Moderates United

I’ll occasionally run into Been There/Done That military types in bars, and getting the straight dope from people who have been there is one of the reasons I dislike and distrust the media so much.  There are oceans of things going on they don’t suspect, or refuse to investigate, much less report.

One interesting thing I learned is that not all U.S. Embassies get Marine guards.  What makes the difference in almost all cases is whether or not they have a CIA station there.  Embassies without CIA activity are guarded by locals, as was seemingly the case in Benghazi.  There was CIA activity in Benghazi, but not in Stevens compound.  The two SEAL’s who were killed, and the people with them who were not killed, were from that activity, which was at a distance of a mile or two.

What he pointed out that was interesting to me is that two members of the Delta Force got commendations for their actions in Benghazi: http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/25/delta-force-commando-awarded-second-highest-milita/#.Vjqs7zQ2xnA.facebook  I had not known this, and it contradicts what I thought I knew, which was that there was no response from Tripoli.

The other thing I mentioned was 9/11.  Here he got defensive, and what I realized as we discussed it is that most member of the military seem to assume that if someone questions 9/11 that they are questioning the military and their loyalty.  That I am lumping patriots quite willing to die for their country with people who are trying to destroy it.  Some do.  Some people spouting these things are incapable of nuance.  But I am not one of those people.

He had participated in Jade Helm, and said it was just a training exercise.  I don’t doubt this.  I don’t think the guys on the ground are thinking they are preparing to invade Texas.  But somebody somewhere IS testing methods for using some element of the military to suppress by force domestic dissent.  You don’t need many conspirators for a conspiracy.  You just need a good cover story.

And the other issue with the military is they have by and large sacrificed immensely.  They know people who have died, their families suffered, they went through traumatic stress that in many cases continues to haunt them, and they worked HARD, much harder than civilians can imagine.  48 hour days are not uncommon while deployed.  Going for many months working 20 hour days 7 days a week is not uncommon.

These people do this for love.  They don’t show it, but most hard core soldiers are very sentimental, and extraordinarily protective of those they love.

To state that 9/11 was an “inside job”, or that people other than Islamists associated with Bin Laden carried out this attack is to question the entire structure and point of the “War on Terror”. It is to moot their sacrifices to an unknown extent, and murky what had been clear waters.  I have realized I have inadvertently committed acts of cruelty on several occasions by sharing my ideas with recently returned soldiers.

When you are being insensitive you are by definition not aware of it.  You are ignorant, and ignorant of your ignorance.  Stupidity feels just the same as wisdom.   It is merely the case that the former is corrected by time and circumstance.

We do have many millions of current and former military and law enforcement who absolutely love this country, and who remain willing to defend it.  Our problem is that the battle that matters most is being fought on the airwaves and on the internet.  We lost the Vietnam War over here.  We won it over there, but it didn’t matter.

If a society has no boundaries, it is not a society.  If judgement is impossible–if you cannot be reasonably sure those around would reach the same conclusion in the same situation–you do not have a society. Groups of people who do not share beliefs do not share a culture.

Within the American system, there is legally no root morality, no root culture, no inherent assumption BUT freedom.  All of our Constitution is concerned with freedom from tyranny.  It was assumed, because in those days it was true, that everyone was quite capable of determining their own moral views, which were normally those associated with religion, and their interpretation of that religion.

America is thus peculiarly vulnerable to an infection of propaganda oriented around “freedom”.  All we can assume to share with other Americans is a concern with our laws–or at least a rhetorical concern for our laws, and their underlying assumption of freedom.

What is missed in all this propaganda is that every “right” asserted potentially removes the right of another.  Men who assert the right to use women’s bathrooms remove the right of women to not fear having a man in the stall next to her, making her uncomfortable.  It may be that self declared transgender “women” feel more comfortable using women’s bathrooms.  It is certainly the case that most actual women prefer them using men’s rooms.

