Author: White Whale

1) Identity Politics amounts to handing out handicaps.  Instead of saying “you can do it”, they say “you can’t do it, and it is someone else’s fault.”

2) In most of the cities and States where the riots are happening, neither black more white people are being allowed to work.  We are all being oppressed.

But seemingly, black people can riot and loot, but not work, not legally earn an honest living, in among other places, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California.

In important respects, is it not stunningly tone deaf to attempt to return Obama era racial division and institutionally endorsed anti-white racism at a time when the government is enforcing a labor lockout of more or less the exact variety old school industrialists used to during the labor movement?

Rather than talking about racism, would it not make sense to talk jobs and returning to them?

Small wonder all these tin pot tyrants are eager to see riots, and eager to talk about anything but the failure of this massive attack on the private sector to do anything meaningful or measurable in saving lives.  On the contrary, it seems a virtual certainty that 5-10 MORE people will die for every one that can plausibly be claimed to have been saved by this disaster.

The delusions will soon fade, I think.  This is not like the Obama era at all.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/chauvinism

One of the many truly odd things about all this is Chauvin’s name.

I think it needs to be said that the same people saying we need to “do something” about racism, and police brutality, and whatever they are upset about that day, have been RUNNING the governments where most of it is supposedly happening for fifty years. They are the somebody’s who should have been doing something.

Minneapolis? Democrat Mayor, Democrat Governor. Illinois? Democrat Mayor, Democrat Governor. Etc.

It is really quite extraordinary for these people to claim that their failures are somebody else’s fault, for them to point fingers, specifically, at Republicans who have been in a minority wherever the problems are largest, and been so for many decades.

Democrats got really good at winning elections by promising the electorate the moon and stars every election, then forgetting about them. They pay off the Big Money every time–that’s just business–but the little people they only remember every time they are running for reelection.

What black people need is what everyone needs: good jobs and the good schools that make them qualified for the good jobs. Good jobs will fix in short order nearly all the problems of the inner cities. And good jobs were emerging steadily in Trump’s economy, and may still yet.

But even though it is a complex topic, it is not unreasonable to trace the progress of blacks in this country economically as consisting in a steady upward line up until the beginning of the riots in Detroit, and Watts, and elsewhere–which, then as now, were largely instigated and led by Communist agitators, or so I believe–and downward or flatlined thereafter.

After the riots, nobody wanted to invest in those neighborhoods. They singled themselves out as different and dangerous. White flight began. The money started leaving and not coming back. Many majority black neighborhoods now were once very nice middle to upper middle class places.

And White Privilege is really an invention of exhausted minds to rationalize all this failure–THEIR failure, to be clear–in such a way that their utter and complete uselessness and hypocrisy could be ignored and a residual feeling of moral superiority retained in the face of complete irrelevance.

The riots are really simple. The labor lockout–which was a tool used by Management in the Labor Wars to punish disobedient workers–was a kick in the collective balls to people already on the margins, already struggling each and every day just to survive. Pain breeds fear and fear breeds anger, and if you just add a match you get rage. This is not emotionally very complex.

But I don’t think anyone who cares about where the black community is going to be in five years can support any of this nonsense. We need to open all of our economies back up fully, and do it NOW. The media has stopped pretending this virus is the existential threat they made it out to be, and our leaders should follow them, and just say fuck it: open everything.

All of our problems have solutions, most of them simple and obvious. But lunatics and nihilists continue to seek to destroy every sprout of good that emerges from the ground, and trample on everything we have built. The problem is not what to do, but what NOT to do. If I could wave a magic wand and make these people disappear, we would live in a utopia in short order, with no poverty, no racism, and a generally happy and content world.

I was meditating yesterday and it hit me that in many ways each life is a bit like an Escape Room.  Your job is to find and assemble small clues into a coherent pattern that allows you to escape.

Nearly all of us miss most of the clues just about every time.  But it’s not unreasonable to suppose all of us get better with time.

I was standing at Target today, on my designated marker (whoever makes those must have done well in all this), and it struck me that this pattern might well be getting ingrained in our muscle memory and in our unconscious.  When all this lifts, where will hugs and physical touch fit?  Almost none of this was necessary, but much of it may be lasting.

