Author: White Whale

I read this morning that a massive war in the eastern Mediteranean around 1200 B.C. may have ended several empires. My thought is that if it involves mutually destructive reckless behavior, it probably happened. That sort of thing is more or less what CONSTITUTES history.

Here is what popped in my head: Capitalism, so called, is the best system ever devised by the mind of man for directing aggressive energies in creative, productive, and PEACEFUL directions. Can and should we criticize the IMF for allowing the figurative rape of nations? Yes. It was created by Communists and does little but help keep the fiction alive that our banking system is just and acceptable, when it is plainly neither.

But the historical alternative is not peace and justice. Capitalism, so called, is not an historically aberrant intrusion into an unbroken history of peaceful and cooperative coexistence.  It is s vastly less bad alternative to breaking down people’s doors and taking what they have built by force. On the one side of it we have conquest and rapine as universal facts. On the other, we have Socialism as a state sponsored version of the same theft and rapine. It simply adds hypocrisy and self deception to the list of crimes.

I would quibble with many things Ayn Rand said, but her defense of Capitalism as a uniquely advantageous form of peaceful and productive coexistence, without the diminution of life energy, is right on the money.

Watch this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB1E0oAAc-w

I find it amusing.  Most people do, including I suspect many black people.  It’s just funny.

Blazing Saddles came out in 1974.  In that period, 42 years ago, it was quite reasonable for most people to assume that the fortunes of black people in this country were on the rise.  Mel Brooks was saying, in his frequent use of the N- word “look, I can’t stop ignorant people from saying that, but between you and me we know they are stupid and ignorant and ridiculous.  Me, as a Jew, I know a little something about bigotry.”

Nobody who was an actual racist would find that movie funny.  EVEN THEN most white people knew genuine racism was reactionary, ridiculous, unnecessary, unfair, and wrong.  Not all, of course.  From what I hear racism in most big cities, particularly Union cities like Chicago and New York, is still alive and well. 

But most people in this country are happy to give everyone a chance. They were then, and are now.

But 42 years, and all that has changed is that movie could not be made today.  It would be attended by protests, with fury, with outrage.  And for what?  That movie did not cost anyone their life, and has generated millions of laughs.

What has happened–ALL that has happened–is that fascist speech police have gradually made it more and more difficult to talk about the lack of black thriving, to talk about the real problems besetting black communities. 

If people had been allowed to sort out their differences gradually, in person, at their own pace, the pervasive decency of the American people over time would have eradicated the functional lines between blacks and whites.  We would not have black ghettos.  Most of them would be middle class, would value education, and would not feel helpless and angry.

What intercepted and prevented this natural organic growth was the Democrats, who developed a codependent, enabling relationship with the black community, by promising them the moon and the stars, by making promises they knew they could never keep, and which would have been damaging even if they could keep them, because you never help anyone permanently by doing for them what they can and should be doing for themselves (as William Boettker put it around 100 years ago).

So today, the outrage when one sees that bigoted old woman say “Up yours, Nigger” can be seen for what it is: useless. It helps no one.  No black child missing his father gets to see him more.  No jobs are created for people who barely graduated high school.  No crime is prevented.  It is all for show.

Mel Brooks was and is a genuine humanitarian, who works to improve the world through comedy.  None of the PC fascists are anything but unreflective and unhelpful haters.

http://nation.foxnews.com/2016/05/13/shock-poll-trump-leads-hillary-among-hispanic-voters

As I have said repeatedly, Cesar Chavez hated illegal aliens. 

The perceptual flaw of all bigots–and I have in mind here the habitually aggrieved, and not Chavez, who I think we can all agree did not hate Mexicans–is that they think all people of any given group think alike, and that they are homogeneous: functionally, that they are fucking stupid, and that only through the intervention of “educated” leftists can their own actual self interest be made plain to them; or in traditional bigotry, that they deserve to be treated in the same way, regardless of personal difference.  In terms of the willed ignorance implied in both cases, they are functionally identical.

But think about it like a human being.  You may need to temporarily slough off some of your counter-intelligent indoctrination.  If you are standing in a line, and you watch somebody walk to the front and cut in, what is your emotional reaction?  If you are on the highway, and it merges, and one of those fucking Mercedes–it always seems to be a higher end car, with some rich prick in it–comes along and merges at the last second, again cutting in line.

It pisses you off, doesn’t it?

Pretty much everybody that is here legally can expect over some time frame to get the rest of their family here.  That tends to be how our system works.  But if we legalize millions of people who have simply slipped across the border, the whole line system goes to hell in a handbag.  It gets screwed up.  Who knows how long, now, it will take to get your grandfather or niece over here legally?  Do you want to trust them to coyotes, who may get them killed or arrested?

