Author: White Whale

I am not an Objectivist, but I liked this: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/blog/index.php/2012/06/political-left-and-right-properly-defined/

The proper purpose of government is to protect individual rights by
banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using
force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. A
properly conceived political spectrum must reflect this fact. Whatever
terms are used to identify the positions of political ideologies or
systems must be defined with regard to the fundamental political
alternative: force vs. freedom—or, more specifically, rights-protecting
vs. rights-violating institutions.

 Posted as a commentary on this link: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2013/05/28/bozell-column-one-mans-fascination-hitler

I will add that the whole left-right continuum gets construed in various ways.  In the French Revolutionary National Assembly, it connoted on the right monarchists, in the middle what we should term liberals, and on the left bloodthirsty savages whose descendants became Communists.  Given that most people know little to no history, this continuum in popular usage is not very helpful.  For my own purposes, I use a continuum based upon no government at all on the right–which is to say people govern themselves based upon shared cultural values; government is as local as possible, which is to say each sovereign individual–and only government on the left.  It should be noted that as one moves from the right to the left “culture”, per se, as a dynamic artifact of habit and behavior within a relatively cohesive social grouping, disappears.  So then, too, does the sense of self, and possibility of conceiving of individual moral growth.  This is why leftism in its very essence is evil.

I get into discussions from time to time about whether or not Fascism is a “right wing” movement.  Clearly, if we draw a continuum from less government on the right, to more government on the left, it is barely more palatable than Communism, which is hands down the worst conceivable form of government, and certainly far to the left of traditional liberalism, with its checks and balances. 

But historically, who have been the people attracted to Fascism/National Socialism?  For one, the man who started the New Deal under FDR, Hugh S. Johnson.  For another, the man who coined the term “New Deal”. 

Here, a generation later, we see Jack Kennedy saying: “Anyone who has visited these places can imagine how in a few years, Hitler will emerge from the hate that now surrounds him and come to be regarded as one of the most significant figures that ever lived. There is something mysterious about the way he lived and died and which will outlive him and continue to flourish. He was made of the stuff of legends.”  and

“I have come to the conclusion that fascism is right for Germany and Italy. What are the evils of fascism compared to communism?”

Mussolini started as a Socialist/Communist, and National Socialist German Worker’s Party–the full name of the Nazi party–was every bit as socialist as one would assume from their name.  It redistributed wealth, guaranteed an income and education to all Germans, prohibited land speculation (and usury, if memory serves), and in general differed only from Communism in its unrepentant nationalism, and in that its economic system worked, once you factored in the wars it waged to steal from other lands.

First, I have likely said this, but courage is obviously related to the French “coeur”, heart.

Watched the new Star Trek yesterday, and it finally dawned on me that courage is not suppressing fear, but embracing it.  There was a book some years back titled “Feel the fear, but do it anyway.”.  I would append that with “and don’t forget the fear.”

To become truly brave, I think you have to have the self awareness to know when you are scared, and to do what needs to be done anyway.  But I think you also need to keep that fear present.  You should never reject any part of your experience.  And what I think true warriors do is use that fear for greater effectiveness.  They would in fact be weaker, less able, if they did not more or less consciously accept the fear flowing through them, and channel it into an adrenaline rush.

Put another way, certain types of people are attracted to certain kinds of fear.  Why do roller coasters exist?  Why are there always rock climbers in Joshua Tree and Yosemite?  Why go 70 mph (or whatever it is) down a ski slope?

Could I posit that “fear is excitement we resist”?  That might be close to the truth.

You may not see an immediate link between these two.  Let me offer a famous image: your roof is on fire.  Your house is on fire.  According to my recollection, the Buddha offered this image to someone who wanted to nitpick small pieces of doctrine which were unessential to his being “released” through the attainment of Buddhahood.

