Moderates United

I’ve been following the story about the guy in Switzerland who attacked train passengers with a knife and who set a fire which apparently got on him, and played a role in his death.

They won’t release his name, other than to say it is a “typical Swiss name”.  Here is the problem: in the comments on one of the stories, someone said that the name was anything BUT Swiss, and that their efforts to post it had been repeatedly met with comment deletion.

I read German, so I looked up the Neue Zurcher Zeitung article on it.  They, too, say only that he was Swiss, he was not a registered foreigner, and that his name was “typical”.  They then note in comments that there will be no comments, and they appreciate your understanding.

As I keep saying, how can you know what is being censored?  You can’t.

Here is a plausible thesis: this guy is named Ahmed or Muhammad, and he was either born in Switzerland, or naturalized long ago.  He was supposed to be integrated, one of them.  The guy you can trust.

The people who do the censoring–the government officials who don’t want to trust the people they are responsible for keeping safe–would be panicked to learn that even long naturalized Muslims can be radicalized and weaponized, right in their midst. This puts at risk the whole narrative of multicultural integration.  This makes it logical to question the loyalties of ALL Muslims.

We live in a very dangerous time.  I am paranoid by nature, but that is the only reason I am wide awake.  Most people prefer sleep, and I understand fully why.  The problems in play are enormous, and seemingly incomprehensible.  But all good has to start with truth, and that is a good start.  

As I continue to thaw–and that is the best word, I think–things frozen come alive and interact with me.  The roots of pieces of inner dialogue become clear.

And I realize that in important respects the traumatized reenact things with the same automatism, and with no more consciousness than, insects.  There is behavior, but it has no purpose.  It does not meet any current need.

You can imagine little race tracks, little loops, next to people who have trauma.  Their behavior and consciousness exists on that loop.  It goes around and around.  They never meet open ended lines.  The only forward is in a circle.  This is the only movement they can handle.  Some loops are bigger than others, but they all repeat.

I remember times when my mother just wasn’t there.  I realize now that she herself suffered and suffers from severe trauma.  I can’t tell her this, because she can’t hear me.  I am not there.  I have never been there.  For that matter, she has never been there.  This is not her fault, mostly, although I don’t doubt some alarm bell has been ringing in her all her life that something has been missing from our relationship, and she has chosen to ignore it.  She did not want to go there.

We have all seen vacant eyes, and met detached people.  They are everywhere. Large segments of their consciousness are taken up with what I might call “Insect memory”.  This is unconscious memory, continually reenactments of things they can’t remember.  Even when nothing seems to be going on, even when they themselves think they are calm and feel fine, large subroutines are running continually, crowding out the pleasures of life, and open curiosity.

This is all very, very interesting.  Large segments of human life are hidden.  They are subterranean.  We all see caves all day every day without realizing it.

And darkness is also where the rainbows are.

It is an interesting fact about Developmental Trauma Disorder is largely invisible to those who suffer from it.  It often shows up in muted emotionality, dissociation, which can quite easily hide as intellectualism.

And I wonder if a large part of the reason the American Psychiatric Association is refusing to do the obvious thing and put this disorder into their DSM is that most of THEM suffer from it.

If you hate life, and feel unwanted, unloved, and disconnected, many professions want you.  Engineers want you.  Medical Science wants you.  The military and Law Enforcement want you.  All of them get to enjoy higher status for being “dispassionate” and “objective”.

And the people who seem to want to run the world: they, too, no doubt suffer from severe developmental traumas.

van der Kolk has not mentioned this yet–none of the books I have read have–but it would seem obvious that both sociopathy and narcissism are part of the spectrum of Developmental Trauma Disorders.  They are grotesque failures of mirroring, and social engagement.  I assume these therapists are trying to keep things positive, and allow other specialists to make these connections, but I’m just the man to go negative.

I finally found an argument that seems to work with some of them.  First off, some of them are actually Democrats and somehow got herded into the wrong party at some point.  Some of them are really stupid.

But the argument seems to be that they are screwed no matter who they vote for, and they don’t like Trump.  If they are fucked, they may as well flip Trump the finger for stealing their party and their Party.

But here is the key: it is no doubt true that Trump may not do what he says.  He may flip 180 once in office.  He may be a Democrat in wolves clothing.  Nobody would ever suspect a Democrat in wolves clothing. They are wolves in sheeps clothing.

But he MIGHT DO EVERYTHING HE SAYS.  This possibility cannot be discounted.  He may lower personal and corporate tax rates.  He may rejuvenate our economy by encouraging confidence and liberating money for investment.  He may overturn Obamacare and replace it with the free market solutions which have always made sense, and which I have argued for for some time.

