Moderates United

 It occurs to me that when you are drunk, you are in effect in the state of a small child.  Your mind is gone, your capacity for rational planning gone, and you act on nearly all your impulses.  You feel no pain, and not infrequently euphoria.

Ponder for a moment the value of that for someone with Developmental Trauma.  You get to return to your childhood, but this time without the pain and stress.  But of course you then sober up every time.  Still, that part of you gets a rest for a time, and unless and until those wounds are healed, you keep coming back.  I think this is my own issue.  I had a dream tonight which seemed to say that.

I would like to propose this as a deep reason for chronic drunkenness, for many.  Heroin does the same thing, as do most barbituates.  Weed not so much, and certainly not amphetamines.  But the most common drugs used worldwide otherwise, including opium, hashish probably, morphine and the world’s most popular drug, booze, all return us to childlike states.

Political manias, now that I think about it, most likely do the same thing.  Most of the people throwing tantrums in the streets are not just figuratively acting like 3 year olds: they are LITERALLY acting like 3 year olds.  A child cannot be asked to foresee the consequences of their actions.  If you are older than 18, though, it is a reasonable request, even if one you have not been taught to honor.

 1. No reform—which is to say conscious alteration in the direction of hoped-for improvement—is possible within an incoherent system.

2. Coherent human social systems are formally complex systems, the rules of which are defined by generally distributed moralities, which can and to be sure usually differ widely. It is the FACT of conscious moral codes which matters, vastly more than the specific content. The American experiment in political Liberalism depends on private moralities, nearly all of which contain basic elements which, broadly speaking, have iteration of the Golden Rule, even while retaining certain tribal and exclusionary elements.

3. There is no moral equivalence possible between those who believe something and those who believe nothing. Muslims and Christians, as one example, can and often have, negotiated difference, and in point of fact have often lived in peace together across wide stretches of time. This applies to all religious and social difference.

4. Principle is practically our conscious intent. Even if most people have fallen short of their own ideals, their presence creates a fertile soil for growth and improvement. There is a baseline and an ideal, even if most are far from the ideal in practice. The idea of “America”, for example, is mythically powerful, even if we have in practice fallen short of our ideals nearly continuously since our founding. Our ideals create the soil within which coherent reform is possible. Without them there is merely chaos and entropy.

5. For practical purposes, the opposite of a principle based orientation is a conformity based orientation, and conformity—elevated itself to a principle—is the tendency which is uniquely unequal to moral growth. Conformity is intrinsically incoherent, since it has no content.

6. Spirituality is a uniquely human activity, when defined as the effort to grow in awareness of God, with God being described as the root of all experience and consciousness, and the essence of the really real.

7. Social systems incapable of reform are inherently anti-spiritual. No system based on conformity, then, can spiritual.

8. When spirituality is rejected, what is left are the plain facts of our biology, which are sex, hunger, violence, and contingent and mutable social relations.

9. All of us are born with a drive to the transcendant, so logically any system which rejects God must reify and worship our animal nature.

10. Hence Satanism, with Satan part goat, which is say part animal.

11. Humans are born with reason, and reason is how we find our way forward.

12. There is an emotional equivalent to reason. We use our minds to reason our way to truth, and our hearts to reason our way to peace and connection.

 It occurs to me that no honest spirituality can or should begin from anything but enlightened self interest.  Take care of yourself, first, then all things fall into place.  Even now, in this world, if all people focused on caring for themselves, without taking too much or too little, all would be well.

The desire to “save the world” really does not normally begin in a place of honest self interest.  Such people, placed in a situation where no one needed saving, would find themselves in an emotional existential crisis.  They would have to return to themselves, and find they don’t know themselves at all.

Yesterday, I found myself saying “FUCK THESE PEOPLE”, and by these people I mean everyone too stupid to understand what is being done to us, or who is being manipulated by the race rioters.

It occurred to me my life would be much more peaceful if I stopped trying to care about the future of humanity, an essentially infinite amount of which is not up to me.  

This is my new goal.  I keep trying to go there, and keep failing, but that is still my goal.

