Moderates United

Nah, not that kind.  It’s Saturday night for God’s sake.

I want the emotional flexibility to adapt to circumstances as they exist.  I want everything from the ability to be completely callous and insensitive all the way to being completely open, loving, and compassionate.  I want a bias in the latter direction, but would submit that neither Buddha nor Jesus intended to or wanted to play a part in public political affairs.  Their creeds were ideally suited to full time spiritual devotees, but not to people with families, homes, and an intrinsic interest in issues of war, prosperity, and legal justice.

If you want to keep something, sometimes you have to fight  for it.  Fighting brings out the best in no one, but it often enables less grief in the world than a loss to someone much worse ethically would entail.

There is ZERO question in my mind that had we chosen to win the Vietnam War by helping the South in the very last stages, that at least 2 million people would either not have been murdered in the most brutal way possible, or psychologically tortured in purpose-built gulags.

You don’t get the luxury of insulating yourself from unpleasant realities.  You can lie to yourself for now, certainly, but when you die, when you see what you did with your life, you cannot escape responsibility in my view.  I literally think that when old hippies die, they will see what happened in Vietnam after the sadists took over. They will see what happened in Cambodia because we abandoned them in the face of a determined but manageable enemy.

And it won’t be pleasant.

To the point here, I see no contradictions inherent in me being a dick sometimes.  Most of the time, it is true that I am being emotionally inflexible and unskilled.  I grant this.  But sometimes I need to be this way.  When I have reached a much more acceptable level of skill, my reactions will generally be those best suited to the task at hand. 

The concept that you should be nice to everyone all the time, though, is one of Sybaritic leftism.  It is not one best suited to improving this world, in my considered view.

I’ve used this term before.  When you see “Marxist-Leninist” what you need to hear is that the methods and aims of what I term Cultural Sadeism have been invoked IN THE NAME OF Marx.  Marx, as I just noted, predicted that revolution was an inevitable historical necessity IF HIS ANALYSIS WAS CORRECT.

But things worked out.  Workers more or less made their peace with the Capitalists, and the distinctions between the two blurred.  What do you call the owner of a shoe store? Bourgeoisie? But what does that mean, and why is that bad?  Because it prevents revolution?  What point is there in revolution if everyone can become  bourgeoisie?

There is no point, not if the goal is to increase human felicity.

This is why I submit that what is primary in these extremist movements is not the supposed aim–here, a “Marxist” coup d’etat that instrinsically contradicts his writings–but ascension to power.  Power is always the aim, and environmentalism, or anti-racism, or anti-colonialism, or gay rights, or feminism, or opposition to war are all simply propaganda tricks.  They make appeals to the better natures of people uncorrupted by leftist antirationalism and hate, in order to win support for power, which can then be used for oppressive purposes.  They are pretexts whose content can change on a dime, because they are intended as lies from the start.

Communists loved to talk of Capitalist “oppression”.  Yet, if you don’t like your employer in a Capitalist system, you get another job.  And if you are low down on the totem pole, if you work hard, you can climb.  You can become CEO someday.  You can start your own company.

In Communists societies, none of this is possible.  They are much, much, much more repressive, with little to no chance of escape, and yet still sought after by leftists.  To this day we see people extolling the virtues of the present Chinese Fascism, despite the political repression: the use of torture on dissidents, the rejection of the freedoms of religion, free speech, assembly, firearm ownership, protection from self incrimination, right to privacy, etc.

Obama’s chosen Propaganda Minister, Anita Dunn, quoted Mao in a public forum, for God’s sake, fully expecting that no one would protest, or do anything but nod and approve.  And nobody did.  It was Glenn Beck, if memory serves, who pointed out that we shouldn’t have people in top offices–and at that in the realm of media relations–who cannot see the problem in revering the single most prolific mass murderer of recorded history.  She went “carrying pictures of Chairman Mao”, and made it with Obama anyhow.

What occurred to me this morning, and what is the real reason for this post, is that while it may be the case that the true loons are the Cultural Sadeists pushing their policies, the role of the Sybaritic Leftists is to not oppose it.  They don’t oppose anything on principle, except opposing things on principle, so they are forced, by the nature of their chosen acquiescence to everything, to condone the crimes of the truly awful.

