Author: White Whale

 The psychological value of fatalism is obvious: the future is out of our hands, so why worry?

Perhaps the purest expression of this is the Arabic saying Maktub, which means “it is written”. The story is already told. We are waiting to see what our role on all this is. We will be given the script whenever it is our time on stage.

To be sure, this can breed passivity. As one Ranger Medic acquaintance of mine once quipped while in Iraq: “The Will of Allah seems to be inversely proportional to work.”

And of course, often, there is some small detail—or to be sure, the CHANCE of some small detail—which could make a difference. This is what drives me crazy. I think often maybe there exists some argument, some idea, some action which might make an unexpected and completely unpredicted difference.

But for all of is spectators, which is really all most of us are, most of the time, you need the ability to just let it all go, to “allow”—as if that were really what is happening!!—everything to work out the way it is going to work out.

Our modern world, with all it success—empowers us, but I think many of us take this too far. It is Life after all, and Ray Kurzweil will never succeed. Thoughts do not originate in the brain. William James called it over a hundred years ago, on “ Principles of Psychology”, and none of the important facts have changed since.

 Lie. Lie a lot. Self evidently, begin by lying to yourself, or few people will buy what you are selling. Then lie to them, about who you are, and what you want.

Avoid silence and honest companionship like the plague (or this thing, if you are true Covidian).

Speak continually of virtue, and regularly subject to scorn those who fail to live up to standards you also don’t live up to.

This is the easy way. There is another way, but it is much more difficult, and the path often includes honest confusion and anxiety, for which there are no truly good remedies, other than accustoming yourself to their company, and inviting them in from time to time for coffee or cocktails.

 I think all the businesses affected should band together and file a lawsuit against all local and even national media outlets which both A) Failed to share all the known details of the case; and B) Consistently ran stories which, absent that context, could reasonably be expected to inflame tensions.

I would argue that in intent and effect, many if not most media outlets covering this tragedy—but not this crime—have in effect acted as seditious agents by fomenting and inciting riots.

Until the bastards start paying a price, none of this will stop. It will on the contrary get worse.

 What happened in the Vietnam Era, as we tend to call it, was we were asked by an ally to help them repel an invasion by their northern neighbor, North Vietnam, which had been conquered by the Communists in the 50’s, with the usual purges, gulags, and Commissars put in place to monitor everyone, and the schools of course taken over for use in Communist indoctrination.  To teach madness, in other words, and an aggressive madness at that.

We helped South Vietnam, which in the early days was run by an unattractive dictator, but which in later days was run by a much more benign group of folks, who actually started implementing much needed reforms in the direction of political liberalization and what might then have honestly been described as social justice.  Land reform was undertaken, in specific, to overturn centuries of what I recall as de facto feudalism.

We won the war.  We kicked the NVA and VC’s asses in 1968 and 1969, and forced them to the negotiating table.  In 1972, the war was over in the South.  You could drive anywhere in the country without protection safely.  The invading troops were destroyed and incapacitated.

Then we lost the war over here. Communist propaganda caused OUR OWN PEOPLE to give up, willingly, even enthusiastically, the gains won with so much death, so much pain, and after the expenditure of so much treasure.

The effectiveness of the propaganda was such that I would argue VIETNAM INVADED AMERICA.  Rather, Communism as a creed did.  They tried to take over our nation, and failed.  Barely, but only after many, many gains in our social sphere.

Today, we are seeing the same madness in our streets, the same counter-rational slogans, the same pointless destruction, and same alliance forged with madness, decay and death.

I really think the riots could be seen as the second phase of the conflict fought all those years ago.  I CERTAINLY think this is how all the old radicals, the old lunatics, see it.  They could have learned from our chosen failure in Vietnam.  They could have seen the boat people and realized that they were siding with violent fascists.  But they didn’t.  They haven’t.  

It is unfathomable to me, the sheer extent of this betrayal of basic morality, basic good sense, and basic humanity.  None of this is complicated, and most of these assholes have high IQ’s.  The leaders, I mean.

 For some years now, if a conservative was talking, they were wrong, as far as the Left was concerned.  “Open your mouth, get slapped”, was the de facto slogan and tactic. “If I wanted your opinion, I would tell you your opinion.”

It doesn’t matter how well reasoned what you say may be.  It doesn’t matter that they are lying and all you are doing is pointing that out to them.  It doesn’t matter that the lunatics are destroying the lives of the people they are claiming to protect and care about.

There is no good way for a divorce, but CLEARLY conservatives need to stop pretending that the Left EVER, EVER, EVER wants dialogue, intelligent policy discussions, actual success, or anything but the marginalization and destruction of anyone who stands between them and absolute power.

Battered women make excuses for their husbands.  Maybe he really does need his cookies in two precisely aligned rows.  I knew that.  It must be my fault.

None of this shit–or almost none of it–is our fault.  Free markets work.  The black community has been abused and destroyed by the Left.   The Global warming “emergency” and the necessity of COVID lockdowns are both bad jokes.  We made more economic progress in 2 years of Trump than we had since the Clinton era, which saw government limited by a  Republican Congress, and the following internet boom.

