Author: White Whale

It remains to be seen how things will play out, but I wanted to point out that acting in apparently erratic and even contradictory ways is part and parcel of the Trump interpretation of the Game Theory of negotiation.  If you give people absolute confidence in who you are and what you want, they can make very precise calculations intended to get the best deal possible for them.  If they can’t figure you out, you carve out a large space which is potentially negotiable, and thus potentially a better deal.

Trump said he wanted to get along with Russia, but now he is sounding war drums over Syria and calling for regime change.  This could be honest confusion, honest emotionality, and thus honest incompetence.

At the same time, we are not Russia’s allies, per se, and they are not ours. Their interests and our interests do not precisely coincide.  Both of us have an interest in avoiding war, and both of us would like to see ISIS destroyed, but is Trump’s best play inherently to suck up to Putin?  Not necessarily.  What if there WERE chemical munitions stored where he sent the missiles, weapons both Putin and Assad knew about, even if they were not using them, and in fact WERE the targets of a false flag attack, as I believe? It’s hard to justify chemical weapons in that environment, even if they were not being used.

The whole thing has to confuse Putin, frustrate him, and make him wonder where he stands.

It also worked to shut up most of the media which was obsessing on their made-up story about Trump colluding with the Russians.  Now Trump is making nice with China.  What is one to think?

Add to this the North Korean situation and the decision to drop that huge bomb in Afghanistan (am I the only one wondering how the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria got into Afghanistan?), and it is POSSIBLE that a very complex game is being played.  It is also possible he is shooting from the hip, stupidly.

Either way, the path forward could easily include asserting tacitly that this was all well planned.  So if you make being erratic your MO, you can still seem a genius even when you fuck up.

Where do we go from here?  Well, obviously we want regime change in North Korea, and we want a ceasefire in Syria, some concessions of human rights to non-terrorists, and we want ISIS destroyed utterly.

Where I think focus should be placed, because this is interesting and important, is how do we get to a genuine return of something like the status quo ante in Syria, ideally with some political improvements?  What are the conditions, politically, economically, and militarily, which must be met for this to happen?

You can ask: what could Trump get from alienating the Russians?  For one, he makes clear that although he does not want hostilities with them–he did not target any Russian troops or planes–that he is also not necessarily their friend, especially if they are complicit in making it even POSSIBLE for Assad to engage in gas warfare.

As far as I know, nobody died in the missile strikes.  I may be wrong.  I don’t know.  But it was certainly not MAINLY an attack on troops.  Sometimes when dealing with dangerous determined people–and Putin is that–you need to put them on notice.  You don’t need to do anything that cannot be smoothed over, but you also need to show you have balls too.

The proof of the pudding will be what happens in the next six months.  If Trump commits significant troops to fight alongside and effectively in support of serial killing psychopaths, then he has lost his way and will lose my support, at least in that aspect of his Presidency.

But if he gets involved in serious negotiations and helps broker a truce and honest ceasefire, then I will call his game playing successful.

I personally would like us to ally with the Russians and yes the Syrians in destroying ISIS, which is an enemy of all humanity.  We don’t have to be the best of friends, but we can and should help each other.

Time will tell what is really happening, and what Trump is really thinking, IF he is thinking.

1. Bill O’Reilly.  From a business perspective, the only argument that could be made for firing the top rated member of your network would be if he was going to start costing you money.  That seems very unlikely.  Whatever is alleged to have happened has already happened, and will be duly investigated by the State.  Their findings will be the same whether O’Reilly stays or goes, as will his and Fox News liability.

More generally, it should be obvious that as a top rated conservative, all the witch hunters on the planet have him in their sights.  The Left doesn’t debate because it can’t.  Their ideas and the outcomes based on their ideas, are uniformly horrible.  They seek to silence and intimidate those who will not agree to their lunacy.  For that reason alone–EVEN IF he is guilty–he should stay.  We need him.

And in the hypocrisy department, was there ever any doubt that Bill Clinton not just serially harassed women but routinely committed acts of sexual aggression up to and including rape?  Where was and where IS the Left on all that?  They don’t care about it.  They don’t care about women.  They don’t care about human beings.  All they care about is expressing their obsessions in the public domain, no matter the human cost in suffering and misery.