 When the 3 cops served the warrant on Breonna Taylor’s apartment in Louisville at 3am, they knocked, hard, and yelled police.  Neighbors heard them.  Breonna and her live-in boyfriend apparently did not hear them, and since they were most likely engaged in the drug trade, probably thought someone was trying break in to steal their drugs and any money they had, so one of them–the boyfriend claims it was him–fired a blind shot through or around a door, hitting one of the officers.  Cops, pretty much one hundred times out of one hundred, are going to return fire when fired at, especially if one of them was hit.  Even though Breonna was standing next to her live-in boyfriend, he was not hit once.  She received all the shots that hit.

Here is my suggestion: if the bullet fired had KILLED the officer, rather than just wounding him, the Left would not have been able to use this event for AgitProp, and if they had not done that, the riots would not have happened, and many large cities–certainly Louisville–would be in a much better place.  Homicide rates, in particular, would not be spiking in the black communities, because cops would still be doing their jobs, in ways they are not right now.  If they come when you call, they come slowly, and I am very sure they are doing zero proactive policing.  There are many shifts most of them don’t even leave the station, I suspect.  Why?  “Fuck those people”, I can hear them saying.  No reasonable person can blame them.  If they do their job correctly they get no credit, and if they make a fraction of a mistaken under a situation of high stress they get killed themselves, or they wind up in jail, suspended, or subject to mob attack.  That’s pretty much a textbook No Win situation.  The win? Do nothing.  Nothing, for the win.

And again, if that shot had been fatal, they would not have been able to avoid mentioning the first shot fired came from the apartment, or that Breonna was anything but asleep and in her bed.  They would have ignored this event, like they ignore MOST cases where cops use justifiable force.  They want a one-sided, cartoonish picture, one which motivates and elevates childish emotions of petulance, rage, and need.  They want to then wallpaper onto these background emotions idiotic and sententious narratives, in which the good black people of the Earth are subjected daily to the venality and wickedness of police everywhere, and the only solution is to get rid of them.  

This is what they wanted, and this is what they got.  EVEN THOUGH homicides have climbed in Minneapolis, and Louisville, and Chicago, and New York, they still want to push the idea that getting rid of the cops is a good idea.  It is obviously a stupid idea.

If this whole world doesn’t make you a bit dizzy right now, well, tell me how.  You are either smarter than me, or much more stupid.

 It is worth noting that the average year for the average person at any place and any time in history before the 20th century was vastly worse than that of even the poor among us now, in lockdown.

We have antibiotics.  We have grocery stores filled with “luxury” goods all available at very modest prices, and Indian grocers on every corner filled with the spices Columbus was hoping to make a fortune with, by finding an alternate route to India.  Our homes are heated and cooled to within a degree or two of the exact temperature we want, and most of us have running water, and heated water at that.  Most of us do not need to do back breaking labor in the fields.  The list is long, and comprises nearly every physical detail of our lives.

So 2020 is not the worst year ever.  It is perhaps the worst year since World War 2, maybe, for many of us.  It would depend on some arbitrary metric, and might make for a good bar argument that the Guinness Book of Records would not help resolve.

But here is a claim I will make with no hesitation: the measures enacted on the PRETEXT (not in response to, since the responses outside of Sweden and more obviously Switzerland have not been scientific, and have patently not had benign intents) of responding to this bad flu bug, have been the largest ENGINEERED, which is to say man-made, disaster outside of wartime ever inflicted on the human species in the whole of history.

I feel very confident making that claim. Now, obviously nearly all wars waged everywhere have been worse.  Homes were destroyed, famines generalized, people killed, and all manner of atrocities enabled and perpetrated in the general carnage and destruction.

But it is peacetime, and our governments–the precise aggregations of fallible and obviously corruptible human individuals which we entrusted with our safe-keeping–have betrayed our trust, and attacked us.  No other honest view is possible, in my opinion.  These responses are not guided by science.  They have no precedent, and the two obvious precedents we now have in countries similar to the US–Sweden and Switzerland–are not being studied, not being copied, not being emulated.

I go back and forth, wrestling with this part of me that says “stop caring, it’s too big for you, you make no difference, you need to focus on your own peace of mind, what will be will be, focus on your own well being and peace”, etc.

