Author: White Whale

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/books/review/michael-houellebecqs-sexual-distopia.html

I didn’t know this Incel–involuntary celibate, aka man who can’t get laid–was a thing.  But I have been saying for some time that in my view much Islamic terrorism comes from these people.  I have had Arab friends, and the math is that if the rich can have four wives–and an unlimited number of concubines–then a lot of young men will never get married.  I know I’ve discussed this somewhere (this theme of repeating myself recurs because I try not to be repetitive, but am quite sure I fail often; even this theme is recurrent, but likely not more than once a year or two).

I suspect a problem with a lot of “Incels” in the West is that they view sex as an end.  Porn makes this inevitable, as well as making frustration much harder to bear.  No woman wants to be viewed as an end, purely, unless she is having fantasies of being a slut.  Ironically, the way to get laid is to stop trying to get laid.  Tantalus and his solution, again.

My personal view is that if prostitution were legal everywhere, a lot of social problems would be eased.  Young men would not be so sexually frustrated, and I think many marriages could be saved if men had outlets for just a few things their wives would not do.  All men age in their bodies, but most of us look at 25 year olds as if we had not.  Propriety keeps most of us from even pretending we have a chance–although we do have a bar around here where a 23 year old was hitting on me hard the one and only time I went there.  I just couldn’t wrap my brain around that.  Come to think of it, that happened another place too, but I’m digressing.  I guess I’m doing that thing where I assess my desirability, and it seems to be OK, even if I’m still crazy.

I have even thought that rather than make this institution peripheral, in the red light district, that we place it in the center of our society, with something like sacred prostitutes, in temples built to the purpose, that we learn to make sex an act of worship of some sort, that we elevate it.  We all have sexual urges.  This is human, and it is ridiculous to deny it.  And these urges, when satisfied, make us happier, more relaxed, healthier, and more creative and generous.  This, too, is not to be denied, at least among reasonably psychologically healthy people. 

Just as self restraint can be taken too far,, though, so too can license.  Everything good in this world depends on psychological health, which I think in turn depends on accurate and useful spiritual ideas.  The men who visit such a temple may drive their wives mad.  So we get rid of wives, but then insane jealousies come out in men over the prostitutes. Etc.

All of us are alone, in the end, but in a universe which is not fundamentally hostile.  And we can build islands wherever we choose, islands of people, islands of love, islands of joy, islands of peace.

I’m rambling, but thought I would comment on this.

I will add that reading Bukowski brings out the obscene in me–I am mimetic by nature– but I don’t think anyone reading him can fail to appreciate he spoke many truths which needed speaking.

I was thinking about sex this morning.  My vascular system seems to be in good order, as do my testosterone levels, both of which leave regular reminders (cue the opening scene of “40 year old virgin”).  Ah, but even for me that’s too much sharing.  C’est la vie.

But I was thinking about many things.  Mostly, I was thinking about this sort of Sherlock Holmes sequence I go through with women, and by this I mean the recent cinematic version (versions?) with Robert Downey, Jr., where he imagines the full sequence of events in a moment, then makes his decision.

For me, I always see failure.  Not sexual failure, and not even failure in the seduction.  I’m not as good looking as I used to be, but if I pick a woman of about the right age, I’m sure I’m as good as I once was.  I can talk to anyone about anything, and make most people laugh.  I’m a good conversationalist, and I’m good–I think–at reading non-verbal cues.  I’ve had multiple barmaids in my bar come on to me, but I just wasn’t feeling it.  They got mad at me, for a time. I don’t blame them: men are supposed to want to fuck every woman they meet, so it’s a personal insult when they don’t.

No: what I see is increased loneliness.  What I see is coming so CLOSE to emotional intimacy, and failing.  What I see is myself, fucking, but still alone in the room.  What I see is me with a woman, but not with that woman.  And of course all women on some level want the man to be there, to be seeing her, valuing her, appreciating her.  I would assume this holds even for prostitutes, although they likely get quite numb at some point, and don’t feel much emotionally at all.

And I go through this sequence, and I see, every time, that I have to finish my work.  I have to inhabit my own body. I have to get over my dissociation, my need for distance, my pushing away, my inability to trust anyone very much.  It’s frustrating.  It’s a bit like the torment of Tantalus, which is an interesting metaphor.  If we accept that all internal hells are of our own making–granted, people can place us in hell, and inject hell into our minds, but once free, their continuance is over some time horizon a choice–then the solution for Tantalus was to STOP TRYING, and to forget about the fruit and water, and to find water and fruit in his soul.

