Month: December 2021

I’m trying to buy a humidifier not made in China, and it is quite difficult.

Here is the thing: buying from China is a lot like buying cotton from the American South during the slave era.  China is an illegitimate, tyrannical regime which commits all imaginable atrocities, including murdering people to provide organs for Party elites, slavery, centrally planned gang rapes, torture, and abusive working conditions not unlike those in the worst sweat shops in the worst parts of the Robber Baron era, with the difference that there is no way to unionize, no way to protest, and thus no way to correct the situation which, in principle, Communism exists to alleviate, not exacerbate and make permanent, as has in fact happened.

So here is my idea: a website called “Not Made in China” where someone like me can go to find some something that is not made in China.  Anywhere but China, obviously including the independent nation of Taiwan, which China continues to hope to add to its Empire through the traditional imperialistic method of military conquest and political suppression.

You get paid affiliate fees.  All the listed products pay a small referral.  Simple business model.  It would take some work, but I would suggest there is moral virtue involved here too, and that it is a small way of making the world just slightly better.

This is quite good.  If it doesn’t make you alternately very sad and very angry you are a defective human being.

It was at the top of this list: https://wakeupsheeple.net/documentaries/

 

I proposed the other day of defining “morality” as those habits and behaviors and thoughts that tend in aggregate to lead to more peace, joy, compassion and love.

I ranked them in my mind, thusly: peace leads to joy, joy to compassion, and compassion to love.

This morning, though, I am wondering if compassion might not be the first.  This is such a cliche, and compassion such an overused word that I hate to propose it, being a contrarian by nature–often with good reason, I might note–but consider the following.

As I would view it, the main impediment to the human creative capacity, which is our greatest treasure, is stagnation.  Stagnation is separation from flow, from the flow of the universe, and from the flowing water of human society, of connection, of interaction, of giving and taking and taking and giving, of talking and touching, laughing and crying–all movements, all flow.

Stagnation is traumatic clinging, to a latent need to hide emotionally, to limit the expression of your unique nature, which results in a felt need for conflict, for fear and hiding, and for shame.

Love heals shame.  Directed inwardly, love is the reduction and elimination of continual self loathing.  And compassion is perhaps the THOUGHT that underlies the eventual FEELING of love.  Where love is the flow, compassion is the form which molds and directs the flow.

Self love, then, is nothing more or less than dispelling a sense of shame which has no root, which does not come from anything you have done or could do.  Or perhaps you DID do something shameful.  Love is what helps you heal that, and return to humanity.

With respect to both myself and others, I think when I see some fucked up behavior, I am going to start asking, first, what positive purpose that behavior plays for that person.  They do it for a reason.  Some part of them sees that as the least painful thing for them to do.

I know a lot of what I call “Bar People”.  They are a type, particularly around here.  And most of them–look at that, I really need to say US–have messed up things we do.  I am going to start asking, first, what positive role that behavior plays.

I am thinking in particular of a woman I know–actually two come to mind now that I think about it–who I think is sexually addicted.  Can or should I say “suffers from”?

I’ve said this before, but you do people a great disservice sometimes taking their lies from them, particularly if they didn’t ask for “help”.  Being a somewhat relentless and even obsessive truth teller, I have often found it hard to remain silent.  But that doesn’t mean I am feeling compassion, or truly working for what is best for that person.  Often I think I am a self important prick, or at least that case could be made.  I just want people to know I am perceptive, without being in the least bit kind.  I’ve commented on this before.

And I will note in this regard that there is nothing wrong, necessarily, with being ruthlessly honest with myself.  I know myself, and I can take it, and benefit from it.  That is not true of everyone.

So for me, it may be useful feeling absolutely sure that something positive accrues to people from even the most self abusive behaviors.  All truly fucked up behavior means is that something truly dark and awful is underneath it, that they are hiding from.  There are terrible monsters haunting them, and those behaviors keep the monsters at bay, for the time being.

The record of what people do to each other is sick, and really really difficult for psychologically healthy and happy people to really grasp, particularly if they haven’t heard these sorts of stories first hand.

