I am the song that I sing.
Edit: I may be plagiarizing someone, with Whitman an obvious candidate. I’ve read excerpts of Whitman, but not much in the whole.
But if no one has said this, they should have.
This is obscured by the fact that they have a new cause daily. They even have a website called the Daily Cause.
But the Daily Cause is always yesterdays cause. Your task, as a dutiful Leftist, is always to feel something they want you to feel, and which always has the net result of making Republicans look ugly and mean. It is usually anger and outrage. But it may be sadness–oh those poor KIDS–which they induce by removing all context, historical or demographic.
Always you have default emotions of anger and outrage. This is perennial, continual.
And these are buttressed by nearly all media outlets. All educational institutions. Everywhere you look, you see a SYSTEM, one which exists mainly to get a small core of cynics rich and powerful, but which is sold as the norm, as the sole source of reality, as the sole way to be kind and good.
Again, look around you: do you see a power elite which the Democrats OPPOSE? It’s laughable. Most of the wealthiest people in America give their money to Democrats. What Democrats are selling is a system which can be bought, and obviously for anyone with money, that is the ideal.
Republicans are not innocent, but they are naive, they don’t play this game well, and they are clearly not an important part of the racket.
I’m wondering of Kentucky is a trial run for cheating nationally. We know voting machines can be hacked, then programmed to read anything. You could reliably win by one vote if you wanted to, but of course the goal is to make it seem close, but not so close that a recount is needed. In Kentucky, the Governor’s race was decided by just OVER 5,000 votes. That’s about what I would have picked, if I were doing the programming.
We all need to understand that TRILLIONS of dollars are at stake. The amount of money on the table is staggering. It is more than enough to buy ANYONE who is for sale at all. And for those dollar amounts, people are willing to do, to stoop, to nearly anything.
And it’s worth emphasizing that The System has evolved to the point where our choices are between madness and the alternative, whatever it may be, however it may be constructed. They are eradicating the lines between normal and insane, between legal and illegal, and between moral and immoral.
The System exists, at this moment, solely to perpetuate itself, and if and when we let them get full control of elections, it will never be unseated without violence.
I think all States need to audit their elections. I think they need to recount 10% of the vote for every election, automatically, and obviously using paper ballots which are harder to forge.
To do otherwise is to instill a very healthy mistrust of the system–by which I mean a growing suspicion that there is A System.
Consider this statistic: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/u-s-has-3-5-million-more-registered-voters-than-live-adults-a-red-flag-for-electoral-fraud/?fbclid=IwAR3JQKAAWktcgBGHd7-WN26HxiXhgwbR48ATuoXOxAyiZ2sqszP7TK8Qm-8
We have more REGISTERED voters than live adults. 3.5 million more. When you consider that 92 million eligible people sat out the last election, every one of those 92 million is potentially a fraudulent vote.
I think Democrats study voter rolls, and look for people who are unlikely to vote, then vote in their stead, particularly in states that don’t require valid ID. It is literally still possible, in two thousand fucking nineteen, to “vote early and vote often”. One would have thought “progress” would have made such a thing impossible. The technology exists to make it impossible, which would include actually scanning drivers licenses to track them, but for obvious reasons the Democrats particularly oppose any step in that direction.
It is worth asking: how would the history of the past half century have been different, if Democrats didn’t cheat? For one thing, Nixon almost certainly would have won in 1960. That alone would have changed a lot, I think.
Democrats tend to spend all their time thinking about strategy, which might be summarized as “what do we need people to think we believe in each of this list of battlefield locations?”
I got to this pondering the Kentucky election. 5 of the 6 Republicans won easily. It was clearly a partisan election. Why, then, did the Democrat barely squeak by the Republican governor? Bevin is not the monster the Left paints him to be. I think they say “he is wildly unpopular” in exactly the way they say Trump is wildly unpopular, even while he is filling up stadiums all around the country.
I think they cheated. Then I got to thinking: it would be helpful to have spies working in their campaign, to report any whispers around the coffee pot, or back rooms. Cheating is not a one person effort. It takes a team, coordination, and planning.
Then it occurred to me the Democrats are almost certainly ALREADY doing this, which is to say planting their people in Republican campaigns, where they listen not for policy ideas (BORING!!!) but for strategy, if there is any.
It’s an obvious move. It’s part of strategy, where winning is everything, where everything is a battle–not for principle or policy or result–but for votes and elected sinecures from which rain manna from heaven. It’s back scratching all around.
Why would they care if their ideas work, when their whole focus is just on winning elections? How would they even notice, unless they took time off from their primary focus?
Me, personally, if you put me in charge of something like this: I would come up with TRICKS that would work, I think most of them.
Democrats run their campaigns like military campaigns. They are disciplined, organized, and focused only on victory.
In theory, nobody is supposed to be a “professional” politician. We are supposed to be electing not just bankers and lawyers, but tradesmen and farmers.
