Author: White Whale

It occurs to me that true transgenderism–the belief that you are an X trapped in a Y body, or a Y trapped in an X body (note what I did there)–is a form of advanced and highly pathological self loathing.  You don’t loathe yourself because you cross dress, or want to be the opposite gender: you loathe who you ARE, at the core of being, at the very root of your sense of self.  Nothing can be more primal than gender.  It is the most basic analogue distinction, even more important than race or religion.  And you can’t be anything else.  Every cell in your body is marked.

And even if this could be changed, it is the LOATHING which is pathological, not the state of feeling like a gender other than you are.  Anorexics hate themselves for being too big.  Obsessive bodybuilders hate themselves for being too small.  And Transgenders hate themselves for having been born who they were.  It is all of a piece; all one cloth. All one problem: deep unhappiness completely unrelated to the symptomatic presentation.

Nearly always–and I can at present think of no exceptions–the task is to deal with the root, not the flower.  That is merely what we see.  There is no virtue in being stupid.  None I have ever found.  And to the extent lying supports stupidity, it too can never be virtuous.

I think a healthy process of life is going often from normal to altered states and back again.  We do it continually without realizing it.  For many, driving is an altered state. Doing the dishes, when you enjoy it.  Hobbies.  Watching sports.  Working with focus. Perhaps the need to pursue altered states with drugs and alcohol relates to an insufficient ability to access them in healthy ways, due to trauma, which causes an inability to be submerged in the moment.

I feel that compulsive thoughts are like a tendril from something alive, living under the water, which produces a form when it breaks the surface, when it passes from the realm of feeling and sensation to our conscious awareness.  What is interesting is to live with thoughts before they are thoughts, to feel them, touch them, get to know them.

You can look at them and say “this will be a thought of worry”.  “This will be a thought of disgust and fear”.  “This will be a happy thought”.  And of course, I am thinking here.  Thoughts can in turn be used to look into the water.  This, too, is normal.

We are sensate beings, which means who we are is what we feel.  The effort to live solely in the mind is an effort to distance ones true self from this truth.

I am thinking aloud.  Here is an interesting way to choose to alter your consciousness: get a lacrosse ball, and a foam roller, and a timer. I like Gymboss.  Set the timer to 3:03 minutes, and follow this routine.  Put on some music which is pleasant for you.

Roll your traps–the tension muscles, which everyone instinctively massages first–with the ball by putting it on the space between your neck and shoulders and leaning against a wall, about the level of your chest.  Roll one side for 3 minutes.  Move it around, forward and back, side to side.  Lean in hard, at times, then move our head gently to the left and right.  You will feel a stretch, in all likelihood (although of course I am very tight since my traps are huge).  Do the other side.

Spend another 3 minutes massaging both of your shoulders with the ball, without forgetting the front.

Spend 3 minutes massaging your chest, again with the ball.

Roll your lats on the foam roller, by laying on it with your lats on the surface, and slowly moving forward and back, and side to side.

Lie on the roller, and massage your upper and lower back.  If you are tight or have a high pain tolerance, put the ball on first one side of your spine, work down, then the other.

Roll your hip flexors on the roller, one at a time.  Roll your hips and the top of your butt.  Roll the sides of your legs.  This usually hurts.

Sit on the lacrosse ball, and find areas of restricted movement and tension in your ass muscles.  Put it under your hamstrings at the top and root around.

Stand on the lacrosse ball and massage your feet.

For tight muscles, find a stretch and hold it three minutes.  Take your range of motion to where it is restricted, and focus on feeling those muscles.  Slowly move back and forth at the range where is restricted.  No pain, but opening, asking, inviting, persistently.

What will likely happen if you do this–and I don’t expect anyone to, but who knows?–is that you will feel emotions coming up, particularly when you find a tender spot.  Moments from the past will pop instantaneously into your awareness.  Go into those feelings too.

This is an interesting process.  I do it most days.

I was contemplating, as I do too often, all the ugliness in the world, and thought that Plato’s cave is really an escape, in a sense.  It gave him the hope that there is a world without ugliness.  The faith, I probably should say.

