Author: White Whale

Can one blame cops for getting shot?  Of course not.  Can one blame them for creating an atmosphere in which people WANT to shoot them?  Yes.  Clearly.

I keep saying this in many ways.  This one is slightly different.

The MINDSET they teach cops in the Academy, the one they enter their professional lives with, is control.  They teach them that they have to establish and maintain from the outset an absolute sense of dominance which is clear to both sides.  They are, in other words, to make every person with whom they come in contact, who they suspect may have committed a crime, feel inferior.  They want you to feel like shit.  They want you to feel shame and fear.  These are the emotions their training implicitly teaches them to invoke.

From a militaristic perspective, this makes sense.  You establish relative dominance, which you support with the clear display of weapons coupled with the  relatively unchecked power to put handcuffs on you and lock you in a cage, and you teach people to feel the fear of animals confronted with a superior predator.  Their fear makes them compliant.  This is not in principle different from a tiger showing its fangs.

The cops like it because they are the Alphas on the block, and they have a lot of other Alphas to share their Alpha-hood with. And in general their methods work.  People with something to lose fear losing it, and they keep their mouths shut, by and large, and their hands visible.

But when this mindset backfires, it backfires badly.  I think a lot of Officer Involved Shootings would not happen if the people concerned were treated with more respect, if they were treated as human beings, if they were not treated as a possible lunch for a hungry predator.

In most healthy people there is a desire to push back when someone pushes you.  In traumatized people, in the sorts of people who populate our jails and commit most of our crimes, this urge can be extraordinary.  It can reach the point–often does reach the point–where they DON’T CARE about the consequences.  This guy in Dallas planned to die.  He knew it was the only likely ending.  That price was obviously worth it to put fear back into the cops, to show them he too was a human being, he too had feelings, and his people had the right to demand to be treated fairly and with respect.

And obviously how can we expect cops to react?  They will do more of what created this problem in the first place.  They will be even more abusive, even less trusting, even more militaristic, as if the war being waged was ON the American people, and not on their behalf, which is supposedly the mission.  They exist as Public Safety Officers.  They exist not to victimize us, but to protect us.

But the mindset they develop is that of hunters, who enjoy the chase.  They are not looking for reasons not to arrest people–most cops on most nights–but reasons TO arrest them.  And again, this is the good cops.  The guys who make the most arrests are viewed with respect.  They are supposed to make the streets that much safer, but given how unsafe many streets are where the most arrests are made, one wonders.

And how do we put a cost to all the lost creation, all the lost labor, of the vast numbers of blacks who enter a revolving door relationship with our jail system?  They go in for something stupid, like petty theft, committed because nobody ever taught them right from wrong, or how to get ahead honestly, or who imbued them with the slightest hint of self respect, and they quickly learn they don’t matter.  Their lives don’t matter.  They are human shit.  They know this, because they have to put up being treated like shit, over and over, by men with guns and nightsticks.

How does any good come out of this?

I understand and have participated in the defense of the police. I have pointed out often that more whites are killed by cops than blacks, and that most blacks who are killed are killed by other blacks.  I have pointed out that a lot of COPS are black, as for example were half the cops charged in Baltimore, who if they are guilty of anything it is surely not racism.

But what I would add to this is that there has been no national self reflection, no asking of hard questions, no asking why our policing is done the way it is.  I get that if Obama calls for something most sane people will immediately feel the need to do the opposite.  He is a disgustingly disingenuous, hateful, divisive and opportunistic human being.  He disgraces our highest office.  But it is the American people’s disgrace, since we put him there.

At the same time, though, these questions do need to be asked.  I have seen 6-8 videos in the last year where excessive force was clearly used.  Shoot first and ask questions later no doubt works to keep cops alive.  If I could be certain I would never be held accountable for bad decisions, then it might be my policy too, if I were lacking in a sense of honor and decency and professional integrity.