2. Sean Spicer.  Spicer was right.  Hitler never used chemical weapons in his conflicts with foreign enemies, even though Germany easily could have.  The Holocaust was not a a civil war.  The Jews, with only extremely rare exceptions, never shot back.

This whole tempest in a teacup, again, has to be contextualized within the general environment which seeks to make of EVERYTHING Trump or anyone connected to him does a horrific and willful crime, which this time will FINALLY cause his supporters to cease supporting him.

What this mindset fails to feel in the air is that Trump is not so much loved as the Left–and its use of tactics JUST LIKE THIS–is hated.  We hate those abusive, cynical, evil mother fuckers with every fucking ounce of patriotic loyalty and pride we can muster.  There can only be small swings a few points one way or the other.  The vast majority of us see Trump as the last possible line of active defense and counterattack.  That won’t change.

I will have to ponder whether or not I am grossly oversimplifying, but I think it could in any event be argued that the Western tradition rests on the idea that all important truths can be spoken.  This would seem to be the claim implicit in Plato, where the examined life–which is the proper life–is in large measure a conversational life based upon the use of reason.

This makes Wittgenstein’s dictum “Worueber mann nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen” a de facto demolition of the Western tradition, and it would seem that in practical cultural terms, this is exactly what has happened.  Moral valuation as a consistent process grounded, at least in theory, in the use of analytical reason based upon clearly articulated principles is gone.  It is dead.  You have people condemning Fascism using Fascist tactics, and embodying the Fascist mindset and cultural and sociological gestalt of radical Other direction and authoritarianism.  This cannot be pointed out within the system, because the system admits no principles.

But if we make the simple alteration that philosophy proceeds from Truth, which is embodied in our sense of self as consciously experienced in, say, a Kum Nye practice, then it recovers.  Truth is ineffable, inexpressible, but what comes FROM Truth IS expressible.

Put another way, most of the time what is to be done is obvious.  It is intuitively and instinctually obvious, but the obvious needs defense in our modern world, where abstraction from abstraction–the use of bad reasoning to destroy good reasoning, which includes the destruction of those categories–has led most of our thought leaders into full dissociation from their bodies, from their intuitive selves, from their basic natural impulses which alone can cause them to feel real and their lives genuinely worth living on a deep level.

Our system persists only because economic success has made emotional superficiality on a long term basis possible.  Our griefs can be managed, and in no small measure medicated.  Distractions and distractions from the distractions have proliferated everywhere and become a vastly important part of our economic life.

But how many Americans can sit in silence for an hour in tranquility?

All of our problems can be solved, but we must first decide that we want to solve them, and that humanity is worth saving. Their hyperventilations to the contrary, I think most Leftists long for death.  They conflate their personal selves with the collective, and they want release from their interminable and–within their world view–insoluble problems.

Most “intellectuals” (morally reprobate half-wits with degrees from prestigious schools) today seek global peace and harmony through centralized government.

As a general rule, men are physically stronger than women, and generally more aggressive.  They are usually less emotionally intelligent, and particularly less socially sensitive, for both good and bad: good, in that their feelings rarely get hurt in normal circumstances, bad in that nuance flies right by most of us.

But it is wrong to infer from the fact that men can rape and beat women either that women are helpless, or that they are not capable of horrific cruelty.

On the contrary, from petty bitchiness to outright psychosis transmitted through children, women are if anything more dangerous than men.  I would stipulate, in fact, as a general rule, that the most violent, fucked up men, had the most insidious and silently or overtly cruel mothers.  Men who are mistreated by their fathers take it out on other men.  Men who have been psychologically raped by mothers take it out on women, then get blamed for “toxic masculinity”.

I was reading that some group of lunatic women somewhere finds biological boys inherently objectionable, so, presumably, they plan to torture such children in ways which make happiness for these poor souls absolutely impossible.

Where I think we need to be clear is that CRUELTY is what psychologically normal people object to, and normal people object to it in all forms.  They object when someone kicks a dog, and they object when some deluded bitch tries to bring up a boy as a girl.

