Moderates United

 When you reify complex economic processes you reduce them.  In reducing them, you lose large swathes of important information.  And in using that incomplete picture as a means of FURTHER reductions, you gradually twist out everything of importance, and leave only what you were trying to create in the first place.

It is true to state that most societies have elites.  It is equally true to say that MUCH–certainly not all–of the wealth amassed in the 19th century concentrated itself in the hands of industrialists.

But this was an era of real money.  It has since concentrated itself in the hands of banks, who are in the business not of making money, but MANUFACTURING it.  I have dealt with this many times.  Just look at how much M1 has increased since 1970 or so, when we dropped the last vestige of restraint on the creation of new money.

The amount of money in existence has roughly quadrupled since 2000 alone.  Do you recall the so-called Quantitative Easing program of the Fed, which it practiced for most of Obama’s two terms?  They gave $50 billion a month to Wall Street banks–which also run the Fed, to be clear, who also sit at both tables, to be clear–for something like 80 months straight.  That would itself account for the M1 increase from 2008 to present.

But the point I wanted to make is that systems are always run by people, and people always have the same motives: power, greed, and sex.  This was true when the Babylonian kings ruled, it was true when the French monarchy ruled, and it was true when the French Revolution replaced it.  Something different, but always the same.

Capitalism is CERTAINLY not the enemy: it is an unmitigated boon, which raises all boats–some more than others, but that is to be expected in a fair system, in which you are rewarded in proportion to your contribution.

Our system is not Capitalism, though.  I have struggled what to call our system.  Perhaps Plutocracy is as close as anything, with the qualifier that it is not just the rich who rule, but those with the power to create money at will.

But the core point is that the enemies of God, of Goodness, of shared power, of generalized prosperity, of freedom and justice worthy of the name, are always the same.  They find a variety of words, use a variety of systems, take and wield power in a variety of ways, but their core crimes, and their core deficiencies as human beings do not vary all that much.

The enemy of “the people”, of the ordinary, are people who are incapable of valuing Beauty for its own sake, who are incapable of breathing honest breaths, and truly inhabiting their bodies.  Who are incapable of true friendship, true kindness, and true warmth.

Virtuous people do not create monolithic power structures, and people who create such structures are not good people.

But everything comes down to morality, to Goodness, to either feasting on the sumptuous banquet of life directly, or being forced to settle for power and continual, unsatisfied and unsatisfiable hunger.

I am rambling.  Perhaps you get what I am saying.  People always want cartoon enemies, but in reality our enemies are always relatively dull, scheming, plodding, perceptually unoriginal people who seek power in lieu of life.  There is no one simple “them” when the true enemy is dullness itself.

As a general rule, ONLY the very wealthy, ONLY the 1%, benefit significantly from the government controlling everything, and trying–or claiming to try–to provide everything.

The language used to get such regimes in place has to do with eliminating “income inequality”, of getting rid of the Haves/Have nots, but the reality of such systems is a radical INCREASE in such inequality.  This makes socialism a HIGHLY congenial form of government for elites, for people far, far, far above the middle class.

Do you think Obamacare affected Warren Buffet in any way?  Bill Gates?  George Soros?  Would an economic collapse?  It’s most likely that within a broad range, a collapse would HELP them.  Those with money, in times when money is scarce, find everything and everyone is for sale and on sale for cheap.

Cuba is a two-tiered society, with a radical separation between the Party cadre–which has its own medical system, and probably its own educational system, and first claims on everything–and everyone else.

Here is the thing:  if all boats are rising, then the system is not Socialist.  And if the system is Socialist, not all boats are rising.   Winners win because they are connected, not because of the quality of their work, or caliber of their intelligence.  Losers lose because they don’t know how to play the Socialist game, or because they refuse to on principle.

When you are dealing with these truly horrible ideas, they are only made palatable through lies, through continual lies, through directed, conscious, carefully crafted lies, in which they say they oppose everything they support, and where they claim to support everything they in fact oppose.

They claim to get rid of the power of “corporations”, for which we might substitute “unelected elites”, but in fact they make unelected elites the only people who matter.  They take them from relative influence to direct and absolute control.

