Author: White Whale

I am in constant movement in all parts of my life. It can be maddening and it can be liberating. I can migrate from extreme sensitivity to being more or less callous and back again, and do often.

Some things I read about bother me greatly, but for whatever reason the slayings in Norway have not had much emotional effect on me.

I recently finished listening to Thomas Sowells excellent book “Basic Economics”. IN terms of articulating the virtues of free markets–which we do not have here in this country, by the way–he does an excellent job (although I would quibble with his treatment of monetary policy).

One point he makes is that many economic errors–perhaps most or even all–stem from looking at the effect of a policy on one group, but not on the economy as a whole.

When we protected domestic steel production from foreign competition, it helped that industry, but it also made domestic steel far more expensive that it would have been, here, and thus HARMED other domestic steel-users, like builders and car manufacturers. By most reckonings, the tariffs COST American jobs, even if they were not lost in the steel industry.

Although this likely sounds a bit clinical, this was the metaphor that kept crossing my mind reading about Norway. There are likely 80 black kids killed in the US weekly. There are likely 80 kids that have starved to death weekly for periods of time in North Korea, even in recent years. In the continent of Africa, a multiple of this dies weekly of war, hunger, or diseases that are gone from the industialized West.

I can and often have lamented the extent of preventable human suffering the world over. If you look at Africa, as an example, their pain cannot be understood without the initial efforst of many nations there to implement socialism, with all the economic injustice and stagnation that implies–and the efforts of international “aid” agencies to support such efforts, apparently as a part of their real mission, which is international Fabianism.

Norway has sheltered behind the shield American military power offered them from the ravages of history for more than a half century. Plainly, they are existentially threatened by facilitating their internal cultural subversion by anti-Liberal Muslims; even if, self evidently, reactions like shooting kids are evil, counterproductive, and ultimately amount to little more than the cry of a profoundly weak and self absorbed man for relevance.

If I believe cyanide is poison, and you do not, a reasonable compromise does not consist in diluting it by half and then drinking it.

To quote Bruce Springsteen: “There’s a dark cloud rising on the desert floor
I’ve packed my bags and I’m headed straight through the storm
It’s gonna be a twister that’ll blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground

Blow away, the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away, the dreams that break your heart
Blow away, the lies that leave you nothing but lost and broken hearted.”

As a postscript, I will add that my three favorite albums, taken as wholes, are Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, Tom Waits’ “Heart of Saturday Night”, and Lyle Lovett’s “Joshua, Judges, Ruth”, all for different reasons.

In our identity-starved age, our musical choices in large measure define us, along with our profession and hobbies and perhaps sense of style (my style is invisibility, so I forget it is important to some).

Religion and family used to be primary, but in our optical age–where in large measure our interaction with culture and others is visual and abstract–these things have come into much greater prominence. That they are in many respects shallow is of course problematic. My whole output is related to solving that problem, so I will leave it at that for now.

The net, though, is that we need to stop making things worse. That is step one. “Primere non nocere.”

One cannot help but notice how often “Elvis” is invoked in hipster joints. The recent obvious example for me was visiting the original Chuy’s down in Austin. Elvis is almost invoked as a sort of patron saint of coolness in dens of irony, the places where all the women are covered in tattoos and the men effeminate; where traditional cultural standards are upended and eroded.

In my view, as I think about it, this is the whole zombie thing again. Elvis died a miserable death–on a toilet, as a result in my understanding of drug-related constipation. He took several flights of drug cocktails nightly. He take his first “attack”, as I believe he called it, then eat fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches until he passed out. This would keep him asleep a couple hours, then he would do it again. Despite his good looks and talent, he was decaying from within.

A zombie is a human being without firm form, without direction, who is lost. It seems to me that Islamic extremism in one respect has to be seen as the interaction of historical jihad with Leftist sociopathy–the reduction of human beings to talentless lumps of expendable clay.

At the same time, all so-called “Fundamentalisms” have to be seen as efforts to avoid being turned into zombies, shiny and smiley on the outside, but stitched together in an unstable way on the inside, with staples, rings and tattoos.

The pessimist sees a glass half empty; the optimist, a glass half full. Someone who can see, however, sees 4 ounces of water, and a method of storing that water, of containing and giving form to that water, without comment.