One of these women I know she was born to a crack addicted mother when the mother was sixteen.  She was in a relationship with a heroin abuser–someone who used heroin because of the benefits it provided for them to at least some extent in staying alive–for some years, despite not using herself.  She may well have been sexually abused, but we never got to talking about that.

The other I know she was sexually abused when was somewhere around 5-7, and reported it, and the man went to jail.  Then it started again with her stepfather when she was 11-13 or so, and she did not report that, since she didn’t want to break up the “home”.  She said she didn’t really realize there was anything wrong with it until she hit puberty, and I guess realized she could get pregnant.

We call sex abuse “abuse”, but it is often voluntary, and it often feels good.  Sex feels good.  But when you have such a large gap in ages, I think it leaves a psychological hole of sorts.  It makes boundary formation difficult.  It makes it hard to differentiate healthy from pathological, nurturing from destructive.

And I think often the less healthy it is–the more you are being used as a sexual object–the more FAMILIAR it feels, and thus even what to a normal person would feel gross and objectionable comes to be calming and reassuring.  And the more the contradiction stings, the more you feel compelled to continue and deepen the behavior.  I feel that.

We all keep it together in many ways, but in my personal view human social life would be utterly impossible without the capacity for self deception.  A truly better society would not need lies, but the one we live in certainly does.  Lies are shelter, comfort, a warm place far from the wind, and I think decent people should keep that in mind.

Christ said “I come not to bring peace, but a sword”, but he did not mean that for all people, all the time, I don’t think.  Some people need blunt truth, and some people just need a hug and a kind ear, both of which you can offer, and then watch them wander off into a night you know will not be kind to them.  Do what you can do, and leave it.  Most of the problems you see in your life will remain unsolved, at least by you.  If you focus on solving your own problems, though, you become the pattern of a doorway through which people can escape.  That is the best thing you can offer anyone.

Give this excellent talk a watch/listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRo-ieBEw-8

Most of what he says I had already intuited, but it still gives me a name and more details on the etiology of this global mental illness.

What I will suggest is that Trump Derangement Syndrome really was an example of Mass Formation, and broadly speaking much of the Left in general, as an undifferentiated, ideologically activated lump, has long been characterized in large measure by this term.  It really does seem that the more ridiculous the idea, the more fervently they believe it.

I called them Headless Ones, per a dream I had back in 2012.  These are the same people.  They are all anger and alienation and unresolvable anxiety.  They are happy to do ANYTHING they are told, since the idea of the pain of differentiation, which is separation, is psychologically unbearable to them once they have gone all in, and placed their souls on an altar and their heads in a basket.

And it has long been my policy, as he says, to never give them an unopposed space.  Always get in there, in at least some way, and keep the mass from getting harder and denser and more violent.  Disrupt their rhythm.  Insert a small no in a sea of YESES.

I was dreaming last night that I, as a perhaps 10 year old child, and my father, had been living some time in an abandoned but monumental building filled with monsters.  A sort of survival scenario, which has been the fare of many movies.

My father was benign, and on my side, which differed markedly from the reality.   And as a child I was not innocent.  I had resolve and resourcefulness, and no little bit of cunning.

The air was filled with danger, but also a long standing capacity for survival.

As I would interpret this, I am slowly integrating more resources for dealing with my trauma.  The constant sense of danger is still there, but I am slowly coming to terms with it.

And the point I would make in this regards, is that our “Inner Child”, which we tend to assume is innocent, helpless, and just needs love and support, is perhaps better imaged in a more complex way.  We all need love, and we all needed love growing up, but even children by the time they are past the age of five or so have developed coping strategies.

If you were born into fire, you have some resistance to it.  It does not do much good to mourn what didn’t happen, and does much good to emphasize the fact that you survived, somehow, emotionally, and to build on what worked, if it was not grossly dysfunctional.

And at the root of this is, as I just argued in another post, is the capacity for the fight, for standing your ground and giving at least as good as you get.