To be a true Liberal is to have principles which one holds sincerely, and which one fights for vigorously.  In a truly civil society, there is enough room for numerous behavioral codes and beliefs, and no one group will attempt to deprive any other of basic rights of existence and opinion.

But we do not live in a civil society.  The essence of the Agitation Propaganda of the Left is to convince the unwary that anyone who does not conform politically is either stupid or evil, and probably both.  That is why I get so much hatred directed at me even when I am trying to be mild and impartial.  If you don’t agree, you are an Other, and that is bad, since bigotry is at the root of the thing.

This is the problem I have with Gay Marriage.  As I have said several times, I couldn’t care less if gay people use the word marriage.  The problem I have is with their demonization of Christians, Jews and others, who reject their claims on religious grounds.  They are not trying to negotiate a common ground, but rather blast everyone who disagrees with them as at root wicked, and unworthy of membership in their OWN society.  This is, again, not civil.

Marx proposed an economic analysis that was formatted scientifically as an hypothesis: that the most useful unit of analysis was social/economic class, and that the nature of “class warfare” was such that the concentration of wealth was bound to continue, such that revolution would break out more or less spontaneously in the MOST industrialized nations, with Britain leading the way.

In general, what developed was not a class gap, but a continuum, in which all members of society, from the working poor to the very wealthy, gradually increased their collective wealth over a prolonged period, such that a “middle” class emerged, which he did not foresee as economically sustainable, and which pissed off severely revolutionaries. Rather than distinctions sharpening, they became muted, such that it was and is impossible to say exactly one “class” starts and another ends.

Where “revolution” happened, the actual reality was that a small number of dedicated nihilists–in the formal Russian sense–were able to use deception, violence and long term effort to stage a coup d’etat, and gradually eliminate political opponents, and usher in an era of much GREATER oppression of workers.  That victory, in turn, facilitated the rest, including those in China and and Southeast Asia.  Everywhere, though, what was called the “revolution” involved mass deception by a small number of people, who used violence against all who opposed them.  There was NOTHING organic about it anywhere.

Marx was wrong.  There is no other way to put it.

So one must ask: why are there still Marxists?  There is a simple answer: Marxism provides a model for creating dichotomous oppositions, which in turn facilitate hatred.  Hatred in turn serves as a meaning system, with anger its defining attribute. If you want to break something, if you want to hate “corporations”, then Marxism still enables you to do that.

I want to be clear, though, on what I view as Marx’s foundational misunderstanding.  He could not understand what value “capitalists” provided, and viewed them as parasitical.

Look at Hostess, though: is it not clear that what management provides is intelligence and the framework for job creation?  The unions create nothing.  They take. 

One person, Ralph Leroy Nafziger, was responsible for creating what became Hostess. He had the idea of baking and selling bread.  He may well have started with a single oven, and likely personally delivered his loaves until he developed more work than he could handle.  Then, to facilitate selling more, he started hiring people. 

At some point, his primary role was directing employees, to ensure quality product and service.  He made money for this.  At some point, he may have hired a manager, and done little except read reports thereafter.  Maybe he played a daily role.

EITHER WAY,  ALL the employees which were later hired had jobs because he had an idea and ran with it.  What a union does is negotiate the price of labor in a way that is not fundamentally different than a purchasing department negotiating the price of flour.  The difference is that a flour manufacturer would rarely decide NOT to sell flour until they got the price they wanted. A further difference is that the government would never step in to support the “right” of the flour manufacturer not just to withhold the flour, but to prohibit anyone else from selling it, using violence if necessary.

We need to be clear: if you look at the situation carefully, the fact that unions can get away with organized violence literally means that they have more rights than the average citizen;  they are a different class of citizen, by law.  Union bosses can order someone beaten up, and Federal laws prohibit prosecution under racketeering laws, or even in most cases under normal laws barring assault.

In point of fact, in a truly Capitalist system, EVERYONE would be in a position to create their own corporations, their own control, their own destiny.  Marx did not think this was possible, but more importantly leftist nihilists don’t WANT this to be possible.

