Author: White Whale

Nationalism has often served the cause of Communism; Communism has never served the cause of nationalism, to my awareness. You are either a Communist or a nationalist. You cannot be both.

A good example is Ho Chi Minh, which of course was the name he adopted when he became a Communist in the early 1920’s/late 19-teens.

Stupid people sometimes argue that he had to compromise with the Soviets/Chinese, after the Americans let him down. The reality is that he joined the Communist International in the early 20’s, and spent the decade trying to further the Communist cause in Asia. He spent most of the 30’s in the Soviet Union with Stalin, and he had dozens of political rivals executed in the 1940’s. In the 1950’s, when he got control of North Vietnam, he had at least 10,000 people executed as “bourgeoisie”. His close followers, in their memoirs, are very clear that he never deviated from his desire to implement Communism in both North and South Vietnam. He pretended temporarily to put Communism aside, but several hundred people knew then, and wrote later, that that was a ruse.

It makes me angry that people would argue even for a moment that he was ever anything but a red fascist. It is not possible to be well meaning and make this argument. It is not possible to be diligent and make this mistake. I conclude that those who do make this argument are themselves fascist apologists.

I will add that there are many ways for elites to take power.

Communism can use the hatred of foreign imperialism to hand power to a fascist elite.

Socialists can use the hatred of the “rich” to hand power to a fascist elite.

Environmentalists can use the fear of environmental disaster to hand power to a fascist elite.

Militarists can use the rage and energy of war to hand power to a fascist elite.

America, by design, discourages the formation of elites. We distrust them culturally, and our system of government–when operated properly, as it has not been for some years–makes it hard for any one group to gain too much power by any means. This is all too the good, since history is replete with examples of those who can taking what they want.

I’ll have more to say about Vietnam after a while, but the net is that is now nothing more than the same corrupt, nepotistic regime it was before, except that the elite has more power than it did under Diem or Thieu. Things are much worse, which was an utterly predictable outcome.

The more I live, the more I hate intellectuals. They have caused so much unnecessary pain, and they never accept responsibility.

Here is a lot of useful information.

What you will note is that in 2008 some $1 trillion was paid in income taxes. Of this, the top 1% (some 1.5 million tax returns) paid nearly $400 billion, and the bottom 50% (nearly 70 million tax returns) paid not quite $30 billion.

The top 5% paid 60% of the income taxes.

Self evidently, our tax system is progressive. Self evidently, the rich pay most of the taxes. I get sick and tired of the demogoguing on this issue by stupid socialists. You know what happens when you radically increase the taxes on the top income brackets? Do you? You do know it has been tried, correct?

What happens is they start hiding income, move it to another country, or move it to non-tax revenue producing assets, like tax exempt bonds.

Back in the 20’s self made millionaire Andrew Mellon said that 25% was about the most you could realistically expect to get sustainably, but if that was all you asked, most rich people would willingly pay it, as that was less exhausting than trying to hide or move their income.

Consider this: By 1926 65% of the income tax revenue came from incomes $300,000 and higher, when five years prior, less than 20% did. During this same period, the overall tax burden on those that earned less than $10,000 dropped from $155 million to $32.5 million.

What are we to make of this? To my mind, the self evident conclusion is that low rates at the top of the income tax bracket is, paradoxically, conducive to TAX CUTS for the poorest Americans.

Fact one: our government needs revenue.

Fact two: when top income tax rates are too high, the taxes don’t get paid. This is not a question of morality, but empirical fact.

Fact three: if the money doesn’t come from the rich, and the government insists on spending the same amount of money, then logically it comes from everyone else.

Conclusion: if we want to decrease the tax burden on the economically less well-off, we need to avoid punitive taxation of the wealthy. 25% continues to seem like a good number.

I will add that socialism is a poorly considered moral creed consisting in resentment and aggression towards the rich. Liberalism–my creed–consists in actually caring about the poor.