Fierceness can be a virtue, and it is my perception that our current cultural obsession with niceness weakens that, and that that weakness, in turn, breeds more trauma–you are more or less giving up without a fight, which means internalizing more shame–which in turn breeds more unconscious violence which, when it is rationalized, as it usually is, makes the world darker and worse.

This is how you get “nice” people who feel little on a daily basis but rage and anger and if we are honest, hatred.  It is in large measure externalized self loathing, which is to say shame.  The target does not matter much, and obviously many power hungry psychopaths are only too happy to provide targets that are politically useful to themselves and their ambitions.

I woke up yesterday wondering if perhaps white Christian culture, particularly Protestant culture, did not take over the world in large measure out of a superabundance of shame.

We think of, say, Japan, or China, as “shame based cultures”, where family reputation, and “saving face” is everything.

But at the root of our own culture is the idea that we are all born “shamed”, flawed, rejected by God, reviled strangers in the only universe we know, and only redeemable by submission to power structures which, in the case of the Catholic Church, hold the power over our very souls, which can “excommunicate” us and condemn us to hell for eternity.

And even for Protestants, your only path to avoiding hell is conforming to the dictates of your Church, to professing piety, to doing what you are told, to never straying too far outside of narrow lines.

That is a sort of ANTI-Humanism, isn’t it?  I don’t really know who Adam Weishaupt really was, or what he really believed, or if his ideas still matter today, as some claim, but if you put yourself in the middle of that world, and make those ideas unavoidable, universal, relentless in their pursuit of your individual conscience, could you not see some strong impetus to refute them, perhaps even by inverting them?

And I will wonder aloud if the world would not have been a better place if Jesus had not lived, or if his ideas had died shortly after he did; or for that matter, if HIS ideas did live, and were not perverted and substituted by others seeking to use his name for their own infernal purposes.

Jesus spoke of Love, which is to the good, but he didn’t invent the idea.  He did not need to invent the word, or the idea.  And practically, what matters most to people is not the positive message, but the negative one, which is eternal damnation if you get caught out of synch with the people around you.  Gays were going to hell.  The apostate.  Maybe even the divorced.  Those who were not baptized.  The Liminal, broadly speaking, who were his original audience, and who he spent most of his time with.  He wasn’t crucified by the outcasts, but by the power elite of his time.  Even the Romans were very prepared to tolerate him and his ideas.  It was the people who held all the local power and influence who most objected to the idea that society should not be stratified, and that an individuals capacity for Love was vastly more important than his learning, or his place and station.  Those are truly interesting, and certainly subversive ideas.

You know, in this world, in this confusing place, where we are born crying and often leave alone, there are a wide variety of logics which make sense, and which need to be understood and transcended, rather than rejected outright.

And it was not insane to believe that if the Church, as it existed in 1776 was the embodiment of “Love”, then sanity lay elsewhere.  And if you look at all the evils perpetrated by that Church, it would not be unreasonable to seek out evils of your own in response, in rebellion, in reaction, in an individualistic affirmation of I AM to prevent being steamrollered into the oblivion of complete and abject submission to inferior people and ideas.  In my view, there would be something healthy in this, even if it were taken too far in the other direction.

So many ideas are out there which have something to recommend them, which are still pernicious on balance and over time.

And as I have said, shame and trauma remove your face, your individuality, your unique perspective and capacity for perception.  They remove your capacity for nuance, for subtlety, for accepting this but not that, for taking from the table what is good, and leaving what is bad.

Racism is really shame based stupidity.  So is anti-racism.  Both miss important points.

And it is hard for me not to see in the Left cultural habits which arose in the Church being perpetrated in spirit without Christian backing, but nonetheless religious and even cultish in their iteration and practice.  ALWAYS and NEVER seem to occur often.  You always–this is an exception!!!–have to have a SOMETIMES, and a partially, and a yes but also no.  You need a middle which moves, which bends, which flows in the water, which is rooted but not inflexible.

But thought is somatically rooted.  If you live in a constant state of mild to severe fight/flight/shame, you will have a hard time with sometimes.  You will NEED TO KNOW what is “right” and what “wrong”.  This is particularly true if your “cultural field” (nods to both Jung and Rupert Sheldrake) has been teaching you for 1,700 years (let’s date it to the Council of Nicea) that your eternal destiny can only be assured by getting the details perfectly right.

