Moderates United

I was writing a message to someone else and something came out I thought I might share:

Parenting is a long series of guesses, where close enough usually counts.

I get the image in my mind of the children of the Left seeing making demands as somehow a validation of their importance.  They have gotten used to having the latest idea come down the pike, shouting and screaming and name calling and mouth frothing at everyone who “opposes” it by not immediately supporting it, and getting submission from Republicans and moderate Democrats.  In this are very much like the children who are used to throwing fits to get their way, and who are indulged in their fits by overly generous and codependent mothers.

What is happening is that Trump–and the mass of American people–are not listening.  Within their logic, if screaming and shouting and rolling around on the floor and holding their breath worked in the past, then MORE of the same is what is needed to return to good old days, the status quo ante.

That is all this street demonstration stuff is.

And when I say children, I mean that even the grey haired old hippies who are showing up have failed in the basic task of social maturation, and for a very simple reason: maturity involves accepting the responsibility of playing a role in a larger order, and these people reject that larger order.  They reject the need for adulthood.  They reject the need for personal responsibility.  They reject the things the rest of us hold sacred, and they have nothing firm to replace them with.

Now, I was pondering today the consequences of growing up watching TV commercials, of watching fake people act excited about things they were paid to act excited about.  Every day, you have mediocre schooling, taught by people who are not proud of our culture, and you come home to some form of falseness.  Perhaps you watch TV, perhaps you play video games, perhaps you watch movies: where in any of this is there gravitas, the sacred, something which MATTERS?

It is a real need–the need for struggle and difficulty and sacrifice–which is met poorly by the constant shouting and pouting.

I have spent some years trying to envision a beyond, a future culture which meets our needs, and which is not a slave culture of the sort the globalists have been working to create.  This should properly, I will suggest, be the task of all honest humanitarians and humanists.  It should be the task of genuine Liberals, men and women of honest good will, and those who feel compassion for the many suffering people on this Earth.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260

How did the Left become mentally unhinged and emotionally out of control?  Still operating Soviet propaganda.  Ideas do not die when regimes do.  They die when they are examined carefully by reasonable, honest, well meaning people who care about the outcomes flowing from their words and actions.

Most academics are utterly unwilling to take responsibility for their actions; rather, for the consequences of actions based upon their words.  They are dishonest, treasonous, and irrational.

Clear vision begins all honest and useful revolutions, and a revolution, a new beginning, a renaissance of truly Liberal thought, is what is needed.

One of the lesser commented on but ubiquitous features of histoical fascisms of both the communistic  and nationalistic varieties is blaming some group for all the problems of the nation. Hitlet blamed Jews, bankers and Bolsheviks. Mussolini blamed socialists as well. The Soviets blamed fascists, kulaks, the bourgeoisie and more others than I can count, including dissidents in their own parties. They had a lot of hate.

The concept of “white privilege” needs to be seen through this filter. Not only does the Left have street gangs at work to try and intimidate people they don’t like, but also have a scapegoat. It is an odd scene, whites blaming whites, but they get excused through self loathing and a willingness to wear hair shirts.

As I think about it, water is very mythic.  It stands for feeling, for purity, and even in some respects for infinity, as in “oceanic” feelings.

But how many pipelines are there in the United States that go under river beds?  Near water sources?  Near lakes and streams?  I can’t honestly say, but I know the number is a lot.

Consider how ludicrous it would be for a suburban kid from Seattle to try and block a pipeline in Louisiana  because the water it was crossing is “sacred”.  White people don’t get to call the Earth sacred, at least not without copying and plagiarizing Native Americans.  Yes, I get the Eucharist may not be thrilling, but it is what we have.  We have our country, and we have our ideals. We are admittedly a myth-challenged nation and we are the worse for it.

This whole protest is in no small measure a means for people who feel they lack a sense of connection to wonder, the universe, the Earth, and even to God, to get that feeling.  The importance they are attaching to it is vastly out of proportion to its ACTUAL importance.

Again: nothing much was going to get done in the middle of a North Dakota winter anyway.  Obama did the politically convenient thing, knowing if Trump won it would be reversed, so that even though the project started and blossomed under his Administration, even though it got within a mile or two, if memory serves, of its destination after a long building process, that he would not be blamed for it.

And I will note that the new water treatment plant was paid for out of the “Stimulus” money.  It is economically useless, but it should have made these people shut up.

I really think David Archambeault–I think that is close to the correct name–or whatever the tribal leaders name is, should tell the protesters to leave.

I will add that there is this underlying sense of the sacred within much of the environmental movement.  Now, I have nothing against clean air and water, and nothing to say in support of pollution and ecological poison.  But it seems to me that as with this case, much, much too often feeling gets the upper hand over science, because people have this emotionally rooted need to believe.  Global Warming is an excellent example.  It is anti-scientific bullshit, but it meets both the emotional needs of people who need something to protect, and the political needs of those who never saw an expansion of government they didn’t like.

I have not followed this thing closely, so what follows may not be all that clever, but fuck it.

