Author: White Whale

Somebody posted on my Facebook today about how some Muslim, I think in Canada, said that some women like being beaten.  One respondent agreed, and my immediate reaction was to reject this idea.

Then I got thinking about it.  What is 50 Shades of Grey (gray?) but a chronicle of one mans quest to secure a woman’s permission to beat her?  It is impossible to listen to women’s stories about their problems with men and not think at some point that some part of them LIKES abuse.  I have listened to countless stories over the years.  Thousands of hours.  As I say from time to time, I am a good listener.

Now, we are supposed on the one hand to decry men who beat their women, but on the other to support those same women when they want to be tied up and hit, controlled and abused.  I don’t know what to make of this.  The abuse of women is likely as old as humanity, and we assume that it serves no purpose, that no sane woman would seek it out, but then you have the sales for 50 Shades.

One woman I was talking to who had read it 2-3 times, who obviously related to it in important ways, said that she liked how Christian (can this name be a mistake?) would give the girl unlimited funds to go shopping, and then when he would abuse her, she had his undivided, complete attention.  This was what she liked: how much attention he lavished on her.  This was her fantasy: to be the absolute center of attention, to be his whole world for a time.  It was not about the pain, but his focus on her.

Now, I don’t know if he was serious or not, but one of the respondents to the post I mentioned at the top said that in his travels through Africa a common editorial question from women was “how do I know my man loves me if he doesn’t beat me?”  Obviously, men run the papers in a lot of these countries, and this is no doubt a question they would love in the public domain, but is it impossible that this was something on women’s minds?  I introduce, again, the sales of 50 Shades.  100 million copies.  A movie.  The series is on par with Harry Potter and Twilight, with virtually all sales made to women, and the author a woman.

Again, all this relates to the idea of hierarchy, dominance and submission.  All of these posts started as another post I still haven’t gotten to, but will at some point.  Do women need to feel their man is in charge, and is this need driven from instinct? Is Feminism in some respects angry and aggressive not because this is false, but precisely because it is TRUE?

Are things like BDSM emerging into the public domain precisely because egalitarianism, the ethic that everyone is equal to everyone, is unnatural?  Clearly, historically, all attempted egalitarian projects have ended in radical inequalities.  Did human nature simply take over?  Is this one idea we can and should add to the mix?  Do we simply displace one inequality with another?  Is this need always satisfied over some time horizon, in some way, and simply changed from blatant to obscure?  Are our true motives occulted in self delusion and deception?

Can we see in rising interest in Satanism not just emotionally clouded reactions to religious hypocrisy-and of course the equally emotionally clouded desire to attack religion itself–but also a powerful symbol of inequality itself?  Is Satan not a powerful symbol of power–of dominance and submission–itself?  Does this interest meet the need which is thwarted by our daylight preoccupations, with our allegedly innocent and dispassionate concerns for erasing power relationships?  I think so.

And for what are we erasing them?  What is the purpose of life which is best served by this obsession?  What do the people in an absolutely equal industrial/post-industrial society do all day?  What passions stir them?  Who are they when they are alone?  What fills their minds?  What constitutes beauty, and how can beauty exist when the concept of ugliness has been destroyed?

On another tangent, I was pondering the movie “The Children of Men”, which I think I can safely assume was intended as a “socialist” critique of emerging patterns in British society of reaction to the unlimited importation by the Labor Party of a reliable voting bloc which rejects British society.  We are shown in that movie Fascist abuses of good people, of concentration camps of the sort we are told Trump wants to build (which is of course pure propaganda, since he has not even hinted at anything of the sort), and a vast divide between the Haves and the Have Nots.  Clive Owen ‘s brother, I think it was, in the movie, lives in this enormous mansion overlooking the Thames, and has put up Picasso’s Guernica and Michaelangelo’s David in his large flat or mansion, all while protected by walls, and armies of police. The people are left to fight with one another over scraps.

Is this not an accurate picture of Maduro’s Venezuela as it exists today?  Do you not think there are secure areas, guarded by hordes of well paid police?  Do you not think there are even today pockets of vast wealth, all connected to and controlled by the government, which was installed, supposedly, precisely to eliminate such unearned wealth?