And obviously, practically, much of the Left seems to view its job as inverting whatever the “right” says–or they think “it” says–and dogmatically adopting the opposite as its creed.

Donald Trump has many flaws, which are obvious to his supporters and haters alike.  But he is not evil, as far as I can tell, and I’m usually pretty accurate in my judgements.  He is not trying to end democracy in the United States.  He is guilty perhaps of bad judgment sometimes in terms of what he says and how he says it, but I have no doubt he does his best to speak the truth as he sees it, and by and large I think most of what he says makes sense.  He was wrong on the vaccines, in my view, but it is ironic that HIS POLICY is now the dominant demand of the Left today.  They don’t remember that because they have not been told to.  That fact has disappeared.

And making him the embodiment of all evil blinds people to other more important evils.  We have a President now who cannot even read a Teleprompter intelligently.  He has read “End of Comments” numerous times now.  I’m surprised they still put it on there.

I perhaps cheapen some of what I say by inserting specific political commentary, but everything good in this world depends on the preservation of freedom, of speech, of conscience, of non-violent behavior, and all of those are blatantly under sustained attack by most of the organs of our government.

All of us need time and space to build something better.  We need liberty.

As I keep pointing out, there are seemingly two stages to emotionally or physically violent or dangerous situations: 1) fight/flight/shame; and 2) dissociation and depersonalization.  The limbic system, then the Reptilian Brain, or so I recall it neurologically.

In terms of emotional health, it seems to me this is a descending order.  The healthiest response is to fight.  People who muster up a fight response in a bad situation are often able to avoid trauma altogether, and almost certainly if their fight succeeds in deflecting or even defeating the attack, socially or physically.

As I understand it, most soldiers do not get PTSD from their actual battles, when they are shooting and being shot at, at least not in the short run.  They get PTSD from things like being shelled–where they just have to wait helplessly–and ambushed–where they lose the control of initiative–and no small number of them from guilt at killing, which is most likely mainly shame.  I think fear is cumulative, but I think anyone who goes outside wire every time feeling empowered and ready and willing to fight, does not get PTSD, even if they see and do some awful shit.

As B.G. Burkett pointed out in his essential book “Stolen Valor”, most actual combat veterans from the Vietnam War did NOT have PTSD, and in fact most of them were proportionally vastly more successful in “Life”, writ large, than people who did not serve, or who did not see combat.  Their experiences emboldened them, and toughened them, and those traits tend to make people vastly more effectively at everything.  They fear less.  They dare more.

Here is my point: I think much cruelty is an effort to take back a victory which was lost long long ago.  When you are a child, and you are subjected to violence of any sort that you cannot avoid, it is traumatizing.  Helplessness and trauma go together.

Peter Levine’s oeuvre really began, as I understand the story, and I’ve watched him tell it on YouTube, when a client with long term physical complaints–I forget the details, but it was likely things like headaches, and various ailments with no obvious cause, and obviously all backed by nearly continuous anxiety–suddenly “ran” in a therapy session.  Her legs started twitching violently, like she was running.  This “flight”, a long term suppressed neurological response, seemed to help her.

And his life’s work is based on that, what he calls Somatic Experiencing.

What I will suggest, though, is that while running is useful, fighting is even more useful.

I think in important respects our entire culture traumatizes us.  I speak here of the dominant white culture in most of North America and Europe, but I think Japan could easily be added to this, and of course Communism is little BUT trauma, so add China.

Maybe ALL “culture” is to some extent traumatizing.  I think of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.  Maybe all of us are, to some extent, square pegs pounded into round holes, even when FREEDOM!!! is the catchword of the land.

Freedom for what?  To what?  Yes, to express ourselves, and do what we feel, but do we also not all have a thirst for belonging?  The freedom to belong, to be accepted?  Is there not always some price to be paid for this?