Marxism is an anti-anxiolytic for emotionally ill people.  It is not a valid economic analysis, and it does not and cannot lead to increased human felicity.

Wrote this with some noise around me.  I may work on this later.

It is my sense that many academics, in the Humanities, enter their field due to some unresolved emotional conflict.  They are compelled by the nature of their chosen profession to spend thousands of hours alone every year, reading difficult texts, often in foreign languages, and then writing recondite prose which even they cannot always justify.  It is not always obvious that their work has produced anything of any use to anyone anywhere.  And at that, it is not always even fun.  I know: I’ve done some of this work, albeit only in a small (but clinical) dose.

Quite often, I think, politics serves as an anti-anxiolytic that rescues them from a profound dread of non-existence, of dissolving in a wave of abstraction and uselessness.  It unifies them, since as a general rule if you are dealing with people who have been granted Ph.D’s, much less tenure, certain basic political commitments can be assumed.  There may be Republicans in the Engineering Dept.–and certainly the Business School–but the tribal identity is intact in Dwinnelle Hall, or wherever else they may congregate.

In the response I wanted to make on the Guardian (from a few posts ago), I wanted to contrast Jacques Derrida–as the exemplar extraordinairre of elevated nonsense (but is it nonsense?  What do we mean by nonsense?  What do we mean by “mean”?), with Edward de Bono.

First, I think if you have read none of Derrida, you should.  Here is a small sampling.  Now, if it confuses you, I will grant it confuses me.  This is the sort of text even academics, even people used to reading difficult prose, have to read over several times.  The level of abstraction and self referential word play is extremely high.

What he calls a “ghost” is what I have tended to term a “qualitative gestalt”, an ineffable something that seems to be worth noting, but not strong to enough to call “existent”.  As I reread this, I think I could translate it, but that is the point: if it were useful, it would not need translation.  It would be clear. 

Now, Derridistas would presumably argue that “artificial” (what does this mean?) clarity is the problem, that if we are not ambiguous, that if the would-be “philosopher” does not lead us down a mist covered and barely visible path deep into the swamp, that we are being unduly arrogant.

This is stupid.  I use phrases like this because they are in my view useful and apt.  It is a cognitive analgesic that will tide you over until the pain eases of having let someone make things refractory on purpose.

The reality is that most academics who like this sort of thing treat it more or less like a Sudoku: something entertaining to decode, but intrinsically meaningless.  They will of course argue it has meaning–why else keep them on the payroll to decode puzzles for a living–but it is useful in a formal and concrete way.

I would contrast this with Edward de Bono, who seems to exist outside all academic disciplines.  He seems to belong neither in psychology nor philsophy.  Where has he done well?  In the business world, where his ideas have helped facilitate new processes and technologies, organizational efficiency improvements, better interpersonal communications, and overall USEFULNESS.

It is a measure of the sheer uselessness of most Humanities Departments that they have no use for de Bono.  Seriously: how could one measure progress in the interpretation of medieval Viking sagas?  How would one evaluate a post-feminist deconstructive hermeneutical exposition of the Shakespeare’s “All’s well that ends well”? I don’t even know what those words would mean, quite honestly, even though I have seen them often.  Hermeneutics seems to mean “talking out loud about one’s feelings”.  Postfeminist seems to mean “I don’t need to justify my existence any more, so fuck you.  Go away”.  Deconstructive seems to mean “I don’t have a clear thesis, so I am going to pretend I don’t need one.”

I will never feel the lack of having struggled through any of Derrida’s work.  I would rather read Finnegan’s Wake (which will also never happen).  But I am glad to have encountered de Bono.

I started this intending to say something else entirely, but it kept going.  I’ll have another in a bit.

Certain ideas stand out in my education in what were normally quite prosaic, uninspired classrooms. One of those ideas was the “hamartia”, or fatal flaw, of Greek Tragedy.  The concept was you take a hero, you take someone who is brave and otherwise decent, but some small chink in the armor, through which disaster flows.

Normally it is “hubris”, or excessive pride.  What I would submit it is for our culture is complacency.  This is a very non-heroic flaw, but we live in a non-heroic age (I would of course exclude from that our very brave, very self sacrificing armed forces: but as a culture how much do we REALLY value or even understand what their struggles entailed?  I think most people would be shocked to learn how hard even average jobs are out in the field).

