Moderates United

People seem to be very upset about this shooting, and I suppose I should be too, but I’m not.  Pondering it, I think the reality I live in is very different from that of those who see this sort of violence as exceptional, or unexpected.

I was vastly more bothered by the murder of 19 Yazidi girls by ISIS last week, who were set on fire, and died a very unpleasant death, in a cage.  Most of them had likely been raped repeatedly beforehand.

It bothers me vastly more to know that Obama played an important role in the creation of ISIS, both by drawing down our Iraq troops much faster than planned, or recommended by senior commanders; and more importantly by providing arms and training to people who were even then obviously Islamic radicals when they were fighting Syria.  This bothers me a lot.  Our President, our Commander in Chief, more or less created the radical terrorist state so many Americans died to prevent, with all the death and destruction that entailed and continue to entail.  Even now, he is not allowing in honest refugees, preferring instead to let in countless thousands of Islamic persons, many of whom are absolutely without a doubt sympathetic to Islamism and mass murder.

What bothered me most when I saw this was that I knew my sense of reality would be assaulted for the umpteenth time.  That people would consciously and willfully lie to us about the reasons behind the shooting, the meaning of it, and what to do.  That they would try again to implement reductions in private gun ownership, to demonize gun owners and those who support them, and fail once again to recognize that the root problem is that we live in a violent world, one made more violent by the very people doing the talking.

Fast and Furious, plainly intended to support the gun confiscation agenda, caused the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans.  None of these psychopaths give a flying fuck.  And none of our fucking mass media wants to hold them accountable for it in the slightest.  On the contrary: they push their psychopathic agenda every fucking chance they get.

It is tiring, fighting for plain and obvious truths.  We live in a world where the mass of people can’t remember what was on the fucking news two days ago, much less 5 years ago.  There is no need for “memory holes”: all the media has to do is stop talking about something, and two weeks later nobody remembers it happened.

This is what I feel about this shooting.  And I hope that the gay community realizes that they are targets, and starts arming itself.  That remains legal.

A military guy on my Facebook pointed out that if there are over 100 casualties, there must have been at least a hundred bullets shot.  This means the shooter had to reload a number of times.  This means there were chances for people to overwhelm him.

What I think we will find, if anyone tells this story, is that virtually everyone was so stricken by terror and incomprehension that they literally hid in corners waiting for him.

Having spent so much time dealing with it, and now beginning slowly to step away from it, I felt today I have not put the right words on what I see when I deal with Leftists.  Their rhetoric is characterized by arrogance, violence, and emotional superficiality.

For them, outrage at conservatives is emotionally equal to compassion for the victims.  It isn’t.  Those are two different things.  Anger is not compassion.  They are two different things.

I often feel like I am dealing with people who have renounced their humanity, their ability to recognize as fellow humans those who do not agree with them ideologically.

Arrogance, violence, emotional superficiality.  What personality profile do those remind me of?

Edit: you know, in family arguments, in somewhat healthy ones there comes a time where you mutually recognize that you are all in it together, and some calmness and forgiveness and regret enter the picture.  This never happens in the political realm.  It is pure obsession.

I see people comparing Christians to Muslims, because there was that one time a Christian, acting alone, and plainly a bit crazy, attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic; and on the other there are thousands of centrally coordinated suicide attacks, bombings, and mass homicides committed by Muslims.  The two do not compare, not to any rational mind.  They exist on different scales.  The crimes are jaywalking versus rape and murder.

And it occurs to me that this is not really a rational decision.  It is possible to argue that if any crime originates in the category “Christians”, it is possible to compare it to any crime which originates in the category “Muslim”.  And if one crime equals another crime, then they are logically equal.  Quantities do not matter.  This is the emotionally detached approach.

But as I have argued–and I think most neurophysiologists would agree with me–you MUST involve instinct in the perceptual process, or you lose much of what makes us human, and indeed much of what allows our perceptions to be broader and more useful than those of animals.

I will invoke Jonathan Haidt, who I have followed a bit, and who has become in my view more useful.  His work is presently called “Moral Foundation Theory”:

Moral foundations theory is a social psychological theory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. At present, the theory proposes six such foundations: Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity

Here is the part I wanted to focus on:

Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense),conservatives, and libertarians, and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as gay marriage and abortion. In particular, Haidt and fellow researchers have argued that progressives stress only two of the moral foundations (Care and Fairness) in their reasoning, and libertarians stress only two (Liberty and Fairness), while conservatives stress all six more equally.

What is missing from both the Libertarian and Leftist psychosocial approaches is Sanctity.  Sanctity is an instinctual attraction or repulsion, based upon certain in-built senses about what is right and wrong.  Some of it is clearly socially conditioned, but the process itself is instinctual.  Part of what makes us human is finding some things–the details will matter according to culture, but in my view the process should be universal–repugnant.

The essence of the Compassion Ideology is eliminating the sense of sanctity, which is to say the sense of moral repugnance.  Clearly, they keep hatred and anger, but these are reactions to their ideas about Ideological Others; they are not inbuilt and instinctual.  They have deconditioned these senses, such that whatever is natural is rejected.

As I noted several years ago, it is literally possible to measure differences in the automatic responses of leftists and conservatives to disgusting images.  This is a difference in conditioning, and it matters politically because it is one of the things which makes them so fucking stupid.

