Author: White Whale

I think on balance this whole thing is highly positive.  It was really stupid of Facebook, Google (YouTube, and presumably their search engine), Apple, and Spotify to all coordinate to “disappear” Alex Jones at the same time.  It betrays their reach, their power. And it betrays their corruption.  They allow many much worse things to be said on their platforms and ignore them completely.  Gross racism, for example, they ignore completely if it is directed at whites, males, or especially white males.  They ignore calls to violence issued by Anantifa.  They ignore calls for violence against Trump.

I’m reading about the Beats right now, and will shortly have some things to say, but for now let me point out that the obscenity trial in San Francisco (conducted while Ginsberg was most likely fucking boys in Tangiers) made him into a national, and even international celebrity.  Nothing builds name recognition like getting in trouble with authorities.  It works for criminals, it works for poets, and there is no reason Alex Jones and InfoWars–ponder for a moment that this salvo was launched at a site CALLED Information Wars–will not reap a HUGE uptick not just in traffic, but in respectability.  Anyone worth banning is worth reading.  I think most of us believe this.  By and large, if there is no criminal penalty, if you want more of a thing, ban it.

I will wonder out loud if Jones is going to become a new Rosa Parks in a new cultural conflict oriented around a new Free Speech Movement.

And I will point briefly to some stupid arguments being made, that 1st Amendment issues are in play.  No, of course Facebook and Google, and Apple and Spotify and all the other search engines collectively, and all the other websites on the internet generally, can eliminate all mention of Jones and not break the law, at least initially.

As a Wikipedia author pointed out, though, there are anti-Trust issues involved.  But this is a legally and morally interesting and sticky issue.  A monopoly, traditionally, is where you are the sole supplier of something, say railroad tracks.  In this case, the commodity is information.  What is the business value of information?   Is it, or should it be, illegal to centralize and the control the distribution of information, when done by private companies?  Personally, I say yes.  I do think it is in everyone’s interest to prevent overt–there was no subtlety here–collusion by information behemoths.

[I was wondering today if there might be some merit in using tax money to pay reporters to dig into local events and find out interesting things.  I can see downsides, of course, but the plus side would be that money would be flowing to people who could be made to cover all sides of all issues.  This should be something coming from a Democrat, but the problem of informational consolidation, and the gradual erasure of interested journalists is quite profound.  I would not support this nationally–just look at the farce of NPR pretending they do not have a robust political agenda–but there are many things I will tolerate locally and regionally I will not tolerate nationally.]

The other, to me more interesting issue, is the value of information in a good society.  How should we value political and ideational diversity?  Should our children not be taught to value it?  Should our college students not be taught to value it?  As consumers, should we not demand it?

I already see something called d.tube has been developed, as what my untrained brain sees as something like a Linux of video upload and retrieval.

It would not be hard to create something else like Facebook.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in coming weeks and months.  If the goal of the Left was to diminish Jones influence, I can only say I wish they were always that stupid.  But of course they are, but tactically, they are sometimes quite astute.  He came out with an app perhaps a month ago, anticipating this happening.  You can get updates on everything there whenever you want.  He still has his main website, and he makes good products.  I use his Smart Pills (whatever he calls them), his turmeric supplement, and his Lung Cleanse, which is fantastic.  He comes across as crazy, but he is not infrequently very right about important things everyone else wants to either lie about, or lie to themselves about.

As I say, I think most reasonable people look at  this and see the writing on the wall.  Anyone, any site, any set of ideas, any story, any picture, anything they don’t like for any reason–and I will note that none of the companies involved in banning Jones provided any specific examples of the charges they leveled at him, which is pretty generic totalitarian behavior–can be made to disappear.  POOF!!  Gone.  Flushed.  Never know it was there.

They may not be coming for you and your ideas today, but the fact that they can, and may, should concern you.  The pattern of the radically intolerant–and that is what we are dealing with here–is to become steadily more rigid and more intolerant with time.  These things are driven by obsessives and neurotics and no few psychotics, so this is inevitable.  It does not take long for such people to find ways of offending and then attacking–if they respond–nearly everyone.  None of the Communist cadres in any of the nation which had Communism inflicted on them ever drew the full support of more than about 10-20% of the nation.  The rest were taken in at first by the lies, then made to fear the government after they realized the horrible truth.  By then, of course, it was much too late.

I’ve been busy the past few weeks, and will have more to say in coming days.  I will be busy then, too, so it may take a week or two.

The core virtue of Socrates is that he taught us the utility and the method for building ignorance.

One might also call building ignorance “ground clearing”.

As our How’s proliferate, our Why’s dwindle.

Why, for example, should you be more efficient at anything?

Why should you be more creative?

