Moderates United

Finally watched this.  The only thing I will say is that true order is never linear.  Javier Bardem’s character consists only in lines, which means he lives in the deepest chaos–true chaos–possible.

Post here: http://deadline.com/2016/01/birth-of-a-nation-premiere-sundance-stunner-nate-parker-1201690343/#comment-list-wrapper

It has not appeared.  I never know why my comments don’t pop up.  There are many possible explanations.  Certainly, it seems unlikely this site has me blocked, but who knows?  In any event, if I’m going to write something, it may as well appear somewhere.

And I will add editorially, that dwelling in the past is bad for both individual and groups.  Yes, it helps to know where you come from, to know who you are, to better marshall your personal resources to move into the future.  But the goal is always moving into the future.  Making movie after movie after movie of how bad being a slave was does not help kids born in ghettos to crack-addicted or alcoholic mothers.  It does not give them hope.  It does not give them a path forward, or a role model for anything but undirected and almost entirely self destructive rage.

It is precisely the failures–the long term, expensive, and obvious failures–of policies designed to remedy inequalities which make movies like this so easy.  Stirring up anger is a child’s task.  Calming it down, and directing it soberly in productive ways is the hard work.

Those same atrocities are being inflicted on Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria TODAY, as the direct result of Obama’s policy of arming and then not seriously fighting Islamist sadists.  At what point do people start living in the 21st century and acting like their moral compasses still operate?

And in point of fact 650,000 people died fighting a Civil War whose cause was the institution of slavery, almost all of them white.  Are the mutilations of cannon grape shot, bayonets, and bullets any the less atrocious?

I feel less than zero guilt.  I feel movies like this actually HURT the cause of black equality by working to build resentment about things that happened long ago, while ignoring the fact that the policies meant to help blacks have destroyed the nuclear family, eradicated their thirst for education and knowledge, taught them that they are helpless, and encouraged them to seek remedies for their poverty everywhere but hard work and long term plans.

All Frederick Douglas asked for was an equal shot.  All Martin Luther King, Jr. asked for was to be judged on the content of his character.  Movies like this have as their clear subtext the idea that blacks are owed something because of things that happened long before the lives of any living human beings. 

If I was still in graduate school, or an academic working in a world where conservatives were allowed to exist unmolested, that might be a fun title for a paper.

I read this, and it jibes with much of what I have been thinking and saying: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/01/why-humans-find-it-hard-do-away-religion

What is truth?  Well, according our modern educational system, it is the output of science.  Since the output of science is variable, then truth, and our understanding of it, must likewise be variable.

But for human cultural purposes, for sociological purposes, it is sufficient that there be a professional and sanctified priesthood.  In principle, once one has accepted the need to concur with and submit to and internalize their pronouncements, this is no different in practice or principle than submitting to the authority of an oracle which regularly offers new information, new truths, new principles, and new views.  You simply take it in stride, even if the information is contradictory.  You assume they are “getting closer”, because that is what “they” do.

So in the same sense that for much of Western history individuals were not allowed to have an unmediated relationship with God, so too does much of our intellectual establishment not want us to have an unmediated relationship with the truth.

They do not want us questioning Keynesian economics.

They do not want us questioning Global Warming.

They do not want us asking what good can come from universal surveillance.

This cultural development is in fact extremely well suited for an authoritarianism which has the sense to never be too open about its operations.  It is the antithesis of genuine Humanism, and the opposite of that spirit which seeks to elevate human kind by elevating all individuals.

We are taught to obey, not to think, and this propaganda is made perfect by insisting within the message itself that everyone who imbibes the daily poison is in fact heroic and individualistic, for braving the assaults of the determined fanatics on the Right, who know nothing, will only evil, and must be stopped at all costs.

This is the world we live in.

I was thinking how clownish this whole things is, a Cabinet level official using high school technology to conduct top secret–and apparently ABOVE top secret, which I guess is Code Word level access, or something like that–business. I was thinking how spy agencies spend years and huge amounts of effort to get agents in place to secure the sort of information she more or less delivered for free and at no considerable expense of effort and time.

