Moderates United

If you look around the world, substantially all violence is related to either Islam or Communism.  Darfur?  Islam.  ISIS?  Islam.  Cuba is a terror island, where informers are on every corner, and complaining might get you put in a box barely big enough to fit a dog, until you break. In North Korea, they might literally feed you to dogs.  You can be shot for possessing Western movies.

Consider this video: http://clashdaily.com/2015/02/religion-peace-woman-stopped-street-pronounced-guilty-shot-head-wearing-red/

I see no reason to watch it all the way through, but my understanding is she is shot dead  in the end.  Look at all these emotionally uncooked, immature, relentlessly dogmatic pseudo-men with rifles.  This is something like the peer pressure kids face in high school, except the penalty is death.  For her part, this woman probably said “fuck all this black shit. I’m wearing something colorful.”  She was warned, and now she is dead.

And for what?  Red is apparently prohibitied in Islam.  Here is some commentary: http://www.islamweb.net/emainpage/index.php?page=showfatwa&Option=FatwaId&Id=83820

Note the tone.  Everything seems to be black and white.

Everyone in my view should read at least a few Sura of the Koran.  It doesn’t seem to matter where you pick it up, it will consist nearly entirely in telling you the rewards of heaven and the torments of hell;  how it is right to be blessed by Allah, and horrible to be condemned by him.

To put it mildly, this kind of language does not breed nuance.  You are being told, over and over and over and over, that your IMMORTAL soul’s future depends entirely on conformity to the Koran, as interpreted by men long dead, and men currently living, depending on men long dead.

And here is the point I wanted to make.  As Steven Pinker, in the first useful writing of his of which I am aware, points out, violence is seemingly at an all time low globally.  Many things factor in to this but one major influence he cites is the advent of the novel and short story.  What these do is build empathy in people.  They put you in other peoples heads and teach you to think about being in their shoes.  They teach rapport, understanding.  Moreover, the painting tradition of the West involves considerable amounts of portraiture, which also helps you SEE people.

Islam lacks all this.  They read one book, by and large.  Even Western educated Muslims seemingly crave and are fascinated by the cult-like ideological adherence demanded by the Koran, by its rejection of personal agency, by its rejection of human moral choice, by its reduction of every last aspect of human life to inalterable law.  Like Communism, Islam rescues people from freedom, from free will, from confusion, from doubt.

Their refusal to allow individual pictures means something.  NO ONE can be pictured.  This is why pictures of their alleged Prophet are so infuriating for these moral children and savages.

Individuation is a process of trial and error.  It consists in making choices and learning from them.  It consists in learning to interact in harmonious and spontaneous ways with people who are different from us.  It is not a straight line process, but if people are granted and use freedom, they eventually attain psychological maturity.

Nearly all the process needed for individuation are absent in strict Islam.  People do not read novels (although of course in practice many do, I’m sure).  They do not paint pictures.  They do not make moral choices.  All their choices are made for them, and enforced by the most fanatical–which is to say the LEAST individuated among them.

All the modern Western inventions which lead naturally to tolerance of difference, of diversity, via genuine empathy, are absent in Islam.

Islam is a cage, within which animal passions are allowed to rage with impunity through jihad. It is not pure ugliness–despite it all, many decent Muslims exist around the world, because Goodness is a natural impulse among us all.  And it has had many moments of reform, such as through Sufism.  But the orthodox kill the Sufis.  They torture  and torment them.

There is no love in their hearts.  And if Love is the only commandment, then they are pure sinners in the only way that matters.

I’ve been wearing work boots and blue jeans (Ballroom Jeans, to be exact, because that ad made me want to buy something from them, and I’ve never had cause to regret it) for 7 years or so.

Here is the thing about construction: you can’t posit anything.  You can’t make a washer with a 1/2″ diameter have a 1/4″ diameter.  You cannot build anything you don’t have the tools for, which means you need a detailed plan of attack.  You need to think concretely about what you are going to do, in what order, and what will be needed at each stage.  I’m in the middle right now of a fairly complex, involved piece of work that involves a lot of tools and pieces.

Many times I have encountered obstacles that made me want to quit.  I’ve faced problems I didn’t think could be solved.  EVERY TIME I have found a way.  That is my job.  That is what I am paid for.

But here is the thing: in the life of the mind, if you run into an apparently insurmountable obstacle, you can just ignore it.  You can pretend it doesn’t exist.