Water is present, and there is little need to measure air. The size of glass itself is irrelevant, to the extent that it is sufficiently large to accomplish its storage task. An aquifer might be 90% empty, but able to provide for a city.

It is my own species of “optimism” to try and reliably see what recources ARE available. It is little use to imagine the endless infinity of things which are NOT present before us. Rather, an acceptable use of imagination is to see the endless things which can be done with what we have.

I had to solve a physical problem the other day. I “knew” what the range of possibliities was, and failed repeatedly (note, this is different than the last such problem I mentioned a bit back). I persisted, and the problem was something that was not supposed to be possible. I had never heard of it happening to anyone, and only isolated it by removing every other possibility. “Once you eliminate the impossible, what remains–however improbable–must be the truth.”

So often we go through life thinking we know what the range of the possible is, when in reality the only means we have of testing such theories is to compare them to the general atmosphere around us, to see if anyone else shares our views. They always have roughly the same inputs you do, and if they reach different conclusions, that does not mean you were wrong. It is quite possible to be the only correct person in the room.

To my mind, this is the value of periodically considering various conspiracy theories. Sirhan Sirhan was brainwashed. The pyramids are 20,000 years old. The plains of Nazca were alien landing strips. Jack the Ripper was a freemason. Christ married and had children.

Quick progress in perception happens when you substitute a better paradigm than the old one. The practical effects of Newtonian physics and General Relativity are quite similar, but the nets that can be cast by taking the latter seriously are much wider. Why else would we have suspected light bent in gravitational fields, or that atomic energy was possible?

This basic premise operates equally in all areas of life. You can “reparadigmatize” people, cultures, or small physical problems right in front of you. If, as Einstein said, “imagation is more important than intelligence”, it is because it grants you the ability to see–through new eyes–what you have never seen before.

When I was in my late teens I had this very romantic notion of what went on at universities. There was this authenticity and happiness and “learningness”–if I might be permitted indulgence in my neologistic hobby–that went on. Kids were free and they did and said cool things and listened to cool music. There was this vibe of being different than the dull mundane sameness of suburbia. All my problems were going to vanish.

I was a profoundly stupid kid. I say this with absolute sincerity and painfully clinical precision.

But water rolls downhill, does it not? Clouds that are full rain, and in the right conditions seeds will always grow. I was at that age who I had to be.

I went to good schools. I majored in the quirky sorts of things that normally get you locked up in a coffee shop or bookstore somewhere. This was not wasted time, but it was time spent finding what was NOT a pathway forward.

The path of the intellectual–the thought esthete–is not one of emotional skill, social productivity, or anything but self absorbed narcissism which protects against the ravages and conscious awareness of sheer uselessness.

These people litter average cities. They litter universities. They float like seeds on the wind, but they never flower. Theirs is a self important flatulence that to the extent it has an effect makes things worse.

I no longer have positive feelings about universities. I admire the productive parts, but view the rest as worse than useless.

If the task of the Liberal Arts is teaching self government in both the personal and national sense, then they are failing. This is incompetence, and it is precisely the utter futility of calling someone in one of these places incompetent who hews to the proper ideology such a name that makes the whole thing stink.

I don’t “long” any more. I seek understanding–actionable understanding–that when applied should lead to useful outcomes. I am quite prepared to alter my views and processes if and when it should be necessary.

It’s strange: I will at times feel utter clarity on things, then when I try to type it, it gets fuzzy. Words really are poor tools, but they are all we have in most times and places. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I think mainly in words. I see/feel things, then describe them, always with a loss.

The salient point I wanted to make about the murders in Norway this past week is that I think it would be worth creating a continuum between those who believe in collective guilt, and those who believe in individualism.

Necessarily, if one says it is “societies” fault that person X is failing, then society is culpable. If a crime has been committed, then society commited the crime. The point people miss is that this does not in the slightest diminish the importance of the crime, or the horror with which certain people view the “crime”, so much as relocate the locus of blame and following anger and hate from the actual person, to an amorphous entity created in the abstract, but “collected” in the real world.

In a properly developed Leftist collective, to be accused is to be guilty. To believe otherwise would be to imply the collective were capable of error. Needless to say, you do not give your heart, mind and body to an error-prone entity, so it is much easier to reconcile the punishment of the innocent with justice, than to extricate oneself from a cocoon which protects you from anomie.