I wonder if a notion of a Transcendent Order of some sort is not always necessary to sort out this contradiction.  Freedom as choosing to accept a place in something larger.  Unfreedom as not being free to choose what order you belong to, and how.

If you look at the history of the United States, “freedom” by and large meant religious freedom, freedom to worship God in your own way.  It was always freedom within the larger order, combined with clear expectations with respect to your “tribe”, your religious group, your “people”.  The goal was not freedom from responsibility, from self regulation, from a clear dedication to the common good.

Government, in America, was to protect your freedom to pursue what in some respects might be seen as your own “restraint”.  Religio-, I will remind you, is Latin for “to bind”.  Your government did not tell you what to do, but your peers did.

And Eudaemonia–on all accounts I read what he meant by “pursuit of happiness”–definitely plays into this.  Jefferson was brilliant for including this, which expanded on Locke’s Life, Liberty and Property.

It is both beautiful and maddening.  To my mind, the only basis for a society which both promotes the elevation of the individual soul, and is stable and peaceful and yes, ideally transcendent, is a general commitment to personal growth, to balance, to continual negotiation in emotionally intelligent terms with everyone else.  To waves and patterns of color, in continual movement, to a dance which goes we know not where, but which, if filled with honest and sincere people, will become progressively more beautiful.

These are interesting thoughts, which are a digression from the initial point I started to make.  I never hesitate to explore side paths when they present themselves.

What I started to say was that completing the “fight” arc is likely the true foundation of sacrifice.  Of ritual violence.  And ritual violence is likely the result of social violence, of hierarchy, of shame made into an institution used for control.  And the irony is that the people at the top are trauma based too.  They disempower others to deal with their own shame and the whole edifice rests on ritual violence to dispel the tension which arises again and again in an unhealthy and unnatural forced social order.

The power elite on this planet, which I continue to believe must be guiding the events of today, are the most shame filled people on the planet.  It has seemed clear to me for some time that the very, very rich raise kids who are filled with terror and expectations.  All of this plays out in their lives.  Most of them no doubt want a return to something like a Caste system, where people are shoved into slots and violent things happen to them if they rebel.

As I have mentioned before–but it has been some years now–I wanted to write a paper in Grad School at Chicago on the apparent similarities between what I was going to argue was the ritual cycle serial killers go through, and the cycle of larger scale human sacrifice.

One book I read talked about human sacrifice in Hawaii.  Liminal people–women, children, people captured from other tribes in war–would be bound and ritually clubbed in the head, in a manner not that different from that portrayed in the beginning of the first Guardians of the Galaxy.

We have a cultural fascination with serial killers, do we not?  Do not most Americans look at them with the same horror and fascination we look at terrible car accidents?  There seems to be something there, but we don’t know what.  It is primal, awful, but enticing and almost intoxicating.

And is there any real difference between a Hawaiian “priest” ritually bashing someone’s brains out, for general observation and contemplation and vicarious participation, and what serial killers do?  Are they different in principle or motivation?  Are not both intended to alleviate and manage latent and unconscious and unbearable individual and social conflicts?

Read the summary of this movie, You’re Next.

Just reading it makes my skin crawl a bit.  It’s all just pointless death and horror, by which of course I mean the POINT of horror movies is the FEELING of horror.

Why would anyone watch this?  What I want to argue is that seeing that death and murder alleviates tension and anxiety.  It is a society level response to pervasive feelings of shame and lack of inclusion.  It completes the “fight” response, vicariously, just as all ritual–really, ritual could be equated with “theatrical” or dramatic, couldn’t it?–is intended to do.

It is perhaps to be expected that elites, looking at all this, would see the solution to the human future as needing to be rooted in violence, but final violence, Endloesung level violence, after which everyone has a place that does not change, and which is not subject to negotiation.

There are many valid reasons to see our future with terror.  I get this, obviously.

But my work, which is in fact rooted in hope, if not in this life, then in the next (and the evidence is overwhelming scientifically that life, consciousness, goes on) that these problems can be solved.

