Moderates United

It occurs to me–or seems to me–that a life in balance has a rhythm to it.  Our brains naturally seek rhythms.

And the “beat” of the rhythm is habit, is patterned behavior, is this is what I do on Monday and this is what I do on Saturday, and this is how we celebrate Christmas.

Seen negatively, this is how people “sleepwalk”, as among others Gurdjieff claims we do, through life.  It makes us resistant to change.

But seen positively, it is a tonic, something healthy, something beneficial and protective to our mental health.

I really think one of the primary drivers in increasing rates of depression and other dysphorias and deep confusions is simply the pace of change in our world.  AI is coming.  Robots are coming.  Hordes of people moving from here to there are changing cultures and making blurry what were once clear distinctions, and clear and generally accepted behavioral patterns.

I really think it is possible both to accept in the abstract the importance of tolerance and generosity, while recognizing in the concrete most of us are happy with our own.  This is, OBVIOUSLY–but this still needs saying–not just a white thing.  Pakistanis have recreated Pakistan in large areas in Britain.  This is because they are happier that way.

Human needs and political ideology can and frequently are at odds with one another.  And it is worth pointing out as well that most people who embrace utopian ideologies are emotionally disconnected in important ways from their own cultures, their own people, their historical ways, which in itself breeds an unhealthy obsession with their politics, since their ideologies and the people who share them have become their new home.  And if their new home turns out to be a shithole–as I would argue it is, necessary, and for reasons which can be shown both historically, and as the necessary consequence of the logic going into the system–then they react pretty much the way the Left reacted when Trump was elected.

Leftism is a shitty home.  It is a cultural wasteland, even if many cultural creators lack the vision to see it.  The Left “progresses” through subtracting all the cultural habits, all the knowns, all the places and names and faces of our group, shared history, and has nothing to replace it with.

This is a recipe for fear, confusion and misery.  This is very, very obvious to me.

I sometimes wish my blog were more consistent.  That I was focused solely on something.  Politics.  Physics.  Biology.  Personal growth.  Sharing my journey.

My sense, though, is that it is always good to share what comes through, or at least, which emerges, from the murky recesses of whatever my or anyone else’s mind may actually be.

I remember a saying that “The Sufi begs to give you himself”, which I have probably commented on.  When you give, you are not taking a thing from you, and giving it to someone else.  You are not even sharing it, so that you both have it.  You are creating a flow of energy, from somewhere deep, through you, to the external world.  It is this flow which a wise person seeks.  They are seeking connection to that energy.

And the way you connect to this energy, and protect this connection, is by giving everything freely which you can.

I remember Hayek commenting way back when that he saw many mediocre minds stumble onto one good idea, and horde and milk it like it was their sole source of nourishment, their solitary cow.  Indeed, one sees people make careers off of extended riffs on one idea, itself usually not their own, but rather its unique exposition their personal coin, combined with their concerted and diligent marketing. 

Me, I had some mild notion of making my way with my ideas.  But this is much more fun.  I don’t know if anyone reads this, but as far as my unconscious is concerned, as far as the flow of energy, it doesn’t matter.  I continue to see more and more vistas the more I write.  THIS is the point.

And I see how insipid must be the life dedicated to recognition.  I think of all the writers of Hemingway’s generation, and most of those who have come after, who wanted not particularly to write great novels, but to be KNOWN as having written great novels.  Hemingway himself committed suicide when the ideas stopped flowing, ideas about stories, about phrases, about skillful fabrication.  His focus was on the wrong thing, in the wrong place.  His focus was on himself, and not on giving but on taking.  He snatched his ideas from the air and brutalized them onto the page.  They belonged to him, goddammit.  Nobody else.  HE was the auteur, the genius, the admirable madman.

Perhaps I misstate the case.  I don’t know. I know a bit about Hemingway, but not a lot.  I often exaggerate the extent of my knowledge.  This is my imagining, to be taken as such.  I think I am done with being quite as certain as I used to be.

But this is my story for today.  Give, and ye shall receive.  It is not a complicated principle.

I think loneliness and shame have to be connected somehow.  Loneliness–feeling pain and fear when alone–would have served evolutionarily (and by the way I don’t reject “evolution”: I simply believe some sort of biological field theories will be needed in order to explain how information is conveyed to the genetic code, and preserved.  In my view, nothing else will suffice to explain observable changes.  There has to be an informational place holder external to the physical code) to facilitate survival, since the alone would always be at a disadvantage relative to the tribe, and banishment a de facto sentence of at least a shortened life.

