Author: White Whale

We express our true moral beliefs not just through what we say and do, but in what we pass over in silence.  It is one thing to secretly abhor adultery, but not say anything to an adulterous friend, but another entirely to ignore massive horrors, such as those inflicted on the Dalits in India.  If there is a widespread campus campaign to alleviate these tortures, I have not seen it.  They seem preoccupied with the “horrors” of drunk sex without a contract, and minor social faux pas’s, the extent of which they seemingly seek to extend daily.

Morality, per se, is not taught in colleges.  Moral reasoning is not taught.  Anger is taught.  That is all.

It is not necessary to share all of your beliefs with everyone.  That is annoying, and likely counter productive.  But it is necessary, to be a good person, to HAVE beliefs.

It is right and proper for someone, after engaging in thoughtless wrong-doing for a long time, to do some soul searching, to question one’s conscience, to wonder about right and wrong.  But no one who permanently renounces the duty of moral choice can be said to be benefiting the world, and given that the world is in constant change, and entropy the tendency of all things, when unopposed, such people are actually contributing the downfall of everything good.

The Western world, after committing abuses of colonialism and war which were unexceptional by global historical standards, has somehow fallen into a miasma of extended self reproach, which helps no one.  It hurts.  It is hurting, and will continue to hurt, until everything genuinely good about our system has been ended by inferior cultural orders.

Otherwise decent people, who drink coffee, and like to go out to eat, and enjoy vacations skiing or at the beach, are contributing to our decline through the myopic focus on our small sins, while ignoring the massive ones occurring around the world, and which have occurred throughout history.

Wake up. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/sunday-review/are-western-values-losing-their-sway.html?_r=0

I read this, and wondered when or if he was going to render an opinion.  He never did.  He merely surveyed the landscape.

Here are some basic questions: Is slavery wrong?  We argue it is, we make movie after movie after movie showing how evil white America was for countenancing it, but we are unable to denounce it in Muslim and African nations.  Western Leftists are unable to denounce it in Communist nations, instead inventing a new word “chattel slavery” to differentiate the kind they are prepared to overlook from the kind they supposedly care about.

If slavery is not always wrong, then it is sometimes acceptable.  How and when, then, is it acceptable?  Practically, when denouncing it means renouncing Soviet era propaganda intended to undermine Western beliefs in their own Liberal system.  Practically, when it means turning the rejection of slavery into an absolute value. Practically, when it means acting and speaking in a morally coherent and defensibly consistent way.

Is beating and raping women wrong?  Is fucking 9 year old girls?  Not trying to give anybody trouble, but these things clearly happen, and they are clearly condoned in some cultures.  In other cultures, drunken consensual sex equates to rape, and we are told rape is wrong.  It is wrong here, but I remain unclear what the Left feels about the rape of boys and girls and infidel women by Muslims.  Is rape wrong in China when it is done by high Party officials and the police refuse to investigate, much less punish it?  This, too, happens.  It happens in Cuba and North Korea, guaranteed.

Here is the problem we have: nobody frames these questions with this degree of clarity.  They use weasel word, big words, ambiguous words, ultimately, meaningless words, useless words.

The task of improving human life is a practical one.  The task of spreading democracy is not that of spreading a system of government, but rather spreading Enlightened, better, values, and gradually building a more genuinely moral world, one which is ABLE to embrace and use democracy.  You cannot impose democracy on morally and intellectually inferior people, and for our part we cannot protect our democracy as moral and intellectual cretins.

But academics, particularly, need to ask themselves what they believe.  Do they REALLY oppose slavery?  Do they REALLY support the right of women to be equal in their status to men?  Do they REALLY support the right of children–both male and female–not to be raped?

If you support it through silence in some cases, and condemn it only when convenient, the proper word for that is unprincipled coward.  Ah, but you can dispute whether or not being brave is a universal value, too, no?  Yes, you can.  And I can call you a fucking pussy.  You and I live in different worlds.  Mine has right and wrong and the possibility of useful moral judgement.  Yours is that of a leaf blowing in the wind, if the leaf was also filled with self contempt, unexpressable and unquenchable anger, and an absolutely vapid and unstable sense of self, purpose, and place.

