Month: May 2021

There was something Satanic in the way we abandoned South Vietnam, wasn’t there?  We went in there to help, got them to trust us fully, then abandoned them.  And when we abandoned them, terror, pain and death filled their nation.  Rape, pillage, families torn apart, concentration camps, mass executions, misery in all forms.

19 million people were thrown to ravenous wolves, and the people most responsible for it, in this country, LIED about it.  They continue lying about it, to this very day.

This is an evil act, is it not?  I remember reading some senior Army officer commenting in the late 1960’s to the effect that “if we abandon Vietnam, we will never again be the nation we once were.”  That was in Lewis Sorley’s Must-Read book “A Better War”.

What got me back on this line of thought–and obviously my essay on Cultural Sadeism takes the abandonment of the Vietnamese as its backdrop–is not obviously connected.

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Spalding Gray and read that he was in a porn movie or two, one of which was entitled “Farmer’s Daughters”.

This film contains multiple rape scenes according to the description.  You might say “it was the 1970’s”, but that doesn’t answer much, does it?

What I would say is that was 1976, one year after the final conquest–and one might without much risk of exaggeration call the rape–of South Vietnam.  All of the “socially committed” hippies starting going on coke benders, having all sorts of weird sex, and otherwise distancing themselves emotionally from what our nation wrought.

Yes, South Vietnam was far away.  Yes, most reporters either were banned, or–worse to my mind–HAD NO INTEREST in describing accurately what happened.

Yes, the Boat People made some headlines.  You have likely never heard of them, if you were not alive in that time.

And there is Doan Van Toai.  Here are some quotes from this article, published in 1986:

For thirty years the motivating passion of the Vietnamese people had been to free themselves from a shameful colonial heritage. Against the French, the issues had been clear and morally certain. Against the Americans and their protégés, they had been less so. But to my generation, at least to those who had not seen life in the post-Geneva “democratic” North, the outlines of the issues had remained the same. We saw ourselves as part of a heroic struggle to assert our Vietnamese identity against the backdrop of a century of Western domination.

But shortly after the complete victory of that struggle in 1975, the Vietnamese in Europe began to receive intimations that the promise of a new flourishing of Vietnamese life had been built on lies. People had discounted the stories of those Vietnamese who had fled in 1975 when South Vietnam fell (much as I had discounted the reports of Catholics who had fled south in 1954 after the Geneva agreement which divided the country into North and South Vietnam). And they tried hard to avoid believing the scattered and incomplete reports from refugees who had begun to escape by boat after the new order had established its apparatus. But now the French papers were headlining news about the hard-labor camps and prisons, and about rule by starvation and blackmail, and the Vietnamese in France found it impossible any longer to avert their eyes.

The understanding hit them that what they had believed was a heroic struggle for independence, on the same order as the historic struggles against the Chinese, had been manipulated from the start by the architects of an insidious inhumanity, far worse than that of the foreign oppressors on whom they had poured their hatred. At each of these meetings I shared my perception that we—those of us who had supported the cause—had been condemned to contribute to the tragedy. And now we were condemned to recognize and bear witness to the nation’s fate. We (that is, the Vietnamese people) had fought magnificently against our outside enemies, but we had been powerless to protect ourselves from the enemy within.

And this:

Like the prisoners, he had believed that the West must be told about the monumental deception being carried out by the Communist regime. Specifically, the Western antiwar movement with all its energy and commitment to the cause of Vietnamese freedom must be educated to what was really taking place. Once they knew, he had thought, they would begin pressuring Vietnam’s leaders back inside the pale of human conduct.

Hoan smiled wanly as he told me this. “Believe me,” he said, “you will get nowhere substantial with these people. Vietnam to them was a fad, or something they did out of anger at their own government. Now they don’t care, I doubt if they ever did. It’s not their fight.”

In my personal view, our nation will be divided, and some large part of it utterly open to and susceptible to the most egregious, venal, and destructive lies imaginable, until we TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM.

