Author: White Whale

I would like to stipulate as a general moral principle to which I can think of no exception that you never help anyone by making excuses for them.  All of us have within us compasses which tell us how to begin to move in the direction of wholeness, wellness, health, and thriving.  But we ignore this compass because the way is hard.  It doesn’t look hard, it IS hard.  This doesn’t matter.  Growth is why we are here.

I myself have had an enormous amount of painful growth I have endured, and continue to endure.  I get pain better than most.  But I dream of a day when no matter what somebody comes to me with, I can say I FEEL THAT.  I have been there.  And there is another side.  You can get through it.  I did.

I can’t imagine any rape or incest survivor, any soldier with PTSD, any refugee, has suffered more than me.  As an infant I feared daily that my mother was going to kill me, and I never really bonded with any adult growing up.  I never felt a sense of love and safety.  I entered life with severe PTSD, depression, pervasive anxiety, hopelessness, and a piss poor social support network.

And I think this is fucking great, because it makes me USEFUL.  I crawled on my hands and knees a thousand miles, and I got to the other side.

Returning to the thought, I would stipulate as a general principle that if you are not thriving, if you are not living as close to the life of your dreams as is possible for you, and if you are not working daily towards it, you have made excuses.

I have a tattoo on my left arm based on one of the Sets of Three John Wooden was raised with, modified slightly: “Don’t Whine, Don’t Complain, Don’t Make Excuses”, to which I added “Never Quit”.

This is indelible ink–or at least I choose to treat it as such.  It is a burden at times.  These are hard principles to live by, and I haven’t even come close.  But it is an absolute code, and a good one, and I think most of the problems in the world would be solved in short order if everyone lived by this code, and simply added curiosity.  That is the entirety of my moral system in a nutshell.

I write too much.  I actually need to be somewhere.  But it comforts me, and it helps me build the visions I need in order to learn how to hope.  And it is not unreasonable for me to suppose they do others good.  My struggles are not so very different from yours.  All of us, if we are lucky, have some serious shit to get through and learn from.

Edit: you know, it is pointless to compare miseries, and it occurs to me I perhaps being grandiose comparing myself to others.  Suffice it to say my difficulties have led to more understanding, but that every situation and every person offer the opportunity for MORE understanding.  Comparing joys to joys or miseries to miseries is like comparing the breeze on a mild Tuesday to the breeze on a mild Wednesday.  Why?

A man in  KKK outfit on one side, and a caption reading: Murders of black men since 1981: 0. (Michael Donald appears to be the last recorded lynching).

And a picture of a group of black youth and men.  Murders of black men since 1981: 170,000 (or whatever: I multiplied 34 by 5,000.  I suspect the number is higher).

We live in a world where the truth is Verboten.

I will add to this a video everyone should watch: https://video-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hvideo-xap1/v/t43.1792-2/10939799_820070614707179_399756170_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjE1MDAsInJsYSI6MjgwMiwidmVuY29kZV90YWciOiJsZWdhY3lfaGQifQ%3D%3D&rl=1500&vabr=510&oh=e6dfd7deaaa8730e341a103a7e2b7eef&oe=55BF88B1

That’s the best I can for a link, for which I apologize.

“Can’t is not a part of your vocabulary”.  Compare and contrast this basic mindset with the notion that black people somehow suffer from this abstract lack of “white privilege”.  What the fuck is this, other than a mindset, on one side, that the world owes you something, and on the other that you have an absolute right, and responsibility, and privilege to make your own way?

Can we really speak about a “lack of opportunity” when 40% of black kids fail to finish their free educations by dropping out of high school?  Access to learning was a key goal of both black activists like Stephen Douglass and of socialists of all sorts.  They won.  They succeeded.

Imagine if her parents had made excuses for this girl.  She would be a failure, depressed, and bitter, much like the people you can see huddled outside the corner liquor store in just about any ghetto in this country.

That says nothing about being BLACK per se.  Actual Africans don’t act like that.  It says everything about culture, and mindset, and no serious person can claim that the goal of the Left is not, and has not long been, to reduce all of us to dependent children, and that they merely succeeded more, and sooner, in the black communities, because of the  propaganda past actual racism made possible.

The answer is not to put propagandistic shows about “stupid white people” on TV, but to DEMAND MORE.  Graduate school.  Don’t knock anybody up or get knocked up.  Dump the baggie pants and stop dropping your G’s.

