Moderates United

First, watch as much as this video as you can take.  I will warn you, it never gets better, and arguably gets worse, but hey, maybe that is your thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b27dcvjOOs8

Here is your question, which I will form in a Kantian way: would you want the ethics, values and manner of social engagement of the person doing the filming generalized?

Put another way, would you want to see this on every street in America?

If so, then Democrats are your people.

If not, vote straight ticket Republican.  You have no serious choice, unless you happen to have some residual sane Democrats in your area.  I’m not seeing any national sign of them anywhere.  Sure, some Mayors here and there, and perhaps a Representative or two–the one in my area is swinging hard right (for now)–but overall, if these lunatics get power, they will FUCK THE COUNTRY UP.

Jobs or mobs.  Builders or wreckers.  Sanity or the demonic (and I do mean that literally).

Edit: I will add that he literally seems to think that his footage helps his case.  He demands the officers immediately surrender the footage to an attorney who hates police.  He posted what he posted thinking that he had captured something other than extraordinarily disciplined and professional police officers trying, despite his best efforts to do their job.

He is very much like the limp wristed bully who is gleeful when he can torment a bear tethered to a stake, or confined in a cage.  He KNOWS he is safe, PRECISELY because he knows the cops, in actuality are disciplined professionals.  In Mexico or Brazil, to take a couple examples, they would just break his camera, beat the shit out of him, then throw him in jail to marinate for a week or a month.  He’s that little dog that barks at you from a distance, but gets terrified the moment you move towards it.

All bullies are like this.  And all these people are bullies.  They are driven mad by anger issues which have nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with their uselessness and powerlessness as human beings, but which get EXPRESSED through politics.  And for those who need to get out rage, the Left has always had a ready avenue.

And I do think that while people should be free to say what they want to police, there need to be limits.  This is very much a social Broken Window sort of thing.  If you put up with people calling you asshole to your face, then much worse things are coming.  If you arrest, consistently, such people, then eventually that will stop being a daily stressor, which for all any of us know, may get taken out on some poor soul far from cameras and far from help.  You know, like a black man, who none of these white thugs ACTUALLY give a flying fuck about.  Nobody is allowed to CALL them the N-word, but it is thoroughly implied by all.

Black people, for their part, need to realize that there is no worse enemy than a false friend.  They are better off with people who don’t care if they live or die, than with people who want to keep them down as a matter of policy, so they can make themselves rich.

The question is really this: how do we occupy, emotionally, a world which is in a process of continual, global, and paradigmatic change?  A world where we fear daily we will read about some massive holocaust, and where we do read about angry people, new and possibly dangerous technologies, amoral leaders, and in which seemingly everything and everyone is interconnected?

I vastly prefer this to, say, the dislocations of the Hutus and Tutsis, both, in their civil war.  I think of the 250,000 Hutus who entered the Congolese jungle, and of whom only 40,000 emerged, all of whom, with perhaps a few exceptions, were then slaughtered and starved even then.  This is horrific.

What is happening to us is not that concrete, not that specific, not that real.  Rather, it seems there is a drip, drip, drip in which we daily lose some fixed source of comfort, in which something we thought we knew is taken from us, in which our culture and history is attacked, in which some small slice of our sense of self is taken elsewhere for examination, in which lab coats and expensive suits tell us everything will be alright, and we don’t, in the main, believe them.

How to occupy this world, with eyes open, with a receptive heart?  This is the question of our age, and those who have glib and easy answers are idiots.  Their solution is blindness.  Blindness is always an easy answer, but in my own world–resting as it does on the primacy of building accurate perceptions–such a thing is as close to a mortal sin as I can conceive.  I speak here mainly of those I call Sybaritic Leftists, and would include there people whose views on the universe and human relations as a whole I would otherwise support, like Deepok Chopra and Brene Brown.

I, obviously, haven’t worked it out.  I may never work it out.  But I guarantee I will spend the rest of my life trying.  It’s the only game in town worth playing.

Edit: I will add that the superficiality, particularly, of all hard core Leftists–who I will include in this group in the process of defining them–consists more or less in a Stockholm Syndrome sort of relationship with the “captors” of uncertainty, cultural erosion, and fear of the future, as manifested in psychotics with plans, like George Soros and the people ultimately behind Barack Obama.

Perhaps the relationship of fearful minds and evil has always been like this.  I suspect this to be true.  There is nothing new under the sun.

Courage, of course, is the answer.  How to summon and sustain it: that is my task.

1. How is it no one is asking questions about the apparently $21 TRILLION which is unaccounted for?  https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-government-spent-21-trillion-of-our-money-without-telling-us/#6949fddd7aef

I was watching my little weirdo alien series on Gaia again last night.  90% of it is stupid.  90% of it is not worthy anyone’s time.  But occasionally they share things I did not know, and seem to have parceled out the actually interesting bits across multiple shows.

A core, recurring contention is that we have what they call a “breakaway civilization” which is funded, in the main, through diverted Federal tax revenues.  Would $21 trillion be enough to do that?  Of course.  As recently as 2000 or so the annual budget was roughly $2 trillion.  $1 trillion, self evidently, is half of that.  HALF.

Here is an excerpt:

On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s “failure to correct system deficiencies.” The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments.  No information is given about these 170 transactions.  

Now, the entire Federal budget was not $6.5 trillion in 2015, so these must relate to past transactions.  The $21 trillion number relates to 1998 to 2015, or over $1 trillion a year, when the budgets were $2-3 trillion or so.

In what I might submit as the understatement of the year, this is not chump change.  Why is no one asking questions about this?

2.  I will ask again: why is everyone in our political world perfectly OK with our money being controlled by banks whose exact dealings are completely secret?

