Moderates United

I liked this article: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/07/donald_trump_a_working_stiff_in_a_brioni_suit.html

Now, I don’t have a mancrush on Trump.  It remains to be seen how he will govern.  But I think it is POSSIBLE he will consistently do the right things.  I did not feel that about McCain or Romney, Cruz, Rubio, or any of the others (except Rand Paul, who never really had a chance).

Here is a, to me, interesting heuristic: put different candidates in Yankee Stadium, surrounded by working class schlubs.  Look at Hillary, saying to her advisor “What do I SAY to these people?  Do I shake hands?  How does one act”?

Look at Ted Cruz.  He is gaming in his mind.  He is calculating.  He is trying to figure out what angle he needs to hit to get their votes.

Bernie Sanders belongs there.  I will grant him that.  But even he is sitting there, thinking: “I can save all these people from their Capitalistic enslavement.”

George W. Bush is in a private booth, coming out from time to time to wave to everyone.  He has no real interest in sitting with working class folks.

Obama is sitting there, acting like he belongs, but he and everyone else there knows he doesn’t.  He is socially clumsy.  His persona is a facade.  He is deeply uncomfortable, even as he tries to mimic their dialect.

Trump is having the time of his life.  He’s the center of attention.  There is beer (which he doesn’t drink, as I believe he doesn’t drink at all), there are hot dogs, it’s a good game.  Did you see that hit?  WOW, what a catch!!!  Man, check out the knockers on her–nudge, nudge, don’t tell Melania I said that. He belongs there.  He is the only one.

Edit: I can’t resist adding to this.  John Kerry won’t touch the idea at all.  No interest.

Al Gore soon finds himself sitting alone.  Nobody likes him.  He is wooden, disingenuous, and belongs in a library somewhere reading something dull and useless.

George H.W. Bush largely makes no impact.  It is obvious he likes the game, but he is only a hit with the aging veterans.  Everybody else acknowledges he is there, and focuses on the game.  He doesn’t stand out in any way.

Reagan, of course is a big hit.  He has everybody laughing almost continually.

Clinton belongs. He is not really working class, and not really a good human being–in my considered view he is awful and nasty–but he is a world class actor, and knows his part extremely well.  This is the big difference between him, and Obama and Hillary.  Honesty is the difference between him, and Trump and Reagan.

I used to have my doubts about Jonathan Haidt–it seemed to me he was using his pulpit more or less to demonize conservatives by damning them with faint praise–but ever since he integrated the disgust findings into his work, it has grown on me.

I have been pondering his six foundations of moral reasoning, as I think he calls them.  They are Liberty, Authority, Sanctity, Loyalty, Fairness and Care.  The more I think about it, the more I think these are NEEDS, what we might call meta-psychological needs.  A good society contains all of them, in a healthy balance, but of course societies do not exist.  Hence meta-psychological.

You can build Fascism out of Authority, Loyalty (Meine Ehre heisst Treue) and Sanctity.  The German nation needed to be purified.  Mother Russia needed to be purified.

In evaluating our border problem, Democrats bring to bear only concern for the well being of Mexicans, and a sense that they deserve their shot too.  Republicans–while not ignoring these concerns, in that none of us are calling for a stop or even change in our current immigration numbers, which are about 1.5 million immigration visas annually–add to this Sanctity (we love our nation, and want to keep it clean from unwanted infestations of crime, disease, and chronic dependents), and Loyalty (we want to look out for American workers first).

If we view these six as NEEDS, and not emotional factors in decision making, we must see them as we see animal instincts.  We are very skillful animals, in some respects, very competent animals. If they are instincts, then they will ALWAYS find ways to expression.  If you hate all political leaders, you will still find a guru in a book.  You will still have a code.

And it is an interesting game that people who value only Care and Fairness–Sybaritic Leftists–have to play.  They have to allow, for example, a latent need for Authority to creep in under another banner.  Their loyalty is to an ideology, but they don’t call it an ideology: they call it truth.  Their calls to eradicate racism are an appeal to Sanctity.  Etc.

It is always best to reject sainthood, and realize that if want to live a life free of emotion, you are only going to make the emotions negative, violent, and unconscious.  You make them worse.

To my mind, the classical Liberal mindset balances all six needs, and does so consciously and diligently.  Out of that balance, success: strong, stable, long lasting success, of the sort we have seen in our own nation, and have led other nations to as well.

I felt yesterday that arrogance is in part a disconnection with the body, a lack of groundedness.  I felt it when it diminished.  It is hard to see ones flaws until they begin to dissolve.  They are simply who you are, who you have always been, and they feel natural and normal.  And they begin moving, and you realize life is much easier without them.  Arrogance has been a burden to me, sucking up energy I could have preserved or used in other ways.

Within Kum Nye there are three levels of relaxation.  I’ve likely mentioned this. The first is superficial (but still quite nourishing), where you just calm down.  It is what you feel after a good massage or a long bath.

The second is Kun Zhi, which if memory serves means in Tibetan “solid ground”.  This term makes sense to me now.  In your practice, it is like you are drifting slowly down in the water, and you reach bottom, and you stay there a long time.  It feels like the bottom.  It feels solid.  Then one day it dissolves and you keep going, and as it dissolves, you feel all the bad stuff, all the ego, all the darkness, all the evil, the hidden rages, the compulsions, the shit.