In my personal opinion the reason Cosby got taken out is he was saying this stuff.  If you keep in mind Cecil the Lion overwhelming coverage of the Planned Parenthood atrocities, then you recall that the media can direct people’s attention in any direction they want.  What happened with Cosby is not that the charges escalated, but that they GOT COVERAGE.  Why?  He was fucking with the narrative of black failure.

Healing dissociation is an odd thing.  You kind of merge into and out of “reality”, which is to say a sense of connection with, of participation with, the present, the past, and the future.  You really have none of those when you are gone.

I pendulate back and forth, taking small sips.  Progress seems to be happening.  And it occurs to me that I at least–but I suspect most of us–are deeply fixed in the middles of our being, and not open to qualitative growth for most of our lives, which is why the metaphor of the child is so apt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn2z19QnEfQ

I was drinking when I posted this.  My intent was not so much to communicate the idea, as the song, which I had not heard and really enjoyed.  Freddie Mercury (real name Farrokh Bulsara) had an amazing voice.  Did you know he was a Parsi by birth, and raised in the Sultanate of Zanzibar (now Tanzania)?


I think most people now know Brian May became an astrophysicist.  I found this funny:

 May appeared on the 700th episode of The Sky at Night hosted by Sir Patrick Moore, along with Chris Lintott, Jon Culshaw, Prof. Brian Cox, and the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees who on departing the panel, told Brian May, who was joining it, “I don’t know a scientist who looks as much like Isaac Newton as you do”.

Here’s another good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PItMuGp39Q 

Turns out blogging is part of my life.

Gibbon’s snark with respect to Christianity would, I suspect, amuse those congenitally opposed to it.  I am not one of those people, but he does make the excellent point that the two new things Christianity brought were fear and radical intolerance.

Fear, of eternal damnation, which was assumed to be the lot of most of humanity.

Intolerance, of anyone unwilling to accept this idea, because of the FEAR that their ideas would lead to apostasy and then Hell.

Now, the Romans and Jews really didn’t think too much about an after-life.  Nor did either group feel any need to proselytize.  As polytheists, the Romans were always happy to add another altar; and as de facto xenophobes, the Jews simply wanted to be left alone.  They did not want to convert anyone, or add new people.  No need.

Only Christianity adds this fear of eternal damnation, which itself makes intolerance a virtue, since no one who fails to become a Christian has any hope of salvation.

All this is quite easy to miss if you simply read the scriptures in red, talking about turning the other cheek, and the Sermon on the Mount.

And if you REALLY think about it, Christianity and Islam are morphologically very similar, with the difference that Islam is less hypocritical.  Both are imbued with the notion that no one who fails to adopt their creed can expect anything but literally unending misery in the next and most important life.  Both are driven by fear more than love, even if Christianity nominally talks more about love.

And both religions have burst out into the world through aggressive violence.  Islam is perhaps more obvious, in the wars it fought, the Jizya, the Dhimmis, the Sword.

But why do they speak Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America?  Was Christianity not an important part of the cultural imperialism of Europe?  Why are there Christians in Nigeria?  Kenya?  China? Vietnam?  Australia?

As I say from time to time–and I seem to recall saying it relatively recently–I cannot partake of a religion based on a human sacrifice demanded by an allegedly merciful and benevolent God.  I am quite willing to accept a high spiritual status for Jesus, but not for those who listened to Him, who garbled His words, and who misunderstood nearly everything he taught.

I say again as well that contextualizing all this is a quite interesting exercise.  Within the presumed lifetime of the disciples, the Temple was destroyed again, and with it the ability to perform the sacrifices commanded in what I will call the Pentateuch (Talmud, Torah?  I’m not literate enough).   A new revelation was needed.

And as Gibbon notes, the entire idea of an after-life, of heaven, was quite new to the Jews.  Do you pick the religion that promises nothing in that regard, or the one which grants eternal bliss?  They were used to an avenging and protective God, but only in this life.

Gibbon even recites a version of Pascal’s Wager, which he assumes–likely correctly–exercised among the Romans of antiquity an authoritative force, at least among those of a more thoughtful persuasion.

