Moderates United

And I understood in an instant the emotional appeal of materialistic Scientism: a core stipulation is that emotions are not real.  When you are hurt, and hurting, that is not real.  It is atoms in motion, or so it can be thought.

The alternative is that feelings do exist in some spiritual way, that they are out there somehow, and that they do not have an Off switch, that they must be walked through, as through a room filled with veils that prevent you from even seeing where you are going, where logic is of no use, and only motion can carry you through and direct you.  You cannot see the end of the journey.  You cannot see the end.  You are without triangles and squares, and the Pythagorean theorem has taken acid and dissolved into rainbow-hued water and disappeared laughing down a drain.

The orientation in emotion, must come from emotion.  It is a world in itself with its own logic, and whose mastery is a skill that is quite beyond anything that could be captured and frozen in a book, of any sort.

The moral logic as it exists today, it seems to me, is an artifact of a period before birth control, before legal protection for many women’s rights, and before the viability of women raising children on their own.

It seems a certainty that the overwhelming majority of the some 90,000 black babies–I just happen to know this statistic–aborted every year were not the result of rape or incest.  They were not the result of an abusive, controlling husband who insisted she had to get pregnant.  It seems likely most of them are the result of the heat of passion, and an indifference to pregnancy, which is to say an indifference to the life of a prospective child, combined with easy and cheap access to abortion.

We have been conditioned not to view fetuses as human, but at what cost?  We had a miscarriage with my wife’s first pregnancy, and she was an emotional wreck.  She cried all day after she went in for a D and C, as they call it.  I myself dreamed I met that child once: it was another girl, and she was quite wonderful.

All of the beautiful things in life come from sensitivity, from caring, from connection, from openness and receptivity.  All of the bad things, from closing down, shutting down, detaching, disengaging.

Is it not worth asking an open question as to whether or not babies are such a wonderful possibility that MAYBE, just maybe, their lives should be treated with some measure of kindness and respect? Maybe not by force of law.  Maybe not by banning abortion. But by pointing out that a great evil is being committed, and no one wants to admit it or even talk about it outside of the people who have been in shock since 1973.

Is that insanity to suggest that, that maybe we have been coarsened by all this, rendered less feeling, less open, less beautiful?  Or is it insanity pretending that treating them like meat is perfectly acceptable?  Why NOT eat them?  It is the next logical step, considering that they are not human and that we are supposed to treat all our impulses towards compassion and protection as inherently ideologically flawed.

I have almost entirely given that up, but find myself engaging with someone who just won’t stop, who I am suspecting has a more than superficial interest in the topic, that of 9/11 Truth.  I think he is a paid or volunteer propagandist.  Why, I don’t know.

But I wanted to comment that I think I understand why I developed that strategy.  The Left’s basic approach is to be annoying, to deal in personal attacks, and overall to wear you down such that you do some combination of lose your cool–so they can portray you as irrational and anger-prone–and simply stop engaging.

The only way, emotionally, I ever found to deal with that was to stay in the discussion on the level of reason that mattered, but to trade punch for punch, low blow for low blow, so I did not feel a sense of helpless rage.  I wasn’t helpless.  And I always remained on topic, and always offered rational, fact based arguments, presented as articulately and as simply as I could.

And I will say that this strategy is important for anyone who is going to go 15 rounds with professional agitators, liars, and propagandists.  Donald Trump may lose popularity, he may not be even a remotely good ideas as President, but he will not run out of energy.  He is giving more than he is taking.  That, in my view, is psychologically important.

Then major drug episodes, emotionally unhealthy sex, general weirdness and provocation.  This is a generic left wing script, attacking traditional values, and large corporate giants.

And here is a point I have made many times, but perhaps not explicitly: if I were a member of the power elite, I would fund attacks on the power elite. I would pay people–perhaps indirectly, as it works even better if people are sincere–to go out and publicly denounce the man, publicly denounce corporations and corporate profits and the “1%”.  I might in fact have created that meme. It’s very useful.