You can pretend, for example, that we are not facing a major crisis in Medicare, and that no hard decisions have to be made now or in the future.

You can pretend it is possible for everyone to be nice all the time, and to form plans based on it.

If it never touches a tape measure, delusion need have no end.

John McCain and Lindsay Graham (and others) were on board.

What do you call a policy of arming and training violent men which results within a year or two in those arms being turned on civilians for the purpose of mass slaughter?  I don’t think incompetence is strong enough.

And why the fuck were they even wanting boots on the ground in Syria again?  It never made sense to me then, either.  We have no skin in the game.  It doesn’t matter who wins, except to the extent that EVEN  THEN it was obvious that if Assad lost we could expect an Islamist state.

I would like to call again for a Congressional investigation as to what, if any, training and arms were provided to ISIS when they were pretending to be “Syrian Rebels”.  My memory is not short.  It is not confined to the news cycle.  I remember Obama and Hillary trying to get us to share trenches, blood, and bullets with the very same people who even then were dismembering Christian children because it amused them.

Why would they have NOT have given “our allies” training and material support?  This seems to have been the whole point of Benghazi–to funnel arms–and why would some training not have come with it?  As I have seen very knowledgeable commentator note, somewhere around 2012-2013, the ragtag “rebels” suddenly learned how to maneuver in larger groups, which is what enabled them to conquer the territories they have.

And while I’m at it, a brief word on Gitmo.  Only lunatics would argue that serial rapist and murderers should be free to roam the streets of America.  We recognize that some people have to be put away for life, and in point of fact thousands if not tens of thousands of violent felons have been thus incarcerated.  Had he not been executed, Ted Bundy would still be in prison.

Why, then, is Gitmo objectionable?  Granted, everyone should receive a trial by military tribunal.  I categorically, absolutely support that.  Standards of evidence should be relaxed, given the chaotic circumstances of war, but some evidentiary hearings should be done, with everyone.

But having done that, they are no different than the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world: they need to stay in jail for the safety of everyone.

I read our brilliant government has put a $5 million bounty on a someone WE RELEASED.  Who, anywhere, can justify such imbecility?  Yes, I get that no leftist anywhere gives a shit about brown people killing brown people–they are so hard to tell apart.

But surely such lunatics remain the exception even in the Obama Administration?  

I thought the last post was a bit off.  I would of course like to define as wrong all Meaning systems I don’t personally agree with, but that is inconsistent with my belief in freedom of movement.

Better is possible.  How is this: Meaning is a felt sense combined with a chosen path which combines to create a sense of Flow with regard to an ACTUAL goal.

Now, the ACTUAL goal does what I need it to do.  The purpose of Democart/Communist politics is not to help people. It is not to remediate racism, alleviate poverty, further global peace, or foster social harmony.  Those are merely propaganda memes.

The PURPOSE, the actual purpose, is to get your people in power and implement their policies.  These people and these policies care only about continued survival.  They are not oriented around an actual GOAL.  They ARE the goal.  Power IS the purpose.

Now, yes, this, too, is a goal, but it is one which contradicts the stated purpose.  The goal is a lie, and no coherent, USEFUL sense of meaning can be built on a lie.  That, I think–and I feel I will need to revise this again–is what I mean by an Ersatz meaning system: one based on self deception.

Imagine global peace, global prosperity, and a world filled with tolerance and equality before the law.

What do you do with yourself?  What purpose or purposes of living would you choose?

It is my contention that many solvable problems are not solved because the people controlling the discussion NEED those problems not just to keep political power, but for a sense of purpose.

Poverty, for example: two parent homes, sound money, free markets.  Done.  After a time, even two parent homes would not be needed.

Global Warming: nothing but the umpteenth resurgence of Malthusianism (aka Dismalism), trotted out because it serves an EMOTIONAL need on the part of many, which in no small measure is the need for centralized control and the “freedom through unfreedom” it implies, itself a Meaning System constructed by imbeciles.

This is where atheism is vastly inferior both scientifically and existentially. It is inferior scientifically because it uses a 19th century world view as its model.  People were shoveling coal into train cars when this world view took hold, and cars had not yet been invented.  Indians roamed the American South, and buffalo herds could be seen to the horizon.

