Moderates United

If blacks want to develop a culture which nourishes its young, teaches them self and other respect, and the value and purpose of hard work, THEN you will be justified being a pompous blowhard. Until then, what most of us will see is a landscape littered with failure–UNNECESSARY failure–crime, illegitimacy, whining and ignorance. 

I speak the truth, and accept that you liars and delusional fools will hate me for it. So be it. Somebody needs to speak the truth, and this isn’t it.

The response:

No. Self evidently, if Democrats are the solution to the problems blacks have, then they are looking to white people to help, since most Democrats are white. Even Barack is white, even if he drops his g’s in certain speeches to certain people he assumes are inferior.

Since you are looking for white people to help, you obviously accept a certain amount of inferiority. I am simply volunteering.

One cannot look at a culture which produces the vast majority of our murders at just over a tenth of our population and call it functional. If you want to go Malcolm X and take care of your own problems and leave us out of it, have at it. But if you want us to help, as in all interventions, the truth has to be the beginning.

Nothing is working, including telling people to shut up when you simply lack the maturity to listen to the truth. You have nothing to lose.

The simple fact is that most white people live nowhere near black people, and even if they are willing to play P.C. language games, that doesn’t help Jaquan, who we do know is living with his mother, and being raised by his grandmother. You may hate our cracker asses, but I should point out most of us are heavily armed, and we outnumber you 5 to 1. We are also better educated.

What is needed is a healthy black culture, one not built by this nonsense posted here in response to someone who obviously meant well. If you don’t want people patronizing you, stop acting like fucking children.

Here is my commentary:

All the people trying to affect the lives of blacks in this country in a positive way seem to share several core, inaccurate assumptions.

1) Blacks are inferior.  They don’t say this, obviously, but it is assumed.  It is assumed that absent hand-outs blacks cannot get ahead.  Unless they have cheer leaders, and crowds of people telling them “you can do it”, they can’t do it.  We are told it is asking too much for black teens to complete their free high school education.  We are told it is asking too much for them to be fathers to their children, or asking the girls not to get pregnant until at least their mid twenties.  We are told it is asking too much asking them not to shoot each other in the streets.

Frederick Douglass, certainly, and probably Martin Luther King Jr. would hold these people in contempt.  They don’t want a chance any more: they want a guarantee of success before they will begin.

Not only is that not reasonable, it is actually asking for a codependent relationship in which they are the needy inferior that has to have the milk of kindness, and the succor of continuous support or else they will fail.

Anyone who wants to put them in that position holds them in contempt.  Again: they believe blacks are inferior.

2) Language matters.  We are told that somehow it affects Jonteel’s life in some shitty 2 bedroom Public Housing project how some white kid at Princeton talks about black kids and black life.  This is bullshit.  It is completely, categorically wrong.  This is a mistake made by and for people who TALK for a living, and who in most cases never do SHIT in their entire lives but talk. Evan Sayet has a nice piece on this.

Language does not affect high school graduation rates.  If they were still called Negroes, as MLK, Jr called his own, that would not matter, if they had changed the MEANING of that word, what we whites and Asians associate with it.

Language matters only with respect to language.  It matters politically, in other words, principally as a weapon of deception and bullying.

3) Blacks have a worse enemy than themselves.  Look: they call themselves niggas not because they are proud, not because it is an emblem of self respect, but because they have internalized a self loathing, one which is perpetuated daily by the people who claim that they cannot make it on their own.

Here is an interesting perspective on the Black Lives Matter agitprop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7MAO7McNKE, particularly after 1:12.

Why do YOU think–seriously, think about it–why do YOU think that the vast focus is on a handful of cases of officer involved shootings, when easily ten times that number of blacks are killed annually by their own?

Is the goal to change the LANGUAGE of the discussion, or to save actual black lives, to make meaningful interventions which make actual, living breathing human beings, happier, healthier, wiser, and more productive?

People who DO nothing focus on language, and this may seem harmless, or even farcical, but the naked reality is that how we speak does have real effects on our ability to solve actual problems.  If we cannot speak needed truths, problems escape solutions.

