Author: White Whale

Logically, any major cultural trend increasing the perception that the world is dangerous is going to help the people who claim they will make it safer.  With few exceptions, all eventual tyrants get their start on the safety bandwagon.  I would go so far as to say Socialism could equally be called Safetyism, or Securityism.

Self evidently, it is largely a lie, and for non-conformists it is the most dangerous system possible.

But weak, fearful people are the ideal audience for Socialist rants, and spending 8 hours a day watching violent TV is more or less a perfect means of building those people.

[Edit; obviously, conservatives appeal to fear too.  They appeal to the fear of other nations, of war, and of economic disaster.  The type of fear I am referring to here, though, is fear of your neighbors, and of “Life” writ large.  Anomalous, unanchored, atmospheric anxiety is what I am talking about.  And it does seem to have been shown that conservatives have less mental problems than Leftists, which makes sense for a number of reasons.]

Actually, on that note, I saw a crowd today listening to someone talk in a park.  I saw that most of them were wearing masks, and inferred it was left wing something or other, probably race related.  I may have been wrong–it would have been good to validate my hypothesis–but I didn’t feel like it.

But why are masks seemingly a bigger thing with Democrats?  It is virtue signalling, yes, but I think much of it is simply cowardice.  They are vastly more afraid of their own shadows, figuratively and literally.

This is a large problem.  One of the obvious solutions, to my mind, is to mainstream the considerable evidence that we survive our physical deaths, and that mind is non-local in ways which can be studied as “psi”, broadly understood.

There can be little doubt for anyone who has done the work to understand the state of the science that the Cartesian-Newtonian Paradigm, as I saw Stan Grof call it in a talk I watched last night, really needs to give way to something suitable for current understandings of the best evidence.

In my view, many political religions depend ultimately on philosophical pessimism.  For all people certain that their own death is eternal, the temptation to live on through “society” can be nearly overwhelming.

All of these are old ideas, much trodden over in the 20th century.  If God is dead, everything is permitted, we hear.  If we are just machines made out of meat, then as individuals we are not perfectable, we hear.  No individual morality is possible.  This is why socialism, as a sustainable  perfection of the machine, comes to assume such mythical dominance among atheists.

It does seem obvious, though, that all this violence in media cannot but make people into emotional imbeciles.  And one sees this, of course.  One sees childishness, patronizing narcissism, glib superficiality, and even cultishness in the political and other domains.

When these kids take over, absent some sea change of some sort, nothing good can be expected, in my view.  But of course changes do happen.  Miracles do occur.  My own work is largely oriented around this observation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf1mLl0tQFQ&feature=youtu.be&utm_source
 

You know, as for me, I’m in it for the duration.  Whatever may come.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=277&v=3-gQ6oBDpB4&feature=emb_logo

How often do I do that?

http://www.med.umich.edu/yourchild/topics/tv

The data below looks just at TV.  Ponder that children as young as–hell, I don’t even know, let’s say no later than 10 years old–are playing violent video games, and that in a game like Call of Duty you might EASILY kill 500 people a day, and do so for years and years.

Let’s call it a mere 100, which is ridiculously low, if you have played that or similar games.  That’s 36,500 murders YOU COMMIT each year.  In 8 years, that works out to 292,000.  And of course the game playing doesn’t stop at 18.  And this is layered onto repeat watches of 300, and various horror movies, and cop dramas.  And at 18 the damage is done.

Ponder all that when contemplating these nihilistic riots.  I think most of the white kids participating thought it was fun.  The kid who set the horses (yes, horses, not houses: he threw a firebomb into a horse trailer and posted a video of him doing it) on fire seemingly thought it was cool.  He posted about it on Instagram or somewhere.

Let me coin a phrase: induced contextual sociopathy.  You get where I’m going with that. Or if I’m talking about you, maybe you don’t.

In my own case, it was obvious to me how easy it was for TV to screw kids minds up.  I monitored my kids very carefully, and I watched a lot of their shows with them.  An awful lot.  I knew what they were watching, and Cartoon Network was off-limits.  I allowed PBS stuff, like Caillou, and Dragon Tales, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.  They watched Mary Poppins a lot.

All of this stuff is subtle.  It is a Strawman Argument to misconstrue media critics as believing that watching violence leads directly to violence.  In some cases it clearly does, like the boy who strangled his brother to death because he wanted to be Dexter.

But in nearly all cases it leads to reduced empathy, and I would suspect to a greater tendency to see the world in polarized terms, as Good and Bad.  It leads to a greater latent willingness to use force against people who are different, and it leads to a greater eagerness to have the opportunity to do so.

It leads to the sense that the world is a dangerous, violent and confusing place.  This, in turn, leads to reduced trust, reduced social contact, and increased rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide.

