Moderates United

It seems to me Leftistd dream of our children inheriting a POLITICAL order, within which culture is marginalized; whereas true Liberals want to gift their children a CULTURAL order, which includes a cultural political tradition of tolerance and the negotiation of difference.

Mussolini, who coined the term Fascism, and who presumably understood it better than ahistorical millenials, defined it succinctly as “everything in the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.”

Leftists as uniformly aspiring totalitarians obviously meet that standard. Here is relevant point: culture must necessarily exist within that State, and historically, beginning with the French Revolution, efforts were made both to destroy all traditional “clingings”, and to COERCE a new “culture” from scratch. It failed every time, because that is not how humans are wired. Nothing authentic and real can arise in conditions of fear, which is the ubiquitous and intended emotion in regimes of the sort Bill Ayers admired and admires.

http://www.infowars.com/warning-domestic-terrorists-and-communists-declare-war-on-fascist-trump-regime/

I read Bill Ayers and others want to enact “Days of Rage” on a national scale, but particularly in Washington, D.C. As someone who planned the cold blooded murder of millions of Americans, he somehow finds Trump objectionable, because he has conflated his own propaganda with the truth.

I continue to be somewhat befuddled by how they can treat Trump–who on all accounts is a very congenial guy who treats his employees well, and hyperventilating complicit media claims to the contrary, has never said anything even remotely racist, and has certainly never blamed “black people” for anything the way Obama has repeatedly blamed “white people”–as if he is, to use the overused phrase, “literally Hitler”.

They have no sane basis for making this claim.  Here is the claim I will make, though, which allows their ridiculous propaganda to make more sense on an emotional basis, which is its origin and destination (sometimes via circuitous and hazy waves of words): this will be the bookend to the 1968 Days of Rage.  It is the end of an era, of a bad dream, of a pompous, childish, absurd vision that America could be improved with a kick to its collective balls, and that the children of affluence who never held a real job, who never understood or even cared to associate with ordinary Americans, could somehow “perfect” this nation, if only granted access to the reins of power.

They got what they wanted in Obama.  He was the result of 40 some odd years of dissimulation and behind the scenes work.  It seems Ayers and his father played a direct role in his ascension, as a covert hard core Leftist, to our nations highest office.

And it has been a disaster, which all sane people could have predicted.  Nothing good has happened, and much bad has happened.  It continues to be the case that our nations universities have become hard core indoctrination centers, but we just saw in the last election that they are not churning out enough brainwashed and demented drones to overpower the vast majority of sane Americans in the voting booth.

I read Obama and the DHS just federalized the elections, presumably because they continue to believe their own lie that Russia influenced the election.  As with all things they do, this is poorly thought out, because it provides the perfect avenue for Trump to begin the work needed to help make Democrat vote tampering and election fraud a thing of the past. Absent fraud, they are on a steep downhill decline.

The Democrats, as I was reminded today, lost, on balance, the last three elections: 2010, 12, 14.  Yes, they retained the Presidency in 2012, but they lost seats in Congress, and nationally in the States.  Overall, they have lost, I read some ONE THOUSAND seats of various sorts under Obama.  This is a decisive and irrefutable repudiation not just of him, but of everything he stands for.  

It is, to be clear, a repudiation of the fascist “democracy” (e.g. the German Democratic Republic, or Students for a Democratic Society) which Ayers envisioned, along with his wet dreams of murder on a scale larger even than that of Soviet Russia (edit: he wanted to kill 5-10 million more people than Hitler, making him and his co-religionists the only “literally Hitlers” in the room; as usual it is the ACTUAL fascist accusing everyone else of it).

48 years later, the 1960’s are over.  Can we expect rage, violence, pouting, churlishness, anti-social behavior, bullying, spitting, shouting, screaming?  Yes.  But the institutions protecting our Republic–even if suffused with traitors, as I suspect many of our agencies are now after 8 years of Obama–will very, very likely prove more than sufficient to, in the main, ignore these pathetic Nazis, their jackbooted behavior, and their hatred of virtue, decency, and the American tradition of freedom.

