Moderates United

If you think about it, Das Kapital was ALSO the work of a dead white male.  Soviet Russia was run by white males.  And it played a decisive role in fashioning autocratic, abusive rule in many brown skinned countries, just like “Capitalism”, so called, supposedly did.

There are no ideas–or very few–ideas floating around universities, including that of dead white males, which were not originated by dead white males, with some dead white females. Self revulsion is certainly not a new thing, but intelligent people making a virtue of it–perhaps I should call it a religious fetish ( or sexual fetish, even, for some)–can scarcely be called a practice consistent with mental health and wellness.

The sum of the wisdom of the man who on most accounts founded Western philosophy was that he knew nothing. This is a useful statement IF YOU ACT ON IT. What is extraordinarily stupid is to use the mans own method to reach different conclusions. Think about it. Was Socrates stupid? Should it be seen as surprising that the intellectual superstructure of the Western cultural project has collapsed, and that our modern “philosophers” are again saying ” we know nothing”?

A fundamental distinction needs to be made between a communicable science of objects–Techne–which we have excelled at to a miraculous degree; and the path of people, of souls.

No one can truly speak who they are, at the deepest level, and trying to do so is to denigrate, diminish, and to kill.

The Sophia we speak of is rationalistic, and reached by endless sputtering, and consists, at the bottom of the mine, in a flagstone saying “Seek elsewhere.”

Here, I give you a word for valuing deep experience for its own sake. Call it mysticism if you like.

I am about to go into my Kum Nye practice. Who knows what will emerge? Wherever it comes from, it is what is real. Words can build peace ( and war), but they cannot build direct understanding of what is most important in human life.

I will add, my initial impulse was to seek ” love of awareness” or “love of consciousness”, but don’t have time to do the research.

The best condiments are tranquility and gratitude.

I wanted to call this a bon mot, but I can’t see how I haven’t seen this expressed somewhere in many forms.  Because it is true.

Pausing to give thanks, pausing to calm down and focus on the task of eating, digesting, and putting the nutrients to good use? Solid, and largely forgotten wisdom.

I eat like a wolf, too often. Food, of course, has always been one form of self medication for me. As I calm, though, I am seeing better ways of interacting with it. Thanking it, and God, and fate and chance, all more or less literally, seems like a great idea to me.

Communist governments ALONE caused some 100 million unnatural deaths in the 20th century. Being a 1 with six zeroes this number represents 10,000 x 10,000. This means it would take some thirty years, killing 10,000 people a day, to equal this number. At the height of the Holodomor, some 20,000 people were dying a day, which is more than 4 times the ENTIRE number of blacks lynched by the KKK in its 100+ year history.

These numbers don’t count Hitler, Suharto, Pinochet, Franco and others.  GOVERNMENTS, more than anything, are what do most killing. We need to fear our government more than each other.

The gun in Texas was bought illegally or stolen. A crime had already been commuted when he took possession of the gun. We have 275 million guns in this country, a large percentage unregistered, and which would not BE registered if those who want to grant the government a monopoly on the effective use of force ever get their legislation passed and enforced.

The true issue is one of mental health. Why did this guy think dying as a mass murderer was the best, or only, path for him?  Well meaning people need to ask the question: how can we better build and protect social inclusion and coherent culture?

Archy/anarchy

This is clinically accurate. Our country has been “slouching”, not really towards Gomorrah, but fascism. Trump opposes this. Those who voted for him oppose this. And this, in turn, has created a precipitation of latent madness.

On a marginally related note, I see no reason Jeff Sessions should not be fired. He helped and supported Trump. He had a good record in Alabama. Trump did, I think, the right thing in giving him a second and third chance. But his second in command is an Obama-ite, clearly dedicated to making Trumps Presidency difficult and as close to a failure as he can manage. Sessions turning Uranium One over to Rosenstein should be the last straw. He can no longer claim to be doing the right thing: he is simply avoiding responsibility for potentially explosive investigations of precisely the sort we ELECTED Trump to do, to help restore faith in our process, in our judiciary, in the FBI, and in our democracy itself.

With respect to my last post, who benefits from the idea that the sole path to black empowerment lies in voting Democrat?  Do I need to answer that question?

Who benefits from attacks on the notion of truth?  Liars.

Who benefits from attacks on rationality?  The confused but proud.

As I have said many times, it is astonishing that so many people have fallen under the thrall of bad ideas, particularly in the midst of economic and political plenty, made possible only by the long term application of the ideas they oppose.

Sociopsychologically, this can only be explained by the sociopathology fed by the fact that only useless, emotionally damaged or limited people choose to pursue study in the Humanities, by and large.  They are the ones nobody liked, or who always felt inferior for some reason or other.  They get their revenge by inflicting damaging ideas on the world as a whole.

They may yet submerge us all in a flood of fire or water.  I personally cannot fathom how so much ugliness can be finally admitted by people who need it.

How can anyone feel empowered who does not believe that some significant portion of their destiny is within their control?  And to be clear, for most of human history, most people were not free.  For this reason people learned to control their experience by learning to manage their thoughts, actions, and feelings, and this equates, itself, to empowerment.

There is nothing more disempowering than to believe that your destiny–all of it–is out of your hands, particularly when tied to the idea that the world is in general hostile to you.

I seek clarity of thought daily, because I see so little of it out in our public domain.

It is, to me, a psychological, psychodevelopmental truism that children need to individuate from their parents.  They need, in our culture at least, and I would stipulate this as universally desirable, to become their own people.