But that policy does not work to keep people alive who have committed no capital offense, and who in most cases are reacting the same way that dogs react when you keep yanking their leashes.  “Yanking your chain” is in fact a common police saying, or used to be.  If you deal with people like dirt, sometimes that alone is going to cause a reaction which results in one or both parties getting shot.  Since they are the ones who took the oath, and since they are the ones who are the supposed professionals, police need to accept a much larger share of the responsibility and the blame when things go south.

https://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow/videos/10154304212146800/

As Trevor Noah points out, in what I thought was a reasonably balanced piece, saying you are against cops killing innocent–or at least people not guilty of a capital offense who could and should have been dealt with with more skill–people is not “anti-cop”.

One immediate change people might consider is the automatic use of handcuffs.  The sting of being arrested is, I think, made much worse by the use of handcuffs.  Some people clearly need to be cuffed for the safety of the officers.  But most people don’t.  Most people, if you tell them you will face a lot of jail time if you act up, will behave fine.  Every time you put cuffs on someone you assume they are violent.  But most people are not violent.  Most people were not going to attack the cops.

You could do something as simple as say “if I don’t cuff you, can I trust you?” and even though in some cases the cop may regret it, I think on balance there would be a lot less fear of, and hatred of, cops.

And we need to be clear that even though cops make noise about public service, and even though many of them would be willing to risk their lives to protect people, most of them are addicted to their jobs.  The cops in small towns are bored.  And the risk cops are not in general willing to take is the risk of being shot in order to keep some suspect alive.

Personally, I view the main difference between a cop getting shot by a criminal, and a cop who is made a criminal by the act of shooting an innocent person (like the drunk guy in Mesa who had no gun at all) is the size of the funeral, and the number of attendees.  They are not usually the heroes we make them out to be.  They like their jobs.  Most of them are highly cynical, detest most of the public, and keep mainly to their own.  Cops almost always hang out with other cops.

We need them, to be clear.  The choice is not cops/no cops.  At issue is how they do their jobs, the authority they have, the training they receive, and the expectations we place on them. Specifically, if they do something stupid, they need at a minimum to lose their jobs.  This would seem common sense.  It would help public relations, and in the long run likely get a lot fewer people killed–on both sides, I am inclined to honestly say, even though we are all theoretically on the same side.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-bad-experiences-in-childhood-lead-to-adult-illness

I am very close to feeling calm, and I was recalling today a study I read some years ago that 100% of people who had exceptionally poor relationships with both parents had serious illnesses in their 40’s.  When I read that, of course I was a bit worried, since for all intents and purposes I am an orphan with two living parents with whom it is simply impossible to communicate at more than a superficial level.  I Googled, something, and the study above came up.  This quote is relevant to my own experience:

Imagine for a moment that your body receives its stress hormones and
chemicals through an IV drip that’s turned on high when needed and, when
the crisis passes, it’s switched off again. You might think of kids
whose brains have undergone epigenetic changes because of early
adversity as having an inflammation-promoting drip of fight-or-flight
hormones turned on every day – it’s as if there is no off switch.

I have not been sick.  Other than a minor surgery to fix a muscular injury, which really doesn’t count, I have been 100% free of physical ailments, even though I’m sure my ACE score is 3 or above.  I don’t really want to know.  I have had more than one therapist look at me in wonderment at my relative stability, given my history.

And here is why I think I have not gotten sick: I chose, at age 16, to fucking FIGHT for sanity.  I didn’t know what to do.  I did not know where to go.  I had no idea what was wrong with me, but I knew something was, that I did not process the world like most other people.  My entire adult life has been oriented around the task of gathering wisdom and learning, on the deepest level I could reach.  This has been everything to me.

And I really think that has made the difference.  You can see my battles here.  What do I have, 3,000 posts or more?  This, even though I’m not really sure more than one or two people read it, and I’m not sure even they read it regularly.   This blog is the fight, or part of it.  This blog is a part of the not giving in, the telling my unconscious that I will continue, I will fight on, I will never quit.

No one can heal me.  The scars are much too deep, and in any event it is unfair to ask anyone else to carry your cross.  I am the one who needs to do it, and I am DOING it.  It is not theoretical.  I am feeling better every day. One day soon I will greet the sunrise without fear.

Where chronic feelings are concerned, like anger and anxiety, the feeling precedes the explanation.  People who are angry will find things to be angry about.  People who are anxious will find things to be anxious about. 

But both functions are intended as tools to help build a better, freer life, not dictators to diminish life and make it compulsive.  This point is important.

