Moderates United

I read that most of the major social media platforms are unethical and unprincipled enough to consider free speech a problem worth addressing through censorship.  http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/263106/all-your-social-media-belong-eu-daniel-greenfield

Here is my thought: this will create a HUGE business opportunity for anybody who wants to duplicate those platforms–making whatever adjustments needed to avoid successful lawsuits–and guarantee to protect free speech of all kinds.

These are for-profit businesses.  Clearly, their long term aim is to enter into a fascistic and enmeshed relationship with an authoriarian government controlling most aspects of society, but they are not there yet.  They may never get there if we are smart.

It is an odd thing that the hippies like goose-stepping so much.  But they never believed anything anyway, so in that respect there is not much of a change.  A change of clothes and a shower was all that was needed to effect the transformation.

I have been having a lot of comments disappear lately from Disqus-run comments sections, comments which were topical, non-abusive, and had no profanity.  Comments which should not have disappeared.  It occurs to me that I have no idea who runs that company, or what their political allegiances are.

The most effective use of propaganda is simply limiting who can speak, while allowing a lot of speech, such that it appears only the major ideas in play have any validity.  If you let A, B and C talk as much as they want, and encourage them to disagree mildly at times on unimportant topics, then nobody notices that D has been cut out entirely, and has a radically different, and vastly more accurate, worldview.

In a competition of ideas, the best ones win out.  But if the best ones don’t get to play, they never have a chance.

As I ponder the practical reason businesspeople who are Republicans might support Hillary, it occurs to me the answer is simple: she is so buyable that Trump looks like an ideologue by comparison.  I would not put it past her to have generated literal lists with fees for services of various sorts.  One type of permit costs one amount (as a donation to the Clinton foundation, obviously), and a harder one more.

Everybody on both sides of the aisle knows how to work with people like that.  They get what they want as long as she gets what she wants, and the only people who don’t win are the American people.  Nobody thinks about or gives a fuck about them.

One can almost hear Hillary ask: “why would I care about Mexicans taking American jobs?  I don’t get it.”  And she genuinely doesn’t, and wouldn’t.  She only cares about power and privilege.  What is right and wrong, what is good and bad for ordinary Americans LITERALLY does not cross her mind, ever.  She is simply not calibrated that way.

Trump, in contrast, is not exactly a working class hero, but he is capable of saying “wait a minute, these are good people, why are we fucking with their jobs?”  I think he actually likes people. He love the spotlight, but from what I read, he is quite cordial in private as well, whereas Hillary is a nagging bitch, by just about all accounts (and we will see a new one in a week or two from an ex-Secret Service agent).

Trump doesn’t like the cross-border invasion because it isn’t good for the American worker.  He has doubts about unlimited Islamic immigration, because, well, a third of them want to kill us.  That’s a good reason, and one based on the fact that he gives a shit about the American people.

Most politicians in Washington have literally forgotten how to think about anything except in terms of political expediency.  We saw that said plainly in a recent memoir from a Democrat (but it could almost equally be a Republican) who was plainly suffering from a bad conscience.

Is it too early to use this term?  Fifth Columnists?

I was astonished that both Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrich objected to Trump’s complaint that the judge in his Trump University case seems to have links to what amount to Hispanic nationalists.

If a black person were tried by 12 whites, few people would find fault with those who cried foul if the verdict was unfavorable.  Racial mixes have become a standard procedure, expected in all trials.

The reason Donald Trump is so popular that he is called anti-elitist (the synonym for “populist”, another being “supported only by stupid people” when used by those same elitists, who in any other context would be happy to wrap themselves in the flag of “the People”) is that he thinks like ordinary people.  He thinks like construction workers and military people.  If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a fucking duck.

A cop acquaintance of mine who worked Homicide for a long time in a large city said that in almost all cases the person who most obviously seems to have done it, did it.  Common sense.  It takes work and years of training to get beyond it.