As things are trending now in Britain, it appears that the power elite are quite willing to countenance, if they can control, an Islamic take-over of the entire nation.  They don’t care about the ordinary British people.  They do not care about ordinary decency.  They do not care about what is fair, or right, or good.  Their self loathing, which informs their policy, does not extend far enough to share in the burdens and travails they nonetheless intend to inflict, through inaction, through delay, through obfuscation and lies, on the proletarians they allegedly care about.

Here is an interesting piece of research, from “The Body keeps the Score” by Bessel van Kolk (Page 33-34).

“. . .dominant male monkeys had a much higher levels of brain serotonin than lower-ranking animals, but that their serotonin levels dropped once they were prevented from maintaining eye contact with the monkeys they had once lorded over.  In contrast, low-ranking monkeys who were given serotonin supplements emerged from the pack to assume leadership.  The social environment interacts with brain chemistry.  Manipulating a monkey into a lower position in the dominance hierarchy made his serotonin drop, while chemically enhancing serotonin elevated the rank of former subordinates.

There are a number of things that have occurred to me in connection with this.  I don’t remember half the ideas that float through my head, but I will pass along those that I recall.

First, it seems to me that we need to ponder the relationship of the police to black people in black ghettos from a position of dominance and power.  The police are like a super-gang: they dress alike, they act alike, they use the same words, observe the same culture, and back each other up no matter what, come thick and thin, and show loyalty to their own even when they know they are in the wrong.

It is of course as wrong to accuse all police of being criminals as it is to assume all of them are innocent.  My own experience, having worked for 3 years in a police department in college, having shared a locker room with cops, having attended their line-ups more times than I can count, and having shared a radio frequency with them for a thousand hours or more, is that most departments have a few bad apples, everyone knows who they are, and they tend to get away with what they get away with for long periods of time, if they don’t take it so far they force others to act.  If they are honest, I think most cops would admit this.

And on “the street” the whole game of being a cop is being dominant.  In most times and places, but particularly in rough neighborhoods, they are always at risk of being outnumbered and overwhelmed.  This is the root cause of being more aggressive than needed.

But if power is a literal drug, if you get a literal hit of serotonin every time you yank somebody’s chain, that can get addictive.  I think in most poor neighborhoods a lot of cops can justify acting arrogantly and with using force often.  And arresting someone is the most obvious use of force.  All sorts of laws seem to get enforced more in the places where the police spend more time, because there is more crime of all sorts.

And here is the question I would raise: what is the psychological cost of getting arrested?  What does it say to you as a person when your hands are cuffed behind your back, and you are locked in a cell, for any reason?  Blacks get arrested at very high rates for things like marijuana possession, petty theft, public drunkenness, etc. Does not every arrest breed some bitterness?  Is not every arrest, in its own way, a crime too?  You have more or less kidnapped someone and held them against their will.  Is this not directly disempowering?

I think in discussing the violence in the ghetto this is an often-overlooked factor.  Over and above police abuse of force, what about simple legal use of force?  When people say the so-called War on Drugs is a war on blacks by proxy, I cannot disagree with this notion.  The people at the bottom of the food chain will logically have the lowest serotonin levels, and thus the highest need to get high.  It is one of the tragic ironies of life–and this world is filled with this sort of thing–that the people with the most need to escape their reality are punished the most for it.  The people most likely to get kicked are those already on the ground.

What I would assert is that the process of policing, as it is practiced in most cities, actually exacerbates crime, by increasing the sense of impotence, the sense of worthlessness, of powerlessness, to which people react in predictable ways.  I think many cops view the ghetto as a playground.  I think many cops view a shift in which they don’t get to lock up a person or two as wasted.  It probably makes them mean, to the extent that in some homes the wife and children know instantly that they came up short that day.

And I”m talking average cops here.  Not the particularly bad ones.  I think the thrill of the hunt gets in their blood, and that even though most of them stay within the law, they enjoy what they do.  One of the cops where I worked had a Far Side cartoon in his locker where two people are pouring hot oil on some people besieging their castle, and one is saying to the other: “I have a confession to make–win or lose, I love doing this.”

Now take this logic to Ferguson.  I am not going to justify what Michael Brown tried to do, which is kill that cop.  I’m not going to blame the cop for shooting Brown.  He was alone in the ghetto, being attacked by a huge man, who was high, and extremely enraged.  Legally, practically, Brown was wrong and the cop was right.