And of course they don’t disappear, but their work depends almost entirely on subterfuge, on hiding, on not being seen, on operating under the radar.  Once you can see them, you can name them, and you can dissolve them as they arise.  This capacity is, itself, the beginning of the capacity for conscious growth, for learning.

This is the third level, the one at which within this particular practice “meditation”, per se–concentration–becomes possible.  It is pointless until then, or largely so.

It seems to me that many people, coming of age in the middle of this extraordinary economic and military success, quite naturally assume the world is good, and evil a problem which does not confront them. Evil is an error, easily corrected and erased.

At some point the fatuousness of this world view becomes clear. They run into barriers, are forced to traverse obstacles, and their view gradually changes to a sense that the world is evil. Go look at the poster in Spencer’s to see what today’s kids are thinking about, or play some video games.

I would compare and contrast this with William James very interesting distinction between once-born and twice-born Christians. The first, in my terms, are naive. They think God will literally supply their wants and keep evil at bay. Evil does not concern them.

The twice-born, in contrast, have both a somewhat fatalistic world view which is quite accurate in terms of recognizing how fragile we and everything in our lives is; and a peace which comes from acceptance, from squaring what is, with Gods will. This belief is redemptive and absolutely safe, because it excludes nothing.

The issue today is that we have in the public domain no good redemptive practices and beliefs. Suffering has no meaning. A victim is permanently marked. It is not a transitional condition, but a part of public mythology.

The band Mofro has a song “Everything good is bad/and everything bad is good”.  That refrain–those are the only words I remember–has been going through my head all day.

I have obviously written extensively about the intellectual perversions which must precede moral perversions.  You get good kids feeling guilty about real crimes, but you neglect to mention that very few people committed most of the crimes, and you also neglect to mention that such crimes have been committed by all peoples against all peoples since, presumably, long before the beginning of recorded history, which itself began (in the West at least) with an account of a war, of slaves, of mass violence, of death, and of atrocities (although I don’t know how much was recorded).

I have, likely inappropriately, chosen to comment on some threads on Facebook posted by some very leftish friends of mine I have met at what I call my “hippy things” whenever discussing them with my kids, since Breathwork is certainly a bit out there.

And in this process it occurred to me that if we look at the issue strictly from a psychological perspective, if we bring in the idea of healthy emotionality, it is extremely UNhealthy to want to or feel the need to take responsibility for crimes you did not commit, could not have prevented, and cannot correct now even with apologies and grotesquely masochistic behavior.

I do not think it could be healthy to ask anyone else to act in an unhealthy way.  It seems a reasonable standard and goal that we all be happy coexisting.  The word for a compulsion to see others suffer for any reason is sadism.

The past is the past.  It is done.  It is in the present that ALL of us must live and make decisions.  I am not sure what the word is, but the compulsion to pretend as if the past is present, and can be expiated in the present, is certainly delusional and sick.  No healthy person would or could ask you to be sick with them.

Problems certainly need to be solved.  But if we reference specifically the problem of blacks in this country, they create most of their own problems, expecting white people to come along and fix them.  It remains my belief that if we stop treating them like children, stop allowing them to act like children, they will mature as a community, and bring forth their full contribution.

If we don’t give all the jobs to fucking robots.

Guess what motherfucker is making U.S. intelligence assets available to Erdogan?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s the same motherfucker who won’t let our bombers target ISIS oil tanker convoys headed for the Turkish border.

http://www.infowars.com/nice-terror-attack-what-theyre-not-telling-you/

It seems to me that these attacks will continue and perhaps get worse until the mass of Muslims becomes disgusted and outspoken about the murders originating from within their faith–murders of the innocent, of children, of babies.

And it seems to me this will not happen until we put moral pressure on Muslims in general by NAMING them at the highest level, by asking their leaders at the highest level how and why they can accept and advocate the murder of innocents anywhere for any reason.

It is disgusting to me that people are so brainwashed that they can somehow reactively, reflexively, worry more about Muslims–many of whom are quite guilty–being blamed for this attack than feel rage at the crushed bodies of infants and their toys.

Until people recover their moral compass, we can’t ask any more of the Muslims themselves.  If we are confused, why should not they be?  And it is likely they are less confused: their faith readily commends the murder of anyone who is not a Muslim.  Our faith–Liberalism–abhors the murder of the innocent.

Here is the thing: notions of collective guilt–and superiority–are inherently bigoted, and bigotry is the overarching rubric under which racism specifically falls.

ANY narrative which starts EITHER “white people are. . .”, OR “black people are. .  .” should be objectionable to anyone concerned with avoiding bigotry.

Self evidently, the entirety of leftist propaganda and practice DEPENDS on bigotry, on prejudice, on anger and hatred visited on groups rather than individuals, but this fact is unclear to most of them.  They are mentally ill.  The land they live in can only be occupied by the sick and demented.

It is a land very much like that of the Inquisition, in which the only way you can be acquitted of guilt is to admit it, and ask to be punished.

To be clear, I reject bigotry, and I am painting “the Left” with a broad brush, but the thing about ideology and ideologues is they choose what they believe.  They choose to join the group.  It is not inappropriate to make general statements about members of the KKK.  And it is not inappropriate to make general statements about the lunatics who keep telling us they want to save us, who can’t balance their checkbooks or do a single honest days work.

 

I can sometimes be heard talking in my sleep saying “Don’t wake me.  Don’t wake me.”