As Jonathan Haidt posits in his Moral Foundations Theory,  moralities the world over seem to be built from 6 basic building blocks, the essentials of which we are born with: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, Leftism claims to care about Care and Fairness primarily.  What is missing is a sense of the sacred, and a sense of loyalty to that sense (rather than to specific people and causes).  There is for them, as one obvious example, nothing sacred about the flag or America, or even democracy and freedom.  They will use these words sometimes, but they don’t mean them, or even in my view understand them.

What seems to have happened in Standing Rock is that the Federal government and the people behind the pipeline solicited questions and concerns for several years, and never heard word one from the Standing Rock Sioux until the pipeline was more or less at their front door.  The pipeline had been rerouted multiple times based on feedback from other tribes, or concerns about undiscovered graveyards and the like.

Additionally, as all the Standing Rock Sioux know, the water intake they currently use to provide water for their reservation will soon be decommissioned and a newer one 7 miles downriver from the pipeline installed.  What they also know is that the pipeline is being built in clay 92 feet below the river bad, which is considerably more distance than is required, and than is normally done.  So both the risk of a leak, and the risk to their water in the event of a leak, have been meliorated.

What seems to me to have happened is that the tribal chief got the bright idea of shaking down the oil company, by staging protests they knew would draw national attention (no doubt they called the reporters to make sure), then more or less asking for protection money to keep the pipeline rolling.  But the pipeline people didn’t give in.  What instead happened is hippies started showing up en masse.  From second hand reports I read, the chief has wanted them gone for some time.  They are a bit embarrassing, and likely making life around there much less peaceful.  But he can’t tell them to leave.  They came to support him and his tribe.  So he is kind of stuck.

Now it was obvious to me that Obama ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to do whatever they did to stop construction–the Commander in Chief is after all in charge of the Army, of which the Corps is a part–and that Trump would start things back up, which he will.

But here is the point I wanted to make: it is not OK to be a proud white person in this country among leftists.  It is not OK to hold your religious beliefs as sacred and untouchable.  It is not OK to love this country, warts and all, and view patriotic effort as a sacred duty.

It IS OK, however, and even extolled, that one feel guilt for crimes you didn’t commit, which your parents didn’t commit, which no one in the entire history of your family committed, and with which you have no connection other than the fact of your birth in a political entity called the United States.  It is also OK to support others–literally anyone else but white people–in their own sacred sense of their own place and people.  It is also OK to feel more loyalty to THEM than to your own people.

So what seems to have happened is that mythic nerve was inadvertently struck, and hordes of aimless, lost, confused white kids are showing up to protect people who do not really need protecting, and who really don’t even want to be “protected”, but who don’t know how to end the party.

Some of these kids are so emotionally involved that they will spend years in jail, for real crimes, for nothing.  The pipeline will be built.  There won’t be any spills, and even if there are, it is a manageable problem.

It is very important to know who you are and what you believe.  And it is very important to develop an internalized sense of self worth, such that you can differentiate between people who really need you, those who are using you, and those you are both using and being used by as fellow codependents.

They say some wounds never heal, and this is likely true for most of us, but it hit me today that their texture does change, and that they are best viewed as a thousand mosaic squares–some of them black, and which will always stay black–but some of which are colored and interesting.  Scars–and I have more than my share–are not just indicative of pain, but of learning, of deepened experience, of potential wisdom.

Two thousand years later, Jews still mourn at the Wailing Wall.  The loss still stings.  But the question can and should be asked: who would they have been if that had never happened?  Not who they are, certainly.  It what ways did Jewish culture evolve for the better?  There is no more animal sacrifice.  That to me is good.   And they are a race of geniuses, having a share in something like a third or more of all Nobel Prizes, despite being considerably less than 1% of the worlds population.

I was contemplating my belly the other day–that is the word, regrettably–and I was suddenly aware that it had a thousand little communities, a thousand different, differentiable, places, contacts, textures, colors.  This image is where I pulled that visual from the first paragraph from.  I realized that far from being monolithic, all parts of me partake in this sensation of being composed of many small pieces.

For their part, the Buddhists break space, time, and self into small pieces as well.  Everything is both discontinuous and connected, depending on your perspective.  But so often you have to push things to one pole to see the other on a spectrum, or to see the spectrum at all.

It is odd to recollect that modern day Turkey–or most of it–was for some 1,000 years a place where Greek was spoken.  So was Syria.  I knew this, but have never really thought about it.

As I think about it, this notion of deriving pleasure from making people happy explains a lot of Trumps behavior.  He loves doing guest bits on soap operas and WWF, because they make people laugh and smile. They are entertaining.  And the whole deal with The Apprentice was making an engaging show which people enjoyed watching.  With, in other words, making people happy.

Trump, unlike most Leftists, has never considered himself a saint, a messiah, or even a positive influence in anything but business.  He is what he is.  He says what he thinks, and always has.  Part of that is the New Yorker in him, and much of it is simply how he’s put together.  He has healthy self esteem, doesn’t feel the need to apologize for who he is (although I think he likely does laugh and smile sometimes at some the things thrown at him he knows are true), and these are all good traits.