Existentially because you remove from the table all possible purposes which cannot be found within a single lifetime. Practically,  what are left are engagement with work, estheticism, and “changing the world”.  But it is my contention that all tend to acquire an unhealthy dose of fanaticism, precisely because on a deep emotional level they have rejected free will, meaning of any transcendent sort, and connection of more than an animal nature (perhaps disguised as congenial intellectual compatibility).  We are talking animals, and animals themselves are merely cleverly constructed biological machines.  It is a dismal world view.

All poorly constructed Meaning Systems should be viewed merely as facades, as shells, as plastic on the outside, and nothing on the inside.  I have room for countless viable and good Meaning Systems, but any which fosters compulsions which squelch genuine curiosity, which become ends in themselves, should be discarded after careful analysis.

Problems exist to be solved.  They do not exist to pull us away from our existential, spiritual work.  The formation of true, authentic meaning is a problem, and it can be solved.  I can’t solve it for you, but I can point to failures.  And do, often.

The argument I want to make, I think, is this: trauma–true trauma, which is a short circuit in the nervous system–comes with a masking element.  It hides, or tends to.  Part of the self splits off, and becomes dormant, and we don’t notice this because it is a primal part of us, not needed directly to function day to day.

But its silence must be bought.  It must be fed.  Evil–taking pleasure in the pain of others–activates this primal instinct which is not that different than that which leads lions to tear apart gazelles and devour them. It is a rage and a satiation. It is compulsive precisely because it does not partake in higher consciousness, in the front cortex.  It is an instinctual hunger.

I have posted that–at least in my understanding of Peter Levine’s contention–neurologically, the circuits activated by curiosity are the opposite of those which store trauma.  To be curious is to engage precisely in an open and free way, versus engaging in a hostile and disconnected way.  Curiosity heals trauma, or at least reduces it.

Logically, then, curiosity is the most important virtue, as it is the virtue most directly opposed to the psycho-neural circuitry which conceives and perpetrates evils of all sorts, from racism to war to rape.

This has been my intuitive, “gut” sense for some time, but I think I can now rationalize it using words and concepts readily available in the public domain.

It is precisely a lack of curiosity which permits generalized anger and all the cognitive distortions it enables.  Put another way, a curious society is a good society.

And in what political form can curiosity most readily be pursued?  Freedom.  This means that morally freedom is necessary for true Goodness, as is an immense tolerance for diversity of all sorts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T8Vya-Znf0  Tee Tot Song

Rufus Payne: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rufus_Payne

Little Hank Williams learned a lot of what he knew from a black man playing the blues.

For his part Jimmie Rodgers also hung around a lot of black folks when he “worked” (he got fired for doing something close to nothing but different than the day before) at the railroad.

Inescapable conclusion: substantially all American music originated in the South with at least substantial influence by black Americans.

As Muddy Waters sang, the blues had a baby and they named the baby rock and roll.

The babies older brother was country music.

Here is one more fun fact: Elsie McWilliams actually wrote many if not most of Jimmie Rodgers songs. It’s not entirely clear how many, since she never wanted credit.  Jimmie is often called the father of country music.  Maybe it had a mother, or at least parents.

Certainly, the impression I got visiting the Jimmie Rodgers museum in Meridian, talking with the curator, was that if not for Elsie, no Jimmie, and if not for Jimmie, possibly a very different, less rich musical history for the past 100 or so years.  He pointed to her piano and said “that’s where country music began.”

You know, giving birth to something is the hard part.  Adapting it, tweaking it, changing it: these are often needed to make something USEFUL.  But without that original Promethean fire: little or nothing.

God bless the creators.  May everyone on Earth one day become one.

India’s National Crime Records Bureau has found that more than four Dalit women are raped every day across the country. Dalit Media Watch, a group that reports on crimes against India’s lowest caste, has reported that two Dalits are assaulted, murdered and have their homes torched every hour.

But the reality may be far worse than the statistics show: “The national figures are grossly under reported since many cases of rape of Dalit women are not even registered,” says Pratap Kumar, a Dalit rights activist in Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “Conviction is a distant dream for many,” 

Here is another resource: http://www.overcomingviolence.org/en/resources/campaigns/women-against-violence/now-we-are-fearless/dalit-fact-sheet.html

Although Indian law prohibits discrimination and violence against Dalit people, in reality atrocities are a daily occurrence.

• 13 Dalits are murdered each week. 

• 5 Dalit homes are burnt each week.

• 6 Dalit people are kidnapped or abducted each week. 