It may be true that these problems cannot be solved without reference to, without the inclusion of, an immanent Universal, a God,  a Great Spirit, an embodiment of approximate Goodness, but science itself posits such a thing.  You cannot solve the equations for quantum collapse without reference to consciousness, and that anything seems to exist at all seems to require a First Consciousness, which we may as well call God, even if we deduct all the culturally specific claims made about this God.  As I understand it, this was John von Neumann’s conclusion, and he was a very clever man.

Or as Heisenberg put it: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”

And I recall now I have quoted from this page before, but will do so again:

 Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we should have to give up from now on. Thus in the course of my life, I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.

 

As regards God, Heisenberg refers to “a central order whose existence seems beyond doubt, who can be reached as directly as you can reach the soul of another human being.

 

After these conversations with Tagore, some of the ideas that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. That was a great help for me.

 

Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.

Where does this leave us?

Here is what I will assert: our task, as Humanity writ large, is to learn SCIENTIFICALLY all we can about God and the survival of consciousness, and develop NEW FORMS OF RELIGION, forms which correct for all the abusive power structures, and inherent cruelty and injustice, and all of the many errors all religions fell into to some degree or other, while still retaining the much that was good and true in all of them.

This is my reasoning.  These are my conclusions.

I heard my first genuinely racist rant in many years the other day.  It was a guy I’ve known for quite a while, who has always been obviously very rigid, very socially awkward outside formal business relations, and just high strung and kind of an asshole.

He was saying things like “all these things going on, there’s only one group smart enough.  It has to be the Jews”.

And “I get along well enough with black people, but I don’t like spending time with them.  Do you?”  I said yes, which is true.  I don’t try and talk black like some white folks I know, but in general I find black folks less uptight, more open, and more sincere than most white people I know.

Now, I may have readers who would agree with him, and I may have readers who think I should have yelled at him and told him the error of his ways.  I may have no readers.  These are all possibilities.

My thinking, though, was that if he has trusted me with things he knows are Verboten culturally to speak out loud, much less in public, then it is possible I can use that trust to reel him back just a little, which is the only good I can hope to accomplish in that circumstance.  If I yelled at him, it would change nothing, and he would never talk with me again.  That would honestly not be much of a loss, but I would lose any chance, as I say, of perhaps influencing him for the better.

I told him, for example, that Jews are one of the most heterogeneous groups on the planet.  Milton Friedman  and Ayn Rand were both Jewish, as were Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, and Emma Goldman.  And  whole lot of Jews avoid politics entirely.

And it struck me then that racism is really nothing more or less than laziness.  It is lazy thinking.  It is sitting on your couch and speculating about what might be happening outside your closed shades.

And it struck me this morning that ANTI-racism is actually equally lazy, but in the opposite direction.  It is equally stupid to reflexively BLAME a given group as to reflexively DEFEND them.

In a post-truth world–if modernism sought truth and power, postmodernism seeks feelings and tribalism–no one is opening the window and LOOKING.  But all morality begins in honesty and information and understanding.  This logically means that no purported morality divorced from honest eyes and honest ears can possibly succeed to any larger extent than mostly not making things worse; and sustained intelligent planning and improving is simply impossible when you are blind.  How could blind construction builders construct a building without plans and materials and tools?  They can’t.  They don’t.  It’s impossible.

As I pointed out somewhere recently on the interwebs to white intellectual Leftists, black people have feelings too.  I don’t think most of them realized they were capable of feeling anything but oppressed by white people.  Some of them like Pop Tarts in the morning, and some like oatmeal with raisins because their doctor told them it lowers cholesterol.  Some are married, most are not.  All of them feel varying levels of anxiety living in dangerous neighborhoods.

A few years ago, Microsoft put out an app that allowed people to avoid violent ghettos.   What was heard, and no doubt in large measure what was meant, was enabling white people to avoid violent black places.  This was called racist, and perhaps that is a reasonable word, but here is my question: how do you think the people who LIVE there feel?

Even if black folks commit violent crimes all out of proportion to their numbers–at roughly 12% of the population, they commit something close to half the violent crimes–violent people are STILL a very, very small minority within the black community, maybe 5% or so.  That leaves a 95% of normal people fearing the same guns and the same crime that white people in general are ABLE to avoid, but they are not.