Donald Trump is not saying, and has never said “No Mexicans”.  All he has said is wait your turn, and if you have jumped in line, you go to the back, like any normal person would expect. It is fair.

But “fair”, of course, is not a word Leftists use except as a club, one invariably wielded with the intent to terminate with extreme hypocrisy.

I would add that the most racist thing I can say honestly is that it continues to amaze me that blacks are too fucking stupid to figure out, even now, the game being played on them.

is that one day they will be unable to continue the delusion that those they hate are other than ordinary human beings, who feel ordinary emotions, who reach reasonable conclusions based on the data they are given.  They fear that they will be forced to finally admit we are not monsters, we are not demons, we are not bigots, racists, haters, misogynists, and liars.  We are NONE of the things they claim we are, and THEY are the ones practicing the bigotry.

This would be a double loss.  First, they would lose their friend, hate, and their very simple, very clear, very black and white world will dissolve into a million unfamiliar colors.  Second, they will lose their self image as righteous, as superhuman fighters for all that is good in this world.  They will fall into the profoundly de-energizing state of having to admit they are like everyone else, that they make mistakes, that they use their weaknesses to spur them into emotional crusades that distract them without healing or even strengthening them.  They will be forced to admit they are JUST LIKE US.

And they are, of course.  They are just much more fucked up, much angrier, and much farther into self delusion than most people are willing to go absent gross individual psychopathology.  Social psychopathology can manifest in many people, and remain relatively hidden.  That is what we have today, and it is fed, of course, by many individual psychopaths, and the magical boxes in all homes.

H.L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as–you with me, man, say with me like we are at a Garth Brooks concert: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The same might be said of Social Justice Warriors (I need to think of a better term, but that for another day), who are both themselves without humor and that levity which makes life among people bearable, but also extremely concerned that everyone everywhere be on guard continuously, lest they fall short of the glory of Marx, who offers no redemption at all.

The feeling is one of continuous strain, of effort simply at existing.  There is no relaxation: only eternal vigilance.

And what is interesting about all this, one thing any way, is that by and large both the crimes and the victims are abstract.  If I call a gay man a “fag”–if I’m not friends with him and we both think it is funny–then something has happened between us which might be considered rude, which might warrant an apology, and/or a permanent sense on his part that I am an asshole, of the sort you don’t fuck.

But if I speak of “fags” in a group of heterosexuals, no one there can be considered the recipient of the insult.  No one there has a legitimate claim to grievance.  But this is precisely what most PC consists in: not an effort to improve manners, but to subject speech to rigid codes.  The crime is not that I have offended someone, nor even that I COULD have offended someone. The crime is WrongSpeak.  If Orwell didn’t coin that term–and I don’t think he did–then I just did.  Anti-Free Speech Nazis–I do like that better than SJW, although development will continue–feel free to appropriate it with your bullhorns, bullwhips, jackbooks, and torches.

Thus the crimes involved have all the concreteness, all the reality, of the sins of the Bible, of unbelief in a God I have never seen or spoken to.  The people punishing the crimes are quite real, but the crimes themselves rarely are.

And in point of fact, true reconciliation, which is what genuine Liberals want, is achieved person to person, not across a moat of reflective hate, reactive anger and defensiveness, and shouting.  Above all shouting.

Look at yourself.  Feel your body.  Is there a place in you which can say “Fuck it, just let people do whatever they want to do.”?  If not, you are likely what you hate, whatever that may be.

I have been trying to spend more quiet time than even I normally do.  For a long time, of course, I would end my day at a bar, then the end of my end was getting drunk at home.  I don’t do that any more.

And I watch/feel my body, and can see warning lights blinking, particularly in my gut area.

And it occurred to me yesterday that persistent thoughts like “I have to”, or “I’m worried about X”, or anything that regularly intrudes, STARTS as a sensation in your body.  I feel the connection.

And it occurs to me that without rejecting the importance and primacy of reason as a means of mediating difference, we must also embrace the body, and its exultations and rages and needs, if we are to live happily, both as individuals and as social creatures.  This of course is an old dichotomy, between “reason” and Dionysius, to hearken back to Nietzche.

And I feel that the roots of the authoritarian temperament are found in the gut, too.  It is found in the sense that the world is dangerous, and that it needs to be placed in a cage.  The authoritarian seeks their own security, first and foremost, even if, of course, they often die violently.

But this sense is preverbal.  It is largely unconscious.  But it exists as a quality of holding, of tension, in identifiable places science will one day track down and isolate.

For my own purposes, I follow the Kum Nye schema, which says that that holding is both nervous system energy, but also subtle energy.

