Moderates United

Well, the HuffPo is letting some of my comments through, which is positive.  I do want to point out a little trick that pencil dicked losers sometimes employ: it is possible to have multiple displays, such that a person with an identified IP Address sees one thing, and all others see something else.

As an example, my comments on the Guardian were finally let through, on another computer.  On THIS computer, though, no comments are visible.  Here is the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/nov/14/derrida-biography-benoit-peeters-review#start-of-comments

It may be a technical glitch, but I have refreshed multiple times, and can’t get any comments to come up.

I know this is possible because I remember reading some years ago that the San Francisco Chronicle was using this technique to censor conservatives WITHOUT THEM KNOWING IT.

We all remember, don’t we, what we were taught in school?  To respect the opinions of others, to engage with them creatively and substantively in the hope of a synergistic improvement in the views of both of us?

What happens when people get into universities, now, is they become ILLiberal.  They become little fascists, who want to kill all thoughts that take them away from their new and improved identities as pod people.  And some of these people have high IQ’s, which means that they can deploy their destructive emotions effectively in the intellectual realm.

When you look at people like Paul Krugman or Barack Obama, what you need to see is a little child inside, raging against a world it doesn’t control and furious about it, and just wanting to smash everything.  And I will readily grant neither is likely aware of this.  As I have said, that is the role their politics plays: an effective cover for their real intent.  It hides it from them, and from onlookers.

Update: Sure enough, I got home and comments were enabled.  What they have likely done is hide either all comments–which seems to be the case–or just mine, which would be more work, I would think.

Fuck you Terry Eagleton, you power mongering, morally vacuous cowardly piece of shit.

I think I read this somewhere, but wanted to share it:

Once made fit for tyranny, a man is soon fit for little else.

Corrollary: Once you have accepted the loss of your identity, from where would the desire to rebuilt it come?

This is very abstract, but I think there is something there.

What is the point of freedom?  Historically, it has almost always arisen as a desire for RELIGIOUS freedom.  Religion and identity are closely intertwined.  The freedom Americans sought cannot be understood apart from the desire to practice religion freely.  The need for freedom depends upon the fact of intellectual and behavioral diversity.  Obviously, if everyone thinks and does the same, there is no need for freedom to be different.

William James, at the beginning of his lecture series published as “Pragmatism”, pointed out that virtually everything worth knowing about a man can be known if you understand his sense of the world, of how reality is constructed and what his role, if any, is.  Do you believe in God?  This is a big question.

True Socialism depends on atheism, on the sense that the notion of quality is empty.  All men are equal because all are composed of atoms that will one day be somewhere else.  There is no nobility of soul, because there is no nobility, and there is no soul.

ONLY once these basic postulates are granted does their project make sense.  What it is is a controlled collapse, a controlled descent, a prolongation of what the adherents of this doctrine feel is the eventual certainty of moral nihilism and the necessity of suicide.

And as I say often, this whole thing rests upon an empirically false foundation.  There IS a God.  We can research these things in scientific ways, through investigations of mediums, through studying psi, through personal experience in altered states.

I sometimes imagine a sane society, one with beautiful cathedrals filled with the sincerely pious, worshipping based upon UNDERSTANDINGS built from personal experiences.  We can create, even now, the sorts of ceremonies seen in Avatar.  We can create Lothloriens.  We can bring Spirituality into the universities.  Other than the piggish and brutal bigotry of academics, there is nothing to oppose it.

We will all be held to account one day for what we should have seen but didn’t.  This will be an unpleasant experience for many.

Seriously, everyone should read Sowell’s book by the same name, Hazlitt’s “Economics in one lesson”, and Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit”.  If after reading these books you don’t feel like punching Paul Krugman in the nose you are an idiot or a malignant asshole.

Because it may not be clear to some, I thought I might follow up on the previous post.  What leftists do is look at who is paying how much taxes, and then make empirically invalid assumptions based upon this analysis. Let us say that all the millionaires put together made $100 billion, and paid $25 billion in taxes.  Your typical Democrat looks at this and says, “hey, if we raise the tax rate to 60%, we will get $60 billion in taxes.”  This is LITERALLY what they do.  That is how they run their numbers.

But this ignores the obvious fact that what made financial sense at a tax rate of 25% does NOT make sense at 60%.  Let’s say, as one example, you sell some stock and have some cash.  Make it one million dollars even.  Do you put it in bonds to earn a reliable 3% income, or invest it in a carwash?  Running a carwash is a pain in the ass.  All employers will tell you that having employees is a pain in the ass, but of course a necessary one if you want to make a lot of money.

Let’s say the carwash generates $100,000 in net income, and you pay $25,000 in taxes.  You pocket $75,000. 