Because here is the thing: most people are too fucking stupid to separate rhetoric from reality.  You could be killing babies with one hand and kissing them with the other, and if you only talk about the one, nobody will notice the other. You can literally make vast profits denouncing vast profits.  You can get your people elected on promises of transparency and responsibility to the people.  You can start wars in the name of preventing wars.

But by creating an apparent opposition, people assume there actually IS an actual opposition.  I would have funded Occupy Wall Street.  Does that sound evil, devious and wrong?  Of course: but these people think in terms of efficacy, not morality.

Do you think Obama has not done every damn thing Wall Street asked him to?  Of course he has.  If I had been a Wall Street banker I would have paid people to denounce the Wall Street Reform Act, because that would have made it look like a bad deal for them.  It was in fact a great deal–and why not?  They wrote it.

Thinking is not something one person in 100 does effectively, not even among people paid to think, paid to understand for a living.

The great transformation TV has enabled is that reality has become what the TV says it is.  Image is everything.  I think when people read, or even listened to their news, there was still a thinking brain engaged.  Now, the TV–or digital equivalent–does everything for you.  One of my advantages is that I literally go years without watching a newscast of any sort.

But I’m like most Americans in my sentimentality towards animals.  I talk to my dog, and feel like she understands in her dog way some of what I’m saying.  I hate hearing about cruelty to animals.  Hunting and fishing hold no appeal for me.

At the same time, we need to remember that personally slaughtering their own meat was a way of life for a great many Americans perhaps as recently as 50 years ago.  I remember my grandmother kept chickens, and would periodically go out back, catch one, swing it by the neck a few times, then pluck it and cook it.  They kept a pig, and would slaughter it when it got fat enough.  They were familiar with blood, and the innards of animals, and didn’t think twice about it.

Theodore Roosevelt was a famous big game hunter. He loved shooting lions and elephants and whatever else presented itself.  Hunting was within perhaps the past 75 years a very patrician sport, and the owner of my company still goes away several times a year to shoot geese, or ducks, or to fish salmon.

We read, perhaps a weeks ago, that some famous lion none of us had heard of until that point had been killed by an American, who has since been identified, and forced into hiding.  His head was cut off, and the meat apparently given to the villagers, as required by law in Zimbabwe.

For their part, the Zimbabwe’ans are apparently completely confused:

“Are you saying that all this noise is about a dead lion? Lions are killed all the time in this country,” said Tryphina Kaseke, a used-clothes hawker on the streets of Harare. “What is so special about this one?” 

The truth is, most locals in Zimbabwe actually look forward to the big game hunts that Westerners engage in, as the high price tag for the hunts means money pumped into the local economy, not to mention the meat from such hunts is required by law to be given to local tribes and villages. 

“Why are the Americans more concerned than us?” said Joseph Mabuwa, a 33-year-old father of two. “We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange.” 

Lions and other large animals are typically viewed as dangerous by the local population, and if these animals are not hunted, their populations will explode and bring about all sorts of other issues, like rampant disease and increased attacks on people.

No American I know of has ever feared being attacked by a lion. In our world, they are by definition confined, since they only happen in zoos and circuses.

And I think animals are the recipients of all sorts of psychological projections.  They are presumed innocent, where we are all fallen.  They are presumed worthy of life, where I think many people think many of us deserve death.

Cecil was an animal who every day of his life sought to hunt down and kill another animal.  Lions are clearly noble, beautiful, admirable animals.  But they are, like all predators, serial killers in the animal kingdom.  We live in such a crazy world that some people feed their dogs and cats vegetarian food, and don’t realize that cannot possibly be good for them.

Now, I want to be clear that it seems to me this dentist has a sadistic, violent streak in him, but this is not unusual.  Zimbabwe is ruled by a man likely much worse in every respect than this dentist, and nobody gives a shit about him, or the hell he has created trying to engineer yet another Socialist Paradise.