One other thing I will mention: if the primal sense of the sacred was something uncontrolled, something dangerous, something both fearful and alluring, then that role is played by televisions today, which show us scenes of carnage, fill us with rage and fear, give us an unlimited number of “car accidents”–figuratively and occasionally literally–from which we can neither tear our eyes, nor forgive ourselves for the interest.

The TV is a literally, clinically, sacred object, seen from this perspective, which is why it occupies the place of honor in most homes, where one might otherwise put a shrine.

To be clear, I feel spirituality BEGINS with a deep, deep relaxation.  I feel all goodness begins with deep, deep relaxation.  You BEGIN with peace.  You do not end there.  But reaching the beginning, of course, is a psychological, not a spiritual matter.

 I was thinking about this the other day: why does Mexico have a wall with Guatamala, and why does it prosecute illegals so severely?  Then it hit me: they want a monopoly on illegal access to America.  And I had to ponder: why are the Mexican Presidents so eager for us to allow their people to leave?

Why did Vicente Fox give Donald Trump the finger (is this what class looks like MSNBC)?

Think about this: the people who run Mexico are mad at us for not allowing their people to abandon their country in sufficient numbers.  Practically, of course, they send money back which helps the Mexican economy, which is why they need this, but how fucking stupid do you have to be to conflate patriotism with supporting people leaving your stinking pile of shit country for greener pastures you couldn’t figure out how to bring into being?

If Donald Trump wins–when he wins–would I take it as a patriotic affront if Canada refused to take all the people leaving?  Why would I give a shit?  I have a country already.  The people leaving have nothing to do with me, other than that I will be glad to see many of them leave.

Everywhere you look, on nearly every topic, it is infused with stupidity, short-sightedness, incapacity of thought, emotional infantilism, rampant ego, outright lies, unwarranted assumptions, etc.

The saner I get, the weirder the world looks.

I read that Brad Thor and PJ O’Rourke came out against Trump today.  I will likely address their points in depth at some point, but for now I wanted to frame this simply: in what respect can anyone argue that Hillary, if elected, will not simply continue the bulk of Obama’s policies?  She was his Secretary of State.  She supported Obamacare.  Her foreign policy WAS the Obama foreign policy for a time.  There is no reason to think she will not continue to abuse executive privilege, and her daughter has SAID that working for gun confiscation via the Supreme Court is one of her goals.

Where would the daylight between them be?  She is even using identity politics to get elected.

Conversely, can anyone SERIOUSLY claim that they expect Donald Trump do follow Barack Obama’s footsteps?  He has already signaled a new peace through strength and not fucking with other countries unless we have to policy.  He wants to rationalize taxes.  He wants to deal in some fashion with the Mexican invasion.  He wants better trade deals (not protectionism, but at least some sense that American interests qua American interests should play a role, and that we can do better).

How fucking stupid do you have to be to support Hillary relative to Trump?  We hear he is a “loose cannon”.  Think this through: who among the candidates has sat through more adversarial negotiations?  Trump has been in conflict with people almost as a rule for most of his life.  He is not a loose cannon at all.  He is a savvy negotiator who provides as few details as possible, acts like he is out of control, but who at the end of the day has a plan, and NEVER actually flies off the handle.  HILLARY, on the other hand, DOES seem to lose her temper often.

Do you want someone who has sat at hundreds of negotiating tables, or someone who couldn’t make it out of the first round in a local charity poker tournament?

I am puzzled at the thoughts and actions of people I thought had intelligence.

Here’s one: https://youtu.be/GjYLWadz5Ychttps://youtu.be/GjYLWadz5Yc

It occurs to me that with the decline of principle as an aspect of human discourse, with the decline of the inner directed individual, in favor of that tribal and animalistic spirit that gets called Other Directedness, that the importance of outer form increases correspondingly.

You are in the tribe, if you observe the ritual and protocol.  The ritual and protocol with regard to Political Correctness is that you say and do what you are told to say and do, and never the contrary.

Thus someone who is acting out a Politically Correct scene which has been choreographed for them, might seem to be able to enter into a discussion with someone acting out of principles arising from underneath his feet, but this is an illusion.  There is never any connection.  There is never any possibility of connection.  The intellectually deviant PC acolyte has nothing to say, and the atavistic man, activating 19th century principles–an anachronism in the modern world–cannot be heard.  His words exist at a frequency far beyond that of the hearing of the PC puppet.

I feel like I am walking along, and periodically attacked by birds, with considerable fury, but no sense, no resting place, no purpose, other than attack.  It is like a force in the air, inhuman–or to be more specific: anti-Humanistic, and congenitally opposed to Life itself.