Author: White Whale

It occurs to me that the sense of shame, too, is a function of a sense of sanctity.  Sanctity is the sense that some people and institutions are inherently worthy of respect, that they matter, that they are important.

In the case of America, the person who occupies the office of President is not sacred–they are, in theory, subject to the same laws the rest of us are, which is what differentiates them from rulers–but the OFFICE of the President is sacred.

And that office has plainly been defiled.

If you go through life respecting nothing and no one, then you cannot respect yourself either.  Nothing matters to you.  Life is pointless, when the markers we are instinctually driven to look for and identify are missing, after a miserable and imbecilic acculturation process.

That is how you get Beavis and Butthead.  We live in a Beavis and Butthead world, and Hillary is their obvious candidate.  Everything is funny, when nothing matters.

Love–psychologically honest love–cannot exist in such a bastardized world.

The sacred matters.

It occurs to me this morning that this word simply does not resonate with people who do not value sanctity and loyalty, with people who unthinkingly adopt the Dalai Lama’s soporific: “kindness is my creed”.  Being unfailingly kind even to the cruel, even to the abusive, is stupid.  It is not protecting the weak from bullies.  It is not protecting your own people from those who would abuse them.  It is not confronting in an honest way the rapists and killers and thieves of the world.

Inherently, in order to privilege being nice above all else, and to reject in principle all other principles, cognitive dissociation is absolutely, fundamentally necessary.  You have to learn not to see, not to process, not to touch, emotionally, much of what happens in the world.

It is perhaps not overstating the case to say that what the press does is GRANT PERMISSION to see to people.  They have granted permission to see Trump, who is imperfect, but not to see Hillary or Bill, who are horrific human beings who are disqualified in every possible way.

Human beings are complex creatures, and we have many instincts.  Jonathan Haidt’s work in this area, as I have said, makes a great deal of sense to me.

To repeat one or more past posts, he posits six foundations of moral reasoning, as he calls it, but we might well also call it ‘Instinctual bases of human interaction”: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.


As he says, self identified Liberals only stress the first two.  Liberty, loyalty, Authority and Sanctity are not important to them.  Conservatives value all roughly equally.


And on this basis one can readily explain the vast difference in the emotional charge generated among conservatives about the charge that our system has been corrupted.  Clearly, the DoJ was pressured to not press charges on Hillary.  The FBI cooperated.  The IRS corruption scandal has gone virtually uninvestigated and no one has been punished.  We read in Wikileaks Hillary has a plan to use an Executive Order to allow murder victims to sue gun manufacturers, which would of course put them out of business in short order.


We see, daily, the prostitution of media integrity to left wing narratives and a more or less open campaign to get HIllary elected, not least by not focusing on her many serious crimes, and instead building up and fluffing even the most flimsy and ridiculous charges against Trump.  They mock factual objections–such as that airplanes had a uniform design in the period in question–as if “mere facts” should count when they have leveled a charge.


For those paying attention, I need not go on.  Our system is broken.  It has been corrupted.  Let us look one at a time at the values the Left does not care about.


1) Liberty.  Christians should have the right not to be forced to support abortions.  Or gay marriage.  Everyone should have the right to own a gun until they prove unworthy.  People should be able to speak their minds in all times and places, within very broad lines of decorum.  They should be free from abuse by the government, such as in the use of the IRS to punish and harass political enemies.


To take gay marriage as one example, most Leftists do not GET the fundamental principle that somebody has the right to disagree with them.  Really, I could say ALL Leftists, since I would use this inability as a defining feature, differentiating them from genuine Liberals.  They cannot balance the principles of Care and Fairness with the idea that someone else might have the right to say they are wrong, that homosexuality is inherently an emotional illness, or sin before God.  I have often–really, generally–been misunderstood by Leftists on this point, because they don’t have this category “Liberty”, or this principle “right to your own opinion” with which to balance the argument.


For my own part, I will stand with whomever is being abused and bullied by the government, which in recent years is clearly the Christians.  At one time it WAS the gays, and I would have stood with them then.  That was before my time, as it was long ago.


2) Loyalty.  Conservatives are willing to offer up our loyalty to the government, in exchange for the same.  We expect our government to look out for the American people, to have our best interests at heart, and to pursue our national interest honestly. We expect specifically that it will not sell its soul to the highest bidder and defraud the American people, pursue agendas contrary to our interest, and otherwise show contempt for us.


And as I have said before, loyalty as a virtue is conspicuously absent on the Left.  It has been replaced by conformity, which is a very different value. Loyalty in some respects is inherently a bit tribalistic, but we all need tribes.  That is why the word has come back into use, as in “finding my tribe”.  You look out for you and your own, first and foremost, and only later others.  This can have negative consequences, obviously, but it is also very important for mental health.