Then it hit me that maybe that was the POINT.  We assume that she had her own server so she could conduct illegal and  unethical business on the side, but what if part of the deal is that she also secured money for providing access to top secret US policy positions and other such data?

I seem to have been unique in suggesting this, but I have proposed that the whole Kenneth Starr thing under Bill was designed to divert attention from the blatant and large security leaks to the Chinese that happened under his Administration.

There was an agent they caught, but Clinton also authorized the open and legal sale of dual use nuclear technology.  I remember a Spec. Op friend of mine telling me he had just been through SERE school, where among other things they get waterboarded and locked in small cages, and feeling very angry that he had to go through all that to learn to protect secrets which did not have a shelf value in most cases of more than a week, whereas with no resistance at all Clinton was simply handing over major secrets to a Communist nation, with whom we had been at war indirectly several times in the 20th century, and which we had every reason to expect would become a major rival.

The Clintons are awful people.  Bill has well developed people skills.  There can be no doubt about this.  But good salespeople do not need to be good human beings.  A good salesperson who is trying to steal the shirt off your back can make you feel guilty for wanting to keep it.  I’ve witnessed this first hand.  Psychopaths can be particularly compelling.

I don’t know who Bill is, but his wife is a lying bitch who thinks rules are for other people, and for his part there seems to be little or nothing that Bill is above.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2015/11/19/unitedhealth-group-earnings-downgrade-obamacare-affordable-care-act/76040322/

In my own, I think reasonably clear eyed, estimation, I am pretty smart.  I wrote one piece on Obamacare back in 2009, and another I want to say in 2012, during the Presidential election.

I was not wrong.  Virtually all complex systems have codes which unlock them, prisms through which they can be viewed which instantly clarify things into lines and circles and coherent forms which are USEFUL.  That last is important.  String theory works in theory, but it is to physics roughly what postmodern literary criticism is to useful intelligence.

Here, again, is the short version: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Notes–31–healthcare%20in%20ten%20paragraphs.pdf

Here, again, is the longer version: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/obamacare.pdf

http://counterjihadreport.com/2016/01/14/hillarys-benghazi-stand-down-order-exposed/

Here is what seems to have happened.  Obama and Hillary Clinton decided to topple the Libyan government, for unclear reasons.  The alleged reason was the support of democracy, but they supported the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, and continue to this very moment to support people fighting the Syrian government who are not Syrian, and who nearly universally support the Islamic State, and the goal of a regional Caliphate.  In point of fact, arms and training provided by the Obama and Clinton policies seem to have CREATED the Islamic State, and Obama’s claims to the contrary notwithstanding, he seems not to be making ANY serious attempts to stop or even slow the growth of the Islamic State.  He is, among other things, failing to bomb the oil tankers selling oil to Turkey in exchange for operational funds which obviously at some point may be used to buy WMD’s.

We know that the State facility in Benghazi was almost comically understaffed as far as security.  The only thing not comic about it is that two people who made the mistake of trusting Hillary Clinton died for it.  Sean Smith’s body had to be pulled out by people who disobeyed orders to try and come help them.

We know there was significant CIA activity in Benghazi.  What were they doing?  One story line has them tracking anti-aircraft missiles.  Another has them funneling arms first to the Turks, then to the “Syrian rebels”, aka ISIS in its infancy.

We know that support assets were available to the CIA Annex and were denied.

We KNOW that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama LIED knowingly in the immediate aftermath of the deaths of four Americans who made the mistake of trusting them.  This is not in doubt.

One wonders why the Left is so desperate to reject common sense standards of loyalty, common decency, and integrity.

But then again, not really.  You can’t not be a piece of shit and be in the middle of this thing, and you can’t not be a willing dupe and be in the outer circle.  Dumb and evil: these are the choices.  True liberals are nary to be seen across the whole horizon.