He might negotiate an acceptable modus vivendi with Russia.  He might get the Germans to pay some fucking money if they want our troops there.  Same with South Korea.

He might do the same mass layoffs in government that CEO’s in the private sector have always been willing to undertake when needed, particularly if they were dead weight.

He might, in other words, be successful.  He might do everything we hope and more.

So in Game Theory terms (actually, no, I forget the formal terms, but fuck it) you have one option where you can assume with 100% certainty that a left wing, anti-liberty agenda will be pursued.  This is given.  This is disputed by no one.

On the other you have a range of probabilities that Trump MIGHT betray us, ranging from very low, to, perhaps, 99% for the biggest doubters.  But nobody can say with certainty that he will ignore EVERYTHING he has on his campaign website.

On the one hand, you have a chance.  On the other, no chance.  This should be a simple decision, for all but the most sanctimonious pricks.  Those people should still come around eventually, or be damned to watching reruns of Roseanne and drinking Folgers for the rest of their natural lives, at which point we turn them over to the Big Man, who will also be unhappy.

On page 163 of Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body keeps the Score” “Stoufe [a researcher] informally told me that he thought that resillience in adulthood could be predicted by how lovable mothers rated their kids at age two.”

It has become a commonplace that “kids nowadays” are weaker and less resilient than preceding generations.  Would it not be interesting to ask if part of this–and given the prevalence of safe spaces and trigger warnings it does seem to be a “thing”–is that their mothers were the first generation working outside the home in large numbers, and also the first generation where divorce and single parent homes were common?

Could it be the case that the Greatest Generation was raised in comfortable, relatively affluent (compared to the past, and compared to most of the world) homes by stay-home mothers who had the time and emotional energy to devote a lot of time to them in their first two years of life?

On a related note–I need to be doing something but I am going to indulge myself, again: I was feeling in a space somewhere the other day, I can’t remember where, that we all have these little tentacles coming out of us which want attachment, which want stability, which crave constancy and “known-ness”.

And I was feeling how we are like balls floating in the air, always wanting to come down and settle, and how the circumstances of modern life keep throwing them back up in the air.  What is the solution?  Where is the safety?  Becoming attached to motion and change for the sake of motion and change.

This is the essence of Leftism: a fundamenatl impatience with, and rejection of, what is, in favor not of what could be, but merely something else.  There is no plan, and no genuine continuity between alleged motive and actual outcome.  Burke wrote about this 200 years ago in regards to the French Revolution.  I don’t speak French, but if we can say “L’Art pour l’Art” can we not say “Change pour change”?

And at the root of this, in turn, is the grinding of trauma, of black magic, of terror and horror.  The leaders, the pushers, cannot remain still.  Trauma does this.  No psychological position is comfortable, but you are driven to constantly seek one. You are in pain, and the pain drives you, nowhere and everywhere.  You rationalize it, you direct it, and you can create the illusion of purpose.

These people run countries.  They run large banks.  And in large measure, they seem to run our world, or at least are trying to.

I was watching a speech by Robert Welch, who was the founder of the John Birch Society, and he was on the money.  Everything he said I agreed with.  He was talking about what we are now calling globalists back in 1958 (possibly 1974: it isn’t clear.  That the same arguments could be made in both years, and indeed today, says something).  He called them the Insiders.

Here is that speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZU0c8DAIU4

Virtually everything he predicted is coming to pass.  Even inflation.  Our currency has been inflated some $50 billion a month for the past 8 years.  We are not seeing price inflation solely because that money is not in motion.  But the stage is set for hyperinflation the moment the group controlling this money wants it.  And even absent hyperinflation, this is a MASSIVE transfer of wealth, an unbelievable, astonishing transfer of wealth.

The headless ones have been winning for a very long time.  Trump is the first Republican since Goldwater who at least might get the big picture.  Reagan won the Cold War, but at the cost of massive deficits, and in the context of large increases in social spending.  And he never questioned our overseas commitments.  Trump does.  He is asking the people who benefit from the presence of our troops to pay for it.

Hell, we should tax the countries who use the sea lanes our Navy protects.  That would be reasonable.

We have been ruled by lunatics for far too long.  The hour is late, but it is not yet midnight. If we elect Hillary, it might be.

Whoever understands, needn’t prevent the flaws in his character.

I can’t decide if there should be a comma after prevent, but you get the point.  If not, well shit I’m going to explain it.

This popped in my head, and I am always willing to take direct transmissions from my unconscious, the Beyond, or whatever.

Here is the thing: Christians SUPPRESS what they call sin.  There are 7 deadly sins.  They are–and I had to look this up since I’ve never seen Se7en: hubris, greed, lust, malicious envy, gluttony, inordinate anger, and sloth.