Anyone who thinks Obama cares about the poor is smoking the good stuff. None of these socialists do. They like feeling high and mighty, and they like throwing their weight around. If you want to see economic ruination, though, just go look and see where they have been.

I offer Detroit and Washington, D.C. as Exhibits A and B.

I offer Britain as Exhibit C, and Greece as Exhibit D.

I offer China as Exhibit E (no national healthcare, by the way), and Cuba as Exhibit F.

History is irrefutable. Socialism is not a historical or economic doctrine. It is the creed of petulant and self-important fools, with neither common sense nor common decency.

Is “possessed of a sociopathic, aggressive personality disorder” the same as saying “evil”? Is it more descriptive? Does it contain more information?

No, I don’t think it does. Where psychology wants to tame the wild social world by labeling it, I want to PARTICIPATE in it–not stand outside it–by interacting with it.

Maybe evil people have certain genes. Maybe they have suffered certain head traumas (as have many serial killers). Maybe they had lousy childhoods.

Yet in the end they still CHOOSE to do what they do. Cruel people choose not only to enjoy cruelty, but to consciously engage in it. They don’t fight it.

Implicit within psychological narratives–their own propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding–is a certain givenness, a certain fatalism.

Within moral narratives, there is the space for choice, and action. This creates more room for movement, and movement is necessary for change.

We have to judge ourselves. This can include forgoing judgement for numbness, but out it will, sooner or later. Moralism is the process of reconciling our self image with our decision patterns. Psychologism, without moralism, is the process of rationalizing what already is.

These are some broad thoughts I will expand on later.

Edit: I have too much else floating around my brain. I want simply to add: where is the concept of Goodness in psychology? In what would it consist? Altruism? What are the categories from which it is built, if not moral categories?

In my view, psychology–a true psychology, of the sort James tried to build (in my understanding)–is necessarily moral first, and descriptive secondarily. I won’t expand on that for now.

I was thinking about monuments. What are our monuments to, in Washington? We have the Washington monument, dedicated to one of the most scrupulous and talented leaders the world has ever known. We quite easily could have been ruled by a dictator.

The Lincoln Memorial remembers, too, one of the most talented and principled leaders any nation has ever known. He was a passionate abolitionist, but considered the principles of our Constitution and the necessity of preserving the Union to be paramount. He negotiated as well as was possible the most terrible time our nation has ever known. One can question his wisdom, but not his humanity and deep-seated desire to do what was right.

The Vietnam and Korean War memorials remember wars we fought overseas for other nations, to protect their freedom, and to position the powers of democracy favorable relative to the Communist authoritarians who wanted to end freedom on the planet Earth.

World War 2 memorial remembers another war we fought overseas, which resulted in the liberation of large sections of East Asia, the protection of Australia and New Zealand, and the liberation of Europe. Other people started the War. We finished it.

Jefferson Memorial. He was a complicated man, but no one can doubt that even though he may have been weak as an individual-really, a man of his times and his place–that he articulated some of the most noble ideals ever uttered by anyone.

Contrast this with the Arc De Triomphe. It remembers a dictator who made war on Europe for over a decade, killing millions. He was the heir to a revolution in which they tried to kill religion, and succeeded in murdering ten’s of thousands of people solely based on accidents of birth, political misfortune, and chance.

The Eiffel Tower was erected on the 100th anniversay of that same revolution, which created the template for Communist totalitarianism.

If you look at Rome, you see everywhere symbols of either Catholic tyranny, or Roman tyranny. The Coliseum saw the public murder of many people. St. Peter’s has presided over the execution of many heretics.

Look at Greece. The Athenians were imperialists. They conquered large sections of the Mediterrean, including parts of Turkey, Sicily and other places. The Parthenon itself, as I recall, was built in a time of war with somebody. Might have been the Peloponnesian War.

I don’t have the time and patience to be exhaustive, but will say simply that almost all nations commemorate empires. The Kremlin. Tiananmen Square. Angkor Wat.

