Yes, that.
Does no one else see the problem here? Can we not apply what might be termed the “Obama Principle” and ask: if this were being done to Obama, would the reaction be the same? Of course not. Of course not.
As I wrote in the lead up to the 2008 election, the damage Obama did to our country can be corrected. We just needed a new leader, which we got.
But the STUPIDITY of an electorate so responsive to almost childish propaganda offensives that it could be manipulated into supporting and electing him: that is a problem with no easy fix.
Obama was obviously no saint, and Trump is no villain, but America STILL seems to be responding to these cartoons, these Looney Tunes, in the way the CIA and other affiliated persons and bad actors want us to.
I think it is past time for a repeat of the Church hearings, but this time with consequences for all involved, and a wholesale shredding of the whole outfit. The media is taking direction, and the most obvious candidates are the one’s with the most experience in overthrowing governments, and electing illegitimate ones.
Ellen and W belong together, just as, in important respects, Clinton, George H.W., W, and Obama belonged together. All of them are, or were, something different from Trump. They were tools, of people whose names we don’t know.
Trump, himself, has inserted a spotlight into this darkness, and while we still don’t know the names, I don’t think, the existence of the problem itself is very, very, very clear.
I read the other day an article from a labor organizer who was treating illegal alien workers in the same stroke as American workers, like he cared equally for them.
We see the letter string LGBT, without really recognizing that the T is really in opposition to the rest. You can only be “gay” or “lesbian” if you recognize that men and women exist, and are different. To this point, I was reading a trans activist the other day who was claiming that BEING GAY is transphobic.
This morning, I was reading this:
An excerpt:
five years ago, I first started seeing lesbians were being publicly shamed, sexually harassed, and demonized by straight men calling themselves lesbians.
These men also tended to call themselves progressives, feminists … They keep telling us now that they are absolutely indispensable to the women’s movement, and we cannot do without them. Everyone can always see this behavior, and they always get away with it.
I didn’t think — and I still don’t — that sexually harassing lesbians is a good way to be inclusive. So I objected.
It turns out it’s a firing offense on today’s left to complain about men sexually harassing lesbians if that man says he feels like he’s a lesbian.
That harassment still goes on, and if anything, it has gotten worse. Women share shocking screenshots with me from lesbian dating apps, which are now just simply packed wall-to-wall with men. These men have even started getting women’s [social media] profiles suspended for saying no to them and refusing to recognize their gender and validate their feelings.
Core truth: YOU HAVE TO PICK SIDES. You cannot be pro-women, in Sweden, and pro-immigrant. They are incompatible. You have to prioritize and choose.
You cannot be a feminist, and be pro-transgender. The latter don’t recognize the construct of “woman” and are doing their level best to completely disrupt and destroy true women’s athletics.
You cannot be in favor of essentially unrestricted and unregulated illegal immigration AND claim you support American workers. Cesar Chavez–who I cite endlessly because in the Southwest there about as many roads named after him as Martin Luther King Jr.–understood this. He organized LEGAL Hispanic workers, who were being abused since even though they were either citizens or had green cards, their inability to speak English, and/or inability to really understand our system, led to their systematic exploitation, which Chavez worked his whole life to stop. Illegals, who really amount to scabs in this whole thing, made all of that harder. They eroded his gains, made regression easier. So he hated them, and on at least one occasion sent his guys out to the desert to beat up and intimidate illegals who were camping there.
Thinking about it, the only continuity running through any of this mess is LOYALTY TO PARTY. Who wins, always? Those in power. If they want you running in this direction this morning, and that direction in the afternoon, you yourself cannot claim moral continuity. You can’t claim you believe anything, personally. What you value, ALL you value, is conformity to those in power.
All of the examples I cited above conform to this matrix.
And there is what I call, or have taken to calling–and I think I posted on this but can’t remember–the Law of Recency. This is of course a learning principle, but here I would define it as “where alleged victims are concerned, the most recent to get our attention has primacy over all others.”
