Moderates United

You know, if this crop of ghouls and demons is speaking, and making a strong claim, by and large it is a willful falsehood.  When they claim Republicans are engaged in “voter suppression” what they are really objecting to is the suppression of fake votes, illegal votes, which is to say the disenfranchisement, in reality, of a number of voters equal to the number of illegal votes.

In the last election perhaps up to 30% of the black community cast their votes for Donald Trump.  Given that his victory was stolen, that means a third of the black votes cast were disenfranchised.  We are told this is bad, which is true except when it is good.  It depends entirely on the Party’s needs.  Die Partei Ueber Alles.

They claim we are racist, but there is no Republican equivalent to ANY of the Jim Crow laws, even though they claim all the real racists left the Democrats some time in the 1960’s.  Well, if so, where is the evidence?  Where are ACTUALLY racist policies, you know, like separate drinking fountains for blacks (I can’t honestly remember if this has actually been done in the present era yet, since farce and reality are indistinguishable), or separate graduations (has been done), or separate housing (has also been done)?

If the Republicans are the racists, WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?  I will note Republican hero Barry Goldwater helped found the Arizona NAACP.

Republicans are Individualists.  This does not mean we believe in greed.  We believe in the idea that individuals can be and should be held accountable for their individual actions, but NEVER for the actions of a group in which they belong only accidentally, such as their ethnicity, race, or gender.  That is the defining aspect of Collectivism, which we view as intrinsically unjust and evil.

Intellectually, Conservatism is vastly more interesting philosophically than Leftism.  Marxism consists almost entirely in stupid ideas iterated an inane lengths, all of which have been falsified by the very History that Marx made his God.  It’s a poorly written fantasy novel.

This opposition to Collectivism and support of the Individual as the moral basis of society is REPUBLICAN 101.  This is BEDROCK.  This is a core value.  It is a LIBERAL principle, one which states that all men and women are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, the pursuit of Eudaemonia (Jefferson’s intended meaning), and the ownership of property (Locke’s original formulation).

We are reading now, from these horrific people, that banning Critical Race Theory, which has a direct lineage back to the Critical Theory of the Marxist Frankfort School, or so I understand, will prevent teachers from teaching HONEST history.  Truth truth truth.  Truth is under attack.  Teachers won’t be able to teach, we are told.  Bad bad bad.  Vote no on that horrible bill, naive gullible fools are told.

Well, let me give you an example of the sort of thing legislators are trying to ban.  The particular version of this law I am quoting makes teaching any of the following punishable by daily fines of $5,000, to be paid either by the school or the school district.

To be clear, you are not ALLOWED to teach that:

1. One race, sex, or religion is inherently superior to another race, sex, or religion;

 

2. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, sex, or religion, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously;

 

3. An individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, sex, or religion;

 

4. Members of one (1) race, sex, or religion cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, sex, or religion;

 

5. An individual’s moral character is determined by his or her race or sex;

 

6. An individual, by virtue of his or her race, sex, or religion, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, sex, or religion;

 

7. Any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, sex, or religion; or

 

8. Meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist, sexist, or oppressive, or were created by members of a particular race or religion to oppress members of another race or religion.

Ponder for a moment–you should not need more–what sort of person would object to the notion, for example, that the chance of a person’s birth should not be used in moral judgement against them.

Now ponder, and this may take a bit longer, how WE GOT TO THE PLACE WHERE THIS DISCUSSION EVEN NEEDS TO TAKE PLACE.

How is any of this not patently and horrifically regressive?

We are at a point where any honest Democrat who sees this sort of shit either needs to raise hell in their own party, or leave the party.

And clearly the Mass Formation Psychosis LONG precedes COVID.  COVID was just layered easily and seamlessly on top of it.  This psychosis is the defining aspect of the Far Left, of the Headless Ones, as I have called them, the core “elite” (what is the word for standing out as a leader in a sea of moral and intellectual mediocrity?) of this mass delusion.

Should we not be long past the point of debating whether or not people should be judged by the color of their skin?

I wake up daily and wonder how we survive SO MUCH STUPIDITY.

I don’t have an answer, but I choose to believe I improve the odds as much as it is possible for me to improve them by posting things like this.

Everyone reading this, if anyone, needs to be fighting these people in their local comments sections, to be debating small points as unacrimoniously as possible with people they know to be Leftists, and in all cases trying really really hard to THINK CLEARLY.  It is so hard.  They make it so hard on purpose.  They are ringing bells and creating constant noise, and when you are continually reacting to the latest atrocity against common sense and common decency it is hard to remember to see the whole of the picture.  That is the aim, and that is the method, obviously.