Why should you want more of anything?

Why should you be a good parent?

Why should you be a good spouse?

Why should you be s dutiful child?

Why should you be a good citizen?

Do you ask these questions?

Why?

Or why not?

When was the last time you stopped moving long enough to wonder if somewhere along the way you got your head stuck up your ass?

The problem, of course, is not that there are no answers, but that the dominant cultural threads dominating the growing post-religious element of our society do not have GOOD answers.

And in such a world, a manic acquisitiveness and need for power is not emotionally irrational, even if it is inherently unbalanced and incompatible with contentment or lasting or deep happiness.

If I might echo Socrates, knowing nothing is vastly better than feeling confident you do know things which are manifestly wrong. You are then clinging. You are then afraid. You are then also alone in important ways. You live, not in a cave, but in a cage.

Here is thing: an open, direct relationship with the truth cannot be shared. It is yours alone. It is your path.

But you can recognize those who have also done this work, also crossed the void, the ocean, in their own way. And THIS unites people, where shared manias and shared lies, in the end, do not.

Slake your own thirst. Then you will have enough for all.

Would it be reasonable to view true moderates as the true radicals in our currently hyper polarized world?

Is radically normal a thing? Should it be?

https://www.infowars.com/video-news-networks-uniformly-use-trump-is-1984-script/

When we are dealing with events we did not personally witness, self evidently the “news” has to serve as our eyes and ears.  If they provide video or audio footage of something, we assume it has not been altered, but you can easily edit things to mean something else, if you omit clarifying and contextualizing parts of it.

CNN, MSNBC and others have long histories, not so much of saying things which are patently false, but of cherry picking information to support their agendas.  If something does not fit the message they are trying to communicate, the persuasion and indoctrination they are undertaking (usually in coordination) at that moment, they ignore it.  This is lying by omission, and they do it DAILY.

What is interesting is the psychological trick you can play, in which you tell people “think for yourselves”, all while knowing what they will be repeating that day on the internet and around the coffee pot is exactly what you tell them to repeat.

This 1984 meme amounts to “think for yourself. see with your own eyes”.  People think that, because CNN is saying this, that they mean it, that their viewers can in fact, in their estimation, be depended on to think for themselves.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is interesting to me about this–and in large measure I am simply describing human nature as it has existed for a very long time–is the parallel with the Buddhist dictum “if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”, which I reference from time to time.

Nobody does this.  Buddhists do not do this.  I have said this often.  They dutifully repeat this injunction as part of their canon, and in so doing kill it.  They kill the life in the idea.  Killing the Buddha is about protecting the AUTHENTIC dharma.  The Buddha did not and does not need to be worshipped.  This is a travesty.  If we tore down every Buddhist temple on the planet but retained the underlying notions, we would perhaps SERVE the cause of Buddhism.  Buddhism is the very opposite of idolatry.  Idols don’t change.  The world does, and change is the essential teaching in this religion based on direct, impartial observation of life as it actually happens.

It is so easy to go wrong.  But I do think having balls helps in all respects.  Fearful people say “reject fear”.  But they don’t.  That, too, is a learned skill, done through long term, purposive activity.

In important respects, that is my own task.  That is what I am trying to figure out: how do you tame fear such that your insanity is reduced, and such that over some time horizon sanity becomes possible?

As far as these media prophets: they have become farce.  It is a bad joke.  As I said yesterday, I hope I have a lot of company in this perception.

You can’t really gauge public opinion by what is on the internet.  The Left is very good both at paying and attracting people who will type shit all day long everywhere.

But I am struck by how instantly and effectively conservatives seem to be addressing all the recent propaganda offensives by the Left.

By and large, most conservatives historically have focused on their jobs and their families.  This is what dignified citizens of a free and prosperous nation, when they are emotionally healthy, do.  You need politics from time to time to better calibrate some particular policy or other, but by and large you do your thing, the government does its thing, and you don’t need to worry about it.  This is the thought process, even if it has been lacking for some time.

But more and more people are GETTING, grokking, that for the Left everything is political all the time.  All problems involve government.  All disagreement is treasonous and despicable.  All people answer in theory to them and their ideas, until they can be made to answer in reality, at the point of guns (other people will be) pointing at them.

There is no humor (outside of politically advantageous mockery). There is no self deprecation, ever.  There is no looseness, no flexibility.  There is no listening.  There is no generosity.  There is no tolerance, not even for uppity blacks or Hispanics who don’t know their place.

There is no fun.  And there is no freedom.  It is a grim, dull, gray, AWFUL place.  And it is where they demand the right to take us all.  They want us there, dull, gray, hopeless.  And they want to be gloating over us, while mouthing bullshit about justice and tolerance, and “Human dignity”.