I remember reading some time ago Nietzche’s “Das Geburt der Tragoedie” (I may have just screwed that up) in German, which made me feel like finding someone to feel superior to, even though I was a vain and silly human being who likely misunderstood half the German , and three fourths of the ideas.

Two things, only, stand out now all these years later: the opposition of the Dionysian and Apollonian, and his sense that tragedy is morally superior to comedy.

Now, “laughter is the best medicine”, and one cannot understand Shakespeare without factoring in his comedies too.  Comedies and tragedies happened at the same time in ancient Athens (I believe: this is not a period I am particularly versed in).

But I would submit the following: the essence of tragedy is the notion that THINGS FALL APART.  What was whole can be broken.  What was happy can be made grief stricken.  Deny this at your own peril.

Now, we have many, many movies in which things fall apart.  We have the zombie apocalypses.  We have Horror movies.  There is a series on now about the world some years after the energy grid fails.

But what do we SHARE as a culture, which makes us truly more responsible as human beings, which instills within us an ACTIONABLE fear of chaos?  Given the sheer volume of movies out there, some could no doubt qualify, but are we not fragmented by what we choose as isolated individuals to put in our magic light boxes?

I was dreaming last night of Will Ferrell putting on a show, assuming endless different characters, moving all over, creating quite a show.  It was an extended distraction.  I have no dislike of Ferrell–and will admit to having Anchorman on my shelf–but I think he as well as anyone symbolizes the deep silliness and irresponsibility of our culture as it exists today.

Well, the Guardian posted my comment, at least for a while, but now has apparently blocked my ability to read and respond to comments.  Even though the header says there are 86 comments, I can’t get them to appear.

This whole thing feels Bolshevistic to me.  Not only does most media fail to report any and all news that does not support the positions it holds on faith and habit alone, but most left wing sites remove outright anyone standing up and yelling “you are wrong, and here is why. . .”  They have already decided they CAN’T be wrong, having defined right as nothing more or less than what they believe at the moment.

THE MOMENT you begin using technology–put succinctly, the moment you begin to ABUSE POWER you have–to silence rather than engage with ideological Others, you are voting for Nazism.  You are voting for a rigged judiciary, and even mass murder.  You are voting to end Western civilization, based as it has been–at its best–on genuine tolerance for intellectual diversity, the use of reason and fact to resolve disputes, and a constant desire for improvement.

These are not small issues.  They are not pedantic.  It has nothing to do with my ego.  Yes, these people do yoga, and take their kids to dance class, and drink wine in their hot tubs and dream of better things.  But AT ROOT, this is a moral sickness.  It is, itself, a form of violence. 

The Left, itself, speaks incessantly about the violence of shutting out the margins, those without a voice.  Yet it does it in perfectly clear conscience when those others are true Liberals.  Those not doing it look with approval on those who do.

It is literally like binding Truth, placing it on an altar, and setting it on fire, to burn completely, in a holocaust, while chanting hymns to truth, hymns to beauty, hymns to justice.  It is moral insanity.

I will keep reading about this, but based on some comments on the internet, what seems to have happened is that a minority of union members sold the entire workforce down the river to protect their own interests.

What Hostess was proposing was a cut in absolute compensation of some 8%, but roughly a one third reduction in added money that was being committed to future pensions.  How this money was managed, I don’t know.  Was it put into an escrow account, or was it simply promised?  Or were they diverting the compensation of current employees in order to pay retired employees?  That seems the most likely case, which means that the actual cuts would have been to the retirees on pension.  That is how Social Security, on a much larger scale, works today.

 Now, you had two groups: retirees who were not union members, whose pensions were paid by Hostess, presumably in part out of operating revenues; and you had union members, who were presumably paid more, and part of whose wages went to fund the unions own pension plans.

As I understand it, roughly one third of the 18,000 workers were unionized, and the rest were not.  

What seems to have happened is that the Bakers Union was concerned that with the cuts in pension funding they would not be able to afford not just the payments to their Hostess retirees, but to ALL their retirees. For example, I think they work with Sara Lee also. Their own pension would have been bankrupted, since they were paying as they went also.