It is probably not too much of an exaggeration to argue that many of the political problems we have stem more or less directly from the media we consume.

I remember, back in the 70’s and 80’s, when things started getting worse and worse, how the Democrats, how the Alan Alda’s, how the PBS supporters, were pretty uniforn in condemning violence in media.  Where did they go?  Why did they disappear ? Did their hate of the Religious Right–which was also talking about it–overwhelm their native understanding that this stuff is bad?  Did they decide that to get the sex they had to put up with the violence?

Are we better off now that porn is normalized to the point that anyone with internet access can watch it endlessly at will?  A clever 6 year old could find anything.  Are we better as a society?

And to be clear, I’m not advocating censorship.  I am advocating INTELLIGENCE and high level, very vocal, very visible public dialogues about all this. We have data.  We have numbers.  And its all bad.  Why is this not better known?  Would parents not perhaps make different decisions if–rather than just have an age level on violent video games and movies–they KNEW what the long term psychological effects were likely to be?  What if they knew what violent media was doing to THEM?  The parents are not immune.  These images are really not suitable for anyone on a daily long term basis.

Here is a cut and paste from the website:

• An average American child will see 200,000 violent acts and 16,000 murders on TV by age 18 [15].
• Two-thirds of all programming contains violence [16].
• Programs designed for children more often contain violence than adult TV [17].
• Most violent acts go unpunished on TV and are often accompanied by humor. The consequences of human suffering and loss are rarely depicted. 
• Many shows glamorize violence.  TV often promotes violent acts as a fun and effective way to get what you want, without consequences [18]. 
• Even in G-rated, animated movies and DVDs, violence is common—often as a way for the good characters to solve their problems.  Every single U.S. animated feature film produced between 1937 and 1999 contained violence, and the amount of violence with intent to injure has increased over the years [19]. 
• Even “good guys” beating up “bad guys” gives a message that violence is normal and okay.  Many children will try to be like their “good guy” heroes in their play.
• Children imitate the violence they see on TV.  Children under age eight cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasy, making them more vulnerable to learning from and adopting as reality the violence they see on TV [20]. 
• Repeated exposure to TV violence makes children less sensitive toward its effects on victims and the human suffering it causes.
• A University of Michigan researcher demonstrated that watching violent media can affect willingness to help others in need [20a].  Read about the study here: Comfortably Numb: Desensitizing Effects of Violent Media on Helping Others.
• Viewing TV violence reduces inhibitions and leads to more aggressive behavior.
• Watching television violence can have long-term effects: 
• A 15-year-long study by University of Michigan researchers found that the link between childhood TV-violence viewing and aggressive and violent behavior persists into adulthood [21]. 
• A 17-year-long study found that teenaged boys who grew up watching more TV each day are more likely to commit acts of violence than those who watched less [22].
• Even having the TV on in the home is linked to more aggressive behavior in 3-year-olds. This was regardless of the type of programming and regardless of whether the child was actually watching the TV [23].

There is something about social media, and even the internet generally, which seems to shrink time and space, which is to say our perception of both, and we can’t be sure epistemologically if there is any other perspective which matters.  We can’t say time and space “exist” outside of observation.

Concretely, though, the Fear of Missing Out interrupts, continually, all day every day, any possibility of relaxation and expansion.  Of just sitting there, slack jawed, watching the clouds, or a stream, or birds flying around, or grass growing.

Ponder how the 2020 use of LSD is to be more productive, in order to be more “successful.”  More successful means more money.  But what does more money mean?  It’s all a silly game, whose nature hasn’t really changed since  Chaplin’s conveyor belt, or Lucille Ball’s.  Who is pushing it?

Kids nowadays are being taught to blame “Capitalism”, but as I’ve argued often, this is stupid.  The blame rests with the bankers and the dilution of our money, and following productive power.  We should have plenty of leisure now.

But what would we do with it?  We are wound up like coiled springs.  Most people “relax” by watching scenes of intense violence.  I have not and don’t plan to watch Game of Thrones, but I understand it includes regular scenes of torture made as graphic as their technology allows them.  No doubt VR torture scenes exist now somewhere.

I was driving down my street the other day.  It’s just a normal middle class street in a normal middle class neighborhood.  And it hit me–it was 7 or 8 PM–that in most of those houses most of those people were watching TV, and probably watching people get murdered.  Cops and robbers.  War.  Horror movies.  The kids are in their rooms practicing shooting people.

Not all homes.  Some were sitting around the kitchen table reading the Bible.  Many were watching sports, at least back when sports were on.  I tend to exaggerate bad things.

But still, that was not a fully wrong perception either.  And that people gather around the glowing altar nightly is really demographic fact.  The average American watches almost 8 hours of TV a day.

