Moderates United

Trump wants to take a reasonable, balanced approach, based on what I think most of us think is the bad advice of Anthony Fauci.  He’s understood Fauci would be fine locking most Americans in their basements at gunpoint for his own convenience, since Fauci seems to view the virus as his main interest, with people and their lives merely existing as distractions.

But Trump, like the rest of us, didn’t know what he didn’t know three weeks ago.  So he recommended people err on the side of caution.  Had he not, and had this thing blown up, he would have perhaps deserved some portion of the blame which is directed at him no matter what he does or says, or does not do, or does not say. Orange man bad daily, details to be announced as they are determined.

Here is the thing: Democrats are not just trying to take the opposite approach specifically, but in tone also.  Where Trump is trying to balance and moderate, they want to unbalance, and unmoderate.  They want a long term, draconian shut down enforced with the nastiest police they can find.

There are really three strands to balance: the disease itself, the proportionality and Constitutionality of the policy response, and the needs of ordinary people to be able to feed, clothe and house themselves with honest work.

Democrats have developed a monomaniacal focus on the first, and discarded the other two.  The forest may contain lions, tigers and bears, but they only count the lions.

How many times do Americans really need to see the contempt Democrats have for ordinary people, working ordinary jobs, making ordinary money, and living ordinary lives?  They have no USE for such people, especially if they are white, but it’s really not any better if they are black, latino, or Other.  There is no principle left.  There is no honest compassion left.

I will recall to your mind the hatred intellectuals everywhere have felt for the middle classes in all their countries.  What they wanted was warfare.  Warfare between a “working class” that didn’t even necessarily exist (Russia, Cambodia), and a power elite.  The bourgeoisie got in the way, because they were actually pretty comfortable.  This means they didn’t want to tear down the fabric of the society.  Since the intellectuals DID want to tear everything down, on the assumption that good things would happen in the aftermath of mass destruction, they hated, and still hate, the middle class.

Right now, they are calling people who just want to go back to work “right wing extremists”.  Ponder that.  Ponder that these are the same people who preach compassion, and who once claimed to care about the poor.  The poor are hurting the MOST right now.  But they don’t want them working.  They want them suffering.  If they can get good numbers of dead from black Americans, well that is Progress, right?

I am starting to wonder if the Left is not taking active joy in watching much of America suffer.  They hate most of us: that much has been clear for a long time.  And they hated America as a whole much more when we elected Donald Trump.

It really seems like many of them are feeling active Schadenfreude at people suffering from being shut in their homes, locked out of their jobs, cut off from any source of income, and being unable to pay their bills.  They very much want this whole shitshow to continue, as long as possible.

I really don’t think it’s just about the upcoming election, but payback for the last election.

None of these people should ever be let near the halls of power ever again.

It occurs to me to comment that the “Cultural War”–which I would argue is really a battle between Culture itself, and nihilistic barbarism and atavistic and pointless violence–is a war of attrition.

Yes, there have been major battles, like the Mapplethorpe thing.  But by and large, the planned and coordinated rivers of doubt wash away some small part more of our shared inheritance each and every day.  Every week.  Every month.  Every year.

The people fighting the battle consist on the one side people who simply want to preserve some form of the status quo, as they conceive it.  Possibly, they want to return to some other time they envision as more clear and more simple (which was usually also more abusive and less free).

Such people really want nothing more than to preserve some form of common sense, in the form of ideas like “if we want to help people born here it is not helpful to import millions more people who also need help.”  That’s not radical.  It’s not even controversial, if one is trying to think clearly.  It’s obvious.  It’s common sense.

On the other side, unfortunately, they have learned how to turn people into abusive, repetitive machines, who rat-a-tat the days propaganda relentlessly against any and all targets they see.  Marriage, family, the notion of biological gender, the sanctity of national boundaries, the value of the Constitution, the value of the concept of universal human rights, the heritage of free philosophical inquiry: all are on the chopping block.

It is really quite impossible to retain any normal sense of human dignity and restraint in the face of machine like abuse.  People get rigid, tribal. They contract.  They get angry, and act out, although so far in very, very few cases.  It’s the other side, trying to prod us with hot rods continually, which is heaping the abuse, and we who are taking it.

But absent some major development, it’s hard to see how common sense wins this battle.  The machines on the one side demand of us that we, too, become hard, rigid, unseeing, violent, brittle.  It’s a really horrible situation.

I don’t have an answer, at least for all of us.  I personally will likely be contracting soon somewhat from the public sphere, and focusing on my own indivisible and private reality.

Something large is going to give at some point.  In large measure,  it already has.  We are a decayed, decadent, stupid people, and I speak of most of the developed world, at least, not just the United States.  Most of us have been trained like obedient dogs to hearken to the words of “experts” and brook no disagreement from their orations and pronouncements from anyone.