Do you not think this is traumatizing?  Feeling fear every time your kid goes to school, as a mother, or actually BEING the kid, in fear of being bullied by kids who have been made psychopathic by insane home environments filled with poverty, drugs, misery and abuse?

Empathy is about touch.  It is about feeling what is out there, about imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes.  How would you feel, living in the most violent parts of Chicago or Philadelphia?  Imagine all the violence was coming from other white people, and that you could not fully avoid it?

The essence of Sentimentality–as I see it, and which I view as the primary disease of most intellectuals–is interacting with your IDEA of people, and reacting to THAT.  I think many white intellectuals EVEN WHEN THEY ARE WITH ACTUAL PHYSICAL HUMAN BEINGS, only see the projection of their own assumptions.  They say “poor dear.  Those police must be really terrible.  I am very sure they are the source of all your problems.  Don’t worry, dear.  I’m going to fix that for you.”

Black people, though, are PEOPLE.  They have common sense and practical views, most of them, in my experience.  Sure, they hate police brutality.  Sure, many of them take it personally when they see police violence on TV.  Many of them have been subjected to much higher levels of interaction with police than white people would.  But they also live in places where nearly all the crime is committed by blacks.  The cops get racist because all they see is crimes committed by people of a certain skin color.

All of this makes emotional sense.  It makes sense that the cops would get jaded and suspicious after years of the same stupid shit, and it makes sense that the persons of color who are genuinely innocent, who are just trying to get along in a hostile world, would resent being thrown in with the thugs and the gangsters.

I had a friend who worked South Central for the LAPD, and he told me he had to get out before he got like the rest of the force.  Over some period of time, it is unavoidable.  And this holds, I am very sure, even for police officers who are black themselves.  In a pretty high percentage of cases, alleged police brutality involves black officers too.  As one obvious example, the Officer In Charge in the Eric Garner case was a black female.

In my view, it is stupid to ignore the very obvious reality of disproportionate levels of violent and other crime in black neighborhoods, which in my view traumatizes people–particularly kids–and which leads to multigenerational maladjustments, emotional problems, and obviously long term continuation of the violence and failure to thrive.

The task of well meaning people who deserve to be called Liberal or Progressive, is to be honest about what is happening, to tell the truth about it–which is that almost none of it is related to racism, and certainly not to how white people far from the problem think about or talk about persons of color–and to engage the REAL problems with REAL solutions.  This is what people who deserve to be called good would, and hopefully will, do.

And in my own view, the problems boil down to three main elements: single parent homes, lack of access to good jobs, and lack of access to effective educations, which would lead to the good jobs.  And I think the single parent homes, and lack of fathers in most homes–I think the statistic is something like 90% in some areas–in turn revolve around the lack of jobs, and those in turn around the lack of solid educations.

So to my mind, the focus should be on figuring out what forms of education WORK.  And as far as I can tell, self paced Charter Schools seem to be the most effective medium in inner cities.  There is a lot of cultural flack thrown out about being “white” if you work too hard in school.  Putting an individual kid in front of a computer and allowing him or her to do self paced tutorials–with teachers floating around to ask questions of–seems to defuse some of this, which in my view would be the main reason such schools seem particularly effective in poverty infused, urban black ghettoes.

And in tandem with this, black leaders who actually CARE about black folks should be preaching the value of learning and education and schooling to all who will listen.  They have not been doing this.  They get more money and power and votes blaming white people for everything.  That is doubly disempowering.  First, it denigrates the possibility that black folks have ANY control over their own destinies, and secondly it relegates all progress to a future denuded of white people, which is just not going to happen.

And thirdly, even if a genocide of white folks, of the sort multiple black academics and self appointed spokespeople feel empowered to wish for openly were to happen, NOTHING WOULD CHANGE.  This would not teach people the value of work, and the self respect it enables.  It would not educate them, such that they better understand their world and how to succeed in it.  Such a genocide would simply continue a many generational cultural habit of disempowerment and disconnection, while killing a lot of good people, who in general are the backbone of everything that works in this country.  That may not be politically correct, but it is true.