Dear God, I was expecting to see 4 hours and that would have been crazy to me.

But all of this, all of the blinking lights, all the things that would stop if the power went off, all of it takes us away from time and space, from stillness and quiet.

Small wonder we are insane.

Anyway, I will share something I just rediscovered: model kits.  One of the first things I can remember that made me happy as a kid were model kits.  I really liked particularly the Aurora model kits.  I had King Kong, and Godzilla, and a couple Neanderthal’s, and quite a few more.  I was very attached to them, and very proud of them.

I just started painting and assembling a Vought F4U-1A Corsair, the type of plane Pappy Boyington flew.  It is REALLY small: 1:72 scale.  It takes patience.  But it is really, really calming.

I am going to start including more things in my life that are slow.

As I’ve shared from time to time, I’m a bit down on the current Dalai Lama, for reasons I’ve probably articulated.  I will actually add an interesting anecdote from “Magic and Mystery in Tibet”, by Alexandra David Neel, where she relates a mendicant Saddhu mocking the then-Dalai Lama, for lacking the  power to protect Tibet.  Said Saddhu himself was able to push someone away without touching him, so he apparently had some powers of his own.

But this Dalai Lama seems like he could have a permanent show at Vegas, or a facsimile of the Potala built for him at Epcot Center.  Maybe that’s just me being an asshole.  That is a distinct possibility.

But one thing he said I liked was that a hobby of his is working on watches.  This requires enormous care and enormous patience.  I like that.

Oh, it’s an interesting ride, all of this.  But most of the time that you are looking at a screen, you are probably missing it.  You are not learning much about yourself or the world.  You might learn facts–or what are presented as facts–watching documentaries, but they won’t teach you to think, to see, or to feel honestly.  All that happens far from the blinking lights.

As I ponder it this morning, there is something abstract, depersonalizing, and actually distancing about social media.

Could you imagine someone writing the same letter to three friends in the old days?  100?

And is there not something fundamentally different about sharing an experience together, and describing one to people who are distant, even if only on the other side of town?  I think of a really good ad for Las Vegas where they show a group of obviously exhausted women.  After a few moments one of them start laughing, then they all do.  Then they cue the line “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” 

Is that not a fundamentally, totally different experience than posting pictures and descriptions?

And one of my kids commented to me that a good number of the rioters–the white ones–around the country seemed to be doing it in part for Instagram.  The violence and destruction was abstract, but the social media seemed real to them, which is a precise inversion.

I’ll post it here–SHARE it with you–if and when I find a way across the river. 

I’ve actually had as one of my quotes on Facebook virtually since I got the account that “if I ever get it all figured out I will text you.”  I guess I saw all this back then, too. 

It’s odd how we figure things out, then forget them.  As Churchill is said to have put it: “men will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

I think I’m going to extend my abstinence to all news.  Let’s see how I do with that.  No news, no Facebook, until July 4.  I won’t deny myself public comments here.

I’m going cold turkey on Facebook for a month, and giving serious thought to doing the same with drinking, for at least a month.  I’ve largely given up drinking, but I still like to get drunk once a week or so.  My sleep is still adventurous enough that I like to go to bed once in a week and know I have nothing to worry about.

But I was really going deep today, and realizing how my media addiction seems to mask a sort of existential nausea.  And then it hit me that is a perennial emotional anesthetic, and that the cost of losing it goes up the longer the addiction lasts.

Put another way, if you deflect using media–or anything else, including booze and drugs–the feelings don’t go away, but it gets harder to go back to them and process them.  If your life was a prison you were escaping, then the way out is to go back into the prison, and figure out how to walk out the front door.  That’s not an easy thing, particularly if you have an easy way to avoid all that.

Here is what I would like to suggest: part of our national affliction with respect to a large, really cult-like social grouping saying and doing absurd, damaging, and divisive things, is that the members are ADDICTED TO THE MEDIA PUSHING THAT PLATFORM.

What would happen if they woke up?  They would lose a security blanket, a known.  They would be thrown back to the wolves of unprocessed emotion, and this as people largely unable to deal with emotions in the first place, particularly those I believe have Borderline Personality Disorder.  The security of a Rachel Maddow–no matter how ludicrous the claims she makes–is vitally important to them.  As long as that emotional need is there, no rational dialogue will be possible.

One interesting aspect at this whole attempt at direct Internal Subversion, is that the very people Trump SHOULD be able to rely on to give him accurate intel as to the Who’s, and How’s might actually be the ones perpetrating it.

Who to trust?  It’s a tough question.  He could get a dog, but the dog won’t have much to say about the funding and coordination of this planned and supported violence and property crime, committed in the main by white people in black neighborhoods, as far as I can tell.

