Moderates United

I have had sex with a lot of women–as best I can recall, the number is around 40–because I used to be pretty good looking, and I have never been shy.

And what I have learned is that sex doesn’t really solve anything.  The main lasting positive is the pride in the conquest. It is good for self esteem.

But in my own case, and I suspect that of a great many men, I consistently found myself unable to respond to women emotionally, on their level, in a connected way.  For the more attentive women–and I can count 3 very attractive intelligent women without batting an eye–this failure on the front end prevented the seduction in the first place.  They could see I wasn’t there.

My last relationship with a woman she was OK with me just coming over every Tuesday night for sex, and asked nothing more of me.  But even though this is about as congenial an arrangement for a man as could be imagined, even then–before all this work and learning I’ve done in the past few years–I could feel something wasn’t right.  I didn’t know what.  I couldn’t name it, but I ended the relationship some years ago.

It is said that women use sex to get love and men use “love” to get sex.  I think this is wrong.  Both sexes need to feel understood, appreciated, loved.  Men are merely more stupid about the whole thing, in general.  Our culture, of course, is vulgar.  We are fueled by sexual fantasies driven by increasingly disturbed pornography, that cannot ever lastingly satisfy anyone, because their real need is social.  They need connection, understanding.  Everything else moves them away from their real needs, their real wants, and makes them more and more angry, frustrated, and alone.

Since I read regular sexual expression helps prevent prostate cancer, and since I am concerned with my health, I express myself most days.  I pretty much never look at pornography of any sort, since I have a very vivid imagination, and I find most of it gross.

What I have in recent months started doing is including the emotional component.  I am trying to develop the ability to be in the room where the sex is, to be present emotionally.  I will literally start with meeting a woman, going on a couple dates, then go all the way through, then at the end imagine the pillow talk, her leaving, and what comes after, and how I feel.  To my mind, this is much more mature and less cartoonish than what you can see on porn sites.  And it is mental rehearsal for whenever I do decide it’s time to head back out into the dating world.

I don’t like passing up opportunities to bash Freud or the professional left, and won’t here: we are living with the legacy of bad ideas in the sexual–the connection–realm, and it is hurting us culturally, which is to say almost universally as individuals.  Married men feel like they are missing out, single men view sex as an acceptable end,  women feel like being used is OK, or that they won’t find a man who can connect with them emotionally.

All of our instincts for compassion, for intimacy, for caring, for love are suppressed.  I called this Qualitative repression some years ago, and continue to feel that a useful term.  College students are fed ideas which were bad when they were rolled out a hundred years ago–that sexual “repression” is unhealthy, that the sexual instinct is more important than the connection instinct, and that people are disposable.  We are all disposable.  This is the net teaching at most universities.

I’ll leave it there.  This is more autobiographical than I like to get, but it may be useful for someone.

First, I will reiterate that NO recount is possible without paper ballots. Period.  Full stop. There is no other correct answer I can see.  Any computer system can be compromised, and the errors never teased out.

Secondly, though, it occurred to me that if we are going to assume for the sake of political argument that black people are inherently and generally inferior to white and Asian people to such an extent that it is unreasonable–the word used is racist, but of course assuming they are that fucking stupid is itself the actual racism–to ask them to provide the same documentation required to drive, cash checks, buy booze, and board airplanes, then we may as well make it is simple as fucking possible to verify their identities: we photograph and fingerprint the voters who vote but do not produce ID.  That way you can avoid having hundreds or thousands of people traveling from voting booth to voting booth pretending to be different, and sometimes dead, people.  We could scan and cross-index fingerprints, and as needed compare pictures.

This would not prevent people both voting for themselves, then voting for someone else in another district who is dead or was not going to vote, but it would make the whole thing harder.  And it might piss off enough people for all of us to admit that assuming the worst of blacks is vastly the more racist policy.

Now, I assume, perhaps erroneously, that the rolls will be checked to make sure all registered voters are in fact citizens, but if we have fingerprints, and particularly if we set out long jail terms for voter fraud, we might get some goddamned common sense back.

I often feel I am living among lunatics.  They repeat as their own ideas imbecilities they have simply heard repeated, and consider themselves intelligent for having done so.  Oi.  And Oi usually means I’m drinking, but I’m not.

if you think about it, the primary job of politicians is convincing the electorate, and their fellow politicians, of their sincerity. Self evidently, everyone promises to fix something, but practically, since the systems in play in complex topics like economics are so recondite to average people, the REAL task, particularly for Democrats, is rationalizing failure in such a way that they continue to seem interested in solutions to the problems–like the failure to flourish among many blacks in this country—they claim as their own core concerns.

And a particularly insidious loop, on that particular issue, is that the very failure of the policies is argued as evidence for why Democrats are indispensable. “You are poor”, they say. “How could you possibly survive without us?” In that circumstance, and as long as they remain believable, the generalized amelioration of black poverty would be an unmitigated disaster.