To my mind, Vietnam can and should stand in for all the other Communist atrocities the world over.  It is the specific one WE MADE POSSIBLE, not by losing a war, but on the contrary by asking millions of Americans to put their own lives on hold in various ways, to die by the tens of thousands, be wounded permanently by the hundreds of thousands, and then PISSING AWAY THEIR VICTORY and lying about the pain and suffering our frivolousness caused people who did not deserve anything that happened to them.

That is the reality.

One sees this ridiculous lack of caring and basic humanity even today, in obvious ways, in things like the attacks on police; or the release of violent illegal aliens, most of whom will go on to most harm other illegal aliens; or policies which make gasoline more expensive, which harms first the most poor by raising costs on everything.  You see this emotionally disconnected moral grandstanding, which NEVER ADMITS ERROR, which never stoops to the level of those in whose name it claims to speak, so as to see and care about them, or understand or interact with them in any way.

It is monstrous.  This whole edifice of lies is horrific, nauseating.

I get flashes of a deep order, that is far, far, far beyond any rational capacity for understanding.  I just got one.

This kind of makes me that Facebook sort of person who posts something with no context and strong emotion.  Sorry!!!

But I did want to float this idea out into the universe, so you got that at least.

Do you think it is true that the 1980’s are when the United States truly became an irreligious society?  I think that claim is tenable, even if I don’t want to make it emphatically.

Yes, you had the Religious Right, but that only existed because the solution split.  We separated into curds and whey.  You pick who is which.

If I might echo the Tao Te Ching, a Religious Right can only appear when religion is in decline.  Prior to the 1980’s, do you not think most Americans, even if they supported the legalization of abortion, opposed the procedure–that of killing an unborn and completely helpless infant–itself?

Somewhere in the 1980’s, the Left became so ascendant–the anti-Reagan propaganda was so effective–that it stopped being possible to have honest, open hearted, sincere dialogues.  It became difficult or impossible for genuinely good people to say things like “I don’t want women using coat hangars to abort unwanted babies, but I also think killing babies is wrong, and every possible means needs to be employed to prevent unwanted babies, and to deliver them to foster parents whenever possible”.

Adoption became solely a “right wing” argument.  Personal responsibility became almost solely a “right wing” argument.

All moral standards got soft.  They were attacked in the 60’s and 70’s and gave way in the 1980’s.  I think this is true.

I grew up in this period.  I came of age in this period.  I graduated high school in the mid-80’s.  And I am sitting here today, watching some videos, reading some stories, recollecting, and the sheer awfulness of that time–what I myself felt at that time, in any event, the confusion and Verworfenheit–is coming back.

This is all good.  I am processing things I have long put off.

The Left Wing line is “we care about people of color and we want to help.”

How do they want to “help”?  They want to control how white people talk about black people.  They want to construct fictitious class warfare–“White Supremacy”–and attack white people.

If a black person were struck in the street by a careless driver, they would, one senses, care vastly more about punishing the driver than calling an ambulance.  Their emotional energy is not directed to building, but tearing down; not to solutions, but to destruction.

Behind all of this, and never, ever forget this, are people who WANT A RETURN TO MONARCHY, AND WHO WANT A KING OR AT LEAST COUNCIL WITH ABSOLUTE GLOBAL CONTROL.

Look at all this.  They destroy Charter Schools every chance they get, when Charter Schools are the ONLY educational system which have been shown to reliably improve black educational outcomes.

They are taking police away from what were already dangerous neighborhoods, even while they are–through abusive, counter-productive, and patently unnecessary lockdowns–creating severe economic stress.

Most blacks would literally be much, much farther ahead if the Left didn’t exist, or if they were silent.  Sooner or later–most likely sooner–black themselves would obviously and organically start lobbying for the solution of their own problems.  They would be asking for and in short order–since most Americans are decent people–receiving better schools.  The better schools would lead to better jobs, and better jobs would lead to less crime, and better jobs would also lead to a decrease in single parent homes, and much of the social and psychological pathologies they lead to.

But the Left is shouting SO LOUDLY every single fucking day, that most blacks THINK their interests are being represented.  They THINK that “something” is going to get done, that people have their back and care about them.

