Author: White Whale

Our options are global culture, or global givernment. In my view, they are mutually exclusive. Culture creates government, and government erodes culture.

If the human race ever evolves sufficiently to be able to institute a just global government, it won’t need it.

It is worth noting as well that history clearly showsthe connection between war and expanding government. The strategic significance of global warming as an idea is it creates a lobal threat against which a centrally coordin
ated “war” must be waged.

Given global peace, however, I think we all know there is no warrant for bureaucratic metastasis and interference.

To pursue peace is therefore to pursue, in principle at least, less government.

I think a case could be made for converse as well: large government has often waged war on the very people it supposedly protected.

Demons are just fences, and all fences have gates.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is yes.

I’m going to let you figure this one out. It has meaning on multiple levels, including the obvious smartass one.

I think it would be interesting to creat a “mirror” which deducted by computer the person looking in to it.

My intent would not be to suggest that person does not exist, but rather that the world is a much more interesting place when we don’t make ourselves the centerpiece.

Additional ideas: highly interesting or even interactive background behind the viewer, or taking their picture and adding it back in reduced and marginalized, but fully mirroring their motions. I think this is technically possible.

If you are not most happy with your own kind, you have no kind. Ponder that.

The root cultural invention of leftists has been to create a kind, a tribe, which dep
ends entirely on conformity to mutable propaganda. It has no substantive content; it is not trying to accomplish, say, an end to tribalistic violence as rxpressed in actual racism. It is in no sense Liberal. It does not truly appeal to universal principles, like the sanctity of human rights.

The tribe consists precisely in publicly acknowledging you belong. It has no coherent world view, no true catechism, no sense of the sacred, no sense of duty, which does not come from conformity to the tribes mutable organizing manias, hates, and avarices.

Where could he go?  Clearly, he was using drugs to kill some pain perhaps even he was not able to diagnose–hell, that he was LIKELY unable to understand, to fathom, to come to grips with.  It’s out there somewhere, but you don’t know where, you can’t figure out how or even where it is hurting you, but you hurt all the same.

Does he go back to rehab?  What do they tell him?  One day at a time, think of everyone you are hurting, we’re here for you.  But he hurts NOW, and none of this reduces that.

He had something on the order of 50 bags in his apartment, and 20 used needles.  He was on a massive pain killing binge.

My dream is to create places where one day people like him have somewhere to go–in the middle of a figurative or literal night, in the middle of a figurative or literal hailstorm–and where they can get actually effective help.  This has to do with worldview (hope relies in part upon structures you believe in which do not contradict any facts you know), with people possessing emotional empathy, and with therapeutic techniques that actually WORK. 

He was a bright guy, and no doubt decided no shrink was going to help him, and that if he gave up drugs he would lose his best and only true friend.  Small wonder his friend killed him.

Read this piece from Russell Brand and thought it interesting.

We all exist in an ocean of energies, of waves flowing through us at different frequencies.  This is certainly literally true (contemplate how many radio waves are floating in front of your eyes at this moment; or neutrinos passing through the earth; or Earth’s magnetic field encompassing you; or “gravity”, whatever the hell that really is), but there are cultural waves too.

Most of the hard core drugs addictions, like heroin, are happening in industrially advanced nations.  So, at any rate, it seems to me.  Can we not postulate that in the process of putting 1,000 channels on the TV, far too many of us have found ourselves on a frequency of one?  Can we not speculate that Russell Brand at least WAS on a frequency of one when he was doing drugs, that they made all the other frequencies appear in a rainbow before he drifted off?

In my considered view, the success of 12 step programs lie in two principle perceptual movements their system facilitates.  First: you are not alone.  There are a lot of people out there JUST LIKE YOU.  As the Police sang, there are a hundred billion bottles. And it is not just addiction you share with them, although that plainly int itself creates a bond that cannot be shared with all.  It is in some respects a view of life, that life as we have to live it is broken somehow.  It is bad enough that it is broken, but worse that we have to lie about it, to ourselves and others.