In important respects the rejection of the notion of reciprocal loyalty is inconsistent with mental health.  You can pretend otherwise, and many do, especially New Agey sorts, but at a deep gut level, it is necessary to belong, and to need to do nothing to belong.  Loyalty, at root, is a family emotion.  To lack this virtue is to lack a family.  The Left attempts to mimic this with a tribalism based on hatred and violence, but in the end membership is highly conditional on you doing and saying exactly what everyone else says.  To belong is to violate your sense of self, and there is no belonging, there is no rest: you belong as long as you are marching in the direction and at the pace of everyone else.  That is not healthy.


3) Authority.  Somebody needs to be in charge.  We want freedom, but we also need leadership.  If nobody is in charge, you get chaos.   Chaos is a bad way to live.  The Middle is the best place, and particularly when the States had first say on most things, Authority was distributed in this country sufficiently that most people could live according to laws they found congenial.


4) Sanctity.  This is the value most violated by corruption.  This is the value that Leftists DO NOT GET.  Our system depends entirely on the integrity and honesty of the people running it, and those people have shown themselves dishonest and lacking in integrity.  They do what is politically convenient, not what is right. Probity is gone.


The importance of sanctity is something best seen on a soul level, on a deep level.  We see Leftists daily demonstrate their fundamental callowness and superficiality by mocking everything and everyone, even very important institutions.


Again, to use a recent example, when Joy Behar, a woman interacting with other women, in front of an audience largely composed of women, calls victims of sexual assault “Tramps”, she is demonstrating an inability to hold sacred space, to grant those women their right to their time and truth.  She KNOWS on some level they are telling the truth, and some flippant and unserious part of her simply dissociated psychologically and launches in the profaning of what they had to say.


If nothing is sacred, then everything is profane. Life is banal, and 1 is equal to 2.  That is no way to live.


At root, Donald Trumps message is THIS STUFF MATTERS.  The American way of life matters.  It is a beautiful thing, and it is in danger.  Liberty is at risk, and we owe it to our children to put in place a government and system which takes its responsibilities seriously, which holds them as a sacred trust.

I get little poetic fragments.  I like that.

It occurs to me that Hillary has been practicing keeping her cool and composure her whole life.  She is never honest with anybody about anything.  This means she has ALWAYS kept whatever feelings she might have been capable of to herself.  She just stands there smiling maniacally because she is 100% phony.

For his part, Trump seems to have genuinely gotten his feelings hurt.  He has surrounded himself with beautiful women his whole life, and many, many intelligent women obviously enjoyed his company.  He wasn’t chasing black hookers in the projects like Bill was, to use and abuse then lose.  And even if he may have crossed some lines that “trigger” people in our hypersensitive times, there have been ZERO allegations of sexual predation until he took the lead as the Republican candidate.  With regard to Bill, he didn’t get the name Slick Willie in Arkansas for nothing.  If this is not obvious to you, this is a double ententre referencing his nearly continual sexual misconduct over decades.  Everywhere he has gone there have been rumors.  Some of his alleged mistresses have wound up dead.

Trump has NONE of this.  Trump is on his third wife because the first two had firm boundaries and were emotionally healthy enough to tell him to get the fuck out when he cheated on them.  Although she accused him of rape in the heat of and immediate aftermath of their divorce, Ivana says now that they are “the best of friends.”

If she were wired like a normal human being, Hillary would have left Bill long, long ago.  Bill was not someone who was just unhappy in his marriage, and reaching out for comfort.  No, he claims to have had sex with THOUSANDS of women while married.  Even if he were single, that would be profoundly unhealthy.  It reminds me a bit of Fellini’s movie “The City of Women”, where in the, forgive the use of the word, climactic scene, the Don Juan displays a statue of his mother, which he worships.  Mother issues: yes, sir, for sure.

But their relationship is simply a business partnership, which means she is really, really cold and calculating, as appears blazingly obvious. I think her main concern about Bill is that he hurts her politically; and it is all about her, and always has been.

Trump likes attention, but this is something you can see every day in nearly every person.  Everybody wants to pick the Derby winner, to be the track or football star, to be the smartest person in the room, to have the most beautiful woman, or richest and best looking man.  The guy with the biggest dick in the locker room knows it and is proud of it.

Trump enjoys his life.  He always has.  He loves the limelight. It makes him happy.

But it is important to differentiate this from clinical narcissism.  A clinical narcissist is someone who completely lacks empathy, who is unable to GET other people on a deep level.  Clinical narcissists can be outstanding at reading and manipulating people.  They can APPEAR warm and inviting, as Bill clearly often does.  It was his biggest asset as a politician.  Hillary and particularly Bill are clearly at least narcissists, and if they are guilty of a fraction of what they appear guilty of, likely sociopaths, with narcissism being merely one aspect of that disorder.  Sociopathy would explain why Bill is so fascinating to so many women.  He clearly draws them in, and always has.

