Month: July 2021

I am now going to slowly work through some notes I’ve made over the past week.

Discuss amongst yourselves:

Conservatives have similar but diverse beliefs.  Some are Ayn Randian Libertarians, some Christian Fundamentalists, some–like me–Old School Liberals.  What unites is certain core understandings about economics and the nature of government.  These beliefs can be articulated, discussed, and debated, but the principles involved for most really don’t change.  They are stable.

Leftists, if they want to remain friends with their “friends”, if they want to keep their jobs at left wing places, MUST be more or less in lock step with the Dominant Idea of the moment.  But those ideas vary continually, and not infrequently contradict some earlier idea.  As I keep saying, feminism is not compatible with transgenderism.  You have to pick.  It is to her credit that Joanne Rowling picked, and stuck with her pick.  That in my mind makes her a Liberal, and not a Leftist.  She is someone who believes something, and doesn’t change it with the tides of morally incoherent fashion.

As another example, importing limitless immigrants illegally is OBVIOUSLY damaging to those already here, and already struggling economically.  Illegal Mexicans hurt legal blacks.  Open borders are incompatible with claims to care about the black community, or to want to improve their lives in any way, but particularly financially.

So politically, you have a range of STABLE opinions.  Broadly speaking, all such opinions can be qualified as Liberal.

Off the charts, where the dragons are, you have limitless moral ambiguity, continual motion, and a sole constant value of conformity to a mutable agenda.

And this mutability comes with an emotional cost.  You cannot not be a fundamentally emotionally superficial person and change your beliefs on a dime.  This superficiality breeds anger, and it breeds emotional alienation.  Yes, you are connected to your fellow storm troopers, but all of you have to fear continually being disconnected from everyone else by the sort of small error or slowness of correction, which everyone is on the continual hunt for.

You cannot be forgiven when no values are in place, and so everyone has to live in constant fear and hypervigilance, lest their fellow travelers travel on without them, and beat them up as they leave.

That is a truly ugly way to live, and the reason now for so much public ugliness.

You know, it’s been a minute since I posted on here, and the reason is that, as my former father in law used to say, I had to see a man about a horse.

And this horse seeing involved some building in my own life.  Some physical work, to make something more beautiful.

And it hit me that one of the biggest obstacles all of us face to building beautiful things in our lives is the consciousness that they will all be undone.  Everything will pass and fall.  If the bastards conquer this planet, whatever they build will pass and fall eventually, as I explored at length some years ago in a post titled “Perfection”.

I think in my own case much of my own procrastination stems from a denial of Time.  If I just put something off, then I can pretend time isn’t real, that I have all the time in this life I need.

I’ve probably quoted it before, but I like John Mellancamp’s line “growing up means growing old and then dyin’; and dyin’ to me don’t sound like all that much fun.”

So we–and I think there are a lot of people like me–put off until tomorrow what we could to today, for the simple reason that we want to feel like we are going to live forever.  It is a comforting delusion, that is not just pure laziness.

We are born and meant to work.  We are born to do a reasonable days work every day, then sleep soundly.  This is our birthright, our heritage.  And most true, lasting pleasure come from work.

And this is where I think having a belief in an after-life–or continuation of life–helps a lot.  It is scientifically defensible, and arguably the default position from a truly empirical perspective.

And from this perspective, the task is not to build and expect anything to last.  What you are ACTUALLY building is the ability to build.  We have to learn how to learn, and learn how to build.  It is a habit that is worth cultivating, that you keep by it become part of who you ARE.

So what we term laziness really needs to be examined more carefully.  Yes, being an obsessive workaholic is not healthy, because it amounts to a continual deflection from unwanted inner emotions that kind of combine and project out as anxiety, but being lazy is just as bad, and arguably worse.  At least the workaholic can point to this, that and the other thing at the end of life.

So what is laziness?  It is what I said: a rejection of death.  What else?  I am typing out “loud” now.  Smoking a cigar.

I think in our society, refusing to work is also a form of self assertion.  Work is made to feel shameful because we are so often treated like peons, like slaves, like undignified little animals, doing stupid things that are boring, over and over, while someone else gets to play with the profits.  In our world, that is a big part of it.

And I think, too, that we DO need silence, down town, and play time.  Play, in its own way, is serious work. It requires energy, focus, attention.  Story telling, dancing, singing, games: these are forms of what might be termed Cultural work, or “social” work, even if that term is already taken.