But, again, look at Barack Obama, the first black President: what did he do to help blacks, specifically?  In what ways did he show he cared?  What concrete actions did he undertake?  As far as I can recall, he dropped his g’s when talkin’ with da black folks, and did a mild rendition of a Southern accident.  That’s it.  No policy initiatives, no honest efforts even at understanding black problems.

With friends like the Left, it doesn’t matter that the KKK has been gone many years now.

And until blacks en masse start telling white Leftists, in particular, to go fuck themselves, nothing good will be possible.  The Left will block–aggressively–all measures intended to provide actual improvement and benefit.  This would include general economic growth.

I will recall to your mind that not much over one year ago, America as a whole had the best economy ever, and that the black community was benefiting if anything disproportionately.  Unemployment numbers were the lowest on record, at least in the last 50 years.

All of that was obviously unacceptable and even horrifying to our aspiring rulers, SO THEY DESTROYED IT.

I would define wisdom, for my own purposes, as comprehensive emotional intelligence, combined with an openness to God, or perhaps the Transcendent, in whatever form that person feels makes sense to them.

I say this, because I am contemplating what this reopening will look and feel like.  I think the world has grown colder over the last year, meaner, more petty, more self assured in destructive impulses, less patient, less kind.

Yet the self IMAGE of the Left–of the people pushing most of what I see as socially damaging, pernicious and completely unnecessary narratives–is they are the agents of kindness and inclusivity.  As such, they are quite prepared to be cruel, and highly, vocally, and violently exclusionary.

Your politics are always bound to be a direct outgrowth of who you ARE, what you really know, what you really feel.

For myself, I am often a wreck.  I do and say things I don’t like afterwards.  But I am self aware.  I know who I am and what I am doing.  I think my reality testing as far as the world at large is pretty good.  I see my flaws.  I see where I can and need to grow, and work at it often.

None of this is necessary, or in important respects even permitted, to be a committed partisan of the Religious/Cultish Left.  You are not allowed public doubt.  You cannot question The Narrative.  You are not permitted to be confused and thrashing around.  You are expected to believe what everyone else believes, and say what they say, and hate the people who you exclude as the Other as a more or less permanent and necessary principle of social psychopathology.

All through this you can be a neurotic mess, but you can’t be that in front of conservatives.  And in important respects your morality–what I would view as the vital core of a healthy Self–is GIVEN to you.  All you have to do is receive it, repeat it, internalize it, and all is forgiven.  Deviate, and you will be cast out and CANNOT be forgiven.  Ever.  Not for the crime of ideological deviancy.

We know so much.  The Social Sciences have come so far.  We can say so many intelligent things with reasonable confidence.  How are so many of us so stupid, then?

Imagine the use that would have been made in the last year of a medicine which promised–if given prophylactically in clinically efficacious doses–to “prevent or reduce the severity of Cytokine Storms in response to COVID-19 infection; strengthen overall immunity; balance internal body hormones; strengthen bones; and reduce the risk of depression.”

Miracle drug, right?  At $500/dose with insurance it would have swept the planet.  All our leaders would have been demanding its general use.  The Drug Companies would have been praised for their innovation and hard work.

My fucking jaw drops every morning, as I emerge from my dreams and contemplate anew the madness which has gotten such a deep foothold on the human species, on those who have sought and won power, and on the people buying apples next to me at the grocery store.

I forgot to mention that watching this documentary is what got me thinking about Dr. Sowell: https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-Sowell-Common-Sense-Senseless/dp/B08V7HBS7H/ref=sr_1_1

It’s not perfect.  But it’s good.  Worth the watch in my view.

In most medical studies, there are three outcomes for medicines which are determined to work: the best, which is from the medicine being tested; some effect, achieved with placebos; and no effect, which comes from the control group.

With a placebo it is assumed you are giving nothing, but this is not true: it is more or less literally a means of giving BELIEF, and of organizing the bodies systems in a way we really don’t understand in the service of the chosen aim.