Put another way, why WOULDN’T they use this absurd system to become sickeningly wealthy at the expense of the rest of us, as seems to have happened?  As I understand the math, our money supply has roughly quadrupled since 1980 or so, when the Fed used the inflation they created to get the last restraints on their action removed.  ALL of that wealth went, first, to them.  No doubt much of it was invested productively, as loans to expand businesses, but this is very much a “one for me, one for you” sort of situation.

It’s absurd.  Ludicrous.  And self evidently, if they are in on whatever game the DoD is playing, there is no limit to how much money they can give them. 

I think now would be a good time for people who pray, to start praying for our country, and for the world.  Pray for peace, pray for understanding, and pray that Republicans (and any good Democrats, if you are able to identify any) win the election.  Jobs or mobs.

If you visualize, visualize.  If you meditate, meditate.

There are no useful sheepdogs who are not part wolf.

It simply revolves around the question: do you feed a hunger for justice, or a hunger for the expression of rage?

1. The Western project, at its root, relies on a focus of what we don’t know.  Historically, all other cultures of which I am aware focused on what they thought they knew, and on the accurate recitation of those “facts”.  This applies equally to tribal cultures, as to Islamic cultures–in which the capture of all relevant knowledge is an article of faith–as to the Chinese, whose world view related to an understanding of how Heaven and Earth interacted, and who were remarkably incurious technologically.

Now, given that moral understandings are not knowable the same way that the laws of physics are, this has created problems which are at the root of the insanity we are seeing right now, and have been seeing for over a century.

But the solution, in my view, is as simple as invoking a simple principle, like “provisional understandings with respect to human life, provisional but testable understandings with respect to the physical universe.”

We don’t want psychotic killers in our midst.  We want peace and relative safety.  We like having things and relative plenty.  We want our children to live in a good or better world.  These are not complicated moral premises which warrant excessive examination.  There is plenty we agree on.

2.  Communism does not abolish property rights–it merely reassigns them from individuals and groups to the State.  Since the State is an abstraction, practically it does not do anything differently than what Kings of old did in asserting their claim, in principle, to everything.  It grants ownership of everything to an elite, to an oligarchy, and does so without any moral restrictions on their use of that property.  Marx was no ethicist.  He had nothing to say about moral virtue other than that he rejected the “virtues” of the bourgeoisie.   Given this, how to build, much less reliably build, people in whom any extent of trust whatever could or should be placed? 

China, now, is run by the inheritors of all this.  They are not Marxists.  They are merely very rich, and in charge.  It is simply a new Emperor, for a people which has had emperors for well over 2,000 years, depending on how you define the term.  The Communist conceit and deceit is gone.  It was a means to power for the same sorts of people who always run things.  Meet the new boss.  Same as the old boss.

Without principled thinking, without the clarity which reason and the clean use of language enable, there is NOTHING which can be done to label and describe all this, much less prevent it.

Pull out your phone and video them.  Then post it on the internet to show the world how fucking nuts, evil, and hateful they are.

Jobs or mobs.  Simple choice.

It will be interesting to see how Trump deals with the Fed over the next few years.  With strong economic growth, the Fed will be tempted to raise interest rates.  Trump opposes this, since there are no signs (that I have seen) of inflation.  Most inflation happens when the banks release large sums of cash.  They seem to still be sitting on trillions, literally.  They could flood the market tomorrow, but the math with Trump in charge is different than it would be with nearly anyone else.

Trump, uniquely among Presidents in at least the last half century, would be willing to bring the Fed under control.  It is extraordinarily irrational that it does not answer directly to the Treasury, as it did for the first decade or two of its existence.  It is absurd that the single entity most responsible for our currency is not under the direct control of the government, but rather is under the control of banks whose names we are not even allowed to know for certain.

It is an insult to reason.  It is something which continues because most Americans are fucking imbeciles who are taught to be confident in the platitudes and propaganda which they are taught.  The most “educated” are those who can reliably throw out the phrases and explanations they were taught quickly and without error.

I look at the world through my own eyes. And everywhere I look, I see stupid people.  That no doubt sounds arrogant.  What is your point?

The Greeks thought everyone who was not Greek spoke nonsense.  They thought it sounded like “bar bar”, so barbarians were defined as the ones who said bar bar.  We might call them “Blahblahians.”

Be all that as it may, Western culture, everything which binds us together, which unites us in actually good ideas like political Liberalism, free markets, tolerance, the rule of law as an absolute principle, and the use of reason to negotiate and reconcile difference, is under attack, or perhaps more accurately, being subjected to targeted sapping by determined opponents.

I was dreaming last night of hordes attacking a museum of Western culture.  I was guarding and protecting it, and succeeded for the moment, but the feeling was that of a Horde, such as that of Genghiz Khan, or Timur.  Within our society, within our gates, within the halls of our best universities, people with hive-minds like those of any gang which has ever preyed upon any society with the simple goals of rape and pillage, proliferate.

Communism is really just the spirit of Timur, run through a rationalizing machine, a lie machine, and then generalized.  It is antithetical to life, to human flourishing in all but the In-Group, and horrifically abusive.

I’ve been interacting off and on on Facebook with some undergrads at some elite schools, and even they literally assume that anyone who did not love Obama is an ignorant troll.  They have no words for it, no category for someone who is both erudite and dissident.

It is hard to be optimistic about the future, when so many minds have fallen into darkness.

Still, we did elect Trump, as a last gap measure, and it does seem that people are waking up.  That Jordan Peterson, to take one obvious example, is attracting so much positive attention among the young is encouraging.

And they NEED something like what he is teaching to thrive.  This is the thing: this whole mob mentality, this herd instinct, IS antithetical to flourishing.  It promotes continuous agitation, likely some social phobias–such as interacting with people who disagree with you–and a thirst for violence which even many of them recognize as unhealthy.