The people we commemorate were decent human beings. The wars we have fought have by and large been for other nations. The Spanish-American War was fought in no small measure because of the repressions of the Spanish.

We have not been saints, by any means, but I do see a sincere effort to remember times of genuine generosity and nobility of spirit. Our best is better than the best of most other nations in history.

Yes, I know these are self labelled, but it’s my blog, right?

“If you never try, you fail seldom, but succeed never.”

I came up with that in response to a post on a board in a business where I was working that said: “Fail often and succeed sooner”, which I liked. Under that, it said something like “if you don’t do your best, you shortchange others; and if they don’t do their best they shortchange you.” That wasn’t it, but that was the sentiment.

While doing my work, I got to thinking about the Greeks. What is their equivalent? “Do as little as possible, and have as much fun as you can every day?” “Soak everybody else”. “Screw work”. Whether expressed or not verbally, that is the sentiment they have expressed politically, as have many other nations in Europe, who cannot even be bothered to reproduce to continue the viability of their nations. Everything, they seem to believe, stops with them. Hard to worry about your grandchildren if you don’t ever have any children.

Americans work hard. No one can deny us that. We work as hard as the Japanese or Chinese. I know plenty of people who work 60 hour weeks. I’ve done it myself many, many times, and more.

People who work hard will always do well, especially if they also work smart. So much of the world wants to take a two hour nap every day and leave at 5pm, and still live as well as people who take 30 minutes for lunch and work until 8pm. That is patent injustice. Reward the workers, and ignore those who don’t work. That is a viable motto for continued prosperity.

Why is there no Hitlerplatz in Berlin? Why is there no monument (I assume) to the rise of the National Socialist Party? Simple: they are understood to have been moral monstrosities, unworthy of commemoration by sober, well meaning people.

Yet what is the Arc de Triomphe? It is a commemoration of what we in modern terms would term fascist wars of aggression, in which millions of innocent people died.

Napoleon used his wars in no small measure to fill a depleted treasury. He encouraged his men to very literally rape and pillage. They would burst into a home in a conquered nation, shoot the men, rape the women, and carry them with them on the campaign, until they got tired of them, and left them to starve. No doubt many were killed. Certainly, Napoleon didn’t care.

And yet this monstrosity, and the Terror which proceded, is fundamental to modern French culture. It is no wonder they cultivate so assiduously the inability to think, which I would term “unilateral intellectual disarmament”: it is necessary to continue to believe that Hitler and Napoleon were different at all.

Yet, Hitler had “scientific” views, based on Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest, which Napoleon did not have. But who could argue that their fundamental self-seeking and need for blood and conquest were any different?

So much of history is bullshit. The same people who continue to see Napoleon as somehow great continue to see our successful efforts to bring peace to a continent– then support it globally–as somehow iniquitous.

If you think about it, the Germans were the very last ones to wage wars of aggression on their neighbors. Yet, those are the only ones we remember.

Why do they speak French in France? Because of us.

The foundational moral problem with the French is they have a shithole at the very center of the city, and they light it up with spotlights every night, as if millions of uselessly dead corpses and countless ruined, miserable lives was somehow a success, and that more of the same would be anything but a waste of human life and energy.

And the stink radiates. One can only hope reason descends for the first time on the City of Night some day.

Here is one exercise I came up with: consciously visualize greater success for people of whom you are jealous. Generalize it to everyone, but in detail. Think of specific people, and pray for them (or wish them well, in whatever manner is consistent with your own ideas on reality).

For me, sometimes, I wish I were a big wheel. I wish I had the M.D., the house, the car, the beautiful wife, and the 2.2 beaming, successful kids to sit around the Christmas tree with and sip some fine wine that I can afford because, hell, I’m a doctor.

This is nice enough, and someday something close to it may come to pass, but the simple reality is that I am who I am mainly because of decisions I’ve made or not made, and in a very small part because of the luck (good and bad) that happens to all of us.