This is where we are at today.  I look around me, and most people don’t want to know the real truth about anything, about themselves, about life, about violence, about anything.  Most people are cowards.  They shy from anything which promises pain and difficulty.

But that is where the magic, the real change, happens.

Edit: My response to the meme was deleted, so I tried again.  I posted this:

I await a more substantive response. You KNOW I am right. Who do your lies help? Your fragile ego? Why be fragile when you can be a man?

His response: Lol you await what? Thanks for the command but I’ll passYou are workin under the delusion that your original post had some sort of substance to it..it did not…raise your level of intellect rather than sounding like someone who is still stuck back in the 1800s good old days…I guess your motto is make America great again huh? Foh 

I wrote something about how the unoffical motto of the Democrat is “screw black people, they are going to vote for us anyway”, which is quite accurate, and it was deleted. I tried again:

That’s the problem with blacks: not enough men. Lots of tough guys, but not serious people like MLK Jr. willing to roll up their sleaves, do some REAL thinking, and start actually fixing problems.

You vote Democrat because you are the same chumps Malcolm X said you were, because he was not stupid. You are.

His response:

My response: If you are one of the “bruthas” then this site is quite poorly named.Intellectually mediocre, bullying brothers. IMBB. I bet nobody has taken that yet. You should be able to get at least a .org.
But then, truth is anathema isn’t it? Lying is much more congenial for the mediocre. It soothes their fragile, childlike egos. 

His response: To anyone still reading this post…this is what a white racist troll writes like…they start spewing some vitriolic none sense….if you ask them a question they continue to inject more of the same…so what do you do? Treat them as the little five year old mentally non intellect that they are..Carry on 

My response, which I do not expect to stay there [it did get deleted, but then apparently released]:

Hugh: is the black community working? Define “working” however you like.

Given that black unemployment has risen considerable in his time as President, as has poverty, help me understand how you continue to believe Obama cares about poor blacks. He was raised by white people, in a rich white neighborhood.

From what I read, the role his father played in his life was impregnating his mother, and providing context for a book. He died in a drunk driving accident after being rejected by the Kenyans for his Communist ideology.

You whine and complain, but the truth is this is the truth. Who do you think you help yelling at me for speaking it? Does anyone genuinely suffering become well? Do bills get paid? Is ignorance in any way corrected?

His response, something out of the 5th grade world of Christmas Story:

Hmmm the troll is strong with this one…so keep crying little baby

My response, currently in moderation:

I’m not the one crying. I’m pretty happy with my life.

It is little black boys crying who miss their fathers.

It is little black girls watching their mothers go on alcoholic and drug binges. I have talked to these people. I know whereof I speak and so do you.

But why would you care? You sit on the internet all day, so your life can’t be too bad. And hell, maybe you can get PAID to blog someday? 

Commentary: I am posting this uncivil, unproductive dialogue as an object lesson in why problems in the United States go uncorrected.  There is no sincerity.  Yes, of course I am pushing buttons and being a bit of a dick, but I am also asking completely valid questions that would scare the shit out of this guy if he stopped attacking me long enough to ponder them.

In what respect can anyone argue that changing the dialogue changes the reality?  The situation is much more akin to an abusive, dysfunctional family where no one is allowed to speak the truth, where lies are the rule of the day, where the clarity of light is feared and reviled.

No one who focuses on language and not policy can claim to care.  Period.


Blacks who claim to speak for other blacks without worrying about jobs and crime and black CULTURE are speaking for themselves, not their alleged “brothers”.

What we call racism is making blanket assumptions about blacks, and by far the worst racists are people like this, who assume that blacks can’t handle the truth, can’t handle their problems, and need whites people to help them, or else they are helpless children.

I assume the opposite: that if more demands–honest, doable, realistic demands–are made on blacks, they are quite capable of rising to the occasion.  Nobody but themselves is keeping them down.  Yes, shit happens, and we all have hills to climb.  The difference is that nobody makes excuses for whites.  When we are born poor and stupid, and want something different, we have to go and get it.  And when we do, we get the self respect that goes with it, and the contempt of people who lack the courage to do the same.