What we are not meant to do is listlessly and mindlessly consume.  What we are not meant to do is watch endless hours of TV that does not occupy our minds, but rather satisfies an animalian appetite for violence and spectacle, but poorly.  Hunting, as one example, is a physically healthy, and perhaps emotionally healthy, for most, activity.  You are out there in the wild, on the plain or the woods, sensing, looking, prowling, aiming.

But compare a comedy on TV with a game of Charades played with actual people.  The emotional need underlying both is the same, but in the first you learn nothing because you don’t participate; and in the second you do.  It is like a tanning bed compared to the full sun.

And of course trauma changes our relationship to Time too.  Dissociation is timeless, and going back into time means recalling all those feelings that hurt so much.

As I have said before, this blog really comes from an emotionally unhealthy place for me.  I am driven.  It is fortunate that I happen to be unusually intelligent and observant (I think), but I would find something like this, where I said stupid things if that was all I could do, if I were not able to do this.

I had a brief moment of relative freedom from this burden the day before yesterday.  I did a neurofeedback session, and came out feeling like a injured animal.  I went to my bed and laid there, hurt, like a dog licking its wounds.  But the pressure of continual thought was gone.  I felt no need to say anything to anyone.  In its own way, it was great.

And as I said in the previous post, you can’t make the future brighter by making the present more gray.  My mission is to learn fearlessness, which is to say emotional present-ness in all circumstances, which is to say, only feeling fear when fear is an appropriate reaction.

And actually I will append a note I made myself the other day: it is acceptable to let a person or accident rob you of life, but never an idea.

And what I mean should be clear enough.  We all die.  But we should not spend every moment of every day trying not to die by thinking of all the ways something could go south.  I don’t need to be gaming which exit I will use if a shooter comes through that door when I am eating out.  I don’t need to be rehearsing drawing my gun for hours every day.

What will get you will most likely come out of left field.  If you work daily on developing situational awareness, which is BETTER if you omit the fear, because more complete, less blinkered by the tunnel effect, and COMPETENCE–which is the ability to plan out your action, then execute it (OODA), then change it if need be–then that is your best chance at surviving whatever.  You can do dry runs in literally everything you do, from taking out the garbage to filling out your taxes.

It is not only the samurai whose destiny is death.

And I will comment, too, that I think many soldiers and police and firefighters consciously choose dangerous professions as means of concretizing ambient fear which would otherwise have no obvious source.  If I start out afraid, it becomes a positive in a place where true physical danger is often present.

I myself wanted to be a cop, and I think for that reason.  Now, obviously this doesn’t apply to all of them.  I have met some truly brave–relaxed and fearless–soldiers, who operated from what appeared to me truly idealistic motives.  And I will actually add that the BEST soldiers I’ve met were very relaxed.  Most of the SEAL’s and others of that sort I’ve known were like that.  To do that job well you don’t practice fear: you practice relaxed competence.

And I will add that in that world, the ones I admire most are the CCT’s.  Their job is uniquely stressful, so to adapt they have to become uniquely calm and fearless.  They have to deal with the same firefights everyone else does.  They incur the same risks infiltrating wherever.  And typically they do so with people from another service, and usually while carrying more weight.

And their JOB is to do math, to maintain 3d situational awareness, and to THINK, to think HARD, all while under severe stress.  You cannot do that job without just not giving a shit at some level.

In that world, John Chapman, and Jim Hoteling–who spent something like 40 hours climbing a mountain in the dark with a 130 pound pack, then immediately provided many hours of accurate CAS, in my recollection–are two of my heroes.

The studs are not the ones teaching classes on survival and urban combat.  The studs are the ones who do that work, then come home and are fully emotionally present to their families.

 

For reasons I have articulated at length and for some time, there are ample reasons to be afraid.  Nearly all the people operating our apparatus of State seem to be for sale, and there is plenty of money to buy them with.

If President Trump had accomplished nothing else, making this obvious to the mass of actually woke Americans would have been sufficient to call him a great President.  How anyone remains asleep when we know so much is a mystery I continue to puzzle over.  No doubt it mostly relates to laziness, complacency, intellectual obesity, and the primacy of fear as a human motivation.

But something hit me yesterday I will share.  I was wondering, how can anyone look at all this and not be afraid?  And then I realized I needed to invert it: when danger is PRESENT fear is appropriate and natural, but not until then.

Here is the thing: why should I feel, all day and every day, what is only appropriate when action is possible?  This is how you lose life.  I am not protecting my life with this fear, I am shrinking it.  If you want a long, good, free life, START NOW.  You can’t control when someone might take it from you, but for God’s sake don’t take it from yourself.

Now, like most things, this is easier said than done, but this is an interesting hobby, no?  Learning to live without fear when no immediate threat is present, no gun pointing at my head, without also falling asleep?