And to take a more general tack, the reason racism is wrong is that it facilitates cruelty against other human being by providing an ideological justification.  It begins as an attitude, but all dehumanizations of others begin as a form of social violence, and end in actual violence.

Thus some forms of advanced–let us call it Stage 4–feminism treat men as less than human.  They prescribe cruelty.  They prescribe denigration, humiliation, punishment, not for specific crimes, but for crimes of birth, of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is ludicrous.

There clearly is a feminine nature, which is nurturing, compassionate, caring, and warm.  There is a masculine nature, which is daring, aggressive, curious, and highly protective.

It may be–I think it clearly is–the case that human advancement will involve better integration by both sexes of the best attributes of the other, but the pathway is THROUGH what already is, what is already given.

To deny what is given, what is there, is violence.  It is violence of the sort which permeated all the countless crimes of those robotic regimes run by the Communists.

To doubt who you are is to become a robot, and we have become a world filled with robots.

All this is a sketch based on some of the text from Allan Bloom I listened to today.  Some of it is mine, much of it is my interpretation of him.

1. The left wing agenda is really a corporate agenda. Why else would so many massive corporations and billionaires support it?  Government  equals wealth and control for those who are connected.

2. Positive thinking is not about ignoring the bad but rather allowing in the good. Bad things will happen whether we want them to or not, but there is absolutely nothing necessary about taking risks based on the hope for something better. Most people, in fact, never do, and leave life with all the bad that was coming anyway, but none of the possible good that required belief.

Allan Bloom talks about how our culture is affected by the knowledge on the part of both children and parents that at some point they will likely leave and never return.  They will travel for education, then career or marriage, and even if there is a reunion in a happy family once or twice a year, the relationship will have changed permanently.

And as he points out, the possibility of separation is already the fact of separation.  You have to prepare yourself psychologically.  And one has to wonder how this changes the relationship between parents and their children.  They know they will not depend on their children in their old age, as was the habit of the world until the present age.  Their children view it as their job to get out of their control, and to become economically and psychologically independent as soon as possible.

Do parents–especially mothers–sometimes unconsciously soften their children, make them more dependent and less able, in order to reduce the chance of their figurative voyage overseas, leaving them all alone?

And how has the nature of the necessary relationship between children and their parents–again, especially the mother, who is the emotional center of most homes–altered the maturation process.  In past ages, you would stay or–if at war or engaged in commerce–return to your home and extended family, your community within the community.

We no longer have communities within communities.  Most of the time, we do not even maintain the so-called nuclear family.

Now, I am speaking here of suburbanites and city people.  In the countryside, much of the old ways remain.  People are born, stay, and die in the same small place, where they have family, and know everyone.  This makes their culture, their expectations of others, very different than those who live in continual anxiety brought on the necessary social separations which their very different acculturation causes them to view as necessary.

People need people.  We all need to feel we belong, are understood, are valued independently of our economic worth, and can love and be loved without fear of loss outside of those which come with life.

I have made some significant progress in my own healing in recent days.  I may post on it, and I may not.  But I do continue to ruminate about how we get from here to a healthy global culture 100 years from now.  It is quite possible.  All the elements are there.  But we have to stop acting like and making love to machines. 

I’m slowly going through an inventory of old movie “classics”, and watched this one yesterday.

My take is that the plot would have been equivalent and in most respects better if it had chronicled a cabby in San Francisco slowly having a nervous breakdown, then jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, surviving, then finding a new lease on life.

I don’t know why people think it is deep and “real” covering seamy stories we all know about, but doing so without any higher purpose, without any redemption.

Travis wanted to kill himself.  Option A was taken–that of killing a Presidential candidate whose only crime was being supported by a woman who, with considerable justification–had rejected him, so he went with Option B.  Iris was an after-thought.  His plan was if he couldn’t get death by cop, he would get death by mobster.  Option C, which also failed, was simple suicide.  He ran out of bullets.  That’s all.

