Moderates United

A lot of people I interact with on the internet seemingly would be fine with this lockdown lasting just short of forever.  They tell me “it’s time to reinvent your life”, or “it’s time to reinvent society”, the latter of which means, practically, empowering and rationalizing the behavior of nihilistic radicals.

Tom Wolfe, some decades ago, popularized the idea of “radical chic”, that it was cool to have a Black Panther, or Fidel Castro, or member of the Weather Underground at tony parties in some affluent part of Manhattan.  It was all a game, played by banal, bored and boring people, whose lives revolved around lazy thrills.

Can we speak now of “Lockdown Chic”?  The notion that the cool people embrace this whole thing, that it is cool, and that only uncool people–most of them probably execrable Trump supporters–would not relish this terrific break in our collective bourgeois normalcy?

What this overlooks is–nearly everything and everyone.  It overlooks the terribly poor in Africa, and Latin America, and Asia, who were on the edge of hunger to begin with, and already shitting in the street and sleeping on the floor.

It overlooks our own poor, both the rural poor, and the urban poor. It overlooks specifically–and I call them out since much seemingly benign rhetoric is being wafted in their general direction–the poor black people who live in violent urban ghettos.

How are they doing?  How the fuck do you think they are doing?  How can this be a serious question?  Many of them were improving in the Trump economy, but its effects were just beginning to be felt.  A great many of them were still struggling to make ends meet.

And ponder the Single Mother, whose nerves were already frayed, and who is now most likely going into clinical depression, at risk of suicide–her responsibilities notwithstanding–and who if she does make it through this will carry permanent emotional scars that will affect her the rest of her life?

This poor woman is not even allowed to know if her kids will be allowed to go back to school.  What the fuck is she supposed to do if she can’t earn a living without working, and can’t work if she has nowhere safe to send her kids during the day?  Is anyone thinking about her?  Sure as fuck not Dr. Fauci, the fucking idiot and probable crook.

Look at all the people the Chic crowd forgets.  They themselves live comfortable, boring lives, because they are unimaginative, dull people.  Thrills are their only sustaining adventure, and drugs and sex the easiest route to those.  But lunatic politics is a useful add to this mix.

And some of these people embrace what I would term a faux spirituality.  They are the ones who fill $4,000 week long seminars at Kripalu with Gregg Braden, or perhaps Marianne Williamson.  They can afford these things.  They don’t understand that such things will never, ever, be a possibility for the mass of Americans, and that blissful pieties about love and compassion mean little to nothing where hard nosed intelligence and accurate understandings are the only remedy, and only honest pathways forward.

These are the people who fund people like AOC.  They are the ones who want a rapist imbecile (he is cunning, though, when his brain is working, in the way those of skillful criminals are, and don’t forget it) suffering from Alzheimers winning the race for President.

And these are the people who COULD NOT CARE LESS about ordinary working men and women in this or any other country.  They don’t care.  Those people are not in their lives, and if they object to being used, then they are also objecting to their raison d’etre, and thereby disposable and immediately forgettable.

The poor are suffering?  Let them eat cake.

Now where was that champagne?

I keep seeing the claim that I “want to kill grandma” if I don’t want to wear a mask.

Here is a question: Since we are speaking for grandma, might she not be saying “save my son and grandson from this disaster and open everything back up as soon as possible.  I’ll stay home.”?

Might it not be true in ALL CASES where we are generating outrage now on behalf of people who are not present, that they may in fact, if they WERE present, be saying something else entirely?

Of course. 

Of course.

I think this book is destined to have a profound influence on my life in many ways.  I listened to it on Audible, but have decided to get a hard copy as well.

One important idea is that meditation is a type of work to be taken seriously, which yields actual results.

Another is a reset in my sense of what is possible and acceptable in the pursuit of spirituality.  It was back then very commonplace for individuals to spend months and years in solitary meditation.  This is not a mistaken stereotype of pre-colonial (Tibet is now an annexed Chinese colony) Tibet.

It was very common to live for years in the cold and even dark subsisting on little but butter tea and tsampa.

And Tummo was a real thing.  It still is.

All of my existential conflicts are abstract.  My concrete needs are well met.  There is no good reason not to take advantage of my good fortune.

I sometimes feel that the internet has trained me for unhappiness, or that I have trained myself for unhappiness using the internet and “the news”, broadly understood.  

It’s really not overstating the case to say that I have spent my entire adult life trying to figure out how to counteract the madness which underlies what we are seeing in our streets, and in people’s willing embrace of their own loss of freedom and economic well being.

I spent a year in high school in Europe as an exchange student, and it provided much needed perspective on the superficiality and ultimately the emotionally unnourishing nature of most American relationships of all sorts.  Friends are not as close as they should be.  Husbands and wives not as intimate and loving as they could be.  Children not as respectful of their parents, who for their part all too often prefer their jobs or hobbies to the process of parenting, and are only too willing to outsource it to the TV and other impersonal media that entrance their children, while they themselves do whatever they do at some emotional distance.