I read this article last night: http://www.themillions.com/2017/01/staring-into-the-soundless-dark-on-the-trouble-lurking-in-poets-bedrooms.html

It’s not bad, although of course it is unsurprising that a modern academic would get to sex and death fairly quickly, as those were Freud’s conclusions: thanatos and eros.

Without commenting too much on the specifics, I would submit that writers and poets have sleep problems because they BECOME poets and writers because they have large numbers of unprocessed emotions which drive them into the creative process.  They have demons, and demons they choose to keep, as Rilke famously commented.

The alternative is silence.  I myself of course have many sleep problems and many unprocessed emotions.  But I see where they come from.  They are not random.  They are not just an affliction from God which landed on me.  They have a source and they have an extinction.  Perhaps one day I will abandon this blog entirely.  Nothing will drive me to write.

And I think of societies which have disappeared in the mists of history, where all the children felt loved, where families were uniformly nurturing, where life had purpose, where the small things in life were cherished, and where people died without fear.  Some Native American tribes seem to have been like that (certainly not all: some were just like the imperialist West, merely less technologically sophisticated, and perhaps slightly less greedy, since there was less to steal).

And one has to ask: are the skyscrapers Ayn Rand admired so much really the acme of progress?  Is progress not more in how we feel about life, about one another, about death?  Is all success in techne really masked social mediocrity and failure?

Most science fiction writers focus on how technology will change our lives, for better or for worse.  It seems to me the more interesting question is how we perfect our society, so that all babies get the nurturing they need, children emerge into a coherent cultural order which is not confused, and which is rooted in genuine wisdom (rather than pious sounding platitudes, and stupid ideas repeated endlessly), where adults possess the emotional strength and maturity to use their freedom in personally and socially productive ways, and where we have learned that death is not the end, and nothing to be feared.

As Madison pointed out in one of the Federalist Papers, if we were all angels, we would need no government.  Is this not the obvious direction to go?  The alternative seems to be rule by demons who think they are angels because they see and feel nothing important, ever.

And what I would add is that there is no evidence that “equality”, which is to say disindividuation, the repudiation of ideas of merit and individual moral progress, makes anyone happier, or happy, or for that matter, less miserable.  I think it was either Ford or Eisenhower who commented that prisons provide free healthcare, housing, and food.  What they also provide is an egalitarian environment.  Everybody gets the same size cell, and everyone gets the same amount of food.

The jail is in fact the perfect emblem of a totalitarian system, both in practice–witness how many risked and paid the price of death to escape countries like Vietnam, Cuba, and East Germany–and in theory, where the minds, too, must be chained.

Leftism is a mental illness.  There is no other way to view it.  The great emotional virtue of the egalitarian creed is that since we are NOT all equal, there is a continually replenishing supply of opportunities to feel anger and resentment which predated the political commitment–which were present due to emotional illness–but which are justified by it.  So often, I think we feel something first, then reach around for something to justify and mask it.  The alternative is investigating it honestly, and coming to the realization we are not who we thought we were, which makes many uncomfortable, and willing to fight hard.

I was drinking beer tonight and watching basketball, and it occurred to me that Nirvana, in the Buddhist tradition, is really like retiring from Samsara.  Samsara is the job, and you don’t have to do it anymore.  Within the Boddhisattva tradition, of course, you still do periodic contract work, but you don’t have to.  Your “time” is your own.

And I feel, without knowing how to explain it, that there are small nirvanas.  It is an energy that you first become aware of, but cannot stay with.  With time and practice, it stays longer, more purely, and you can expand it.  It is not an extinguishing of what matters, but a flourishing.

As the Tao Te Ching puts it, you are fed by a different mother.

All tigers in the wild move the same way.  Absent injury, you can’t tell one from the other by their posture and way of walking or running.

With people, of course, we are so different that technology has been developed for automated gait and posture analysis such that even in disguise some of us could be identified.