I have been playing with a concept in my mind in recent weeks of social freerunning.  Within the science of biological rhythms, free running sleep is when the cues are removed which regulate human–or hamsters–to a 24 hour, regular rhythm.  People who are blind have major problems with this, because they cannot register the light/dark cycles which the rest of us respond to unthinkingly, automatically, instinctually (absent too much artificial light, of course).

Social freerunning is living as a hermit, as I kind of do, without the synchronizing signal of hearing my name, of seeing people who recognize me, of being reminded who “I am” by people who have seen me before, all of which enable all of us to “reset” to our previous defaults.  I am who I am because other people see me as I am, as they have long done, and will always continue to do.  I can always inhabit new roles with new people, but this process of continual reconciliation remains.

My children are the only ones who have ever visited me where I live.  I have been making a more active effort to expand my social life, but historically it has mainly consisted in hanging out in bars, where I know the people who work there, and most of the regulars, all of whom are lonely people like me, who need to see people sometimes, but get away from them too.  An arm’s distance at a bar, with a beer in hand, is ideal.

But I am toying with pulling that out of my life.  I have no office to go to, and my job sites vary.  Wherever I work, I rarely work there more than a week, and quite frequently it is in other States.

And I live with myself.  And when I mean that, I am close to my emotions.  They cannot but run through me.  Most people seek distractions–idle conversation, video games, TV, stupid things that mean nothing to them–to avoid all that.  When you spend a lot of time alone, you find the enemies within you, the patterns which make you miserable, the true reasons you cannot find peace, why there is a difference between sitting contentedly and doing anything else.

Buddhism really consists, at root, in three ideas:

1) all people who have not done focused inner work carry with them inconsistencies and miseries that they can easily spend a lifetime failing to see.  Let us call this karma. Or Samsara.

2) There exist methods for loosening these emotional knots, for releasing chronic emotional pain, for learning to be tranquil and at peace.

3) It has been done.  This part is important, because the world is filled with people spouting theories which “should work”.  I know too well, as I have been, and likely continue to be, one of them.

To this I would add the implied principle of Self Similarity, aka “As Above, so Below”.  What works to generate inner peace and tranquility is inherently spiritual, and what is spiritual helps in whatever other worlds there may be too.  There is no conflict.

This, in turn, leads to an interesting idea: if you would not want to see a given behavior in heaven, do not enact it here.  If you would not like to be punished for “improper” belief in heaven, don’t punish people here.  Why would any infinite being care about our opinions on the Sabbath, or the perfection of the Koran? It would seem places where violence are happening, are not heaven.  Put another way, if you want to go to heaven, do what you can to create it here.  Build harmony in yourself, and seek to build it around you.  Seek beauty, seek kindness. And do not tolerate those who seek to destroy it, but do not make their spirits your enemies.  Seek no enemies, but do seek Goodness. I am perhaps spouting cliches.

What I have been leading to is the observation that emotions can be divorced from their objects.  I’m pretty sure I have said this before, but if so, it has cycled around again.  I go in circles, but I hope expanding circles.

When it comes to sex, for me the most pleasurable aspect is the anticipation, knowing I’m going to “get laid” tonight.  Sex feels very good, but it is the feelings around it which last.  Especially as a man, the best I can hope for is Bolero.  There is the feeling of “conquest” as a man–and to some extent for a woman, who has proven herself desirable.  And there is both a Beforeglow and an Afterglow.  There is excitement, energy.  These, to me, are the best parts of sex.

And to some extent, Tantric practices recognize this.  One practice I know of consists in having what amounts to a picnic, then penetrating a woman, and simply remaining within her for 30 minutes, while looking in her eyes.  Now, this is not sex.  It is not oriented around orgasm.  It is oriented around a relationship of shared joy and attraction.  And although I have not done this, I think the feeling generated would be permanent.  It would be something you could always recall. It would, actually, be a good way of concluding a marriage ritual.  Seriously. 

And materialistically, think of the pleasure you get of ordering something, and awaiting it expectantly.  Oh, it is going to be so good.  The new book, the new dress, the new whatever it is.  Or think of the pleasure you get for a time owning a new car.  Or the joy you feel as a new parent.

What I think is that Buddhist “Emptiness”, or the “void”, or “Fundamental Openness” is nothing but realizing that all of these feelings–and more–are possible without attachment to the objects we THINK occasion them.  It is empty because there is nothing there.  There is no person you need to feel that feeling.  There is no new car.  There is no anticipation of anything.  All the things, in important respects, were placebos, which enabled you to activate a potential that was already there, in potentio.