Scorsese seems to think that extreme violence equals depth.  In the respect that it mirrors latent violence within so many people trapped in this giant rat cage, yes, it is deep.  But violence in itself is not redemptive.  It teaches nothing.  There is no lesson to be learned.  This is not an old school western where the bad guys are punished, and the rule of law and principle upheld.  This is a chaotic emergence from a world where everyone is venal, dark, sick, and lost.  Travis is not a good man.  He is suffering from undiagnosed trauma–likely traumas–of various sorts.  This is why he can’t sleep.  He would have been more honest as a full blown alcoholic who spent his money on whores.

As Iris said, Sport was not a killer.  Nor was he abusive, even if we can all grant that having sex with a 12 year old is sick.  Travis was a killer.  But we are supposed to side with him, apparently.

I can check that movie off, but I can say with some finality that I am not a Scorsese fan.

On a pretty regular basis anymore when doing my Kum Nye practice, I will enter moments where words are acidic and damaging.  I feel fields of motion, perceptual domains where things are moving, where colors exist, where SOMETHING is, but where calling things out by name is ridiculous.  Change happens without planning, without thought.

And what I feel by extension is that the evolutionary purpose of psychosis is qualitative change within fixed brains.  There has to be nothing there for a moment, for something new to emerge.  The problem in our contemporary world is that if you cannot embrace this radical change, then the process can never complete, and you get stuck in the intermediary ground between one sanity and another.  And our system, by labeling, encourages people accidentally to stay there.  It medicates them so the process cannot complete.

I think many rituals of past tribal peoples, who knew much more about many important aspects of life than we do with what we assert to be our “science”, understood that a butterfly is nothing for a period of time after it is a caterpillar, and that if you break open the cocoon too soon, what you see and get is a muddled mess.  You cannot conclude from that that nothing was happening, or that butterflies are impossible.

I would like to define sanity for the moment–I may change my mind or heart tomorrow–as being consciously connected to the spirit of Goodness in a dynamic and adaptable way.

There is a wind blowing through the world–it has been called the Way–which suffuses the lives of those who breathe it with delight, resilience, compassion, and higher level intelligence.  If you can feel it, and know how to breathe it, how to be in it, then you are sane.

And if you do not, then you are some level of insane.  This is most of the world, certainly most of the “developed” world.  It continues to feel odd to me that Socialists–who as a cultural group are very amenable to diverse ways of doing things, to some forms of artistic culture, and certainly to oddness as a discipline–are so utterly unable to realize that there are rewards in life that have nothing to do with money, and that the rich are often miserable, and poor Africans who pound oil barrels into wood burning stoves they can dance around on cold nights are much happier.  God forbid they get rescued by professionals, which in most cases in the 20th century meant do-gooders creating the economic means for them to be reenslaved by their own people using Western money.  They went from one frying pan into another, while those, like Mugabe, who were copying the Western imperialist model using socialist rhetoric were praised by the “rescuers”.

I watch people: at work, in bars, on the street, in restaurants, in the gym.  Everybody I see is hiding something.  Everybody I see has secret pains they in many cases cannot even admit to themselves, but which show up in behaviors they can explain but not really defend.  It is not what they really want.

This is Duhkha.  The Buddha was counseling nothing more or less than better mental health.  If your house is on fire, and you continue living there: insane.  Do you really need a reason to change other than realizing you are miserable and have been all your life, compared to what is possible?

I get this wind sometimes, for moments.  It only takes a whiff of perfume to process it, and this experience is the same.  It feels like the world is nurturing, soft, close, fascinating, and my own ability to respond with excitement and interested engagement even in the face of obstacles (which I faced literally today while I was trying to remember how wise I am (I am very wise until some mother fucking piece of shit gets in my way, then I start swearing, but, uh, in a spiritual way.  OM)) is robust.  Even bad things become interesting.  All experience becomes a source of growth and moving closer to continual contentment and frequent joy. Nothing shocks you, because you know that even in fabrics of grief there are threads of consolation, and that frustration and continually reinforced indignation are childish, churlish, and warrant starving, not feeding.

Becoming sane is, in my view, the point of life.  It is only accomplished rarely, but approximated by many.