Nor can I stomach for a moment the Soros-funded agitprop which followed, because it was infused with left wing radicals who didn’t care any more for Brown than they care for the people locked in cages in Cuba, or who were shot in the back of the neck in Lubyanka, or who were forced to eat their neighbor’s children in Mao’s completely arbitrary and unnecessary famines.  I dare say that sort of thing is likely happening even now in North Korea.

But if we are to use genuine empathy–and I do like to consider myself capable of empathy, even though I am often hot-headed, sometimes mean, and nearly always irritable–then we have to look at the root of the anger.  Of course people want the cops when bad things happen.  But when cops are the SOURCE of the bad things, the proposition is much more dicey.  I suspect in that neighborhood at least half the young men had been locked up at least once for something that was not that big a deal. And being handcuffed and locked in a cage leaves scars.  Eric Garner was killed through incompetence–and I will note again, with a black female officer on the scene as Officer in Charge–for the crime of selling cigarettes.  Why did he react with such rage?  Because he was tired of cops, tired of harassment, tired of being made to feel inferior, tired of having his chain yanked.  Is this so hard to understand?

I hate the Left.  I hate the people who hate humanity, who hate decency, who want power at any cost, for nothing.  This post is long enough and I will deal with my original topic in another, but I will say that real change for the better will come when reasonable people on both sides sit down and discuss how to improve the situation.  Such conversations are IMPOSSIBLE when radicals are in the mix.  I might perhaps begin calling Leftists anti-humanists.  That is what they are.  They support nothing good.  They help no people who matter.  They are not working for the common good.  They are not focused on decency and actual human lives.

In my view, some alternative to getting handcuffed and thrown into a cage needs to be on the table.  In my view, a whole lot of things which are illegal need to made legal, or made subject solely to a citation. The same people who support Black Lives Matter, and who reflexively vote Democrat are the ones who made selling cigarettes without a license illegal. Curtailing freedom is what government does.  Without that, it is useless.  Even in the pursuit of national defense, it acts solely to curtail the freedom of our enemies.  Some freedoms need to be curtailed, but selling cigarettes should not be among them.

And ponder the world people live in where they can only afford to buy a cigarette at a time.  Ponder the feelings that must arise when even THAT is punishable by incarceration or unnecessary death.  What hope is there?  Why NOT lapse into drug abuse, lethargy, alcoholism, and chronic irresponsibility?  Yes, I know that there people who rise above all this.  But what merit can there be in a system which must be endured to be transcended?  Why not make success the most common, most obvious, most available option?

Economics is a complex subject, and one filled with lunatics.  But everything we need to know, we know.  Free markets, the protection of property rights, and sound currency build generalized wealth.  The more these things exist and are protected, the better for all but the authoritarians.

We are all of course by now familiar with the Leninistic methods that left wing radicals are using to suppress free speech, which is to say, any speech they disagree with, and which competes with their monopolistic control of many public dialogues.

It is seemingly assumed by some for-profit entities, like Target, and now the PGA, that kowtowing to these radical agitators is somehow good business.  What I would submit is that an  at least equal and likely larger number of people are seeing Political Correctness for what it is–nascent and very ugly Fascism–and voting for the OTHER side.  This is the whole reason people love Donald Trump.  He sees no need to even pretend to play that game, unlike pretty much everyone else, and certainly the last two “moderate and thus electable” Republican Presidential candidates.

It seems obvious to me that the stakes are high for any business wanting to make political statements.  The potential negatives–like the Target boycott I personally continue to uphold (I bought a watch and a food scale from Walmart today, despite the fact that the Target is much closer)–are at least equal to any possible positives, like attracting new customers.

Particularly for mass market companies, the people who most need your services are likely already there, because your business fundamentals are solid. You can add a few with ad campaigns, lose a few with poor customer service, or more aggressive competitors, but making political statements is most likely to polarize people.  It may make some people more loyal, but cause you to lose entirely others.

Thus, I would submit that the second type of evolving political correctness is oriented around applauding and supporting those who consciously and consistently work to subvert the first.  That is a constituency which is growing, and it needs to be reckoned with by everyone.  We call it political incorrectness, but why cede them the word?  Why cede these people anything?  I don’t grant them liberal, compassion, or justice.  Why correct?

If one could “find” oneself, what then?  There you are.  No doubt about it.  Right there.

It seems to me what one can do is enter into a light, a dance, a movement, and call it home, knowing that its walls and floors are prone to disappearing, and everything known evolving into something else, somehow.