Someone I know is apparently fooling around with a married Muslim man, and this got me to thinking: the Islamic legal status of a willing infidel woman is likely that of concubine.  Muslims are allowed unlimited concubines.

This means that Muslims cannot commit adultery with Western women. And legally, both consensual and forced sex–rape, to be clear–are both completely acceptable and consistent with Islamic law and Islamic tradition.  Thus, when you read about elderly, married, Muslim men participating in gang rapes in England, they are very literally not breaking any precept of their religion. To the extent Islam speaks to the topic, it is likely to ENCOURAGE such behavior.

Their wives–of which they are allowed up to four–cannot of course have any relations with non-Muslim men.  Merely speaking to a man who is not a family member is enough to get women killed in some countries, like Pakistan.

In the West we forget at our peril that a substantial portion of the globe retains the sensibilities and mores of the 7th century,. which was, as has been most of human history, violent, misogynistic, and grotesquely unfair.

Only in the West did the concept of universal human rights come about.  Only here.  We are condemned with the very ideas which would not exist but for our cultural innovations.

You cannot repeat Soviet propaganda–and that is what they push on the Daily Cause and HuffPo–without being historically ignorant, unprincipled, and characterized by that stupidity which thinks it knows everything worth knowing, never guessing the extent of its intellectual depravity.

I am trying to say something, but I am not yet sure what.  What follows is, I recognize, incoherent.  There will likely be another ramble after this one, but not until I take care of some business.

As the State grows, individual power diminishes. As the State does for you, you do less. As the State embodies and expresses power, you embody and express less, you do less, you are less.

Someone claimed that one of the goals of an aspiring global totalitarian was to get everyone implanted with microchips which contain everything about us.  We can walk into a store, pick something up, and walk out, and the cost of that item is deducted from our account.  There is no need for a cashier, since they know who I am.  They know where to find me.  And if I act up, my chip is emptied, and my movements can be controlled.  They know who I talk to, where I go, even what I say.

But of course we have to agree to this.  And all of these ideas demand, for their implementation, fear.  Governments are grown because of fear: fear of war, fear of crime, fear of confusion.  And what drives fear is a sense of helplessness.

Terrorism is a perfect vehicle for authoritarians because it is amorphous.  It has no boundaries. It has no time.  It is not a conventional war, and thus can be declared in perpetuity.  I personally wonder if ISIS has not been built by our shadow government precisely BECAUSE we were winning the war on terror.  Certainly, Obama armed and almost certainly trained what became ISIS, and it seems we are not attacking the oil trucks which deliver wealth to ISIS, and are not effectively targeting their leadership or propaganda centers.  We seem in fact to still be arming people whose only allegiance to us is their claimed opposition to Assad.

It seems to be the case that our unconscious will only feed us information it feels we can handle emotionally.  A great many people–likely most, in my view–spend lives with shit crammed into the back of their emotional selves which never comes out, because they never give it time to, they never ask it to, and they are unprepared to deal with it if it does.

For my part, as I am watching darkness come out of me, I also watch it fade.  You cannot fight darkness in yourself: you allow it, and it dissipates.  All emotions have information.  Listen to that information, learn from it, and that emotion is no longer needed.  It is a telegram that has been read.

Last night I was realizing that as a baby I was not wanted.  I imagined this scene of fighting out of the womb–I had a difficult delivery–being placed in my mothers arms, and her face being filled with shock and rejection as she realized I was not the perfect girl her narcissism had led her to believe was the only possibility.  They did not even have a boy’s name selected, such was her certainty.

She tried to love me.  I don’t doubt this.  But will cannot coerce love, and she herself was never loved.  It is a mystery to her, as indeed it has largely been a mystery to me.

And I ponder how babies deal with primal rejection and neglect, and it seems to me that we are missing part of the puzzle: children are not born fully helpless.  All of us, all humans, come from another world, and reenter that world when we die.  This is my belief.