Practically, what has been happening for many years now is that aspiring fascists like George Soros fund groups whose job is it to be perennially offended about some commonsense and historically well rooted feature not just of our society but societies the world over, and then make a lot of noise about it, which is then covered by left wing media.  Large splashes are made of miniscule problems.  Compare, for example, the number of transgenders in Houston with the number of women.  The number can’t be less than 1,000 to one, but the women who don’t want men in their bathrooms can’t count on the funding of the professionally aggrieved.  Common sense loses all too often battles it would have won absent effective brain-washing and media management.

As I’ve said before, who loses, at least potentially, in gay marriages?  In my view, children, adopted children.  We can’t ask the question if gay couples raise equally well balanced children.  It’s not allowed.  Asking what is best for the children is a reasonable question.  Asking if being raised by two men is best is, therefore, also reasonable.

How many of you truly grasp that all this is leading us into a vast array of atomized nothings, who believe nothing, are willing to defend nothing, who have been taught since birth to give ground instantly in every cultural attack?  Who suffer the depression, fears, and anxieties of the weak, and morally malformed?

I-Pods won’t save the pod people.

There are real problems in the world.  The people Obama funded and trained in Syria and Iraq are throwing homosexuals off of roofs.  They are raping women, children, and probably men.  They are torturing people.  Fidel Castro is still jailing–and as needed torturing–dissidents.  Nut-job in North Korea still has nukes.

Most of the world still has a standard of living that is well below the worst of our “poor”.

Most of us are stuck with choosing between a consumer lifestyle and family and some version of leftist activism or at least moral support.  These are our meaning systems, and they both suck.

I continue to have as an ambition putting together an acceptable answer.  I have discovered one way not to do it, but expect more success with my next attempt.

Posted here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/opinion/in-houston-hate-trumped-fairness.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

I don’t of course regularly read the Ragged Lady, but I do think they have on occasion let my comments through.  Still, I’m not going back to check, so I’ll post it here too.

If you have a penis, you go in the Men’s room.  If you have a vagina, you go in the women’s room.  We all know that some men who have penises like penises, but I can live with that.  It is a fact of life.

What is not a fact of life is that men with penises should be able to unilaterally declare they “feel” like going to the bathroom with women.

This is not hate.  You people have so corrupted the English language that it is regrettably no exaggeration to call it Orwellian.  Racism, sexism, hate, X-phobia: none of these things mean anything any more.  They are simply hateful labels placed by hating people on the necks of people they want to club into submission.

The raison d’etre of the mind is to solve problems.  This means that where no actual problems exist, it will create them, if not curbed through body wisdom.

And to the extent we identify our selves with the mind, to the extent we have ego investment in the mind, our problems come to identify and define us.  We are our problems.  We are our ontological angst, magnified daily by our readings and recurring assumptions about what life “is”.

All of our psychological problems exist within us, and they exist in the  form of recurring failures of psychic energy to flow freely.  The Tibetans seem to more or less conflate all psychological dysfunction as “Kun Zhi”, which means “all ground.”  All ground is no air, no motion, no moving.  Being stuck.

As I meditate more deeply I can feel primitive emotions loosen in the warmth of attention and come free, like a tree branch stuck on a rock in a river coming free.

One of the attributes of getting through Kun Zhi–and I am referencing Kum Nye theory here–is letting go of one identity–that of our problems–before the new one can emerge.  It is a period of confusion and doubt, but absolutely necessary.

And I can see one me walking out a door, and a new me–a realer me, who I have secretly known all my life–walking in.

And what I realize about myself is that my obsession with problem solving–which you can see littered all over the internet–has been really a sort of displacement to avoid feeling feelings that I am finally getting to.

I just ordered a book on attachment disorders from early childhood trauma.  It looked quite interesting.  I may not need it for me if this progress continues, but as I have said often, I think early childhood trauma is much more common than people suppose.