The fact that Trump is bothered by the accusations against him show he has a conscience, and a core personality capable both of empathy and genuine outrage.

And I would say that in our modern world, genuine outrage is rare.  It would require non-ambiguous standards applied evenly.  And we all know that what is supposed to make us angry in one context we have to overlook in another.  When Joy Behar said “I apologize to those tramps who slept with my husband”, what is she doing if not showing grotesque emotional detachment from the emotional worlds of those women?   And none of them asked for it.  Two were groped or flashed by Bill, and one was raped outright against her will.  The final one, Kathy Shelton, was a victim of Hillary herself.

We see so much play acting in the public realm.  It is because people have forgotten how to feel, how to be real, how to be sincere, how to react in authentic, emotionally direct and real ways.  No, they are PROGRAMMED, and their faux outrage has all the reality of the Truman Show. It is a manufactured world, one built for idiots, by conniving bastards, for the decay of everything good.

http://redstatewatcher.com/article.asp?id=42529

Here’s an idea I haven’t seen: what if the hacks are being done by US intelligence officers pissed off that our system has been so corrupted? How could any sane intelligence professional want Hillary in the White House after what she has done?  She pissed on them.  She pissed on our system.  She holds those who risk and lose their lives for this country in contempt.  She wants pointless wars which are being paid for by the enemies of our nation.

Let’s hope this is legit.  The claim has been made of a tape of Bill Clinton having sex on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Pedophile Island” with a 13 year old.

We live in strange times.  But let’s remember–and I am more guilty than most of forgetting this often–there remain a LOT of very good, very strong, and highly competent people in this nation.

Never give up the fight.  Despair if you must, sit down for a minute, then get up and get back at it.

This is likely the worst period of your life.  Much worse than business set backs, divorces, or anything else.

Understand that you have been declared the enemy of the elite, and that you are being attacked by literally everyone BUT the American people, and a handful of supportive, honest journalists.  Everyone.

This is OK.  The truth is that despite everything, despite all the lies and slander and false accusations you are still very much the person tens of millions of us want to vote for.  You are, in the last poll I read, STILL the frontrunner by a bit.  People hate Hillary.  They really, really fucking hate her.

And they like you, warts and all.  Obviously, you are no saint.  I get that.  But I also think the American people get that if there were a pattern of abuse, it would have come out sooner that 3 weeks before a close election being run with as much mean spiritedness and nastiness as the media and Clinton campaign can muster.

More people care about the corruption of our democracy than the latest sleaze they are throwing at you.  They care that Bill got a million dollar check from a nation that is funding ISIS.  They care that Hillary hates Catholics, and honest Christians generally.  They care that we risk war with Russia if we continue the Obama/Clinton foolishness in Syria.  And they are starting to GET, en masse, that our world is run by and for a small elite who don’t give a flying fuck about ordinary Americans.

Hell, you got Jill Stein’s endorsement–relative to Hillary–and that is saying something.  Climate change is not real, but issues of clean air and water are relevant to many Americans.  We can be smarter with our resources.  Maybe you can find her a place in your Administration, if the American people prove they still deserve their Republic by voting for you?

Think of Churchill in his underground bunker, working 16 hours a day for years at a time, regularly going up to the streets to meet with ordinary Londoners and seeing the devastation.  I don’t doubt there were times he wanted to throw in the towel, but he didn’t, and the world is better for it.

You can win this.  Persistence prevails when all else fails.  I believe in you.  You seem to be all we have left.  That is an important responsibility, but one you can meet.

When it comes to politics, it seems to me there are really only two questions: what is right, and what works.  With regard to the first question, as Thomas Sowell pointed out long ago, the question you have to ask before answering it is, politically, who gets to DECIDE what is right?

Liberalism is the idealistic notion that many different answers to that question can coexist peacefully, because we adopt a policy of enlightened and genuine tolerance on the one hand, and grant people regular access to the process of law making, and grant geographically disparate groups the right to govern themselves as they see fit on the other.

Where we see an irreconcilable political split nationally, it is because of perversions of our system.  The Supreme Court never should have asserted itself in Brown v. Board of Education.  It is not that the cause was not just, but that that was never their business.  It was the business of policy makers in Kansas.  It is absolutely the case that protests and non-violent tactics were appropriate, but it was not the job of the Supreme Court to issue national mandates.

And look at our schools.  Are they not functionally segregated in many cities even in 2016?  The solution was not achieved.  The outcome they wanted, for which they were willing to prostitute the sanctity of the Court, was not achieved.  They failed, and whatever moral arguments they may have offered to justify their abdication of their responsibility to protect the rule of law in this country–which is to say the dignity and wisdom inherent in our Constitution–failed with them.