But if you are the opposite of a shadow, this is your natural condition.

It is possible to describe the tango, but can one truly capture the feeling of dancing, what dancing is?  It is that.  One can say, properly, no more.

1. It occurs to me that the root of self sabotage is that by creating problems in the outer world, you avoid the peace and calm which cause the problems in your inner world from appearing in your consciousness and demanding resolution.

I don’t think I have said this in quite this way before.

2. It occurs to me that worry, fear and anger are inimical to empathy.  It is easy enough to feel what someone else is feeling if it happens to coincide with what we are feeling, but the task is to see what’s there, not to resonate solely with like-minded people.  This teaches nothing.  You learn nothing.

And if you are worried about anything, your emotional vision is clouded.  If you fear, if you are angry, likewise.  If you are sad.

The best place from which to see honestly?  Happiness, if you are capable of also touching everything else.

is a political system in which the government can legally require public obedience to bad ideas and worse people.

Socialism always leads to authoritarianism.  Let me expand on this.  We live in an age where it is hard to know what is worth doing.  Our historical culture and its ideals have been attacked effectively, and confusion fomented.  This makes maturing harder, which is to say it makes true psychological individuation harder.  This leads to a default condition of physically adult humans who feel and act as children.  They do not want to take responsibility for their lives.

Socialists, for their part, are happy to assume the codependent and utterly unhealthy role of parents.  They promise to provide for their “children” in exchange for their obedience.  Since they start out kind and decent, this deal is easily made.  Has been made in Europe.  Was made in Venezuela.

But if you allow others to do for you, to do for you what you could and should have done for yourself, you become both weak, and dependent.  You grow quickly to NEED the parents.

Any rudimentary study of history will show that over some time period power aggregated WILL be abused.  That is the whole point of our Constitution: to prevent a concentration of power.  Once you let the government provide your health care, your education, and God forbid your very job, they have you by the short hairs, don’t they?  If you decide you don’t like them, well fuck you, you stupid son of a bitch.  It’s too fucking late now.

Every Fascist of the 20th century promised to make the trains run on time and to be more efficient that a legislative system.  They fixed some things, but overall made the people their thralls.

Fascism is a socialism which focuses on war, and war emblems, and national identity, while protecting relative economic liberty for a handful of large corporations run by people who cooperate with the government.  It is opposed to truly free markets, since the government reserves the right to interfere at will and for any reason in all economic activity, and property rights do not exist except at the sufferance of the political class.

Communism is a socialism which takes the bad ideas and bad people to the next level by not only rejecting property rights, but rejecting the right to property outright, and rejecting the idea of a private domain.

When Obama shook the hand of and sort of bowed to the Vietnamese dictator–his name doesn’t matter, since his kind are a dime a dozen, but let’s call him Ho, Jr.–what I think people need to grasp is that in all likelihood he is the sort of hypersensitive kid you knew in high school who was upset about everything, always resenting someone, who didn’t know how to tell a joke, and who didn’t like people or fun.  If you take that person, that nerd, that loser, and put them in charge of a country, and give them the power of life and death, the right to torture and imprison anyone at will, you have a snapshot of what Communism is.

It is a sickening creed, palatable only to disgusting people.  It’s sheer ugliness outweighs the worse abuses of Capitalism so much as to rank them by comparison no crimes at all.

Me personally I can’t get the image out of my mind of the millions of people who were locked in tiny boxes for long periods of time for crimes as small as reporting government corruption.  This is what these foolish children need to see, who think themselves clever for having learned to repeat Communist propaganda.

This whole world is insane.  Truth is rare, and hard to find.  I grew up in a home where lies were the stuff of the day, the currency of mutual coexistence, and I will grant that comforting delusions are hard to give up.  But there is no other good way to life.  A life of lies is a half life: no, it is no life at all.  It is a death.

Imagine a nation of such living dead, as imagined in Wrinkle in Time, or the Ministry under Voldemort, or the rule of Sauron.  Such are the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the North Koreans.  Horror on horror, called truth, called salvation, called honor, called anything but what it is.

Here is a good article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262988/obama-and-ho-chi-minh-embracing-evil-daniel-greenfield

Obama’s trip to Vietnam is not a mere strategic journey, but yet another opportunity for him to remind us that the left has not repented or recanted of its solidarity and support of Communist terror, whether in Cuba, Vietnam, or anywhere else.  It still sees every Communist dictator as a role model worth emulating, and every Communist mass grave as the price that must be paid for a better world.