I sometimes comfort myself with the patent fact that many “rich” people aren’t happy. A brother of a friend used to make $5 million or more every year. Now he complains that it’s less than a million. He has to sell one of his $5 million homes. His wife is fat, and he is in a bad mood most of the time. He drinks a LOT.

Or take the patent fact that a lot of bed hopping happens in a lot of ritzier neighborhoods (hell, everywhere). There are a lot of unhappy marriages, broken homes, and traumatized kids. Part of the price of large success is very hard work, which often leads to alienation from your family.

So one can do that analysis. I have done it. But what are you really doing? Bringing them down to your level. Well, I have this problem and that, but so do they, so they are just as unhappy as I am. As gratifying as this may be, it is not actually satisfying. It’s a form of Schadenfreude, which is just an amelioration of misery, not a positive good.

Sunlight is infinite (pedants let that go), and so is our ability to accomodate ourselves happily through creation with the outward circumstances of our lives. Plainly, some lives would be virtually impossible to live happily–say that of a poor, hungry, abused woman–but you can always live more happily if you choose to seek it. As I believe Abraham Lincoln put it “most men are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

And this starts with being supportive of the happiness of others.

So find that guy with the Porsche and hot girlfriend, or that woman with a great man, unlimited allowance and beautiful kids (or fantastic career, take your pick), and imagine them being happier.

Say the man is overworked. Imagine/pray for him to have more energy, a more positive attitude, and for the relationship he has with his family to strengthen. See them all smiling and being happy. See him getting promoted. See him having a wonderful vacation skiing with his wife and kids. See them getting old gracefully together.

Imagine that woman finding the perfect outfit, and absolutely beaming when she gets to wear it out. Be happy for her, ESPECIALLY if you don’t like her and are jealous. [Note: I am indulging in some stereotypes. Like most stereotypes, this one has some validity, in my observation]. Imagine her children getting awards and being successful. Imagine her dealing well with the daily stresses of home life. Imagine her, too, growing old happily with her man, who dotes on her and is perfectly faithful.

Or imagine that independent strong woman you always wanted to be rising to be CEO or Partner, or whatever the pinnacle of her career might be. Imagine her finding a man who is willing to share all that with her–if that’s what she wants, and I think most women do. Imagine her taking daring, exciting vacations all around the world, having a ball volunteering in Africa, or South America, windsurfing, sunbathing. Imagine her growing old gracefully, and contented with the outcome of her life.

It seems to me as you go through this process, you create more space for yourself. You don’t have to play defense.

I think quite often when we are jealous of others, absent a strongly competitive spirit, we unconsciously try less hard. You think, “they are successful because they are like THAT”. I didn’t get that. I’m not like that. My parents/school/life never taught me that.

In other words, in the process of justifying your own relatively lesser success, you create a self fulfilling prophecy, in which you try less hard because of some supposed ontological, innate disposition you don’t have, rather than because you simply have not made a decision to succeed.

And in visualizing the success of others, you create a template for yourself. Why not want a world in which everyone is happy and thriving? As I have said before, if things get too easy, we can always create problems for ourselves.

As things stand, though, I see kids emulating vampires and zombies, not creatures of light. Something is very messed up in our society, and I think it is what I have called at times our “Resentment Transmutation Mechanism”, aka “Meaning System”.

This is the reason you are happy when odds say you should be sad. It is the reason you succeed when odds say you should fail. It’s the sun and the rain, and the fertile earch in which you plant your seeds to grow.

That’s what I am trying to create here, for both you and me: a better way to live.

I have a quote on my refrigerator that I (obviously) like: “Happiness come more from loving than being loved; and often when our affection seems wounded, it is only our vanity bleeding. To love, and to be hurt often, and to love again–this is the brave and happy life.” J.E. Buchrose. I have no idea who that is. It was in one of my planners, and I cut it out.