Obviously, some things which seem to be “obviously” true aren’t.  Teaching people to differentiate the two is supposedly the role education plays, and the reason the graduates of the dumb factories in Cambridge and New Haven are so arrogant.  But education in plain fact on balance actually makes people stupider in almost all practical matters.  This, again is one of the reasons I prefer spending my time with people in hard hats.  I can’t stand imbeciles in ties driving expensive cars.  What “higher education” in the main does now–and I think this has long been true–is calcify instinct such that it no longer operates.  The world becomes abstract, and abstractions leave few clues, since they have no textures.  A large section of our perceptual apparatus has gone off-line.

You need instinct to think clearly.  The fact is it never disappears, but can be trained to be reliably wrong, such that every first impulse routes first to the correct place, then an automatic subroutine routes it to the opposite place, all without conscious awareness.

Orwell was clear that the abuse of language must precede all actual abuses.  This is the main reason I am such a big Trump supporter.  We are literally fighting for the ability to speak obvious and needed truths in the public domain.  The whole POINT of free speech is diversity of opinion, which is intended to, and usually does, diagnose over time major problems, and point out solutions.

But if you can’t speak the truth, there is no limit to the number of festering sores which can become chronic just under the surface of the public discourse.  I am wondering if what will become Pravda is already in publication.  No, actually I’m not.  Pravda is already in publication, under the headings of numerous alleged news organizations, all of whom vie to lie most effectively.

In my view, the very existence of poor ghettos–and in this country almost everything comes back to race, so I want to continue to be clear I view the Social Justice Warriors as the most racist people operating in America today–is a symptom of the failure of diversity of discourse.  The right solutions cannot get proposed among the people most concerned with implementing them, because powerful special interests–like teachers unions, like Democrat politicians–oppose them, and cover themselves in the cloak of opposing racism and thus wind up supporting and continuing the policies which have already proven so damaging.

This campaign year has been quite illuminating.  If anyone is wondering why the Left has been so successful, it’s because large numbers of Republicans have grown accustomed to saying “I know, I know” in response to their propaganda.

The psychological importance of firm and clear boundaries, of setting boundaries with others, with having rules that you yourself live by and value, is quite firmly established.  It is impossible to “be” a generous or kind or compassionate person if you are not a person at all, if you move every time someone pushes, and if you stand for nothing.

Likewise, it is a hallmark of unhealthy emotional adaptation to demand that others conform to your sense of the way things should be.  Self evidently, balancing these needs is a principal social and psychological task of people living in genuinely Liberal orders.

This is difficult work.  The people who are continually repeating the indefensible slander that Donald Trump is a racist are effectively doing so in the name of what might be termed “boundary-lessness”.  They refuse to consider that whites, in particular, have the same right to their culture that cultural Hispanics do to theirs; and more particularly that the United States has both the right and duty to enforce its literal boundaries to protect its identity as a sovereign nation governed by the rule of law.

I consider as friends a number of people who would self identify as Liberal, who no doubt are puzzled by my simultaneous ability to express concrete compassion and empathy as one individual relating to another, but to also embrace ideas which get called, propagandistically, “hateful”.

In my view it is both natural and desirable that we look at American history dispassionately, with an eye both to granting it what is uniquely good, and without lying about what was and in some respects still is bad.  The willingness to do this is in important respects one of our most distinguishing features. Most nations do not do this.  Most nations do not tell the truth.  The Soviets–who were the original authors of most anti-Americanism, certainly never did.

What is not natural is to apologize for your success, for your virtue, for everything that makes you, and our society, good.  Psychologically healthy tolerance cannot extend so far that it accepts the contempt of people for who you are and what you believe.  You can grant people a hearing, but you need not accept their own self centered verdicts.

These are plain and obvious words, but they need to be spoken.  Everything good in Europe is under attack.  And the United States is only a few short years behind them.

I readily admit that becoming psychologically individuated is a difficult task.  But maturity is necessary for freedom.  Anyone indulging childishness, or tolerating unwarranted abuse for any reason, is inherently working for tyranny.  There is no other way to look at it, in my considered view.

I am going to give you a stream of consciousness.  Today I was making myself a green shake for breakfast–or 1st breakfast anyway (small handful parsley, half a lemon, third each of a cucumber and avocado, half a Granny Smith apple, 1/2″ slice of ginger, 2 leaves romaine lettuce, and one cup coconut water kefir)–and thought I’d listen to some Bach organ music.