Let us all pray we survive this time with our freedom and dignity intact.  We are under assault by intelligent, well funded, determined people.  They do not mean the rank and file among us any good at all.  We are Untermenschen to them, irrelevant, to be used as and when needed, and then discarded.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer talk about what they call a “Culture Industry“.

I will likely have more to say later, but for now I want to point to the mindset inherent in the commodification of objects, the mass production of identical objects.  You can go to Walmart and get this t-shirt or that t-shirt, but you can’t get one that is custom.  If you want something truly unique, go to a Flea Market and get one airbrushed on the spot.  Go to an individual.

I think there is this latent idea bred into Americans from birth that ideas can and should be like manufactured objects.  You pick this one or that one, but you never fashion your own.  You take what is out there, and make it your own.  You buy it.  You buy into it.  You consume it, make it a part of your ideational furniture.

In order, therefore, to make everyone a fucking idiot, all you have to do is create Pattern 1 and Pattern 2, and tell people they have to choose.  You can have any kind of politics you want, as long as it is either Democrat–as expressed by what Democrat leaders are saying–or Republican, as expressed by what Republican Party leaders are saying.  Anything else is ridiculous.  Those products do not exist.  They will not be made for you.  You have to make your own.

Trump is unique.  He is his own creation.  And he does not fit either pattern at all.  His danger to the System is precisely that his very possibility–that someone outside the System could come to exist inside the System–calls into question what were very tidy lines, what was an easily manipulable system.

Do you really think the Power Elite CARE who is in power, between owned Republicans and owned Democrats?  If they put one of the Republicans in power, like George W. Bush, they get credibility for “national security”, and thus are able to push through a program of Orwellian surveillance, which is what happened.

If they get a Barack Obama, they get to expand drastically the power of the government, and teach people to depend on the State.  Either way they win.  If they fight wars against foreign enemies, they own the arms companies.  If they fight “poverty” or “racism” or “injustice”, they own the companies that get the contracts.

You can’t pick a “Pret a porter” idea off the shelf and credibly present yourself as someone who is doing any thinking at all.  And this applies to esoteric or off-beat, or uncommon ideas like Anarchism or Communism.  This is just going to a boutique store which sells hard to fine items.  You are still buying off the shelf.  You are still buying, and buying into, someone else’s ideas.

This idea, that you should be discouraged, functionally, practically, from thinking for yourself, is the root idea of totalitarianism.  This idea has entered our cultural world through Consumerism, through the replication of the consumer ethos in all parts of our lives.

Brown University, I think it was, recently conducted then suppressed a study seeming to show that many kids nowadays who decide they are “trans” were in reality manipulated by social media.  They weren’t “born that way”.  They were not even bred into it.  They saw something on the shelf they decided to try on for a time, perhaps to buy, and certainly to rent, prepackaged.

I can see how transgenderism could easily be seen as bucking the conformity all around us.  But it, too, is conformity, merely to different ideas.  Punks dressed like punks.  They were readily recognizable as such.  “Rebels” dress like rebels.

It is very hard to think for yourself.  It is hard to think at all.

But it is made exponentially harder when you operate from a subliminal suggestion that all the important ideas, all the best ideas, all the accurate perceptions, will be arrayed on a shelf for you, in a line for you, like so many willing prostitutes at a brothel, and that your only job is to choose from among them.

None of us being God, there is always something even our best minds have missed.  Always remember this.

So I finished watching Rent.  I cried when Tom was singing his song at Angel’s funeral, and again when we thought Mimi died.

I am often angry and intolerant.  But I am not heartless.  My feeling hurts me, and so I dial it down.

But I feel that there is a middle way between complete emotional dissolution–one based on a fetishized “creativity” which, when it fails, as it usually does for all but the most talented, and even for them often (Hemingway killed himself when he ran out of ideas), turns to destruction–and a robotic existence hemmed in by clocks, tedium, and emotional vacuity and superficiality.  There is a way between the bohemian and the Organization Man.