What this fellow did was no different in principle than Bill Ayers attacking American soldiers, who at Fort Dix were no doubt in large measure drafted. To be clear, it was incompetence–not a lack of malignancy–which prevented that bombing from being the most serious and deadly in American history.

This was no different in principle from Hitler singling out the Jews, or Lenin the “bourgeoisie”, or Pol Pot and his sociopathic children the “intellectuals.”

In all cases, generalized abstractions were applied to concrete individuals. Have there been examples of greedy Jewish bankers? Of course. There have also been greedy German bankers, and greedy Indian bankers. Are most Jews guilty of anything? Of course not.

Were the “bourgeoisie” guilty of crimes against the people? Some, perhaps, particularly noblemen who took their estates by force at some point in remote history. But the factory owner, or windmill owner, or successful merchant? People like that CREATE wealth. The factory owner employs people. The windmill owner likewise. Both produce products needed by “the people”. The merchant helps create markets for them and others, helping build the general economy.

Yet scenes reminiscent of Kristallnacht happened over and over in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik victory. Homes were broken in to by the Cheka, the men shot, the women raped, and everything that moved taken away. Some of the women they even consolidated in brothels, where they would have vodka and cocaine parties.

This guy in Norway, whatever his name was, saw these children as abstractions. They were not real to him. They were guilty because of their membership in some group. Admittedly, they were likely all leftists.

But first and foremost, they were human beings. You convince human beings. You channel your anger into coherence and understanding. That is what I do. The madder I get, the harder I think, and more work I put into educating myself.

Self evidently, what B. did will be counterproductive to conservatism generally. We already face a foe with a prodigious capacity for propaganda and deception. This makes me angry. But see above: the proper reaction is to think, understand, and then educate others. We cannot beat them with raw power. Their system is predicated on power, and they know how to aggregate it. If we aggregate it for them, the momentum will soon enough slip into any form of human government but that of liberal democracy, the rule of law, and political freedom.

I found it interesting if unsurprising that he was a Dexter fan. I have posted on this before. It is a recurring topic for me, but here is one of my longer treatments of that show and media violence in general: https://moderatesunitedblog.com//2010/09/dexter-murder-and-mass-media_23.html

I think this question that I asked there is a good one: “are you starting with the desire for justice, or the desire to harm others, and a need to justify it”?

Ted Kazynski (close) was a bright guy. He was not obviously psychopathic. I have no doubt he could hold a close to normal conversation with most people. Yet something was so separated from other human beings that he could and did treat them as interchangeable objects.

Tonight I watched two typical kids of middle to upper middle class backgrounds park their parent’s Volvo or something similar, and come in to the sushi bar I was at. One of them had a T-shirt on it that said “I require to be immersed fully in human waste”. Not so pleasant an image for a restaurant. Sade, of course, has many images like that, which I personally have not chosen to inflict on anyone in any of my writings.

I looked at them. The thought that occurred to me is that anyone who would consciously choose to put objectionable images in other people’s minds–to attack them qualitatively–is someone lacking both empathy, and the capacity for innocent happiness.

Watch kids interacting with their telephones and computers. They are interacting with people via the medium of objects. There is something different between the physical presence of someone, and their text messages. Yet this causes or facilitates some of the zombie behavior–the living death of lacking the capacity for genuine pleasure.

Again, this Norwegian grew up in what was obviously a reasonably well balanced home. His radicalization happened within the context of playing violent video games–many modelled on training software developed by the military to desensitive soldiers to killing–and watching shows like Dexter, which don’t just glorify violence, but also an incapacity for human feeling, and following taste for the darker “pleasure” of sadism. This is the metaphor of the vampire, who is dead, but keeps moving by literally sucking the life out of others.

As I think about it, perhaps the best comparison is that of Columbine. Rich kids, saturated in both violence and self pity, treating the world as a unified whole, and their own freedom of action as a curse.

Few thoughts. I had more, but I am tired.

Few points:

1) Our national debt is set to increase some $7 trillion over the next ten years. Most of the media talk of “cuts” has to do with decreasing the amount we go into debt, not actually decreasing our debt. Nobody has done that successfully since FDR initiated our spending orgy, which has sped up and slowed down periodically in the years since. Clinton just balanced the annual budget, without making a dent in the underlying debt, and despite promises to the contrary anyone with a pulse and a positive IQ knew would be broken, Obama has of course initiated very consciously destructive massive spending, and put in place massive tax increases to be instituted after the 2012 election. This is what deceiving nihilists do: they put their little time bombs in places nobody can see them, right away.

