Moderates United

I think it would be useful to use the words liar and Communist interchangeably.

 The first time I heard an ad from Duluth Trading Company on the radio–it was the one where they were working out the name for Ballroom Jeans (as in, room for your balls)–I knew I had to buy something from them.  And I did.  Most days, both my pants and shirt are from Duluth.  I fit their demographic, but even if I didn’t, I would buy from them.  I just loved how they took a risk.

Nobody seems to want to take risks any more, do they?

Same with BRCC.  They were just fucking around, and I don’t think any of them ever thought anything would come of it, but that’s what I liked.

Here is the first point I would make: in a divided nation, there is actual advantage, from a marketing perspective, appealing to one side or the other.  And given how dominant the Cancelling side of the thing is, there is in my view HUGE money to be made by playing the other side.  Just look at Goya.  Don’t do it halfway: make it so that if you have their bumper sticker on your car, you can reasonably infer their politics.

I’ve tried a few of their coffees, and Blackbeard’s Delight is my favorite.  I like that logo, so I bought one for my ball cap I bought from GoRuck.

I pondered this for a minute.  One, that was not the actual logo, as far as anyone can tell.  Two, pirates usually killed everyone on board.  Blackbeard was a mass murderer.

But here is the thing: I am not endorsing a return to mass murder.  I AM expressing, implicitly, my ANGER at a lot of things going on, and at a lot of people, without actually cussing anyone out, or causing any actual violence.  Pirates are a part of our culture.  The Pittsburgh Pirates.  Tampa Bay Buccanneers.  It is a metaphor for no quarters given, and an all in to win mindset.

Che Guevara was also a mass murderer.  Here is my second point: the people wearing shirts with HIS face on them ARE advocating a return to mass murder, mass enslavement, and mass incarceration.  There is no other way to look at it.

In my personal view this is a sellers market for marketers who are willing to take risks.  Proctor and Gamble showing a biological woman who is taking steroids and thus has a need to shave: not truly risky.  We have all been indoctrinated to reflexively accept whatever the latest assault on historical cultural norms (and in the event, biological science) may be.  P&G suffered a bit for that, I think, but not in a major way.

No, I mean risks like what the Goya CEO took.  AT LEAST 60 million Americans will buy something they don’t even want or need, if the people running the company will say ordinary, traditional, historically garden variety patriotic things.

Forgiveness is really the act of severing the bond of anger and resentment that ties you both to the past and to specific people and situations.  It is cutting a chain.

And here is the thing: all of us have sinned.  All of us have done things which we know have hurt other people, things we have done out of malice, pain, thoughtlessness, spite and anger.  Most of us have done bad things to ourselves.  Quite often, rather than punish others for our pain, we punish ourselves, in various ways.  Addiction is a punishment of sorts in itself.  It is an introjected aggression, a grenade we create then fall on to protect others.

But until we learn to forgive others, we can never include ourselves in that blanket amnesty.  You can’t let YOUR OWN past go until you learn the process of severing the bonds of guilt, resentment, hate and anger with respect to others.

True morality never requires us to choose between our own interest and that of others.  The ideal, always, is that we all feed one another–you may recall the story of the long spoons and heaven and hell–and in so doing become happy and connected.

What is being done to Americans right now is more severe than the most severe restrictions in any of our wars, most notably World War 2.

What is being done right now has never been done to any nation, much less large number of nations, in the history of the world.  Quarantines–for known infected areas–have been a regular feature of pandemics for thousands of years.  But forbidding people from working–across NATIONS–who show no signs of illness, and particularly in response to a disease that kills perhaps 4 people in a thousand who are INFECTED with it: never been done.

What is being done right now is in direct imitation of the highly unsuccessful response of the Communist Chinese, who starved to death 50 million of their own people through stupidity and callous disregard for human life, and may have caused the deaths of more millions through their incompetent response.  We may never know the true death toll, but that they are lying about it is obvious.

What does it take to go from the observation that some cops are bad, to the conclusion that all cops need to be banned?  How does this sort of fucking idiocy happen?  Minneapolis–and from what I can tell PARTICULARLY the black parts of Minneapolis–is already turning into a war zone more worthy of Mogadishu back in the day than a prosperous, supposedly educated global leading nation.

Here is what I perceive: proper thought should be endlessly articulated, in the sense of joints.  It needs to be endlessly particulated, in the sense of particles.  It needs to be malleable, in the sense that it can be impressed on the topic at hand, and come away with a reasonably complete composite picture, like an imprint in sand.

What fear does is disarticulate, and departiculate thinking.  The more fear, the less joints.  Imagine trying to live life with knees that would not flex, elbows that would not bend.  You would walk funny, and many things you can do now you would be unable to do. 

This is what that sort of thinking looks like.  If 1 part in 100 of something is bad, then the whole thing is bad.  Only perfection is acceptable, and since nothing is perfect, you have to reject everything.  Burn everything down.  Only then will perfection emerge. This is literally what some of these people think.

I had someone try and convince me the other day that because race riots happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago, that black people can’t get ahead now.  Should anyone really be confronted with such a fatuous, obviously stupid argument, much less be forced to respond to it? 

These kids in the streets: this is how they think.  As far as I can tell, fear–deep, profound, existential fear–must underlie all this idiocy.  Anxiety is the coin of the realm, and in such a realm, ideational disease is necessarily rampant.