It feels to me like compassion is the last of the virtues to go.  It is an easy virtue, because it simply means, for most people. allowing people to do what they were going to do anyway.  It is a virtue which requires no work, no thought, no effort.

I have said before that tolerance is only a virtue if you are capable of judgement.  Compassion is the virtue of those incapable of judgement, and thus incapable of an actually moral tolerance.

Many complacent Europeans assume that compassion compels them to allow the current Muslim invasion.  Why?

When you apply actual energy to compassion, when you put thought into it, you realize that many people are involved in all situations.  In Germany, can they not feel compassion for their children, and their children?  Can they not feel compassion for the women of Germany, knowing that the Muslim invaders do not think women are full human beings, and that infidel women can and should be exposed to every atrocity possible?

Compassion without judgement is the moral sentiment of the decadent, who I have chosen to term Sybaritic Leftists.  Sooner or later they find themselves siding with evil. This is the inevitable consequence of abandoning culture, reason, decency, and the ability to think.

From the perspective of survival, traumatic dissociation can play an enormously valuable function: it shuts down the emotions until they can be processed.  We can survive using only our rational minds. We can go on when some part of us has been overwhelmed and shut down, even if it is at the cost of suppressing much of our vital life energy.

I am getting powerful, primary, what I tend to call antique feelings coming up, and at that age trying to keep contact with those feelings and keeping my sanity would have been impossible.  I wonder if some of the people who are driven mad by circumstances perhaps lack or have a substantially muted ability to dissociate.

And what I am realizing as well is that dissociation is like having an emotional vanishing cabinet–a place you can go where no one can find you.

I need to bring those feelings–that part of me–into the flow of my every day life.  The payoff will be vastly increased happiness and energy.  Some part of me wonders, though, if there is some way to keep that, just in case.  I suspect the answer is yes, since the pathway is known.  It is a door I can close, where I don’t visit any more, but which does not disappear.

It is perhaps unwise to step into wellness one foot at a time, but this is unknown territory, and I am taking my best guess.  That is all you can do.  Observe, orient, decide, act.

I am in the process of the final conquest of my fears.  During that process, it seems my need to post the processes of my inner life will diminish.  If I post less, that is why.  It is all good.  I have other irons in the fire as well.  I won’t disappear.  With luck and skill, I will transform, and come back a more skillful eagle.

As I continue my listening of Gibbon, my sense of trust in, belief in, and confidence in the values of, Christianity continues to plummet.  On his account, the first sack of the Library of Alexandria was by Christians, dedicated to eradicating Paganism.

Alaric was a Christian.

But more than anything I feel this sense from my own history of sin, of needing to beg forgiveness, for NOTHING.  If you accept Christian doctrine, you are born a sinner as a little baby, before you can smile, before you can babble, before you can crawl, and long, long before you can walk and talk.  In your very crib you have been judged and found wanting.

Catholics get around this–and I will stipulate as a general principle that their theology is light years ahead of, and vastly superior to their rivals, even if their actual practice and actual organization have been and continue to be filled with mediocre and even awful human beings–by baptism at birth.

But most people who are not Catholic are born sinners, in the view of Protestant Christians, and can only with difficulty get rid of this stigma.

Christianity was unique in human history to that point in its radical intolerance, its violence towards alternative practices and beliefs, and in the fear it was able to exert in the cause of avoiding eternal damnation.

Islam was a logical outgrowth of  Christianity.  It takes a basic idea–that those who have not been saved face eternal damnation–and builds on-going wars, ubiquitous fear, and an absolute sense of superiority, even in the very processes of taking slaves, raping women, marrying children, and killing their enemies and taking their possessions, which would normally be called theft..

I am realizing there can be eloquence in silence.  Sometimes you say a lot by saying nothing.

Everyone is stupid sometimes.  Some people are stupid most of the time, but everyone is a genius every once in a while.  To remain absolutely and consistently stupid, what are needed are dogma and fear.