Edit: and to comment on that last little bit I just added, who is there caring about the CHILDREN?  When Sally Struthers used to post pictures of starving African kids (usually the result of wars started by Communists, as in Angola, or famines caused by Communists, as in Ethiopia) everybody felt sorry for them.

Where is the concern for 10 year old kids walking alone through violent neighborhoods–the same ‘hoods white people won’t go to, which apps are created to avoid, and which are no safer for black kids than white kids–and showing up at a home to an empty cupboard, an absent mother, and no supervision?

Who sees and cares about the tears these kids shed?  The terrors they endure daily, and which gradually make them hard, cruel, and violent?

We seem to be breeding psychopaths everywhere.  Whatever solutions I can offer require me to stop typing for a while, here at least.

http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector

What is unmistakable is that this women is a liar.  She never liked or supported Trump. It’s my understanding she never even worked for him.  She worked for a Super-PAC that he had his lawyer disband.  That is what I read.

That is disputable, I suppose, and I have not taken the time to verify it.

What seems beyond dispute, to my mind, is that what this is, is a tacit admission that as a Democrat, she and others thought that putting Trump in the race would screw things up, and that is what they wanted. Now that he is in the lead, they are having second thoughts, so they are saying publicly what they thought all along.  You can put good money on the fact that this piece was run through a propaganda committee–which of course went by another name–prior to getting the OK.

The only Democrat policies that work are those dedicated to lying, cheating and stealing.  When people say Democrats are “smart”, this is the only possible referent which is honest.  But they are good at that.

What I love about Trump is that everyone on all sides hates him, and he keeps going.  Yes, that takes a huge ego, but he is also showing that you can stand up to the bullies and still speak truths they thought they had killed and buried long ago.  It is still possible in USSA to speak the truth.  Even if he is a  hypocrite and a flake, were there actually any other alternatives on the table?  How could he possibly be worse than Hillary, and Cruz is only in the race because Trump drove the debate to the outside. He is not a leader.  He is a poll reader just like everyone else.  He reads, then speaks.  Trump speaks, then reads.

And I will comment briefly on what I would argue is the unmistakable Democrat rhetorical style.  This piece is long on feeling, long on bandwagoning and opinions, and has this tone which, without actually discussing policy, assumes that those sorts of things are so obvious that she and the reader can share certain assumptions without subjecting them to scrutiny.

The goal, obviously, is to make Democrats feel themselves superior, again, and for weak minded Republicans, also, to buy into Democrat propaganda about Trump.  I will note that this is coming out at a time when only two Republicans are still effectively in the race, when by common consensus a brokered nomination would be devastating for the Republican Party, and when Trump is the stronger of the two candidates by far in national polling.

This is why Trump: it fucks with the rat bastards who have been trying and continue to try and drive our country into the ditch.

I am not naive.  I do not see him as a Messiah.  I simply see him as the only true qualitative outlier I have seen have a shot at national office in my lifetime. If we elect anyone but Trump, we get what we have been getting.  If we elect Trump,  we may still get that, but it is at least possible we won’t.

I see many people who seemingly fail to grasp this point, which seems obvious to me.  Perhaps I am missing something, but that is not usually the case, if I am honest.

When our response to the killing or torturing of a fellow human being is anything other than horror and outrage; when we consider the deliberate infliction of pain as no more disturbing than standing in line for our daily food rations; when we have reached this point, we must accept that the world will not improve simply because Hitler is gone. Scanning the hall, Camus declared: “We are all of us responsible and we are duty-bound to seek the causes of the terrifying evil that still gnaws at the soul of Europe.”
This was not all that Camus now grasped. Absurdity, he saw, “teaches nothing.” Instead of taking this diagnosis as a fatality — instead of looking only at ourselves, as do Sisyphus or Meursault — we must look to others. We are, in the end, condemned to live together in a precarious, unsettling world. “The misery and greatness of this world: it offers no truths, but only objects for love,” he wrote in the journal. “Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.” Love saves us from absurdity. 
What we fought for, Camus concluded, “was something common not just to us, but to all human beings. Namely, that man still had meaning.”
We need, he declared, “to call things by their proper names and understand that we murder millions of human beings when we allow us to think certain thoughts.”

I have always liked Camus.  That is all I will say.

