Moderates United

I have finally learned how to be an adequate pirate captain.  I got the Elite Ram, after some difficulty, and have taken on some ships even the game told me not to. I’m pretty much a big deal.

And I had to laugh today when it hit me that I can’t self sabotage myself now.  Unlike life, The game only goes forward.  I would have to start a new game, and the whole deal with self sabotage is it has to be plausibly deniable.  No one says “OK, now I’m going to fuck things up royally.”  No, they just DO it, then either wonder what the fuck just happened, or KNOW what the fuck just happened, depending on their self awareness.

Then I got to thinking about Complexity Theory and Dancing landscapes.  Here is the thing with life: you have never “made it”.  You could be the blanking-est, blanking-est, and blanking-est (pick what you want: richest, most powerful, sexiest, most handsome, coolest) person in the world, and you will still die.  You will still lose, or at least undergo, to my understanding, a phase transition.

And of course most of us are never blanking-est anything.  And I look and see that the only way I can plan to avoid self sabotage is to develop the contrary habit of daily growth. It is not enough to try and avoid it.  I have to get at the roots of it, and the way to do that is to GO THROUGH all the things that stand in the way of planned growth; to learn to walk steadily and confidently in a direction I have actually consciously chosen.

More generally, it seems to me if you are not growing, you are being left behind.  That is the lesson of the Dancing Landscape.  And I don’t mean economically, or at least not only.  I simply mean that you are falling behind the learning that COULD have happened if you had chosen it as a daily activity.

If you are not growing, you are shrinking.  I think that is a useful principle.

The other deep lesson of Assassin’s Creed is this: as a pirate in the Caribbean in the early 18th century I deal with a lot of British and Spanish.  The game is quite violent, and most ships I take wind up being sunk, and all aboard, with few exceptions, implicitly killed.  Believe it or not, it sometimes makes me sad, watching all the carnage, because I know these things really happened.

But more generally it got me to thinking that there really was no moral difference between the pirates and the conquistadors and imperialists.  What does a pirate do?  He shows up, shoots everyone who resists, and steals your stuff.  What did the British do in their colonies?  They showed up with guns, shot everyone who resisted, and said they were in charge and you now owe us taxes.  They took slaves for a long time.  In 1710 or so (I think that’s where we are in the story) they were still shipping Irish slaves to the Caribbean and “breeding” them with African slaves to make the children more valuable.  I’m sure you can imagine what those scenes might have been like.  These were the British, the ones we like to think of as the good guys, who all have charming accents and a marvelous and droll sense of humor.

And I think that none of these people were innocent.  Very few, at any rate.  Pirates were perhaps the most honest ones.

I do feel as well, though, that one must be very careful with this whole hypocrisy argument.  I recently listened to Hunter Stockton Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”, and felt strongly that what I was listening to was Cultural Sadeism, and it caused me to make some alterations to my theories.  I’m still processing and will post on that later.

For now, I wanted to point out that Thompson no doubt rationalized his sundry crimes as “at least not hypocritical”.  They were honest crimes, and he admits to them.  Sade, too, found the only crime to be hypocrisy.  What is the moral value of the charge of hypocrisy for such people?

It is this: they can distract others from their crimes by accusing everyone else of them, without ever articulating a morality.  Saul Alinsky, of course, was a Cultural Sadeist and palled around with literal gangsters (remember Mackie Messer/Mack the Knife winds up allying with the protagonists in the Three Penny Opera).  Everyone else was awful, he said.  Why?  They were HYPOCRITES.

Bait and switch, that is all.  Look over there, he says, while he picks your pocket.  Nothing meaningful has been said, and awful things left unjustified because unjustifiable.

One more thing: I think the phrase “psychologically harmful” could be substituted usefully for “immoral”.  This is the crux of my argument.  And there is no need to add “socially harmful”.  If an individual knows something is socially harmful and does it anyway, this is psychologically harmful, even if that person is so far gone the added injury is invisible.

Someone has no doubt come up with this term, but it’s new to me.

I was reading about efforts to implement Sharia courts in, of all places, Irving, Texas.

Sharia is misogynistic.  Women are not treated equally, or even, to a great extent, decently.  Men can legally beat their wives.  They can marry and rape 9 year old girls.  They can rape any woman who is not a Muslim.  This is legal.  Not considered wrong.  Neither is slavery.

And I got to thinking about the psychodynamic roots of all this.  What is the psychological condition of Muslim women?  They are kept apart from men, not allowed (in most traditional societies) to be educated, not allowed to live independently, not allowed opinions, by and large, although I assume Muslim women, like all women, find ways to have their say.

There is something traumatizing about all this.  One can assume, I think, that most Muslim women know someone who has been beaten, and know it can happen to them too, and there will be nothing they can do about it.  Even in America we have had quite a few honor killings.

