reality.  One doesn’t need drugs, the other one does.  One doesn’t need sex every day, but the other one does.

Healing is accomplished, to offer a truism as something deep, through integration.  If alcohol amplifies and improves your existing life, then it is healthy for you.  If it is an alternative to your life, something where you escape it, then it is unhealthy.

Here is another metaphor: addiction is a means of feeding a wild beast which does not belong in society.  The solution is to reintegrate to society, but the thing is, you can only do that when you can figure out how to actually belong.

I think Jonathan Hari is unquestionably correct that addicts suffer from lack of connection, but I think in a great many cases, it is because their traumatic experiences prevent them from socializing properly.  We live surrounded by people, most of us.  That is not the problem.  The problem is HOW to do it.  If your mother did not love you, if she perhaps even hated you, then that is the water in which you swim. 

It’s a complicated fix, but I’m working on it.

You know, I think a lot of psychologists, looking at that dream I posted, might see a good indication of latent shame in there too.  Generic, lasting, developmental shame. 

That would no doubt be accurate.  It occurs to me to comment, though, that in the same sense that I have been made relatively fearless by the fact that I am afraid of everything and everyone, I am also not afraid of being shamed by others, since I already feel it anyway.

Here is an hypothesis: a great many creative sorts–and definitely comedians–derive much of their creative potential FROM shame, and from a following need to justify it with, if not transgression, at least the NEW.

I think most of us are born conformists.  The people who stand out are those driven in some way.  They may be driven by love–a love of beauty, of form, of the creative process itself.  And they may be driven by what I call the Unholy Triumvirate of Shame, Fear, and Anger.

You can’t really much fear losing connections you never really had, although I think there is another direction, that of hyperconformity, in which the connections are tepid, weak, and highly contingent.  Those are the people who go through the meat grinder and come out Fascists.  There are a lot of those people right now.

Think about this, too: would you not expect a groundswell of support for mass marches and demonstrations, when people have been locked up alone for months?  They get to belong.  They get to participate, allegedly in the service of a noble cause.

Buy up 100 million doses of HCQ–if he can get them, but whoever makes it has to be working over-overtime, and we could probably make it here pretty easily–and give them out to anyone who wants to use them as prophylactics.  I think it is 2 200mg doses the first week, then 1 200 mg dose every two weeks.  It’s not a lot of pills.  For God’s sake, India deployed them in a slum where people were living on top of each others, and saw almost no disease.

We need to bypass the System.  Bypass Fauci and the NIH.  Get this in the hands of the people.  He can issue an Executive Order making it available, at least in States where not (for inexplicable reasons) explicitly prohibited.

This is not a new medicine.  It is like Tylenol or Sudafed.  It’s available over the counter to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

I was dreaming, for the umpteenth time, that I was back at the University of Chicago, enrolled in classes.  I was going to become a first rate Sanskritist and scholar.  At least, I was going to become a good enough scholar.  I lack the patience and diligence to be a great scholar, but I certainly have the intelligence to be a good one, and probably a great teacher.

Everything was going fine.  I was hanging out in the coffee shop–the one in the basement of Swift Hall has since renamed itself “Grounds of Being”, which of course is a name I like. I was talking with folks in the halls. 

Then I remembered my terrible secret.  I don’t belong there.  I am a CONSERVATIVE.  All the smiling faces would soon turn to snarls.  People would ask that I be expelled.  If I did get my degree, no one would want to hire me.  All the same people I had been having pleasant conversations with, about the weather, professors, their courses of study.

It really is a sort of madness that has fallen over the Academy, writ large.  It was described well by Allan Bloom 35 years ago.  Moral virtue is no longer taught, and the Great Synchronizing Signal and Official Religion has become politics.  And the politics is not fixed: it more or less demands something like: “we expect you to agree immediately with whatever we come up with next week.  You don’t get any mulligans or misses.  One failure and you are OUT, permanently and irrevocably.”

How did this happen?  Again, Bloom traces it reasonably well.  It was ideas that did this, ideas which consumed themselves, leaving nothing left in the fire but mimetic imitation, rote conformity, childishness.  You pick up the ball and play with it because that is what the other children are doing.  This in people with average IQ’s of 140 plus, but emotional IQ’s much, much lower than that, particularly when it comes to self knowledge.

Think about this: the Left has found itself more or less cheering the deaths of 100,000 Americans and the deaths by starvation of perhaps over 100 million people.  All in the hopes of destroying a man whose main crime has been telling the truth in a time when they can’t and won’t do it.