And to return to the point of debate, big picture stuff is off the table.  What the Left loves to do, and does effectively, is stipulate abstract points, then claim everyone who opposes them opposes those points.  The lifting up of the poor.  Improved race relations.  Justice.  Caring and empathy.  They use these words, and as long as the debate happens at that unanchored, non-specific level you cannot debate that.  It is all insincere cant, consisting mostly in lazy narcissistic self congratulation, but even most of THEM don’t realize that, because they ARE lazy, self congratulatory and emotionally rigid.  It would be, and I hope will be, eventually, emotionally painful for them to realize just how long and how badly they have been failing most the people they claim to care about the most deeply.

But to take one obvious example, you could show this list of teaching being disallowed and ask them if they would want to defend any of them.  That is reasonable, in my view.  And most will not have seen the actual CONTENT of any of these bills.  They are simply accepting–complacently and obediently as usual–the lies being told.

 

 

I tried to remember for a moment how Trump handled war resolutions, then recollected HE DIDN’T START ANY WARS.

But if the Constitution means ANYTHING it means getting Congressional approval prior to involving us in a potentially global war with a nuclear power.

I fear the Russians vastly less than I fear my own government.

This makes me then wonder what it is in the Russians that my government fears.

It’s worth noting Joe Biden took several million in bribes from Burisma in the Ukraine.  And given that NO ONE has looked at his other corrupt activities, there is no reason to think he has not also been bribed by the Ukrainians themselves.

It’s impossible to look at this situation and see the least bit of sanity.  Joe belongs in JAIL, and failing that a RETIREMENT HOME, where he can get a nurse to change his diapers when he shits his pants, since Jill is not that kind of doctor, much less that kind of nurse.

What MADNESS, what folly, to allow this man to even be allowed to CONTEMPLATE war with a major power, when we have ZERO national security interests.  Taiwan, yes.  Taiwan we need to defend.  Ukraine: not our problem, any more than Syria ever was, or than Yemen is.

What a crazy time to be alive.  It’s lunatics running the asylum, and lunatics reporting on it, and psychopaths funding and running it all, all to make money they don’t need and cannot hope to spend.

 

I think emotional strength is much like physical strength: much of it is trained, but a good part of it you are born with.

Obviously, if you lie around on your couch your whole life playing video games, you are not going to be strong emotionally or physically, and I think there is definitely some connection between physical vigor and emotional vigor, but some of it people just can’t help.

We all have breaking points, and they are set at different places for different people.  I realized yesterday that for myself virtually every day of my life I have woken up wondering if today would be the day the weight of my unprocessed and conflicting emotions finally flattened me.  And at the end of every day I sighed a breath of relief, and for many years got drunk.  I have had a Matisse painting on my walls for many years, his “Thousand and One Nights”.  It says, in French, “She saw the morning light begin to pierce the night. She discreetly grew silent.”

She survived every day for three years by her wits and audacious courage, then she lived out her natural years, and saved many lives in the process (although I have to wonder what marrying a mass murderer may have felt like).

I just realized why this made so much sense to me.  I sort of knew, but this is much more concrete.

I may or may not have mentioned an interesting conversation I had in a bar with a former SAS soldier.  In his view the capacity to endure that training was genetic, like the ability to sing.  You either had enough of it or you didn’t (I will insert parenthetically that if that meeting was not purely by accident I did eventually figure out why he was here; I am very sure he thought me, correctly, a dunce at the time.  I am stupid sometimes.  It comes and it goes, and as I’ve noted, being smart and being unconsciously dumb generally feel exactly the same.)

But most people endure to their capacity, and then they don’t.  That point varies by person and it’s not purely voluntary, any more than their scores on the SAT are.  There is a range, but nothing more than a range.

I suppose I am slowly, grudgingly, working my way around to being less judgmental, in saying all this.

And obviously, unless you have walked in someone’s shoes, you don’t know what something FELT like, even if they have described it.  We all have both differing levels of pain tolerance, and differing levels of sensitivity.  A high pain tolerance, low sensitivity person will do well in the SAS.  A low pain tolerance high sensitivity person will be miserable.  That is a likely addict.

And some of us are high pain tolerance, high sensitivity.  We suffer a lot, but by and large suffer productively.  Such people make, I would think, good artists and writers.  I style myself, in my own mind, a creative and insightful sort, and not without some good reason.

I think the future of Pfizer should be a global boycott, and swift ruin.

It is now BEER and Circuses.

