Moderates United

NO WAY was Donald Trump going to win.  They censored us on their websites, delivered insults as emotionally painful as they could conceive to us every time they encountered us, considered us ignorant, rude, and inferior, and certainly not a national threat.  Trump supporters were certainly not THEIR neighbors. 

But of course we were.  Many or most of us kept our mouths shut precisely because we knew we could expect a verbal barrage and quite possibly a physical attack if we spoke our views publicly.  But no better way of misgauging the Zeitgeist could be imagined.  You have one group histrionically proclaiming the death of another, while that other group still retains the right to vote privately, and to speak privately, however they choose.

And we picked a loud mouth for a President.  Thank God!!!  That was the point.  We wanted a big talked, because we were and are tired of being insulted without any of our leaders returning fire in the way and at the volume it was launched at us.

So here we are, a year and a half or so into Trump’s Presidency, and many of these psychological misfits are still trying to figure out what happened.  What happened is that their bullying simply made us hold our tongues.  We never went anywhere.  Nor will we.  My best guess is that their tactics can only be causing our numbers to grow.  We are the true Liberals.  We are the protectors and defenders of the authentic American traditions of tolerance, justice, rational self defense, and reasonable introspection without irrational shame.  Our nation is not perfect yet.  We get that.  But it is perfectable.  We can continue doing better, without feeling the need to cower in the dirt and hang our heads in shame because we were not doing as well 100 years ago, or even 20 years ago, as we are now.

But safety is now a matter of Federal OSHA standard, and there is not much need for unions at this point to address any particular grievances.  Most issues of labor law are handled at both Federal and State levels.

Union workers do get more money, but they also pay a healthy part of it back to the Union.  As Roger Miller sang: “Old worn out suit and shoes; I don’t pay no union dues.”  I assume he means that yes, he is poor, but no, he isn’t forking over his money to someone else.

To the extent they are still useful I think unions should think of themselves as educational institutions, the graduates of which have EARNED the right to charge more money because they do better work.  This is reasonable, and I think to a great extent the case.  Some buildings only use union workers not because some goons from back east threatened them, but because they do better work and are overall more reliable.

And of course as I’ve probably commented often, public sector unions are a non-starter.  In the private sector business owners want to keep wages down, while unions want to raise them.  They negotiate something they can both live with.  In the public sector the governments wants to pay their own workers–themselves–more and so do the unions.  There is nothing to control costs.  Add to this the fact that the same people who are doing handsomely can then turn around and use the union funds they collect from people required by law to pay them, to help elect people who will allocate them even MORE money, and the whole thing becomes ludicrous.  There is no justification for public sector unions.

With respect to law enforcement specifically, I do think some form of collective legal representation is reasonable.  Cops are often accused of things they didn’t do.  They are also accused of things they did do.  But I think all public pensions should be eradicated.  They create too much hassle.  And all the laws government retirement savings should be liberalized.  I personally think we should adopt something like what Milton Friedman talked Chile into, where people have to save a percentage of their income for retirement, but where and how they invest it is up to them.

Keep in mind Social Security is inherently a negative investment.  Inflation alone means would you get back only, say, 75% of the dollars you put in, and that is only IF your remittances had not already been spent on the generation before you.  Add to this the overhead of a 62,000 person organization, and the whole thing makes zero sense from an investment and financial perspective.

And constant distraction, itself, morphologically as seen from a temporal perspective, works to mitigate deep reflection and deep thought.  It distances us from our own inner knowing, our own inner perceptions.  You need something periodically like a complete media break, a week without TV, iPhones, internet of any sort, or even a CD player.

The horror with which so many would view that tells us something about the state of our addiction.  What is wrong with silence?  What is wrong with doing nothing?

The constant tap tap tap, drip drip drip of news–any of it, from any perspective, saying anything at all–demotes our inner silence and rewards, so I feel, the same limbic system. We get addicted to stress and outrage.  This is perhaps the true addiction.

I am trying to build silence in my life.  It is hard, because it is also a solitude for someone who has been somewhat socially disconnected all his life, because of a lack of ability to activate my frontal cortex, due to hard core and awful trauma.  That is slowly changing.

And my hope, and occasional brief glimpse, is that the world may soon seem less hostile.  It is easier to be alone and undistracted when a pervasive sense of attack is not pressing in continually, until you relent and distract yourself by buying something, playing a video game, getting drunk and/or high, or watching TV.  Or watching porn.  That’s never been my particular thing although I do watch it sometimes.

We may survive this time.  That is my hope.  We may build mile high skyscrapers with elevators that can connect to space ship loading docks.  We may build bases on the Moon and Mars in our lifetime.

And, vastly more importantly, we may introduce into mainstream science the notions that we survive death, that God–or something we may as well call God, even if it is nothing like the Christian God–exists, and that we are all interconnected energetically in interesting and fun ways.