Does it make a difference, trying to speak coherently, when the world has lost its fucking mind?  I don’t know.  I don’t even know if it is strictly necessary for my own sanity.  I can write in my journal, take walks and think my own thoughts.

I am confused.  I look at the videos being played in my gym, and reflect that most Americans lack the intelligence and the motivation to question our dominant culture, one currently highly relevant feature of which is obeisance to purported expertise, and quite frequently, by extension, to government itself, in all its forms.

How does one combat the stupid, the ignorant?  Is combat the word?  How does one reform them, teach them, guide them, when they are complacent, self satisfied, and unquestioning?  They won’t listen, and nothing I have to say is really that easy to understand.  The simple and wrong answers are nearly all owned by the Left.

For my part, if all of our leaders outside of Trump have sold out, and abandoned their moral duties to protect American life and liberty, I see no way out.  I see no way, if the CIA, DIA, NSA, Pentagon, and all our senior leadership have sold out, that our freedom stays intact.  Where are our protectors?  Even Mattis is corrupted, and he was damn near a demi-god to most veterans.  The guy got bought; the price does not even matter.

Where are the honest leaders of America?  For what did so many fighting men and women give their lives, if we are to be sold out to the highest bidder by a bunch of fucking whores?  

I have no good answers.  I don’t even have any bad answers.  I just don’t know.

 It seems to me that the Democrats have revealed their core agenda to be nearly entirely demonic.  They lie continually, attack good people in cruel ways, foment pointless violence that hurts the very communities they claim they want to help, institute policies which weaken America, attack our working people, and are even now to a very disproportionate extent presiding over the largest concentrated attack on general prosperity ever conducted on a developed nation.

Consider that we were at record low rates of unemployment, and that income gains were on par with the largest on record, JUST SIX MONTHS AGO.  Now, they are using the pretext of an illness that kills four people in a thousand to utterly destroy everything.  Every city in America has boarded up restaurants and businesses that were thriving back in February.  It’s unbelievable.  Unconscionable.

I don’t believe ALL Democrats are batshit insane.  There is Tulsi Gabbard, at least.  She gives me a modicum of hope, although she really does not belong there.

But if any sane Democrats remain, their task is not to goosestep with the rest of the Democrats to “Stop Trump”, whose main “crime” has been to make both parties look like incompetent fools, which they are.

No, their job is to break ranks to stop the madness.  Their job is to defy Schumer and Pelosi.  Their job is to signal to America that they are not ALL crazy and hellbent on driving this country into a ditch.

This is certainly something which supports my political agenda, but I personally think a number of them ought to break ranks and vote to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

I think all aware Americans can only look at them, now, with jaws agape, wondering what the hell happened to the party of Kennedy and Truman.  It’s a shit show now, with anger, destruction, nihilistic violence, and continual planned dissimulation as their only tools.

 In Tibet, a common way of saying farewell is (or was–I think there are more Chinese speakers now) apparently Kale Pheb, which means “go slowly”, to which the reply is Kale Ju, which means “stay (or sit) slowly.”

I may try and import this.

This is from Alexandra David Neel’s marvelous account of her journey to Lhasa in the 1920’s.

 Repose means in its root “to cause to rest”.  It is re plus pausare, which is Latin for “to rest”.

If you think about it, repose is that state in which all possible neurological states are equidistant.  All possibilities are open to you.

But when not resting, you have to make decisions.  A decision is, in its root, a “cutting off”.  You cut off all other pathways, which will forever remained closed to you.

Here is what I would suggest: at this moment, people need to pick a side.  The Democrats, and the plutocrats and Communists (an historically common pairing, which is less ironic than it may seem, if you understand Communism) running them, have made a middle ground impossible. Either you make excuses for the destruction of our economy via Fascistic and counterproductive curtailments of our freedom or you don’t;  either you rationalize self destructive, nihilistic riots or you don’t;  either you sanction mass election fraud or you don’t; either you believe our country should have a border and that the job of our government is to protect the well being of the people here legally, first and foremost, or you don’t; either you rationalize the election as leader of the Free World a man who may literally be crapping himself and who needs daily long naps and still doesn’t know where he is half the time, or you don’t; either you welcome Trump’s negotiation successes in the Middle East or you don’t;  either you ignore or rationalize the continual lying in our media, along with its continual efforts to gin up racial divisions and following violence, or you don’t.

