Moderates United

http://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g298003-d2615522-r169527496-Pergamon_Asklepieion_and_Acropolis-Bergama_Izmir_Province_Turkish_Aegean_Coast.html#photos

I think I ended the last post with a positive vision, even if I have little faith that the nuts running our schools and media will stop being nuts because I asked them to.  [Best English accent: if you would be so kind as to stop fucking the planet up with your horrible ideas, unchecked emotional needs to interfere with other peoples lives, inability and unwillingness to learn, and functional economic incompetence–all while relentlessly accusing people like me of the same–I would be ever so grateful.]

Here is another.  A friend of mine posted a video of this marvelous complex in Turkey with which I had been unfamiliar, the Asclepion of Pergamum.  The Asclepion comes from Asclepius, from whom we get the caduceus, which is still a modern symbol of medicine.  Pergamum is the Roman city where it was.

It was a healing center, where among other things they had sleeping chambers where you would go to have dreams which it was hoped would provide the clue to curing whatever your ailment was.

What struck me was what we might call the ceremonial science, in which you would drink water thought to have healing properties, and then in my understanding walk a path between columns and through a tunnel into what I think were underground sleeping chambers.

Ritual and architecture, song and chant and music, ceremonies and images and sculpture: all can be evocative, and supportive of altered states of consciousness which are healing.  I think they knew, then, some things we have not yet rediscovered, about how to nourish and tend to the inner self, the spiritual self, and how then to integrate it back into the outer world.

And the image returned to me, which I shared a few years ago, of modern temples build using actual science.   There is no reason we could not study what they did then–and what various religions around the world do even today–and discover what value they provide, and eventually how they provide it.

We can and should develop a Science of the Sacred.  Complete psychospiritual integration should be a university level discipline, one which uses aspects of psychology, sociology, visual arts, music, architecture, literature, biology and biochemistry, neurology and neuroscience, and philosophy.  And whatever I forgot.

The task of learning to live with love and pleasure in this life, and learning how to properly enter the next, is really all that human life is actually about.  We have entered an age in which leisure COULD be nearly universal.  We have made slaves of our machines.  We can exist well with relatively little work, and without living on the backs of anyone, as most of the world has for most of history.

But we have to overcome bad ideas, stubborn, recalcitrant people, and the clinging to a past which is gone.  We have lost matter, and it is not coming back.  We are left with spirit in the middle of our science, but all too few want to admit it.

We need to admit it.  We need to tell this truth too.  We need to begin to build a world which is beautiful, not ugly; free, not confined; and genuinely liberal, open and honest.

There is a huge difference between saying “I know just what you need” and “How can I support you in your growth?”

One is a statement and one is a question.

One comes from me to you, and one asks you to come to me, if you choose to.

One assumes that person needs something–they may not–and the other asks if they need something in order to help them help themselves, which assumes that even if they could use something today, they may not tomorrow.

One creates a hierarchy of superior/inferior, and the other a relationship of equality and at least potentially friendship.

The former fosters growth in neither.  The person “giving” is not asking if what they are giving is needed, and the person getting it is either accepting it or refusing it.  In neither case is a conversation happening, and the mutual learning it would enable.

The latter fosters growth in both.  It encourages the person who is being offered help to ponder their own condition and ask themselves if they need to grow, and if so what might support it; and the person asking the question gets to learn something about the other person, possibly about themselves, and they get the pleasure, if they are a good person, of possibly seeing an increase in happiness and well being on the part of a fellow human.

The political parallels are obvious, but I will offer one concrete application: white leftists, if they were sincere about helping the poor and minorities, would ask: how can we help you help yourself?  And the poor and minorities would think it over, and provide answers of different sorts.  But they would speak in THEIR voice, about THEIR problems and concerns, and they would be listened to.

There is something fundamentally wrong that the most vocal–the most annoying, self righteous, and LOUD–supposed “protectors” of the poor and minorities in this country live in enormous mansions, attended Harvard or Yale or Princeton or Columbia, send their kids to private schools, and spend close to ZERO time trying to build the sorts of coalitions of ACTUAL community leaders with whom they might interface to get such questions answered.  Instead, they talk with people like Al Sharpton, whose first consideration is ALWAYS WIIFM: what’s in it for me?

And they paper over their failures with distraction campaigns.  What do you think the whole Trayvon Martin thing was?  Should we not have been more concerned that he had no future?  He was bound for jail, likely sooner than later.  He was extremely angry, likely prone to fits of despair he reacted to with violence and drugs, and I doubt very much he truly felt anyone loved him.  Both of his parents were likely self absorbed–victims of their own traumas–and emotionally unavailable.  He was an accident waiting to happen.