Blacks have primacy over the working class, but illegals have primacy over blacks. Transgenders have primacy over LGB’s, who have primacy over women. The Law of Recency is how the Democrats have abandoned substantially all actual Americans, without most quite realizing this is the case. It’s astonishing, but really the inevitable outcome of people subordinating their own judgement to those of power elites. The will to see atrophies. The capacity for perception, for squaring up principle and action, slowly withers.
And the continual evocation of anger helps mask all this. When you are angry, you are not thinking. All they have to do is point out one crime, one injustice, and ignore the counterbalancing, often worse injustice. Children here illegally are treated poorly, we are told. Ignored is that 1) their parents sent them here, knowing this was the case; and 2) most of the children throughout Central America live in shit situations ALREADY, and we can’t save all of them. That is the job of the adults in the region, and most of them are corrupt and violent. It’s sad, but it is not ultimately our primary or even secondary responsibility. This is a situation for international charity, and would not be hurt at all by an airlift of books by Hayek and Friedman.
You have to pick sides. Either you do, or you are a politician, and worthy of receiving all the condemnation that job evokes with morally normal people.
The Joker is a body blow to our collective psyche, quite intentionally. It is a villain who supercedes all our heroes, to the point where he is not even a villain, just a truth-teller.
This movie, I think, is satanic, and will be taken as such by many. The Joker represents the spirit of the mass shooter, the rioter, the gleeful sadist and anarchist. But everyone is dressed the same, I think. They all have the same mask. The ability to express their rage and hatred comes at the price of personal conformity. All amygdalic attributes.
I watched the psychic creation of this character. He was struggling, and then a female “bruja” gave him what he needed, including his face. I read the plot summary, and this female energy would be both his mother and Sophie.
For some time, in American–and probably other, since Hollywood has influenced most of the world–movies, there has been the righteous retribution motif. Someone kills your dog, you are John Wick, and John Wick 4 is being planned. The Punisher. Batman, in directly relevant ways. Outlaw Josey Wales. Most Rambos. This is a basic theme of a very high percentage of action thrillers. Bad guys do bad things, then the good guy becomes a bad guy who is really a good guy. Why? Because he recognizes LIMITS.
Joker, seemingly, takes this retributive motif, and simply directs it at “Society” as a whole. Everyone is guilty, or nearly everyone. As the mass shooter, you might spare that one person who gave you the money for a cab or a Coke or something, but then shoot some woman right next to him you have never seen before in your life.
I’m actually going to go out on a small limb here, but with a high degree of mythic/psychological confidence: I think Martin Scorcese has major unprocessed mother issues. He was the psychic backing of this film, which was on all accounts modeled in part on Taxi Driver, which I’ve seen, and King of Comedy, which I haven’t and won’t. I read Scorcese initially wanted to be a priest, but failed out. You can’t get subtle psychological dynamics, obviously, from Wikipedia. The stuff that matters the most, usually, is often invisible to those involved. That, in any event, has been my experience. I’ve been doing some processing of my own I’m not talking about.
Based on my reading of the plot, finding out his mother was a sort of disgraced whore was the final unraveling, the final humiliation, the final shaming.
This is a mythically powerful film. Its potential for evil should not be underestimated. I personally have no plans to see it. I am not immune to evil, although, having seen a great deal up close, having been visited by many demons, I think my resistance through recognition is quite high. It’s the demons you don’t see which get you.
I am washing toxins out of me right now, toxins I was unable to feel before. Things are going well with me, but not well with our society. We need new, better dreams. We need hope. We need civility, but won’t get it back as long as a large segment of our populace depends on what I will call “Amygdalic Politics”. There may be a large crash before, hopefully, things get better.
I am reminded of a movie by Federico Fellini, called “The Orchestra Practice”. As I recall it–having seen it many years ago–it may be a good metaphor.
Back to bed. I had to write that, before sleep erased what I had to say.