Thus, in my understanding, an increase of “merely” $3 trillion constitutes, in an Obamaworld Republicans are largely letting him get away with, a “cut” of $4 trillion. This is farcical. Even conservative radio hosts seem unable to grasp this point.

2) The top 1% of taxpayers pay more than the bottom 95% of Americans. The top 10% of income earners pay something on the order of 60% of all taxes, and the bottom 40% or so only pay the regressive 15.2% or so taxes used to fund current Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security benefits, which most of them will never receive. They pay no income tax at all.

3) Corporations are always double taxes. The entity itself is taxed, which makes it harder for it to create jobs, since that is money that cannot be invested in expansion. It is, on the contrary, given to unionized Federal employees, many of whom view it as their job to make business as hard as possible.

Secondly, the employees are taxed, from the CEO to the janitor. As mentioned, the janitor pays no income tax, but has, in effect, to bear the full 15.2% (I think that is right: I am adding direct contributions to what the company pays; I believe it is 6.2% of earnings for SSA, and 2.9% for Medicare/Medicaid; I don’t know what Unemployment is, but it is likely added on to that–that is a topic for another day). The CEO is taxed on his income, and everything he buys, from homes to yachts, to watches to cars.

Thus only fools argue that any corporation pays no taxes, or that reducing tax rates somehow constitutes “corporate welfare”. Welfare is when you take something from one person by force of law, and give it to someone else. What is happened with corporations is that less is being taken directly in corporate taxation, which enables business growth, and following increases in income and other taxes.

4) We pay interest on the national debt. I see different numbers, but is currently somewhere between about $250 billion and $400 trillion. Certainties are that it is going up, and that at some point the sheer size of our debt will create questions about our ability to pay, and following increases in the rate we pay to get people to finance that debt. Currently, Bernanke’s Quantitative Easing–money printing, which is gifted to member banks in the Federal Reserve System that Americans can neither control nor even monitor effectively–is what is keeping these interest rates down. We could at some point be paying a trillion in interest alone.

Since he is a liar, Obama in my understanding does not even factor interest in to his purported cuts; neither the present interest, nor any projections on what future interest is likely to be, particularly given the likelihood at some point of a downgrade.

5) There is no amount of taxation on the rich that can pay for this. They already pay a disproportionately high amount, and history is abundant evidence that increases in nominal tax rates on the “rich” do not necessarily lead to increases in actual income. Foolish people assume that the rich simply hand their money over willingly. They don’t: they move their money into tax free bonds, move it offshore, or simply leave it in the bank or gold, none of which are economically productive. Capital gains, which ignorant people want to call unearned income, is always the result of some productive economic activity, which normally consists in providing capital for some job-producing activity, whether building a house, or expanding production in something.

We could literally confiscate the combined wealth of the richest 10% of Americans, and I don’t think would pay our bills for more than a year, and the effects would lead to us turning into Cuba in short order: totalitarian, utterly impoverished, and utterly bereft of any valid reason for hope.

I have endured far more than my fair share of hate on the internet, for the simple reason that in large measure I sought it out. I spent years “debating” people who more than likely wanted me dead, because I found it useful. It is useful because when you get angry, at least in my case, it heightens my focus and enables all sorts of new perceptions to occur that would not have happened if people had not been doing their best to wound me emotionally. On balance, that whole process was useful, even if I’ve transcended it, in large measure.

One thing that one immediately notices on almost all message boards the internet over, though, is emotional shallowness and lack of empathy, which of course are traits indicative of retarded emotional intelligence.

It seems to me that people express their real selves behind pseudonyms, so these boards are, I think somewhat useful in cultural analysis. Clearly, it is a certain type of person who spends all day in front of a computer, whose social contacts are primarily virtual, and who feels the need to foster group cohesion by denigrating other people whose only crime is difference and perhaps awkwardness. We read regularly about kids whose lives are torn apart by Facebook or Twitter or other aggression.

Kids that are out shooting hoops and bussing tables are not, in general, the problem.