This is something you can lean on which will never let you down.  This is an emotional and spiritual SKILL which means that, no matter your material or social circumstances, you never need fear change.  But it is also a FULLNESS.  The space, the plenum, is filled with infinite energy.  It is an infinite ocean–in an often used metaphor backed up by modern science–and matter something like foam on waves.  You can be free in this space, though, and this freedom makes you more generous with yourself, and with others.  Why not share your bread–physical and metaphorical–when there is an infinite amount to go around?

Within Kum Nye, there is a practice of remembering a wonderful time, a wonderful day, and focusing on it, and expanding it.  For me, I have been dissociated my whole life, so there is very little to draw on.  But I think all of us have felt this anticipation of getting something–a blowjob, a love letter, a trip around Europe.  This is a useful starting place.  Feel the feeling, then let the rest fall away.  This is emotional skill practice.  This is resilience training.  This is prehab for emotional pain and suffering.

I look around me and see my own difficulties echoed everywhere.  Everyone’s house is on fire.  The only “normal” people are the ones you don’t know very well.

But so much more is possible.  I see this.  I feel this.  I don’t know how much more time we have, but let us all try and wake up, and remember–perhaps not what we have forgotten, which is the point of this work–but THAT we have forgotten, something, and it is time to start trying to remember; to wake as babies with new eyes, in a new world, confused, but hopeful.

I believe, in any event, that is our destiny, which we can choose to accept, or not.  Authentic religion is about remembering we all got lost somewhere.  It’s not a sin.  It was not a crime, any more than, to use a Christian metaphor, there is something personal intended when small lambs go astray.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/donald-trump-sparks-fury-posing-12914158

Would these not be the same British, the mayor of whose largest city–and once arguably the most powerful city in the world, and certainly the most important city by far in Britain–approved raising a balloon of the American President in diapers?  I’m surprised Trump did not take a dump on the lawn somewhere.

The British don’t respect themselves.  They are not protecting their civilization and institutions.  They can’t demand respect for them they are unwilling to grant themselves.  Habits are outer forms.  The substance of their culture has been in decline for many, many years.

It is true Churchill did support something like the EU.  It is also true he fought personally in one massive European conflict, and led Britain in a second.  That sort of thing will cause you to see the value of being interconnected.

But Churchill was very clear sighted as far as Islam.  His quotes on the subject are of course not politically correct, but they were the result of close personal observation.  Among other things, he fought against the Mahdi in the Sudan, if memory serves.

Islam, as being practiced currently in most of Britain, IS NOT compatible with Liberal culture.  Period.  There is no need to qualify this statement in any way.

Now, given how many nations Britain has invaded and occupied, perhaps it would be just for it to fall to those who come from those nations, but any genuine Liberals in the West cannot accept this without protest.  Islamization is regression for the rights of women, for children, for gays, and for everyone unable or unwilling to submit to Islam.  They want everyone to believe as they do, and they want to inflict physical violence on those unwilling.  No sane person can accept this, particularly when the religious content is that of a 6th Century sensibility.

So even though it is a bit comical watching some British pretend they have standards, it is really more sad.  It is sad for all of us, sad for those who think that the concept of human rights is beautiful and should be protected for all.

I think many people resent the growth of others because it reminds them of their own captivity.  A crab crawling out of a barrel reminds those who are there that something else is possible.

Perhaps in some ways, all cruelty comes from this root dynamic.  Many sadists seem to prefer children, not just because they are relatively weak, but because they had so much potential, and could have gone so many places.

You
Cannot
Go anywhere
In thought
Bright eyes
And a
Bright mind
Are
Two different things.

I got to thinking about the Nazis the other night, with regard to my comment on the British Empire, how it was perhaps a massive attachment failure.  My thought there was that maybe the British system of schooling created what amounted to millions of people unable to form stable adult attachments at a deep emotional level, and who took the resulting energy and invaded and conquered nearly every nation on the planet.  This idea arose from David Copperfield, which I am listening to.  “Character”, at least thus far, roughly equates to cruelty.

Ponder what must have been the attachment conditions for German children from 1914 to roughly 1925.  They would have been born to extreme anxiety, food shortages,  and from 1914-1914, absent fathers and perhaps grandfathers, and worried mothers.  The early 1920’s was the “wheelbarrow” period.  Things sorted out about 1925, but even then, ponder all the men in all the homes with severe “shell shock”.  Ponder all the consequences of war which never disappear–the fear, the pain.

A child born in 1914 would have been 19 in 1933.  A child born in 1925 would have been 8.  Was this not roughly the age range from which arose the Hitler Youth?  And were most of Hitler’s early supporters not college age students, those born perhaps just before the war?  As I think about it, any small child who suffered through that war would have been severely effected.  A child born in 1910 would have been 4 in 1914 and 8 in 1918, and 15 in 1925.   There would be scars.