I was having I guess a new version of nightmares last night–really anxiety dreams–where I was in some new happy place, with smiling managers, everybody dressed really well, and me miraculously somehow in a roughly fitting, somewhat rumpled but acceptable suit. I was supposed to be selling something to somebody, after all the pep talks. They gave me some list to start making calls, and I was supposed to know somebody, since they mapped my social network for me, but I had no clue who this person was, and made the mistake of asking them, and was starting to see frowns.
Corporate America really can be an odd place. To play politics well, you kind of need to focus on it, and forget your core self. You have to be who your bosses seem to think you need to be. You have to perform, of course–something in my experience in most cases of outside sales means making selling something close to your real religion, something which intrudes into everything you do, such that church is a place to meet new contacts, golf something you use to close the sale, and vacations something you plan to use as an item of relating to clients–but you need to kiss up to the right people, too. You need to be the right “sort” of person, the sort who never really makes any waves, who goes along to get along.
Two anecdotes:
1) I was sitting on a conference call a few months ago–something I avoid gymnastically and generally successfully–and was the first one to arrive. I was on time, which meant everyone else was late, which I assume most of them looked forward to it as much as me. Anyway, I asked the gal running it how the weather was. She told me, then when the next person got on she said “Oh, we’re doing this fun team building exercise. How is the weather there?” The vibe I actually got from her was that corporate life had traumatized her, and she probably knew it. 40+ hours a week of conference calls will do that to you.
2) I and a couple other sales reps were socializing with this woman who worked for a Very Large Company (VLG), and one of them made some inappropriate joke about sleeping with clients, and she just smiled without batting an eye and said “I’m always willing to take one for the team.” It was so extraordinarily unoffended I actually, honestly wondered if she WOULD be willing to do that. It was a very weird vibe. According to stories I hear, there ARE women who will sleep with clients to get the contract. Imagine that. They are paid, but the process makes them into literal whores.
Anyway, I think the underlying energy is anxiety. I’ve gotten through the hard trauma–the screaming and shaking–by and large, but what is left is years and years of feeling out of place, scared, and anxious.
And to the title of this post, I think being forced to live like this has political effects. Can you imagine the pressure of being a Trump supporter anywhere in Silicon Valley? Or most of the West Coast? If the corporate culture is already cult-like, how expanded and powerful must be the compulsion to conform at least publicly?
And they had muscle cars, some of them quite nice. And I was contemplating and wondering. Is our government REALLY in possession of alien artifacts? Unrelated: how badly were our soldiers betrayed in Vietnam? We won the war. But was the CIA secretly undermining us with one hand while supposedly helping with another? What secrets exist which we don’t even suspect?
These sorts of things will drive you to despair. There is no knowing. Oh, and I was wondering about the dilution of our national wealth by money creation.
Then it hit me: in spite of ALL THAT, we made some really awesome cars. I was looking at I think a Cobra or a Corvette (I’m a late 60’s Mustang convertible in that world, painted yellow or orange), and a sense of awe and gratitude came over me. In spite of everything bad (most of which exists mainly in our imagination), there are some really amazing things in this world, both natural and man made. The physicality of the car, the Done-ness of it, the completion, the this is something a group of men and women made at one time, really struck me.
Today, I am contemplating how one enjoys life. Every one of life’s pleasures is evanescent. They come and go. How can you enter into anything which won’t last? The answer, of course, is: what choice do any of us have? There is a cheese plate with some excellent wine being placed in front of you at every moment. You can say no, but why? That moment won’t last, but none of them do. And life is really just an endless succession of moments. I think in Buddhist theory they do consider time to be discontinuous, and this would be the sense in which this would be true.
The conclusion I have evolved–and you know maybe they should make a movie about this, with oh I don’t know maybe Jim Carrey–is that I need to practice saying Yes more often. I’m a grouchy old man, a badger in his lair, and that’s no way to grow older.
The sky shines for everyone. You can take it or leave it as you choose. You can enjoy where you are at and what you are doing all the time, or you can try and “spend” all your moments only in some times and places, hoping the outsized pleasure will make up for all the want.