We hold tensions in various places habitually, and this affects how we move.

What I am realizing is that some part of me wants to hold onto tensions, because they are familiar.  But the image that is coming to mind is water.  Even if I have become used to the idea of water being constantly swept by wind, has its nature changed if the wind dies down?  Nothing has changed in the water itself.  Only my perception of it.  And in important respects, it is more itself, more natural, more real, more authentic when it is still.

Visualizing a pool of calm, blue water is actually a meditation within the Kum Nye practice, which I think comes from the Buddhist tradition.  But it is a relatively advanced practice, I think.  Certainly, I have had trouble with it.

That won’t last forever, though.  Good things are happening.

Edward de Bono called arrogance a “mistake in the future”.  What he intended, of course, is that someone who is too sure of him or herself will sooner or later miss a fork in the road they needed to take.

I would submit that tension is a mistake in the future as well, and the likely precursor of arrogance, which is a form of rigidity.

My Mobility Meditation is working splendidly, and I am really beginning to open up.  I am getting more visions, and more insights, few of which I will share here.

But one thing I will share I am seeing–the word is feeling, actually, although it is more of a synesthetic sense–that I am like everyone else, and everyone else is like me.  There is no human expression I have seen on a city street which could not occur to me.  There is no human impulse which could occur to anyone else which is fully foreign to me.  We are all born with the same needs, the same instincts, the same confusions, and same compensating need for certainty.

Ritual, it occurred to me this morning, is little more than a way of shaping order out of chaos.  It is something recurring, stable–a table to which all are invited at the same time, to share in its benefits.

I felt too how feeble must any attempt at coherent action be in the face of pervasive tension.  Certainly, this has been my own problem: the unresolved tension from my childhood (and for that matter youth and most of my adult life) makes calm action impossible. I can impose my will, but it is very much like overcoming an engaged parking brake by stepping on the accelerator harder.  Ironically enough, I have in fact destroyed not one but two clutches in my life doing that.  How?  Tension induced stupidity.  And youth.  I was younger and dumber once.

And when I get really relaxed sexual imagery sometimes comes into mind.  Healthy sex begins and ends with relaxation.  You can’t kiss well with a tense mouth.  You can’t ride the wave, allow things to happen, when you are tense.  You can’t be playful.  You can’t be fun and spontaneous.  At its worst, for men, it is a job to do: generate an ejaculation.  Actually, worse: conquer her, using sex.

I feel much of the contemporary obsession with sex is really an obsession with relaxation.  And it seems obvious why tension would intrude on all this: sex alone cannot generate the effect needed, and it doesn’t, so various manias come into play.  BDSM from this perspective is really just the generation of an extremely tense state, so that releasing it feels like bliss.  Well, I’m sure its more complicated than that, but that is likely a factor.  I’ve never done it and never will do it, but I’m acutely aware of what both psychological masochism and sadism feel like.  They are in me too.

And I got to thinking about all the talk about sex we saw in the recent election.  Would you not agree that Bill Clinton and Trump have very different sexual styles?  Bill Clinton has all the hallmarks of a sexual addict.  He just needs fixes.  He just needs to get his rocks off, and doesn’t much care how he does it.  He seems to hold women in contempt.

Trump, on the other hand, genuinely seems to love the company of beautiful women.  And he does respect them: he has promoted women to high positions often.

It does seem likely that he has groped women, but it would seem to me the reason no one has ever called him out–the women who popped up during the election and have since disappeared don’t count–on it is that he has an extraordinarily developed sense of judgement, and that any women he may have done that with took it as a compliment because he had accurately judged they wanted him sexually. In fact, some he likely did subsequently seduce.

But the point I want to make is that his overall relation with women is one of PLEASURE, of consensual sex, of fun.  He has always loved having a good time, like when he got Mario Andretti to drive him for the Apprentice .  This is a guy who knows how to relax, and not always take himself too seriously.  Obama could learn a lot from him.