This is a great game.  I am going to start trying to play it effectively every day moving forward.  And if I lose my fear, then it will still come back when I need it for something.

It occurred to me the other day that the de facto assaults on small business–to the benefit of Big Business–has the political effect of making it easier to turn political propaganda offensives on and off like spigots.  The recent near universal and instantaneous “Pride” (another word usurped by the Left, along with, among many others, woke, and the symbol of the rainbow, which was once quite innocent and in my mind at least associated with happy children) offensive in Corporate America is a case in point.

When all the largest corporations can simultaneously begin saying the same things, and pushing the same agendas, they have more or less become fully politicized, and another front in the culture war, one run by the same Generals, and directed to the same ends the agents in media are.

What the Left wants, obviously, is less and less “cranky” small business owners putting signs on their doors that don’t comply with their agenda, which in the end amounts to turning us all into frightened serfs, working diligently for peanuts and various opiates, including violent TV, which I might term vicarious participation in sacrificial violence not different in principle from gladiatorial contests.  Doritos, craft beer and CSI is our own Panem et Circenses.  We are even paying people to stay home, as the Romans once did.

And the same basic idea applies to police departments.  What is happening, more or less is that these cynical, truly evil human beings are denigrating the actual police trying to do their dangerous and in the best of times often thankless jobs.  The honest ones will leave.  The corrupt, politicized ones will be taken care of and promoted.

The mid-term goal is to use the politics of racial grievance, coupled with the vast increases in actual crime directed at blacks BY blacks, to both push increasingly centralized control of local police departments–another intermediate institution–as well as the disarming of law abiding citizens.

They are doing the same thing in the military.  They are doing their best to push out honest patriots, and replace them with people like Milley Vanilley, who is to honest patriotism roughly what that pop band was to genuine artistic ability.  Teaching racism is the OPPOSITE of everything this nation stands for, and that is what CRT is.  I was watching a video on Front Page Magazine the other day, where people attending a CRT conference in Somewhere, USA were LITERALLY capable of blaming white people for all our problems in this country, then IN THE NEXT SENTENCE denigrate judging racial groups en masse.

That sort of stupidity has to be trained.  It cannot occur naturally in an organically sound human being.  If they don’t have brain damage, that sort of thing should not be possible.  It is conditioned, and the conditioning of course starts with the perversion of words.

In my personal view Milley–who is an absolute disgrace, and yes we do have the right to judge anyone in public office–has done more to damage the reputation of our Armed Services than anyone since John Kerry, who started his career by creating the myth of the fucked up Vietnam veteran, which he himself knew to be a lie when he was telling it.  It’s appropriate he too is part of this whole shit show.

And we have the various National Guards, but I wonder how they too are being undermined.  Perhaps bringing them to Washington created opportunities for indoctrination.  And in any event, they are more or less “temp” soldiers, appended to full time combat units in most cases when they are short staffed; and otherwise used by the States as trained and logistically solid cadres to deal with natural disasters and on occasion internal violence larger than the police can deal with.

So you look at the landscape, and all the possibility for “weirdness”, for local ideosyncracy, is being slowly erased.  Roughly a third of small businesses were destroyed by national and local policy, while Amazon and its brethren (whose motto might be Big Business for Big Government) posted record profits.

Most local police departments are being taken over by lunatic Leftists, and ordered to do non-sensical things that are making the streets much more dangerous, the police officers themselves furious, and pushing out all the good people.  And obviously the crime will be used to support gun grabbing that is completely counterproductive.

Always remember: more legal guns, less crime.  This is fact, and borne out in many volumes of data the world over.  And if you want to flip that, you can: more ILLEGAL guns, more crime.  Both hold true.

Local media has largely been coopted long ago.  Your local newspaper is likely owned by a conglomerate.  Gannett owns an awful lot of them.  Same with your local TV news.

The internet remains relatively free, for now, but obviously Social Media, writ large, is where most of the talking and exchanging happens, and that too is under relatively centralized control.  Facebook talks to Twitter who talks to Google, and if they want to make something or someone disappear, its a few mouse clicks.

I wonder, actually, AT THIS MOMENT what stories have been fully disappeared?  We read about ones that are posted and then removed.  We don’t read about, obviously, the ones that are killed before birth.

I continue to wonder why there would be hope.  But something in me continues to feel that something good remains possible.  I don’t know why.

Last night I was dreaming I was on a plane rounding a bend, and the sun came out in a most beautiful way.  And we were climbing steadily, and I realized the pilots were competent, and I went back to sleep.