It occurred to me this morning that the metaphor of Robin Hood, if we apply it to our current era, would be armed bands breaking into police stations to take back what was taken in Civil Asset Forfeiture–a highly abused process which is certainly antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution–and also stealing money from the IRS as it convoyed the money taken in taxes–taken, to be clear, at the point of a figurative and sometimes literal gun–from the public.

Leftism could not exist without effective lies, without effective propaganda, without long term and carefully directed and orchestrated misdirection.  Indeed, so deep is the malaise that in the 1960’s they found it necessary to attack the process of rational–goal based–thinking entirely.

If you look at all the enormous government buildings, what you need to see is King John.  What you need to see is a bloated organism that takes a third of everything we make, uses it to fund lavish salaries, expensive buildings, and a continual thirst for more bureaucracy because it means more taxes, which they depend in the end on the police–in some form–to collect.

The power granted the government must be taken with great responsibility. With regard to the police, I have been saying for some time that if the police do not start policing their own, if they do not start sending abusive cops to jail, or at least firing them, as should have happened in the Eric Garner case, then people are going to start shooting back.  It is inevitable.  If people lose faith in the system, and have little to lose, then why not shoot back at a system that is already shooting at you?

I know a lot of people who have been arrested for one thing or another.  Cops do not treat prisoners like people.  Even if they are superficially polite, they are not thinking of you as a human being even at a traffic stop.  They are thinking how they will kill you if they need to.

I think most of the people who go into law enforcement like this emotional superficiality.  They are able to leave unprocessed all sorts of negative emotions, which certainly include rage and some degree of sadism.  And if they don’t start that way, it happens soon enough.  You cannot lock people up every day for any length of time and not develop a latent sadism and sense of relative empowerment.  As I have said, I think this process becomes addictive for most.

I have proposed as one solution not allowing cops to be cops more than 5 years, except in the case of jobs where a lot of experience is needed, such as homicide and some other types of investigations.  Perhaps 5 years is too long.  Perhaps 1-2 years.

Another idea would be to make a lot less things illegal, and the need to arrest people much lower.  There is something traumatizing, I think, about having handcuffs placed on you, and being locked in a cage.  That most black people endure this often cannot but have an effect, that of increasing both rage and relative sense of helplessness and disenfranchisement.

I do think Black Lives Matter is being used as a front for the usual fucking psychotics who want death and destruction for us all–the George Soros’s of the world.  But I do also think it has or had a potentially useful purpose, which is providing a non-violent–or mostly non-violent–outlet for pent up energies.

When you hold people down, when you suppress them daily for decades, when they get arrested for having a little weed, or an open can of King Cobra,  or even for just loitering in the wrong place at the wrong time and giving the cop some attitude (cops are intensely sensitive creatures, who learn they can get away with not tolerating the slightest back talk, and who quite gleefully punish it), then some combination of rage and helplessness builds.  The despair shows up in drug and alcohol abuse.  The rage in violence.

By and large black violence has been held within their communities, by the police, and by habit.  But it has long been my opinion that sooner or later they are going to start shooting cops, utterly without regard to the consequences to themselves, simply because they have nothing else to live for, no good, creative outlets for their life energy, and because some of these assholes–you have seen the videos, so don’t play innocent–deserve it.

I worked in a police department for 2 years where I interfaced with cops on a daily basis.  Every department has bad apples, and everybody knows who they are, but they cover for them.  This is the point I am making: people need to stop covering for them.  I don’t give a shit what the “culture” is.  Those people are going to start getting everyone else killed.

It could be that every cop killed in Dallas was a wonderful human being.  More likely, they were average human beings who were decent at home, responsible in their private lives, but who dehumanized people on a daily basis, and viewed it as their job.  To some extent it is their job, but even after factoring in guns I think there is a reason there are so many more cops and civilians killed in their interactions in this country than anywhere else.  It is cultural factors, and most specifically, in my opinion, the habit of treating people objects.

I will add too that I think jail for most is a stupid punishment.  Most of the people who get arrested are already emotionally disturbed.  They acted out impulsively.  They did something without thinking it through, they got too angry too quickly.  I was talking to a kid the other day who had somebody steal a bunch of money from him, so he went over to this persons house and stole a bunch of stuff of his, including a car.  He was looking at 10-20 years.  This, for an hour or two’s bad decisions based on rational anger.

