Author: White Whale

Like many, I am waiting eagerly for news on the Vegas shooter. Since I don’t personally deal well with recognized large gaps in my understanding, I am going to offer a provisional hypothesis I will amend or discard as new facts-/which may or may not be forthcoming–emerge.

I read Paddock had far more weapons than he could have hoped to use himself. I read they found Antifa (which I will henceforth refer to as Fascist) literature in his room. I read there is a police account and a different account as to when he checked in. I read he apparently had a guest https://www.infowars.com/receipt-shows-paddock-had-another-guest-in-his-room-before-shooting/

Put all this together, along with low simmering unresolved emotional trauma, and relentless left wing propaganda calling for violent  resistance to the expressed will of the American people, and a relatively high IQ, and what I get is this guy conceiving an excellent scheme for the mass murder of likely Trimp supporters. I see him inviting many people to join him, at least one of whom actually visited his room. I see him sharing Fascist literature with him or her, and showing off his gun collections, and all the windows looking down on the spot where the country show was going to be.

I see cops reaching this conclusion early and going on a hunt for people who knew of his plans to due to direct invitation, and who chose not to join him on his suicide mission, which was the part they objected to, not the murder part, for which they applauded him, as some leftists have had the audacity and cruelty to do publicly.

So a hunt begins, with little information to go on. Perhaps he effectively wiped all his devices. Perhaps he left few clues. Perhaps there were no cameras in his hall, leaving them to guess who, among tens of thousands of visitors–many of whom were not guests–might have come to see him. This would be a MASSIVE undertaking and until they can get a confession–unlikely even if they find someone who knew–they have nothing.

His girlfriend has a practiced alibi and nobody can prove she knew anything g.

So in the end, after tens of thousands of hours of work, they have to propose a possibly radicalized lone shooter as their best guess, not wanting the public to know their real best guess is that up to dozens of people may have gotten away with complicity to mass murder.

Does anyone remember this movie? It changed my world in some ways. Things are not always what they seem.

Something is screwy in this whole Paddock thing but he is dead, and we may never know who else to question.

What functional difference could there be between the Communist rejection of “bourgeois morality”  and Aleister Crowley dictum “Do what thou will”?

On the note of Communism, Paul Johnson makes the interesting argument that the obsession with the money-obsessed Capitalist by Marx is really just a metastasized anti-Semitism, and the abuse of groups of people based on collective crimes by Lenin and those who followed him–such as efforts to destroy Kulaks, and the bourgeoisie generally–were morphologically pogroms in a classic Russian sense. People were pulled from their homes, beaten, jailed and/or killed, and their possessions confiscated.

It is an interesting thesis.

Hate makes hate. Marx apparently asked Heine, with whom he was acquainted, “Why so much love, and not more of the lash?”  Heine, for his part, lamented the grotesque violence he saw in the future of socialism, even if he was in many respects sympathetic.

Why 2 windows shot out?

Could it be that many people were invited or even expected to show up? Could it be there were multiple shooters , who returned their guns to Paddocks room before the cops got there?

I can’t know. But one or two or three guns with plenty of ammo is all one needs for mass murder.

It would seem an obvious step to find and question everyone who rented a room on that side of the building. Maybe some chickened out.

Does anyone else remember Tom Cruise, before Tom Cruise was Tom Cruise, shooting a machine gun out a window in Taps?  As I recall, when Timothy Hutton confronted him, he said “It’s beautiful, man!!!” just before both of them were wiped out in a volley of automatic fire.

Can any serious human being really argue that continual–and continually increasing–violence in our media has no effect?  To my mind, it has the dual effect of making people more afraid and thus more emotionally restrained and superficial, and the following effect of making them feel more  lonely, since they have shut down the pathways to the outside.

Take this basic alienation, and the ability to nurse a grievance–real, or much more often perceived–and you get this sort of violence.

How is it people who appear continually in violent movies can tout gun control?  They are complicit in making violence seem to be an answer to many of life’s problems.  Do not many American men idolize as badasses men like Vito Corleone and Tony Montana?

This madman may or may not have bought his weapons legally, but even if we ban them, the possibility of such shootings does not disappear.  Whoever controls a monopoly on the effective use of force has accumulated power, and accumulated power is sooner or later always abused.  I wonder how the referendum in Catalonia would have played out if guns were allowed in Spain?  More violence, certainly, but also perhaps more circumspection in the use of force by the authoritarian regime in Madrid.  I read some 800 people were injured.  If that is not a species of fascism–and I will recall for you that Spain was formally Fascist until the mid-70’s–then I don’t know what would count.

Federico Fellini made a movie doing some combination of satirizing and lamenting the Italian political world, although I’m sure he knew it extended farther, in a movie called Orchestra Rehearsal.  To play beautiful music, self evidently, all the sections need to get along.  When they fail to do so–if the winds are fighting with the brass, for example–it becomes impossible.