What he called the absurd, I call madness.  But madness is not an ontological condition.

Ok. that is all I will say.  Until I do. 

Oh yes, I remembered the other thing I meant to say.

I think horror is the sense you are about to be eaten, or that someone close to you is.  It is a primal fear with survival value, which we share with animals.

Where we differ is in our imaginative capacity, with which we can conjure this emotion even absent actual danger.  Like animals, we can be traumatized by horror and confinement, and like animals we can stay stuck there forever.

The other day I felt this sense of horror in me soften.  It became something else.  It became like wax about to melt.

I thought: I have no word for this.  So I invented one.  Moving away from horror is dis-horroring, but I wanted de- and that doesn’t work without an S.  Then deshoring popped in my head.  It alludes to the original word, without including it.  It also conjures an image of casting off to sea after being stuck shoreside for a very long time.

Taking a piss in the gym today it occurred to me that logically if the two biological imperatives are reproduction and energy capture, Freud erred–as he always did, after coming so close to a truth (he had an amazing intuition, but his intuition about his intuition was horrible)–in privileging the sexual instinct.  Logically, you cannot reproduce if you fail to reach maturity, and you can’t do that unless you can find and consume energy sources, aka food.

This makes digestion superior to sex as a primal drive, and as a content of the  unconscious.  This, in turn, opens up a lot of interesting ideas.  What are people obsessed about?  Sex and food, but not necessarily in that order.

If you think about it, abnormal relationships with food are potentially as interesting as abnormal relationships with sex.  That kid surfing porn?  Let’s find out more about what role those Cheetos play in his life.  I’m serious.

I wonder and I wander.  It’s what I do.  It’s perhaps my defining trait.  I like myself, all things considered.  I am not jealous of anyone, and I like my life, exactly the way it is.

I will add that I felt, too, how anger has a form.  It is the same energy which powers a sense of the magical, a sense of curiosity and open connection.  But it has a skin.  It is contained.  It is simultaneously a pushing and a resisting.

Do with that what you will.

I don’t always agree with myself or even understand myself, but sometimes I do.

Being work competent is in large measure a result of being driven, and of making it a life-style.  People that are good at anything tend to like doing more of it.

I can and often am competent, but I phase shift in and out.  When I do my meditations, that is a completely different world, with different rules.  And it is a better world, too.

So many people are driven to work, to consume, to win.  But where is life in all that?  At the end of a lifetime, living in a large home, emotionally alienated at least from your true self, what is left?  I see little.

There has to be a happy medium.

When I look at history, I see that insanity expands, for the simple reason that unhappy people are forced to work, forced into conflict, and the more unhappy they are, the better they get at it.  Most large empires are built this way.  Most large fortunes are built this way.

Small wonder that Chuang Tzu extolled the useless and thus invisible.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3511343/Marauding-parents-Easter-Egg-hunt-rampage-control-adults-push-children-ground-steal-buckets-leave-one-four-year-old-bloody-chaotic-free-event.html

The issue here is that the adults felt the need, the competitive need, to get the eggs FOR their children.  In another time, the adults would have felt content to let the children get their own eggs.

I was thinking this morning that the parents of the children today, particularly the biologically adult children in our universities, were themselves the children of hippies.  They grew up in emotionally unstable homes, and seem to have reacted by overparenting their own children.

It does seem to me too that in a world where childhood is made so important that many parents want to extend their own by living vicariously through their children.

Let them go, people.  You are the cannon, they are the cannon shot, life is the charge.

Never do for anyone something they can and should do for themselves. This principle starts in the earliest infancy.

Conservatism is nothing more or less than common sense.  The fear and confusion of this world make it seem that compassion is offering help, but most of the time the only person helped is the codependent, emotionally unwell person offering it.

It seems to me the path of the Bodhisattva is not to eliminate pain, but to increase it.  The path of com-passion is to know all pains from personal experience.  How else can you SEE the pain of others, how else can you know it?

Suffering plainly is real, and in this world, the pains of this world cannot be avoided.  You can be born in the lap of luxury to loving parents, and live a fulfilling life doing useful work.  You can see the world, fall deeply in love, bring up a happy family, and live in health to an old age, and then everything you built and knew will fall away.  You will have to begin again, in some way.  This cannot be avoided.