The needed connections are not made.  Silence is never endured.  The threads are never untangled.

I have ideas.  I have plans.  But the time is not yet, I don’t think.  Certainly I have failed every time I tried.  People fear openness and intimacy.  They fear what is inside of them, and what is inside of them is what WAS inside of them, plus 100,000 murders on the low side, countless acts of cruelty and torture, and a lifetime spent cultivating the habit of being just enough available to kind of get their needs met, without ever going all the way with anyone.  And of course if they do, the chances are good the other person will recoil.

We see the notion of “true love” in movies.  It is a fantasy, mostly for women.  But most of them see it in a fundamentally narcissistic way.  They want to be the woman in love, with the good man.  They want a beautiful wedding.  They want to be the focus.  There is not much love in all this.  The man can almost be generic.  He needs to be relatively handsome, and acceptably successful.  That’s it. 

To be sure, loving people exist.  Loving relationships exist.  Fantastic parenting exists.

But should we not make it an aim that that is EXPECTED, that failures should be the exception, and social/community safeguards in place for that eventuality?

I read all the kids locked down now for three months are missing out on valuable time for socializing, for learning how to be a human being.  They are bonding with their electronics, learning to “be” with others at an emotional and physical distance.  All of this gets “hard wired” at some point.  It is fixable, but it becomes the default until major efforts are made to change it.

Where are the visionaries?  I try to supply that need, but I am one person, with an obscure blog on a backwater of the internet.

With so much supposed intelligence, with so much research, with countless billions spent every year on making the world smarter, why are we so fucking stupid?  

The lockdown and “social distancing”–which I have noted amounts in many respects to emotional distancing, forced isolation, and alienation–are a good answer to the question “how can we convert most Americans from happiness and prosperity to irritability, anger, and want?”

Another good question they would be the answer to is “how can we create the emotional climate necessary to sow deep and lasting divisions in American society, and in particular, how can we reseparate the black community from the Republicans?”

I will note that in Detroit, and Chicago, and Baltimore, and Louisville most of the black folks have not worked in three months, or not worked steadily.  Democrats cheer this, albeit not honestly and directly, by telling us that this lockdown should last, well, just short of forever, and at least until the election. In my experience, they get angry both at good news and at suggestions for better ways of dealing with this that don’t involve forcing people who don’t want to to wear masks.  They don’t want good news.  They don’t want ideas.  They want JUST WHAT WE HAVE.

That most of those proposing this are not themselves suffering in any ways I will say, even though it should not need to be said.

Ponder in this regard billionaire “champions of the working class and minorities” like Bill Deblasio and ostensibly Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.  They don’t have a clue, and they don’t care.  The math is to figure out what needs to be said to who, in order to achieve political aim X.  That’s it.  It’s cynical top to bottom.  Evil might be a better word.  People of the lie.

There is really no way to differentiate the people who hate Trump right now from people who also hate America, and wish most Americans pain, penury, and failure.  The two are tied at the hip.

There is nothing positive in their rejection of Trump.  They do not have a positive, humanistic, life affirming agenda.  Their only impulse is destruction and anger.  There are no ideas.  No vision.  No caring, no kindness, no compassion.

This is how you get to the idea that implementing useful change in how policing happens in the black community is to burn down large segments of the black community, and banish the cops.

Here is the thing: there are a lot of single mothers, with children, in these neighborhoods.  Most of them are poor, and most of these cities have pretty strong gun control.  How do they protect themselves without police?  How are the psychopaths not emboldened and empowered when the good men and women are ordered to stand aside and let the whole fucking world burn? 

It is hard to know where Trump should fit into all this.  As I have said before, the cities have Mayors, and the States have Governors.  I oppose the Federal Executive infringing on how they do things.  I would therefore oppose Trump sending anybody in without being explicitly asked, and when called on this by, among others, Tucker Carlson, that is what he said: I told them I’m here if they need and want me.  He also made it a Federal crime to attack at least Federal statues, and made protecting them a condition of Federal funds.  Those are positive actions.

What is really playing out is the logical effect of voting into office radicals who were not well concealed in sheep’s clothing.  DeBlasio, in particular, should not be directing a Burger King, much less a large city whose economy is important to that of the whole country and even world.

Yin and Yang.  Madness has a way of creating a reaction in the other direction.

Here is a list of 1968 riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_riots

Nixon won that election.  Nixon (or for that matter, Johnson) did not personally play a role in putting down any riots.  That was done, or not done, by the Mayors of the cities in question.

Trump can win this election pretty easily, I think, if we can avoid fraud.  And then, seriously, we need to start cracking down on the radicals.

I will continue to suggest that requiring all college graduates to spend two hours watching PragerU videos and passing test on them would be a good start.  You can literally spend many thousands of hours reading and attending class and not ONCE, anywhere on a college campus, in any class, or any coffee shop, or any late night bullshit session, run into intact, clearly expressed conservative political ideas.

It is madness.

If you oppose racism, you can thank a white man.

Seriously, no one who knows history at all can fail to know both that racism and slavery were universals the world over, UNTIL US.