In theory, the electorate is offered two competing sets of ideas in every election, and the set which best conforms to their own beliefs wins. But in reality, one side is grooming the electorate in a thousand ways to vote for them, regardless of the value of their ideas, or to put it more clearly, how damaging they always are.
Professionalizing politics is a lot like making a trade out of lying. It is image management, where the image is whatever the image needs to be at any given time and location. This is a truism, but no less valid for it.
Republicans are much less professional in this respect. I remember some noted Democrat strategist saying that our ideas were better, but he could never vote for a Republican because we are so stupid. And by stupid, he meant letting Democrats pull off amoral stunts election after election, and never getting the wiser, never fighting fire with fire, and never doing anything but learn how to lose to inferior people and ideas, all while pretending the fight had been fair, when it was anything but.
Couple thoughts. One, the present Swedish ideal–what we think of as “Sweden”, even though they have adopted school choice, vouchers, and a system of social security tied directly to the current economy–was enacted early in the 20th century as a direct outcome of Eugenic thought, which looks at human society as amenable to the same sorts of planned interventions as animal husbandry. People could be bred like cattle, desirable traits selected, undesirable traits eliminated (through sterilization, although infanticide was also likely practiced at times), and a better world created through biology. Biology was the supreme science.
Socialism and Eugenics have a common history and a common root. Both look at human beings as, in effect, problems to be managed by superior people. The perfect society, the utopia, is understood to be the inevitable result of putting everything in the hands of the right sorts of people.
And Nazism and what might be termed the Swedish project were kissing cousins. The concept of “racial hygiene” that Hitler preached was already ubiquitous throughout northern Europe in the various universities, perhaps most notable the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Nothing Hitler did was illogical when viewed from the premises which motivated Swedish socialism and social engineering. And to be sure, Sweden was never invaded by the Nazis. They supplied, if memory serves, a lot of raw iron or even steel to the German war machine, and were left unmolested, unlike Denmark and Norway.
And going down the line, Planned Parenthood should be seen clearly as what it is: the last vestige of Eugenic thought present in the modern world. Killing black babies particularly was seen as a form of racial hygiene, of protecting the rest of the world from inferior beings from an inferior race. Racism, to put it another way, is absolutely and inextricably linked with Planned Parenthood, and this holds, I would argue, to this very moment.
Planned Parenthood does not exist to provide advice on how to deliver healthy babies. That is for obstetricians and perhaps gynecologists. It is exist solely to PREVENT births, or what Eugenicists refer to as negative eugenics. Less black babies, less problems: this was the argument, which I am summarizing but not agreeing with.
Watching all this, particularly the Soviet efforts at trying to figure out what in the brains of geniuses made them geniuses (in Lenin’s case, they might also have wondered what made him a psychopath, but of course that was a path to disgrace and murder), I was reminded how often we overvalue the power of intelligence.
The logic of pure brain power leads to, ultimately, as seeing computers as superior to us. After all, they will soon be able to do calculations, to know things, to think ahead, with vastly more power than any of us will ever possess.
I have long meant to post this, but things float into and out of my memory, but Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in Sirens of Titan where he talks about an alien race which decides its robots are better than them, so they commit mass suicide.
But this is really a means of denigrating the spiritual aspect of existence, the way LIFE, and life alone has of participating directly in the cosmos, in the energy swirling around us. It is a life out of balance, a head without a body, a mind without a soul, which of course in many respects is what Communism was and is now.
But I remember this way of thinking. I have often fallen prey to it. After all, I have a reasonably high IQ, somewhere in the top 10% of the top 1%. Being smart, though, is not, in itself, a path to being happy. You need love for that, and you need a heart for love.
Again, I continue to try to make connection with all of my being. It is a long term, difficult task. I have many strange dreams, and feel frequent confusion and lostness. This is the price, though, of coming back to where I belong. This is the price. You always have to pay the price.
He keeps saying “I just don’t know”. I think this is important. I think many addicts, myself included, often find ourselves confused. We want to be passionate, but don’t know how, or where, or why.
But the strong feelings that are released or caused by altered states of the sort characterized by addiction are a sort of ersatz passion, or even an ersatz meaning formation. You don’t know, still, but you feel like you do. It’s a temporary solution to existential confusion, to “lostness”, to “Verworfenheit”.
Reading about Reed, it doesn’t appear he himself used heroin. He was an alcoholic and meth user, who died ultimately of liver cancer. But the basic mindset is the same.
For workaholics–and in important respect all addictions have unique features as well as commonalities–the rush is competence. It is getting things done. It is a feeling of control, of mastery, of winning. And there are always more details to be sorted, new initiatives to begin, more information to absorb to stay on top. It is all about keeping a low simmering anxiety buzz punctuated by period dopamine hits. It is, in other words, all about having a place and a purpose and a way forward, and keeping that line taught so that nothing else ever pushes through. Too much slack, and some part of you will start asking questions and looking around again.