Nobody gives a shit about the 1.2 million Africans who died of AIDS last year, or the 13,000 killed in Nigeria, Central African Republic and South Sudan last year.  1 million people were displaced by war in Nigeria alone, and I doubt one person in 100 on the street could find Nigeria on the map, or tell you ONE fact about it.

It is not the case that every story has two sides, but some do.  I do not fault the people who are enraged with this dentist, but I also do not fault people I KNOW who hunt elk and bison and deer.  It’s not my thing, but it is a violent world, and we all die.

It has long seemed to me that animal rights activists particularly seem to be highly misanthropic.  Their love of animals is balanced by their hatred of humanity.  When I was at Cal the most violent, craziest demonstrations by far were from PETA.

Every day the world over, countless millions or billions of fish are eaten by other fish.  Billions of insects are eaten by birds, who are often eaten by other birds.  Rodents are scooped up by hawks, and bird eggs eaten by snakes.  Millions of cattle and pigs and chickens are slaughtered every day, and run through efficient factories to wind up in plastic trays in our grocery stores.

I understand misanthropy, but I also understand compassion.  This is a very confusing world, and it is worth regularly trying to look at it from new angles.  I have many answers, but I always remain willing to ask myself if they are the right answers, and I always put out a place-setting at my Table of Knowledge for uninvited but welcome strangers.

Post Script/Edit: I wonder if we might see in the outrage over the killing of Cecil some measure of the number of people who secretly would like to strangle someone. It has long been my observation that people who are obsessed with compassion often harbor latent and not always well hidden animosities, angers, spites,and violence.

We will forget about poor Cecil soon enough.  All of us but the dentist, whatever his name is.  This is going to be a life changing nightmare for him.  Does he deserve it?  Not my call to make.  I’m going to forget about him.  Killing him won’t bring Cecil back, but it will demolish a source of income in a poor nation, and nobody is going to care about them, or any of the lions they themselves kill in self defense or even hunger.

I do think this: this is a referendum on how many people would secretly like to strangle someone.  I think the capacity to read people’s minds would be profoundly traumatizing.

The accounts of the collapses of those two buildings are also ridiculous.  I focus on Tower 7 simply because it did not have the complicating factor of having something crash into it. 

At root, the question is simple: was a crime committed which was larger than that 4 planes were hijacked and crashed?  Specifically: is the government’s account of the collapses of World Trade Centers 1, 2 and 7 plausible?

And I would like to draw an analogy.  If someone stumbles across a dead body with stab wounds in it, do we need to establish what sort of knife was used prior to considering it a murder or suicide?  Do we need to know if the perpetrator was left handed or right handed, educated or uneducated?  Do we need a motive?  Do we need the knife itself?  Do we need to know exactly when and how it happened?  Of course not.

In the entire history of modern building–let us call it 85 years or so, dating from the opening of the Empire State Building–only three skyscrapers have gone through complete collapses, all of them on 9/11.  A particularly annoying person I have been going back and forth with–the word debate would imply a level of sincerity he quite obviously does not possess–cited the McCormick Place fire.  This is not relevant, as McCormick Place was not a skyscraper, was filled with highly flammable material and no sprinklers, and did not undergo a complete collapse.  The roof collapsed, and the building was rendered unusable, but did not collapse entirely, or instantly, as did all three WTC buildings.  It was a progressive fire, whose reach could be and was watched by helpless firefighters.

Further, this collapse happened in 1967, and influenced national building codes.  WTC7 was not opened until 1987, 20 years later, and can be safely assumed to have incorporated the lessons learned.

With regard to Sight and Sound Theater, the fireproofing for the steel supports had been removed, and it was by design only reinforced on the sides by metal beams.  By design, the middle of the building included no structural supports.  There was no forest of beams in the core reinforcing one another as was the case with all three WTC buildings. It is not a comparable case.

Here are comparable cases: http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/compare/fires.html

Here is a partial listing of major high-rise fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_fire

It is indisputably the case that there have been a number of fires which have burned on more floors, longer, and not even brought on partial collapse.  9/11 is unique.  All three collapses of skyscrapers that have ever happened, happened on that day.