Edit: I will note as well that Donald Trump has a very robust sense of the disgusting.  It is one of his favorite words.  I doubt very much he hired PR people to study the rhetorical uses of Haidt’s theory–that is one of the things Democrats do, and do well, and must do well, since their ideas are bad in nearly all cases–but that rather it comes to him instinctively.  People speak of political instincts.  Bill Clinton had them, Hillary does not.  Trump does, clearly.  [Bernie did not either, btw: his appeal is oriented around the childish need for endless Christmas’s.  And he always struck me as someone who didn’t brush his teeth enough and always had bad breath.]

And I will say that on contemplation, this is my issue with all the gay and trans issues.  I find those behaviors disgusting, particularly after looking at the Mapplethorpe exhibit some 25 years ago.  Some things I wish I could unsee.  I do. I am liberal enough to grant anyone the right to do what they want.  It’s a free country, and that is enormously important to me.  I will fight for the right of those people to be free.  But don’t ask me to suppress my feelings, to pretend they don’t exist.  Don’t tell me who and how I can be.  That, too, is an abrogation of my freedom, of my rights as the citizen of a free nation.  Live and let live has always been and continues to be a good policy.  

Politically, it doesn’t matter in the slightest what IS true.  It only matters what is perceived as true.

Corollary: no political candidate gets any points in the public eye AT ALL, simply for being right.  This is an elaborate game, and the manipulation of appearance is an integral part of it.

Donald Trump, in my view, needs to be our next President because he is the only thing even approaching a conservative who has known how to play this game effectively since Reagan. If he does nothing other than speak obvious truths for 4-8 years, and deal with illegal immigration, it will be worth electing him.

And I suspect he will do a great deal more.  Lois Lerner and her cohorts have likely committed crimes within the statute of limitations as it will pertain in 2017.  Hillary will be prosecutable.  Many of the crimes committed by, and consciously excused by, the Obama Administration will be put under the microscope, and decisions made.  I don’t doubt this for a moment.

I have not thought of it this way, but reading the resolute, determined, single-mindedness with which Leftists are refusing to call an act of Islamic terror and act of Islamic terror, it occurs to me that we might usefully speak not of compassion as a way of life, or an ideal, but an ideology.  And as with all ideologies, conformity to the Party line is vastly more important than real world outcomes or congruence between words and policies.

As an ideology, the Compassionistas–can I can them that?–insist that being nice is the summum bonum of human life, and to the point, of political life.  Their very human need for cruelty and exclusion is met by dehumanizing and hating conservatives, without whom, they suppose, there would be no hate, and no violence, and peace would reign.

But this is stupid.  To even call it well meaning is a disingenuous cop-out.  They do it because it is EASY.  Their world is one where they never have to make a hard choice.

In Miami, they will presumably blame guns–i.e. conservatives, aka, the few sane people remaining–“Islamophobia” (you know, the people afraid of spiders, the Arachnophobes, do have a point, too, that spiders can and do bite), and that “je ne c’est quoi” of what might be termed “vacuous reaching”: “who knows why people are violent?  I am violent, you are violent.”

In all this, there is ZERO determination to understand, to really GET, why this tragedy happened, and work in a conscious, disciplined, and consistent way to make sure it never happens again, or at least happens less, and that fewer people are affected.

If you are not an honest student of policy and history, you are not a good person, if you are in the fields where those are essential to getting things right.  You are an ideologue.

I was wondering too if we might define “ideologue” as “a belief system which does not realize it is a belief system”.  Maybe.

https://youtu.be/tcySGRYyuxYhttps://youtu.be/tcySGRYyuxY

This is interesting.  Apparently both kindness AND power stimulate serotonin production.  This is consistent with the two wills to power I described in my essay on Goodness.

It occurs to me that the importation–and this is the word, since most of these people are not refugees, and some of them were the ones committing the atrocities, both in Syria, and on the way to Europe–of enormous masses of Muslims is intended to provide a political base for the continuing aggregation of centralized power in Europe, and the continuing project of building a global government run by and for lunatics, at the expense of most of humanity.

Here is the thing: once they are there, they become a voting bloc.  When combined with the people who have been taught to loath themselves and welcome the odious if it happens to have another name, the patriots and people trying to yell FUCK NO will get overwhelmed in the voting booths.

The intent is to do something similar in America.  So many Latin Americans–mainly Mexicans, but some clever Central Americans likely make it here too, although the barriers are much higher, since the Mexicans police illegal immigration seriously–come here and are immediately put on public benefits that a GUARANTEED voting bloc is engineered within only a couple years, and, again, when combined with the useful idiots, they will be able to control public policy, and begin over some time horizon–certainly the next ten years–implementing UN initiatives intended to bring about global governance, again, by and for lunatics, and of an immiserated mass of humanity about whom they do not give a flying fuck.

This is not conspiracy theory, in my estimation, if by conspiracy theory I have to posit all sorts of secret agendas for which there is no evidence.  The agenda is plainly there.  I will post again a link I like on this topic: http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/all-the-leaves-are-brown/ (I’m so PROUD of you Google, for stopping your active suppression of it!!!)

And if you didn’t know, the Bilderbergs are meeting this week.  Supposedly Frau Merkel will be there, but not “officially”.  Maybe she will wear a hijab to smuggle herself in, or more likely dress as a man.  Maybe she will climb in secretly from the sewers, or parachute in at night.  Maybe she will just drive in in a limousine with blackened windows.  It’s an ample security perimeter.

Anyway, this is a fun little infographic:

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2016/06/04/bilderberg%20group_1.jpg

Obviously, there is nothing to see there.  It  is just most of the most powerful people in the Western world (I do wonder if the Asians are there in any numbers) meeting in secret and discussing long term policy.

The past will be present until it becomes present.  Only then can it recede into the past.