The thing with Flynn is that this corrupt judge (who in my understanding hired a lawyer.  Imagine that: a judge executing a politicized ruling himself hiring a lawyer) is just trying to buy a delay.  Flynn apparently is still a threat to them.

Assuming Trump can get through all this fraud, and the smoke of a thousand literal and rhetorical fires and win reelection, he needs to set the pitbulls loose.  He will have the support of enough of us that the screaming of the few really won’t matter.

And if we can get a fair election, this will be a bloodbath for Democrats.  I really feel that.  They are doing everything wrong.  Their old lies won’t hold anymore, not in the face of all this.  Black people–who even now are surrounded by young Communist radicals wearing skinny jeans tearing down BLACK neighborhoods–surely have to be able to see what is really going on.

1) I had a dream perhaps ten years ago, in the middle of the Obama era, that a number of left wing radicals were making it through SEAL training, and joining the Teams.

A couple days ago, somebody posted this: https://havokjournal.com/world/we-are-the-useful-idiots-how-our-nation-divided-is-playing-straight-into-the-hands-of-our-greatest-enemies/?fbclid=IwAR1LChvafrq6lPdrqf-ZabBhu83PwQezxRc7D_36r1n89Sh8dAtVfKKSKJM

Basically, a DevGru connected operative told this journalist “PSST.  THERE IS A CONSPIRACY.  We don’t know who–probably the Russians, but maybe the Iranians, or Chinese, or North Koreans.”

Left out, of course, is the CIA. 

Here is my thing.  This left a sour taste in my mouth: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/2018/08/16/retired-admiral-navy-seal-compares-president-trumps-actions-to-mccarthy-era-witch-hunts/

Yeah, the guy was JSOC commander, all around badass.  He told everyone they need to make their beds.  But he was buddies with Brennan.  That is a fatal flaw in my view.  He supported the idiotic notion–and it has ALWAYS been idiotic, but plausible for fools, which he is not–that the Russians helped Trump win the election.  He knew better.  Hell, he may have provided guys to help Brennan run domestic operations.  They come from somewhere.  If not active duty–which is unlikely–recently demobilized and sheep dipped operators.

And that, in turn, makes me wonder if Extortion 17 was not a planned effort to take out a non-compliant Old Guard.  McRaven took over August 8, 2011.  The Chinook was shot down by people who were expecting it just two days before.

I am not the idiot who would want to throw dirt at all of them.  It’s a small cadre, in my view, but in that environment a small number of bad apples can cause a LOT of damage.

My point is that that unit seems to me compromised to some extent, and I will believe that until I see some reason to believe otherwise.  My opinion doesn’t matter, and it’s very possible I’m being paranoid to a more than usual excess.  But that’s my two cents. 

2) I had a dream perhaps 10-15 years ago that Bill Gates was building an enormous server farm underneath the lake next to where he lives. It was obvious in the dream that his intent was to gather very, very, very large amounts of data on people.  The purpose was unclear, but now what I would suggest is that he has set himself the goal of rivaling the NSA in his ability to gather, store and analyze data.  There is no reason at all not to think that literally every computer on the planet that runs Microsoft software and is connected to the internet cannot be breached easily by built in back doors, not just in the Operating Systems, but in Word and Excel and the like, not to mention Explorer.

You know, a few billion here, a few billion there, spent intelligently, and pretty soon you have yourself a thing.

I will say, I don’t want to spend my life in prison.  I don’t want to be shot.  And I definitely don’t want to be tortured.  These are all possibilities.  I get that.  But they are possibilities whether I speak my piece or not.  Life is an inherently uncertain process.  But it is much, much worse if you spend it as a coward, hiding.  I have managed unmanageable fear all my life, every day, most of every day.  I don’t like it.  I fight it, and that is how I choose to live.

If my journey ends early because I talked too much, so be it.  In any event, that was probably the plan all along.  To some extent we are all straw dogs, as Lao Tzu teaches.

Really, what has happened is that what should have been multiethnic, united, broad based protests to reopen our economy have been coopted–seemingly by plan–to create divisions among us.

This extraordinarily evil tactic has also created suffering in the black community piled on already deep suffering. There can be no doubt that the riots supposedly protesting the death of George Floyd will create much, much more pain than change or justice (I say supposedly, because this was also clearly a Communist AgitProp operation layered onto honest, sincere and warranted grief) .

But politically, this whole thing is both stirring the racial pot, AND creating a massive DISTRACTION.

It is leading people to forget just how large the crime was that our sundry governments just committed–and indeed continue to perpetrate–against the American people. If you want justice, seek to end this labor lockout first.

And the nightly fires are also pulling attention away from the Congressional hearings on the crimes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.