The existence of the Placebo Effect should be much more researched than it is.  Almost all of them do something, and it doesn’t really matter what illness is supposedly being treated.  I am far from the first to find this fascinating.

As one obvious idea that has no doubt occurred to someone, why not give placebos for illnesses for which we have no cure?  I am sure some professional medical ethicist could make that work.  You increase the chance of life.  You incur no risk of harm if you are not substituting the placebo for something which might have worked better.

You know, the Marshmallow Test is really not about the supposed character of the child, but more or less a direct measure of the environment in which they have been growing up.  Does their world have a future?  Can people be trusted?

At age 4 kids really don’t have any long term habits at all.  What they have are life experiences.  Those life experiences will in most cases go on to inform–as their emotional water, or atmosphere–their entire lives.

It seems obvious that kids who grow up in stable homes, where people can be trusted, will be better able to trust that that second marshmallow will show up, and thus find it less hard to wait fifteen minutes.

Children who grow up in abusive, unstable homes, will find it impossible.  I personally highly doubt I would have passed that test, and in some respects my adult life shows it.  I was shattered, and have spent the time since trying to find a way into a health I have never truly known.

But here is my point: I suspect that most members of the black community who grow up in the ghetto would not pass this test.  This has NOTHING to do with race, but the test IS a valid predictor of future behavior.  I don’t doubt for a moment that those how pass do better in every way, but this is because they grew up in healthier, more nurturing environments, in which planning for the future was logical, because their worlds were not being overturned and disrupted by unexpected chaos every day.

And I reference black folks specifically, knowing that the numbers of messed up whites are vastly larger, simply because of the volume of noise generated by the Left, in which they claim to care, to care more, and to want to help.  They don’t want to help.  They don’t care about analysis of this sort.  It does not have enough THEM in it.  Leftist thinkers care about leftist thought.  Actual human beings are cockroaches to them, outside small token contingents that grant their lies superficial plausibility.

As I have commented, but some time ago, Ayn Rand had her own version of the Marshmallow Experiment.  Her mother, who seems to have been crazy (most likely a narcissist) told her that if she surrendered her Teddy Bear (or something like that) that she would get something much better in a year.  She did it.  A year later, her mother could not even remember the deal, and told her in effect to shut up and quit whining.

Her entire subsequent life and philosophy may depend emotionally on this one incident, at least as it stands in for her entire early childhood.

As I have said often, but not recently, most of us have what I call “Rosebud Moments”, and not infrequently, we cannot even recall them.  But they stand on altars in our inner caves, unlit, but transforming everything.  No conscious life is possible until we find them and integrate them.

I am of course a big fan of Thomas Sowell, for obvious reasons.  It is not uncommon for me to think I’ve come up with some great argument on some topic or other, only to find out that he, or David Horowitz, or Friedrich Hayek, or even Bastiat said it better 40 or 100 or more years ago.

But Sowell fought the hard battles for half a century.  He was there reliably most Sundays for most of my youth, defending common sense, and attacking lunacy.

Here is thing: Conservative–or what I call Honest Liberal–arguments win.  They are the best.  They stand unopposed, when articulated clearly by informed people.  Nothing the Left “stands” for has been actually left standing, intellectually.  It is all gone.  Burned.  Torched.  Shown to be deficient, anti-human, destructive, morally bankrupt, and harmful to human happiness and flourishing.  And all this happened at the latest by the mid-1970’s.  At the LATEST. One could argue simply reading and understanding Edmund Burke and Frederic Bastiat should have been enough.

But these ghoulish ideas keep coming back, over and over and over.  Why?  BECAUSE WE NEED A RELIGION AND THIS CULT SERVES THAT PURPOSE.  As Sowell himself notes–and he himself was a Marxist until he actually spent time in the government–the left wing visions are more attractive than right wing visions.  If the world worked the way the Left claims it does–the way it assumes, in an act of empirically ungrounded faith–then the world would be a better place.  Assuming it works the way honest Liberals do–the way which comes from a clear eyed reading of history and social psychology–is much less pleasant.  People tend to be nasty, and tend to be nasty because it is easier and more obvious for them.  They are best civilized by ideas, and in the beginning and middle those ideas have to be rooted in self interest, which is the root of “Capitalism”, so called, which in practice is nothing more or less than the erosion of systems of hereditary privileges, grotesquely curtailed personal freedoms, and compulsory religion, all in favor of generalized prosperity and freedom.  Socialism, in turn, is a return to the status quo ante, merely without God, in whose stead is made to serve a perverted and chained “science”.