It is easier and most likely preferable to accept imperfection than to pursue, across a lifetime, perfection; if you accept imperfection, then natural growth proceeds from there, in the same direction, but more slowly, more organically, and more surely.

In truly good books, not infrequently I find some feeling within me expressed that I had not known so well before as I do after.  Since there is a lot of latent grief in me, I find situations filled with pathos very moving, and find myself crying.  But it is salutary, even if difficult.

I would draw an analogy between emotional and physical wounds.  Physical therapy following, say, knee or hip or shoulder surgery, can be very painful, but that is the only way you get as much movement back as you are going to get.

And with emotions, of course, they are more subtle, and there is no Physical Therapist with a clear, if difficult, plan.

Participating vicariously in the feelings of others, through art, is a sort of therapy, if you give yourself up to it.  I suppose that is why I have read little literature these many years.  I like Doris Lessing a lot, but most likely because she is intellectual, and does not stir up the same feelings in me that this current book is.  She is clinical, observational, and extremely trenchant in her observations, but it seems likely she moved on to the next world with many things unfelt within her.

Or I could compare it to a large selection of essential oils.  You sniff one bottle, and that’s not it.  Nor is the next.  But the third brings out a lot.  It’s a frequency, a tone, a gestalt that is not a form at all, but which has a recognizable presence all the same.

Most people spend their lives in a very small range of permissible emotions, and certainly the American obsession with work does much to both support and further this.  As we lose touch with our feelings, we redouble what is causing this fracture.  We learn to walk on broken legs, to swim with broken arms.

And then we wonder why sad music makes us so sad, and why life seems tedious and pointless after a time.  Why life seems like WORK, rather than play.

We have done much with science, but in the process most of us have lost much of our humanity.

And it is my personal challenge that most of the people who are most open to ideas of this sort tend to be naive enough to believe silly political lies, such that where I might otherwise be able to find community is largely closed to me.

But every day I feel the energy in my belly lessening just a bit, and I am getting fractions of a second of peace, such that I know it is possible even for me.

Speech is how you leave silence, isn’t it?

I am reading the excellent  book “Extremely loud and incredibly Close” [that felt right, writing it like that], and I can relate to Oskar well.  I wonder sometimes if I am not “on the spectrum”, as I believe is the currently appropriate phrasing.

But really, I think whenever you try to fit a large quantity of trauma into any human psyche, large sections of your self become immobile.  This immobility makes you stupid and insensible to things you should be able to see.

I seek and I search because I have lost something valuable.  Most of us have.  Nearly all of us have, I think, but our world offers a plenitude of means by which to forget this.  I coined the term Forgession some time ago to describe the process of forgetting.  It can be done daily across a lifetime.  This much is clear to me.

Words, mere words, are an island in the sky that are protective.  If you look at a library or bookstore, you should also see a lot of forgetting.

And, to quote a fictional sincere soul, “that is all I have to say about that.”

I commented today that just as Zhou Enlai was not wrong to say in the 1970’s that it was too soon to judge the French Revolution, it is also too soon to judge the effects of British Imperialism.  My friend was wishing the Zulus had been better armed against the British, and I pointed out that the Zulu were hardly innocents.

And without denying countless crimes were committed by the British, which all began with their forced presence in nations which did not want them, what they also brought was a mindset, that of IN PRINCIPLE–certainly not in practice– but in principle the equality of all human beings, both in theory and before the law.

This principle, among other things, caused the British to be the first culture in recorded history to renounce the historically universal, or nearly universal, practice of human slavery.  And when slavery was banned, it was banned everywhere in their considerable Empire.

No one who condemns racism can but do so from this perspective, which did not exist in most African, Asian, or American cultures.  The idea that prejudice, bigotry, racism and oppression are wrong has never acquired such prevalence in any culture before that of 18th or 19th century European culture.

White people did not invent wars of conquest.  We did not invent slavery.  We did not invent human rights abuses.  We merely made them HYPOCRITICAL.  And should we renounce all principles, merely because crimes can be committed in the name of them?  Should we renounce all principles because they can be used for their contrary?

For all intents and purposes, the answer of the modern Academy is YES.  Emphatically YES.

But the idea of ideals has done immeasurable good in the world.  When people speak of human rights, that is a European invention.  It has no analogue anywhere else I know of in human history, even if countless enlightened leaders have observed them out of simple compassion, dignity and decency.

And broadly speaking, the IDEAS of white Europeans have conquered the world, permanently and irrevocably.  There is no going back.  You can choose Marxism, as for example in PRINCIPLE (but not in practice) the Cuban and Chinese Communists have done.  They claim to want to “free” people while using slave labor and torturing dissidents.  There is nothing benign in that.  If you want to find something truly good in those nations, your sole recourse is reading their words and ignoring their actions.