So was Michael Brown, who more or less committed suicide.  [in that regard, watch this video of a police shooting caught on camera.  He fires 8-10 rounds, all of which may have been on target, and the guy he was shooting was much smaller than Michael Brown.  They teach cops and soldiers, now, that where deadly force is required, to keep shooting until they stop moving.  I assume too many people were getting second chances that they used effectively. And this also appears to have been a suicide by cop, because the “gun” he pulled was a BB gun, although of course the cop had no way of knowing that.]

Should we not have been more concerned that Michael Brown felt he had nothing to live for, than that he chose to use a cop to commit suicide?

Should we not feel compassion for the countless young men like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin who live lives of despair, hopelessness, and fear?  Do we help the living by attacking the police for defending themselves and occasionally fucking up?  (the Officer In Charge at the Eric Garner arrest in my view clearly should have been fired, but inconveniently she was black).  Half the cops in the Baltimore case were black.  If they were “racist” was it a case of self loathing?  Of course not. The whole thing was bullshit.  Cops in Baltimore now are  afraid to do their jobs, and this is causing a massive increase in homicides.  Perhaps 100 people a year will die now because of the AgitProp campaign launched to protest the death of 1.  In common sense, using basic math, how is that an improvement?  How is that sane?  How can any person of genuine goodwill be other than appalled?

These propaganda narratives not only don’t help, in general they make things WORSE.  If white and black leftists were honest they would realize their internal dialogue goes something like “But, you know, fuck black people.  None of us know any without college degrees.”  There is no concern.  There is no respect.  There is no empathy and compassion.  Leftist react in a Pavlovian manner any time the bell is rung, and stop the moment the stimulus stops.  There is no thinking.  There is no reasoning.

Genuine respect and decency require sincere reflection, and sincere action which is oriented around visible results.  If you are not trying to, for example, see more smiling faces in the ghetto, more 2 parent families, and more kids eager to do their school work, then you are an asshole.  And you are not sincere.

And precisely because I am not a fucking hypocrite, I can’t say what the ghettos in particular need, but it does seem that a closer relationship with the police, and possibly even something like self policing–could we deputize men between the ages of 25 and 50?–might be beneficial.  The ability to own a gun to protect yourself decreases crime everywhere, so returning them that right–which was also revoked by Jim Crow–would be good.

Actually, I like this idea: if you put the kids who would be the criminals in charge of keeping the peace, provide them training and self respect, and an INCOME; crime would go down sharply, I suspect.  You could have a Harlem police force.  The police union being what it is, they would have to be a part of the overall NYPD–union leaders in general being self absorbed, self aggrandizing assholes–but the concept is good, I think.  You would exactly reverse the current motion.

School choice (vouchers and charter schools) would be wonderful, and is in fact in my understanding supported by substantially all members of the black community with whom the idea has been shared (that are not teachers, self evidently).

And the Left has never shied away from propaganda campaigns.  They are great at getting the word out about all the programs they put in place to buy black votes (and ameliorate to an almost imperceptible degree their actual poverty), so why not a campaign to marry the mother of your child?  Or better yet, a campaign to do the three things you need to do to get out and stay out of poverty: graduate high school and ideally college; not have a kid unless and until you are married; and work hard at your job.

Can you imagine “Work Hard” posters around the ghettos?  They would be called racist.  Why?  I don’t think blacks are intrinsically lazy.  Do you?  Honestly, I think THEY do.  It is the self image they have been taught implicitly to internalize. They are taught to wait for handouts from the earliest age, and the underlying assumption is that they aren’t able to fend for themselves.  It is white propaganda which has created this situation.  Working “like a nigger” used to mean you had three jobs.  Black unemployment in the 1950’s was lower than white unemployment.  Now people make racist jokes about work boots (in private, of course: actual racism is not diminished by being forced out of the open, but it is hidden).

Why?  Why has all this happened?  Because white leftists thought they knew what the poor and the blacks and everyone else needed.  They took simplistic ideas, failed to think them through systemically, and are even now so fucking self absorbed, smug, arrogant and complacent that they refuse to learn.  That, and of course there are de facto sociopaths like Hillary and Barack who literally don’t recognize the concept of “truth”, and who will say and do anything that furthers the elevation of their egos and personal interests.  Hillary would climb a pyramid of black slave backs to get to the White House, and then proclaim her profound commitment to the cause of black freedom, without batting an eye, or losing a moment of sleep.