More life is possible, which is not seeding at every moment its own failure and cessation.  Seeds can be planted which sprout and yield more seeds.  Life is a pasture which can be cultivated, a garden which can be grown, all within limits.   This is my own work.

And as I have said before, the paradigmatic creative act is perception.  It is not the paint you put on a canvas, but the vision you have of something you have not seen before.  This vision is a perception, and crystallization of something which you now see was always possible.

And craftsmanship is an act of creation too.  Woodworking is creative, because it requires an on-going perfection of technique, of detail, of a deep understanding of how things work and how they go together.

I was drinking last night, but as I reread what I wrote last night, it rings true.  Where ARE the people who could rightfully called Liberal?  Where did they go?  What happened to them?

I’ve been talking about this slippery slope from what I might call intellectual sloppiness to political dogmatism for some time, but for some reason, now that the extent of what these tech companies are capable of is really hitting me because it is HAPPENING–Alex Jones, self evidently, is nothing more or less than the canary in the coalmine, as I believe he has described himself–I am wondering again how seemingly good people could be led down this evil path.

I sat down to post on something else, but I’m not feeling it at the moment.

We are at a crossroads.  Our culture has been bifurcated between those who value reason and principle, and those who have either forgotten what those words mean, or–ironically enough–rejected them AT the level of principle, for reasons they can’t really articulate because they don’t exist at the level of logic.

They are animals seeking shelter from the storm, nothing more.  What was human, advanced, noble in them: they no longer want.  They want crumbs from heaven, and the relative warmth of caves.  Give them that, and they will follow anywhere, do anything, believe anything, permit anything.  There are no “No’s” left in them.  Their “Yes’s” they are given, and those same “Yes’s” can be and are taken away at the turn of a hat, and pushed in some completely other direction.  They can be made to love anything, or hate anything, based simply on the headlines they read that day.

Daily Cause indeed.  Perhaps there needs to be a publication called the “Nihilistic Prophet”.

https://www.infowars.com/breaking-apple-quietly-removes-infowars-official-app/

You have to ask: what is the game here?

Was there not a time when authentic Liberals yearned for press freedom everywhere?  Was there not a time when restricting it HERE would have been considered heretical, unprincipled, insane?

I remember this time.  I remember people like Norman Lear saying “I may not agree with you but this is America goddammit, so do whatever stupid shit you want and I will defend your right to do it, all while calling you a dumbass.”

But Norman Lear is gone, like Joe DiMaggio in the “Mrs. Robinson”.  I turn my lonely eyes to him.  He let me down.  I was never his ilk of Liberal, but he stood for something, for a time.  And the time passed, then he seemingly stood, stands, for nothing.

Apple stands for nothing.  Google Stands for nothing.  All these people: money, power, politics: all trump principle.  Worse: principle is not even a factor in the equation–perception is, with self perception leading the pack.  Who do they think they can be if they act in ways likely to draw cheers from preselected people and groups?  This is what is in play.  More or less literally, Apple execs, and Google execs, and Twitter and the rest of them are asking: what filter do I need to put on my personality to get more likes for my selfies?

This is what I feel.

Where did all the good people go? Where the fuck did Normal Lear go?  Where did the people who value freedom–right to assemble, right to free speech, right to religion, right to fair elections, right to fair trial, etc.–go?  We exist in a day and time where the dividing line is not between differing conceptions of freedom and justice, but between differing conceptions of the VALUE of freedom and justice, as defined conventionally.  The good people are gone.  The Liberals are gone.  Norman Lear is dead.  Meathead is dead.  Alan Alda is dead.

And its fucking Nazis, with their propaganda Luftwaffe bombing the shit out of everyone.  This is a sad, sad development, one even my cynical fucking self did not expect, a betrayal even for someone used to betrayals. 

Fuck you people.  I don’t know what the fuck happened, but I hope all die painfully tomorrow, and that your kids and grandkids have some iota of decency, human feeling, and the capacity for rational thought.

I’m working my way slowly and painfully through “Rent”.  I don’t like it. I don’t like the people.  I’m not getting their groove, although of course I have met and known many people like them.  I did go to Berkeley after all, and for a long time I thought the misfits were cool.