And all nations pursue science in their own ways.  Science–of the sort which invented penicillin and the atomic bomb–is now universal.  It will not be put back in the bottle without a global catastrophe, of the sort many seemingly wish for.

What is at stake at the moment is which sort of European ideal will win out.  I would assert that broadly speaking Communism is a European social system rooted in the ideal of systematic hypocrisy–you can call an elite living in abundance at the expense of an ocean of oppressed serfs, in the NAME of the serfs, nothing else–and its opposite is honest Liberalism.

And please note that when I use the word Liberal I not speaking of rich hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi.  I am speaking of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and our Founding Fathers.

I would go so far as to say that the system in  China today is not really different in principle or practice from that of the medieval Church, in which a small oligarchy imposed on the Many ideas which brooked no opposition, and which worked to the enrichment of that oligarchy at the expense of the many.  Chairman Xi is the Pope, and his Party the wealthy and omnipotent Church.

The dominant Bad Idea animating this farce is that a SOCIETY can be improved without working for the betterment of any individuals within it.  Within the notion of SOCIETY as an actually existing organism, innumerable crimes can and in the event HAVE been committed and hidden.  That process continues today.  A Falun Gong practitioner may be having his liver cut out at this very moment to provide to a Party member who has spent his or her life drinking too much.  Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are enduring the conditions in work camps on a scale never contemplated by the British at the height of their arrogant hubris.

The Opium Wars are dwarfed in scale by the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communists.  Not even close.  Not within several orders of magnitude.  The British were merely greedy.  The Communists want people’s bodies AND souls, and will tolerate nothing less.  That is the domain of a Church.  Mere greed and garden variety rapacity never asked so much, even if they always asked much too much.

Communism represents a return to the old.  Liberalism, in contrast, sees in humankind the possibility of moral improvement, of enlightenment, of growth, of sustained and generalized felicity.

Human individuals are and must be the core concern of any person trying to improve the world.  And to improve people you must have ideas on how to do so.  This obviously is my own concern.  It is why I wrote what I will call my essay on Goodness.  

[I would modify that piece in some ways now, but have not taken the time.  The most important change is that I decided Curiosity, as a value, stands in well for, and is less challenging intellectually than, Perceptual Movement.]

In order for some human dignity and freedom to survive, in the long run, we MUST have an articulated and actionable moral code that is generalized and willingly accepted by most people.  My whole intent with that essay was to formulate principles which did not lead to zealotry, to dogmatism, and to rigidity in all forms, but which in aggregate and over time still worked to improve people, to make them happier, healthier, and more naturally communal and beneficent.

As Milan Kundera commented in his bitter “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, what he really wanted in Communism was laughing people dancing in circles.  And if you look at the cover of the book carefully, you may see the hidden image below.  They are floating in the air.  But what is real is seen on the ground.  It’s a great pictorial metaphor.

We have seen that mass murder can be justified under the name of Love.  What crime is not possible in a rigid people?  None.  All have been committed.  Many are being committed at this very moment.

And I do think that the notion of God is very relevant, for this reason: with God all individuals, in the end, have their own accounting to make.  With Society–which is the God of Communists and their countless brethren who use differing names–the accounting, in the end, is with an omnipotent State.  Politically, this was true even in the Medieval Church.  Given that only horrible people would WANT to have that power, or participate in such a system, only human degradation, impoverishment spiritually (and usually materially), and ruin and loss can be the outcomes.

And as I continue to insist, the existence of something most reasonably called God IS AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION.  We have the power to bring science to bear on this question.  We KNOW that within the paradigm of Quantum Physics none of the shared assertions of most traditional religions are impossible.  By all means renounce the notion that you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb to avoid eternal damnation, but do not reject the notion of a benevolent Creator, the reality that our souls transcend our bodies, or that we are all connected spiritually with one another and all Life in ways we are only beginning to guess at.

Read the books of Dean Radin, and Rupert Sheldrake.  A good commentary on Quantum Physics is Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality, although there are many.  If and when any honest skeptic–and this is virtually an oxymoron (although one could make the case that the word oxymoron isn’t one)–starts reading in this vein, there are thousands of good titles.  The evidence is everywhere, and cumulatively vastly, vastly better than the evidence for matter.  Matter does not exist.  Anywhere.  Not in an absolute sense of a bottom to Reality.  The only place matter exists is in the mind of ignorant people.