I”m not a big fan of Amazon, for reasons partially but not entirely attributable to a general tendency of being irritable with large corporations.  I have some specific beefs with them too.

Having said all that, I really like Audible.com.  I was listening to Gibbon today in sheer delight.  It is a comfort and genuine pleasure to spend time with people who value the English language and treat it with craftsmanship and care.  I can remove myself fully from todays cares.

And I think I said this, but there really is a qualitative difference between LISTENING to a book, and reading it.  I greatly enjoy this man’s Queen’s English, and as Gibbon himself noted, “books” in the ancient world, at least Greece, were read aloud in groups and discussed.  The listening evokes a different part of the brain.  It is of utility over and above the ability to do it while driving.

If you change the medium, you change the message.  I’m still not sure what he meant with “massage”, although we can all guess, if we take pleasure in unexplicated ambiguity.

I have 127 hours of Gibbon I WILL traverse, then James Varieties of Religious Experience, Johnson’s History of the Jews, then Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

I am a one man nerd Army.  Fear me. Or at least get me something from the ice cream truck.  Here’s $2.56.  Hopefully that’s enough for a Bomb Pop.

We have been slowly going mad for quite some time: http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2015-07-08.html

We do not denigrate the citizens of any other country the rights to patriotism, and to looking out first and foremost for the people who were born there.  It is natural. It is human instinct.  And logically, if you have to prefer one group over another–if the interests of one group are by and large in direct conflict with those of another group–why do people on the Left choose the OTHER group?  They cannot actually support the rights BOTH of American born blacks and incoming Mexicans who are drawing from the same pool of benefits, and competing for the same jobs.  They speak of their “caring” for one group, and then of their “caring” for the other out of the other side, assuming as children do that Santa has an infinite amount of goodies, and that no one need EVER be told no.  It is the creed of imbeciles.

It is not a question of people being hurt.  There is not and never are solutions in which everyone benefits equally in situations of conflicting interests.  Either we deny some Mexicans the ability–they still do not have the right, and should never have this right, which they certainly do not grant anyone in their OWN country–to come here illegally and take advantage of all the things we have done well on this side of the border to make our economy so much better, and nation so much more just and prosperous; or we deny some Americans the rights to life and liberty, to jobs, and to the highest wages possible.

There is a continuum.  To say that too many illegals are here in this country is not to say there should be no immigration.  It is just to say that if Hillary gets elected and does even less than Barack to enforce the border, and half the country comes up here, everyone will suffer.  Mexicans will get a relatively better deal, since their country by and large seems to be a poor shithole filled with dishonest politicians and cops, and a citizenry that is all too happy to vote for people promising free stuff.  But what America WAS, it will be no more.  Poverty will increase, unemployment will increase, and crime will increase.  That will not be good even for the many millions of Mexican-Americans who did everything right; who are law abiding, hard working, pious and honest; who are an asset to our nation.

I have been feeling keenly this sense of unreality, the way I imagine Germany must have felt in the late 1920’s, at least to the sensitive.   Things were going well.  The economy was relatively good.  The hyperinflation was all gone.  But something wasn’t right.  There was something in the air.  All it took was a sharp economic downturn, and they got Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplin mustache, who they quickly learned to take seriously.

We have lost the ability to speak about, to negotiate, to consider, to bring out into the open, all issues of race and sexuality and gender and consider them honestly.  That this is an intended outcome of social propaganda does not make it any less odious.  Decent people, who should be open to discussion and compromise, are not.  I have to walk a line with friends who watch MSNBC, because I know that if I cross it too blatantly, they will likely not forgive me, because they will have to classify me as a thought criminal.  That is very vexing, and discomfiting.  It is, honestly, painful.  It hurts me to see that we have come this far from true Liberalism, and that this fact is seen by so few.

This is me trying to dial it down a tad.  The link is here: http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/trump-is-right-illegal-alien-crime-is-staggering-in-scope-and-savagery?f=must_reads


George Orwell once said that a principal duty of good people is to speak the truth in times of universal lies. 


To say that, for example, Obama simply released over 30,000 illegal aliens who had been convicted of crimes ranging up to rape and murder–which he did– is not to say the majority of illegal Mexican immigrants are not law abiding, genuinely decent people just trying to make better lives for their families. 


But a key difference is that whereas if they had been native born they would have REMAINED locked up, somehow under current policy the very fact that they are here illegally seems to be getting them special treatment. 


And for every criminal there is a victim: there is a mutilated body or psyche. This article lists the details of perhaps 60-70 crimes–which include things like raping and burying alive an 8 year old girl–and the overall pattern of much higher rates of crime appears unassailable demographically, even if it shouldn’t be true. 