Do we really believe that Liberal values are absolute?  Do we think free speech, and the freedom of conscience should be universal?  Most of our professors who call themselves Liberals do not believe this.  They want a coercive power to tell all of us what to do.

Freedom has been such a thirst for most of humanity for most of history.  We have it, and a great many of us do not value it.  We do not know what is worth, because we have not known anything else.

Me, I have experienced totalitarianism.  It is a tonic for the weak and the dead, but poison to anyone with a heart, with dreams, and with a conscience.

We see the claim made continually, implicitly and explicitly, that the failure to thrive of the majority of blacks in this country must relate to factors external to their own choices.  Specifically, “racism” is blamed, which in turn amounts to the claim that white people to this very day have the absolute power to make or break all blacks in this country by our acceptance or rejection. If we accept them en masse, the argument goes, they will thrive, and the fact that they haven’t means we must not have accepted them sufficiently, that somehow this pernicious bugaboo “racism” must still be with us, even if we cannot find examples of it which would even remotely compare with, say, the racism of a Woodrow Wilson or FDR.

This is bullshit. If I were to take an Ideal Type of the typical black kid, I would find he or she was raised by a single mother who existed in large part on public assistance, who only got a high school education, if that, and whose father was largely if not entirely absent during the entirety of their childhood.  I would find that they were exposed often on the street to danger and violence, and that fear was their constant companion throughout their youth and adolescence.  I would find that they listen to loud, angry, violent music which extols the virtues of power and the ability to command sex. I would find that they more educated they seem or seek to become, the more contempt they feel directed at them by people barely able to speak the English language.

I would find, in short, a system virtually scientifically calculated to breed failure.  This is not racism.  Racism is what people outside the system think.  No, this is social incompetence, ineptitude.  This is a system whose failings are obvious to anyone with eyes to see, and which needs to be labeled such.

Until running away from your children is held in contempt–or failing to take precautions not to get pregnant, either through birth control or abstinence–blacks will suffer.

Until education is held in high esteem, blacks will suffer.

Until they get away from that infernal music, whose frequencies and content corrupt both the minds and bodies of those listening to it, blacks will suffer.

Would Einstein have listened to hip-hop while contemplating the mysteries of the universe?  How could he?   How is any higher thought possible when one is confined in the bass and base frequencies?  Look at this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16201210 

What bass sounds do is increase a sense of power and aggression, while diminishing the capacity for abstract reasoning.  To state the obvious, you need abstract reasoning in this society to get ahead.

To return to the point of this post, what I would assert based on data is that black kids who grow up in two parent households do as well as white kids, on balance.  Certainly, starting in the ghetto is not ideal, but the only people who stay there are those without a plan to get out.

Likewise, white kids raised in single parent homes fare as poorly as black kids do, on balance.  They are at higher risk for everything.

Being raised in a single parent home is inferior to being raised in a two parent home.  Thus, if I am to be accused of any -ism, let it be Parent-ism.  Race is an excuse, not an important factor.  Only those who want it to be make it so.  If a black kid isn’t getting the job, it’s because he comes slouching in with baggy pants unable to speak intelligible English.  The person who does not hire is likely making the right decision, because that kid was only going to do half the work that the black kid who came in dressed nicely using proper English does.

Is there any hope that common sense and common decency will ever return?  I wonder.  Nobody is being helped by the relentless race baiting, certainly not blacks.  They are hurt by it, because it confuses them as to the nature of their duty, which is to take care of themselves, and their families.

I lived in an affective cage as a child, where literally nothing I did was right.  If I misbehaved I was punished, and if I did nothing I was punished.  When dealing with a violent narcissist, the only thing you can do is watch and try and anticipate what it is you need to be doing this moment.  This is of course a root of my hypervigilence, itself a source of my constant reflections on my own inner world, and what is going on in the outer world. I need to know what is going on.