I would like to publicly thank Hillary Clinton for reclaiming the paranoid style for the political left.

It’s ironic: when the Russians actually WERE a threat they didn’t want to hear it.  Now that they are a  small fraction of what they once were, and China the new emerging superpower (hard to say if they will make it, the weight of their internal conflicts and contradictions weighing heavy on them), they want to talk about nothing else.

But Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset: priceless.  Thank you, Hillary. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 

For whom is record low unemployment among blacks bad news? Is it bad news for anyone but Democrats, since it is likely to cause many blacks to give Republicans a hard look?

Does this fact alone not tell you everything you need to know about Democrat priorities?

Looking at who is arrayed against him, I think the naked hatred of Trump we are seeing showcases better than any words ever could why he is ESSENTIAL.  This hate makes me value him MORE, not less.

If we are going to stand any chance of undoing many decades of corruption, involving unimaginable amounts of money–which is what access to the richest Treasury on the planet by far gets you–then Trump is the indispensable element.  He’s bold, he’s honest, and he really enjoys beating amoral assholes at their own games.

Never bet against him.  He will always find a way to win.  Syria is already looking like a master-stroke, and certainly not something we had a moral obligation to do.

The drum beats are strong, but so too is my faith, and I am not someone prone to optimism.  This is rational faith, based on recent history.  It’s the sort of faith that says Tom Brady is likely to have a good season again.

To oppose school vouchers and charter schools is literally to oppose poor kids getting the best education possible for them.

Through some combination of confusing lies, Democrats have made this point obscure and non-obvious.

The reality, of course, is that poor people tend not to show up to vote, and when they do, they reliably vote for the people promising free stuff.  This makes them reliable Democrats.

And teacher’s unions, knowing that some percentage of their membership does not belong in front of children because they are lazy, incompetent, abusive or otherwise unfit, want to make sure they are never exposed to competition.

Here is the thing: good teachers need not fear competition.  The goal is not to run out good teachers, but bad ones. The goal is to REWARD good teachers and fire bad ones.  I personally would support much higher salaries and much better benefit packages for teachers, if I could be assured there was some structural incentive, like competition, for them to reliably produce good work over the  long haul.

In Sweden–where they seemingly performed this logical operation, reached the correct solution, then made the morally defensible decision–they found that charter schools not only worked to improve educational outcomes among the poor, but that they reliably improved the quality of all schools around them.  Competition will do that.

[And I will note that competition assumes that only self interest is, in the long run, a reliable motivator.  Morality and character are fine, but they decay over time, and no means has yet been found to ensure they are reliably produced–other than, perhaps, a top quality education, which is the topic being discussed.]

Logically, then, the only rational goal being defended by the unions is their own existence.  Union bosses don’t want to be fired either, so their JOB, by and large, is to protect the incompetent and unfit.  That is literally the only solid reason they have for existing.

The union bosses, in turn, see Democrats as their own protectors, and so contribute heavily to them, like all public sector unions, which also exist mainly to protect the incompetent and unfit.

Thus, all Democrats who oppose vouchers and charter school are literally protecting incompetent and unfit teachers simply because it nets them campaign cash, and they are literally standing in the way of poor kids getting access to the best possible education available to them.  They are helping ensure, in other words, another generation of ignorant and thus poor kids; and thus another generation of people who want the public largesse Democrats have positioned themselves to dole out, which is never enough to live a good life, but enough to support bad decisions and chronic underwork.

Count me disappointed. He’s gotten the infection somehow, making one more formerly respectable person I now hold in less esteem than Alex Jones.

Again, Jones is half crazy, but he is and long has been willing to sacrifice everything to tell the truth as he sees it. I don’t agree with everything he says. But he’s not playing a political game.

Hard to say what happened to Drudge but I won’t go there much anymore. 

Become the sort of person you need.

I was wondering in what ways Albert Camus would compare and contrast Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix’ rendition of the Joker.  Specifically, who would he be in juxtaposition to Meursault?  Could he be simply a more aggressively, more thoroughly traumatized Stranger?

More generally, it occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to ask graduate students in philosophy to write various position papers in the style and voice and using the ideas of various philosophers.

How would the Joker morph with Heidegger?  Sartre?  Nietzsche?  Jesus?  William James?  Spinoza?

In important respects, I think the Joker can be seen as an allegory of the genesis of evil.  To the extent any person values, or claims to value, the good, then they must be concerned with evil too.