Moderates United

From here: http://www.avclub.com/articles/tobe-hooper,13680/
 
O: What do you think of the current debate over violent entertainment?

TH: [Pauses.] Let me see if I can put this correctly. It’s
messing with the First Amendment, it seems. It’s troublesome in that
way, and because there’s a problem with messing with the continuity of
the national psyche. It’s difficult any time you mess with the tribal
consciousness, the expectations of the country’s psyche. It seems like
censorship in a way that is not productive, constructive, or helpful.

O: There’s a quote from the documentary where someone said of
the early ’70s that all that bad karma had to go somewhere, and that
it’s better to channel it into films than into other places.

TH: It really is.

O: I think if you lose that means of expression for violent
thoughts and the darker sentiments of human existence, you’re in
trouble.

TH: It’s both a catharsis and a safe darkness. When I was
shooting in the ’60s, making documentaries for the end of the Kennedy
Title 3 Advanced Educational Programming, I saw things like effigies of
one’s boss that the employees could take it out on at lunch break and
have a release. I think there are potential problems with restricting
what anybody can see. It is, after all, a safe darkness and a place for a
certain kind of release.

Do we not, now, have exhibits that in their own way are both much more disgusting, and much more graphic than the death-filled scenes in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”? I am speaking of the various “Bodies” exhibits, which take human corpses, and more or less make artwork out of them.  You literally have corpse “mobiles”.

I’ll ponder this a bit more.  It does seem to me both that we need a sacred and profane, and that this distinction, at carefully chosen times and ideally in ritually defined ways, needs to be broken.

The most salient characteristic of Horror, perhaps, is that it retains the sense of danger and submission, but never transcendence. It is one half of an ages-old equation.

Well, I finally got around to watching it.  I just finished it, so my thoughts will be a bit scattered.

One thought I had yesterday is that I think we all need to regularly express ALL the emotions.  We understand sadness and anger, love, joy, sexual desire.  But what about revulsion?

I read that there are, on one typology, 6 basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise, and sadness.  Horror certainly caters to the fear element, but also both surprise and disgust.  I would submit that in our sanitized world, where all convenience store clerks are taught to say “have a nice day”, that some primal part of our selves craves the dissolute, the insane, the repulsive.  Cannibalism certainly fits the bill.

On a perhaps deeper level, do we not all sense that crimes are happening, even now, that particularly in wide open places may never be punished?  I have in mind particularly pedophilia, but wife beating, and cruelty to animals certainly also go on.

Think about the Texas of 1973.  This was an era when the reality of pervasive pedophilia/sexual abuse of children and minors was still widely rejected.  Children would tell their stories, and be abused for it.  Catholic priests were still routinely molesting children.  Actual racism was still present, and blacks had to watch their steps, lest they have violence visited on them.

There is a line from Conan Doyle’s story “The Copper Beeches” which has always stuck with me:   They are traveling to the countryside on a very beautiful day, watching farmsteads go on by from the train window.  Watson says “Are they not fresh and beautiful?”

Holmes replies: “Do you know, Watson, that is is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject.  You look at these scattered houses and you are impressed by their beauty.  I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with crime may be committed there.”

You hear country music throughout, even in very grim places, like when the gas station owner is tying her up.  They seem both to be hinting at undiscovered crimes–and here I have Tobe Hooper and the other author in mind (what do they know?)–and to be explicitly pointing to the violent nature of life, as in the description of the  process of slaughtering cattle, which of course was a large industry in Texas.

All living beings, in some ways, depend on the death or use of other living beings.  The smallest fish eat plants, and the larger fish eat them.  Humans are theoretically at the top of the food chain, but countless bacteria within us are always trying to survive and thrive at our expense.

And to the point of this movie, there is a bloodlust that is superior in some ways to the external trappings of our civilization.  Humans can be food for humans.  We can move sideways, and have in many cases.  There were many examples of cannibalism in Napolean’s march on Moscow.

Few thoughts.  It will keep percolating for a while.

From here: http://www.examiner.com/article/fact-check-on-glenn-beck-s-documentary-was-hitler-more-liberal-or-conservative?page=1#comment-15055766

I will add, that it is worth reading the actual NSDAP platform: http://www.hitler.org/writings/programme/

You neglect the obvious fact that Lenin and Mao–ALL Communists in fact–ALSO outlawed labor unions.  Does that make them conservative?

Conservatism has two principle strands: respect for the past–and for coherent moral narratives based upon them–and free markets.  Hitler completely repudiated the moral ethos of the German nation, and under him markets absolutely were not free.  They were much more like the relationship between Barack Obama, Wall Street, and Big Business generally, like GE, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Culturally, National Socialism (I did not see you note that the full name of the Nazi Party was “National Socialist German Worker’s Party; or that its principle constituency was the working and lower middle classes) did invoke the German past.  In that it did not try to completely invalidate every aspect of German culture, it was less radical than Communism; but clearly what it brought was revolutionary, not a part of actual German history.