What I DON’T think is really a big motivating factor for him is a need to always be the center of attention. Yes, his towers have his name on them.  Yes, he has enjoyed the limelight for decades.  But I think he sees himself as part of a bigger show, one with many more personalities he is happy to welcome onto the stage.

He is not a narcissist in my opinion.  He thinks about other people a lot.  He is unquestionably at times selfish, especially in his infidelities, but he is capable of recognizing the many individual worlds he shares this planet with.

He differs in this, in my view, from Barack Obama, who was some combination of convinced by others and by himself that he was unique, wonderful, and a gift to humanity, despite patent intellectual mediocrity, muted passion, an unserious attitude, and an aversion to hard work.

I have had dreams of the last 3 Presidents, and had one of Trump last night.  I have written about them, and will not again here. I do feel I am powerfully psychic, potentially.  I am about a 75% believer in astrology, even though I admit I have no idea how it may work, and 7 of my ten planets are in water signs, including both Sun and Moon.  I also have a water trine.  Lots of feeling.  Lots of perception.  But those abilities are kind of on hold.  If I can’t manage my own emotional world, how the fuck could I manage an assault of the worlds of those around me?  That will all need to remain mostly latent for a long time, and perhaps never be fully expressed in this life.  I would view that in any event as more a curse than a blessing.

Be that as it may, what I saw was a man who dedicated his life to showing people a good time, who is at his happiest watching over a landscape of people eating great food, drinking great booze, in a beautiful setting, laughing and having a good time.  This is the outcome he loves.  He is married to his work, and that is the only marriage he has ever truly recognized.  He needs a woman–a beautiful woman–at the end of the day to help him wind down, but he is an extremely driven, extremely passionate man.

For her part–and I have never seen the wife before–I think Melania is often lonely.  After his fashion he does love her, but his work is his true love, and if she does stay in New York, it will be because she may as well, for all the time she will spend with him.  I think that tape may have hurt her too.  He may have already been married to her when that discussion happened.  Certainly, she must wonder what has changed.

Trump is obviously no angel.  He is a hard driving man, but in his own way he is an archetype of the self made man.  This is an American archetype, the tycoon.

In effect, what Trump is trying to do is take this sense that everybody should be happy and having a good time and apply it to practical politics, and apply it nationally.  We should all welcome this with open arms.  It is good.  It is a good passion to have in the White House.

I am trying to lay off politics a bit, but can’t resist a couple more comments.

First, though, on politics: what it occurs to me is that political obsessions are the perfect deflection mechanism.  There is ALWAYS something to be mad about, something to be passionate about, something to take your focus away from inner core dynamics and push them to the periphery, and instead focus on something always changing, always evolving, and which can and does continually provoke emotions.  Politics in this sense is much like sports.  And as far as that goes, our political opinions matter, practically, about as much as our sports opinions, which obviously is to say not at all.

Obamacare: what SHOULD have been done originally is obvious.  Rand Paul has sketched out a path to middle class freedom from the tyranny of bad policy.  It is all simple.  But by design Obamacare also created a complex system of rewards for voting Democrat.  Subsides were handed out, Medicaid expanded.  It seems to me that the most politically effective way of ending Obamacare without creating a massive rallying cry for the Democrats, is to figure out either a path to migrate the people who did benefit from Obamacare to something at least decent and defensible; or to simply grant this money to the budget and find cuts elsewhere.  That process could take some time.  It is highly detailed and complex, as all large intrusions of government are.  I am perhaps making excuses, but if there is a delay, my HOPE is that this is the reason.

Neil Gorsuch: I read he was privately defending what we might call the Thin Black Line, from Trump’s warranted comments on judicial activism.  He is quite right, of course, that the judiciary should not be politicized.  But I wonder about his intelligence in apparently not grasping that it IS politicized.  As Thomas Sowell apparently said in 2003 “One of these days the 9th Circuit is going to rule the Constitution unConstitutional”, and the specific ruling which proceeded it was no better.

The actual law is very clear.  There is no ambiguity.  Foreigners are not protected by our Constitution, and Federal law grants the President very broad discretion in deciding who he is going to let in.  All forms of discrimination–of discriminating one sort of person from another, of making or perceiving a difference–are allowed.  We all must grant that in complex situations sometimes it is necessary to treat people as groups, in the manner the Left does ubiquitously and daily, albeit in their case to uniformly affirm the absolute virtue of anyone who is not one of us, and the uniform and absolute corruption of all white people.  Nothing racist there, obviously.

And the Supreme Court, where Gorsuch may land, is blatantly politicized as well, and has been at least since the time of FDR.  The Four Horsemen stood their ground for a time, but the tide was too great.

We can applaud the sentiment, but again I wonder about the wisdom of someone protecting a boat which sailed long ago.

As far as Trump, he faces a gale force wind.  I was in Wally World yesterday and every single magazine and tabloid at the check out lanes had something in exclamation points, and in general negative about Trump or his daughter and her husband.

I said the fighting would be house to house, room to room, and I hoped I would be wrong.  I was not wrong.

But Trump has the passion, the courage, and the habit of determination that should get us all through this period, get much useful work done, and hopefully at some point a grand national party to celebrate.