But it hit me yesterday, with absolute crystal clarity, that a totalitarian regime GIVES you a list, a short list to be sure, but a list, of what you CAN do.  If you are a Muslim, you can pray 5x a day.  You can give alms.  You can travel to Mecca.

If you had been a Nazi, you were free to inform on dissenters, free to fight for the Reich, free to speak patriotic rhetoric.

If you were or are a Communist, you are free to lie cheat and steal if it serves the cause. You are free to do what your handlers, the upper echelons of the Party, want you to do.  You are free to hate any and all class enemies.

All of these things are huge reliefs for some people.  It gives them clarity.  It gives them a path forward, and the feeling, paradoxically, of freedom. I  felt this.

My task is to create my own list, and steadily expand it.  I have lived for a very long time in a very gray world.

Some simplification of complex abstract ideas is necessary, and I would assert that the appropriate degree is at least to the point where decision making and following action is possible.  If nothing you say can be used to make an actual decision, then you are useless in all practical respects, outside of the entertainment value you provide those who tune to your channel.

With regard to morality, greatly simplifying, I would stipulate 4 moralities:

1) Be moral because God will punish you, and society will exile you.

2) Be moral because it is rational.

3) There is no such thing as morality.

4) Be moral because experience teaches this brings about both the most individual happiness, and the greatest overall social harmony and well being.

You do not have to justify the statement that “when I push button X, a horn toots”.  It is a scientific claim, one which can be verified as often as anyone may care to.  You don’t have to know WHY it works, merely that it does.

I will call this the Morality of Experience.

First off, according to Islamic law, the religion–and the duty to uphold the religion–passes from father to son.  Obama was BORN a Muslim, by Islamic law (assuming his father actually was Barack Obama, Sr., which I very much doubt; I believe, as I have said, that the bulk of evidence points both to Frank Marshall Davis being the real father, and his name on the birth certificate being the real reason they won’t release it), so he is EITHER an apostate or a Muslim, from the perspective of Islamic law.

This is FACT.  It is not disputed or disputable.

We further know that his religion was listed as Islam on his school records in Indonesia.  This is not disputed or disputable.

We live in this Bizarro-World universe where up is down and even allegedly conservative news networks (hint: we have none on TV) carry water for the most ludicrous, extravagant claims.

Obama’s birth certificate consisted in 4-5 PDF layers which were CLEARLY, unambiguously, if-this-was-a conservative-it-would-have-been-damning, faked.  Signatures were faked.  Names were faked.

And to commit an act of treason to the notion that we must be compliant, stupid, see nothing/know nothing future drones and apparatchniks, let me point out that the original copy was never made available to anyone.

I reiterate: Obama could not have gotten a drivers license with that certificate or proved citizenship, or joined the military.

If fails the most BASIC tests, and yet somehow these deluded or complicit lunatics in the media want to continue to portray those who question it as unhinged somehow.

I get that Trump wants to protect his lead, but I would still like to see him trot out a series of digital document experts and go through in some detail WHY this document is faked and why America should be angry both at Obama and those around him, but especially the sycophantic, dick sucking, ass licking media.

It might help to get some judges, and former bureaucrats to go on record saying that document would be unacceptable anywhere.  This lie does not become less important because it is the President telling it, it becomes MORE.  How is this lunacy possible?

It truly is disgusting.  Almost nobody has the balls to do their job.

Edit: I would add: Mr. Trump, this is the Meat Grinder.  Any front-runner for the Republicans, particularly, can expect relentless traps, relentless attacks, and the creation of scandal where none exists.

These people are ghouls whose humanity has been trained out of them, who attack because they have been taught to hate, who lie because they have been taught it is the best method for “progress”, and who feel neither remorse nor pity.  They are cruel savages, who will laugh at your downfall if they can engineer it, and celebrate the success of Hillary or Biden, knowing full well that there is no reason to expect any actual amelioration of the miseries of poverty, true racism, injustice, and pain of all sorts.  They will if anything increase them, because the little people will always be the little people to them.  Useful idiots, nothing more.

How many American kids do you think grow up with piggy banks?

Ponder for a moment what they actually symbolized when they were common.