There is so much wrong now.  Things seem to be trending, culturally, in such bad directions.  All anyone can do is stay awake and aware, not panic, and keep exploring and trying. If I get stopped mid-sentence or mid-journey one day, so be it.  I WILL be in movement, internal or external.  I will be looking.  I will be seeking.  And I don’t think it is overstating the case to say I have done some finding, too.

And the Left has thrived because it has mastered the art of the small, simple thought, which uses words the person agrees with, which is both easily digested, and which offers easy, simple views of the world.

America is too violent.  Get rid of the guns and it will be less violent.

America fights too  many wars.  Disarm and everyone else will too.

We owe the poor charity.  If we give them money, we will ease their burden and they will disappear.

These are simple, but wrong, ideas.  Conservatives–genuine Liberals–require more than a sound bite.  We have to talk about the vexing but quite real complexities of economic theory, international relations, and efforts to create a government monopoly on legal gun ownership.  We require time and attention, and what works against us is a background of anxiety and fear.

And so a very large number of people have sought out the seeming safe harbor of congenial, simple, and wrong Left wing ideas, nearly all of them designed to abuse their trust in the pursuit of oligarchic power.

This is a factor in the current left wing melt down.  To accept that the world view they have accepted in its entirety, as one piece, as a fully fleshed out vision and feeling of the world, is wrong, is utterly devastating to them.  Most of them won’t do it.  Their defense mechanisms kick in LONG before they perform this conscious analysis, and they get angry and aggressive.

Cult members are the ones who can’t listen to anyone else, who are triggered by alternative views.  As I have said often, all conservatives cannot but have heard Leftist ideas ad nauseum most of our lives.  The same is not true of the Left.  Most of them are only ABLE to assume we are racists because their ignorance is complete.  It is otherwise such an idiotic claim that it could only be granted credence by congenital simpletons.

Hate is not the right word: I oppose these people.  This is the animating principle of my life.  And I feel similarly for dogmatic materialists, those who want to kill God–despite the scientific evidence–because it makes them feel strong and powerful.  No few of them seem to additionally have clinical sadistic impulses.

The Left is trying at the moment to create a situation in which people are forced into supporting them or being publicly branded an anti-humanistic radical.  Ponder this.

None of us should be forced into saying we are not Nazis, even though self evidently we aren’t. I grew up, like most Americans, watching World War 2 movies.  Two guesses which side I was rooting for.  I give you two, because some of you may be Leftists, although it hard to see how any Leftist could read this blog for long, and not lose at least the unreflecting hatred and disgust which animates their race.  And if they lose the hate, I am willing to call them Liberal.

This whole border thing felt like a loyalty oath.  Either you felt the proper amount of human compassion and empathy, or you were a monster.  Either you wanted to cry with Rachel Maddow, or you really were LITERALLY HITLER.

It is of course illogical and stupid for any student of the political left to ask or expect of them anything like moral or intellectual consistency–or even the attempt at it–but I will note that when Joseph McCarthy–and his counterpart committee in the House, since I will note he had plenty of company–was asking for loyalty oaths, the Left hated it, PARTICULARLY because many, in fact, in our government and the culture at large plainly WERE Communists, or at least kissing cousins.  But they called it, itself, Unamerican, knowing they were liars, knowing that cause was just.

And Trump seems to have awoken many predatory beasts who had been in hiding, whose presence only the most paranoid among us suspected.  Ponder the spectacle of the former head of the CIA OPENLY calling for what would amount to a coup, conducted against a man who clearly won a fair election.  Who would have thought this possible?  Who would have thought our media could be so corrupted as to become a nearly uniformly political organ, which daily expresses lies, half-truths, political vitriol, and bad ideas?

My dreams were quite wild last night.  We are going through a storm.  I don’t know where it stops.

And I will add, procedurally, methodologically–these may seem odd terms for something deeply personal, but that is how I am wired–it is very difficult to separate personal dreams from collective dreams.  But I think that when I am dealing with something personal, and it matches the frequency of something playing out in our greater Collective Unconscious, or collective “space”, then the dream goes farther and becomes more powerful.  That is what I felt last night. I felt large numbers of savage beasts unleashed, which no one had suspected.  We didn’t know they were there.  They were highly organized, highly savage, but waiting, hibernating even, because it was not yet time. Their cave has been breeched, and they are now waking up and hopping mad.  I do think this is a collective dream.

Personally, I am getting very deep into my trauma.  I am feeling increasingly that getting rid of the death in me will itself feel like a death.  It is a poison I have lived with all my life.  Or perhaps I will literally die soon. I  don’t know.

It is important in life to face it with what equanimity you can manage.