This seems true to me. I think all of us have this well of enthusiasm and affection in us, which wants to get out. Given that we all have it, all of us would be giving to each other all the time, if there were no blocks to it. And yet manifestly we live in a world where indifference to others is common, and cruelty not as uncommon as we would like it to be, and apparent fascination with sadism growing.

I have commented on this often, but the destruction of our shared culture has been proceeding apace for some time: through violent media (which reduce interpersonal trust, and foster cynicism and even depression); less face time with one due another due to the alternative of the virtual presence of other virtual human beings; and attacks by socialists on all subjects of sentimental attachment, like “God” (however we individually conceive of him/her/it), patriotism, our history, our identity, marriage itself, and even shared rituals like Christmas.

Home is where we come from. Home is where you leave from. Home is the energy from which you create yourself, and explode into the world.

What if you have no home, in the most general possible use of the word? What if you inherit no creed? What if you reject the teachings of your parents and community? What if you reject your history, and your traditions, and your rituals? What if nobody ever even tries to teach any of these things to you, and just lets the TV be your parent and guardian, as happens often enough?

You never know who you are, and you never know who other people are. This makes the process of community building much, much more difficult. If you look at many inner cities, there functionally IS no community. That is the role that gangs play, and a vitally useful social role this no doubt is for many confused kids.

But even in the suburbs, who are you? You exist in an air conditioned home, with plenty of food (much of it processed beyond recognition), and shop and strip malls. Maybe you go to Abercrombie and Fitch, and for a time think sex is going to solve all your existential problems. Then it doesn’t. To the extent it was what you hoped it would be, it is so through the eyes of your jealous friends (in most cases: no doubt “true love” continues to occur). If you’re a guy, you get your rocks off, then she suddenly seems less interesting. If you’re a girl, you’re hoping to get affection and esteem by giving yourself up, but you are almost always disappointed, and in many cases destined for future cynicism.

These are obviously recurring themes for me. Yet I think they are recurring themes for radicals too, who reject the banality they have known for a political zero-sum racket which on some level they KNOW will lead to general suffering, even for them.

You have to have a reason to suffer. Love is as good a one as you can find, but historically this has often been achieved through rigid social codes.

Think about this, though: is an Untouchable at the bottom of the Hindu caste system worse off than a person who regularly contemplates suicide because life has no meaning for them? The children of wealth and privilege kill themselves regularly.

No doubt the life of what Gandhi called “Harijans” were (and are, if they still exist, as they likely do in muted form in rural India) difficult, but most of the misery that matters happens between your ears.

In my view, the person who is racked with confusion and self pity is worse off than a person who knows who they “are”, and what his or her role is in the world.

To be clear, I am not advocating a return to feudal hierarchies. We have evolved, in my view, past the need for such things, if we will just rationally take stock in what we have.

We have the ability to create ourselves. So does everyone else. And if the most important source of happiness is loving, then freedom gives us the greatest capacity for choosing our own passions.

As I see it, we don’t just love people. We can love activities, or ideas, or places. The more places you can direct your love innocently, the happier you will be.

I don’t think it is overstating the case to say that some people are married to their careers. If it is something they genuinely love, then it satisfies the need in them to give generously and spontaneously.

So often we think we need to get love to give love. Mathematically, if we have a Keynesian style Demand failure–if the loving process doesn’t get started properly, or declines–then we are stuck with a world full of selfish, unloving, and unloved people. That is stupid. And it gets the causation error backwards in my view.

The need to love is primary, but we have somehow convinced ourselves that the need to BE loved is primary. This is a beautiful setup for the generalized pity party that characterizes so much of our nation and wider world today.

It need not be so.

I would differentiate the two. If you are not happy, it is not necessarily the case that you are feeling sorry for yourself. When you take emotional risks, and lose, there are consequences. Maybe the great can handle such things quickly and efficiently, but I think most normal people–everyone I know–has to go through a period of mourning/suffering, and it is not always possible to fully recover from a trust that has been deeply betrayed.

