Moderates United

Just watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”.  I thought it was well scripted and well executed.

Movies like this, though, make you long for what I call quantitative experience: have you scuba dived?  Jumped out of an airplane?  Eaten at a fine restaurant in Paris?  Ridden with a drunk helicopter pilot?

I have had many experiences in my life, some of them a bit wild.  But what I long for more than anything is perfect enjoyment of a simple day in which nothing unusual happens.  I long to enhance my sensitivity to the point where I need go nowhere or do anything exotic the rest of my life, and live very contentedly, happily.

It is an odd juxtaposition, but can we call the Sean Penn mindset the Hemingway mindset?  What I follow I might call the Tarthang Tulku mindset, that of constant expansion.

There is a frequency to the Hemingway mindset.  It occillates.  It goes up and down.  And keep in mind that despite all his adventures, all his “living”, all his risk taking, Papa Hemingway in the end killed himself.

The Tarthang Tulku process is to build up the capacity for experience, for connectedness, for love, without calling it love.  It is a steady increase in ambient energy–expressed in peaceful and alert joy–that becomes constant.

That is what I want.  I have had enough glimpses to know this with certainty.

Within the Socialist moral mindset, the only way to “do better” is to erase difference.  But what is life without difference?  How can anyone justify this morally other than by simply positing it then eliminating opposition?

They can’t.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/lea-singh/canada-on-verge-of-banning-christians-from-professional-life/

What do socialist believe in?  Equality.  What else?  Crickets.

It is quite possible for a truly liberal society to ensure that its poorest members are well treated, and that difference is tolerated and negotiated.  It is inevitable that any society with political freedom, free markets, contract law, and sound money will raise its poorest members out of poverty in short order.

But it is not possible, over the long haul, for socialism to do anything BUT evolve into tyranny.  It is in the nature of the beast.  It is made inevitable by the premise that equality is more important than outcome; that individual success can only be explained by factors other than individual effort, and superiority.  To insist on egalitarianism is to reject in principle grades of morality, and that in turn is to reject in principle the possibility of individual moral growth, which is to reject morality in principle.

Once morality is rejected, power and conformity become the only possible values.  One is seeing that here in Canada, just as it is being seen in Sweden in articles I linked to over the past few days.  Sybaritic Leftism, the nice bambi, the “we just want to take care of our own”, inevitably has to mutate into Cultural Sadeism.  That it does so in a context of permanent lies and deception merely fools the stupid.

If you have not seen the latest X-men, and like narrative surprises, don’t read this post.

We think of Wolverine as possessing the power of physical regeneration, but if you think about it, he also has the power of continuing to exist in existential limbo, in confusion about his identity and place in the world.

In the first movie, he has no memory, and has to deal with this.  In the latest, everyone he “knows” has become a sort of stranger.  He has even become a stranger to himself, in that he cannot remember how his life has been conducted over the last 30 or whatever years.

There is to my mind a mythic power to this.  I have often wondered how I would deal if I woke up somewhere without memory.  If a self is anything, it is habits, and the three habits I would absolutely want would be the rejection of self pity, perseverance (in all the forms it takes), and the capacity for and thirst for learning.

I was talking with a cop tonight who among other things was trained in crowd control.  He said they were trained in large measure by the Feds.  I asked what department, knowing full well what the answer would be: Homeland Security.

Ask yourself: what do these people do?  They don’t have field agents as far as I know, like the FBI.  They don’t have foreign intelligence capabilities like the CIA and DIA.  They are not in the business of snooping, like the NSA.

What do they do?  They are extremely well funded, and of late extremely well armed

Here is one thesis: under Obama at least, their job is the militarization of police departments.  Now, this guy had common sense, and understood that protest is a valid political activity, one protected by the  Constitution.  He resented the anarchists, and having seen these kids first hand myself, I didn’t blame him one bit.  I would hit some of these kids upside their ass myself.

But would it not make sense–within the Leftist mindset–to first create a training capability for crowd suppression, a mindset, and then seed key positions with people capable of relaying effectively lies told for the explicit purpose of manipulating the minds and emotions of otherwise honest cops?

You call someone a genuine racist, or child molester, or domestic terrorist, even if it is a lie, it has a strong chance of eliciting a strong response, a response that you can channel down training patterns you have facilitated.

The other interesting thing he said is that they now have a wave weapon that attacks people inner organs, making them so uncomfortable that they have to disperse.  This one was mounted on an APC, or what I suppose they now call an MRAP, of the sort that the DHS just bought over a 1,000 of.

Stay awake.  Sleep is what the totalitarians want.

Addition: Can you think of a worse potential for abuse than a well-funded bureaucracy with no real mission?  The job of the DHS is to counter threats, and the job of bureaucracies is to expand.  Logically, then the very existence of the DHS depends on manufacturing threats, if they don’t exist.  To do otherwise is to risk becoming smaller, which is unacceptable to all bureaucracies.

We should abolish the DHS.  While we’re at it, take the DEA and ATF with them, and most drug seizure laws.  We can fight drug, alcohol, tobacco and gun (and explose)  related crime through standard law enforcement.