This line of thought and feeling is a bit grim, but that’s how I feel at the moment.  Perhaps I will lighter in an hour or a day.  Or when Hillary Clinton is arrested and charged with as many felonies as she is CLEARLY guilty of.

I found this film interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA5HcfVUYlo

You may also.  I certainly do not agree with each and every point, and key elements are completely undocumented, like Mark Zuckerberg’s supposed comment about consuming adrenochrome.

Here is the thing with conspiracy theory.  In the same way Mad Dog Mattis said you had to have a plan to kill everyone you meet, you need to have a plan to disbelieve everyone and everything you hear.  Be ready for it.  Be ready to call bullshit.  Always.  With everyone.

You can see a chain of 7 things, and believe numbers 1,4, 5 and 7.  Then add your own 8 and 9.

I was thinking about this the other day, and watching and reading very non-orthodox accounts of reality is a form of what I have from time to time called “paradigmatic flanking”.

Here is the thing: you need to know what consensus reality is.  This is what they call “education”.  But if you want to best approximate how reality actually works, you need to be willing to regularly hold up alternative patterns and see how they fit.  Some will fit beautifully.  For example, the idea that our souls survive death makes vastly more sense when one evaluates the SCIENTIFIC evidence than does the contrary hypothesis, which among other things requires us to believe in matter when our own scientists’ best guess is that matter does not exist in any formal and final way outside of consciousness, which then becomes logically the primary unit of reality.  In my understanding, this was John von Neuman’s conclusion, although like Feynman I don’t think he ever really troubled himself with the philosophical and even theological implications of his own work.

Consuming unorthodox ideas is really just a way of regularly reevaluating your own first assumptions.  As I said the other day, you really need to set aside time for this regularly.  If you are on the wrong road, you need to know it.  And if everything over time validates your road, then you can have increasing confidence in it.

Personally, when I look at the art work of the Podesta’s, then look how connected they are, it seems obvious something really sick is going on.   This is not rocket science.  If you look at the artwork at Comet Pizza, I believe you will see what I and everyone else who ACTUALLY looks at it sees.

And add to this the decision by Microsoft to use Marina Abramovic to hawk their VR platform, using occult appearing imagery.  This woman is famous for throwing parties focused around simulated cannibalism.  She is a more or less open Satanist, whose ceremonies involve pain and blood.

If you watch something like this film and conclude 90% of it is BS, then that means 10% was useful to you.  It is really an awkward and unjustifiable conceit of our system of education that most people watch films purporting to convey information and either accept 100% or none of it.

This is really a symptom that we don’t teach critical thinking any more.  Any educated person should be able to say yes, yes, no, yes, let me look that up.  That’s what I do.  If I find something interesting, I do more digging.  That’s the use of the internet as an information instrument, although I do wonder if institutional elites might not soon start disappearing things from the internet.  I was wondering yesterday if I might ought to buy a physical encyclopedia for that reason.

But for now, it seems to do the job reasonably well.

Think.  It is not illegal yet.

I really think that in the latter years of our lives, and when we die, what we remember is the little things.  The Sunday mornings sipping coffee with our loved ones.  Church, if it is a place where we feel calm and welcome.  Gardening.  Perhaps the wedding days of our sons and daughters, if they are happy.

One of the most pernicious things in our culture is that stronger experiences are to be valued at the expense of smaller, seemingly weaker experiences.  Like everything else, experience becomes a commodity, to be paid for and consumed.

It’s a cliche, but listen to it, perhaps for the first time: the best things in life are free.  The smell of morning coffee.  A light breeze on a beautiful morning.  The smile of someone you love.

We punish ourselves for more, more, more, but what we get for it is ephemeral and often completely non-existent.  I see many people who I really believe do things just to make other people jealous, just to be the person who did X, Y, or Z, took a bunch of selfies and pictures, then posted them on social media, all without FEELING ANY OF IT.

You cannot consume experience.  You have to participate.  You have to be present, not as a gulping hungry experience ogre, but as an emotionally present human being.  We really are small and weak, in  a cosmic sense.  We are not much.  But we are all we have, in these bodies, in this life.  It takes faith to be human.  And it takes time and patience.  And it takes a lot of courage, honest, deep courage.  None of us know where this wild ride is going.  It helps, though, if you can handle ups and downs and hard lefts and rights with faith and sang froid.

I really think the point of life is this: to FEEL life within us, and around us.  Nothing less, nothing more.  To FEEL ALIVE.  To feel energy flowing through us.

The more I study it, the more I feel the writings of Tarthang Tulku in the Kum Nye part of his work ALONE constitute a better body of thought and practice than those of any church I know of, including Buddhism itself, although I’m sure he himself would demur on that last point.  It’s all there.  How to live, how to manifest and nurture the feeling of being alive, how to bring that crackling alert energy into our daily lives, making all moments unique and memorable, and all at no cost.