 I fear my government 50x more than I fear this disease. We can manage the disease. What remains to be seen is if we can manage the disease of bad government, which is VASTLY more destructive. Not even close.

It occurs to me to comment that addiction really comes into play when it is an alternative to your “real” life.  You count the time until you can get back to what you really want to do.  It may be sex, drugs, or rock and roll.

And as I think about it, I think this represents, in effect, an affective split, a dissociation.  You have your face that you take into society, then your core reality.  One doesn’t need drugs, the other one does.  One doesn’t need sex every day, but the other one does.

Healing is accomplished, to offer a truism as something deep, through integration.  If alcohol amplifies and improves your existing life, then it is healthy for you.  If it is an alternative to your life, something where you escape it, then it is unhealthy.

Here is another metaphor: addiction is a means of feeding a wild beast which does not belong in society.  The solution is to reintegrate to society, but the thing is, you can only do that when you can figure out how to actually belong.

I think Jonathan Hari is unquestionably correct that addicts suffer from lack of connection, but I think in a great many cases, it is because their traumatic experiences prevent them from socializing properly.  We live surrounded by people, most of us.  That is not the problem.  The problem is HOW to do it.  If your mother did not love you, if she perhaps even hated you, then that is the water in which you swim. 

It’s a complicated fix, but I’m working on it.

You know, I think a lot of psychologists, looking at that dream I posted, might see a good indication of latent shame in there too.  Generic, lasting, developmental shame. 

That would no doubt be accurate.  It occurs to me to comment, though, that in the same sense that I have been made relatively fearless by the fact that I am afraid of everything and everyone, I am also not afraid of being shamed by others, since I already feel it anyway.

Here is an hypothesis: a great many creative sorts–and definitely comedians–derive much of their creative potential FROM shame, and from a following need to justify it with, if not transgression, at least the NEW.

I think most of us are born conformists.  The people who stand out are those driven in some way.  They may be driven by love–a love of beauty, of form, of the creative process itself.  And they may be driven by what I call the Unholy Triumvirate of Shame, Fear, and Anger.

You can’t really much fear losing connections you never really had, although I think there is another direction, that of hyperconformity, in which the connections are tepid, weak, and highly contingent.  Those are the people who go through the meat grinder and come out Fascists.  There are a lot of those people right now.

Think about this, too: would you not expect a groundswell of support for mass marches and demonstrations, when people have been locked up alone for months?  They get to belong.  They get to participate, allegedly in the service of a noble cause.

Buy up 100 million doses of HCQ–if he can get them, but whoever makes it has to be working over-overtime, and we could probably make it here pretty easily–and give them out to anyone who wants to use them as prophylactics.  I think it is 2 200mg doses the first week, then 1 200 mg dose every two weeks.  It’s not a lot of pills.  For God’s sake, India deployed them in a slum where people were living on top of each others, and saw almost no disease.

We need to bypass the System.  Bypass Fauci and the NIH.  Get this in the hands of the people.  He can issue an Executive Order making it available, at least in States where not (for inexplicable reasons) explicitly prohibited.

This is not a new medicine.  It is like Tylenol or Sudafed.  It’s available over the counter to hundreds of millions of people around the world.

I was dreaming, for the umpteenth time, that I was back at the University of Chicago, enrolled in classes.  I was going to become a first rate Sanskritist and scholar.  At least, I was going to become a good enough scholar.  I lack the patience and diligence to be a great scholar, but I certainly have the intelligence to be a good one, and probably a great teacher.

Everything was going fine.  I was hanging out in the coffee shop–the one in the basement of Swift Hall has since renamed itself “Grounds of Being”, which of course is a name I like. I was talking with folks in the halls. 

Then I remembered my terrible secret.  I don’t belong there.  I am a CONSERVATIVE.  All the smiling faces would soon turn to snarls.  People would ask that I be expelled.  If I did get my degree, no one would want to hire me.  All the same people I had been having pleasant conversations with, about the weather, professors, their courses of study.

It really is a sort of madness that has fallen over the Academy, writ large.  It was described well by Allan Bloom 35 years ago.  Moral virtue is no longer taught, and the Great Synchronizing Signal and Official Religion has become politics.  And the politics is not fixed: it more or less demands something like: “we expect you to agree immediately with whatever we come up with next week.  You don’t get any mulligans or misses.  One failure and you are OUT, permanently and irrevocably.”

How did this happen?  Again, Bloom traces it reasonably well.  It was ideas that did this, ideas which consumed themselves, leaving nothing left in the fire but mimetic imitation, rote conformity, childishness.  You pick up the ball and play with it because that is what the other children are doing.  This in people with average IQ’s of 140 plus, but emotional IQ’s much, much lower than that, particularly when it comes to self knowledge.

Think about this: the Left has found itself more or less cheering the deaths of 100,000 Americans and the deaths by starvation of perhaps over 100 million people.  All in the hopes of destroying a man whose main crime has been telling the truth in a time when they can’t and won’t do it.

In Minneapolis, ground zero to their ministrations, desperate ordinary people are being forced to build barricades and form militias to defend themselves, as if this were Somalia and not America.  Crime is rampant.  Children are terrified.  And all according to plan.  They are getting what they wanted: no police.

It is all a sadistic trance, a madness without justification.

I don’t regret my decision.  It was the right decision.  That will not change.  But I would like to see the world come back to sanity in my lifetime, where someone like me–perhaps a grand child–could go in peace to a place with lots of smart people and expect honest, measured, compassionate wisdom.