And here is is worth doing some detail level analysis.  The way steel frame skyscrapers are built is metal I-beam are bolted together, then in most cases welded.  There are horizontal connections, and vertical connections.  Wherever there is a “joint” fire-proofing is sprayed. No fire can get within 4-6 inches of a welded, bolted joint.

This construction is, quite obviously, DESIGNED to withstand fires.  You could build a bonfire around one of these beams, using anything you might find in an office, roast marshmallows, sing campfire songs. and have NO worry that anything would happen to it.  The flame cannot reach the beam, or the joint, and it cannot loosen bolts, burn through welds, and cannot come close to melting steel.

Even though their final conclusion is farcical, we can use the work of NIST to rule out certain conjectures about the collapse particularly of Tower 7.   We can assume, for example, that they found no evidence that fuel from the backup generators at the electrical substation played a role.  If there were any evidence, they would have brought it forward.  We can assume that they found no evidence that the falling debris from the collapse of the other two World Trade Centers played a role.  What holds a building like this up is the core supports, and the gashes were superficial.  If there has been any merit to this claim they would have mentioned it.  We also would have seen an asymetrical collapse, like a tree being felled.  If this collapse was off vertical, as some claim, it was only by a few degrees and that can easily be explained as imperfectly synchronized beam cutting.  Some bending is seen in even acknowledged controlled demolitions.

We can, in fact, conclude, that they could find no explanation other than the one they provided, EXCEPT that of explosives, which on their own account they did not look or test for, and which we can therefore was excluded from consideration at the outset, for unknown reasons.

We can and should conclude that only two hypotheses remain standing: explosives, and what NIST claims caused the collapse.

And what do they claim?  That a single supporting beam, in a forest of beams, was loosened by being exposed for eight hours to the combustion of office furnishing, to the extent that it gave way, and that this led, within 6 seconds, to the initiation of a general collapse of the entire 47 story building, a collapse that began in absolute free fall, and slowed little in the ensuing few seconds it took to complete.

I would like to examine this story in some detail.  Here is their official report: http://www.nist.gov/el/disasterstudies/wtc/faqs_wtc7.cfm

They say that “Debris from the collapse of WTC 1, which was 370 feet to the south, ignited fires on at least 10 floors in the building at its south and west faces. However, only the fires on some of the lower floors—7 through 9 and 11 through 13—burned out of control.”


Then: “The heat from the uncontrolled fires caused steel floor beams and girders to thermally expand, leading to a chain of events that caused a key structural column to fail. The failure of this structural column then initiated a fire-induced progressive collapse of the entire building.

As I have said often, minimum wages can only be set at, below, or above prevailing market wages for that job, for that person’s level of capability.  If set at or below the wage that business was already willing to pay, it does nothing.  It is literally the case that ONLY when it is disadvantageous to, particularly, small businesses, does the minimum wage matter.

But here is the thing: I am making an economic, which is to say a practical, argument; socialists are making a MORAL argument.  They are saying that even if wages are retarded in the long run and unemployment increased substantially, that it is still wrong to pay someone less than X, however they determine X.

John Ruskin made this argument over 100 years ago, in Unto This Last.  He said that it didn’t matter if it increased unemployment or hurt business, but that certain minimums had to be paid, because even if he couldn’t be bothered to answer for the consequences of his actions, he could be made to answer for his intent.  He was very nearly that blunt.

As I keep saying, this is shitty, imbecilic, childish, irreponsible logic.  IF YOU CARE ABOUT PEOPLE, you care about making things as good as possible for as many as possible.

I don’t care if the average starting wage is $100/hour one day, with today’s buying power.  That would be great.  I have no objections with regard to, and every possible positive sentiment concerning, increases in material wealth and earning power, generalized across all classes.  We need to go beyond that, but I think we need to go through it, first, as a whole, as a people, as communities.