I suppose the inevitability of this should have been obvious to me, but the smarter I get the dumber the world seems.  We are a bunch of chickens, and fools, doing what we were told for no reasons other than fear and unimaginativeness.  The rebellious experimentation of the 60’s has given way to a drab, dull thirst for conformity and herd membership.

Ayn Rand, in her talk on the topic, really captured the fact that nothing REALLY new and interesting happened at Woodstock.  It was a bunch of emotionally underdeveloped yet emotionally greedy adolescents seeking experiences they muted rather than amplified by generalized drug use and hedonism.  They did not invent anything new.

A society worthy of the name, a culture worthy of the name, has boundaries, expectations, and a system of growth.  The moment of the moon landing was really something memorable.  It was a moment of earned shared pride.  Hard work was done, and effort expended.  Imagination was called into action and tempered with specific planning.

The people who put our men on the moon died with strong positive memories.  I am quite sure of that.  And I think most of the people who were at Woodstock died bitter and regretful.  Not all.  Some grew up.

But from a strategic life perspective, I would offer Kum Nye as a means of developing emotional rationality, of learning about, and HARNESSING the patent power of emotion and feeling and instinct, without subordinating ones reason to them.  Emotions provide the power, and reason the destination.  It’s a strong combination.

I read through these books, and am astonished that there is no other system I know of which comes CLOSE to the variety and depth of the exercises Tarthang Tulku Rinpoche has created.  Not within an order of magnitude. 

I don’t know why it is not better known.  People are stupid, I guess. 

Putting more effort into it, I would say there is nothing sexy about it, and there are no immediate results.  If you go to Asia you will not find monks doing this work.  There is nothing “authentic” about it.  It happens in California in a couple places, and small centers in a handful of other countries.  That’s it.

I will teach it locally one day.  I am slowly, slowly calming down and, as I tell people, becoming sane.  What I mean by sane perhaps differs from what most people mean.  In my case, it is the resolution of things which have haunted me since my brain evolved enough to form memories.  And it is happening.  It takes time.

Saying that you can’t consider a source valid if it is “right wing” is literally exactly equivalent to saying “I refuse to listen to anyone who might disagree with me.”  Alternatively: if they disagree with me, they are invalid for that reason alone.  Self evidently, this is not the creed of any HONEST Liberals.

This website is called “Moderates United”.  I consider myself a moderate.  I really do.  There are people to the right of me who want to bring back institutional racism and sexism (although not very many outside of the very large group of Islamic Scripturalists, who most likely number in the hundreds of millions), and most of the world has fallen off a cliff to the Left of me, believing–as I see it–demonic and deluded things which work to destroy people and societies spiritually, morally and economically.

I’m just trying to say reasonable things, that in a sane world would be uncontroversial.

That, in a sane world, would not NEED to be said.

Thomas Sowell has probably said what I’m about to say more clearly, and certainly more often, but I really think the basics are worth returning to over and over.

1) There is no moral virtue in demanding the world work some way other than the way it works.  The job of the reformer is not to play a game of make believe, coupled with force–“you will be generous with your money or we will take it and kill you.”  Rather, the job is to understand the rules of the system and reform them from within.

What most Socialists REALLY want is a more generous, more compassionate world.  This can ONLY come about with mass individual moral improvement.  That has to come gradually, evolutionarily and voluntarily.  It has to come about by means of better ideas, both philosophically and psychologically.  In many respects, it has to come about through better means of dealing with trauma and dissociation, which are the roots of most anti-social behaviors.

When you attempt to FORCE “moral improvements” by conflating “morality”, so called, with social organization–and not the collective output of countless individual moral dispositions–what you actually do is make society WORSE.  All of the people existing in a world where some asshole is always pointing a gun at them and telling them what to do become MORE traumatized, MORE selfish.  The OPPOSITE of the desired effect is not only reliably achieved, but necessarily achieved.  Even for those personally inclined to agree with the aims of the efforts, no true growth will be possible in such a context, where the means are anger and repression.

2) there is no moral virtue in being generous with other peoples money, particularly stolen money.  More generally, the motives most Leftists operate out of are, on the one hand, resentment towards people who are successful (they are generally personally failures, like Marx and Lenin), and on the other a desire to seek “success” themselves through the medium of bad ideas.

Think about it: most “revolutionaries” never really have jobs.  They are people who think, but don’t do.  They speak continually and yet do very little, concretely.  The “revolution”, psychologically, becomes a means of personal empowerment, and a means of relevance.  All opposition, then, comes to feel like personal attacks on them.

Hmmm.  There is something about right there.

Take Bernie: he’s an asshole who’s never really had a real job.  He was a fuckup at his Commune, then he went into politics, where his schtick was handing out other peoples money as fast and in as large a quantities as he could.