And I will speculate for sex addicts it’s not all that different from work addicts. You are always looking for that next conquest, and always looking to sex as a qualitative alternative to the workaday world. I think workaholism and sex addiction dovetail marvelously, and are most likely highly conspicuous in many CEO’s. I’ve known one or two myself.
In both cases you maintain a low key anxiety–you can never be sure when you make a pass at a new woman if it will work–punctuated by regular dopamine hits. Fucking is fun, no doubt, but I think for true addicts the best moment is actually just before it begins again. This is how I visualize it, anyway. The relief at the beginning is actually better for most than the actual orgasm. This is precisely what makes it addictive behavior. There is nothing wrong with having fun, and sex is some of the best fun you can have. But what addicts bring is the opposite of emotional presence. They bring need which will not and cannot be satisfied in that or any other encounter. But if they could be satisfied, they wouldn’t be addicts.
Few thoughts. I’m a pretty basic alcoholic, but all that is changing. I have found I seem to be OK with a beer or two before bed. That never used to be the case. If I had two I had to have six, then some hard liquor. That part of my life seems to have passed.
I actually gave myself permission to get drunk last night, and bought a bottle of Aquavit for the purpose. I had probably four fingers in a glass–which is a lot for most, but not for me–then went to bed. I NEVER used to do that. Absolutely never.
I may in the end give up booze, but increasingly it is seeming like I am, to use a Feldenkrais term I like, “reversible” with respect to it. I am becoming capable of setting boundaries, of using it, I think, for its intended purpose.
One day soon I may have a daily whiskey for my health and pleasure, and leave it at that.
Peter Levine speaks of “restoring goodness.” Here is a sample video, which I found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8b-6C-5wQo
It occurs to me that what he is speaking about is the resolution of irrational shame. People who are innocent, who have done no wrong, feel good. I think feeling like a good person is something which comes naturally to relatively normal people who are, in fact, good people. Neurologically, feeling shame and feeling good are on opposing ends of the affective spectrum.
This raises the interesting question: are people who are shamed into socially desirable behavior actually good? I would answer: no, not really, to precisely the extent their own personal feelings would otherwise lead them in other directions.
This leads to the further consideration that a society, as a whole, which acts to shame people into conformity cannot really be called a good society. Think of Communists. Think of Southern Baptists. The effect is the same, other than that Southern Baptists do not and never have felt the need to murder millions of people.
Shame and violence, of course, go together, but nowhere in world history are the two combined so inextricably as in regimes like that of modern China. First there was the physical violence, the concentration camps and psychological torture camps. Then the Cultural Revolution where millions were murdered by psychopathic children. Current dictator Xi Jinping was apparently exiled when his father fell into disfavor during that cataclysmic series of atrocities directly inspired by Mao.
Now, the violence is indirect. It exists in the “social credit score”, which is a more or less direct measurement of how much shame an individual should feel according to a government which, if it wanted to, would know how many shits you take a day, and certainly knows how many cigarettes you smoke, what books you are reading, what websites you visit, and how many and which video games you own.
All of this, though, is on a continuum. Shaming can and should be seen as violence by other means.
Shame has a place, like all human emotions. But it rarely leads anywhere genuinely good. Its value is most conspicuous in its absence. Chuck Schumer, for example, seems incapable of feeling shame. In him, it would accomplish some good.
Leftist: I am a Democrat, therefore I care about people.
And I will note that the evolution of the Norman Lear’s of the world–again, compare 1980 Norman Lear to 2019 Norman Lear–has consisted in “evolving” from the first to the second, as their proposed solutions to an array of social problems have failed and they have lied to themselves and everyone else about it.
They don’t want to hear our shit, because our shit is mainly pointing out that their shit is in fact shit. Vanity is a powerful emotion, particularly when tied to time and habit.
Paul Krugman, for example, talking about the economic devastation of a Trump Presidency, could have said: “I predict death and famine, but I will revisit this in 9 months” and then DO it.
Honest, serious people would have no issue with this.
The current crop, though: MAJOR problem.
It’s all about selling, yo. Get me through this week, and then another week, and equally stupid people.
The problem people like Mitt Romney have with Trump is that their apparent sobriety and sense of decorum are an act. He is not serious. His fellow RINO’s are not serious. They stand down to save face every fucking time they are challenged. They are Milquetoast assholes, who by their actual BEHAVIOR betray a lack of principle, and if you lack principle, no matter what act you may put on, no matter how you dress, or how seriously you talk, and how obsequious to abusive standards of behavior you may be, you utterly and completely lack gravitas.
Here is a counterintuitive truth: Trump fundamentally has more gravitas than Mittens. Trump has beliefs and he acts on them, consistently and daily. Mitts has beliefs right until the moment he has to be impolite to call bullshit on the latest left wing outrage, and then he is a fucking scared puppy on the corner. I personally will never forget his failure to call Obama a liar to his face, when he was lied to, to his face.