This might well be labelled a moral hazard.

how many textures does the average person encounter in an average day? How many smells? How many unexpected sounds?

It seems to me modern life, where everything is smooth, predictable, electronic and sanitized, cannot but deaden our senses and the intelligence–the intuitive, instinctive, natural intelligence–which regular and open connections to those sensations enable.

There is something to be said for walking barefoot, feeling the textures of trees, smelling nature, listening to wind in the grass and the flow of water.

Any time the government gets bigger, the potential for abuse gets bigger.  And the more power and privileges government employees have, the more incentive they have to protect and expand them at the expense of the people.  This is simple human logic.

I was thinking about “dark matter/dark energy”: there is nothing dark anywhere in this universe: there are merely perceptual limitations.  In pitch blackness, at the bottom of a mile deep cave, everything is bombarded continuously with neutrinos and other radiation which, for its part, does not “see” the visible, “solid” universe.

If you think about it, thinking about emotions is a type of pendulation away from them.  It is the opposite of processing them.  It is sometimes necessary to use symbols–words–to perform logical operations, but it can never be inherently therapeutic.

If it is true that adult resilience can be largely predicted by how lovable mothers think their children are when they are two, then it should be fairly obvious why single parent homes do so poorly.  Children feel everything their mother feels, and if she is feeling anxious, lonely, angry, sad, she is not loving that child: specifically, she is not making it feel lovable.

It may or may not be the case that “there needs to be a man in the house”, but there definitely needs to be love, safety, and attention.  Who is a teenage mother living in poverty in a dangerous neighborhood?  Well, she is a saint if she is fully available emotionally, particularly when her own mother never modeled the behaviors she now needs to be showing her own child.

Humanity is not clay.  Our DNA, the hard wiring of our brains, our entire instinctual complex, is not something that can be molded like clay.  It cannot be overthrown overnight through any amount of violence generated by emotionally retarded, petty, arrogant, and blind intellectuals.

We have to work with who we ARE, not who it is preferable to believe we are.  Public policy has to be grounded in sanity, and the assumption that most people will pursue their own self interest, if they can perceive it, and that living productive, creative, engaged lives is and should be the goal.

So let me get this straight: you feel the need to feel offended on behalf of people who are not here, because they MIGHT be offended?  If you feel both the right and duty to feel the feelings of others, why not express all the possibilities? They may just have found that joke fucking FUNNY, so you need to laugh on their behalf.  It might have reminded them of their mother that just passed away, so you need to feel sad.  They might not have even heard what I just said because they were thinking about their mid-terms, so you should feel nothing.

Or perhaps, you could just mind your own business, and stop being such a judgmental, rigid asshole.

If you think about it, there is a fair amount of prejudice/racism inherent in the idea that it is possible to predict with absolute confidence how “they” would react.

The ESSENCE of the Leftist project–and I am speaking her of ideas, not people–is reducing the world to homogeneous “theys”. That is all class theory is: the elimination of intra-group diversity at the level of principle, combined with fright and anger whenever someone behaves inappropriately, with “false consciousness”.  Ponder how fucking arrogant and out of touch that is.  And yes, I am again thinking of Sartre and his fellow frogs.  Their work lives on today.

They used “middle class” (bourgeois: in Alinsky-speak “have a little, want more”) as an INSULT.  Ponder that.

I will wonder out loud as well why nobody has pointed out yet how fond Hillary was of Alinsky.  Granted, nobody seems to have cared that Obama considered him his most important political influence–a Communist who dedicated his main book to Lucifer–but it could be something put in the public domain.  Certainly lying is something he recommended.

It seems to me the principle engine for individual and social progress is curiosity, which is ideally combined with patience and kindness.

When we speak of “Morality” in our current climate, we are usually speaking of behavioral standards which, if violated, occasion the violence of censure.  This censure can be internal, expressed as guilt, or external, as expressed in shaming and/or imprisonment.

It is interesting to think that the word “order” can mean both something arranged in a coherent fashion intelligible to our minds and/or senses; as well as a demand that we do something, as in “the officer ordered me to . . .”.

Implicit in historical social orders is that some violence was needed to maintain harmony, i.e. order.  Ideosyncratic understandings–particularly in Judeo-Christian-Islamic orders–were met quite often with death and imprisonment.

What I would propose is that healthy morality is an outgrowth of play, which itself is an outgrowth of generalized mental and emotional health, which itself cannot come into being except through freedom, acceptance of diverse behaviors and ideas, and self knowledge on the part of every individual within that order.

Morality, so called, in other words, is not a rigid system for judging others, but a spontaneous effect of healthy social relations, as the Taoists argued long ago. The very existence of morality as a field of study indicates its essence, the truth within it, has been lost.

Might I say “where there are words, there is darkness”?