Other than that thousands of tons of supplies are piling up on the dock in San Juan, and that only 20% of the drivers who should be distributing it have showed up for work, no firm statements can be made, but it does appear the local Teamsters have chosen this time for a de facto sit-down/slow-down strike.  A video in Spanish which, it is claimed, supports this is making the rounds.

What makes America special–the reason we outperform so many nations economically and in actual social justice–is that we tend to be able to put aside our petty differences in countless ways, and work together for common aims.  This, despite our cultural and racial diversity, which the Japanese, as one example, do not deal with at all.

When Houston became a vast lake, Americans of all stripes and backgrounds pulled together to help out.  People were not worried about getting paid, or whether or not they were getting a fair shake.  Work needed to be done, and it got done, and is getting done.

Puerto Rico, on the other hand, now, is showing exactly why it was in terrible trouble before the literal storm hit.  Selfishness, laziness, resentment, and an unquenchable desire to shift blame all seem to be on prominent display.  I want mine and fuck you seems to be a common sentiment.

Now, I’m not there, and I’m sure there is a lot of sharing going on.  I’m also sure there is a lot of stealing and score settling going on too.  This is why they are who they are, and why we–and yes, culturally we are a different nation, clearly–who we are.

Success is not an accident.  This is claimed by people who know nothing about hard work and long term planning, for whom stealing equals the only growth they will ever know.  But it is not the American way.  We have thieves, but nearly everyone who gains wealth did it in one way, and one way only.

Media still working on why, and what his motive was.

Seriously: in what sane world does being hated become reason for hate?  One could as easily say–as many have throughout history–that Jews should be hated because everyone hates them.

I continue to be astonished by the emotional and intellectual superficiality on display everywhere.  I continue to wonder when and if the media and those who constitute and run it will awaken from their spell.  Yes, I get that the people at the top are completely cynical and believe in nothing but power, and power alliances, and Trump does not get them those things.  But the rank and file: how fucking stupid, for how long, can you be?

As far as this latest tragedy–oh, I hate to read the news sometimes–we will see what explanation we get, but the story seems to be two pissed off local hispanics–the term used by a woman who spoke with them, even if the term the media has latched onto was “Asian” for the woman, which in NewSpeak usually means Muslim–attacking a country music concert attended largely by white rednecks.

Can we not suppose anti-Trump hatred–for which he bears no responsibility–is in play?  Can we not, in fact, blame the media for relentless, white-hot Agitation Propaganda?

This is simply a guess, and particularly if I am right, we may never know it, but I think it is close to the mark.  You cannot run the equivalent of a Nazi campaign of structural anti-Semitism and not expect less-hinged people to take it literally and start killing people.

The hate needs to stop.  It won’t–the Left is far too emotionally gone for self reflection–but in a sane world it would.  I don’t know what the solution is.  In my small world, in my small way, I continue to work for local antidotes, and am making progress.

Is a gathering of ideas, and perhaps personalities, but not people.

Is there not an inherent anti-humanism in the idea that ideas are what matter most?

Corrolary: you can dedicate yourself to humanity, or to the IDEA of humanity, but you cannot do both.

I feel, as someone who could reasonably call himself “intellectual”, that what a lifelong obsession with abstraction–at least with regards the abstraction of “life”– really bespeaks is an unquenched emotional thirst for a sense of existence.  It is a rebellion against, and a shelter from, tides which seek to devour me.  Existentialism was itself, paradoxically, an unanswered pursuit of the sense of existence.  This is what I feel.  And I feel that being devoured, there is another side.  It is not madness: it is health.

I think what all intellectuals crave is a simple existence where they belong.  I think in this psychological dynamic we can find the unrelenting obsession with community, itself expressed politically as left wing activism, as a community in the future, as a community for other people.

Utopia becomes an emotional ideal, where one belongs without psychological risk.  We are, obviously, all surrounded by an expanse of people.  Community is always there, in possibility.  Where not present, it can be formed, concretely.  But it requires risk, and losing a taste for risk, true risk, is a defining feature of most people who live lives apart from the mass of humanity, who rarely or never come down, who are always at a distance, even when physically or virtually present, even when frothing out clouds of words.

My work continues to bear fruit in ways I am increasingly less inclined to discuss here.

This is an interesting story, if true: https://www.infowars.com/shock-report-nfls-oakland-raiders-threw-game-after-white-qb-refused-to-kneel-for-national-anthem/

It seems very obvious to me that there cannot be uniformity of opinion among NFL players. It seems most likely a few very vocal but dim witted people are yelling a lot in the locker room and cowing people into supporting them.

Like police, like military, sports teams need each other. They need to be able to depend on one another. And this Oakland story, if true, shows what can happen if individuals go their own way.

So even there is no unity at all, a front of unity is being presented.

If the Russians—or any other group or interest, like George Soros–truly do aim to undermine American faith in our institutions, getting idiotic and morally incoherent politics introduced into what should be a non-political arena would be a great way to do it.

Now, we clearly idolize sports and sports heroes much too much in any event, so this cannot be called a major cultural loss, but it will be interesting to see how things play out. Net good may come of it, albeit not for the NFL.