If there is no world without ugliness, one must either learn to accept ugliness, or go mad. And to be clear, failing to see the world as it is is a form of madness.  In my own view, and only slightly oversimplifying the issue, most of what passes for higher wisdom in our universities consists in a combination of the two.  They no longer have any room anywhere for any other world.

This is a pity.  It remains open to them, and the best empirical explanations we have of who we are and how we got here, and what we are supposed to do can be grounded in learnings which are accessible to all, but pursued by few.

These questions really are too important to attempt to answer from a position of sloppiness, unwarranted assumption, arrogance, and emotional need.  Failure, obviously, is inevitable.  Certainly, it has been.

But this need not continue.  No evil must proceed indefinitely.

Part of this comes from watching the disappointingly disjointed movie “Children of Men”.  I certainly got the sense when the crowd walked by shouting Allahu Akbar that it might have gotten some aspects of the future of Britain and Europe correct.

But I could not help thinking of all the poets and writers who killed themselves thinking the future was hopeless.  Games are played to the end, because the ending is sometimes a surprise.  I am making my own peace with my death at some point.  We may as well.  It comes whether we want it or not.

But for the time being,  life is interesting.  There is much to see and learn.

I had a feeling, too, watching this movie which I have never had before.  I felt that even though the movie was gloomy and oppressive–and inaccurate in that the surveillance state in 2027 will be perfect–that it was the product of human minds, human creativity.  That even the worst, most pessimistic movies still represent the human spirit in some sense.  Perhaps they are using art to wrestle demons.  Whether they win or lose, this is an eminently human and thus beautiful act.

This will prove a helpful insight, I feel.

This is reasonable: http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/the-truth-warming-alarmists-dont-want-you-to-know-about-the-climate-models/

There are many, many flaws with this whole notion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, but one of the most obvious is that the hypotheses–the models–are treated as DATA.  That is a circle.  That is not how science works.

The only reason this whole farce has been able to be continued–admittedly at great cost and considerable effort–is because the time horizons in play prevent the immediate and incontrovertible empirical refutation of their models. They have been, and continue to be, wrong, but they keep telling us, decade after decade, that the final tweak is just around the corner.  There is no historical basis either to believer this now, or to trust them in the slightest at any point in the future, absent actual corroboration of their models.  They lie.  That’s what liars do.

Well, this conservative never thought I’d be quoting a rapper but Azealia Banks is one smart cookie. Even though she has tweeted insults about Donald Trump she now tweets that she will vote for him because Hillary “talks to black people as if we’re children or pets.” She also tweeted that, “Right, black folk having been voting democrat for the last 70 years and we don’t have s**t to show for it.” 

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, a black man, accused the Democratic Party of “bigotry” because their programs have “decimated the black family.” On a Fox News program he responded to a question about Hillary Clinton’s statement that a Trump presidency would put “more kids at risk of violence and bigotry.” “If black kids are at risk from anybody, it’s from other black kids in black-on-black crime. The bigotry that she’s talking about stems from her party that has decimated the black family. It has kids shackled — black kids shackled — to failing K-12 public schools in urban centers. And it’s where black men in these urban centers can’t find meaningful work.”

Why aren’t the leaders in the black community ranting about how the Obama Administration is spending millions to find summer jobs for refugees? Obama’s brought thousands of immigrants here who will take away the jobs from Americans of all colors. The racial hucksters have fomented race riots with lies like the ones in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore that destroyed black neighborhoods and plunged them into further residential despair. Facts were ignored by a complicit media that did whatever it could to continue the blatant false reports that made victims out of the unworthy.

When will the black community recognize that their biggest enemies are the ones who treat it like Ms. Banks asserts-like children and pets?

This November, it’s time for the Black community and the whole country to grow up.

