Moderates United

“Uncle Tom” has the precise affective valence as “uppity negro”, or its uglier cousin, the N word.

It conveys disgust, contempt, vitriol, and latent violence. 

My youngest knows a guy who scored a 36 ACT, has taken for some 5-6 AP classes a year and gotten all 5’s on the tests, and still got wait listed for Harvard. I get that the competition is psychotic, but pondering it, could politics also not be weighed into the mix? We assume indoctrination happens at the secondary and college levels–and it clearly does–but particularly for the most selective schools, could the ideological in-breeding which is yielding so many intellectual stunted emotional dwarfs not start with the very first weeding? Might it be at some schools that anyone who is not ALREADY a mouth breathing fascist, conditioned to scream “compassion” and “tolerance” at the ring of the “racist” bell, has no chance of getting in?

If these are factories, and “quality” consists in perfect ideological relication–a zero defects model–then why tolerate “garbage”? Why add the additional hurdle of converting them, when the aim is AMPLIFYING and weaponizing them?

I’m the guy rubbing elbows on a normal day with ordinary electricians, pipe-fitters, carpenters and the like.  I think most ordinary people are vastly more intelligent than they are given credit for, and most elites–especially “educated” elites–vastly less intelligent in practical ways than many of them EVER realize, across lifetimes.  Paul Krugman may die as stupid as he is today.  We can hope not, but given a Napoleon complex and a vast ego, it’s hard to see how growth could get through his defensive perimeter.

Be that as it may, I wanted to expand on my previous idea, inviting “subalterns” from the ghetto to the White House, from Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, even Washington D.C.  Security is manageable, and it would be a HUGE ego boost for many of them.

And specifically who I would exclude are “black leaders”.  They have done nothing in 50 years, and there is little reason to think they will now.  They can be made retroactively relevant, once ideas are proposed and adopted, and “leading” by staying ahead of where everyone is already going is something they well know how to do.

And it occurred to me that inviting COPS, and maybe even prospective employers, to the mix might be interesting.  And beat cops, not the suits.  The cops on the level with the people getting arrested.

When you see riots in the streets what you can assume is missing is dialogue.  The Left no longer dialogues.  It no longer seeks to remedy the sense of unpleasant difference through talking.  Trump can show them, and everyone else, how it is done.  That is the sort of thing he is a master at.

If Tarkovsky’s movies resemble dreams, my dreams sometimes resemble Tarkovsky.  He has a long shot, as one obvious example, in Stalker, just looking at all the detritus in a stream, in water, in feeling.

Water is emotion.  It is the sea we swim in, often while falsely believing we are standing on dry land, on reason, on fact.  Self evidently, the Left thinks it stands on reason, on fact, but it is in fact deeply, deeply submerged in a never ending eddy of primal and generally ugly emotion it lies about, to itself, and to others.  They call hatred compassion, intolerance tolerance.

Last night I was dreaming I was in a dream urban landscape.  Everything was ruined and covered in water.  There were bullets everywhere, and I found a half broken gun I was afraid might still fire, and I could not figure out how to open up the chamber to look, so I fired it underwater.  It shot.  Twice, then a third time.

Now, in my style of dream interpretation all dreams are first highly personal, but also sometimes transpersonal, collective.  I think this was one such dream.

In my own case, of course, there is a strong emotional residue of conflict, of battles fought long ago (like in Lord of the Rings and the swamps, which is a highly mythic and interesting image when applied to practical psychodynamics, how many of us are surrounded by ghosts ready and able to come back to life if we touch the water, the emotional space, they live in, and how fear of this prevents many people from on-going growth, and traps them in an emotional swamp), and discharging the gun was likely discharging unreleased aggressions and fears.  The feeling was one of the after-math of the battle.  Everyone was in shock, but the fighting was over.

But on a higher level, I would submit that this image describes many of our inner cities, and perhaps even our national political landscape.  Refuse from violence is everywhere.  There is a lingering field of latent emotion on the landscape (obviously if I tell the outer truth, that emotion is quite present, quite ubiquitous and very much expressed).

In any event, to make a short story long, in tandem with another dream I had I don’t want to share, here is what I would supposed: Trump needs to go on a charm offensive with his enemies.  But he should start by expressing caring for our inner cities that Obama NEVER DID.


I read some Chicago gangs have expressed a desire to talk with Trump about how to end the violence.  I say he should convene a conference of sorts, where he brings in gang members from a variety of cities, and allows and encourages open discussion about their problems, and what they need.  As a general rule “blacks” have been represented by people like Jesse Jackson who couldn’t care less about concrete accomplishments, as long as he gets to lead the march, and gets his cut of the shake-down money.

Not unreasonably, these people feel neglected, abandoned, and that nobody does, or ever will, give a flying fuck about them.  So why not engage in self destructive, even suicidal behavior?  What good could the future possibly hold?  At least continual violence makes life interesting, and sometimes you win a battle here and there, which you can celebrate with your actual family, your brothers and sisters of the gang tribe, the people who have your back, and who you cover for.  This seems emotionally logical to me.