All of us, ALL OF US, need to stop trying to pretend that any of us can win a game with the Left which does not involve submission to lies, bad ideas, psychopathic thugs, and the continued ruining of America, and by extension, much of the world.  Say what you are thinking out loud, or not, but stop pretending any of this is our fault, or Trump’s fault.  He’s just the first one to talk back to them, and like the abusive bullies they are, they can’t stand it.

 It occurs to me that when you are drunk, you are in effect in the state of a small child.  Your mind is gone, your capacity for rational planning gone, and you act on nearly all your impulses.  You feel no pain, and not infrequently euphoria.

Ponder for a moment the value of that for someone with Developmental Trauma.  You get to return to your childhood, but this time without the pain and stress.  But of course you then sober up every time.  Still, that part of you gets a rest for a time, and unless and until those wounds are healed, you keep coming back.  I think this is my own issue.  I had a dream tonight which seemed to say that.

I would like to propose this as a deep reason for chronic drunkenness, for many.  Heroin does the same thing, as do most barbituates.  Weed not so much, and certainly not amphetamines.  But the most common drugs used worldwide otherwise, including opium, hashish probably, morphine and the world’s most popular drug, booze, all return us to childlike states.

Political manias, now that I think about it, most likely do the same thing.  Most of the people throwing tantrums in the streets are not just figuratively acting like 3 year olds: they are LITERALLY acting like 3 year olds.  A child cannot be asked to foresee the consequences of their actions.  If you are older than 18, though, it is a reasonable request, even if one you have not been taught to honor.

 1. No reform—which is to say conscious alteration in the direction of hoped-for improvement—is possible within an incoherent system.

2. Coherent human social systems are formally complex systems, the rules of which are defined by generally distributed moralities, which can and to be sure usually differ widely. It is the FACT of conscious moral codes which matters, vastly more than the specific content. The American experiment in political Liberalism depends on private moralities, nearly all of which contain basic elements which, broadly speaking, have iteration of the Golden Rule, even while retaining certain tribal and exclusionary elements.

3. There is no moral equivalence possible between those who believe something and those who believe nothing. Muslims and Christians, as one example, can and often have, negotiated difference, and in point of fact have often lived in peace together across wide stretches of time. This applies to all religious and social difference.

4. Principle is practically our conscious intent. Even if most people have fallen short of their own ideals, their presence creates a fertile soil for growth and improvement. There is a baseline and an ideal, even if most are far from the ideal in practice. The idea of “America”, for example, is mythically powerful, even if we have in practice fallen short of our ideals nearly continuously since our founding. Our ideals create the soil within which coherent reform is possible. Without them there is merely chaos and entropy.

5. For practical purposes, the opposite of a principle based orientation is a conformity based orientation, and conformity—elevated itself to a principle—is the tendency which is uniquely unequal to moral growth. Conformity is intrinsically incoherent, since it has no content.

6. Spirituality is a uniquely human activity, when defined as the effort to grow in awareness of God, with God being described as the root of all experience and consciousness, and the essence of the really real.

7. Social systems incapable of reform are inherently anti-spiritual. No system based on conformity, then, can spiritual.

8. When spirituality is rejected, what is left are the plain facts of our biology, which are sex, hunger, violence, and contingent and mutable social relations.

9. All of us are born with a drive to the transcendant, so logically any system which rejects God must reify and worship our animal nature.

10. Hence Satanism, with Satan part goat, which is say part animal.

11. Humans are born with reason, and reason is how we find our way forward.

12. There is an emotional equivalent to reason. We use our minds to reason our way to truth, and our hearts to reason our way to peace and connection.

 It occurs to me that no honest spirituality can or should begin from anything but enlightened self interest.  Take care of yourself, first, then all things fall into place.  Even now, in this world, if all people focused on caring for themselves, without taking too much or too little, all would be well.

The desire to “save the world” really does not normally begin in a place of honest self interest.  Such people, placed in a situation where no one needed saving, would find themselves in an emotional existential crisis.  They would have to return to themselves, and find they don’t know themselves at all.

Yesterday, I found myself saying “FUCK THESE PEOPLE”, and by these people I mean everyone too stupid to understand what is being done to us, or who is being manipulated by the race rioters.

It occurred to me my life would be much more peaceful if I stopped trying to care about the future of humanity, an essentially infinite amount of which is not up to me.  

This is my new goal.  I keep trying to go there, and keep failing, but that is still my goal.

 When the 3 cops served the warrant on Breonna Taylor’s apartment in Louisville at 3am, they knocked, hard, and yelled police.  Neighbors heard them.  Breonna and her live-in boyfriend apparently did not hear them, and since they were most likely engaged in the drug trade, probably thought someone was trying break in to steal their drugs and any money they had, so one of them–the boyfriend claims it was him–fired a blind shot through or around a door, hitting one of the officers.  Cops, pretty much one hundred times out of one hundred, are going to return fire when fired at, especially if one of them was hit.  Even though Breonna was standing next to her live-in boyfriend, he was not hit once.  She received all the shots that hit.

