Moderates United

One point only: any argument that the requirement to prove you are registered to vote is “racist” is ipso facto racist, because it is claiming that black people, in particular, are too STUPID to do the things the rest of us take for granted. In my view there is no other way to look at this. There is no ambiguity. I am, to be clear, not claiming this to be the case. I think black people can and should be held to the same standards as whites. It is the NAACP that is making this argument.

I want to make one point only: no secrety order, no gag order, no requirement to remain silent is legal if it is intended EITHER to cover up patently illegal activities, or the full transparency required by law for all governmental agencies. Even if an activity is not illegal, per se, all governmental activites–including all military activities–are to done in the open at some level of security clearance. Any act to cover anything up for political purposes is ILLEGAL, and whistleblowers for that reason alone should be immune from prosecution. Congress: fight some offense, you cowardly pieces of shit. Go find the people who know something and protect them.

I read this article in an article on Scientism by Steven Pinker in the New Republic. .My issue is simple: he has conflated speculation–unexamined paradigms–with Science outright. Our best evidence is that the mind and brain are severable. This evidence is empirical and scientifically repeatable. It belongs within the realm of what is called science, but it will not be included by mediocre and haughty minds like his.

Our best evidence is that the universe is interactive, that it specifically interacts with our minds; that we in some measure cocreate what is called reality. Mediocre and haughty intellects refuse to examine the implications of this idea. They assume because it is convenient for them that whatever they are studying is “out there”, and not “in here”. They assume their minds can someone be objective, when our best evidence is that this is a fanstastical notion, every bit as irrational as the belief that Christ occupies the host.

These people frustrate me, because they lie constantly while proclaiming their love of truth. If they were willing to examine ALL the evidence on all topics which has been produced honestly–take as one example the evidence for Remote Viewing–then they could be called scientists. This would be a most excellent thing.

I have among other things often thought that morality itself is a matter for science–not in the sense of studying neurons, but in studying the correspondance between cognitive inputs and behavioral outputs, and affective health and well being. Buddhism is scientific, in a formal way, at least in its premises and many of its practices.

Until honesty prevails, though, such people are merely clever technicians: of words or experiment, it doesn’t matter. They don’t warrant much respect, nor does the worldview which arises from their demonstrably wrong empirical assumptions. There is no room in science for assumptions. There is simply empirical and non-empirical. They live in the realm of the non-empirical, while claiming the contrary. This makes them hypocrites of the worst sort.

One of the greatest propaganda victories of our recent history is the idea that when two ideas seemingly oppose one another, that the “true truth” is “somewhere in the middle”. This is a patent falsehood. If I stipulate that gravity operates at 9.8 meters squared per second, and you claim it is 5 meters, the truth is not about 7.5.

But practically, in public dialoguq, leftwing radicals get away with this constantly. What they do, to be clear, is abuse the goodwill of honest people to make lies plausible. They take everything that works in America–our fundamental honesty, decency, concern with doing “the right thing–and pervert it in the interests of an insane appetite for power, the only good they know.

What I would propose here is that truth is more like the bullseye on a dart board, and various guesses best understood as relatively closer or farther from the center. Now, it can happen that two guesses are equidistant from the center, but on opposite sides. This is the ONLY case where the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle would be true. Most of the time, different guesses would share many common accurate ideas, but differ both in the exact details of their mistakes and their accuracies.

To further complicate this idea, but bring it closer to my view of reality, imagine both the guesses and the truth they are trying to approximate as being little swirls of smoke, in constant rotation, and drifting here and there, sometimes dramatically. What is an accurate truth today could become quite wrong tomorrow. What was actual racism in the past is in almost all cases today a simple concern with truth, the future, and common decency.

And when speaking of moral truths, they are based upon the ideals actually in place. The present America cannot be judged by its past ideals. If one wants, as an example, to look at our treatment of the Indians, one must also look at the activities of all other nations at that time, and the ideals informing them. One must look at the Belgian Congo, and Rhodesia. One must look at the slave states of the Islamic world, and the serfdom of Russian peasants.

If one studies actual American history, and compares it to the world, the simple fact is that our nation has been by far the most principled, idealistic nation in human history, even if we have often failed to adhere to our ideals. The point is that these ideals can be invoked, and people CARE. That is how leftist propaganda operates: it uses words with high meaning content to Americans to trick them, and is thus most effective precisely on those people who LEAST need to be upping the moral ante. One can’t use the propaganda used here in Russia. One can’t use it in China. One can’t use it in the Middle East, or any Islamist nation. One can’t use it in most of Africa, where tribal loyalties continue to make the most vicious sorts of racism and social exclusion ubiquitous.

The truth of a moral intention is its sincerity. Do you actually want to improve the world? That is good. However, as I state over and over and over: you are NOT sincere–you are a sanctimonious asshole–if your actions are not constantly rconciled with the actual OUTCOMES of the ideas you espouse.

If you claim to oppose racism, but persistently assume as a matter of course that black people are inferior, then you are worse than open racists. You are worse than the KKK, who were at least open about their aims.

What has been the effect of half a century of what is called “compassion” by the thoroughly disingenuous? Hell. That, has been the outcome. Detroit. East St. Louis. East Palo Alto. Philadelphia. Trayvon Martin.

I have said this before, but in my view the case of Alberto Gonzalez should be put in the public eye regularly by all people of good will and who value the truth–which is to say by only perhaps a quarter at most of our media complex.