This is batshit insane.  There is no moral excuse for it, and grotesque psychopathology can be the only explanation.  Our worst people embrace this doctrine, and produce the predictable results. 

It seems to me what the Left sees in the Right–what it fears–is precisely what it fears in itself, not what is actually there.

I have been told regularly–many times daily, or as often as I dipped my foot in these polluted streams–that I am a racist, a hater, a bigot, an apologist for rich, an apologist for the power elite, a dupe, a sap, a homophobe, an Islamophobe, a transphobe, a light bulb.  Maybe not that last one. Those shed light.

These are projections, in a clearly, purely, and unambiguously psychodynamic sense.  They see in others what they fear in themselves.  How do they deal with these?  They say that conservatives see in others what they fear in themselves.

Well, how many of us have you attempted to talk to in a rational, civil, human way?  My experience is that if they have attempted to interact with any conservatives, it was to yell, cajole, insult, and denigrate them.  To understate things, this is not a path well suited to building mutual understanding.

They don’t want understanding.  As I have said, true understanding would deprive them of their enemies, and thus their raison d’etre.  They fear this latent existential crisis, and this drives them deeper into the expression of outwardly directed fear and hate.

And I will add that it puzzles me how many psychotherapists fail to see this.  I guess they swim in such small and shallow waters that they forget the horizon exists, and that people live there too.

More likely: in developing the habit of expressing compassion, which people like, and in avoiding judging–which people dislike–they have forgotten that the spiritual path consists not only in being nice, but also in being right.  There are countless congenial lies, comforting to our souls, easily told among like-minded people, which work to make life worse for most if not all.

An obvious example would be the lie that the Islamic people–many of whom are not refugees at all, but opportunists where they are not outright agitators and aspiring terrorists–who are flooding into Europe will not work over the next 30 years to devolve all the humane institutions they have developed at great cost and over time, into relics of a primitive past.  The same people who agitate for the rights of women or gays will in the next moment agitate for the rights of “refugees”.  This is stupid.  And this stupidity, again, is the result of unprocessed emotions, of unfinished psychological work.

It hit me today that the deal with Trump’s hair, other than that it makes him very distinctive, is that it causes people to underestimate him.  In any conflict or competitive situation, at issue is not how competent you appear, but how competent you ARE.  He won the Republican nomination, in spite of the opposition of virtually every media figure with a pen and pulpit.  People look at him, at his hair, and think he’s easily dismissed.  He knows this.  He counts on it.

And I will add too that as a “reality star”–and to be clear he has had a talent for being in the news since the 1980’s, but didn’t have his own show–his job was to find and reward the most competent teams who were given specific tasks with measurable outcomes.  His job, was to identify talent, and get rid of dead weight.

Is that not what we need?

He may disappoint me.  No one can say they truly know what he will do, not least because I don’t think HE knows exactly what he will do.  But he will make decisions, quite likely large ones, and very likely ones which will benefit our country for a generation.  Making our national pension and socialized medicine systems–Social Security and Medicare/medicaid–sane is certainly possible.  Moving past Obamacare is certainly possible.  Stopping illegal immigration is likely.  At a rock bottom minimum, he will tell ICE to do their jobs, when Obama is telling them now, and Hillary will tell them then, not to do anything but look the other way, and release whoever stumbles over their feet.

And with regard to trade, at issue is not that we need to enact huge trade tariff’s.  The economics are clear that free trade on balance helps everyone.  At issue is that China and most of Asia put tariffs and restrictions on our products, which makes it harder to sell there.  We don’t want to tariff their stuff so much as stop them from preventing our entry into those markets.  That is my understanding.

But negotiating will require some gamesmanship.  At this point, China needs us more than we need her.  There is no reason to push things all the way to the brink, but they have been screwing us for a very long time, and they know it.

do you spend more time thinking about what you enjoy, or fearing what you don’t want? Do you spend more time in the pursuit of worthy pleasures–learning, mastery, communion with others–or running from what you fear, hiding from pain?

The universe is an open place. You can do as you please.

How’s this for a motto: “Do what thou wilt, but know thyself”?

Anton Lavey/Socrates double team.