Just as some physical wounds leave scars that never fully disappear–and some that never fully stop hurting–so too does emotional trauma leave a mark. The mark is left in the patterns of emotional life: how trusting you are, how open, how enthusiastic, how willing to take risks. You have new decisions to make, and you change from one set of default assumptions to another.

Within my own world view, this does not become a sin until you start to become angry at other people for your condition. At that point, however, pain becomes self pity, and self pity is the foundation of resentment, which leads to chronic anger, hate, isolation, then aggression, and following rationalization.

We live in a culture of resentment, and that is why we see large skulls on large swathes of our popular culture, from t-shirts, to boots, to hats, to book covers. It is part of the reason why the horror section is so full in your local Blockbuster.

America has always been a nation whose people were inventing and reinventing their common culture, in response to constant change. Yet, historically we had at least a common appeal to Christianity, which itself–in direct and unmistakeable contradistinction to the can(n)ons of Socialism–gave voice to sentiments such as forgiveness, love and faith, and which countered the natural human urge to resent others. This appeal has been under attack for some time, and the doctrine with which we are supposed to replace it is one of constant anger.

You cannot build a nation worth living in from that basis.

I was thinking about a creative use of the Fed this morning. Not sure if I came up with this term–it seems too obvious not to have been thought of by someone–but I can’t consciously trace where I may have read it.

In the 20’s, Wall Street was largely unregulated. Groups of super-rich could and would, as a matter of historical record (I saw this on the History Channel, so it must be true), get together and pick a stock, any stock. They would buy up large amounts of it. The fundamentals didn’t really matter, although good lies are always more plausible than bad ones. They would literally pay someone at the New York Times or whatever other rags there were back then to start writing positive stories about that stock, such that excitement was generated. Other people would start buying it, so the price went up. At a certain point, they would send in their Sell notices, and pocket in some cases millions over the course of weeks. Obviously, you can’t do it weekly, or people wise up, but this was definitely something that happened more than once.

Now, let’s involve the Fed in this. I own a very nice top hat, gloves, tuxedo, have a chauffeur, a valet, and smoke expensive cigars. I instruct my bank to buy up a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds at prevailing prices.

As it so happens, I also sit on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Frankly, this could be in the 20’s, or it could be today.

I decide that the economy–which is to say the same thing as “me”–would benefit from a healthy infusion of cash. So I vote for the Fed to buy up a bunch of my Treasury securities. This is new money. When I bought my Treasury Notes, that money went to the Federal government, and was promptly spent, entering the wider economy. That money is gone. So the money now coming from the Fed is money from that magical checkbook they have.

I now have a pile of cash with which to inflate things. I focus on a range of stocks, to make what is happening less obvious. But the net is that I buy up a lot of stock, and in so doing inflate the prices. This creates upward motion which, given human psychology, most notably a need to not miss out on a “sure” thing, feeds on itself, up to a point. Given enough money, you can “day trade” in a quite secure manner, by being the one who–by and large–dictates the value of the stocks. Again, there is no fundamental reason this could not be happening today.

At a certain point, you have made enough for now, so you put your Fed hat back on, and buy the Treasury stocks back. You take that cash out of the system, which is deflationary. To be clear, you pay the Fed cash for the Treasury notes it holds. That money is then extinguished.

Stock prices then fall to the extent to which they were inflated, but–again given human psychology–will tend to fall farther than equilibrium. What does this do? It creates sales. You have excess money left over from your stock speculation, so you use that to buy up banks and industries.

If you don’t get overly greedy, if you are sufficiently patient, you can do this over and over forever. I believe there may well be trillionaires out there.

I am still evaluating the situation, but it is hard not to believe this is basically what happened in the leadup to the Great Depression. Clearly there was inflation; clearly the Fed was ivolved; and clearly the main players got out before the Crash.