Science, I say, can be our means for testing metaphysical claims, and science can be our means for developing rituals and behaviors which further our growth as animals on the way to being angels via the dangerous path of being human.

Holy crap: I had 100 posts in July.  Somebody get this man a life.

When I turn really intellectual, I think it is often because I am feeling really emotional.  Today in my Kum Nye practice wave after wave of feeling kept sweeping over me.  I am a deeply emotional person.  I am a water creature.

And I understood in an instant the emotional appeal of materialistic Scientism: a core stipulation is that emotions are not real.  When you are hurt, and hurting, that is not real.  It is atoms in motion, or so it can be thought.

The alternative is that feelings do exist in some spiritual way, that they are out there somehow, and that they do not have an Off switch, that they must be walked through, as through a room filled with veils that prevent you from even seeing where you are going, where logic is of no use, and only motion can carry you through and direct you.  You cannot see the end of the journey.  You cannot see the end.  You are without triangles and squares, and the Pythagorean theorem has taken acid and dissolved into rainbow-hued water and disappeared laughing down a drain.

The orientation in emotion, must come from emotion.  It is a world in itself with its own logic, and whose mastery is a skill that is quite beyond anything that could be captured and frozen in a book, of any sort.

Calling abortion an issue primarily about a woman’s right to her own body is, it seems to me, to suggest that women CAN and should control the disposal of babies, but not the creation of them.

The moral logic as it exists today, it seems to me, is an artifact of a period before birth control, before legal protection for many women’s rights, and before the viability of women raising children on their own.

It seems a certainty that the overwhelming majority of the some 90,000 black babies–I just happen to know this statistic–aborted every year were not the result of rape or incest.  They were not the result of an abusive, controlling husband who insisted she had to get pregnant.  It seems likely most of them are the result of the heat of passion, and an indifference to pregnancy, which is to say an indifference to the life of a prospective child, combined with easy and cheap access to abortion.

We have been conditioned not to view fetuses as human, but at what cost?  We had a miscarriage with my wife’s first pregnancy, and she was an emotional wreck.  She cried all day after she went in for a D and C, as they call it.  I myself dreamed I met that child once: it was another girl, and she was quite wonderful.

All of the beautiful things in life come from sensitivity, from caring, from connection, from openness and receptivity.  All of the bad things, from closing down, shutting down, detaching, disengaging.

Is it not worth asking an open question as to whether or not babies are such a wonderful possibility that MAYBE, just maybe, their lives should be treated with some measure of kindness and respect? Maybe not by force of law.  Maybe not by banning abortion. But by pointing out that a great evil is being committed, and no one wants to admit it or even talk about it outside of the people who have been in shock since 1973.

Is that insanity to suggest that, that maybe we have been coarsened by all this, rendered less feeling, less open, less beautiful?  Or is it insanity pretending that treating them like meat is perfectly acceptable?  Why NOT eat them?  It is the next logical step, considering that they are not human and that we are supposed to treat all our impulses towards compassion and protection as inherently ideologically flawed.

I think I was at one time notorious in some circles for my debating style.  I call it the scalpel and cudgel approach.  I make factual, logically consistent, relevant arguments, then I hit them on the head with a personal attack.

I have almost entirely given that up, but find myself engaging with someone who just won’t stop, who I am suspecting has a more than superficial interest in the topic, that of 9/11 Truth.  I think he is a paid or volunteer propagandist.  Why, I don’t know.

But I wanted to comment that I think I understand why I developed that strategy.  The Left’s basic approach is to be annoying, to deal in personal attacks, and overall to wear you down such that you do some combination of lose your cool–so they can portray you as irrational and anger-prone–and simply stop engaging.

The only way, emotionally, I ever found to deal with that was to stay in the discussion on the level of reason that mattered, but to trade punch for punch, low blow for low blow, so I did not feel a sense of helpless rage.  I wasn’t helpless.  And I always remained on topic, and always offered rational, fact based arguments, presented as articulately and as simply as I could.

And I will say that this strategy is important for anyone who is going to go 15 rounds with professional agitators, liars, and propagandists.  Donald Trump may lose popularity, he may not be even a remotely good ideas as President, but he will not run out of energy.  He is giving more than he is taking.  That, in my view, is psychologically important.

I think we can most productively define abortion in the present era as “an elective outpatient procedure to remove unwanted fetal tissue”.