If we generalize, humanity has spent most of its history in warfare. In most cultures for most of the time, men more or less owned their women and could hit them or their children any time they pleased. Violence has characterized our past, and it should come as no surprise that it is seen on the internet.

At the same time, it is hard not to imagine that something has been lost in our age, when children don’t HAVE to socialize, and can instead spend endless hours “playing” with interactive but more or less imaginary friends. Apparently kids that play “World of Warcraft” often play it 30-40 a week or more. Their social universe is in effect abstract, and this leads, in my view, to emotional and social retardation. The image I have is bread that is baked before it has risen properly. It is just too thick in the middle.

It is of course easy to picture the “good old days”, which I suspect were much tougher for most people than we are able to imagine. At the same time, the one concrete metric I would suggest might shed some light is our shared fondness for poetry. Virtually all cultures for all of history have had their epic stories, that made men and women rejoice and cry as the fortunes of their heroes waxed and waned. One can readily imagine a storyteller by a campfire reciting Gilgamesh 3,000 years ago, to an audience that knew the story well, but wanted always to hear it one more time.

We have lost that. We have, in large measure, lost Shakespeare, and Keats, and all the emotional “tuning” that such imaginative and evocative writing enables. We calibrate as machines, and machines are not sensitive or empathetic. They understand software algorithyms–they understand conformity to behavioral and emotive standards, normally based on shared aggression and a bestial sense of humor–but not what it means to truly see other people. They can’t see themselves. They are not developed. Why would they see others?

This is a cultural problem whose extent I find impossible to diagnose. I am simply describing it for now.

Posted this quote and commentary in a couple places after the publicized tiff with QVC. What people need to grasp is that Jane Fonda commited treason, which for this purpose is defined as “adhering to their [note the plural of the United States] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”. Posing with AA guns which could and did kill American pilots, and helping the NVA propaganda effort clearly qualify. 100 years before that she would have been shot or hung, no questions asked, and none needed. Her public statements and publicity photos said it all. Likewise, Bill Ayers would and should have been hung from a tall oak tree, rather than spending a career researching the indoctrination of children.

From Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War”: “[NVA Colonel] Bui Tin testified to the importance the North Vietnamese attached to the antiwar movement in the United States. ‘It was essential to our strategy’, said Tin. ‘Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9am to follow the growth of the American anti-war movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former attorney general Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that WE SHOULD HOLD ON IN THE FACE OF BATTLEFIELD REVERSES [emphasis mine]. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.”

The NVA agrees that she was a key war asset, FOR THEM. She should have been shot as a traitor. I am dead serious about that. Some 58,000 brave Americans, and many times that in Vietnamese died in that war.

I will add, that I have a listing of NVA atrocities, and some context, here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page21.html

The plain and unpleasant reality is that this woman helped facilitate mass torture, murder, and unimaginable misery for millions. This treatment is excessively kind.

There is no such thing as a right. If there were, then people could not violate them. The Muslim crudaders would not have been able to rape and enslave infidel men and women in their imperialistic expansionary period. The Scandinavian raiders would not have been able to rape and take as slaves for sale large sections of Europe. Dublin, Ireland, was in my understanding founded as a center for the slave trade.

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued (in my understanding, based on having read several internet pages devoted to him and the book “Wittgenstein’s Poker”) that non-empirical arguments are intrinsically either tautological or nonsensical.

If you define a right as “that which exists the way I conceive it”, then what you have said is that a right is equal to a “right”. The abstract ideal is equal to the word, which is equal to nothing empirically, and thus necessarily solipsistic, and meaningless in a social context.

When Jefferson modified Locke slightly in stipulating “self evident” rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, he was describing ideals, and not realities.

What he was REALLY saying is that in his considered view human felicity would more naturally flow from social and political orders oriented around those principles. He was quite right in this.

But we need to be careful with this word “right”, in how we use it. If we fail to see that these rights are stipulated in such a way that measurable effects can flow from them, then they become tools for tyranny. We can measure the effects of the ideals Jefferson offered us. In the last two hundred years we have grown steadily in the freedoms offered to American citizens, have grown in prosperity and power, and have done so, with a large 4 year interruption, in conditions of peace.

The “right” to income equality and other such rights no more exist that “rights” to life liberty or property. What we must look to is what empirically verifiable effects they “work to”, in the Hayekian sense.

Have to run. That will have to do.