But until we recover the ability to separate the politically inconvenient from the factual–until we tell the truth, no matter what it is–we will never be able to speak sensibly about anything, and most importantly, never be able to implement actually compassionate, actually sensible policy that works to help real people, and punish those who abuse the public trust.. 

My thinking is becoming more clear.  I reject moral ontology, which is a term by which I connote value statements such as “People ought to. . .”

I reject moralities which consist in Is-ness, which posit that some fact or other about human behavior is absolute and unchanging. I reject even positive ontologies, like “People ought to love one another.”

How could that be bad?  Well, have you ever been to a Baptist Church, and seen the fake smiles and the fake love?  They are commanded to love, so they conjure it up, even when they don’t feel it.

This is of course a cartoonish description which misses many realities.  But fakeness is one possibility I personally have often seen.

I have not put the words together, but how about Moral Motology, where Motology recognizes that what “is” is in constant motion, and which includes within it the notions of Emergence and Strange Attractors.

The system is not defined by what other people ought to do.  It is defined by what I choose to do and believe.  All definitions are approximate, and all behavioral expectations are approximate.  There is no law, merely tendencies.

Self pity is not easily defined or measured.

Perseverance can mean what you need  it to mean, anything from not killing yourself to always and invariably finishing everything you start.

Curiosity, too, is relative.

See, here is the thing: all of these things, practiced in any measure, will always tend to make people better.  They may go slow and they may go fast, but that will be the general direction in nearly all cases over time.  It assumes gradualness, and quiet growth.

And the burst of energy it enables is that you transition–or will tend to transition, if I have thought this through properly–from judging other people to helping them.  People become more focused on building happiness than enforcing behavioral codes.

In  its way, Socialism is very much an Old School moral ontology, one with important similarities to the worst judgmental tendencies of old religions.  It places nearly zero focus on building people up.  It’s focus is on tearing down.  It does not focus on building happiness, but on reducing misery.  It judges and judges and judges.  It judges everything that has worked in history and that works at the moment.

It is unpleasant.  No lasting beauty has ever evolved from a focus on ugliness.  At least, I don’t see how a tendency to hate evolves into a tendency to love.

And we need to be clear that there are Socialist equivalents to the fake church people.  They are the people who cry out racist 50 times a day, but have no thought through plan to help black people in this country live better lives.  They simply enjoy the ability to sit in judgement on others, because it makes them feel good.  Just the same as ugly church people, who love to condemn the sins, real or imagined, of their fellow church-goers.

The people who cry out racist really do think they are Holier-than-Thou, but they in fact are naked hypocrites.

It’s funny: after posting I was going to stop making posts, I had a spasm of posts.  There is some part of me that whenever I try to forswear something insists on focusing on it.

But things are getting better day by day.  I should be working more, but it has been a beautiful blessing, in the middle (as I hope) of my life, getting this time to simply allow things to percolate.

And I retain the hope that enough people read this that I have some influence.  It may be a foolish hope, but the fools have their roles to play too.

I may have told this story, but some years ago I was on a job site listening to a black guy and a white guy go at it, for hours–electricians, if memory serves.  The white guy would make jokes about you niggers, and the black would start making jokes about honkies and crackers and “stiff white folk”.  I listened to this for probably about ninety minutes, wondering if one of them was going to lose his temper.  Eventually, one of them said “It’s lunch time.  What sounds good?  The other said, “I don’t know, Subway?”  Sure. let’s do it.  And the way they did it told me that they were in fact good friends, and thoroughly enjoyed each others company.

Words are not weapons.  Sticks and stones break bones, but words do not.

I have great faith in the common people, in their common sense with regard to how to treat the people immediately around them, and in their ability to learn new and better ways of getting along.

What most people who hate need is simply contact.  They need to see the other people as they actually are, and see that they face the same problems, feel the same fears, have the same hopes, as we do.

And as I say obsessively, the TRUE hate in this country is not racist, or homophobic, or classist, but rather the hate that the Left feels for everyone who fails to conform to their view of how the world should work.

The creed of molly-coddling, as we might term the impulses underlying what I call Sybaritic Leftism is that of helicopter parenting.  And I read that, in fact, that is the style employed by most parents of the kids who attend our elite schools.

Helicoptering is great when children are very little.  It is great for someone to always be there.

But the helicopter has to move away, and eventually leave that child.  That child must make his or her own way in the world, and call back the helicopter when needed, but otherwise use the space created to build a sense of self, a sense of the world, and self respect and embodied integrity.

Children do not exist to meet our needs.