And I honestly would not presume to say what the answers are, prior to listening to what they have to say.  I assume what they say will make sense to them.  It may not be practical, but it would represent a starting point for planning and acting in coherent ways to eliminate these emotional swamps where so much bad happens, and far too little good.

And to the extent he can, I think Trump should reach out to all the groups which feel threatened.  He should reach out to gay rights groups (since they keep adding letters, I’m just going to stick with Peking, Bombay, and the Koran, figuratively speaking), to Hispanic groups, perhaps even to the “anti-fascist” groups.  It is much easier to demonize and hate people you don’t know, haven’t humanized, can’t relate to.

And at some point he should invite in Hollywood, to help them understand that he is human, that he isn’t crazy, that he is not trying to do anything but PROTECT America from fascism, and that they don’t have to agree with everything he does and says in order to accept that they will get another shot in two years at altering the balance of power, but that in the meantime, he intends to help as many people as he can.  He will win a few converts, in all likelihood.

The core psychological reality is that most Leftists have the same emotionally rooted assumptions about conservatives that the KKK does about blacks, the Nazis did about Jews, the Soviets did about the bourgeoisie, kulaks, the Cossacks, and others, and that the Cambodian fascists did about anyone who seemed educated in any way in the old system.  They dehumanize them, depersonalize them, dissociate from them emotionally, and these acts open up the emotional logic of physical and emotional violence.

Trump is a normal human being.  He has flaws, like everyone, but if there is one group on this planet that commits and condones particularly sexual sins of all sorts, it is Hollywood.  Trump is vastly better than Roman Polanski, or Woody Allen, who MARRIED his own daughter, more or less.  Nobody cares in Hollywood.

Hollywood is in no place to judge these things.  And what SHOULD matter is whether or not Trump is fixing real problems.

Now, many of these people are lunatics. That can’t be fixed.  But not all of them are.  This is cause for hope.

The thing about a healthy morality is it is the by-product of emotional health.  Healthy morality is flexible, but clear about the dominant principle of making the world a more peaceful, happier, healthier place.  It recognizes the world is ambiguous, and that the right answer in one place may not be in another.  Every day is a new day.  Every moral decision must be based on an effort to understand the totality of the situation at hand, and must include both the present moment and the future, and not just those immediately affected, but to the extent possible predict who else may be affected in the future.  It is easy to do something good for one person, that hurts many other people down the line.  This is not morality, in my view.  This is what Obamacare did.  It clearly helped some, but at the expense of most.  Mainly it was congenial to the egos of emotionally superficial people.

Few ideas.

I read the fascist “anti-fascists” at Berkeley last night were chanting “this is what community looks like”, while screaming, dripping hatred and starting bonfires. Could their bullying be any more obviously that of the black and Brown Shirts?

Do you not think the SA and the Italian fascists thought of themselves as s family, as a community of spirit, as the true guardians of decency and everything good?

And ponder this “community” on their own account. Anyone who is white, and not fucked up or poor is automatically excluded unless they hate themselves. These people want to spit on virtually everyone in America, including blacks, women, Hispanics, Muslims and in this case even gays who don’t agree with them.

Who can this attract? How can this become a mass movement? Unless you are an articulate gender queer, handicapped Muslim, they don’t want to talk to you. It is a coalition of fringe fuck ups, which thinks it can use violence to further its goals. The whole thing reeks of mental illness.

I keep watching, with disbelief and amazement, how completely seemingly normal people have separated from the capacity to weigh facts in an even and reasonable manner.  One might agree or disagree with Trump’s policy on immigrants, but it is certainly reasonable.  It is not a reason to call for his assassination, or to compare him with Hitler.

Hitler took people who had lived in their communities for very long periods of time, seized everything they owned, and put them on trains which more often than not led them to their deaths.

Trump is asking for a SLOW DOWN in the pace at which we let into our national home people who come from places where beheadings, bombings, rapes, pedophilia and the like are common.

Is it really so hard to see the difference?

Hitler talked relentlessly about Lebensraum, which all intelligent listeners understood meant at some point invading all their neighbors, which of course is what happened.

Trump talks about diminishing America’s direct role in world affairs, a less aggressive foreign policy, and focusing on making the best of what we already have.

Is it so hard to see the difference?

What Trump has done is crystallize the lunacy and hatefulness of the Left, for all to see.  It is an ugly picture, one filled with mind numbing atrocities against reason and proportion; the complete eradication of the ability to hear, much less rebut in an even and emotionally neutral way, any opposing viewpoints, with hyperarousal being an ubiquitous outcome of even encountering an ideational Other for most Leftists, even the nice ones;  and of course the physical violence that follows all those unable to engage in reasoned dialogue.

Here is the thing: most cops and most of the military–particularly in the Mattis era–support Trump.  Violence might be an answer if Hillary were in charge and willing to encourage it like Obama did and continues to do.  But Trump is in charge.  There are limits to overt attacks on our system and its elected leaders.  Most conservatives own guns, most veterans are conservatives, and all of us are simply watching these street spectacles thinking WTF?  These kids think they are tough, but against the mass of people arrayed against them, currently peacefully, they don’t stand a snowflakes chance in hell.