Here is my suggestion: if the bullet fired had KILLED the officer, rather than just wounding him, the Left would not have been able to use this event for AgitProp, and if they had not done that, the riots would not have happened, and many large cities–certainly Louisville–would be in a much better place.  Homicide rates, in particular, would not be spiking in the black communities, because cops would still be doing their jobs, in ways they are not right now.  If they come when you call, they come slowly, and I am very sure they are doing zero proactive policing.  There are many shifts most of them don’t even leave the station, I suspect.  Why?  “Fuck those people”, I can hear them saying.  No reasonable person can blame them.  If they do their job correctly they get no credit, and if they make a fraction of a mistaken under a situation of high stress they get killed themselves, or they wind up in jail, suspended, or subject to mob attack.  That’s pretty much a textbook No Win situation.  The win? Do nothing.  Nothing, for the win.

And again, if that shot had been fatal, they would not have been able to avoid mentioning the first shot fired came from the apartment, or that Breonna was anything but asleep and in her bed.  They would have ignored this event, like they ignore MOST cases where cops use justifiable force.  They want a one-sided, cartoonish picture, one which motivates and elevates childish emotions of petulance, rage, and need.  They want to then wallpaper onto these background emotions idiotic and sententious narratives, in which the good black people of the Earth are subjected daily to the venality and wickedness of police everywhere, and the only solution is to get rid of them.  

This is what they wanted, and this is what they got.  EVEN THOUGH homicides have climbed in Minneapolis, and Louisville, and Chicago, and New York, they still want to push the idea that getting rid of the cops is a good idea.  It is obviously a stupid idea.

If this whole world doesn’t make you a bit dizzy right now, well, tell me how.  You are either smarter than me, or much more stupid.

 It is worth noting that the average year for the average person at any place and any time in history before the 20th century was vastly worse than that of even the poor among us now, in lockdown.

We have antibiotics.  We have grocery stores filled with “luxury” goods all available at very modest prices, and Indian grocers on every corner filled with the spices Columbus was hoping to make a fortune with, by finding an alternate route to India.  Our homes are heated and cooled to within a degree or two of the exact temperature we want, and most of us have running water, and heated water at that.  Most of us do not need to do back breaking labor in the fields.  The list is long, and comprises nearly every physical detail of our lives.

So 2020 is not the worst year ever.  It is perhaps the worst year since World War 2, maybe, for many of us.  It would depend on some arbitrary metric, and might make for a good bar argument that the Guinness Book of Records would not help resolve.

But here is a claim I will make with no hesitation: the measures enacted on the PRETEXT (not in response to, since the responses outside of Sweden and more obviously Switzerland have not been scientific, and have patently not had benign intents) of responding to this bad flu bug, have been the largest ENGINEERED, which is to say man-made, disaster outside of wartime ever inflicted on the human species in the whole of history.

I feel very confident making that claim. Now, obviously nearly all wars waged everywhere have been worse.  Homes were destroyed, famines generalized, people killed, and all manner of atrocities enabled and perpetrated in the general carnage and destruction.

But it is peacetime, and our governments–the precise aggregations of fallible and obviously corruptible human individuals which we entrusted with our safe-keeping–have betrayed our trust, and attacked us.  No other honest view is possible, in my opinion.  These responses are not guided by science.  They have no precedent, and the two obvious precedents we now have in countries similar to the US–Sweden and Switzerland–are not being studied, not being copied, not being emulated.

I go back and forth, wrestling with this part of me that says “stop caring, it’s too big for you, you make no difference, you need to focus on your own peace of mind, what will be will be, focus on your own well being and peace”, etc.

Does it make a difference, trying to speak coherently, when the world has lost its fucking mind?  I don’t know.  I don’t even know if it is strictly necessary for my own sanity.  I can write in my journal, take walks and think my own thoughts.

I am confused.  I look at the videos being played in my gym, and reflect that most Americans lack the intelligence and the motivation to question our dominant culture, one currently highly relevant feature of which is obeisance to purported expertise, and quite frequently, by extension, to government itself, in all its forms.

How does one combat the stupid, the ignorant?  Is combat the word?  How does one reform them, teach them, guide them, when they are complacent, self satisfied, and unquestioning?  They won’t listen, and nothing I have to say is really that easy to understand.  The simple and wrong answers are nearly all owned by the Left.

For my part, if all of our leaders outside of Trump have sold out, and abandoned their moral duties to protect American life and liberty, I see no way out.  I see no way, if the CIA, DIA, NSA, Pentagon, and all our senior leadership have sold out, that our freedom stays intact.  Where are our protectors?  Even Mattis is corrupted, and he was damn near a demi-god to most veterans.  The guy got bought; the price does not even matter.

Where are the honest leaders of America?  For what did so many fighting men and women give their lives, if we are to be sold out to the highest bidder by a bunch of fucking whores?  

I have no good answers.  I don’t even have any bad answers.  I just don’t know.