The second selection on Spotify is the one that makes everyone associate horror with organ music: Toccato and Fugue in D minor .  I had not known the name of this piece, nor was I even clear it was Bach, although of course that was always a good guess.

Then I wondered why it goes with horror so much, and figured it must be the Phantom of the Opera, and this brought images to mind of the revolutions of the late 18th and 19th century in France.

And I looked at both sides in my mind, and I could find value in both views.  The Royalists–the true reactionaries and thus “rightists”–no doubt felt that their social order, whatever its flaws, was vastly better than chaos and mass death, the possibility of which was quite obvious after Robepierre’s Terror, but of course which was latent in the air long before.  Such people would be either Christians, or people who used Christianity to pursue personal power goals which were rational at least within their own world views, meaning that they pursued intelligently some concrete goal.

The people opposing them were also rational, in that the system was plainly rigged, geared for the pleasure and well being of an elite at the expense of a mass of people who were poor, insecure, and held in contempt for their very place of birth, and birth parents.  Since there were no elections (for varying lengths of time throughout this era), violent uprising seemed the only possible solution.

On both sides of the barricades one could find reasonable people who were able to explain what they wanted and why. I’ve never really put it this way to myself, but it makes sense.  The conflict was rational, even if we now would have a much harder time sympathizing with aristocrats than aspiring republicans.

But I look at today, and wonder “what are these fools rebelling against?”  The revolutions of the past two centuries have bought, in America at least, all the advantages and possibilities that any reasonable person could demand.  And all the efforts to overturn and break it–the actions called for by Bernie and his fellow pinkos (we can and should bring that word back)–will only damage beyond repair something which is WORKING.

Venezuela WAS working.  Argentina WAS working.  Europe, for now, is working, but it is not trending in the direction of continuing that way much longer.

Our age is one of lunacy.  People fail to value what is important, and pursue relentlessly idiotic dreams consisting in pipe smoke.

Imagine waking up every day feeling “something good will happen today that has never happened before”.  Imagine feeling this, even though you know this day, like every day, will have its frustrations, its embarrassments, its anxieties.

It popped in my head the other day, waiting in line at the grocery store, that “the love of life is the beginning of wisdom”.

Ponder for a moment the cultural significance of the Christian admonition to hold this life in contempt, to risk all now, for a better life to come.  William James has convinced me, in some of the stories he relates in “Varieties of Religious Experience” that some people genuinely do become filled with light, but those people become happy NOW as a result.  They become good people, pleasant people, loving people.

But I feel many, many people use religion to hide from life, and that their “devotions” make them mean and even cruel.  It may seem odd that so many Catholic priests are pedophiles–obviously as a pedophile anything that gets you close to children works–but it seems to me they already live in a world of abstraction, one made concrete for them by their crimes.  Abstraction is the realm of the traumatized, and no one commits acts of willful cruelty who has not themselves in some way been pushed out of their natural bodies and selves.

The love of life, though, becomes naturally the love of others–and starts with love of one’s self–and love itself is the essence of wisdom, or so I believe.

I was discussing the other day with my youngest a story related by Jean Houston about meeting Helen Keller.  She was struck by how radiantly joyous she was.  My youngest, naturally, said that it would be great to be really happy, but she would hate to be blind and deaf.

I pondered it for a moment, and said that maybe there is another sense, one which seeks out happiness, and that most of us are blind in that direction, but Helen Keller was not.

We both thought this was deep, and I share it with you.

Since at least the French Revolution, and in earnest since at least Woodrow Wilson and the rise of the Bolsheviks, the forces of collectivism–which is to say anti-individualistic forces which reject tacitly or explicitly the primacy of the individual conscience and personal agency–have been on the move.  They are supported strongly by the meaninglessness which arises naturally and spontaneously from the theory and practice of Scientism, which view human life as short, that of an animal, unfree, and ended with the cessation of brain activity.

William F. Buckley famously said that his goal was to stand athwart History and yell STOP.  All that conservatives–sane people in an insane world–have managed to do is slow the process of the installation of a new priesthood, a new Pharaohism, one ruling in the name of science, and through the delusion that human beings are objects, society a knowable machine, and manipulation of the objects the goal of the All Knowing.