While I’m thinking about it, I wonder if we have tried paying Mexican and other officials on the drug lords payroll more than the drug lords.  It’s hard to see how it would cost more than the drug war, and we could even provide and fund volunteer or mercenary troops.

I don’t have cable, but I will flip around from time to time in hotel rooms.  More than once it has struck me that all the emotion, all the drama, all the violence, all the hurt and anger and fear–is fake.  It is staged.  Cameras are all around the actors, whose world is quite small in comparison with the large studio around them.

The average American spends perhaps 2-3 hours a day watching people who pretend to feel things for a living; people whose real emotions are hidden.

Ponder spending time with people who could convince you you were their best friend while secretly hating you.

Given that what Hollywood produces, in large measure, is strong emotion, ought it not to be a deep place, filled with contemplative and deep springs?

I hung out in a bar on Hollywood Boulevard a few months ago, and it was funny to me how often it came up that some group was superficial.  The people who move here from out of State, but not us locals.  The people who live in LA, but not Orange County.

Could we perhaps posit that many actors become actors precisely because they DON’T feel deep emotions?   That pretending to do so is therapeutic for them, that it fills, temporarily, some gap in them?

What is the fallout of surrounding ourselves with icons whose job is merely to pretend they feel things?  Does it wash through our cultural order and promote insincerity, plastic lives, constant grasping for states they merely pretend to reach?

I mentioned narcissistic empathy as a trait of people who desperately want to be able to think of themselves as concerned human beings, but who are incapable of doing so in the concrete, in the particular, in the only places that truly matter.  Is this perhaps one root of Hollywood’s leftist mindset?  That at root they feel nothing deeply, believe nothing deeply, and so latch onto what is easy, what is made easy by political operators?

Would Annihilationism be a better word?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/swedens-totalitarian-face/

Read this and ponder it.  Ponder the connections between believing nothing, and the need for an omnipotent State.

I would compare black violence here with pervasive sexual violence in Sweden: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/1-in-4-swedish-women-will-be-raped-as-sexual-assaults-increase-500/

If it was white people raping blacks, there would be outrage.  Why?  Rape is wrong.  I think all sane people can agree with that.

But once one enters this never-never land of leftist ideology, nothing is any longer wrong if SOMEONE OBJECTS.  All you have to do to stop a sybaritic leftist is accuse them of insensitivity.  They have no place-holder for justified violence, for self defensive violence, for violence in the name of principle, in the name of decency.  They cannot justify blaming this epidemic on Muslims, and cannot justify asking them to either behave or leave, which is quite obviously within their rights.

And if they fail to do this, they will fail as a Liberal nation.  They will fail as an advanced nation.  They will fall, of their own free will, to primitives.  They will demonstrate, in the end, that they believe nothing.

Perhaps the salient difference between a Sybaritic Leftist and a full blown Cultural Sadeist is the extent to which the latter creed is infectious.  The first is not living, and the second is an aggressive flesh eating zombie.

All of these myths–the zombie, the vampire, the werewolf–address important sociological realities.

Liberalism is possible. It is both possible and desirable to reconcile cultural and social differences, peacefully, through shared understanding.  But you cannot do that with primitives who insist on imposing their vision of the world on you.  You cannot negotiate with people who do not WANT to negotiate.  That is why wars and violence will be needed at times until all of humanity grows up.

One of the benefits in believing in God–believing one can both move towards and away from God–is that moral judgement becomes possible, not in the sense of judging people ontologically, but in the sense that their chosen patterns of behavior are either moving them towards God or away from Him, away from Goodness.

Read this: http://americanthinker.com/2014/05/widespread_memorial_day_black_violence_ignored_by_national_media.html

The problem is that the pervasive cultural nihilism, which is an ineluctable element of dominant notions about the nature of human life, make calling this what it is–unacceptable and shameful–impossible.

If human life does not matter, then so too do those of blacks not matter.  Then so too do those of whites not matter.

Practically expressed, the very anxiety that these ideas produce makes the shelter of ideological conformity–which sees and hears nothing which does not originate from a “trusted” propaganda source–almost necessary, and certainly very comforting.  The world can be coming apart around you, but you can still have faith that you don’t have to make any personal decisions about it.  This was the essence of New York under Dinkins.

It does seem to me that black youth are getting angrier.  And why not?  Relentless race baiting will do that.  So too will the on-going failures of left wing economic policy.  Why should any of these kids have any hope at all?  As I have said repeatedly, nobody gives a shit about them: not their parents, not their leaders, not society as a whole.  They are just asked to only kill each other, and not worry the rest of us about it.  That’s what ghettos and prisons are for. If they wind up eventually getting out of their boxes, I can see how that would happen.

But hate does not build self respect.  Hate does not educate.  Hate does not create jobs.  Hate will not get them ANYTHING but momentary relief from self loathing and emotional pain.  And those who encourage it are evil.   They will be judged.  I do not believe hell lasts forever, but I do believe it lasts for thousands of years.  That I do belief.