But I’m with the “sell-out”: there is no virtue in piss on every doorstep, and the creation of a Calcutta in a prosperous city in a prosperous nation.  That is more or less literally what Paris and San Francisco–two Bohemian paradises–have devolved into.

I just watched this bit.  Read the lyrics and compare in sentiment to Ginsberg’s Howl. [ Here follows a train wreck of getting off topic, but venting some observations I had been intending to share].  I count at least two references in there to pedophilia (“who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication”; and “who retired to Mexico to cultivate a [drug] habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys. . .”), and of course many more to his homosexuality, and did not miss his reference to Neil Cassady (“NC secret hero of these poems”, plus the references to Denver), who was nearly certainly a sociopath, more certainly Ginsbergs lover for a time, and the man to whom the poem is most dedicated.  Cassady was, to put it bluntly, a narcissistic asshole who left human wreckage everywhere he want.  And he was central to the work of both Kerouac and Ginsberg.

I am working my way through Kaddish at the moment too.  I will have more to say.

But for now, read this: http://www.metrolyrics.com/la-vie-boheme-lyrics-rent.html 

Here is one selection:
To days of inspiration
Playing hookey, making
Something out of nothing
The need to express-
To communicate,
To going against the grain,
Going insane, going mad
To loving tension, no pension
To more than one dimension,
To starving for attention,
Hating convention, hating pretension
Not to mention of course,
Hating dear old Mom and Dad
To riding your bike,
Midday past the three-piece suits
To fruits – to no absolutes-
To Absolute – to choice-
To the Village Voice-
To any passing fad
To being an us for once … instead of a them!!

Jones has now been banned from Twitter, at a time when grotesque racism, the organizing of violence, and abusiveness are routinely permitted. The double standard–the personalization and persecution of this violence through censorship–is categorically undeniable and obvious.

Here is the thing: Jones’ core contention, the one he has been making since the 1980’s, is that the world is run by organized Satanists, who ritually engage in all sorts of awful things, including child trafficking and pedophilia.

His other claims, the ones which arise from a standpoint of Constitutionalism and limiting government, and the like, are made in many other places.  Ron Paul makes them daily.  So too do many others.

Jones is unique is his focus on pedophilia and child trafficking by elites, and in his self funding.  These ideas have seemed crazy for many years, so he likely never really had the option of attracting mainstream advertising dollars.  So he sells supplements.

I will say that, after leaving it on the shelf for a “rainy day”, a true need, a period of focused intellectual work, I have started using his Brain Force, and I really do think I have more ideas, and of better quality.

Having said that, I want to focus on the original point: it is POSSIBLE that he is completely correct.  I have run into several people over the years who were pimped as children, both in very wealthy households.  One woman was sold eventually outright to an illegal brothel.  People came to her house, and took her away on a gurney.  Her parents told her to go, then abandoned her. The brothel was, if I recall correctly, in rural Pennsylvania somewhere, and frequented by very wealthy people.  One eventually took pity on her and helped her get out.  I heard this story firsthand.  She was so dissociated she told the story in the third person.  When she meant herself, she said “she”.

It is worth asking: why is Alex Jones such a target?  Yes, he has a lot of subscribers, but they only increase the subscriptions by banning him.  The only logical long term game is disappearing him from the internet outright.

Logically, if they can disappear him completely, they can disappear anyone.  Any story can be suppressed.  You could film government violence on your cell phone, watch people being dragged away by armed thugs for political dissidence, and POOF, not only can you not post the footage–that is one level of censorship, “we’re sorry your account has been blocked for ‘hate speech'”–it is gone outright, from your phone, which would be a second level of censorship.  This is all technologically quite easy.  It’s been possible for some years.

And Apple and Google are a part of all this, clearly.  They are more on the side of the Chinese fascist model than the American liberal model, as evidenced by their behavior, such as making it easier for the secret police to find people, and supporting the fascist government in their censorship  (and I am being precise, by the way: the system was Communist for a time.  It was a complete fucking disaster, so they implemented something much more like what Hitler and Mussolini did, where they tolerate large corporations, as long as everyone working for them is a wage slave, as long as the owners support them, and as long as the government controls everything in principle, even if they leave many day to day decisions up to the owners).