And who foots the bill for that?  We do.  And these fucking for-profit jails no doubt have lobbyists hard at work making the penalties stiffer for everything, using an appeal to moralism and the need for public order.

Does this make any sense at all?  Not that I can see.  What these people need is emotional counseling, some way of learning impulse control, some way of processing deep traumas, some way of becoming useful rather than caged citizens.

I think the reaction to crime–we might start by using this word rather than punishment–ought to be oriented around the maintenance and improvement of social order.  Some people are psychopaths and will never be fit to exist in civil society.  I think these people–and I have said this before–should be locked up for life.  Their jails should be comfortable, reasonable, but permanent.  They cannot be rehabilitated, and they will always be dangerous in a free society.

But a lot of people just made a stupid mistake, or continue making stupid mistakes because they don’t know any better.  Nobody is teaching them anything, and what jail teaches them is they don’t want to be in jail, but if they know it and are familiar with it, fuck it, if I get caught I can deal with it.

What we need is a system to at least try and figure out who is who.  Who are the psychopaths, and who are the people who are just very confused and angry and impulsive?

Now, the devil is in the detail.  The war is won with logistics.  Most therapies suck.  They are stupid.  I don’t doubt there are groups of men sitting around in groups where somebody is telling them to talk about feelings.  They comply superficially, and wonder all the time at the gullibility and stupidity of everyone involved.

But anyone who is not functional is hurting inside.  On some deep, likely unconscious level, they want to heal, but it seems impossible.  This is the task for intelligent therapists, to figure how to TRULY help people who genuinely want to heal.

I have to run, but these are a few ideas.

I had this image come to me, which I may have read somewhere.  I can’t remember any more than anyone else everything I’ve read and heard.

I was thinking of these self righteous assholes who run communities, and who think it’s quite OK to send an 18 year kid to jail for 20 years for a car theft committed in a moment of rage and immaturity.

He dies, and he’s standing outside the door marked “Room of Judgement” at the head of the line.  He just found himself there, and figures it makes sense.  A poor woman missing her teeth is standing behind him, and says she’s scared and worried.  She did meth and was a prostitute for many years, but she did her best to be kind all her life, but she just had too much to deal with.  Her father and uncle molested her, she ran away when she was 14, and it never got any easier.  She did take care of her sister when she was dying, got off drugs finally, and took up Buddhist meditation which finally brought her some measure of peace.

Our hero says: Buddhism?  Unless you have been born again in the blood of Jesus, eternal Hell is your punishment.  And he surely will not look kindly on your many years of sin, ESPECIALLY since you have not sought his forgiveness.  You must surely be damned.

And Jesus, of course, appears in his true form, and says “as ye judge, so shall ye be judged” and condemns the man to the Pit.

Within my own metaphysics, of course, I don’t think these stories about eternal damnation and salvation are true.  I think people more or less find the level of their measure.  They rise or sink according to their actually dominant spiritual and emotional habits.  But even within this model, the prostitute would be at a much higher level than this man, who is cruel, lacking in understanding and sympathy, and utterly self righteous.

I think we need to all collectively recognize that the FBI has been completely politicized and that a major house-cleaning is in order.

Yesterday, I spent an hour watching this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4VaRGqJZ_I (it is an hour, broken into roughly ten minute segments).

In it, among other things, they note the public testimony given to the Senate that a senior NTSB official caught the FBI destroying evidence in the middle of the night. The topic is the coverup of the destruction of a commercial Boeing 747 airliner off the coast of Long Island by what were almost certainly two surface to air missiles.

The relevance to the Clintons is clear.  They were involved in the cover up from the get-go:  http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/hillary_gorelick_and_the_corruption_of_the_twa_800_case.html

I don’t think it would be too much to call this Benghazi 1.0, although I am likely being overly generous in calling it the first cover up.