Asia, Africa, North and South America, Europe.  Maybe the Australian aborigines didn’t practice it, but the Maori in New Zealand definitely enslaved one another.

One of the main products of Viking raids was white slaves.

Here is the thing: for most of human history, if someone was not a direct member of your in-group, they had no rights and no claims on your conscience.  This is a fact, an historical fact.

The racism of the present Left, the hatred, the depersonalization, the demonization, the violence: all very, very old, atavistic, and actively regressive.  We should have grown past all this a long time ago.  We really should have.

Part of the problem is that we have given our world over to people who deal well with abstraction, and far too many of those people are emotional grotesques.  They are ugly on the inside, in ways not hinted at even remotely by how awkward and/or banal they are on the outside.

There was a time, as recently as the 80’s, I would suppose, when people who called themselves “liberals” were fun.  They let their hair down, didn’t care about social conventions, and were willing to take risks and seek adventures.  Compared to stereotypical conservatives–who wore suits, worked hard, lived boring lives, and retired conventionally and uninterestingly–liberals were the ones out there “living life”.

All that seems to have changed.  The world has gotten darker, or so it seems to me.

No doubt most of the people in rock climbing towns–as one example–still identify as “liberal”, but there are no laughs without glances.  The only really safe laughs, I would think, now, are at the expense of conservatives and Trump  supporters.  The whole thing is very serious, humorless, puritanical, tense, and angry.

At their worst most members of the Moral Majority were not that bad.  Most of them still believed the “condemn the sin, not the sinner”, and I think most would have been happy to invite into their homes the most flamboyant homosexual for a slice of pie, if they could talk with him about Jesus.  And failing, they would still have prayed for him, which I suppose is still an attack of sorts, but far, far short of the angry condemnations which greet anyone who runs afoul of today’s crop of little Nazis.

As Robert Plant said (can I call those proto-jeggings?), when hippies were still fun, “Does anybody remember laughter?”

If there truly are grey aliens, we seem to be marching towards matching them emotionally.  Most of us, at any rate.  I’m doing my own thing (I love JT: he makes me happy.)

I suppose this sort of post adds to the problem. I ain’t laughin’ neither.  I’ll need to smoke on that.  I am going to add “buy some Marx Brothers movies to my list”.

It occurs to me that what Leftists–who I will once again term “People of the Lie”–create when they get full control through violence and deception, is an external analogue of their own inner worlds.

Their inner worlds are filled with delusion.  They don’t just deceive others: they deceive themselves.  They create elaborate structures in their heads of how the world works which bear no real relation to how it actually does work.

Correspondingly, their emotional lives are filled with notions of who and how they are, what sort of person they are, and what sorts of emotions they feel and why, and NONE OF IT IS TRUE.  It is all lie.

So it should come as no surprise that in, say, Cuba, they can look at mass horror, desperation, failure, poverty and injustice, and see happiness, success, empowerment, and plenty.  They have free education, you see.  And free medical care.  And it is the “Republic of Cuba” so of course they are free politically.  Why wouldn’t they be?  Only wrong views are corrected.  Everything else is allowed.  The Party exists as a Friend to the people, and is much better than God, since God doesn’t exist.

So in the same way a person can be cruel and perceive themselves as kind–and by the way this has been true of most Christians, or at least the Church, for most of its history–so too can governments destroy the hopes and happiness of their people and see it as “liberation”.  Leftists always use this word “liberation”.  They invent the crimes, then “rectify” them with real ones, then lie about all of it.

From an emotionally strategic perspective, the movement to oppose “bourgeois morality”, and then reason itself–which after all is the attempt to correlate action with the supposedly desired outcome, which is measured honestly–creates the freedom for unlimited and unopposed delusion.

What you see, in other words, in a Communist regime, is the physical manifestation of unprocessed gut energy.  What you see is hell, painted over as heaven.

I think it can be stipulated as a general principle that all of us create in the world what we are.  This means that to create a better world, the would-be savior needs first to create a truly good self.  This does not mean becoming a vegan or learning rote and angry political ideas.  It means sitting quietly until all the horrific and angry and painful and unpleasant feelings floating around are integrated and a quiet happiness becomes the default.  Only from that place does anything truly good flow.

And certainly many critiques can be made of human history.  Many valid critiques of American foreign policy can be made.  We are not pure good.

But all those critiques have to be placed in the context of the whole of human history.  By and large the Communist propaganda which teaches American kids to hate America is looking to Communism as the enlightened alternative, which of course is an exact inversion.  Whatever our crimes, they are only a small, small fraction those of the Communists, and while our system can be amended and improved and evolved from within, such a thing is impossible in a Communist system, which amounts to nothing so much as a retrogression to the default mode of all human societies for the past 4,000 years, which had kings who made laws, and brutal men with swords and spears who enforced them, and in the name of the Good, and of God.  Communists substitute History for God, and wind up in effect worshiping themselves but the practical effect is the same: the Party has a Divine Right to rule, and opposing it is opposing their God.