What the union seems to want and expect is that following liquidation the union plants will be picked up by some venture capital firm or competitor, and reopened to keep the Twinkie and other brands.  Part of this process, they think, will involve a renegotiation of the pension contributions that will be better than what Hostess was offering, and which will enable their solvency across all the companies they cover.

What they did not CARE ABOUT is that the likelihood is that everyone who was depending on a Hostess pension–as opposed to a union pension–will stop getting it.  Not only did 18,000 CURRENT employees lose their jobs, but the overwhelming likelihood is that after all the real assets are liquidated, nothing will remain for those 60-70-80 somethings who worked there for 30 years, and were getting a check every month.  In effect, to help–maybe–some 6,000 workers (the number may be higher or lower, but the princple is the same) they knowingly cost some 12,000 people their jobs and pensions PERMANENTLY. 

This is the most awful cynicism, and far worse than ANYTHING Hostess management is accused of.

So the damage is actually likely even larger than it appears, and is the result of selfish calculations–based on greed and the profit motive–by paid Union operatives who themselves risked nothing in the negotiations.

I see people demonize corporations as greedy and money grubbing, and in large measure that is true: you can’t stay in business without making money, as Hostess found out. But in reality, ALL corporations make the most money when they have the most employees, provided they can keep those people productively occupied.  They WANT to employ people.

Knowing nothing else, who would you assume makes more money: the person with no employees, or the person with a thousand employees?

Ethically, businesses have first to create something people want at a price they are willing to pay, then it becomes a process of negotiating for labor.  Unions say it is unethical to pay less than they can, to give bonuses to idiots, but the simple fact is that the company is providing a service that NO union can provide, which is creating a demand for labor.  Unions exist solely to siphon off more wealth from entities someone else created.

The need for corporations is vastly prior to the need for Unions.  We could and did built wealth without extensive unionization.  We cannot and will not build wealth with all unions and no employers.

The reality is that the economic downturn Obamaism is going to cause will hurt workers the most.  It will hurt the working poor, the wage workers, and even the unionized, who will see more layoffs due to less work.

They have designated me a Super User, apparently to emphasize the irony of not allowing my posts through.  Maybe it will make it, but I doubt it.  Here is the link. 

I think the situation is pretty simple: virtually all media outlets have become de facto propaganda arms of the Democrat Party, and that is worth a 10 point swing or more.  They could destroy Obama in a week if they chose.  As it is, they dutifully repeat talking points from the White House.  We do not yet have a Propaganda Minister (Anita Dunn, as an open fan of Mao, was not a good choice), but we don’t need one.  Anyone who doesn’t want to know the truth has only to tune into any network but Fox, and anybody who wants the full truth won’t even find it there.

How many of you know that our true annual deficit, if the Federal government used the accounting methods in universal deployment in both the private and public sectors, is around $5 trillion a YEAR, right NOW?

How many of you know that it is a virtual certainty that Obama’s mother posed nude for Frank Marshall Davis?  When the story first broke, Snopes claimed it was someone else.  Turns out their breasts didn’t match, and Snopes took the story down.  Here is a link to an analysis from Obama’s own website, which seems clearly to show a doctored photo: http://www.obamasrealfather.com/breaking_news001/

Conservatives are grieving following this election.  We are not just grieving because Romney lost, but because America has shown clearly that it doesn’t WANT to know any unpleasant truths.  That is quite simply horrible.

I was doing some Kum Nye exercises and it hit me why I like her so much: we have nearly identical personalities.  She is highly analytical, very observant, and conversant with feelings, but not ones that emanate from her.  She reads those of those around her, while keeping her own mind and self under tight control.  There is a something that she never releases, that is like a windup clock that never winds down.  Her writing output–and she has said she really can’t not write–is the hour and minute hands winding their way around the clockface.

What the hell am I doing here?  The same thing.  I am wound up.  Yes, I think I am capable of good ideas and trenchant analysis, but the whole thing, I see now, is like a screen, behind which something much larger can be experienced.

You will know I am making serious progress when my posts diminish to one or two a week.