But suffering can be processed.  It can be digested, like food, like drink.  The task is to become stronger, more able to do this; to become larger and in becoming larger to become wiser, and thus more useful.

In a true spiritual path I believe you are lost most of the time.  The sense of being lost, too, is a suffering, and that, too, can be transcended.  I increasingly believe that what the modern world most needs is a recovery of the sense of the magic of time and place, of the moment, of the world.  You can live forever in every moment you truly feel flowing through.  We are surrounded by rivers, and choose to stay on the shore.

It feels to me like the authentic spirit of Buddhism passed away with the growth of the monasteries, with the growth of barriers to life, to the wilderness, to the wild beasts, randomness, and to most forms of unplanned loss.

This is what I feel today.

Read this story: http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/roth.html

Then listen to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK-5OS1WAFk

It is perhaps not sad enough–I find it comforting–but there is something of life in it.

I find myself feeling the gap between the meaning of life, and my habits.

Living is a skill, and we are all born, I think–most of us certainly–far from it.  We paper over this gap with thought.  We think: “I can think the meaning of life. It will be much easier than finding my way to it.  Yes, that is the path”.  But of course, you cannot think your way there.  You must dare your way there.  You must embrace what hurts you, and in the hurting, find the healing, and the way.

Here is another nice song, also from John Harford: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBEOjcQstUc 

You only know a small fraction of what you think you know, and if I am lucky I know even less.

Happy Easter!!!!

Perseverance is one of my core values.  So I got to thinking about my previous post.  Am I getting soft?  No longer willing to fight the good fight?

Well, AM I fighting the good fight?  Who really gives a shit what I have to say?  Not many people.

And then I got to thinking that persuasion is a laudable and valuable goal, but it can virtually NEVER be approached from a stance of anger or judgement.  If you claim to want to persuade people, and you are yelling at them–as I have always tended to do–then you are deceiving yourself.

I need to take the anger out.  Step back.  The world clearly will end one day, perhaps one day soon, but it has no plans to ask me first, and there is no reason not to get as much sunshine and light in the meantime as I can.  You know, the jacket, the wind and rain, and the Sun.  Old story.

By chance I spent the day at a college.  I used to get excited going to colleges.  There was so much possibility, so much learning.  Now, I find them depressing.  You go there to learn how to live a better life?  Ain’t gonna happen.  You read all the English authors.  Or you major in German or Spanish or Portuguese.  Latin or Greek.  Philosophy.  Psychology.  Who will provide you with a comprehensive template for personal growth?

Kids come there with all sorts of hopes and dreams.  They want to make a difference.  But the Western world has lost the capacity to respect individual moral growth.  It can’t define it, because it can’t differentiate good and bad outside of social contexts which are themselves based on political contexts. Is rape wrong?  Well you have to tell me who is raping whom and why.  Yes, of course, in general, but surely the bombs being dropped on ISIS are far worse than their crimes against women?  It’s Western Imperialists imposing Western Imperialist values.

And I thought, as an African-appearing man walked by me (have you noticed that you can usually tell the difference between African born blacks and American born blacks by the dignity and seriousness of the former’s carriage?) that in the early 1960’s Britain was decolonizing.  Imperialism was still a very real thing.  But that was over 50 years ago.  Not many years before that, Japanese Zero planes were crashing into our aircraft carriers, and Jews were being turned into soap.

Virtually all the language and thought of today was formed in that period.  The professors teaching today still look back on that era as a Golden Age.  It is all they have.  And what they have is deficient and pathetic. It is based on lies, willful misunderstandings, sloppy thinking, and infantile fantasies both of power and freedom from responsibility.

We need an individual moral code.  It is possible that before Christianity all religions were intrinsically social, and thus in conformity with our ancestral, evolutionary past.  But Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, is individualistic.  It is about an individual’s relationship with God, unmediated by society and political structures.  This is a powerful means of forming the individual conscience, and moving humankind along.  But it no longer works.  We need something new.

This continues to be a project of mine.  Progress has been slow, but shit I’ve only been off the bottle for a month now.