If the tax rate is 60%, though, you only pocket $40,000, despite major headaches and a lot of work.  So you put your money in bonds and wait for tax policy to become rational.  You pay

At 25% taxation, it’s worth the risk.  At 60% it isn’t.  So in Scenario One the carwash is built, jobs are created, and taxes are paid on higher revenue.  In this case the taxes collected are $25,000.  In Scenario Two, you put your money into bonds.  You make $30,000 in passive income, which is taxed at 60%.  That generates $18,000 in taxes.

So in scenario one we collect more taxes, and generate more jobs (and of course the employees pay income taxes and FICA, so I am estimating on the low side). In Scenario Two we collect less taxes and generate NO jobs.

In a nutshell, this analysis is why California has been turned from the most prosperous State in the country into the one with the most poverty.  I read a couple weeks ago that even prior to the bottom 60% of Californians voting for the top 40% to pay more in taxes, some 4,000 high net worth individuals were leaving PER WEEK.  These are the people that spot opportunities to provide goods and services people want and need, and figure out ways to deliver them at prices they are willing and able to pay, and who is so doing generate both jobs and tax revenue.

Self evidently, if job creators leave, so too do jobs.  Self evidently, if tax payers leave, all that will remain are tax takers.

And all of this is unnecessary.  It is brought about by hate, and hate does not build. 

His newest thing is bringing back the 91% top tax bracket.  This is just one more symptom of many that the true passion of leftists is punishing the rich, and not asking what policy benefits everyone the most.

The salient question, obviously, is “how much money did the government collect at the 91% tax rate”?  I’m sure the answer is “not much”.  Back in the 1920′, Andrew Mellon demonstrated clearly that if you cut tax rates on the wealthy you get economic growth, and they PAY MORE, both in absolute dollars and in terms of a percentage of the whole.

Yes, this is because they are getting richer, but SO IS EVERYBODY ELSE.  We would not have had a crash if the Fed had not pursued inflationary then deflationary policy, and we would not have had a Depression if first Hoover and then FDR had not tried to engage in social engineering.

Leftists love punishing the rich so much that they are willing to suffer generalized poverty to do it.  This is a moral malignancy.

In a well functioning society, there is a stream of energy that makes things work, makes life felicitous. I will describe that as Goodwill.

Some time back in the 1960’s, large numbers of people starting drawing on that Goodwill, starting using it for their own purposes.  I don’t blame the poor, but rather the people who USED the poor for their own aim.

I do blame the hippies, in part, since their claim was that they need not participate in civil society to enjoy its benefits.  And when they eventually put on suits and ties, they brought with them a sense that they were entitled to a certain quality of life, and that their principle aim COULD properly be to enjoy life, rather than to build, and take joy in building.

When they raised their children, they taught them that they could have anything, do anything, and that their satisfaction was a proper aim in life: that selfishness was a virtue, in so many words, and this while robustly rejecting Ayn Rand.

Then of course you had the political cultists, whose sole aim in life was to use goodwill, to use the space given them by fundamentally liberal-minded people, to engineer destruction.  No political cultist builds.  Their whole aim is to destroy.

All of these things drew down our pool of Goodwill.  They have caused mistrust, and hate.  I have been chronically angry lately, even though I able to beat it back.  I go through periods of acceptance, then see something like a handicapped person who is plainly just lazy, not hurt, throwing fits because they have to walk an extra 20 yards because somebody parked in their space.

We are not a nation of dignity, of reserve and calm.  We are whiny and petulant. All of these things draw on our social fabric, make it less robust.

And if we look at this as a debt, it is every bit as large as our national debt.  I have a plan to pay our national debt.  How to pay our cultural debt, though?

My only idea is generalized deployment of Grof’s Holotropic Breathwork, in countless little circles of 24 people, who use that work to regerminate seeds of true communal awareness and personal responsibility.

That, or we may react in creative ways to a general economic collapse.  We need to remember Argentina did not disappear as a nation.  It merely went from being a prosperous nation to being a poor nation, entirely due to the idiocy of its people and leaders.

I was going through some notes yesterday and found this: the most basic fact is the definition.  Now, self evidently definitions need not describe a given phenomenon, but they categorically DO describe how you think of them, and to the extent that reality and concept overlap, definitions are useful.  The following are in my view useful definitions.

Liberalism is when the freedom to express yourself creatively is checked only by regard for the rights of others.

Socialism is when the hatred of  the rich overpowers concern for the poor.

Communism is when that hatred wins.

I have from time to time used the analogy of wave/particle duality to speak metaphorically of the social/individual natures of our selves.  We could not individualize were we never to socialize.  Babies brought up in isolation become more or less permanently retarded.

What I would suggest is that the recent electoral disappointment brought with it a reason to disconnect our daily emotions from things which are in fact abstract, distant, and as-yet unreal.  Few if any of us are suffering from “tyranny” in any major way.  We FEAR it–rightly in my view–but there is little we can do at the moment.  So why not focus on personal growth, on “particularizing”? 