And I ponder our own society.  Where are our Nazis coming from?  How is there so much hate, so much violence, so early?  What is the genesis of our own attachment failures?  One is the mothers working.  Another is what I will call the failure of the extended family.  But the main one I think, now, is the children raised not just with, but in large measure BY technology.  It has made far too many of them functional narcissists and even sociopaths.  They have ideas of goodness and compassion, but they really don’t understand what they mean.  That is why they “value” them so much they are willing to commit acts of violence against people they don’t understand, to “protect” other people in ways they also don’t really understand.  This is where the craziness comes from.  They need to believe something, but they lack the emotional intelligence to anchor their beliefs in reality.

What they want, really, is to live in a giant machine with rules they understand, and can manipulate like their iPhones.  There are ranges of possibilities, but all known and understood in advance.  Nothing truly new just “pops up”.  There is to be no genuine novelty.  That they cannot stand.  They are, in other words, demanding an authoritarian state, because they feel radically alone.

This aloneness is what connects ideology to action.  We might define ideology as “The rational in pursuit of the irrational”, at least as it concerns ideologies like Fascism and Communism.

I will have more to say on this subject, but I have to go for now.

I think these charges are fantastic. I think we should demand and expect to receive a full accounting of how Wikileaks came to be in possession of John Podesta’s emails.  I think we should offer him immunity in exchange for full disclosure.  After all, these are serious charges, and he is in a unique position to know where he got what he published, with Wikileaks, OBVIOUSLY, having been the main or exclusive source of all the emails which caused so much trouble by revealing so much corruption.

And we need to examine our election system, top to bottom.  We need to require all States to use paper ballots as backup–because it is certainly possible machines can be hacked–and we need to prevent Russian agents from using agents to place illegal votes.  Obviously, the only true way of preventing this is requiring valid and hard-to-falsify voter identification.

And this should be a bipartisan effort.  After all, the Democrats are concerned about interference by foreign agents, right?  The Democrats value the sanctity of our elections, right?

I say we give these sons of bitches exactly what they are asking for, and give it to them right up the ass.

I continue to wonder why Rod Rosenstein still has a job, but maybe it is precisely because Trump knew he would not be able to resist overplaying his hand.

I will comment, though, that the timing is self evidently intended to sabotage Trump’s meeting with Putin, and as such, is effectively a treasonous effort to undermine the diplomatic efforts of our chief diplomat. 

Having said that, given how much the Left hates Putin, I have to say I am growing to like the guy.  He can’t be a worse gangster than senior Democrat leadership and the people who keep them in power.

And if he is pissing them off, then he must be doing something right.

If the Left keeps up this relentless hatred, divisiveness, anger, and just nastiness, at some point they will be able to evolve the very hatred and violence they claim existed all along on our side. I am already getting much too much satisfaction watching cops pepper spray and manhandle these lunatics.  I’m not proud of it, but I am also tired of being called names by mindless drones who enjoy nothing better than spitting in my face.

Chuck Schumer is sitting on top of a seething mass of enraged goons, and his hands are tied.  I think he is politically smart enough to know that the Democrats are running a very real, very large risk of marginalizing themselves in a major way for a VERY long, but you can’t stop a boiling pot.  All these currents of rage and hatred and intolerance were stoked carefully for perhaps 4 decades, but kept below a simmer until the right time.  The right time was Obama, and all the stops were pulled out.   A perfect police state and propaganda operation were prepared, and awaited only Hillary’s anointing to bring to fruition.  Given that her election was a foregone conclusion, there was no reason not to fan the flames, no reason not to stoke anger, no reason not to take off the mask and show the fangs.

But then Trump happened.  You can’t just say “hey guys, all that stuff we said that made you mad, well you need to not think about it for a couple years while we work on getting our people back in control.”  So it’s an out of control train that has left the tracks.  It has a ton of energy, but nobody can direct it, and nobody knows where it is going.

So Trump just has to sit back and say “hey, this guy is reasonable.  There’s no reason other than partisan politics for the SAKE of partisan politics not to confirm him.”  And if the Dems STILL won’t do it, it helps our overall cause, and as I said, Trump can pull Kavanaugh and put someone farther to the right in January, if Republicans are able to take advantage of the anti-lunatic tide which seems to be coming in.

I’ll find other things to be upset about, no doubt, but them fighting Kavanaugh is not one of them.