And blacks do not exist to meet the emotional needs of white do-gooders.  I am not calling them children, but one certainly cannot look at the bulk of black communities in this country and call them developed and functional.  What have they been taught to call for?  White do-gooders.

Oh, I know I shouldn’t say these things, but goddamn it what we are doing isn’t working, and it is creating a shitload of unnecessary pain, fear, sadness, and failure.

Who the fuck is still capable of telling the truth?  Too few.  Too few.

It occurs to me that the great power of propaganda is that it allies itself with the principle of entropy.  It appeals to peoples apathy, laziness, and fear.  Given a choice between hard thinking that is punished, and accepting a tailor made answer that is rewarded in a Pavlovian manner, most people without doing so consciously choose the latter.

You punish the dissidents and reward the obedient, and you make everything simple and absolutely black and white, so that the morality of any given position or policy is inherent, and unquestionable. It becomes painful for the thinkers to think in public, and very easy for people to choose the path of intellectual torpor and compliance.

These wheels, once set in motion, require very little effort.  The earliest Soviet propagandists/information warriors, started their work in this country in the 1920’s.

And the same thing applies to supposed intellectuals.  Even they in all too many cases take the easy routes.  The, as they supposed, dead ends they hit in philosophy, and the metaphysical pessimism necessitated by their on-going embrace of 19th century materialism, made any and all easy routes all too attractive.

That is all Leftism is: the easy route.  The path which foregoes thinking, the path which not only encourages groupthink, but more or less demands it.  You get tests where most of the answers are already filled in., and you get membership in a marvelous club which regularly regales you with praise as to how intelligent, insightful, and HUMANE you are.  And you get to indulge the hate which your protean self makes necessary regularly and to your fill, without guilt, and without any need to hide it.

I got to thinking about this: NOBODY call the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia the Confederate flag.  They call it the Rebel Flag.

We are told it is a “symbol of racism”.  But could we not ask the people who wear it, and hang it, and use it in their business advertising what it means to THEM?  No symbol has inherent meaning.  The Cross means many different things to many different people. Everyone interprets it in their own way, which is the great value of symbols: they are, to use acadamese, polyvalant.

Does it seem likely that all the people flying it intend by it that they hate blacks?  Some no doubt do.  It is most popular among rednecks.  But just as the Civil War was not fought PRIMARILY either to protect slavery or to end it, the flag which the largest army of the South used does not symbolize primarily racism.  Everyone was racist in 1865, by and large, including Lincoln.  The Europeans were just getting started with their many conquests in Africa, and the Muslim and tribal black slave trades continued unabated for a long time.  It was in general the arrival of the British or French that stopped it, and in point of fact slave trading continues today, in a number of African nations–where both the slaves and slavers are black–and in Malaysia, which is promising to stop just the way alcoholics do.

No, I would argue that the best guess as to what it means for most people who fly it is contained in this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjaqrL7Kzj8

White country Southerners are to white metrosexual leftists roughly what boobs are to virgins: terra incognita.  They don’t get them, and in the former case they don’t want to.

And if we can assume this guy is a dick to just about everyone he doesn’t know, what is wrong with that?  We call this a free country, and one of the most basic freedoms is to be left alone.  As he says, “I ain’t asking nobody for nothing, if I can’t get it on my own.”

This is precisely the great and signal flaw with Socialists: they can’t leave well enough alone.  They have to insist everyone both be within their system, and doing what they are told.

Shaw’s call for people to “justify their existence” and his call to create something like Zyklon B, is relevant here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBZsTf6oLfY

Shaw is CLEARLY what I call a Cultural Sadeist, but note the evenness of his tone, and his congeniality is discussing the murder of people he considers useless.

Charlie Daniels Long Haired Country Boy, and the flag that represents him, have no place in his world view, or planned totalitarian order.

I think the precise psychological flaw of Socialists is something I have already described: it is precisely a failure to psychologically individuate, to develop a healthy ego.  This failure makes them extremely unstable in their personhood and sense of who they are, and this drives them to force everyone else to make the same decisions they have made, to be like them.  And this, of course, does not create an ego either, but it shelters them from the Great Fear.

One of the things we learn from Complexity Theory is that diverse social orders are both robust and resilient.  They crash occasionally, but they fix themselves nearly instantly if allowed to.

A diverse natural order is any unspoiled natural area, filled with many flora and fauna.  A socialist equivalent is an apple orchard in which the very grass is pulled up, and all animals banished.  Apple orchards are for apples only, we would be told, or else they are not apple orchards.

Without a present you cannot have a future: you can only have a past.