But in the same sense that Freud mistook the often very real sexual interest abusive adults took in children for their own fantasies–a politically driven but largely conscious error that still haunts us–I would assert that many parents have great difficulty in relinquishing the role of parent.

I was reading about the incoming class at Harvard a couple years ago, and most of these kids talked to one or both parents daily.  They never truly left home in some respects, not least because the parents did not want to let them go.

I would submit this is a two way street.  It is sad to see your kids go, but they are like an evolving work of art at loose in the world, taking continual new shapes and sizes and directions, which you cannot and should not try to control.  Build a strong foundation.  Instill common sense, pain tolerance, resilience, and curiosity.  These become their guides, not you.  Shit will happen, and shit should happen.  If they survive, they get better, hopefully, or at least different.

There is so much about life on this earth we do not know, but that it is about discovery, learning, and growth is to my mind an absolute fact.  Why should any parent keep their children from the game because they themselves never learned how to play?

I do think a certain amount of healthy selfishness is an absolute necessity for anything even approximating genuine liberality and generosity.  If you do not have a life of your own, you necessarily have to take it from someone else.  Their problems have to become your problems, because you have nothing else.

There is, in this sense, a fundamental homology between all-too-common helicopter parenting, and the leftist political orientation which underlies it.  They go together.

Put another way, the Democrats–even the ones who truly believe they are well-meaning–cannot let go of the blacks.  They cannot renounce their racist paternalism.  They cannot say “without us, they will still be absolutely fine.”

Life is about letting go.  Hold on to what is truly your own–your way, your truth, your path–and allow everyone else to do the same.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Jfp0_vIn2U

He argues that Republicans are openly predatory.  He doesn’t come out and say it, but I’m sure in his mind he considers this something they can deal with.  Blacks can organize, get smart, fight back, punish people for trying to take advantage of them.

He argues, though, too, that Democrats are actually worse, because even though they too are predatory, they pretend for a time to be the friend of the black man and woman.

What do they want, the interviewer asks, the Democrats?  They aren’t getting rich.

Votes.  He says, although of course any member of Congress who gets through a term or two always seems to manage to be vastly more well off financially when they leave than when they got there, even though they are only “serving the people.”  It really is great work, if you can get it.

And how do you get it?  By promising the sun, moon and stars.

And when you fail–and this is very much the case after 8 years of Obama, the first two years of which included Democrat majorities in Congress–what do you do?  Do you take responsibility?  To take stock, and ask if what you are doing is working?  FUCK NO.  What you do is blame facts and reason themselves as racist.  You make it so you cannot be held to account on any standard whatsoever other than lack of popularity, which you ensure through relentless propaganda campaigns.

I have asked before, and will ask again: where are the black leaders who are not just using the plight of blacks to line their own pockets?

Malcolm X was not shot by racist whites, like Martin Luther King Jr.  No, he was shot by blacks.  In my view–and the full back story has to my knowledge never been told–his crime was his honesty.  He was calling the corrupt corrupt.  He was calling liars liars.  He was calling fake leaders fake leaders.

If I myself were black, there is no doubt in my mind, the way I am wired, that I would be a huge Malcolm X fan.  He was the only one telling it like it was, not just to white America–which MLK Jr. also did–but to black America too, telling them to wake the fuck up, and stop entrusting the hen house to one fox after another.

And I will underscore his point that all the other black leaders he know had the support of white Democrats.  An honest black leader does not, thus, just undermine corrupt blacks, but the whites who use them for their own elections and reelections, and to satisfy their own lust for money and power.

It seems psychologically obvious that much of the affection millenials feel for the notion of Socialism is quite literally a desire for lifelong paternalism: they want to leave their actual parents house at some point, but never lose that feeling of being continually protected and sheltered by other people.  They never want to grow up, in other words.  They never want to risk and lose, and hurt, and cry, and learn from it.

I won’t dilate too much on all this, but I did want to offer one idea which has helped me, personally.  All their lives I have taught my kids to take calculated risks: not stupid ones, but ones where it is not certain things will go their way.  One of them has taken it farther than I am comfortable with.  I tell them to take risks, but I am terrified every time they do.  Going rock climbing scares me, even when it is introductory, and they are not leading, which is where most accidents happen.

My personal belief is that we choose the broad arc of our lives.  I believe in life after death, life within death, and logically this means that my children’s lives, like mine, are their own.  If they chose terrible fates, that was their choice.  They don’t belong to me.  Their lives do not belong to me.  I can offer them shelter when they request it, but both are relatively fearless, and while we enjoy seeing each other, they don’t come crying home, ever.  If life deals them a blow, they just deal with it.

My oldest was a bit upset the other day about a bad grade on a quiz, and I was dishing out the usual platitudes “life always has a path.  Failure doesn’t define you, etc.”  And she got MAD at me, because I was helping her accept a B in that class, and she wasn’t prepared for that.  She wanted to fight HARD to get the A, in spite of her fuck up.

I was proud.  She had no time for me helping her accept failure at any level.  One of her parents, at least, did something right, but part of that she was born with.  It’s not me, it’s not her mother: it’s her.

I can actually honestly say that as a parent my proudest accomplishment is giving both my children the space to become exactly who they are, and who they were meant to be, and watching them slowly become absolutely unique.  I–and their mother, too, although we each have different relationships with them–presented all the support they needed, and no barriers to leaving and growing far beyond the walls of the home they grew up in.