Again, I can only assume that Trump will continue to win.  The media can be ignored, and the protests can be ignored.  They claim to, but clearly do not, speak for most Americans.

Stay the course Trump, and put the screws to Congress to give you a repeal of Obamacare SOON, with Rand Paul’s replacement.

I have referenced shit in several recent posts, and I wanted to comment on this.  I of course underwent the de rigeur Freudian indoctrination, and am familiar with his posited and utterly unscientific psychosexual stages of development.  I took a class in college with Alan Dundes, who is one of the preeminent folklorists in the country if not the world, and he had a book titled “Life is like a chicken coop ladder (shitty and short)”.  He had a Freudian take on the Nazis and their obsession with cleanliness.

Here is what makes more sense to me.  References to shit are implicitly references to sanctity, to sacrality.  The Nazi reaction was one to crumbling institutions and mores, to pervasive Bolshevik efforts to destroy German culture.  What Hitler wanted to invoke was the sacred nature of Germany itself, which he valued all the more, like all recent converts, having been born in Austria.

Purifying is no different than a bird nesting, getting rid of unwanted “intruders”.  Dogs will not shit in their containers.  Why?  It is an act of impurity, understood completely at an instinctual level.  We share this need, this drive, with most animals.

Now, Nazism was lunacy, but all ideas taken far enough become lunatic.  Communism is the opposite idea: that we have no need of culture, need regard nothing but homogeneity as sacred, and that individuals have no right to assert any differentiated identity.  This is lunacy as well.

Something can be a good idea in moderation.  Nationalism is not something we begrudge Mexicans.  If they want to root for their team in the World Cup, then most Americans say great.  If they want to put that flag up on their wall at home, even though they are no longer Mexicans, fine.

But Americans have the same right.  We have accomplished amazing things.  There is nothing wrong with taking pride in that, and indeed something pathological in feeling shame for things we have not done.  No nation and no individual is perfect.  That does not mean that they are not BETTER as people and nations operating in the world with self respect, and an on-going intention of growing.

To make the latent obvious: self loathing is not a mechanism for growth.  It is rather the AVOIDANCE of growth.  It is the tactic of psychologically infantile people to substitute masochism for genuine self reflection.

My two cents.  Work to do.

Here is the thing: Trumps policy does not ACTUALLY affect, if I had to guess, more than 1 in 1,000 people living her, or more than 1 in 1,000 people trying to travel here.  I read that on the first day of the “ban”, some 325,000 people entered this country from somewhere else–this includes in my understanding all travelers–and out of those perhaps 150 were detained for further questioning, and most of those were released.  Even among those there was no significant inconvenience.

But the same people who would defend pedophilia and Islamic rape culture if told to do so, were out in the streets en masses, protesting what they were told was a “racist” ban.  They don’t a fucking clue what the order actually says.  They don’t have even a rudiment of a capacity to weigh this against past policy.  What were things like under Kennedy?  Reagan?  Obama?

They don’t have a fucking clue what the actual law says.

In a world of instantaneous media consumption, where news has all the substance of Diet Frosted Flakes, people only know what the media tells them.  They can’t remember what fucking happened two weeks ago, much less two years or God forbid two DECADES ago, which is recent history on most renderings of the idea.

So it is not a stretch to say our media is inciting riots.  They are willfully misrepresenting and underrepresenting important facts.  Now, I do not want any media bans, but I think those hurt by violence instigated by grossly misleading news stories should have the right to sue them for their blatant irresponsibility.  They never otherwise pay any price for lying to the American people, disrupting the peace of our streets, and continuing the long term process of diminishing the minds of ordinary Americans by feeding them a diet of shit and calling it gourmet food.  

I’ve pretty much reached the point where if a given policy pisses off the Left, or Islamists, or pissant countries half a world away we have been giving money to for half a century or more, then that anger is sufficient to qualify it as likely sound policy.

The Left considers Western civilization to be the enemy, and thus we should rightly fear anything they find congenial, and welcome anything they find threatening.

As far as Islamists, their goal is our women herded into homes, chained up in the kitchen, and holes in the heads of anyone who misses one of his five daily prayers.  Fuck them, and anyone who wants to make apologies for them.

that the Left has laid a trap for ITSELF.

You only get large numbers of people under a big tent if you can convince them you are good people with good ideas; or that you can deliver the goods reliably.

But the facade of kindness is gone.  The facade of moderation is gone.  And they didn’t even deliver the goods under Obama, to the extent they needed to to secure a broad base of support based on entirely on self interest.

Thus, the more they agitate, the more they drive people away, with no means possible of bringing in anyone who was not crazy to begin with.  Their present base of support should be viewed as a maximum, in my view, which will continue to decline, no matter how securely the complicit media thinks it has sealed the informational leaks.

The simple fact is that Rush Limbaugh is just one of HUNDREDS of conservative outlets, and Trump is not going to do anything to slow any of them down, ever.  Total Informational Control wanted a Hillary victory, and she lost.