As I have shared, the Oklahoma City bombing also appears to have involved a much wider conspiracy, one also with the FBI in the middle.  Without taking too much time, I will simply share the letter a retired Air Force General who was an expert in the relevant field–that of damage assessment–to Senator Trent Lott: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/OK/PARTIN/ok8.htm

I will note that one police officer involved in the case appears to have been assassinated, and at least one suspect tortured to death, almost certainly by the FBI.  No one was punished.  The truth was never told.

It is an odd thing to me to observe Democrats who fear their government when Republicans are in charge ceding to their fellow Democrats such enormous trust.  If the government can be abused by one party, why not both?  

We saw yesterday what kind of monster we are unleashing if we put Hillary in the White House.  She broke many laws–she lied to Congress, she lied to the FBI, she broke numerous regulations concerning classified data–and SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT.  In full daylight.  Everyone knew and knows what she did, and they said WE DON’T CARE.

The FBI has shown itself to the world to be a corrupt, filthy, disgusting travesty.  They follow the IRS in this.

Hillary has a long history of backroom deals.  She was selling contracts to the Russians.  She is taking huge sums from the Saudis right now.  She is venal.  She is for sale, and ethics is something she vaguely recalls reading about in one of her mandatory college classes many years ago.

I read today she likely played a major role in covering up a major attack in Long Island: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/06/hillary_gorelick_and_the_corruption_of_the_twa_800_case.html

She got an American Ambassador killed, along with 3 good Americans, then LIED ABOUT IT to all of us.

The woman is a fucking psycho.  She is a walking list of mental health problems, and power seems to be her sole consolation.  And power is not power until it is abused, and abusing it is clearly what she expects to do, and what any sane human being must expect her to do.  Why not?  Morality is off the table.  Common decency is something she has never known or had any reason to practice.  Fear of the law is off the table.  Obama has shown our Congress has been neutered, and now the FBI has shown itself to be her lap dog, as indeed it did for Bill in the 90’s.

And I read Gary Johnson thinks everything Hillary did is OK: http://www.redstate.com/california_yankee/2016/07/03/gary-johnson-gives-hillary-pass/

Johnson seems to prefer the Democrats to the GOP these days. In addition to giving Hillary a pass on her email scandal, he said that President Obama is “a good guy” and Hillary was “a wonderful public servant.”

Gary Johnson can’t win, but he is the only alternative to Hillary and Trump, and anyone who could vote for Trump and instead votes for Johnson is voting for Hillary.

How fucking hard is this call to make for anyone claiming to be sane, and to value the future of our country?  If you are on the gravy train, sure, I get a vote for Hillary; and if you aspire to be on the gravy train, likewise, I assume that like all Machiavellian gangsters she rewards loyal service; but for anyone else, voting for Hillary is a vote to continue our national suicide. 

Being something of a student of Islamic history–Gibbons treatment of it, by the way, in Decline and Fall, is excellent–I have never liked the term “Radical Islam”.  This implies that something has gone wrong with normal Islam, that it has been taken beyond the boundaries.

The truth is that most Muslims, in most Muslim countries, have gone torpid.  They have become drowsy with respect to their faith.  They have allowed their innate humanity to overpower the innate inhumanity of the Islamic creed.  They have privileged sloth and common decency above dogma and ideology.

Islam in its primitive form is ascetic (except for sex), violent, inflexible, and aggressively expansive.  Iran under the Shah was not Islamic.  Women were free to dress as they chose, there were many bars, men did not have beards, many people did not pray the right number of times or at all, etc.

As I have said often, the best Muslims are the worst Muslims.  Conversely, the worst human beings are the best Muslims.

Therefore the term “Activated Islam”, to me, better conveys the sense that the violence was always potential, it was always possible, just not yet present.  The task of the radicals, so called, is merely to activate it, to make Muslims read their own Koran and try to live by it.

And in the West we make it easier to recruit because of our fundamental decadence.  You cannot offer an alternative if you believe nothing.  Humans are believing creatures.  We are tribal creatures.  We need to belong, both socially and intellectually, to some larger group.

Nobody who watches Europe can say the are humanists any more, or that they believe in the promises of the Enlightenment.  They are superficial, egotistical hedonists who are not having children because they don’t want the responsibility of creating a world they will not cringe to pass on to their progeny.  This leaves a gap Islamists are only too happy to fill.