Either you are a decent human being, or you are not.

Decisions need to be made.  All of us should try and keep as many people in our orbit as long as as much as possible.  But there come times in life–and this is one of them–where people have to pick sides.  The sides, this time, are vastly, vastly more stark than they were even after 9/11, when it was far from clear who are true enemies were, and we have of course since come to find our worst enemies draw paychecks from the US government.

Make a decision.  It is time.

 It occurs to me that whether or not riots are on the way for Louisville, in nearly all cases, the cause of the Globalists–the psychopaths driving this global lockdown–are served.  PARTICULARLY if there ARE riots that is what people will be talking about.  Their media outlets will work to divide people, and in particular divide those who “support black people” and those who, in failing to readily embrace their mean spirited and destructive propaganda, don’t.

Never mind that the riots hurt black people, that they destroy THEIR businesses and community, and that destroying downtown will reduce yet further for a long time the number of jobs available to them.  This will be the line.

But ALL OF THIS serves to distract from the drip, drip, drip of continual economic destruction being perpetrated on Louisvillians, Kentuckians, the American South, the United States, the industrialized world, and indeed most of the REST of the world.  If we are fighting, we are not looking at the Big Picture, which is a globally engineered Depression, which can be readily used by billionaires to do nearly anything they want.

Economic downturns are fire sales.  People become available for purchase in large numbers.  People willingly embrace reductions in freedom in exchange for shiny baubles and crusts of bread.

It is maddening, all of this.  The crime is bad enough, but seeing the nearly continuous pattern of idiocy in response to it is what is really driving me up the wall.

Never mind Hydroxychloroquine: even without it, the responses make no sense.  As the Swedish health minister pointed out, THEIR response was the only one based on data.  Everything else has never been done before, and the evidence returning is that in the best case severe lockdowns don’t help, and in the more likely case, they WORSEN health outcomes, making them a perfect storm of bad policy.

But good policy for people who hate freedom, who hate the ordinary schlubs who mostly populate this planet, and who hate God and everything good in this world.

To be clear, I hate these people sometimes myself, but if I ran the world I would EDUCATE them to not be so fucking stupid. Our aspiring masters have done the opposite.  Everything they can do to make us stupid, fat, and complacent, they do, they pay for, they encourage via the media outlets they have purchased and run, for their own benefit.

 I was hypothetically asking, in my mind, a socialist to show me a place where their ideas had worked.  I mentally scanned all the nations I know, and all the history I know–which is not quite encyclopedic, but still quite substantial–and could not come up with one good example, other than perhaps Israeli Kibbutzim which are small systems enacted by homogeneous groups within a larger State which is not socialist.

What could they say?  Well, it ALMOST worked here, and almost worked there.

And it reminded my of the line from Megamind, where he says he and whoever the hero went back and forth: “Sometimes he won, sometimes I almost won.”

Sometimes Capitalism works, sometimes Socialism ALMOST works.

Patently, there are degrees of social protections.  Some nations have vastly less efficient medical systems, which are paid for through taxes and run by the government.  This is not true socialism, since it is the economic output made possible by free markets, enforceable contract law, and protected private property rights which spin off the wealth which pays the taxes, which pays for the compared-to-America mediocre healthcare.

And to be clear, most of the bad healthcare outcomes in America come from people who ALREADY have socialized medicine in the form of Medicare.  We have large swathes of our population who take shit care of themselves, then ask doctors to fix it.  Most other nations don’t have that cultural problem.  Most other nations do not have medical systems which are set up to take care of people who will not take care of themselves.

Not sure how I got there, but I will note, as I like to do, that Sweden has Charter Schools, the equivalent of educational vouchers, and a Social Security system which is indexed to the GNP, or at least total tax receipts by the government.  I argued a while back, and will argue again, that part of the reason they chose not to decimate their economy with a foolish and anti-scientific response to the COVID-19 appearance was that it would have destroyed their retirement system, and generated a vast popular backlash.  As it turns out, they nearly uniquely did the actually intelligent thing.