Moderates United

I once sort of dated an Austrian woman–never got to home base–who told me of an assignment she once got, an essay.  The topic?  Freiheit: wovon?  Wozu? Freedom: from what?  To what?

It’s a good question.  I was just sitting here drinking whiskey (until it’s all light and happiness on here, don’t trust me when I say I’m going to stop; what pattern interrupted me tonight was this whole Syrian thing; my own boundaries, my ability to not care about what happens half a world away, are insufficiently developed), listening the wonderful voice of the lead singer of Hem (Sally Ellyson: I looked it up) and was thinking about these people who are OUTRAGED that most of the world still believes in gender stereotypes.  They want to be free from the assumption that you can believe ANYTHING reliably about someone about whom you only know she is a “woman” or a “man”.  They want freedom, freedom, freedom.

But this is freedom from.  What is it freedom to?  To act how you like?  Have women not been free to be castrating bitches since time immemorial?  Have men not been free, at least in certain classes, to behave effeminately?  Do you think American Indians or Australian Aborigines did not have occasional people who truly were “born that way”?  Not knowing otherwise, I assume the whole range of reactions was deployed, from full acceptance to exile or even death.  But in loosely bound societies cruelty is likely rarely practiced.  So I suppose, perhaps wrongly.

You cannot have a negative morality. You cannot have something worthy of the name which consists entirely in the things you cannot say, and the things–judge–that you cannot do.  A negative morality is a cage, and only the wingless can truly find a home there.

My conception of Goodness is positive.  The more happy you can be on your own, and the more pleasure you can take from the successes and happiness of others, the “gooder” you are.  It is progressive, but in a way which is built on feeling, and concrete accomplishment.  It is a HUGE accomplishment being able to be happy with little, and alone.  It is a HUGE accomplishment taking as much or more pleasure in the success of others–particularly strangers–as in your own.

These PC police: they are mean and sad, and only distract themselves from it with the ostensible passion of their cause, sex, drugs, music, and that most powerful anti-anxiolytic: actual emotional detachment through convoluted intellectualism.

https://youtu.be/7GEaaxtTQ_4https://youtu.be/7GEaaxtTQ_4

It seems a high percentage of these “refugees” are young men of exactly ISIS age.  You watch this video, and you cannot help but feel he is strutting at how successful their brazen attempts to get invited into a society they hate have been.

It seems to me that these young men are intended as a sort of yeast to talk to, to recruit, to radicalize the large Islamic populations in all the countries they are going to.  There are ALREADY places in Germany and France where white people just don’t go.

Many of these young men have likely participated in beheadings, crucifixions, rape and pedophilia.  They have killed people at close range and laughed about it.

And the goal would not be to start terror attacks right away, or even in the mid-term.  Their goal is to tell stories at the coffee shops in Muslim neighborhoods, to be the heroes, the cool kids.  Their goal is to continue the already powerful momentum in the direction of complete Islamic dominance of Europe which Mark Steyn wrote about 4-5 years ago.

The Europeans are effete, decadent, sentimental.  They LOVE having the opportunity, in their comfortable lives, to “make a difference”.  But these sadistic savages do not want a love fest.

The ability to call evil evil is the salient difference between a true Liberal and a Sybaritic Leftist.  As I said in my essay, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking out pleasure and comfort and stability.  But it erodes the capacity for setting boundaries, for asserting rightful claims, for defending oneself in the face of opposition.  The tacit sentiment dominant among the Sybarites is that no hard choices EVER have to be made, and that being nice is ALWAYS the best policy. This is stupid.  Some conversations need to start with a kick in the teeth.

You might wonder how someone who speaks of love can say something like that.  Simple: I am thinking of all the English girls getting gang raped right now by much older Muslim men.  I am thinking of the headless corpses of innocent people these people left rotting in the sand, and all the crosses erected to punish those who in theory pray to the same God, and recognize the same prophets and teachers, all but one.

You have to look at the whole picture.  There is nothing wrong with getting angry with sadistic rapists and murderers.  Quite the contrary: if you are incapable of it, something is wrong with you.

This is a good phrase.  Pattern interrupt.

It occurs to me that everything everyone does every day is rational, IF you understand the questions being asked.  Self destructive behavior–an issue with me–is rational if you assume that failure was inevitable, and that every small failure prevents a much bigger and more painful one.

