Moderates United

Can you see how this turns into angry hip hop?

Can you feel how this song retains some hope, hope now largely lost?

With all due respect to whatever else he does well, this actually argues FOR the decision, not against it.

Freedom, if it is anything, is freedom of conscience.  It is freedom both from coercion to do things you think are wrong, and freedom TO do things you feel are right.  You can both not support abortion directly AND give to charities which oppose abortion.  Congress shall neither impose a national religion, nor interfere with existing ones.  This is very clear, and very logical.

The entirety of the outrage over the decision arises from the assumption by the left that their viewpoint is the only morally valid one, that “reproductive rights” are absolute.  This is not different in principle from the idea that all morality proceeds from the Koran and Hadith and Sunnah.  Both are absolutisms, dogmatisms.  All their arguments proceed from this assumption, from this failure to recognize the right of anyone anywhere in our body politic to oppose their version of moral reality.

I think all of us would oppose a national mandate for women to wear the hijab, and would support a Supreme Court decision which reversed it.  This is the point: our national government does not have the right and authority under the Constitution to make people violate their moral beliefs, to force them to do things they don’t want to do.

Women are not prohibited from getting Morning After pills by law, even if they work at Hobby Lobby.  Nor are they prohibited from buying their own insurance elsewhere.  They are neither forced to do anything they don’t want to do, nor prohibited from doing what they do want to do.  This is freedom.

What freedom is not is using the power of law to impose one set of moral views on a heterogeneous group.  All genuine diversity requires compromise, respect, and efforts at understanding.  The left does not do this with ANY group which genuinely differs from them.  That is why they are fascist at their core.

And to be clear, the argument, from the perspective of Hobby Lobby, is whether or not they can be forced by law to facilitate murder.  All one has to do transform this debate from one side to the other is put an = between “woman’s body” and “baby”.  The former construction, self evidently, is propagandistic, and in my view has led directly to a coarsening of our actual public morality, capacity for empathy, and even the skill with which we raise children.  There is a cost to treating helpless infants as lumps of unimportant flesh; and life itself as a disposable commodity.

I have often quoted the Taoist–proverb, can I call it?–“the ten thousand things rise and fall without ceasing.”  You might say it is a motto of mine, like “que sera sera” (however you spell it).

Can I add that the ten thousand legs move forward and back without ceasing?  And who looks back when they are moving forward?  Forward, when they are moving back?

You might doubt me, you might and probably should laugh at me, but I am approaching lucidity.

If you have seen it, note how Wolverine feels the need to protect people he has just met, in a culture and country he does not understand, simply because it is the right thing to do.

This impulse is largely Western.  Specifically, it is Anglo-American.  It is based in abstract notions of right and wrong, and in absolute principles.  It is chivalry, the code of the Horse.  This is quite different from the absolute loyalty to a specific man implied by the Way of the Bushi.  Both imply courage and honor, but deployed, potentially, in very, very different ways.

Some ideas are better than others, when measured against a global goal, which I argue often should be Goodness.

I believe I have mentioned this, but during the Vietnam War era, among the Vietnamese, it was apparently a commonplace that all you had to do was get an American drunk, and they would do anything for you.  They would give you the shirt off their back.  I personally experienced this: a Vietnamese man I was taking a Chinese class with got me drunk, then asked me to help him get his girlfriend back.  I did it.  The stereotype in my case was true.

I will contrast this with an example given by a martial arts teacher with many years experience dealing with Japaneses.  He said the Japanese will give you the shirt off their back, but they will resent you for it.

The female protagonist, throughout, wrestles with duty and honor.  It is noted clearly in the chopsticks scene that she understand herself to live in a world filled with humble obeisance to tradition and those who enforce it (men).

In the end, though, she “betrays” her grandfather.  Her father wanted to kill her, and her grandfather is trying to kill Logan.  She chooses Goodness, the right thing, over tradition.

In the course of human history, allegiance to principle over tribe is a very new innovation.  It is, in my view, an innovation which has most taken root in the United States, in our traditional, actually Liberal, culture.

Can we not safely assume that even this detail of propaganda was managed by those who value influence over truth, tricks over reason, conformity over public discussion?

Have conservatives not ceded again the high ground to those who don’t deserve it?  It is likely this concession is as large as granting the word Liberal to fascists.

I said this after a discussion with an electrician who has been working 90-100 hour weeks.  The people asking him to do this don’t give a shit, but he said that “when I make a promise I keep it.”