And so we are presented with the prospect of a continent which invented democracy, virtually every major scientific discovery of the modern era, the philosophy of Liberalism and universal human rights, returning to an atavistic stage of cultural evolution firmly rooted in the 7th century.  That this is absurd, does not mean it is impossible, or even improbable.

I am seeing some interesting things.

It seems to me that a key element in developing self acceptance (in quieting the fight or flight responses I will discuss momentarily) is realizing that EVERYTHING you do has a reason.  You may hate yourself for always winding up with the same sort of romantic partner, or for oversleeping, or for being a workaholic, or for abusing drugs and alcohol and sex, or whatever.  EVERYTHING you do has a reason.  It is emotionally logical.  It is intended to save you pain, even if of course in the long or even short run it increases it.  You are substituting a conscious pain to avoid dealing with an unconscious one.

And what is interesting to me is that as I slow down, I am realizing that every day, countless times a day, people go through sequences which have a middle part that they are unaware of.  You see a person, and a series of events trigger in your brain, and a reaction issues forth.

Let me reframe that a bit.  Emotionally healthy people are likely aware of why they do things, but most people are not emotionally healthy, not by a long shot.  You find yourself saying “I don’t know why I said or did or felt that”.  There is an answer, but the part of you which ACTUALLY made the decision did so in a split second, in an altered state of consciousness that may have endured no more than a tenth of a second.

Healing, become healthy, consists in being able to touch this place, to speak with it, to give it room to express itself, to feel it, to make contact with it.  Invariably, it is where things are hidden which make you uncomfortable at best–and invoke deep feelings of horror and violation at worst–which is why they are hidden.  Some part of you is protecting you from things it can’t make go away, and doesn’t yet know how to process.  Suppression enables you to function, even if suboptimally.  This is a truism of course, but old truths are sometimes worth saying again with new words.

What I realized this morning is that I cycle between fight and flight.  If you pin a bird to a board with a nail, it will alternate fighting and passivity.  But if you look at this metaphor–and it is a bit gruesome, but suitable for my purpose since it evokes the actual feelings involved–the fighting and flighting are the same motion.  The feeling of wanting to escape and wanting to attack are quite similar.

There are two cycles involved in people dealing with trauma.  There is a cycle between depersonalization–passivity–and fight and flight.  And there is a cycle between fight and flight.  Fight is when the traumatized person gets enraged and angry in an inappropriate proportion.  Flight is when they become lost in daydreams.  It is not the same as numbness.  It has motion to it.

And what I saw this morning is that fight and flight cycle back and forth, but they go through a dark zone which evokes fear, but which is really the latent possibility of calm and peace, of relaxation.  The traumatized person fears relaxation, because it feels like it increases risk.  Certainly, I do, on some level.

There is a lot to ponder and feel here.

When you interact with another human being, and they fail to be fully present, this on some level, if you fail to perceive it, works to distance you from your own emotions.  What I am seeing is that other people, and to the main point here, parents, can say all the words you need to say but that if they don’t mean it, it hurts, on balance.

They can say “I love you”.  They can say “I am there for you”.  They can say “I am proud of you”.

But if they are narcissists, if they are watching TV while they say it, if they are heading out the  door, then that bond is not formed, that connection is not made.  And in point of fact, you are being trained in superficiality.

To look a child in the eye and say something you don’t know how to mean, or are unwilling to take the time to mean, is emotional neglect.  And what is interesting about this is that this neglect will not be easily perceived by either party.  The child will think “they said they love me, so this must be what love is”.  The parent will say “I said I love you, what else can I do?”

So often I think that in this and now other countries, media fills the gap where emotional honesty should have been.  People are hurt, do not know they are hurt, do not know they are missing something, and use constant distraction as a means of managing it without ever becoming consciously aware of it.

This is a fragile system.  In the past, absent these distractions, something would have given.  Some truth would have been told.  The delusion would have collapsed.  But in our modern world, delusion can survive a very, very long time, and it is buttressed by sentimentalism as a pseudo-moral creed.

I am consciously directing most of my thinking to my diary, but I felt this needed to be said publicly.

Things are going well for me.  I will have crossed the ocean soon.

Edit: could we not say that what we might term the Age of Divided Attention is the Age of Ineffective Love?