How do such women deal with the latent anger and rage, and fear, and humiliation?  Well, in part they likely internalize it, the same way that battered women refuse to put their batterers in jail, and stay with them, knowing it will happen again.  They rationalize the Hijab and restrictions on their movement and education as someone appropriate.

But they have access to little boys, and little boys can be punished.  They can be made to feel fear.  They can be humiliated.  They can be hurt.  Yes, these are their own children, but surely most of these mothers must feel some ambivalence, looking in the eyes of their men in their children?

Obviously, there are many happy homes, and many good mothers.  But I would argue that this outcome is made much, much less likely the more seriously the men take the fundamental contempt for women which pervades their holy text, and accounts of the deeds of its author.

Separate but equal, I think we can all agree, is not equal at all; and most Islamic apologists are being excessively generous even in granting equality in principle.  Women are a step below, maybe two.

I used the term Rosebud, or Rosebud moments from time to time.  The meaning should be clear enough to all who have seen Citizen Kane, but I thought I might clarify a tad.

All of us carry within us “moments” which are primitive, childish, and of vast, existential importance. I  was reading the other day that Sartre’s parents divorced, and if memory serves (the details don’t matter) his mother remarried when he was 12.  Somewhere in there was a childish need that was not met.  He was crying with every ounce of his being for something–for maternal love, for his father, for a return to how things used to be.  But his cries went unheard.  His needs went unmet.

And what do you do with such things?  What did our portrait of William Randolph Hearst do?  He carried on.  He put it behind him, so he thought.  He suppressed it.  What good does keeping fucking hurts in your fucking memory fucking do?  Fuck it.

But here is the thing: they don’t go away until we own them, not really.

Christ taught both that we should be as children, and as wise as serpents.  Both.

Here is my emerging view: anyone unable to access the spirit of a child likely has major unresolved Rosebud moments.  Anyone STUCK in childishness, likewise.  You have to be able to move back and forth.  You have to be capable of what I will call “appropriateness”.  This is a very Taoist term in the sense I am using it. It is mutable, and its exact meaning will vary constantly.

All stupidity, repeated long enough, must be regarded as intentional.

Those who want to learn, do.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/knights-templar-maps-plan-fight-130000317.html?soc_src=mediacontentstory&soc_trk=fb&fb_ref=Default

I read this article, and was reminded of an idea I had I will propose again: someone involved needs to create an organization funded by public donations–and governmental money too–to fund a mercenary/volunteer army to fight ISIS.  Hell, Blackwater could float a trial balloon by announcing a money-gathering venture to fund the fight.  They could put a Donate button on their website.  People could sponsor soldiers, like people used to sponsor kids in Africa.

Churches could get involved.  This is in no small measure an anti-anti-Christian campaign.  Christians are being slaughtered: crucified, raped, buried, beheaded.

And I think he’s right, too, that it might take a Non-Governmental Entity to fight one.

Some days I get to admit I’m crazy.

Some days I can only attest to the craziness of others.

I prefer the first.

I have many dreams.  It is my belief that I often touch the energies of systems and people, but it is also my belief that I can only see what I can identify and manifest in myself.  I never see any evil or good that is not in me, too.

I was watching the British last night.  It has devolved into something like a feudal system which lacks the dignity of work.  Many, many lower class Brits sit around all day, waiting, helpless.  The initiative is gone, the gladness in work is gone.

And guns are fundamentally empowering.  I wonder if some do not seek out ISIS just to put a gun in their hands, to feel that power, that authority.  Access to them is hugely psychologically important.  They are agents of goodness and responsibility in the hands of decent people, and a CRITICAL element in a healthy democracy.

Finally: in hard times, commandments are much more useful than suggestions.  Keep the Ten Commandments is much easier than “love thy neighbor”.  True Christianity is much more advanced in some ways than the Mitzvot diet of the Jews, but it also requires a much more refined sensibility, which is why most Christians are not particularly loving, and in the case for example of the religious wars and witchcraft trials, have committed quite grievous sins in the name of “love”.

I think the height of mastery is giving nothing, but asking that people steal everything they can.

I read here http://www.truthandaction.org/iranian-military-calls-emp-attack-america-killing-90-population/
(by the way, I know how to connect the link to the word; I just want people to know what they are clicking on) that it would only take $2 billion to harden our energy grid against EMP’s.  If true, it is beyond stupid–I would argue it ranges into the criminal–that this has not been done.  We have probably spent more money videotaping koalas fucking than this, and almost certainly more on Obama’s vacations.

Why does everybody have to be so fucking stupid? 

It’s in the air,
          this feeling:

the dragons have fled from
    my plastic sword
and my tiny arms

the lizards have fled, with
  their flickering menacing tongues

and a rainbow. . .