And then there is the idea that you can’t do it yourself.  You have to collapse, disappear, qualitatively reorganize based on the idea of a simultaneous destruction of your self destructive self, and your reconstruction as someone now living within a web of meaning and support that goes beyond the mere human.  You can rest without drugs or alcohol.

To this I would finally add that culturally we need insanity to be sane.  We need periodic breaks from deadlines and coffee breaks, and relentless greed and striving; and I don’t just mean vacations.  My own experience is that vacations, once you sort out the logistics and spend your money, are not always that recuperative, and in this country at least, the one week vacations we get stuck with really don’t do more than titillate us.  Still, I think Germans and other Europeans with much more generous breaks find many of the same problems.

No, I mean some version of dancing around the tribal campfire and letting spontaneous elements of yourself come out in a setting where you feel welcome, among friends.  This is what the hippies tried to contribute, but their failing was that what they effectively proposed was dichotomous: you were either one of them, or a suit.

Plainly, plenty of suits smoke pot and go to Dead shows.  This is not what I mean.  What I mean is that their proposals never stood any real chance of getting integrated into mainstream culture, and not just because of social conservatism, but also because of the countless casualties of that lifestyle.  Many, many people went mad.  Many more became relentlessly self absorbed and narcissistic, talking about Love, but really in love with the idea of themselves talking about love.

[pretend there is a segue here]

These problems have solutions.  I cannot emphasize this enough.

I will add, actually, one of my favorite lines from any movie, from “Battle: Los Angeles”: “Marines don’t quit.”  Simple.  Nothing fancy.  But there is a profound spiritual depth in persistence, in my view.

We must persist.  We must assume that good will see its day, will win the final victory, that happiness and general prosperity can be achieved.   Or we die trying.  These are the choices for those with eyes that see and hearts which see.

How often does this really mean “Can I tell you what I need you to hear?” or “Can I tell you what I want you to hear?”

We all have internal dialogues, and one regrettable element of my own is that this phrase pops in my head constantly.  Growing up, it was always followed by lies of varying shades. Truth and love are both words to which I am borderline phobic.

I will add a semi-related, but not really, point: if a psychotic tells you that the bathroom is the third door on the right, and they are correct, this is useful information.

When you dig into psychology, there are all sorts of trick mirrors and trap doors.  You are projecting.  You are indulging your infantile self in fantasy gratification, or whatever.

One can easily psychologize, as one example, people like Alex Jones, who see Illuminati everywhere, who think that a cabal of several hundred super-rich, super-powerful people is plotting regularly at the Bilderberg conferences to institute a global government, and abolish democracy and human rights.  You can break him down.  You can say that he is suffering from some psychopathology or the other.

But at the end of the day REALITY still exists.  Truth statements can still be made which can be validated or falsified. And if he is right, EVEN IF he is crazy, he is still right, correct?  Third door on the right?

For many years of my youth I eschewed psychology for this exact reason: it can make lunatics of the sane, and treat the insane as wise elders.

This video is excellent, and true: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwiaW-N7qWg

I would encourage you to share it, particularly with any folks you may know in the areas being described.

This is the wavelength people of genuine goodwill need to be focusing on.  We need to confront vigorously and without shame or hesitation the lies awful people have been telling for half a century about their true intentions.

No one who genuinely cares tolerates this level of failure, decade after decade, without realizing that what they are doing is not working.  No one is that stupid.  No one.

From this, one MUST infer that the people pushing these policies DON’T CARE.  Yes, they may be hypnotized automatons, drunk on their own rhetoric and narcissism, but no one can lie in their hearts as to who they are.  They can simply cover it up by directing hatred outwards.

It is precisely the knowledge of their horrific and ubiquitous failures that drives the invective against true Liberals, which is to say, in this country, political conservatives.