So much of modern history can really be seen as the large scale effects which come from individual psychopathology.

Self evidently, in important ways Adolph Hitler was psychologically not that different from Bernie.  Bernie’s followers wanted concentration camps.  The whole thing runs on resentment.

I have been walking a lot lately.  It’s therapeutic, and it creates space for me to perceive and to think.  Today I have a couple moments where I was able to feel the immensity of simply being alive on Earth at this moment.

And it occurred to me that you have to break your own rhythm from time to time.  It is no good doing the same meditations, the same practices, over and over in more or less the same way across a lifetime.  The spiritual path is not straight. If it were, everyone who followed the rules would invariably become wise, and that is plainly not the case.  There is precious little wisdom in the world today, that I see.

The Tantrics have a ceremony called many things, but called Tsog in the book I recently listened to.  You eat forbidden foods, and do forbidden things.  The book I was listening to made a case that it would be logically appropriate to literally eat shit, although he certainly was not counseling it.  I had reached a similar conclusion independently some time ago.  It would not be inappropriate to put shit on your altar.  Not as an act of sacrilege, but to indicate that the whole of the universe is holy.  All of it.

And as I’ve indicated from time to time, I make some effort to take a day of rest on Saturdays.  To just do everything a bit differently.  To give myself plenty of time for nothing.

It seems to me this is how you make progress.  So many of us want to create lines in life, to perform some sort of math once, then stick to it indefinitely.  For physical goals–like career success, physical health, and an organized living space–this is suitable.  For wisdom, it is not.  You have to throw yourself open over and over, without having any plan or any idea at all what may come floating in.

And it occurred to me that the idea offered in, of all things, the movie World War Z, about the Israeli Tenth Man, whose job it is to disagree with everyone else on everything, to live in a world of the counter-narrative.  We all need an internalized Tenth Man.  It keeps people who do that from getting too hard.  If you ever get too far from being a cloud, you will drop like a brick. Your mind will die, and your spirit will be chained to it.

This, at any rate, is my view, and certainly what I do.  I leave you to judge my success, much of which I post here, but certainly not all.

I’m interacting with folks on the internet, and have reached a really incredible conclusion. For many years, whenever unemployment was relatively high (most of Obama’s eight years, for example) that was a “failure of Capitalism”. The people without jobs were in misery, it was terrible, the world needed Democrats to save them.

But now things have inverted. We have 25 MILLION people made at least temporarily jobless due to government coercion and mandate, and they want them to STAY that way. There is no pity. Wanting to go back to work is “right wing extremism”. “Right wingers” are going to kill people. They are murderers, more or less, who don’t care how many millions of Americans live or die.

Do you see this? They literally want MISERY to be part of our shared reality permanently. All the time. Without stop. Why would they ever want to enact effective policy when they need people who to be suffering so they can lie and claim they both have the solution and want to solve the problem?

It INFURIATED them that our jobless rate was so low. It made them MISERABLE that across all demographics we were at historic lows.

Now, they YELL at anyone who thinks that maybe just maybe the unemployment being CREATED by the government might be something we should take a hard look at, particularly since NONE of the models of mass death and destruction have come true.

And why have they not learned? New York and Seattle were hard hit. Why were the hospitals built to handle the excess never used? Do any of them REALLY think a wave of any sort is coming, or that it would if we opened up tomorrow? I don’t know. But they certainly don’t care. There is zero sense of urgency to lighten the burden of the working poor. They don’t CARE about the working poor, despite those people–many of whom are women and minorities–being the people they claim they uniquely look after, the people who just couldn’t make it without them.  With friends like that, nobody needs enemies.

I have for some years described what is commonly called “Liberalism” in this country as an emotionally sick form of codependence, but it is really worse than that. Most of the people who are not part of the system clearly seem to be guilty of at least that. But the CORE is really just pushing words to get richer and richer, and they need failure to keep the game going.

The whole things makes my mind spin. If this does not enrage you, you have not understood it.

amounts to allowing the government to become your Sugar Daddy.  And we all know what Sugar Daddies get for their money.

And I would add: is it not OBVIOUS that those at the bottom of the economy are being forced into prostitution and drug dealing to survive?  I was in our poor section the other day and saw a lemonade stand, being run by adults.  It was the only idea they could come up with, and it was worth a try.  Maybe it made them something.

But when you breed poverty, you breed desperation.  For many years, one of Cuba’s main products was prostitution.  Europeans would go there and spend a week fucking for cheap.  Communism took away all their other options, and hell the hookers were probably taxed on their income by government pimps.

Drawing obvious moral conclusions is not hard.  Seeing what is in front of your fucking eyes: that is what seems to be the challenge for a disgustingly large number of self important and intellectually lazy and complacent assholes.