People who cannot use their own freedom, do not want to grant it to others.

So in the end, economic questions are religious questions.  The irrefutable answers highly competent intellectuals like Dr. Sowell provide CANNOT BE HEARD by people whose main aim is a life of purpose, and whose main means to that purpose is at odds with economic truth and fact.  Truth and fact will lose every time, to someone who otherwise stands to lose everything by evaluating them honestly.

Obviously, better philosophy is needed.  We need better reasons for living, than the ones we were living for, if I might paraphrase a Bruce Springsteen line I’ve always liked.

And take Bruce Springsteen.  He is an alert, alive, spontaneous guy.  He is bright, and perhaps even a genius.  I don’t know how he came up with so much great music.  I know the words to most of the songs on his first seven albums or so.  Why is he a Joe Biden supporter?  Bruce Springsteen is the “working man’s hero”.  Well, since the 1970’s his New Jersey and that region have suffered massive industrial decline.  And since Barack Obama, at least, no honest efforts have been made to protect the lives and incomes of blue collar workers by the Democrats.  On the contrary, they are importing by the millions Hispanics whose main job is to eventually vote Democrat.  To help who?  Democrat politicians, that’s who.  Not Springsteen’s people.  Not Americans.  Democrats as a whole used to be clear on this.

But nobody is thinking clearly any more.  They are not about trying to achieve concrete ends.  Their world has gotten much colder.  All they are doing is trying to avoid realize how wrong they have become, how wasted their faith has been on faithless people.  It’s hard.  I get that.  But it still needs to happen.  Bruce Springsteen needs to become a Trump supporter.  Trump had, and will have, the working men and women’s backs.  Trump, or someone like him.  As I’ve said, I like Kristi Noem.  She seems to be dealing quite intelligently with the lunatic idea that biological men should be allowed to destroy all the hard work and dreams of biological women.  Trans ideology is inherently anti-feminist and inherently anti-LGB.  This cannot be said too often.

Well, that was a nice tour of the ranch perimeter.  Couple lines from Sowell worth repeating (from memory, so they are right in substance if not specific verbiage):

“Many nations in history have become prosperous.  Many have raised their poor to affluence.  But NONE HAVE DONE IT USING THE METHODS BEING USED TO RAISE UP BLACK FOLKS IN THIS COUNTRY.”

And I will add the comment that the rhetoric is no longer even ABOUT raising up black folks.  Trump was doing that, and the Left hated it.  It is not even about justice.  It is about PUNISHING WHITE PEOPLE.  That is it.  There is nothing life affirming, generous, or good in any of the Left’s proposals and focus any more when it comes to race.  It is OBVIOUS they want blacks in ghettos indefinitely, they want their schools piss poor, their graduates ignorant, their streets crime ridden (why otherwise get rid of the police and charter schools?), and blacks in general bitter, hopeless, and looking to Democrats for any relief they may get.  That is the left wing vision.

“It is amazing how much panic one honest man can induce in a multitude of hypocrites”.

He no doubt said this long before Donald Trump.  Sowell has had little to say about Trump, and it’s not hard to understand why.

He is an old man.  He has been battling critics and the work of sifting complex information into accurate portraits of reality as it is since at least 1970.  That is fifty years ago.  I can understand fully why, at his age, he would just want to go out in nature and forget the news, forget the need to comment, and just focus on whatever comes next.  I don’t know for sure, but I would think he must have some religious beliefs.

He has earned his rest.  Most of us would be doing exceptionally well to accomplish a small fraction of what this man from North Carolina did, who was orphaned before he could write.