It is also my belief that we land on this world with a plan, and with a nascent self that has been in development over long periods of time.  We are not blank slates.  We are born with worlds of information latent within us.

Here is one of my favorite reincarnation stories: http://www.iisis.net/index.php?page=past-life-murderer-identified-ax-axe-skull-reincarnation-birthmarks-past-life-scars&hl=en_US

At three this child was speaking of what he knew, but somewhere in him it was there when he was born.

Fear and helplessness, it seems to me, are inextricably linked. And fear and chronic anger are likewise linked.

This thought pattern, which concords (I made it a verb) with my own sense of how “objective” (note the bias inherent in needing to use this word) reality works, is congenial to me, and perhaps may be to you as well.

Countless thousands of unwanted children are born every day. What is their destiny?  They are sundry, but we must never assume from one cause must proceed another effect where consciousness is concerned.  Life is far more complicated, rich, and interesting than that.

I watched Captain America–the first one–with my oldest last night, and the obvious theme was “I don’t like bullies”.  This is the American self image, and one which has animated much of our foreign policy over the past century.  We were of course often accused of being bullies by Soviet propagandists–perhaps, it must said, sometimes accurately, although not in Korea and not in Vietnam–and their propaganda was congenial to the conceits of very soft, historically ignorant western intellectuals.  It continues to be.

In a post which did not last an hour I told the Huffington Post audience that their beliefs could reliably be inferred by simply positing arrogance, complacency, and Soviet propaganda memes.  I view that as only very slightly hyperbole, and with respect to the Soviets, I will mention I have not had a post last an hour on that Goebbelsian–should I say Leninist, Alinskyan, or Obaman?–thought-vehicle in some years.  It doesn’t matter what I say.  It seemingly only matters that I say it.  These people censor opposing views then both wonder why everyone does not believe as they do, and why they are so angry at them.

The point I wanted to make relates to this sad story: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/15/15-year-old-boy-was-stabbed-to-death-by-migrant-because-he-was-protecting-young-girl-from-sex-assault/

A Muslim–and the religion is clearly significant, since rape is nowhere condoned by any civilized religion, even if it has sometimes been practiced–attempts to rape a Swedish school girl, and the boy who stops it is stabbed to death in retaliation.  The Swedes suppress the truth, call the victim a “bully” with no evidence, and rush to get the story from the Muslim, who of course makes something up.

The image I keep getting in mind, and I’m sorry this is not more classical, but perhaps the more useful for it, is the Minister of Magic in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, who keeps denying that Voldemort is back.  Despite all evidence he chooses to privilege the more congenial, the easier, the less painful, of two options, even though it has nothing BUT convenience going for it.

And see what happens when you are suppressing something you KNOW on some level is true is that you do not exist on a continuum, but the more WRONG you are, the more you FIGHT for your wrong view.  You get angry at those who insist on telling the truth.  You resent them.  You demonize them.  You push them to the side and marginalize them.

What we see in this Swedish story is that common decency and common sense are simply not welcome.  They are not interested in doing the right thing if it requires new thoughts, the reevaluation of the cultural direction they have chosen, and particularly if it requires JUDGEMENT.  They want to be nice.  They want to be all things to all people, and they do not want to admit evil exists.

I was describing this in my version of the Grand Inquisitor, when I had Sade say he would eliminate all notions of good and evil, as the best guarantee that evil would prevail.

If “all that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing”, then the cause of evil has to stigmatize the very idea of good.  And this has transpired.  A boy killed for preventing a rape is the villain, and the aspiring rapist and actual murderer is the hero.

This is where decadence, weakness, spiritual sickness, which I term “Sybaritic Leftism” transitions into that hatred, violence, anger, and pervasive deceit I call “Cultural Sadeism”.  As I say over and over and over, they are connected.  The one MUST lead to the other.  It lacks the strength to defend itself, and it lacks an alternative vision that is constructive and coherent.