Bill’s addiction was based on a need for dominance, not pleasure.  Bill cultivated a great, goofy smile a long time ago, but he is deadly serious when it comes to power, to the pursuit and cultivation of it.  He is privately a very angry man, we were told long ago when he was in office, as of course is Hillary.

The fact the Left does not want to talk about is that women do sometimes not just want but expect some degree of sexual aggression.  It lets them know they are desirable, worth pursuing. Not all women, obviously, and certainly not traumatized women, but many women. And any man who consistently guesses right, and backs off immediately if and when wrong, is playing that game in a manner consistent with the instincts of both genders.

Edit: women want PLAYFUL sexual aggression.  There is an expression a man can wear where it is OK, and one where it is not, and it really can’t be faked.  The first time I really felt a strong sexual instinct was in a pillow fight with a bunch of girls at camp.  We were laughing and having fun, but I suddenly realized I wanted one of those girls, and I think she wanted me.  It would have flowed very naturally for both of us, if you will forgive that phrase.

We say the birds and the bees, because the urge to reproduce is a very important instinct, and it is the most natural thing in the world.  We have made it something very, very complicated.

The Constitution clearly grants the right to declare war to Congress.  Since leadership by group is inefficient, the President is granted the right to lead our troops.  When the Constitution was written, no standing army was envisioned.  The idea was war would be declared, troops mobilized from the sundry States, and that they would be demobilized when the threat was over.  No permanent General-ship was imagined, because it seemed to them to be highly dangerous.

We are witnessing now Obama–for reasons which are opaque, but certainly not connected to valid policy interests, or anything remotely defensible–seemingly trying to provoke Putin, seemingly trying to wring some sense of accomplishment from his eight years of nearly continual failure.

Specifically, we know he has sent troops to Lithuania (or so it has been reported: let me not follow crass mediocrities and liars like CNN and NBC and assume this to be a fact).

Here is the thing: crossing the border could be construed as an act of war, and those soldiers have every right to refuse to follow that order.  All of our troops take an oath to defend the Constitution, and they are allowed to refuse to obey unlawful orders.  Even if they were arrested and court-martialed, Trump could and would pardon them.

Our pilots have the right to refuse orders to provoke the Russians in Syria, or to fly into Russian air space.   Our soldiers, until a formal declaration of war with Russia by Congress, which is not forthcoming, have every right to refuse to obey any order to do anything which could be construed as an act of war by Russia.

Now, I think Putin will keep his cool, Obama’s amateurish and childish provocations notwithstanding.  He has no interest in war.  It helps neither nation, and wars are always expensive and greatly damaging even when won.

We have allowed many small wars, like the one in Libya, and the one in Yemen, and for that matter Panama and Grenada back in the day, to be waged quickly with no Congressional consent.  But if there is anything obvious about this, it is that a war with Russia would be a potentially catastrophic event, and that even ONE life lost in pursuit of nonsensical policy seemingly motivated by petulance and completely inappropriate vindictiveness would be a war crime, a murder, a treason to the loyalty of our troops.  They should just tell Obama to pound sand.  Motherfucker will be out soon enough, and relevant only to a small, small segment of our population, which will quickly forget him, his mediocrity, his failures, and his vast and unearned ego.

It occurs to me that the continual need for competitive adaptation–the very real fight to be cool, which seems to be very acute in cities like Seattle and Portland and San Francisco–is tiring.  This itself would lead to the longing for stasis of the sort created by totalitarians.  Time stopped in Cuba, didn’t it?  This mythic longing was perhaps well expressed as well by Dormammu (?) in the Dr. Strange movie.

They called them “hippies”, because being cool, being “hip”, was in their very genetic profile.  It was interesting for a time, but the obsession with novelty fades, and is replaced with a need to stop.  But it is unclear where or how to do that.  One cannot return, and one cannot create something new without the trauma of creating boundaries, of creating non-negotiable demands.  So it seems, I think, to many.