And again, economically, the only difference between Communism and National Socialism is that in the former all means of production are controlled in ACTUALITY by the State, and in the latter they are only controlled in PRINCIPLE.  In both cases the right to the possession of the results of ones own efforts is non-existent.

I continue to view the efforts of the Positive Money people to educate people in Britain about the nature of our financial system favorably, and continue to view their proposals unfavorably.  Here is a comment I left today on their new website.  What I did not mention is that, as of the last time I read their proposal, the idea was to do gradually something almost identical to the deflationary process that initiated our own Great Depression.  In conditions of high levels of debt, deflation is devastating.  This means, inescapably, and as a simple matter of exercising logic, that any serious solution must first eliminate that debt, which my own proposal does.

The problems described are quite real, but the proposal simply transfers
power from banks to the government.  Whoever has the power to create
money has the power to create wealth from nothing.  Why is this
intrinsically better when done by the government?  Why not anticipate an
expansion of the symbiotic relationship that already exists between Big
Business and Big Government?  Because your panel somehow becomes
ethically superior?  There is no functional difference between banks
creating money for themselves, and money being created by government and
parceled out to chosen corporations.

The logical solution is to
end money creation outright.  This is the ONLY equitable solution, the
only solution that does not recreate a de facto master/slave
relationship.

My proposal to do this is here: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/Page23.html

Again, posted on the “right wingers are murderers/Leopold and Loeb” blog post.

I will add that the “essentialization of the Other” is very much alive among the most robust, most strident, most self satisfied cultural nihilists/comfortably ensconced Humanities professors.  They simply consider anyone who views our cultural heritage with fondness, or the egalitarian project with scepticism, as being  a very appropriate object of hate.  Hate, per se, is not rejected, merely rationalized.

You have not even made a token effort to consider the benefits of free markets on actually living, actually laboring, actually suffering human beings.  You have posited them as evil, and made of anyone who supports them a psychophilosophical riddle, when the reality is that we are simply more knowledgeable, more decent human beings than your elitist cabal.

What if you could somehow know that your purpose in life was to travel ten years through thick jungle, and endure great difficulties in so doing, only in order to get to a complex machine, find one small screw, and turn it one quarter turn?  What if you then had to travel another ten years out of the jungle?

What if your purpose in life were to wait in place for a ball to come bouncing down a chute, and to stand where there is a gap in that chute, lean over, and allow it to roll over you.  If you were not there, it would fall.  You can’t know where the ball comes from, or what its end goal is, but you do know that if you do not stand your turn in place, that life will be worse for many.

It is impossible to know what our purposes are in life, of course, but I would submit that there are countless inflection points, “butterfly effect” points, and that the purpose for many may come and go unnoticed, but none the less critical for it.  One can never know what small effort, what seemingly insignificant act may make a large difference.  You can’t live life sweating every last detail, but at the same time, don’t ignore them either.  Do what you can.  Then do it again.  Eventually they will lay you in the ground, or send you into the sky, and your assignment will change. But the process will not, in my view.  How we live today, in this world, is how we will live in the next world.  We just know more there, and get a LOT more support.

That, in any event, is my orienting belief.

In response to this article: http://www.thenation.com/article/174219/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek?page=full


I will admit in advance I only scanned it.  I have read in full many pieces like this.  Their point is to so overwhelm the reader with seeming erudition that basic questions are missed, like “does socialism work?”  This is such a common tactic with the left that I would submit their propaganda would be impossible without it.

I have one simple question: what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?  And if that is the point, is not the question of how to do this an empirical and not a moral question?  Is it not obvious beyond any possibility of discussion that free markets create both wealth and the possibility of leisure–at least in a post-tribal society, and certainly in a crowded world–far better than any possible alternative?

The salient malignancy of socialism is that the egalitarian creed rejects morality outright.  Morality depends upon the notion of progress, and progress in turn depends upon the notion that some people have developed more than others.  This does not mean they were born that way, but that the very concept of a meritocracy depends upon the notion of people who are morally qualitatively different, even if equal before the law.

Unless you can answer my first question–again, “what is the point of economic activity, if not to liberate the capacity for moral development?”–then I will assume based on long experience that, despite your capacity to produce seemingly useful words, that your project is one of destruction, not creation; death, not life.

All apparent logical contradictions between contextually valid statements are resolved in motion.

I’ve never read Logico-Tractatus Philosophicus, but I’ve always liked the geometric conceit of it.  I’ve also of course spoken of my fondness for Descartes and Spinoza’s use of the concept of geometric proof.  I’m slowly working my way there.  I think this would be worth including.

I will add, that we need not “pass over in silence” (schweigen) such statements.  They are arrows.  We need to look at where they are pointing, the “that”.  The “moon” is not the moon, but that doesn’t mean there is not a bright orb that brightens the sky on a  regular basis.  The only difference is in the materiality of the perceptual domain.

Confused?  Ah, my work here is done.

Perfection is the goal; and perfection is not the goal.

I think I get where the humor is in Zen Buddhism.  If you are laughing, you’re in touch with your inner One Hand.  Clapping.