Ponder what early Buddhist life was like.  They were required to wander as beggars, owning only what they carried, which was a rice bowl and perhaps a few other essentials.  They were required to not eat after 12pm.  No doubt they had other tasks–perhaps the recitation of mantras or scriptures, and almost certainly meditation–but consider how hard this life was, at least physically.  For the true believer it was no doubt a liberation of sorts, living out the Buddhadharma, but put yourself in that position.  Imagine living in homeless shelters, wandering from town to town, constantly hungry.

“Life is Pain”.  This is what Cary Elwes tells Robin Wright as Buttercup in “The Princess Bride” (I will note in passing that his role in the first Saw is in this respect interesting).  What Horror movies do is reinforce the sad, sick, grotesque side of life.  Could we not find many horrors in cancer wards?  In third world hospitals, with cases of elephantiasis, and leprosy, and all the deformations I am told by world travelers are quite common in unsanitized, non-developed nations?

The point of Movie Yoga is not to intellectualize about movies, although of course that is in some measure what I have done.  But I know myself–the feelings come later.  When things happen to me, the feelings land in a sort of filter, where I can release them at appropriate times.

The night after I watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre I got hints of some part deep within myself grasping that life is serious, at root.  This is an emotional truth, one that I think most modern Americans don’t get.  We feel lost in the superficial, because we are not confronted with the existential.

In a very real way, Leatherface is chasing all of us with a chainsaw, but he is far away.  Our deaths are far away.  There is nothing to PUSH us, there is no imminent threat forcing us to fundamentally reevaluate who we are, and what we stand for.  But I think people need that, they want that, they want structure, and they are not averse to turning to fear to provide it.

Obviously, Horror movies do not tell us how to live our lives, but I think they may create the momentary sense in some/sum that life does have gravity, that it is serious, and that the existence of the viewer is not pure foam. 

My two cents for today.

If it is not obvious, a very common perceptual “move” I make is to invert things, here, by wondering if there is a positive equivalent to a vampire; something undying, but which makes those possessing this energy willingly and often GIVE their life energy to others.

From here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/tobe-hooper,13680/
 
O: What do you think of the current debate over violent entertainment?

TH: [Pauses.] Let me see if I can put this correctly. It’s
messing with the First Amendment, it seems. It’s troublesome in that
way, and because there’s a problem with messing with the continuity of
the national psyche. It’s difficult any time you mess with the tribal
consciousness, the expectations of the country’s psyche. It seems like
censorship in a way that is not productive, constructive, or helpful.

O: There’s a quote from the documentary where someone said of
the early ’70s that all that bad karma had to go somewhere, and that
it’s better to channel it into films than into other places.

TH: It really is.

O: I think if you lose that means of expression for violent
thoughts and the darker sentiments of human existence, you’re in
trouble.

TH: It’s both a catharsis and a safe darkness. When I was
shooting in the ’60s, making documentaries for the end of the Kennedy
Title 3 Advanced Educational Programming, I saw things like effigies of
one’s boss that the employees could take it out on at lunch break and
have a release. I think there are potential problems with restricting
what anybody can see. It is, after all, a safe darkness and a place for a
certain kind of release.

Do we not, now, have exhibits that in their own way are both much more disgusting, and much more graphic than the death-filled scenes in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”? I am speaking of the various “Bodies” exhibits, which take human corpses, and more or less make artwork out of them.  You literally have corpse “mobiles”.

I’ll ponder this a bit more.  It does seem to me both that we need a sacred and profane, and that this distinction, at carefully chosen times and ideally in ritually defined ways, needs to be broken.

The most salient characteristic of Horror, perhaps, is that it retains the sense of danger and submission, but never transcendence. It is one half of an ages-old equation.

Well, I finally got around to watching it.  I just finished it, so my thoughts will be a bit scattered.

One thought I had yesterday is that I think we all need to regularly express ALL the emotions.  We understand sadness and anger, love, joy, sexual desire.  But what about revulsion?

I read that there are, on one typology, 6 basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, and sadness.  Horror certainly caters to the fear element, but also both surprise and disgust.  I would submit that in our sanitized world, where all convenience store clerks are taught to say “have a nice day”, that some primal part of our selves craves the dissolute, the insane, the repulsive.  Cannibalism certainly fits the bill.