I will wonder out loud again if this fire will not consume the lion’s share of the moderates in the Democrat party, leaving them lifeless on a national level. One can hope.  And the funny thing is: nobody can stop it, even if that is true.  The New York Times posted an editorial saying to tone things down for the mid-terms: they got a dose of their own hate for it, or so I read.

Any Cassandra’s in their midst would do well to be worried.  But nobody listened to Cassandra, did they?  

There is a marked difference between chronic anger–which is symptom of unhealed emotional wounds or traumas–and righteous anger, which is when someone breaks a common sense, commonly observed social taboo.  We can be grateful that true hate crimes have become something people shun.  We can be grateful that gays, by and large, no longer need fear being beaten up or killed, at least in American and Western Europe (for now).  True racism is rare in this country, even if it remains common in much of the world, where in many cases literal tribalism remains alive and well.

But there remain lines.  And calling someone a Nazi without any reason other than their failure to kowtow instantly to your lunatic agenda should be one of them.  The proper response is HOW DARE YOU!!  This, as my internet friend Tony Blauer likes to point out, is the root impulse behind all effective self defense, either physical or, as here, emotional.

The accusation itself is abusive.  It is inherently a personal attack on the character and basic decency of the person to whom it is directed.  It is intended to wound.  And in the propaganda network built under Obama, it is intended to promote and justify the further marginalization of that person, and to enable eventual actual violence against them.  Verbal violence always precedes actual violence.

I think we have all become anesthetized to all this, to the radical inappropriateness of it.  I have commented on this before, but I am really feeling it today. 

As an English comedian put it, in a rant where he was clearly venting actual anger, saying you are not a Nazi is like saying you don’t finger children.  We assume it.  It is the default.  It should not be necessary to deny it, because no sane people are Nazis, and no sane people are pedophiles.

Thus, as I said a few days ago, this accusation is very much a form of Gaslighting, in which you claim the other person is insane because they disagree with you.

Now, self evidently, this accusation was everywhere for a very long time.  Godwin’s Law dates back to 1990, before there even was an internet.

But I have never seen it be so relevant daily.  I see people say “But Trump REALLY IS Hitler”.  I ask: what do you know about Hitler?  Have you read any books, watched any good documentaries?  Answer: I DON’T NEED TO.  So we are to believe someone who has spent his whole political life mainly talking about bad trade deals is “basically” the same as someone who rose to power with an explicitly militaristic, clinically racist, and politically abusive agenda.  This is insanity.

Speaking for myself, I am losing my capacity to interact with these people at all.  Speaking for many on the right, I think, we have put up with the bullshit for so long because it is so obviously WRONG.  Dennis Prager created PragerU specifically to offer simple, well argued, fact based cases for conservative beliefs.  There is no equivalent on the Left, because there CAN’T be.  Their agenda is control achieved through conditioned responses to propaganda initiatives.

So I and people like me think “surely to God they can’t be that stupid forever.  Surely there remain people willing to listen.”

But I really feel that the public “dialogue” is really about who is human.  They accuse us of being Untermenschen.  We say that is ridiculous, try to prove them wrong, and they shout louder, then stop participating, all while calling us prejudiced and ignorant bigots.  It is lunacy.

For my part, I really am starting to look at THEM as an inferior version of humanity.  They lack principles, lack character, lack curiosity, are chronically hateful and angry, emotionally and sometimes physically abusive, and all in support of policies which in general make the very things they claim to care about WORSE.  There is no upside.  There is no sunny side view of this public debacle.  There is nothing good about it.  Real people are hurt, the social fabric is torn, and viable solutions to real problems are made impossible. 

I was really feeling angry last night, more than I have in a long time.  Perhaps that is why I was so flippant this morning.  How do you deal with all this?  I honestly don’t know.

I am a man of many moods.  Sometimes I’m up, sometimes down.  I’m usually chasing something, except when I am sitting still and staring at the wall.  I can think of nothing drearier than making a concerted effort to always agree with myself, and remember who I was yesterday.  I am most reliable when I predict I will be unreliable. I do have a Lambda, but sometimes I am still looking for crawfish in the creek or envying a lazy hawk gliding in the air.

Although: I’m not a Californian: no, I am not that gone.

I am merely curious.  There’s always something off in the distance, or staring back at me from my belly button.

This, of course, is my dog speaking.

But why not some Emerson, too? 

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Am I great?  Most days I’m an idiot, but I think I do have some good moments.  Perhaps: “to be genuinely curious is to be misunderstood”.  Curiosity takes you off firm ground, and sends you you know not where.  As Emerson says, implicitly, most people worry more about how they are perceived than how they are perceiving.  This is pure silliness, and perhaps the deep root of most of the world’s ills.