He was forced to resign by a campaign of sheer innuendo, waged relentlessly by the complicit media.  Then-Senator Hillary Clinton alleged that he was trying to hush up some unnamed and mysterious scandals.

Eric Holder has gotten hundreds of people KILLED while breaking the law, and he has not faced a FRACTION of the heat visited on Gonzalez.

Not everyone in this country is an asshole, or tolerates assholes.  Many people are simply ignorant, or lack the attention span to remember things when they leave the media spotlight.

Me, I have not forgotten that North Korea threatened to launch nukes at us, or that we still do not have a statement or even plausible presumption of guilt on Joker Tsarnaev–who seems not to have had a throat injury when arrested.  We don’t know anything about the Saudi the Obama’s got spirited away immediately. 

I have forgotten none of the scandals (which, as I have said, ought properly to be viewed and described as “evidence of Obama’s true intentions”).

Gonzalez, though: he is a textbook example of a propaganda operation waged for purely partisan purposes, and contrary both to the best interests of the United States, and the cause of truth generally.

I can’t remember what I said last time, but here is the shortest summary of the issue I have come up with:

The minimum wage only does anything when set above what the market was otherwise willing to pay.  If set at or below what the market was willing to pay it is irrelevant and unnecessary. 

In economic theory, any increase in price, given a fixed demand, will cause a decrease in the consumption of that product, which here is labor.  This is as ironclad a rule as one can find in the field.  Necessarily, then, artificially fixing the minimum wage above what the market was willing to pay will ALWAYS cause increases in unemployment.  There are no exceptions.

This is masked by the fact that in many places the minimum wages are set below what was going to be paid anyway.  People look at a high standard of living and confuse cause and effect.

I will add that in the United States part of our problem is the ignorance of large segments of our populace, which makes them worth less.  Both in rural areas, and inner cities some 40% of the kids fail to graduate high school.  The difference is that in rural areas there are a lot of opportunities for unskilled labor.  This is much less true in cities, particularly when characterized by high crime rates.

To belabor the obvious, universal public education was a key socialist objective for much of the 19th century.  They got it.  Now many of the people who ought in theory to most benefit from it fail to appreciate it at all.

When anyone says that “society” has failed an individual or group of individuals, what we almost invariably mean is that their FAMILIES have failed them.  The people our culture depends upon as the first and primary source of adaptive acculturation have failed to do their job.

This has been made unclear since at least the time of Rousseau since he himself sired a number of children  he flipped off to orphanages since he didn’t want to take care of them, since he was either a narcissist or a sociopath.  Thus, “society” is what you lean on when you are irresponsible, and which in practice means depending on the tender mercies of a power elite who use taxpayer money to buy votes, and thus to get the power they need to take de facto kickbacks and bribes.

Compassion is a necessary virtue in others for the irresponsible.

His family failed Trayvon Martin.  That is precisely why they are so mad at everyone else.  The mirror can be a painful place to look, and God knows they have plenty of help shifting the blame everywhere but where it belongs.  I don’t blame Martin for reacting in predictable ways to what was no doubt a very unpleasant environment.  I would say until about age 25, in our culture, kids are direct reflections of the work the parent(s) did or (in all too many cases) did not do.

Hell, it’s been WEEKS I think since my last conspiracy theory. 

She is there to facilitate the release of our latest nuclear research to the Chinese.  Not directly, but by hiring people at Lawrence Livermore who can hire people, who can leak the data.

I have said before, but not recently, that my conspiracy theory on the whole Ken Starr thing was that by keeping the focus on irrelevancies, nobody would think to investigate with the care warranted how so many of our secrets were either stolen, or sold outright to the Chinese.

If our system were not fundamentally superior to others, we would have fallen long ago.  We have many traitors–in a formal sense of giving aid and comfort to our enemies–in our midst.

I see this phrase “social engineering”.  I have been dealing a lot with architects lately, and it seems to me if we want to describe the activities of morally (and otherwise) obtuse political schemers, it would be social architecture.

Engineers as a group tend to be a bit cranky, insular, and pessimistic.  There is usually some older white guy who will tell you all the reasons something won’t work.  You normally shouldn’t build anything until this guy stops being able to find problems.  All architects in the end depend on structural engineers to make sure their visions can actually be built.

Architects, on the other hand, seem to self select as “visionaries”, in the sense of seeing, ideally, innovative, unique ways of approaching the craft of creating structures, of in some respects sculpting space, of creating openness and enclosure where before there was mere emptiness.

As I have said before, the visions of leftists tend to be static.  Like the ennumerated crimes of Sade in most of 120 Day of Sodom, they lack motion.  The same basic themes recur.  The dominant feel is not of a machine but a picture, one in which all the components are harmoniously interrelated.

Mao, in decreeing, say, for the Tibetans a crop which had not been tested in Tibet, and which was destined to fail, killing a million or more people uselessly, was not operating a machine, or modifying a machine.  The machine had been operating successfully for at least hundreds of years and likely millenia.  He did not ask the questions an engineer would ask.  He did not look at all the things that could go wrong.

What he saw was a picture of happy, smiling Tibetans, thanking him for so brilliantly changing their lives for the better.  He saw a static image.  He saw a society in the same way that a building stands, unchanging.

He was a sociopath, obviously–whether congenitally or made so by an evil creed is irrelevant–but one whose principle fault was a defective mode of thinking.

Couple thoughts.  I’m tired and perhaps disjointed, but this theme has been in my head a few weeks, and I thought it time to put it to bed as well.