Do you reliably do everything that you decide to do?  Are you behaviorally coherent?  Are you capable of expressing great joy and empathy?  What gaps are there in your factual knowledge of our world?  In what ways can you grow your business?

As I have said repeatedly, things will have to get worse before they CAN get better.  I just signed up to donate $30/month to Freedomworks indefinitely on autodebit, and would encourage others to do the same.  Matt Kibbe is more or less trying to bring to maturity something in a few years that the Left has been building for the better part of the century. It would be an impossible project, were the facts not on our side.

I like RandPAC and Campaign for Freedom too.  Think of this as a long battle, as it will be.  I have said before and will say again: imagine you were Churchill, who had been saying for nearly a decade that Germany was a major threat, finally being put into office only to face immediate and apparently catastrophic military reversals, including mass bombing of civilian populations.  He had few resources and no allies other than the US, which did not formally enter the war for several years after the assault on Britain began.

We have no death, now.  We have no food shortage.  What we have are abstractions that cause us fear.  I feel, obviously, that they are correct, but it must be said that we may be wrong, and it is CERTAINLY the case that nobody knows what the future holds, not even those who think they are planning it.

I had some very positive dreams last night.  My defenses against my past are apparently complete.  This is reassuring to me.  And I see no reason I can’t keep growing until somebody puts a bullet in my head.  I have even made plans for prisons and work camps, the notion of which of course seems ridiculous to any Leftists reading this, but the fact is I read history, and the inmates always say “I didn’t think it could happen here”.

The Left is MAKING it happen here every time they murder a needed truth, so all possibilities are on the table.  I see this, to be clear, and still feel like my life is working to a purpose, to a good, to something better.

http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/grusbf5/are-state-exchanges-our-last-hope-against-obamacar

If they are right, there may still be a chance of blocking full Obamacare implementation. We need to all understand that large systems, when disrupted in major ways for sustained periods of time, take a VERY long time to return to stable states, even if supported by helpful public policy.

Obamacare will fuck things up, fuck them up badly, and fuck them up for a long time.  For every winner there will be four losers.  Democrats will talk about the winners, and blame the losers on the Republicans.  They will figure out how when the time comes.

Churchill once said: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” 

As I look at the Left following this election, they seem to be a bit surprised.  I think many Democrats view the election process as a sort of game, and are quite proud to see that their side has prevailed again.  The feeling is analogous to your ball team winning on Saturday or Sunday.  You get bragging rights, you get to feel superior by identification.

And since in their world view this is a game, what they expect to see is that Republicans will learn from them, start spinning things in a way more calculated to appeal to the vast masses of mediocrity in this country, start moving to the “middle”, and start pretending that our national discourse is “moderate”.

We’re supposed to lick our wounds, then start going at it again in a spirit of collegial rivalry.  “You got us this time, you rascals, but we’ll get you in 2014.”

What they are seeing instead is masses of people in complete despair, talking about the end of our nation as we have known it.  This is far beyond just a desire to return to the 1950’s.  It is plainly not racism.  And it puzzles them.

The smarter ones are getting whiffs of panic.  They are wondering–or allowing just that whiff of a hint into their mind that doesn’t even quite rise to the level of a conscious thought–if perhaps we are right.  But how could that be?  Everyone around them is in complete agreement that spending more money is the solution, that we have a moral duty to the poor, that the world is only made violent by violence (even though OF COURSE Obama is being responsible in the Middle East, pursuing a “middle of the road”, balanced policy, consistent with his innate restraint and intelligence), and that the supposed “national debt” is just a distraction, created by corporate fat cats to keep their tax money from being used to help sick children get medicine they couldn’t get any other way.

But our mourning continues.  We keep talking the same ways, even though we lost badly.  There are even signs we may move farther to the right, despite the polling indicating this is a bad idea.  How can one explain that?

What happens when that whiff hits, when your stomach momentarily contracts in anxiety, is you have to make a choice.  You can go into freefall, realizing that you have spent your entire adult life supporting ideas that were completely wrong; or you can reaffirm yet more strongly your commitment to the ideas you have held your entire life.

What do you think will be the default response for most?  Still, it is interesting to see flickers of life here and there.     

There is in fact a dichotomous choice to make.  Things are no longer on a continuum.  Now is the time of either/or. Long term lying, which has resulted in castles in the sky that must crash, has made it this way. 

I had ten hits on this post from last year: http://moderatesunited.blogspot.com/2011/09/previous-post.html  , and took a look at it.  I don’t remember this post, but do remember the clear feeling that SURELY all the BS coming out of this group of ninnies has to catch up with them by November 2012.

I was wrong.  Americans are stupider than I thought.  I will say, though, that if 8 years of this shit isn’t enough to wake people up, we may not wake up.  All giants sleep, all nations fail, everything that is built decays.