I would argue though that when you practice enjoying everything, that can only expand the experience when something truly amazing happens, like Twue Luv.
The more I learn about personal growth, the more I realize how little I knew.
And what are coming back to me are feelings from the last time I felt anything close to equilibrium, when I was about 14. Something happened then (I was not molested, although that would be a good guess) which changed how I approached life. My light–which was to be sure not that bright to begin with–dimmed.
I think most of us are like this. You lose your childish pleasure in things as you slowly find out about all the bad things that can happen in life, and start worrying about them, start anticipating them. We shrink. I shrank.
But this is not a necessary process. If I might generalize very broadly, the best spiritual teachings are about how to retain the childlike wonder and thoughtless grace of a child, with the wisdom and capacity of an adult.
Bad experiences come and go. The pain comes, and if you let it, it goes. What so often stays, though, is the change in your base expectations of life. “if this is how life is”, I probably said unconsciously to myself, “then I’m not going to feel that any more, or open myself up in any way.” That “setting” stays, and for most of us it stays across a lifetime.
Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize Winner, although not acceptor) had that great phrase “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.”
I think I am going to generalize and say that the point of most spiritual work is recovering spontaneous delight in life. This is the root, the seed, of whatever then becomes possible beyond that, but very few of us even get that far.
I would like to shine. I would like to be able to teach with my being. I think it is possible for me, in this life, although certainly I have many miles to go.
I don’t recall the exact language I used in the post where I discussed this, but this sort of outcome was pretty obviously a strong possibility for many kids “transitioning” for the wrong reasons, which in my view is nearly all of them.
But I think they were also quite aware that guns serve many purposes. For the lonely homesteader, the gun is their only line of defense. Communities which are well armed tend to deter criminals. Most criminals are not looking for a fight: they are looking for an easy score. This has always been true, and remains true today.
To this discussion, though, I would add an angle which just occurred to me: a factor worth keeping in mind is the ratio of offensive to defensive gun uses. In a community which has been disarmed by law, one would expect this ratio to be very high. It is high, for example in Great Britain. It is high in Chicago and probably New Orleans.
When you look at poor black communities (this issue would apply in white communities too, but if we are honest, the overwhelming bulk of street gun violence happens in black, and to a much lesser extent Hispanic, ghettos), the problem is often not that guns are not available, but that they are EXPENSIVE, making most of the people who own them people who got them illegally.
In both cases, though, criminals are much more likely to have guns than the people they are victimizing. In such a case, it would look like “guns” are causing violence, and doing little good.
But guns are both a disease–when used offensively–and a vaccine or remedy or medicine, when used defensively. Violence is a disease which is often PREVENTED by the presence of guns. It is prevented when you break into someone’s home and they point an AR-15 at you, as was the case in a video I watched a couple days ago.
And it is also prevented by the idea that you PROBABLY have a gun. Most homes in most of rural America have AT LEAST one gun. And in those areas, crime is very low. As Sun Tzu wrote, for unfailingly secure defense, defend where there is no assault.
He also said to to attack where there is no defense. This is the rough situation of people who own guns where guns are hard to own legally. They have an advantage which is not even remotely mitigated by the possibility of police help. As the saying goes, when you need help in seconds, the police are AT BEST minutes away.
So you need, to evaluate this thing honestly a disease/prophylactic/ or disease/vaccine ratio.
If the CDC wants to treat gun violence as a disease, it has LOGICALLY to treat ALL violence as a disease, for which guns are often the cure.
My hypothesis, which I am quite sure about, is that the ratio will be high where there is legally constrained access to guns–which is a disease out of control–and very low where gun ownership is plentiful. I would suspect there are many communities in America where the ratio is less than one, where guns are used more often to stop or prevent crimes than to commit them.
If violence is the disease–and if you think about it, this point is really indisputable–then anything which alters it in a positive direction must be seen as a policy failure, and as extremely stupid.