Even before that, Social Security never should have been ruled Constitutional.  Roe v. Wade, for its part, is farcical from a legal perspective.

Who rules our nation is a large question because we are not one nation: we are many nations, and those nations differ fundamentally in their beliefs.  As I have been saying for some years: let Texas be Texas and Oregon be Oregon.  Let people vote with their feet.  You cannot make one nation of many, and expect there will be no violence of sentiment.

And in terms of what works, that is an EMPIRICAL question, is it not?  What I would submit is that rhetorics of morality have corrupted the notion of efficacy.  The claim is made over and over that because something SHOULD be true, that it is true.  It may be that higher education (so called) “should” be free.  But it is pointless to make the claim without understanding the systems in place, and having a realistic understanding of the logistics of making this happen.  Anything less is childish pouting, which of course has become trendy.

First off, I will note that conspiracy theories are very common in parts of the world where the media is known to lie, in order to represent the interests of the State and/or a power elite.

Conspiracy theories, according to the properly indoctrinated, have no place in a transparent democracy like our own, because if something big was hiding–especially in plain sight–SOMEONE would have reported it.

But do we not live in the season of the witch?  Has this not become the era of the Big Lie?

Necessarily, if you sense you are being lied to, but cannot find anyone honest enough to even approximate the truth, then you have to make up an answer of some sort, if it bothers you not understanding why what you are seeing happening is happening.  That is a “conspiracy theory.”

Anyway, I read today that Hillary is taking 5 full days off less than a month out from the election.  She is obviously prepped for another debate.  She was prepped for the first.  It may be that she is sick and simply cannot get out. It could also be–and here’s my own pet theory–she is worried about somebody hitting her with a flash or strobe.  The Secret Service can vet debate attendees very thoroughly.  They likely go through something like what they use at the airports now.  But they can’t do that at each and every rally.  And her crowds are so small, many people could get very close to her.

Hillary’s health alone should disqualify her.  The fact that she should be in jail should disqualify her.  The fact that she created ISIS through errors of both omission and commission should disqualify her.  She is sick, corrupt, and incompetent.

And America at this moment STILL appears likely to elect her.

My take is Trump needs to release his tax returns, and if there is anything that Hillary can use to attack him, he needs to do it before the last debate, so he can address it directly in front of a national audience.

Particularly in the context of all the damning stuff about Hillary that is coming out through Wikileaks, he should be able to handle anything up to a major scandal.

My sense is that Trump needs to strike a conciliatory tone in the third debate.  The images from that will be what people take to the polling stations.  He needed to attack in the second debate, but I actually think Hillary may be the one who feels that need in the third.

And I think it would be quite appropriate to say something like “Look, this has been one for the ages, hasn’t it?  I’m getting attacked by the Democrats, which of course I expected, but I’m getting attacked by my own party.  The media has been completely corrupted.  Everybody who has had a stake in taking advantage of the American people–and that is a lot of people–is attacking me.  Why?  Because I SCARE THEM.  I am my own man.  I’m not in politics to make money, like Bill and Hillary–who have done quite well for themselves.  I was living a very nice life before I chose to run.

And if people want to accuse me of being a secret Democrat, look, I’m a NEW YORKER.  We have soft, moderate and hard Democrats.  That’s who shows up at the parties.  And that’s what I was.  And there was a LONG time being a Democrat was OK.  Democrats could balance budgets, defend the United States, and love this country.  That was true for a long time.

But it is no longer true.  Many Democrats actively hate America.  Hillary said as much in some of those emails.  She said she no longer understood the middle class.  Obamacare was not about HELPING people, but controlling them.  It is a disaster.

And do you know we will soon be spending MORE on interest payments on our national debt than we give to the Pentagon?  $600-700-800 BILLION a year of your tax dollars, and those of your children, going to pay for this insanity.  And insanity is what you will get if you elect Hillary.

And not even the Republicans have been doing their job.  We are supposedly the party of fiscal responsibility, of tough love and tough choices.  But both parties have been trying to be all things for everyone for far too long.  We’re fighting wars abroad we can’t afford, and spending money domestically we don’t have.  We can’t sustain this.  You know this.  I know this.  And I am the only one who will put us back on a sustainable path.

I’m no angel.  Nobody has accused me of it, and I”m not.  But I do sincerely love this country.  I love ball games at Yankee Stadium, and hot dogs, and the OPPORTUNITIES that exist for all of us when our system is working, both for the people born here, and the people who come here legally looking for a better life, who have done so, so much to make America the great nation it is.

I don’t know what I can do to deserve your vote more than promise to you that ordinary Americans are who I care about and who I will protect and support if you should grace me with the opportunity of a lifetime to make America great again.  Thank you.

Feel free to steal Donald.  I have to say, that’s not bad.