The very process of inculcating the ideas necessary for submission to this practice makes life meaningless.  None of us are anything, in the eyes of the State.  We are numbers.  Autonomous machines, which it will one day be possible, and is certainly necessary, to control.

I continue writing and hoping that one day this powerful spell will pass, that this hypnotic delusion will fall away, and something like honest science with respect to the nature of life, of consciousness, of God, of the survival of death, will emerge.

Everything we do is only delay.  Until there is a general awakening to the horrors which have been and may yet again be unleashed on humanity in the name of “progress” all any of us are doing is treading water, and buying time.

I honestly do not know what it is possible to do to counter the headless ones, as I call them.  They have surrendered their humanity, their reason, their agency, their very souls.  How do they win them back?  What is the opposite of this process, and how does it begin?  I ask myself these questions continually, and the only answer that comes to me is to try to live my own life authentically, and to speak the truth as I see it as often as I can.  That is all that is left me.  There seems no chance it could be enough, but we all need to do what we can, where we are, with what we have, and hope that some day the right spark will be kindled in the right place.

Traumatic memories are like a room where you always go when you are quiet.  You can’t not go there.  You can’t not remember, even if the remembering has so many protective layers that you can’t even see what is under them.

But one day you may find yourself packing your bags, and realizing it is time to leave.  You may wonder why it took so long; more likely you will wonder how you were able to find the door at all.

And the memories are powerful.  They are of LIFE.  Whatever suffering there was, it was real.  It was authentic.  It involved the gut, the inner animal, the wide awake, the resilient.

I GET, I think, veterans whose task is made harder by the other people in the room with them, especially those they left on the battlefield oh so long ago.  Leaving is hard enough: leaving someone behind makes it exponentially harder.  This is called traumatic grief, or survivor’s guilt, but I’m not entirely sure that is the best way to put it.  I think fidelity to the person becomes entwined with fidelity to the grief and pain.

And the solution, I think, is to see those people not in your past, but your future.  Time is a circle.  They are not dead.  In some respects, this is all a giant game, made far too serious because we don’t know the rules.

Here is a good song for leaving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk2SNcpTNbs#!  32:05 is where it starts.

is to develop the capacity for deep relaxation.  This is the first purpose, at any rate.  All true virtue arises non-compulsively, and absent the capacity for relaxation, nothing ever arises spontaneously.  Only programming.  Only effort, obsession, conformity, and spiritual mediocrity.

Laying in bed this morning it popped in my head that the capacity to relax–really, to feed oneself, to recover from efforts large and small–means that you are neither hurting inside, nor hurting others.

I feel that all wounds are simultaneously aggressions.  All hurt carried inside is nascent or potential violence on the outside.  It is a seed with two paths of growth.  Ahimsa is only possible with complete individual healing.  Deep relationships with others are only possible when one can calmly know oneself.  Before you can sense yourself in your body, before you can embody your awareness, you are an abstraction to yourself, which in turn means all other people are also abstractions to some extent.  They are there because they are needed, rarely because they are valued for who they are intrinsically.

The question “Who am I?” can never be honestly answered with words, or absent an awareness of body, breath, and emotions (I am here repeating in my own words a Kum Nye teaching, or my understanding of it, at any rate.)

Likewise, any answer to the “meaning of life” which starts as an abstraction is doomed to final failure, since the answer can only be found in a felt sense, and thus exists at a level outside of the possibility of sharing, of discussion, of writing, of the intellect.

I am having some good Kum Nye sessions lately.  It is really a very interesting process, which over time amounts to an inventory and processing of the past, as embodied in the present.  Things come up, are allowed, are expanded, are accepted, and slowly diminish.

The path of relaxing–and Kum Nye could easily be called the yoga of inner relaxation–is interesting too in that it consists not in adding, but subtracting, at least at my stage.  I will notice one day that, as an example, my stomach is not tied up in knots as much as it used to be.  Things that used to set me off don’t any more.  I am more free of obsessive thinking and worry.

At some point you wonder what do you do when all your constant companions are gone.  They have never been my friends, but they have been known.

Time will tell.  There are right and wrong ways to do things, and the right way here is to keep going no matter what.  I will see soon enough what is over the next hill.