• 21 Dalit women raped each week.   

It is estimated that a crime is committed against a Dalit person every 18 minutes. The problem not the law but the lack of political will, at local and national levels, to apply these laws. In 2006, the official conviction rate for Dalit atrocity cases was just 5.3%.
Social discrimination is also a major problem. Dalit people are considered ‘untouchable’; most higher caste people would not marry a Dalit, invite them into their home or share food with them.

• Dalit children sit separately from other children in schools.  Almost 1 out of every 3 government school in rural areas prohibit children from sitting together.

• Dalits are prevented from entering police stations in 27.6% of rural villages,

• Public health workers refuse to enter Dalit homes in 1 out of 3 rural villages,

• Almost half of Dalit villages are denied access to water sources,

• Dalit and non-Dalit people cannot eat together in 70% of rural villages

Dalit women experience triple discrimination based on their caste, their economic situation and their gender.

• 70% of Dalit women are illiterate in rural India

• Thousands of girls are forced into prostitution before they reach puberty. .

The International Dalit Solidarity Network states “ Violence, including sexual assault, is used by dominant castes as a social mechanism for humiliating entire Dalit communities.”

13 a week works out to 672 a year.  Let’s compare this to the lynchings in the South:

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States.  Of these people that were lynched 3,446 were black.  The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched.  These numbers seem large, but it is known that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded.  Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched.  That is only 27.3%.  

This works out to 55 a year, 40 for blacks. (It’s worth noting that there were periods of white lynchings, for example a number of Germans were lynched when we declared war in WW1).

Let’s compare this number to South Africa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid 

I can’t find good numbers in the time I am allocating to this exercise, but it looks like 70-odd were killed in Sharpsville, and there were occasional massacres in following decades, with perhaps a 1,000 dead.  Steven Biko, if memory serves, was tortured to death, and of course there were atrocities like the South Africans taking pages from the Communist playbook and relocating millions of Africans to places where they were poor, and unable to effectively sustain themselves.

Net: NOTHING in modern history, in a developed democracy, comes close to the scale of these atrocities.

Why, then, is no one talking about them?  Why, as an educated, reasonably aware and switched on person did I only recently become aware of this?

Simple: brown on brown violence does not fit the narrative that Soviet propaganda disseminated, that white imperialists were somehow uniquely evil, rather than uniquely good as colonizers.  Empires, violence, conquests: these are older than history.

What is rare is conquerors reforming themselves morally.  What are rare are attempts at empathy and connection.  What is rare is GUILT.  Historically, only white Europeans suffer from this, by and large (although one could of course cite people like Ashoka).

This is why I spoke of Leftist hypocrisy in the last post. They want to relive the American 1960’s because it was a period of relative moral clarity.  What they do not want to do is ask themselves to live by consistent moral standards and to apply those standards around the world.  They don’t CARE about the women raped by upper caste vegetarians, because they don’t know about them, and they don’t know about them because their thought leaders don’t want them to know.

I recently spent a week touring the Deep South.  Rather, I had work there, and as usual planned some sight seeing.

I visited Jefferson Davis’s final home, Beauvoir, in or right next to Biloxi, Mississippi. It is quite literally as far south as it can be, sitting right on the beach, or as close as prudent in an area prone to hurricanes; and of course in the State in my mind at least most associated with the Antebellum South.

Two things caught my attention.  One, he was married to Zachary Taylor’s daughter, who died three months after they were married, leaving a seemingly permanent hole in his psyche.

Second, and much, much more importantly, he was arrested after the Civil War, and placed in prison for two years without charge.  The obvious charge would have been treason, but he was never tried.  Why?

BECAUSE THE COURTS MIGHT HAVE VINDICATED SECESSION.  The right to secede has never been argued before the Supreme Court, in my understanding.  Lincoln simply DECLARED it illegal, and with a solidly Republican Congress behind him (all the Democrats, by and large, left with the South), was able to get war declared and waged.

Legally, though, the case has never been put before a high court, or so I believe.

It is of course impossible to defend slavery.  It is quite possible to put it in context by noting that it was then and remains common in the Islamic world, and that slavery has been a feature of life for all of human history.  What we know of the Roman Republic comes from a Greek slave, Polybius.  The Spartans depended on slaves for their ability to train warfare full time.  Most of the major cities in Ireland were established by Viking slavers, who bought the slaves created when one Irish clan or tribe defeated another.  The word slave comes from Slav, since so many Slavs were enslaved particularly for the Ottomans.  Etc.  The world over you find this.