It is logical to surrender your boundaries, to let people walk all over you, if you assume that you are inferior and they superior.

The essence of cognitive psychology is identifying and tracking these thought patterns, and disrupting them by challenging the base assumptions, which themselves are typically rooted in a mythic, deeply emotional hurt of some sort, either by omission or commission, usually a bit of both.

I tend to privilege the emotional work, but clearly both are appropriate.  How you think affects how you feel, and obviously vice versa.

I enjoyed this obituary: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Remembering-Robert-Conquest-8204

I will note as well that I grant the label Liberal to anyone still capable of calling evil evil, and am quite willing to negotiate/debate policy specifics.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with government programs to relieve poverty.  My contention is simply that they always fail–relative to what would have been possible–that they always make things worse in the long run, and that the same work can be done better in other ways.

But I am open to counter-arguments.  My willingness to listen is in my view what makes me a Liberal, and on the other side, the willingness to make those arguments, without demonizing  and hating me simply for disagreeing with that day’s propaganda, is what would characterize a genuinely Liberal opponent.

Conquest was the British version of a Democrat for many years, and in that time he showed the evils of the Soviet regime.  He was forced by the regressive march of his party to the Left to transition to ardent support for Margaret Thatcher, without changing his fundamental beliefs all that much.

In the same vein, I would suggest that Donald Trump might not have all the traits we would like to see, but he is a damn sight better than anyone who will be running against him.

It occurs to me that given that attacks on Trump frequently backfire, option B might be backing anyone but him, which in this case would most notably be Ben Carson.  I like Ben Carson, and view him as trustworthy.  I just don’t know if he will make it through the meat-grinder.

Our politics is owned by a left wing radical elite, who make speaking common sense virtually impossible.  They need to be bitch-slapped back to 1917, and forced to begin telling the truth to keep their jobs.

It occurs to me that addiction is a rational approach to the solution of a real problem, that of social isolation caused by unresolved trauma. It is rational, because it WORKS.

The problem is that, as a solution, it can also exacerbate social isolation, to the point where the addict who has to decide who his or her actual best friends are–the people they know, or the magic potion which deadens their pain.  If they choose the latter, they die.  If they choose the former, they go into what is called “recovery”, but which is really just a system of damage mitigation.  It is remission, not cure. It is management.

It seems to me you can really only call an “addict”–again, someone who used a rational means to solve a real problem, even if that means is not socially acceptable, because the truth of trauma is not something we allow to be discussed publicly, properly–“cured” when they have found some intrinsic energy flow, some inner part of themselves, which creates an even more positive energy than they were able to get with their chosen pain management system.

To cure addiction, logically, then, you have to find ways of increasing positive emotions, particularly in social environments.

We have very, very poor means of doing this, compared to the past.  What do you think the Native American drumming circles were?  In tribal cultures the world over they have means of altering their consciousness to induce positive energies. How do we do it?

Addiction, by and large.

http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/09/05/gulf-states-refuse-to-take-a-single-syrian-refugee-say-doing-so-exposes-them-to-risk-of-terrorism/

Few read history, fewer still remember it, and all but a few fail to learn and remember the LESSONS of history.  History is really our best laboratory for discerning cause and effect, what happens when you do X and what when you do Y, in circumstance Z.

We know, for example, that the best of intentions can and often have led to disastrous outcomes.

In 1948, the UN declared Israel a nation.  Immediately every neighbor they had invaded.  Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt all sent their armies in to crush the Israelis–contrary to international law and intention, to be clear.

In what can only be called a miracle, one born of the desperation of having just had 6 million members of their “tribe”, I will call it, slaughtered–in perhaps not the largest mass murder in history, which is filled with them, but certainly the first to apply modern science to the process–the Jews prevailed.

This war created many refugees.  Some, but not all, Muslim Arabs left the nation.  Those who stayed remain citizens of Israel, with more guaranteed rights than are afforded any other comparable group of Arabs living in largely Arab nations.  They have more rights, say, than they would in Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Tunisia, or Algeria.  This, despite the fact that some rights are still denied them.

Most of the refugees, if I recall correctly, went to Jordan.  They caused trouble, and many if not most got kicked out.  Then they went to Lebanon, and caused trouble there, too.  Eventually, they were given effective control of the West Bank–formerly a part of Jordan, and captured in a war with that nation–and the Gaza Strip, itself also taken in war with Egypt.