So it seems obvious to me that the outer level of Jones being targeted is simply that he is in some respects an unlikeable person.  He yells, he froths, he goes off on tangents, he interrupts people, he says things which most people view as crazy.  This makes him an easy target.  But it also makes him an easy test case.  As I say, whatever they do to him, they can do to anyone, including President Trump.

But I can’t help but feel that once you peel back the tech companies, and the Fortune 500, there is old money underlying many of the decisions made in this world, and I can’t help but feel that there is something to Jones’ ideas. I can’t help but feel some of these people exist.  We are being driven in an evil, totalitarian direction.  People capable of that are capable of anything, and evil is nothing more or less than sadism practiced consciously and with no conscience.  I feel Sade in all this. Cultural Sadeism was an intuitive impulse, but one based on HISTORY and observable mass psychology.

I can only hope that genuinely decent people who have been furthering all this wake the hell up soon.  Evil triumphs in the face of the STUPIDITY of good people, too.

I am struck this morning how easily evil can happen in the presence of an oppressive niceness, which is framed as tolerance, and is really a principled indifference.

The only true evil the modern Left recognizes is “Fascism” or “Nazism”.  The only criminals are fascists and Nazis.  To be labeled a fascist is to be evil, and to be evil is to be a fascist.

In other words, these words have been fully denuded of meaning, as have the principles underlying them.  They mean nothing, and they mean nothing because the people using them believe nothing.

Here is the thing: the Left is quite willing to tolerate fascist BEHAVIOR, as long as it is done under the name of something else.  Muslims can persecute, torture, kill and exile Christians, and that is fine because within the rubric of multiculturalism, we can’t judge them.

Children can dress themselves up in matching uniforms, threaten and commit violence in the streets against innocent people, for no reason, and it is forgiven as being ANTI all the things they hate.

It is acceptable to hate, as long as it is in the name of opposing hate.

For my part, I don’t understand why intelligent people–otherwise intelligent people, whose opinions you would value on most topics–fall for this lunacy, this confusion.

We cannot help but feel what we feel, but in a great many cases what we feel is in reaction to what we think.  Politics is almost entirely an abstract enterprise.  99.9999% of the people who hate Trump have never met him.  Something like 99% have never tried to have a sober, face to face conversation with a Trump supporter.  To be sure, they have yelled at us on occasion on the internet, and given up when their yelling did not work, and we somehow, for reasons they can’t fathom, but which must be evil, failed to immediately accede to their poorly constructed and factually ignorant views.

I forget who said “all that evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing”, but it really needs to be amended to include an alternative version: “evil succeeds best when good people support it.”, and “All that is necessary for good people to support evil is a successful lie, coupled with principled incomprehension.”

When you boil the philosophy of the Left down, there is none.  There is no structure.  There is nothing left when the propaganda organs stop talking.  There is no means of recognizing up and down, right or left.  It is all constructed in opposition, literally, to everything which has historically worked, to culture as it has evolved, to political institutions as they have evolved.

And at its root it consists in the core demand that whatever is, if it is in any way imperfect, must be torn down and replaced.  By what, they cannot say.  How, other than a dictatorship, they cannot say.  In the name of what alternative principles, they cannot say.  Why this would be better–particularly when the alternative, historically, has always been worse–they cannot say.  This is all concealed with lies, half truths, evasions, and violent attacks on their detractors.

Leftism is a mental illness.  It is also an emotional, intellectual, social, and cultural illness.  It is a cancer, a metastasizing mistake, an abomination, a repetition of everything that is wrong and evil in the history of humankind.

Good people, if they want to warrant this self understanding, have to THINK.  Fucking THINK.  Pay attention, see where the problems are, or are likely to be.  Educate yourself.  Read history and ponder it.  Why do all iterations of Communism, whatever they call themselves, always result in control by a small oligarchy?  Why do human rights wither away?

There are few crimes which cannot be committed in the name of some combination of Justice, Beauty and Truth, and few large scale crimes are ever committed in the name of anything else.