I sense that perhaps many feel Islam represents a possible solution to this quandary.  It is categorically inconsistent with Western ideals, but very consistent with the need for perfect fixity and the final and complete absolution of individual moral conscience and struggle.  One can finally merge with a herd which in principle never changes.

I often have phrases pop in my head.  This morning, after a night of very odd and evocative dreams, it popped into my head “the essence of GroupThink is the group.”

Now, I get the phrases, but then whatever meaning they might contain other than, to reference Dickens, some piece of undigested meat, I have to tease out.

But in the context of the dreams I was having what I think it means is that the Group is vastly more important than the Think.  What people think is vastly less important, particularly in the early phases of an indoctrination process, than that they both think it together, and depend on others to think it with them.

Take the Oscar Meyer song: “my bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R.”  People of my generation used to sing that song.  It’s a commercial, but I still remember it.  It is inherently meaningless, but it became a part not just of so-called “pop” culture, but culture itself.  Pop culture is culture.  It is who we are.  We like to think it is out there somewhere, but we are saturated with it daily.

And we become used, as Americans, to continual change, to new daily commercials, movies, TV shows, products, apps, video games, clothing trends.  We reference them with each other.  It’s how we know we belong to the same culture: we are referencing the same things; we’ve seen the same movies, watched the same shows.

I was watching this rant from Paul Joseph Watson last night: http://www.infowars.com/why-does-popular-culture-glorify-being-a-pussy/

He’s both right and wrong.  Wrong, in that I really do think many people are not getting their emotional needs met, but right in that helplessness is not a virtue.

He is also right that signalling “I’m so depressed” can also become a de facto unifying theme.  It becomes a way of creating a grouping in an atomized world where no reference points last more than a few weeks.

And this is perhaps the miracle–intended, as I think, or not: our young particularly always feel no more than a few weeks away from being socially isolated from their peers.  Hopefully they have good, stable parents–although many, perhaps most–don’t, but when they are trying to connect horizontally, they need to have watched the movies, heard the music, know the words, all of which are always changing.

What roots people?  Church roots people.  What happens on Sunday is not very susceptible to larger cultural fashions.  It is something you can depend on, and people you can depend on, who are not very concerned with the broader culture as a whole.

A sense of place roots people.  Things not changing, or only very slowly.  Seeing the same people on the same street corners every day.

Given this, is it any wonder Trump’s support came from stable places where church-going is still a “thing”?  This, despite his manifestly unChristian lifestyle and urban roots?

Virtually everything in our culture exists to create a constant matrix of change, distortion, and perennial movement.  You teach people that the latest fad is their connection to others, then you simply connect the IV drip of political propaganda, and you have the spectacle, which I have recently seen, of people literally repeating HuffPo headlines as their own thoughts, and accusing anyone who dares think differently of being in a propaganda bubble, and engaged in GroupThink.  Well, which of us can have a five minute discussion without getting triggered?  Which of us can explain in depth what we believe and why we believe it?  Hint: it’s not the person who starts with propaganda–with repeating a superficial, factually inaccurate but emotionally evocative phrase–and moves immediately to hate.

This does perhaps explain the extent of the emotion felt by the Headless Ones when confronted with alternative viewpoints: their very sense of self, psychologically, has been staked on their conformity to GroupThink, but they cannot admit this to themselves, or they will face the devastating truth that they have been living someone else’s life, which I personally have always viewed as my own worst fear.  It is literally an existential attack on their sense of self.  As such, it is treated rightly as a matter of grave concern, one of far more significance than a mere political disagreement, which individuated, psychologically stable people can and do have often, but which they cannot.

Think about it: they have taught themselves to adapt seamlessly–perhaps even prided themselves on being ahead of the curve–to all changes coming down the pike.  This is how they live their lives: they adapt to the ideas of others.  How does one rationalize this?  How do any trendy people justify themselves?  Pride in being DIFFERENT.  Pablo is quite the clothes horse.  Pablo is so TRENDY, so fashionable.  So different from those of us who are not trendy.