I will add that I got the chance to listen last night to a short talk from a man I’ll call the Anti-Sharpton–the Anti-Jackson, if you prefer–named Christopher 2X.  He was wearing a t-shirt saying “We all we got”, which is a beautiful motto.  Whenever some young black kid gets killed, he is one of the first people who gets called.  He comforts the mothers and grandmothers–please note, this seems to be the reality–not with vapid soporifics and platitudes, but by saying “this will hurt the rest of your life, but if you help me work to try and prevent the next one you will be able to manage the pain, possibly.  I am here for you, whatever you need.” He offers, as he said, strength.

That is hard, ballsy work.  His goal is to teach young kids that there are better ways, alternatives to crime and violence.  The goal is not to give up your self, not to stop caring, not to stop having balls and principles, but to direct them more productively.

And I was sitting there wondering how much energy, how much drive it must take to confront the endemic hopelessness, sense of uselessness, that he faces every day.  He is clearly doing it the right way, but it is a hard way.  He tells young kids they matter, that they were born for a purpose, and he has found that if he can convince themselves of that, that they care more, do more, become more.

His message needs to be amplified.  Blacks have been told by self interested and self satisfied Democrats–the overwhelming majority of whom live in mansions and send their kids to private schools, like Obama, like Jesse Jackson and Jesse Jackson Jr.–that their way out is the voting booth.  This is a lie congenial to their ambitions, and apparently not insufferable to their absent or dormant consciences.

I live alone.  It is rare that I interact with people.  I am not incapable of social interaction–I’m actually quite good at it.  What I have difficulty with is trust and openness.  I probably should have talked with him, but I chose not to.  I am working my way back into the world, slowly.

Be that as it may, I am glad to see good people out there, doing tough work in the face of considerable resistance.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0516/prager052416.php3

This is worth the read.

I will add my two cents.

Each of us, in every moment, has a choice to try and improve the world, or to allow sloth and apathy to dominate us, to simply drift.

Often, improving the world involves improving ourselves.  We can be more contemplative.  Alternatively, we can be more active.  Always, what we do, though, flows from who we are and what we value.

When we improve the world, we put something into it.  It might be the energy to help a little old lady across the street.  It might be having done the inner work to be able to relate honestly to others, to understand them, to support them where they live, and to thereby help build happiness and trust where it was not present.  This is important work.

With regard to Trump the question is this: do I vote for someone who I dislike simply because he is less bad than the alternative, or do I privilege my VANITY over that choice, and pretend that I become better, or the world becomes better, when I refuse to make a decision in an important issue, simply because my vanity rejects the necessity of that choice?

Obviously, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice (thanks Neal Peart).

Do you help Killary get one step closer, or push her one step farther from the White House?  This should be a simple decision, and frankly I am disgusted at the intellectual incoherence, moral imbecility, and tacit admission of Leftist sympathies–or at least vulnerability to Leftist propaganda–which is exhibited by any person claiming to be conservative for whom this requires a more than 5 second deliberation.

You people believe nothing, if your vanity is more important than exercising what power you have for what good you can do.

Do what you can, with what you have, and do it now, as Teddy R. put it.  And if you refuse, you are a whiny little bitch.  That is how I see it.  And I don’t like whiny little bitches.  It saddens me to see that you are the people who claim to be on my team.  I don’t want you.

And perhaps this whole conservative thing has just been a phase, like cross dressing.  If you want to get back to the roots of your core indoctrination, have at it.  With tepid friends, who the fuck needs enemies?

Because of Donald Trump.  ONLY because of Donald Trump.

“I’ve talked to most of the women,” Goldberg stated. “You can’t talk to them all, life’s not long enough. But the women that became public reached out to me because of my involvement with the Lewinsky affair.”

I asked whether she found Clinton’s accusers and mistresses to be credible.
She replied:

To a woman, they were class acts. They were lovely women. They came from good backgrounds. They were ladies. These were not barflies that he picked up, although I’m sure there were plenty of those. These were lovely, lovely women.
You can tell when someone is lying to you, and especially about something really serious. And I believed every one of these women. Women don’t talk about something that intimate and make it up. There was nothing in it for then.  I mean, they weren’t selling books that would make them millions of dollars, or making movies, or going on lecture tours. They were telling you the truth.