This is a good sentiment, but can you see, in a painfully obvious way, how it can and is being abused?  These assholes don’t deserve that level of effort out of him.  My current suspicion is that the GC, who is too lazy to even create a schedule, gets a bonus for hitting his date.

Most wars are fought by people that feel loyalty to people who, at the top at least, do not feel loyalty to them in turn.

There are many good people in this world, and a great many of them fail to grasp how many bastards there are.

I am increasingly of the opinion that most persistent anxiety is caused by unprocessed trauma, and that trauma is processed by activation and motion.

This is more or less the opinion stated here, shared by Barry McDonough [sp?], in a personal interview with an MD.  You lean in.  You pull the knife or circular saw in, as I saw in my breathwork session.  When you realize something terrifies you, you activate that fear, then move, in any direction.

Last night was awful for me, but I woke up peaceful.  I asked unconscious parts of me to process an activation of grief, anxiety, and this sense of unreality that had me wondering if I was going to lose it.  I fell asleep, but it was like I woke periodically to the sound/sense of battle all night long, with horrible shaking.  I got up about 5:30, did a relaxation exercise, and slept peacefully for two more hours.  The battle, I feel, is won, although tonight will be the first test.

We all have all the tools we need to process anything, although many will remain unaware of this across their lifetime.  This overwork, paradoxically, has been enormously good for me.  I am activating grief, then dissolving/releasing it in motion.  I am activating trauma, then dissolving/releasing it in motion.

Healing is work.  There is no other word for it.  It does not just happen.

But large segments of our unconscious know EXACTLY what we need, and are quite willing to provide it.

And I want to be clear that what I am discussing is mainstream psychology. I  am referencing techniques most good therapists use every day.

They have a large rework of an Executive suite that was supposed to begin in January, but which they held off on, so as to make a LOT of revisions.  Work commenced some time in March.  The original deadline was July 1, based on a January start date.  They decided to keep the July 1 date, despite the delay.

This has meant numerous trades not only working 80-90 hour weeks, but also constant redoing of work already done, that has been damaged by other trades.  The painters, for example, have more or less had to paint the place twice. It is the second biggest cluster-fuck I have ever seen, and by far the largest preventable one I have seen.  There is no urgency, outside of the stupidity and cupidity of the top executives.  The punch list will be so long it may as well be viewed as on-going construction. The final, end date of absolute completion will 2-3 weeks AFTER it would have been, had a tough but sensible schedule been put in place.

Here is the point I wanted to make: pretty much EVERY trade has had fantasies of walking off the job, but chosen to stay because they need the work.  Choice, as in worker self determination and freedom, can ONLY come in conditions of economic prosperity.  Nowhere else.

In any negotiation, the strength of your position is your BATNA: Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement.  This is the one idea of which I know that has originated at Harvard in the past 50 years that has been useful.

In conditions of economic malaise, such as characterizes every foray into socialism, your BATNA is shit.  You have no choice.  Workers are screwed.

And it doesn’t matter if you have a union.  Unions make everything more expensive, and thus cause decreased overall economic activity.  Find me a Rust Belt, and I will find you States which allow unions to coerce membership.

It doesn’t matter if you have protective regulations.  Workers who need the work are going to overlook abusive practices.

The ONLY thing which reliably empowers workers, which would allow these guys and gals to tell this large corporation FUCK YOU, you sorry, abusive sacks of shit who don’t give a flying fuck about us, our lives, our safety or our families, would be plentiful economic activities elsewhere.  The GC would then be forced to actually treat them with some sense of fairness and consideration.

As always, the policies pursued by the Democrats and their apologists in the Republican Party work to disempower the very people they rhetorically claim to support.  The problem is that they don’t really care.  They perhaps did at one point, but that was 50 years ago.

I will add as well that the root cause of economic malaise is monetary inflation and the wealth transfers it enables.  Everything else is window dressing.  Of course relative economic freedom is a good thing–we should in my view abolish corporate income taxes, for example–but if you ponder that 90% of our collective wealth has done to banks and the government over the past century, via devaluation of the currency, you should readily see this is the single most important factor.

Given sound monetary policy–such as the Germans appear to practice–we could all work less, earn more, and have more time for pursuing happiness as we conceive it.

If you are unfamiliar with Robert Putnam, here is a place to start.

His finding, which he himself suppressed for something like 10 years, is that the more diverse a neighborhood is, the less people interact, and the less they trust one another.

“Melting Pots” are schools for isolation.

All of our problems can be solved, but only if we tell the truth about them.