I really hope America is waking up.  What is planned is truly despicable, truly awful.

Leaking a tape, which was seized by the FBI in pursuit of a very specific set of data, relating to a particular case–which is what justified the warrant which Rod Rosenstein signed to authorize an unprecedented police raid on the office of the attorney of the sitting US President–is illegal.  A crime has been committed, taking secure evidence, and feeding it to the press.  Some FBI agent needs to be charged with a crime, arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to a prison term long enough to send a clear message.

But everyone knows this.  They know you don’t raid the lawyer for the President.  They know you don’t dig through a decade or more of private conversations, then leak them for nakedly political reasons.  You know the FBI is AGAIN putting its very shaky–for me, nonexistent–credibility on the line.  You know they are weakening EVERY case they are trying by doing this.  This will not help convince the judges for Paul Manafort that Mueller is not on a witch hunt. 

We KNOW, now, that Carter Page was innocent, and that there was never any solid reason to survey him.  We KNOW, now, that one of the lead investigators into election meddling believed, based on the evidence, that there was “no there there”.  We KNOW, therefore, that there was never any real reason to appoint Mueller, and that the WHOLE THING IS A CONSPIRACY.  It is a Machiavellian deal, created by the leaders and senior officials at the CIA, the FBI, the DoJ, and of course the Democrat Party as led, then, by Obama, to do ANYTHING to sabotage Trump.

This becomes more and more obvious every day.  Whatever curtain might have been concealing the Wizard, busy at his levers, has disappeared, and is being replaced with blinking lights, with klaxons mere days or weeks away.  No sane person, who is informed, can deny the obvious.  That many among us choose insanity, given a choice, does not change this fact.

And the ringleaders, the people trying to bring Trump down, all know this.

They must be truly desperate.  They must be truly shitting in their pants, to think that NOW, after all this, that any of us give a flying fuck about a fucking Playboy prostitute, when it is OBVIOUS that senior agents of our own government are trying to reverse the results of the last election, are trying to completely vitiate the rule of law in this country–rather, continue to do so, since we already live in a land where breaking the law does not mean there will be a consequence, even when the crime is major and the evidence overwhelming and incontrovertible–and all in all, are doing all the things that TRUE autocrats do.

It is not even a stretch to think Bill and Hillary, like Putin, have engaged in political murder. Nobody can pin anything on Putin, and nobody can with certainty pin anything on Billary.  But the string of bodies, and their political convenience, are equally suspicious.  We easily believe Putin capable of ordering murders.  But why not Billary?  Do you really buy into their dog and pony show?  THEY STOLE MONEY FROM STARVING HAITIANS TO FUND CHELSEA’S WEDDING.  What are they not capable of?

Oi.  I really hope we get through this insanity with our freedom intact, and without massive bloodshed.

I wonder if the anti-Trump hysteria, the ginned-up, manipulated, completely unnecessary and unhelpful emotion, has finally, at long last (have you no decency CNN? At long last have you no decency?) gone too far.

We have all heard the phrase “need to know”.  It is used with regard to sensitive information, and refers to the obvious and self evident principle that the more people know something, the more likely it is to be leaked or revealed.

Now, the CIA Director has an extremely high “need to know”.  If they are going to run the outfit, they really need to know everything.

But EX-CIA directors don’t need to know ANYTHING, any more than any other citizen does.  They are gone, done, retired.  John Brennan has no more need to be able to legally received classified information than I do.

And this would be true if he were sitting quietly at home writing his memoirs, but it is PARTICULARLY true when this asshole is using the credibility of the CIA–such that it is, apparently, among some–to attack the duly elected President of the United States as a traitor.

What is particularly egregious about this, is that the very rumors and innuendos he is referencing–the accusations amount to nothing more, which is why Mueller keeps digging–are KNOWN BY HIM TO BE FALSE.

He is using lies to launch baseless attacks, which seek to destabilize our democracy.  This is the CIA operating in America.  This is the CIA using the tools it has used for many years to destabilize other nations, being deployed here.

This, clinically, is treason.  We are not technically at war, but that Brennan’s effort is to delegitimate the people as the ultimate source of power is unambiguous.  That he seeks a “regime change” through disinformation is obvious.

And that CNN, MSNBC and others act as propaganda organs is made clear in their treatment of this issue.  They act as if some important principle is in play, that our very democracy depends on Brennan keeping his security clearance.

At long last, America, have you no fucking brains?

I don’t know what it never hit me before, but tea, in much of the world, equates to known pure water. It has been recently boiled.

For me, “meditation”–Kum Nye–is a continual struggle.  It is wrestling down on a mat.