If you look at Africa, you will certainly see the legacy of Colonialism.  But white Europeans did not create any of those conflicts, by and large, even if at times they made them worse.  Africa has always been riven by ethnic and tribal and religious rivalries.  Slavery exists at THIS MOMENT in Africa, and in most cases both the slaves and the slavers are persons of color.  Most American blacks, if they could be magically transported to the country of their choice in Africa, would see immediate and enormous decreases in their standards of living, their security, their protected rights, and even their sense of belonging.  They would not have tribal affiliations, or ethnic affiliations.  “Black” means nothing in Africa.  You get no points for a physical trait which is nearly universal, even if it would in many cases be worse to be white.

So this is my small effort to say something REAL, to speak truths which would be obvious if all of these discussions were characterized by sincerity, humanity, a thirst for the common good, and common decency.  All of these things are missing from nearly all the words inflicted on the world in the name of race at the moment.

and worth sharing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHHPNMIK-fY

It’s the thoughts and reflections of someone a lot like me, and maybe you too.

I was thinking about mustard seeds today.  They don’t seek perfection, but they don’t delay either.  It is enough to try.  Blossoms come from starts, and starts happen naturally if they are not killed at conception.

It is the same thing with the parable of the talents.  If we eliminate the analogy of money, then every possible investment you could make with whatever you were born with is sufficient.  Just show up.  Don’t bury yourself, or hide.  Even if you are terrible, even if you feel like a loser, a sucker, a failure, just keep showing up.  That is the power of faith.  That is all Life asks, in my view, and the difference between a race run a few steps at a time, and one not run at all, becomes very large over time.

Don’t sit your life out.  It’s OK to be a fuckup.  Just admit that’s where you are, then slowly start trying to unfuck yourself.  It may take a very, very long time, and it may not be fully possible.  That’s still doing it right.  That’s still showing up.

Edit: looking her up, it appears she has written a number of books, some of which sold quite well.

Reading reviews, it seems like her voice may have become more diluted and perhaps even contradictory the more she wrote.  It’s very hard to sustain a voice which satisfies people’s expectations.  You speak out, initially, from a deep place, from a need.  But if people HEAR you, and praise you, then they become a part of your internal conversation, and this is ESPECIALLY true if you find yourself making money with your words.

I see this.  I feel this.  This is one of the main reasons I would really never like to be a published author.  I did try at one point, and even went to a writer’s conference in New York where we presented to publishers.

But you know, there are smart words everywhere.  Most people can’t hear them.  The pace of our lives, the Time which stands over us like an angry Death with a scythe, makes it hard to think, to feel, to process.  No words will fix that.

And in my own case, I am also still mid-river.  I don’t want to talk about feeling in process, or feeling confused and messy.  I want to talk about having found a path through the world to a place which consistently feels good.  That is my personal mission.  In my view, that is why I am here.  I certainly am confused with everyone else, but I don’t want to stay that way.

That is my thing, though, and not for most people.  I think it is my burden and my honor to have volunteered to work harder and longer than most people can.

 

This is the new website put out in part by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

And I will note that, while they have not touched Vitamin D, or the Zelenko Protocol, as far as I know, everything else is perfectly in alignment with what we know, and have known for a long time, about how to respond to pandemics.

If it is true we are fighting a “war” against COVID-19 (I don’t think it is, or if it is, we are secretly supporting our enemy as well), then you have a column in which you tally up the costs of doing nothing, and a column in which you tally up the costs of doing what we are doing.  If doing nothing causes less death than what we are doing, then what we are doing is stupid . Full stop.

And I say much too much, obviously all these statistics can and should be influenced by known effective prophylactic and treatment protocols.

To say the same thing a slightly different way: as I understand them, the authors of the GBD are arguing that EVEN WITHOUT HCQ and Ivermectin and recommending D supplementation just about everything we have been doing has been counterproductive and has led–and CONTINUES to lead–to more death, more pain, more poverty and hunger, and all the bad things, without enough good things to justify them.