In Minneapolis, ground zero to their ministrations, desperate ordinary people are being forced to build barricades and form militias to defend themselves, as if this were Somalia and not America.  Crime is rampant.  Children are terrified.  And all according to plan.  They are getting what they wanted: no police.

It is all a sadistic trance, a madness without justification.

I don’t regret my decision.  It was the right decision.  That will not change.  But I would like to see the world come back to sanity in my lifetime, where someone like me–perhaps a grand child–could go in peace to a place with lots of smart people and expect honest, measured, compassionate wisdom.

It occurs to me there is an analogy to be drawn between the lockdowns–with restrictions on movement and social interaction, a demand for obedience to authority, and for mask wearing–and the normal means by which the Left relates to ideological difference of any sort.  I won’t even limit it to conservatives, although that is the main target.  They will turn on Muslims at some point, but they want to destroy Christians first, if they can.

They distance themselves, do they not?  They lock down communication, and when it happens, maintain a distance.  They wear masks.  They don’t speak with personal voices, but more or less the We of the Borg.  Talking points.  Yesterdays news, blogged today.

And the latent assumption behind all censorship is that Authority is to be trusted implicitly, and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.  Why would you not remove wrong opinions from the public domain?

I was thinking about it this morning, and one of the more primal reasons I hated mask wearing from the get-go–even though I started stocking up on masks back in February–was that I could see the salacious glee with which the Left embraced it.  It was a pain they were going to be able to inflict on us.  They were going to be able to make us uncomfortable, and then get to use government to make it nearly impossible to avoid. 

I felt that clearly, now that I look back on it.  Not wearing a mask felt like a way of saying FUCK YOU to people who truly deserved it.

My new stance is a bit more nuanced.  I have had some luck saying I have asthma, which is not entirely untrue, but in stores I am wearing my mask, and here is my logic: the customers can kiss my ass who care one way or the other, since they could stay home if they were that scared.  However the people who WORK there are stuck.  They can’t run.  They can’t hide.  They don’t know who has the disease, and they don’t know if masks work, but it’s all they have.  Out of courtesy to them, and only to them, I have started being a good boy, mostly.  

I was doing some tough work yesterday, and will be again today.  Something that makes me relate just a bit to what it must have been like to work in a coal mine, although even remotely close.

Those guys got it done, but they died in large numbers of Black Lung, and heart attacks, and a host of other things.  But they were men.  They persevered in the face of difficulty, in large measure for their families.  They were loyal, diligent and committed.

But some of them came home and beat their wives and raped their daughters.  Or sons.  Or both.  Maybe down in the mines they talked about it.  It’s not much of a stretch, especially 100 years ago.

Toxic masculinity is many things, but mainly it is the suppression of kind emotions, of softness, and an overwillingness to express aggression, anger and violence.  We all agree less violence is good.  We can all agree more emotional intelligence is better.

But flip this.  Take Nathan Lane in Birdcage.  He is very certainly not suffering from toxic Masculinity.  But he has a host of his own issues, doesn’t he?  A psychological dependence on Pirin tablets?  A tendency to become hysterical for no reason and on a dime?

In the same way you don’t kill yourself because you find evil in you, and you don’t burn down your society because it has committed crimes in the past, there is no reason to tear down or denigrate traditional values.  Masculinity at its best is generous, open, honest, brave, loyal, and reliable.

Toxic Masculinity is the Shadow of Healthy Masculinity.  It is very possible to value the latter while working on reducing and perhaps eventually largely eliminating the former.

And there is Toxic Femininity too.  Just ask any woman how nasty and evil women can be and are to each other.  This does not mean women at their best are not compassionate, warm, understanding, caring, kind, and persevering in a way most men never really understand.

She has been censored. She is a Houston based primary care physician who, on her acvount, has treated 350 people for COVID 19, with no deaths, using HCQ, zinc, and Zithromax.

She further claims that she and her team are using HCQ as a preventative and no one has gotten sick.

THAT IS A CURE AND A VACCINE. AND IT HAS BEEN SUPPRESSED.

Think abput this time we are living through. Do you REALLY believe there are not powerful elites who want the citizens of the world to suffer for their own fun and profit?

Look for her name. I sense she will not be vanished that easily, not now.

This pandemic–plandemic–is fake.  The disease is real, but we are being lied to, abused, and manipulated.  Trump gets it.

Watch this:

https://www.facebook.com/prageru/videos/3852566581425150/