 If you feel pride you punish yourself.  If you feel greed, you punish yourself.  Good Christians might find themselves whipping themselves continually for sins of thought.

But every impulse in the human being has a positive intent.  What happens is they get perverted by traumas and unprocessed unconscious content, and made obsessive.  If they are not obsessive, they come and they go, and they are of no more consequence than passing clouds.  You can watch them, feel them, understand them, and let them go.  This is sinlessness.

Christianity is in many respects a dark and unpleasant religion.  I doubt very much Christ would recognize much of his teachings in most churches, at least those which focus more on sin and eternal damnation than love and optimism and the promise of heaven.

I read today that Trump is “tired and discouraged”.  I can’t of course know if this is true or not, but it would certainly be understandable if he is finding the process of dealing with continual lies, attacks and backstabbing tiring. Anybody would.  Churchill himself, who is my gold standard, would be tired.

But he would also know in his gut that this battle, this war for sanity, is winnable.  Churchill took a lot of naps, smoked a lot of cigars, and drank a lot of alcohol, and all seem to have helped buttress his inherent resilience.

My take is that if Trump is tired–and I’m talking to you, Mr. Future President, because obviously this blog is Yuge–take a week or two off.  The Olympics are a distraction.  This moment is not a prime time for campaigning.  The debates are coming up, and hopefully you have reached out to Assange to see if you can coordinate the next leak, and if you can be prepped in advance as to what to expect in detail.

And at some point, I want to see a massive media blitz.  I would like to see a couple hundred million flow out in well targeted ads aimed at swing states, and a continuity stream in the safe States.  I’m not an electoral strategist, but it would seem obvious some solidly Blue States can be ignored.  People get paid big money to figure this stuff out.

Hillary is a crook–might not hurt to juxtapose an image of her and Richard Nixon–physically frail, and hates our troops and cops.  You can juxtapose images of her supporting Black Lives Matter with the images of fire in Milwaukee.  The blacks who might find this offensive are the ones doing the burning, not those dealing with its effects, which is about half of them.

Finally, I would insist that all jurisdictions, at least in States you care about, have paper backup if they use digital vote machines.  There is no possibility of a recount when you are dealing with a hacked voting machine.  It will turn out the same result every time.  With paper–and after the hanging chad fiasco, the simple pen and oval method seems the most obviously useful–you can verify things.

And you can simply say that you will not accept the results of any vote in any jurisdiction that cannot prove no fraud was committed.  We keep reading, from the usual propagandists, that “no evidence of voter fraud has been found.”  Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  If a fraud is successful, and not challenged by the loser, then the evidence is washed down the drain.  This is logically obvious.  And how many elections have been challenged?

Here is the thing: if you can cook the polling data, then hack the system to alter the voting data, you can make massive fraud appear plausible.  The only possible safety from this is paper ballots, and accurate voter rolls, and of course, in a sane world, proving that you are who you say you are.

I have a number of posts I want to make, but I’ve been doing better at not writing compulsively. I note the idea, and should have time tomorrow to catch up.

But I thought I would write a quick post in reaction to a conversation I had last night with a woman in a bar.  She is having trouble with her boyfriend, they have a boy together, and both had very troubled childhoods: her parents had a really ugly divorce when she was 6, and his mother left the family when he was 3 without notice.

As she was leaving I told her: remember you are both scarred human beings and you don’t really know why you do half the things you do.

And I was remembering, remembering arguments I’ve been in.  What happens is we carry all these little harmonic emotional strings in us which vibrate to certain frequencies easily.  They are attuned to hear, for example, contempt and rejection, even when it is not there.  This triggers a whole cascade of reactive and largely unconscious responses.

This is how you get into huge arguments over nothing.

And it occurred to me that freedom is detuning all those string.  It is processing all the hurts, first, but then all the instincts, such that you know them and feel them, and can allow them the proper and healthy place in your life.  This is mastering “the body”.  This is mastering sin.  This is human perfection.

And it occurred to me as well that if I had been a perfect listener, I would not have offered advice (I didn’t offer much, but some), but done the task of helping her see herself more clearly, and figuring out how to solve her own problems.  True emotional problem solvers are facilitators.  They are not doers, or advice givers.  We are all born with all the knowledge we need.  We just suppress it with all the other things we cram into our closets, and leave in the dark.

If we use this as a synonym for “evil” can the dipshits that think you can reason with everyone admit this is, always has been, and perhaps always will be a lie?  Trauma prohibits reason.  Until it is healed, no reason is possible in a sustained way.  And until it is recognized, it appears the very essence of reason.