Many of them, 67 years later, still live is these refugee camps.  Nobody wants them because they cause trouble, and everyone in the Arab world knows this.  If they wanted peace with Israel, all they would to do is honestly lie down their weapons.  They refuse to do this, despite the impossibility of a military victory of any sort.

It seems to me that many European nations are likely indulging in a fatal kindness.  These groups, in the numbers they are emigrating, are well positioned to cause major problems, likely beginning nearly immediately, and that is the case even before you factor in that ISIS has already SAID that it fully intends to use this crisis to foment and commit acts of violence against virtually all of humanity.

Some poetic seasoning for your day.

Given that he was the only major public figure to talk about the birth certificate other than Joe Arpaio, that I can recall, I wonder if Trump, especially as a native New Yorker, could be persuaded to revisit 9/11, and all the lies and half truths that have been told about it ever since.

It is at least possible.

Asking him to understand the Fed is likely too much, but again, he is willing to hold controversial opinions, so maybe.  A cabal of bankers controlling the amount and price of money for their own profit: what could go wrong, right?  It’s not like they can write their own banks checks for $10 billion a month, right?  It’s not like they sit at a desk at the Fed in the morning and decide to gift money to, say, Chase Bank, then walk across the street and decide how to spend it, right?

Wait, they can do that?

Yes, they can.  People are fucking idiots.   Fucking, fucking idiots.  NOBODY major other than Ron and Rand Paul are even attempting to deal with this.

It is interesting to speculate if the person who told the truth about his intentions in South Vietnam had won, rather than the person who lied about them; if the person who would have prosecuted the war honestly had beat the person who drew the wrong lesson from Ia Drang.

We would have won in Vietnam, albeit in a different, more direct way than we eventually did (prior to forfeiting in 1974).  We might have invaded the North or even nuked them.  Most likely–and we are talking 1965 here–the credible threat to do so would have ended their incursions, and HUGE amounts of life would have been saved.

The Soviets would have done a lot of huffing and puffing, but even though propagandists lie for a living, that does not mean they do not know what the truth is, and the truth is that that war was ALWAYS, from the outset, an invasion by the Communist north of the non-Communist South.  They know it is not OK to invade other nations.

We would not have had the Great Society or War on Poverty, although we might possibly have gotten Civil Rights legislation of some sort, but not as encompassing as what was passed.  People forget that Goldwater was an early and enthusiastic civil rights advocate, and that he founded the Arizona chapter of the NAACP.

Nobody would have tried to save the blacks or poor.  They would have continued to be forced to advance on the legs of their own effort, own ingenuity, own persistence.  And they would have advanced, in fits and steps.  They would have continued growing, integrating, becoming middle class.

They would have continued to encounter racism in the South, but this would have forced them to become so good, so well educated, that they either could not be denied, or were readily accepted elsewhere.  Characters like that of Sidney Poitier in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” would have become common, even expected.

Over some period of time of determined effort, had it happened, all the old “truths” of institutional racism would have fallen away, and blacks understood and welcomed as equals.

A growing economy would have raised all boats.

And when you get to things like the Oil Shock, and Iran, and stagflation, you have to go back ten years and wonder how things might have played out differently.

It appears the PLO was created by the KGB, so the entire military history of that region has to be understood from the basis of the Soviets operating largely unopposed in their propaganda and organizing.  A stiff defense, and following victory, in Vietnam–and everyone understood even then this was a proxy battle for who was the more convincing and reliable ally–would have greatly diminished their recruiting efforts.  We might not have seen terrorism grow to the extent it did.  The coup in Iran, if the situation had even been allowed to get to that point, which seems doubtful, would have failed.

We would not have seen the slaughter in Cambodia and Vietnam and Laos that happened.  There would have been no labor camps and no psychological torture camps.  The war in Afghanistan likely would not have happened, or in Angola, or Ethiopia.

The Oil Shock likely would not have happened. As far as stagflation, I cannot speak to what the Fed would have done.  They were largely uncontrolled even then, and following their success in getting the last vestiges of control removed, COMPLETELY free and unaccountable as of roughly 1980.

In short, a lot of good things would have happened.  Slow progress does not make headlines, but seemingly neither does slow decline.