I don’t watch the debates.  Why?  My opinion has no effect on who eventually gets inflicted on me as a choice.

I do keep hearing Donald Trump “isn’t Presidential”.  What the fuck can this even mean when we elected Barack Hussein Obama, a nothing from nowhere about whom we STILL know nothing, twice?

Obama’s ACTS Presidential.  That is the word, ACT.  It has been credible alleged that his entire persona is a creation based upon a friend of his from Chicago: http://www.examiner.com/article/actor-harry-lennix-says-he-trained-obama-to-act-presidential

We have to come to grips with the fact that our political process has become theater, where the tide appears to go one way, then the other, but in reality it is going out, and all of us will be swept away with it, absent some sort of pattern interrupt.

The pundits have been preaching and talking now since at least the 1950’s about Communist propaganda, declining moral values, and the importance of limited government.  But no matter who has occupied the White House–other than a brief hiatus under Clinton with a Republican Congress–government has done nothing but expand since the New Deal.  Barry Goldwater was talking about Republican sell-outs in 1960.

We can assume that if the Establishment is fine with a candidate, if there is no hooting and howling, if they are talking about what a “fine conservative” they are, how they are “electable”, “Presidential”, then that means they will simply continue the decline of America.  They may slow it, but they will not alter the end destination.

Trump’s ENTIRE appeal is that he is a loose cannon, or at least appears to be.  He has a huge ego, but that makes it harder to keep him in line.  What if he DOES just go ape-shit and start cutting expenses and programs?  What if he does raise taxes at the same time, and achieve a balanced budget?  Fiscal sanity was at one time unobjectionable on both sides of the aisle.  Even Democrats at one time thought a balanced budget was a good thing.  They just wanted more spending and more taxes.

We live in a strange world, so much of it abstract.  We are forced, by the nature of our system, to take an interest in, and try to form opinions about, people we will never meet, and likely never even see in person.  We forced to try and decipher how honest they are, what they might actually do, and to do so through a prism of repeated disappointment and failure.

And as I am realizing, it is important for mental health not to obsess too much about things far away and beyond any hope of control or management.  I think I personally look out when I don’t want to look in.  I also think that conflict makes me feel at home.  I have been in some form of war, I think, since the moment I first looked into my mothers eyes and she realized I was not the girl she assumed I must be.

The thing about the traumatized, I think, is that you seek out pain and conflict and danger, because otherwise you spend all your time anticipating it.  Once its there, you no longer need fear its emergence.  It is the pregnant silences which are perhaps most terrifying.

I am feeling less and less inclined to post here.  It seems I should spend more time with the fall leaves, and economically productive work.

I used to consume a lot of self help books back in the day, particularly when I started in Sales. Tony Robbins, and Zig Ziglar are the two I remember.  I particularly liked Zig Ziglar.

Just today I was looking at a list of goals I made 15 years ago about all the stuff I wanted, and all the experiences I wanted to have.  Many more came true than I would have guessed then, but many did not.

And I got to thinking about it: there isn’t a thing on there about work.  About a job.  To be sure, I had goals, but my mental focus was not there.  The process and the outcome were not emotionally connected.

They tell you do dream big, but here is the core truth, as I now realize: the way you get all the stuff, and all the experiences, is that you figure out how to LOVE the most basic tasks of your chosen field, and learn to love the process of learning to do them even better.  You have to fall in love with your craft.  And if you do that, then success is inevitable over some time horizon.

You have to start with the beginning, in the present moment, and the next task.  And they have to matter to you, and bring you some comfort and satisfaction when done well and consistently.  Everything else will take care of itself.

I feel stupid for not seeing this before.  To be sure, what I do for a living aligns well with my talents only to the extent that I have lots of free time to do the things I am good at, but if you are going to do a thing, why not extend the hand of friendship and affection to it, and bring it into your confidence and family?

Every excellence is a reward.  Mark that a bon mot.

Edit: the logical corollary to this is that the visualization that matters is visualizing work well done, and with pleasure.  Do this, and everything else happens, provided a very simple plan.