On a perhaps deeper level, do we not all sense that crimes are happening, even now, that particularly in wide open places may never be punished?  I have in mind particularly pedophilia, but wife beating, and cruelty to animals certainly also go on.

Think about the Texas of 1973.  This was an era when the reality of pervasive pedophilia/sexual abuse of children and minors was still widely rejected.  Children would tell their stories, and be abused for it.  Catholic priests were still routinely molesting children.  Actual racism was still present, and blacks had to watch their steps, lest they have violence visited on them.

There is a line from Conan Doyle’s story “The Copper Beeches” which has always stuck with me:   They are traveling to the countryside on a very beautiful day, watching farmsteads go on by from the train window.  Watson says “Are they not fresh and beautiful?”

Holmes replies: “Do you know, Watson, that is is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject.  You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty.  I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with crime may be committed there.”

You hear country music throughout, even in very grim places, like when the gas station owner is tying her up.  They seem both to be hinting at undiscovered crimes–and here I have Tobe Hooper and the other author in mind (what do they know?)–and to be explicitly pointing to the violent nature of life, as in the description of the  process of slaughtering cattle, which of course was a large industry in Texas.

All living beings, in some ways, depend on the death or use of other living beings.  The smallest fish eat plants, and the larger fish eat them.  Humans are theoretically at the top of the food chain, but countless bacteria within us are always trying to survive and thrive at our expense.

And to the point of this movie, there is a bloodlust that is superior in some ways to the external trappings of our civilization.  Humans can be food for humans.  We can move sideways, and have in many cases.  There were many examples of cannibalism in Napolean’s march on Moscow.

Few thoughts.  It will keep percolating for a while.

From here: http://www.examiner.com/article/fact-check-on-glenn-beck-s-documentary-was-hitler-more-liberal-or-conservative?page=1#comment-15055766

I will add, that it is worth reading the actual NSDAP platform: http://www.hitler.org/writings/programme/

You neglect the obvious fact that Lenin and Mao–ALL Communists in fact–ALSO outlawed labor unions.  Does that make them conservative?

Conservatism has two principle strands: respect for the past–and for coherent moral narratives based upon them–and free markets.  Hitler completely repudiated the moral ethos of the German nation, and under him markets absolutely were not free.  They were much more like the relationship between Barack Obama, Wall Street, and Big Business generally, like GE, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Culturally, National Socialism (I did not see you note that the full name of the Nazi Party was “National Socialist German Worker’s Party; or that its principle constituency was the working and lower middle classes) did invoke the German past.  In that it did not try to completely invalidate every aspect of German culture, it was less radical than Communism; but clearly what it brought was revolutionary, not a part of actual German history.

And again, economically, the only difference between Communism and National Socialism is that in the former all means of production are controlled in ACTUALITY by the State, and in the latter they are only controlled in PRINCIPLE.  In both cases the right to the possession of the results of ones own efforts is non-existent.

I continue to view the efforts of the Positive Money people to educate people in Britain about the nature of our financial system favorably, and continue to view their proposals unfavorably.  Here is a comment I left today on their new website.  What I did not mention is that, as of the last time I read their proposal, the idea was to do gradually something almost identical to the deflationary process that initiated our own Great Depression.  In conditions of high levels of debt, deflation is devastating.  This means, inescapably, and as a simple matter of exercising logic, that any serious solution must first eliminate that debt, which my own proposal does.

The problems described are quite real, but the proposal simply transfers
power from banks to the government.  Whoever has the power to create
money has the power to create wealth from nothing.  Why is this
intrinsically better when done by the government?  Why not anticipate an
expansion of the symbiotic relationship that already exists between Big
Business and Big Government?  Because your panel somehow becomes
ethically superior?  There is no functional difference between banks
creating money for themselves, and money being created by government and
parceled out to chosen corporations.

The logical solution is to
end money creation outright.  This is the ONLY equitable solution, the
only solution that does not recreate a de facto master/slave
relationship.

My proposal to do this is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html