At the same time, I believe NSA spying on every American was made possible by Appamattox.  Our Founding Fathers read history, and they understood that power tends to concentrate, and having concentrated, it tends to increase, in a manner quite similar to Newton’s Laws of Motion.

Who could have imagined 100 years ago that literally every public communication in the country might be subject to the scrutiny of a Secret Police?  Our cell phones are tracking devices, which can be used as microphones for eavesdropping.  Every telephone call can be monitored.  Every email, every fax.  Some people even have wired in Kinect’s or Wii’s, that transmit EVERYTHING going on in your living room, in an EXACT replication of Orwell’s Big Brother.

Historically, it is clear that the Supreme Court has been the most proximate agent of tyranny.  Even now, it has not rendered an opinion on NSA spying, which if it is not violating the 4th Amendment, we may as well throw that Amendment out.

But all of the massive vitiations of Constitution were enabled by the after-math of the Civil War, specifically the Amendments passed by Congress after the Civil War granting the Federal government rights it had not previously possessed.  Were the goals admirable?  Of course.  But they were also long lasting, and have worked today for the concentration of an increasingly abusive and unaccountable Federal government.

Without the Civil War and its after-math you could not have a Roe v. Wade (not everyone realizes that this ruling was derived entirely from the Bill of Rights and one prior case ruling designed specifically to engineer this bench legislation) or Obamacare. One can certainly argue the merits of both, but my view was and continues to be that the only possible resolution of complex moral problems is through distributed solutions.  Let Texas be Texas and Oregon Oregon.  Anyone who dislikes their climate sufficiently can move to more congenial places.

But slavery.  Here is my take: did slavery end with the Union victory?  Did blacks benefit in immediate and measurable ways?  Did they?  Do you know?  What happened to them after the war?

The South was wrecked, culturally, economically, politically.  Everyone became more poor. And who was most poor to begin with?  Blacks.  What did most former slaves do to earn a living?  Share-crop.  Was this better?  Hard to say, but it was certainly not a large improvement.

Fast forward to Brown versus the Board of Education.  The Supreme Court mandates integration, despite the fact that this policy likely would not have made it through Congress or southern legislatures.  The problem is so huge, they effectively said, that SOMETHING must be done.  Something must be done.

And they did something.

And Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending legal segregation and discrimination.

And Affirmative Action policies came into being, policies which actively and openly discriminated against whites (and eventually Asians).  Progress, right?

Where, now, today, do most blacks live?  What is their average socio-economic status relative to the rest of the country?  What is their average income?  What does their typical home look like?  What is their average level of education?  At what rate do they get Ph.D’s?  As a group, what are their cultural ideals?  Who are their heroes?

Frederick Douglas had balls and vision.  Martin Luther King, Jr. had balls and vision.  Is Black America where they would have wanted them to be?  What do you think?

Here is my contention: complex social systems can only evolve in helpful, hopeful, useful ways when they evolve gradually.  If you pull out a hammer and follow the Fabian vision of change (I had actually not until this moment realized that both hammer and sickle are also weapons), it doesn’t take.  It is like a hollandaise sauce that clumps up (I have lots of experience with this).  It’s not only not optimal, it can even be retrogressive.

No one can call the Civil Rights movement a success who looks at the plight of blacks today, and in my view no one can blame anything but the destructive ideas of restitution and self pity which leftists implanted for use in their own political games.

Finally, one last reflection. The Antebellum South was in some respects a caste system.  You had the rich plantation owners. the soldiers, the businessmen, the poor farmers, and the slaves.  It was not unlike India, with its Untouchables.

I bring this up because I recently read about India’s on-going violence against so-called Untouchables.  It is horrific, and as bad or worse than anything done to blacks in the South.  Here is one article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/06/0602_030602_untouchables.html

People watch Selma and they cry, and they cry as if America is the only nation in the history of the world to commit crimes.  No: we are the MOST MORAL, because we have deeply moral impulses en masse, and because our crimes are admitted publicly, and atoned for.  There is a monument to the Selma march in Montgomery.  There are Civil Rights monuments throughout Mississippi and Alabama.  I saw many of them.

Who is speaking, today, about the 160 million Indians living virtually without rights?

The hypocrisy of the Left is nauseating.  I’ll leave it there.