Referring to Donald Trump’s willingness to discuss the issue of Bill’s accusers and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in silencing the women, Goldberg predicted, “This is going to be a highly sexed, with a lower case ‘s,’ highly sexed campaign.”

“Because as I say, Trump will say everything,” she added.

The other day I did the flurry of posts–shit, was it yesterday?–I meant to mention that the conscious cultivation of happiness is the last stage of personal growth, and can only happen once your psyche is relatively in one piece.  Otherwise, the darkness is always just outside your door.

I think of the Lemony Snickets movie, which begins happily enough, then cuts to the real story.  I think people who have unprocessed grief and terror are always waiting for the real movie to begin, the other shoe to drop.

It has often seemed to me that much of the New Age movement consists in the desire to say and do and live happy things, without admitting knowledge of the darkness without.  Yes, they give lip service to the “shadow”, but they overvalue niceness much too much to truly fool anyone.

And I will comment too that hypervigilance is only ONE possible outcome of trauma.  HypOvigilance–too little vigilance and too much trust–is the other possibility.  These are the broken people who stand up for nothing, trust everyone.  They are the doormats.  Yes, they get angry, but rarely appropriately, at the right people, at the right times, for the right reasons.

I think it is safe to say the Europeans are quite hypovigilant at the moment, as are a distressingly large number of Americans.  I wish life were easy, sometimes, but the fact is that it demands we stay awake.  That is the rule of the game.

Resistance breeds response.  The need for adaptation breeds selection.

In our current political climate, one in which dispassionate evaluation of important topics in public by high minded and serious people is made impossible by leftist propaganda, the only possible selection can be in the direction of survival of people, not ideas.  In an ideal world, one not suffused by angry nonsense, the best IDEAS would win out, consistently.  This is the premise behind free speech: it is more efficient, over and above the moral value we subscribe to it.

John McCain and Mitt Romney were “selected” as the “candidates who can win”.  Republican voters gave up on that idea in this election cycle, because, obviously, they were NOT candidates who can win.  They were saps, who failed to articulate clear goals, to stand firm on principle, and who may as well have been Democrats, such was their quite actual “moderation”.  What sane person would elect the architect of Romneycare to undo the damage of Obamacare?

No, the person selected has to be able to deal with a mean environment, continual manufactured controversy, and the sense on the part of many Americans that our dreams and ideals are being slowly strangled by virtually everyone, D and R alike.

Leftists created this environment.  They have no right to complain that the system is operating properly.

I just read about mirror neurons for the first time.  They seem to be a part of our social brain that fires in response to interactions with other beings, which of course evolutionarily would mainly be people, but today could be animals, cartoons, pictures or anything else we connect with.

Empathy is an emergent property of the proper functioning of these neurons.  We instinctively feel what the other person is feeling.  Logically, there can be different sorts of relations.  One person can be feeling something strongly and the other person mainly reacting to it. There can be a loop, in which Feeling 1 generates Feeling 2, which is reacted to by generating Feeling 3, or a stronger 1, etc.

What narcissists would seem to react to is others mirroring them.  What interests them is them.

The mother looking at the baby is a paradigmatic image.  We assume that mothers mother, but why?  Many mothers, particularly young mothers, bring an enormous range of emotional problems to the table.  If they are emotionally needy, the neediness of the child will trigger them in unpredictable ways.  Babies being babies might anger them, or provoke sadness, over and above, all the naturally irritating things like crying, pooping, and needing to be fed regularly.

And I wonder specifically at the relation where a mother is looking in her childs eyes wanting to see herself, who rewards herself when she sees it, and ignores everything else.

And I wonder what connection will eventually be found between the operation of the mirror neurons and narcissism.  I need to learn more before I speculate further, but it is an interesting question.

That we are in some respects machines I do not question.  I simply do not share the belief that that is a complete, fully accurate, or even reasonable–based on the totality of evidence, much of which never makes it into university labs and classrooms–conclusion.

I see no reason to discard brain science or evolutionary theory, even if I think some of the underlying assumptions are clearly faulty.