Someone who is a trend-setter is out front, but do they too not have to remain in constant motion, constantly setting new trends, lest someone else overtake them?  It is inherently an unstable and insecure position.

Does being fashionable not create anxiety too?  Does one not become worried about getting behind the curve?  What if you are the last one to realize that the Russians hacked the election?  What if you are the last one to realize that Obama HAS to take some sort of action, and that if necessary nuclear war is absolutely an option if the Russians hacked our election?  What if thinking all this through has nothing at all to do with the mortar which holds you together?  Well, you get the headlines at HuffPo and the Daily Cause.  That is what if.

So you combine this HABIT of conformity, with the FEAR of being left behind, and you get this monolithic mass of people confronted, at this very moment in America’s political history–following not just a resounding defeat on a national level, but 8 years of failure at the State level, and an overall out-going tide where the Democrat Party is concerned–with the choice of realizing they have gone far, far down the wrong path, and now need to turn around if they want any meaningful capacity for independent thought and accurate reality testing to develop, or choosing to double down.

Keith Ellison is what doubling down looks like.  He is the choice of lunatics.  And to be clear, I WANT them to choose Keith Ellison.  I really do.  I would normally dissemble that, but here is the thing: they can’t understand what I am writing here without waking up.  It is one or the other.  And emotionally, the simplest thing is to just say “fuck that guy, racist motherfucker, we’re going to do what WE want to do, and that is nominate somebody who isn’t white, isn’t Christian, and who is therefore best qualified to lead us to a post-racial era.”  I get that.  I don’t live in a box.  I move around.

So logically, of course, they will need to accuse me of being stuck, fixed, and utterly entranced by right wing propaganda. Projection, pure and simple.  We all tell ourselves the lies we need to to get by, but hopefully for all of us, at some time in our lives, we realize we are not really who we thought we were, are not really controlling our lives consciously, and can and should choose new directions.  This starts with the notion of choice itself, with agency, with the capacity to devote time and energy to what you decide, as an “Undividable”, what matters.  Your body may not be whole, but all of our minds can be.

But living in a propaganda matrix is a half life.  I can’t say I know for sure what is true–in fact I’m quite sure I get things wrong often–but I can say I do my best to make my own decisions on that score.  That is all any of us can do, but far less than most of us DO do.

I seem to be getting more accurate.  And I am touching a place of hypercompetence within myself.  I know what the fuck I’m doing, even if I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Some part of me has its shit together times two. It is gradually opening up.  This can only be a good thing.  I have had bees buzzing around my head, and horns sounding in my ears, and been getting punched at random for a long time.  It’s distracting.  But something sees through it all.  Something never loses focus.  Something never, ever, ever, ever, quits.  It feeds only on victory, and then only if more work is not needed.  Battles do not win wars.  Never quitting until the war is won wins wars.  And even then, as the Japanese say, Zanshin.  Do not fear, but do not forget.  That would be a good motto.

Be all that as it may, I’m not going to celebrate until I can do 20 good strict pullups.  Getting my squat back into the 400’s would sure feel good too.

I was looking at a guy in my gym today with 5 45 pound plates on each side.  He was doing deadlifts.  It looked like a lot, but shit, I used to be able to do that.  510 is my PR.  5 plates is 495.  Bob Peoples did 700 something in his late 40’s.

I maxed out my squat at 200 for 3 today.  It’s embarrassing, but I’ve been not working out for so long I have to rebuild the tendons and ligaments and soft tissue in that specific range of motion.  I’m going very gradual.  5 days a week.  I might comment on my workout later;  I might not.  Diet is definitely suboptimal, but as I say, something very, very powerful seems to be waking up within me.  It is not and never has been my destiny to be weak.  My destiny is to get the shit beat out of me in every possible way for a very long time, then use all that as information to not be a fucking moron.  That’s what I try to do here: not be a fucking moron.  I sincerely hope I mostly succeed.