This is very much like the much mocked meme put out by a thoughtless leftist that “blocking voting rights for convicted felons is racist”.  The person, self evidently, was visualizing most felons as black, as indeed they are, at least seen proportionately.  But that claim, too, simply validates the original point.

As I understand it, the ban in no way affects the vast majority of the world’s Muslims.  It does not include Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia or Malaysia.

It DOES include Venezuela, which is not noted for its high Muslim population.  It DID include North Korea, but it is possible Trump may change that.

The countries last year were Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Chad, and Somalia, at least according to the first list that came up with my DuckDuckGo search.

And it is worth noting that Syria, Yemen and Libya are largely hellholes because of the policy initiatives of Barack Hussein Obama, and his minions (sure I’ll go there) Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.  Do you remember “We came, we saw, he died, hahahaha”?   I sure do.  The results of that policy had been, when I checked last year, some 40,000 war dead, most of them civilians. I’m sure that number has grown.  Do you wonder why the media never talks about Libya?  Just kidding.  There is no serious doubt as to what is going on there.

And again, Syria: Obama armed, trained, and funded what became ISIS.  In important respects he ENABLED them to become ISIS.  As I have commented before, around 2012 they underwent a major and sudden qualitative improvement in their war fighting abilities.  Somebody obviously trained them.  And that training enabled their military successes, and all the horrors that followed them, the crucifixions, the rapes, the sex slavery, the indisrimate beheadings, the tossing of gays off of buildings, complete with laughter.  This is all on Obama.  It is a war crime, in a very real sense.  There was no conceivable policy justification for it, and he can’t claim ignorance if I was reading on the internet about how the moderates were a fiction in 2012.

And Yemen, too: it all got worse under Obama.  I have not studied the details, other than to know it is nasty war in which we are–or were–supporting the Saudis in a civil war which is killing a LOT of civilians.

So if you add these considerations to it all, the grotesque anti-humanism of the Left wing attacks on this policy become more clear.  The Left does not care about people.  They were not horrified, as I was, when ISIS put young girls in a cage, doused them in gas, burnt them to cinders, and filmed the whole thing as an act of piety.  They didn’t care about any of these atrocities.  They were told to care about Al-Assad, and they dutifully did.  Everything he did was a crime, even if it didn’t happen.  Everything ISIS did was simply ignored, and people who wanted to talk about it accused of Islamophobia, which in that region amounted to what they would no doubt consider an irrational desire for your head to remain connected to your body.  Perhaps we should call it Homicidophobia, the fear of being murdered, or perhaps Psychopathophobia.

But of course, there is nothing irrational about realistic anxieties.  Hence Trump’s policy.

I am glad to see we chalked up another win today for the rule of law, for common sense, and indeed for sanity.

This becomes a part of what you call “life”.  It is what life IS, to you. And contemplating the notion that it will ALWAYS be like this is what leads, I think, to self destructive behaviors, to addictions of all sorts.  It’s not just that it bothers you now, but that it may bother you forever.  And much of this happens at a preconscious or unconscious level.  You may not know why you are wild and reckless, but some part of it is likely just wanting the fucking thing to STOP.

Kurt Vonnegut called smoking a socially acceptable form of suicide.  But it is a slow suicide, not an honest suicide, but it is still trending in that direction.  You are feeding the part of you that wants to die, because life is painful.

Many who live choose the path of death early on. They don’t do it consciously, but there is some part of them which is always tearing things down and tearing them up, which is relentless in its own domain.

To want to live is to feel affection for life, for yourself, and for everyone else.  This is the natural goodness Peter Levine talks about.  I am getting occasional whiffs of it.

A $9 trillion increase in our national debt, with nothing to show for it.

A healthcare bill which was passed on a strictly partisan basis, which failed in all the ways it was predicted to fail, and which delivered none of its alleged benefits.  We were not able to keep our doctors, most of our premiums tripled, many policies were cancelled outright, and it nearly forced a massive consolidation of health insurance providers, which were blocked by the courts on an anti-trust basis.  The numbers of insured increased a bit, but only because having a policy was made a legal necessity, causing people who may well have had a reason not to be insured, such as excellent health and an adequate bank account, to get health insurance anyway.

A Middle East on fire.  The deal with Iran merely delayed their pursuit of nuclear weapons.  It did not end it.  For this we gave them massive amounts of literal cash, and apparently access to as much as billions, all covertly.

The war in Syria would likely have ended long ago if Obama had not fanned the flames by funding, training and arming what became ISIS, one of the most horrifically violent groups of human beings ever seen.  There is nothing in the worst parts of human history which was foreign to them.

A completely lawless Libya, and a greatly expanded war in Yemen.

A huge regression in race relations, and in respect for law enforcement, all in tandem with a metastasis of violent and radically intolerant hyperpartisanship.