And then it struck me that if I was plotting to take over the world, that creating social schizms, and increasing net social distance and sense of alienation and disconnection among the target population might be a key goal.  You would want to prevent self organizing systems from forming, prevent bands of people getting together to oppose you.  You would want everyone shaking in terror at home in front of a glowing light through which you feed them each day’s thoughts and fears.

Then it struck me that we are really talking about PHYSICAL distancing aren’t we?  That is the goal?  To be physically distant?  Then why is it called SOCIAL distancing?  I guess you aren’t supposed to visit your friend’s house, but the theory is that if you did, you would stay 6′ apart.  That is how it is iterated everywhere I’ve seen it mentioned.

All of this is very interesting.  I’m aware of this whole Q thing, but I’m not willing to place too much faith in it.  It could equally be a PsyOp conducted by the aspiring conquerors to create some degree of control over people who might otherwise already be out shooting people.  I’m not saying that’s what I believe, but I am saying it is possible.  Anyone who creates their own opponent can control the course of the game.

But there is not and never has been any empirical data showing that keeping a a 6′ distance is any better than mantras or throwing salt over your shoulder to prevent disease.  I have seen it alleged that it was literally originally the idea of a 6th grader in a science project.  I would buy that, although I haven’t seen enough evidence of that claim either.

As often as science is invoked though, it is distressingly obvious how little science has to do with any of this. 

Science did not dictate we shut down our society in a way no society every has before.

Science did not dictate we wear masks that appear to do nothing where viruses are concerned.

And science does not exist to any extent, as far as I know, with respect to the recommendation of physical distancing.

It’s a shit show.  My hope is that people are waking up.  That seems to be a valid hope.

We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection. Public health authorities define a significant exposure to Covid-19 as face-to-face contact within 6 feet with a patient with symptomatic Covid-19 that is sustained for at least a few minutes (and some say more than 10 minutes or even 30 minutes). The chance of catching Covid-19 from a passing interaction in a public space is therefore minimal. In many cases, the desire for widespread masking is a reflexive reaction to anxiety over the pandemic.

From here: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372?fbclid=IwAR0B5-8ux-MLcrA00tHlvrf3NIDNnsRyezr7WgCqSK4_voyKSRpzw-76cK0 

might be translated as “omnipresence”.

What sparked this comment is I was contemplating that every step towards Collectivism is a step away from personhood, from conscience, from personal agency, and ultimately away from the possibility of authentic spirituality.  It is a journey in the direction of true nothingness, where the Buddhists “Void” might as easily be seen as the ultimate somethingness, merely one without defining marks.

And on this account it is certainly true that many religions have served as de facto collectivisms.  Probably all of them, to some extent or other, here or there.

But a blind and dehumanizing commitment to political ideology today is no different than an all encompassing religious fanaticism in any other era.

And to my mind, the salient feature of both is not the atheism of the former, or the supposed theism of the latter, but the obtuse blindness of both.  Reality works the way it works.  Changing fads do nothing to alter this.

A criticism made of “capitalism” by its critics is that “everyone is selling something. Everything is for sale.”

And of course we think of dumb people in bad suits pushing infomercials.

But, really, what is the alternative?  NOT selling something, because you have nothing to sell? That is penury, if you cannot even sell your labor.

Or not being ABLE to sell something, because it is prohibited? This is slavery, is it not, if your needs are met by those doing the prohibiting?

One can produce and not be greedy. One can sell and not be crass.

We are surrounded by voluble fools, many of them educated in the process of learned and earned ignorance, and not of the good sort.

I am bombarded on all sides by claims and counter-claims.  I listen to everyone, up to a point, so it is all very confusing.  I can see clearly the appeal of an All-Encompassing Heuristic–like religious or political dogma–in order to make sense of it all.

But really, we have to consider that NOT ONE PERSON ON THE PLANET has it all figured out.  None of them.  None in history, none writing today.

But a great many of them have parts and pieces figured out. 

This sort of approach both requires and develops the Fundamental Openness the Buddhists talk about, which in the Zen iteration often gets called Beginner’s Mind.

In Signal Theory terms, in order to make sure you don’t miss any of the actual signal, you have to allow all the noise.

If time is money, what is money?