The subversion of multiple Federal agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the ATF, the Department of Justice, and the EPA.  He rewarded and promoted partisans who favored his political goals over integrity, professionalism, the rule of law, and common decency.

A stagnant economy.  He presided over the worst recovery since the Great Depression, despite the Fed pumping $50 billion a month into its member banks for 4-5 years.

This is a short list.

People remember him, who supported him, as a “classy” guy.  But I was thinking this morning about this whole birth certificate issue.  He could have had it released at any time, the original. Public documents can be made public and to argue otherwise is to betray, in my view, imbecility.

There are only two possible conclusions for this decision.  The first, and most likely, is that he had something to hide, most likely that the Communist drug dealer pornographer Frank Marshall Davis was his father.  And if we grant that, it becomes much easier to believe it was his mother who posed for all those nudes with him.  That he was 20-30 years older than her also adds to the fucked-up-ness of it all.

The second was that he was playing politics, that he saw the “Birther” tag as a way of scoring partisan points, and if he made it go away completely that it would cease to be a political asset for him.  This is possible.  But that is the opposite of class.  That is an asshole move.

All in all, it is a blessed MIRACLE we got Trump.  Look at all these goons in the street. Imagine if nobody was fighting back.  Imagine if our President was egging them on.

And I get completely how vast a disaster this was for the radicals.  They spent 3 decades or so building up their apparatus, doing it quietly, disingenuously.  They learned to pretend to be normal people.  They learned to keep their true views private, and their public rhetoric moderate and unobjectionable.  And under Obama they got themselves embedded everywhere in the Federal apparatus.  But they need a leader who supports them.

Trump can’t wave a wand and make these people go away.  It seems most likely he learned early on that vast changes in vast organizations rarely succeed.  Gradualism is the way.  But that he is pursuing his agenda quietly, seriously, and on a daily basis I have no doubt.

It is the knowledge of this dripping which is driving the Left insane.  They can’t stop it.

But this particular spasm, where I could feel the waters of emotions rising, rising, rising, will fade, and more people will wake up.  They will shake their heads, and wonder why they were so hysterical, why they were shouting so much, NOW, when they didn’t care about the same problem when Obama was President.

Relaxation tends to follow tension, in even moderately healthy people.  You can’t be completely wound up all the time.  It’s not possible.  Even on the Left they only rarely reach fever pitches like this.

This whole thing might have been fantastic if it had happened the last week of October.  But it is June.  I can’t say of course if the media had been holding this in their pocket, and pulled it out to counter Trump’s success with North Korea, and the very ugly charges in the IG Report which make it no longer really possible for reasonable people to deny the FBI has been politicized, or more generally that something we may as well call a Deep State in fact exists.  There is a referent.  Trump was right.  He’s right about a lot of things.  He speaks the truth.

You can’t run long term campaigns purely on emotion.  It fizzles out.  This is why John Wooden taught his player to avoid the highs, so they could also avoid the lows.

We are in an informational war.  We have two cultures which have evolved next to each other, one based on our history, certain foundational principles, and ethical ideals like fairness, hard work, responsibility, tolerance and the like.  The other, of course, manifests more or less as a collective neurosis which abhors all unwanted truths, which refuses to demand of itself consistency in behavior or principle, and which is maintained through a continual drum beat of outrage and self congratulation.

Small daily truths, spoken from on high, as Trump’s position gives him the ability to do, are anathema to these people.  Trump is no monster.  On some level they have to realize this.  Who he is does not even REMOTELY warrant the revulsion, anger, and violence they direct at him.  Truth is like a bell which exorcises demons.  It is unbearable, physically painful to them, and he keeps speaking it clearly and regularly. 

And my best guess is that when this wave finishes sweeping over us in a week or two, a lot of people are going to wonder “what just happened?”  Why did I call my friend a fascist?  Why did my blood boil so hot?  I call myself generous and tolerant, but I don’t want to remember all the ugly, nasty, awful thoughts I just had. None of this makes sense.  Where did it come from?

Yes, it is awful that Trump supporters and people who work with him are being attacked again.  But in the long run, this works to our favor.  It is indefensible.  All of these charges of bigotry and corruption are not even good lies.  They have no serious basis for even the most open minded of people to consider them remotely justified.

If we keep doing what we have been doing, the tide will begin turning.  Yes, the maniacs will get worse, but at some point the knife edge will have disappeared, and their screamings will be met with equal and even superior responses so often they will begin to realize how it feels to be a target, and some may just begin to feel some remorse.  One can hope.

It’s a hard fight, what we are doing.  Not easy.  Painful.  Difficult.  But very, very much worth it.  We can built not just a great nation, better than we have ever been, but a great world, too, and a great future for humanity.